How do we actually go about the process emotionally, energetically and practically on how to grow your wealth by falling in love with your money?
I’m a huge believer, as you know, that when we begin to focus on our relationship with money, we start to focus on what matters the most. We start to focus on our thoughts, our beliefs, our inner dialogue, our inner critic, really focusing on increasing that self-worth piece.
When I was thinking about who can I interview that really gets this, that really lives and breathes this whole topic of falling in love with your money, I could think of nobody else, but a very good friend of mine, Michelle Stonhill.
This episode is really going to help you to think about a number of things. Stretching your comfort zone, how success loves speed. Michelle shares a little bit about how pain actually fuelled her to begin her journey into becoming an entrepreneur.
There’s always this question isn’t there, are you born a millionaire or can you just become a millionaire? Can you learn to become a millionaire? It’s one of the things that Michelle shares her opinion on. We also talk about how much space do you hold for money? What capacity do you have when you’re setting yourself financial intentions and financial goals?
One of the things I loved about what Michelle talks about in this episode is how do you set goals? Do you set goals in the hundreds? Do you set goals in the thousands because when you set your intentions or your goals that forces you to up level. So if you’re setting goals of, I want to save £100 this month, what would happen for you if you were to up level that goal and say to yourself, I’m going to save £1000 this month?
If you think about it from a neurological perspective, your brain is going to look then for evidence to try and support you in that journey and that intention. As long as you’ve got strong motivation behind a financial intention, then you’re very, very likely to achieve it.
We also talk about not placing too many expectations around money. Thinking about how much energy you give to your thoughts. We talk a little bit woo woo here but less around the law of attraction side of things, and more around the practical aspects of what our mind thinks the soul creates.
If we can start preparing for success and getting out of this mindset of fear and scarcity and hardship, that is really the first step, I think, in creating an abundance and a place of being ready to create success for yourself.
I’m delighted to interview Michelle Stonhill, a millionaire mentor. Founder of the Wealth Accelerator Mentorship Program, where she teaches and guides her students in step-by-step business strategy with a sprinkle of spiritual magic.
For those people who have been following Michelle and her journey, one of the recent journeys that Michelle has been sharing is this humongous project that she’s taken on in Spain. She lives in this incredible house, where she’s now launching retreats. It’s just been such a wonderful journey to follow you on where you’ve been traveling abroad and buying all these objects for your bathroom.
Tell us a little bit about that recent journey for you and obviously during lockdown, being in Spain.
It’s been a bit of a bit of a whirlwind really, because we initially said that it was a five year goal to buy our own retreat venue. We said this 18 months ago. This is how James and I do things. We say in the next five years and that means five months. We set the intention we were going to start slowly looking around at what sort of venues were out there and that translated into three weeks to purchase.
Then this reno project that was going to take, we said about three years because we wanted to take it slow and enjoy the journey, was done in a year and six months of that was in lockdown. So we really went pedal to the metal. But I think what we’ve realized about ourselves is that anything that’s new, it’s either slow and painful or fast and painful. So we’re like, let’s just get it done. It’s still going to be painful, but at least we’re going to get there quicker. We’re more fast and painful people.
What have you learned through that process because you’ve just bought another retreat venue as well, haven’t you?
Yeah. The hippie house. We loved it. We absolutely loved it. Yes. It’s difficult. We’re in a foreign country. My Spanish is nowhere near what it should be really. We chose to use only Spanish builders because we want it to feed the Spanish economy and not be those typical English people that go and get all expat workmen. So it wasn’t easy. But we loved it. I don’t love the building stuff but I love the interior stuff. So whenever the walls are all up, that’s where I come in and go, what colours are we going to choose?
We just moved on to our second project, which is not as big as a build. It’s more just cosmetics. So really exciting.
How does that feed in then to your North Star, into your vision and purpose for the world?
It’s evolved. It’s really evolved. So initially it was all about improving women’s lives through online entrepreneurship and helping them to create wealth and happiness and joy. Yes, that’s still 100% the core mission for me, but the world has sped up so much. I think lockdown helped us to see this. When we all suddenly had more time to think about what we wanted.
One of the big things that came to me was that there’s people that are really struggling with the pace of the world online because it is so fast and our brains are so overstimulated that that’s where the retreat aspect started coming in more and more because I started to think, what can happen in just a few days when we’re not having to think about all the other day to day tasks. We can just unplug and get in nature and play Scrabble instead of being on our phone and do the things that just really ground you.
When I give myself that time, that’s when my huge growths come in business, finance and life, because I’ve had time to rewind a little bit and get clear about what’s next. We’re not good generally as high achievers, at giving ourselves that. So I’m wanting to provide a space where people could learn and grow but in a really different way than what you can achieve online.
So take us back to the start of your entrepreneur journey, Michelle, and for those people who have not experienced the power of your work, where did you start in your entrepreneurial journey?
I wouldn’t class myself as a natural born entrepreneur. I was asked this question recently, are entrepreneurs born or made. I think it might be a mixture of the two but I was definitely created not born.
