2 Tips to Increase Your Self Worth and Your Net Worth

Our relationship with money is complicated – it is a reflection on who we are, what we value, our past, our experiences, our beliefs, our influences. To me, in order to create financial resiliency it is about working on how to increase your self worth and your net worth, In other words learning to manage the money and manage the emotions.

So I want to share with you 2 ways to increase your self worth and your net worth.

Our self worth is made up of our own conscious and subconscious beliefs around money.

When do we form our emotions connections to money?

Our money story starts from when we are teeny tiny and research suggests we have developed our relationships with money by the age of 7.

How we feel about money is driven by external factors like media, family, peers but also from our internal influencers – our personality and our beliefs and experiences.

These messages and experiences have a huge impact on how we feel about money. They sit in our subconscious mind and shape our internal belief system which then drives how we behave with money. This then becomes the money story we believe to be true.

We anchor every thought about money on our belief systems even if they are not true. This creates money blocks and is this what stops us from making any progress.

For example a common belief is that “money is hard to come by.”

This may be demonstrated in your behaviours with money that perhaps you were told money doesn’t grow on trees. And you therefore feel that you have to work hard to earn it. For some if you then feel undeserving of that, you may want to get rid of it as soon as you receive it. Or perhaps you undercharge for your worth. You find it hard to even have the conversation about the costs of your products or services. It feels icky. You say to yourself “I hate sales”

These are all money blocks that are being driven by what you believe subconsciously about money.

“I am undeserving of wealth” is another common one.

Being rescued is another one. You may feel that you have been rescued by parents and therefore beat yourself up because you do not feel responsible with money.

My first tip is to manage the emotion.

Manage the emotions

Next time you go to reach for your credit card to make a purchase, just pause. What emotion are you feeling in that moment? If you are stressed, or feeling sad, or guilty, ask yourself, ‘what could you do differently?’ Implement a 24 hour rule to yourself next time to allow your brain to think more rationally, when the emotion has gone.

I discussed this with Carl Richards, who is the founder of The Behaviour Gap earlier in the series.

Tip number 2 is after you have managed the emotion is to manage the money.

It is not just about managing the practical outgoings. It is about managing the emotion and managing the money.

Manage the money

Plug those pesky money leaks!
Look at your expenses.
Rate on a scale of 1-10 how valuable they are to your wellbeing.

Remove the ones that don’t bring you happiness, focus on ways to save money on the ones that you HAVE to pay, i.e utility bills and plan ahead for unexpected costs over the next 12 months.

Set aside money into pots or different accounts for different expenses. Perhaps have a treat pot, a Christmas gift pot, a car expenses pot, and skim money into each pot each month.

Automate this if you are a spender. I do this with my Starling Bank app.

It is so important that we save and don’t just spend everything we have.

The word ‘saving’ to me infers putting money aside for ‘some other time’. It is for our future self. If we don’t save, we aren’t giving our future self any options.

When you realise and increase your self worth and make a conscious decision to value your future, you will learn to make changes to get you closer to having a life of meaning and self fulfilment.

With this comes happiness and isn’t that what everyone wants with money? 🙂