We often treat money as a math problem, but it is actually a subconscious one.
Imagine if there was a high-rise office building with old, faulty electrical wiring in the basement, and management sent a team of experts up to the penthouse to talk about it, but no one ever actually goes down into the basement to update it.
This is how most people approach their blocks, beliefs and self-sabotage. They talk about it, read about it, come to conscious understandings, and try to consciously change their behavior. They use willpower, create action lists, decide to behave differently, etc. But most people never go down into the basement where the actual old wiring is, and then they get frustrated when the old wiring keeps creating problems.
If you could consciously change your subconscious beliefs we would all be effortlessly transforming every day.
The vast majority of our beliefs are formed by six years old, and are running subconsciously all the time—beliefs about how safe we are, how the safe the world is, what we have to do to be safe, what we have to do to get what we want, what we have to do to deserve good things, how deserving and worthy we are, and how difficult/easy life is. All of these hugely impact our experience of life and money.
If change has been hard for you, you are not alone. Because unlike our phones, our subconscious is not designed to update our old beliefs and patterns.
But what if we could actually go down into the basement, and update the beliefs and self-sabotaging patterns in the subconscious to something that more automatically creates the experiences that we want rather than sabotaging them?
When I began studying NLP in 1994, (a.k.a., Neuro-Linguistic Programming a terrible name for some really cool stuff) the common wisdom in the scientific community was that Neuro Plasticity was not possible. However, by using NLP tools for interrupting/disintegrating old neural nets that were stabilizing old limiting beliefs and making new neural nets and connections which automatically began generating new positive experiences and behaviors, we were consistently getting changes that were not supposed to be possible. And those changes could be aligned with what the clients actually wanted. It was like finally getting an operator’s manual for the brain.
In 2006 I was asked by the executive director of Nlp Marin (where I was teaching) to create a 2-day workshop focused on money. At the time I had no money, no interest in money, and no knowledge about it, so I had no idea what I was going to do. I decided to lean into what I did know, which was how to revise the blocks and patterns keeping people from having what they want. I spent a summer adapting and creating tools to shift subconscious beliefs and patterns about money and then that autumn I tried out this experiment with a group to see what would happen.
We weren’t talking about money, budgeting, investing, or financial planning—we were updating and revising beliefs about money, self-worth, family patterns, and self-sabotage, as well as creating new neural pathways and neural nets to support participants feeling safer, more abundant, and having a greater sense of their own worth and agency.
The results surprised even me. Incomes went up, raises and promotions happened, sales increased, windfalls showed up—and almost all without the participants doing anything consciously different. The most common phrase people would use was, ‘out of the blue’. ‘Out of the blue I got these huge new contracts’, ‘out of the blue I got a raise’, ‘out of the blue new opportunities started showing up’.
Funnily enough, even my income went up. I had put myself through all the exercises as I was creating them just to test drive them, and lo and behold, over the next year my income also went up 66% and stayed up.
We are so used to having to use struggle and effort to make things happen that it feels almost magical when things come easily. But most of our struggle and effort are caused by parts of us trying to create what we want, while subconsciously believing things such as, ‘you have to work hard to make money’, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’, ‘it’s not ok to make money easily—you have to earn it’, ‘money is evil’, ‘good people don’t care about money’, ‘there’s not enough for everybody’, etc.
It’s the difference between trying to lug a boulder up a hill while people are trying to drag you backwards, and sledding down a hill with the wind at your back while people are cheering you on. The second one is a lot more fun and a lot easier.
This work isn’t a substitute for financial planning, but if we have old limiting beliefs about money, the best financial practices in the world will yield very limited results. I’ve had this confirmed from many financial planners over the years
By applying specialized NLP techniques, you can dismantle the self-sabotage that prevents you from reaching your financial goals. Wired for Money is the essential manual for you to align your subconscious mind with your greatest financial potential.
Interested in more? Wired For Money is available now!
Michelle Masters is an international instructor helping clients create permanent, positive change using tools like Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Family Constellation work to transform how they see themselves and live their lives. Michelle has been a personal development trainer and coach since 1995, and her expertise lies in a unique fusion of neuroscience-based change techniques, family constellation work, and quantum transformation modalities. She lives in Sebastopol, California.
Photo Credit: Dan Quiñones