I came from a family actually that was very divided when it comes to money and success. My mom’s side of the family struggled financially. They wouldn’t have called it struggle because they were such happy people and always just about got by. But that was enough. Family came before everything and actually had these really powerful beliefs that rich people weren’t happy or they didn’t have time for their family.
Then my dad’s side of the family were wealthy entrepreneurs and not very nice people, not all of them, but a lot of them. They were arguing all the time, falling out all the time could be quite vicious and the core family values weren’t there. So I grew up with this belief, from that experience as a child, just seeing money and success as being bad. That was the root cause. I now know it wasn’t the root cause, but that’s how I felt.
I went into jobs and just got by and wore that like a badge of honour. This means I’m a good person because I’m choosing this path instead of that path. I guess I found entrepreneurship later on because I became the jaded corporate professional first. It was actually meeting my husband that shifted everything because he was an entrepreneur and he never had a job and he was a good person. He was like this revelation, Oh my God, he can be both.
So I guess it wasn’t a conscious shift, but I started to find myself daydreaming a little bit then about, maybe I could do it then. Maybe I could still keep my morals and values intact and pursue a business and become wealthy. That was the start and initially that led me to network marketing because it found me at that point where I was looking for an opportunity.
This thing fell into my lap, that appeared to be low investment to start up. They were going to train me and help me and support me. All the things that feel scary when you first start your own business. It felt like an actual first step and it was a great first step. It wasn’t something that I could have, I think, made my life career necessarily, but it was definitely a huge stepping stone for me.
For those people who haven’t heard of network marketing, could you just very briefly explain what that is?
Yeah. Basically it’s a business model that means you don’t have to create a product. You use somebody else’s product to set up almost like an affiliate business underneath the umbrella of a big company. You don’t have to worry about the creation, the distribution of the product, all you do is learn how to market that and get paid to do it.
You can then recruit a team and be paid a percentage of your entire organisation. At the time that was attractive to me because it was like the first steps into learning what it felt like to have the responsibility of running my own business.
Although James and I had got a traditional business alongside this at the time it wasn’t online. So it was very, very different and my interest was in the online world because I could just see that that was going to be the thing that really gave me the freedom that I wanted as well as the income. For me it was never about becoming a millionaire. It was just about being able to get up and say, what should we do today? It was as simple as that.
Yeah. What was the business you did before the network marketing business?
James and I ran a promotions and marketing business for night clubs. We would be hired by night clubs and bars across the UK to make them busy. We would promote them. We were quite early adopters of Facebook to do that. Back when Facebook was just for university students, we were hacking in (that makes me feel really old!)
We weren’t university students, but we were using it to market to the students to make the club’s busy. No one else was doing that. So it gave us the edge in a traditional business where no one was using digital marketing on social media. We were really successful at it, but we were fixed to a certain place. We had to be going to nightclubs every weekend to be successful and I hate nightclubs. I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to just be able to wake up and say, should we go to Bali today and go. That was my idea of success and we would never get it in that business.
It was that searching that led me to network marketing for more of the freedom and was the springboard really into bigger things.
That word freedom is really interesting for me. A lot of people talk about financial freedom and actually in one of the previous episodes we did a few weeks ago, we talked about what does financial freedom mean?
When you just said there about, I didn’t want to just be stuck to having to go to nightclubs every weekend. I just wanted to be able to just wake up and say, let’s go to Bali today. Sometimes that the word freedom can be freedom of time. It can be freedom from all sorts of different things.
So when you think about financial freedom, and what drove you to create your business, what was the vision there for you around financial freedom?
It’s definitely evolved, but I’d say what led me to start and go through the painful part because let’s face it. It’s pretty painful in the early days when you’re learning everything from scratch and you’re trying: if you want more, you’ve got to be more.
So everything about me had to change. My circumstances wouldn’t change unless I did it. I created who I am today in order to create what I’ve got today. Those two things have to go hand in hand and what led me to go on that journey of self growth and improvement in the beginning, as painful as it is, because you do have to question everything about yourself and you have to look at everything the way you think, the way you act, your discipline, your habits, everything has to transform if you’re dead serious about it.
The reason I signed up for that is because initially I just didn’t want to feel the anxiety in my chest anymore that came with doing something that I didn’t love, that came with working with people that didn’t really get me. When I was in nightclubs, I always felt really different to everyone around me. I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel like this, but especially entrepreneurs that are very mission driven and feel like they’ve got more of a purpose inside of them, go through the majority of our life feeling different.
I felt different and that made me feel anxious because people called me a dreamer, they told me to get my head out the clouds, get real, be realistic. I’d see exchange of looks where people would roll their eyes when I talk about my dreams and goals, it made me feel anxious. It made me feel socially anxious.
Then there was the money. I was fed up of looking at my bank balance and feeling sick that there wasn’t enough money in there. So I think what drove me in the beginning wasn’t desire. It was pain.
I’m so glad that you’ve shared that with us today. Thank you because when we think about entrepreneurs, a lot of people get stuck. Often they get stuck in that early stage of, how do I know what my vision is? How do I know who to go and serve? How do I know what business strategy to take? How do I know how to create financial freedom? The entrepreneurial journey is ebbs and flows, right? You have to go through those ups and downs.
Actually there is just as much to learn in the downs, as there is to learn in the ups. What would you say from your early journey then of people saying to you, you’re just a dreamer, get your head out of the clouds – I can appreciate that must’ve been a bit like stamping you back in the sand. It’s kind of like, well, you can’t do this. It’s not possible for you. Particularly when you’ve got role models, like you said.
How did you then go from that to, I’m just going to ignore, everything that you guys are saying, and I’m going to push through this pain to the next level.
I started getting around people that did get me. I mean, never underestimate the power of that. That’s where network marketing became transformative to me because although it wasn’t the vehicle that was going to necessarily take me to where I wanted to go long term, it got me around people that were like minded. It got me around people that did dream and did want different things and couldn’t settle with ordinary life. Suddenly I didn’t feel weird anymore. It gave me the confidence to keep pushing and growing and pursuing.
I think you don’t have to have all the answers on day one. If you’re just starting out and you’re thinking, I feel called for more. I want to set up my own business. I don’t even know what that looks like right now. I just know I don’t want to be where I am and you’re driven really by pain of your circumstances right now. That’s OK. Don’t put an enormous amount of pressure on yourself to know where you’re going to be five years because the chances are good that you could plan the shit out of that now and it’ll change anyway.
My journey’s evolved. You’ve got to know what the next step is and the short term plan, I think. It should become more evolved, more experienced in business and more experienced in knowing yourself. You can start to set larger goals for long term, but I don’t think you can do that effectively on day one. I don’t. I think you’ve got to trust that if you keep improving, keep working on you, keep taking steps and learn to grow whilst moving. Don’t stand still while you’re growing.
I think that’s why people get stuck because they feel like I’ve got to wait to be better before I can move. I’ve got to wait to have the answers before I can take a step forward. You don’t, you’ve got to learn to keep moving forward whilst you grow it and know that it won’t be perfect, but be all right with that.
That perfectionism, that inner critic that often comes out, is a big one isn’t it for entrepreneurs? How do you deal with your inner critic, Michelle?
Huge. I think loving it, because it’s not the enemy. I’m a bit of a geek so I research a lot about human potential and extraordinary people and what makes the difference because it fascinates me.
So when you look at extraordinary people through history, they’ve had imposter syndrome because when you’re a high achiever, you’re very hard on yourself and it’s that, that keeps you striving growing, improving. We don’t want to eradicate that. That voice that tells you could do better, serves you to a degree because it helps you to not rest and not become complacent. That gives you the edge and that’s why you are a high achiever.
So we don’t want to eradicate it, but it’s when it becomes overcritical and paralyzing that it becomes a problem. That’s generally because we fight it. I shouldn’t be thinking like this, I should be better. We allow it to take control rather than, I guess, loving it and saying, Oh, thanks, it’s not as helpful as I would like right now so I’m going to park and just move through it anyway.
But definitely don’t go to war with your thoughts because it’s exhausting. You’ll get to the end of the day and achieved very little but feel knackered because all you’ve done is fight with yourself.
I love that. Because the inner critic is there to protect us, isn’t it as much as it is to serve us. I love that approach. It’s like thanking that inner critic and saying thank you for helping me to be guarded or to push those boundaries or to get me into a different mindset. I really love that approach and that leads beautifully actually into the topic of this interview, which is about how to grown your wealth by falling in love with your money.
So when you’re talking about this with the women that you’re leading Michelle, how do you help them to fall in love with their money?
I love this topic. I’m going to get a bit woo woo on you now. I know that this might be a leap for some people and that’s okay. It probably would have been a leap for me at one point, but what I’ve learned to do is see everything, that is energy, which is everything, as a conscious energy, an intelligent energy.
The law of attraction and some of the basic teachings, which are amazing, are the things that got me into it, like The Secret, they teach you that your thoughts become things. I think that’s a very basic level sort of top level understanding of it. Actually I think that in a deeper way, that’s not necessarily true because our thoughts are only thoughts. That’s all they are. We mustn’t give them too much power because that can give us enormous amounts of anxiety.
Actually there’s a human part of us and there’s a spirit part of us or soul part of us. It doesn’t matter what you call it, spirit, God, soul, intuition, universe, the belief underneath it isn’t so important. But the faith and trust that there is a higher intelligence is what counts. Now, those two parts of us, the mind is a physical part of us. It’s the human part. The mind was developed to help us survive and live on this planet and have this human experience. But it has very little to do with the soul part of us, which is what creates energy. The mind thinks, the soul creates.
So actually when it comes to the soul part of us, the part of us that creates the energy that matters, the energy that calls in the things that are meant for us, that’s got very little to do with the mind. Yes, if we keep thinking the same thing over and over and over and over again, and it forms as a belief and we believe it like it is truth, then we embody that and then we start to manifest and create that. It’s not quite as simple as I think therefore I am, because if it was that simple, imagine what life would be like. I think of an elephant and suddenly bam!
So the reason I share that is because of two things. One we can fall out of love with money if we place too much expectation on ourselves to think this way about it, it becomes a bit of a tug of war. We start to say, I shouldn’t be thinking that, I shouldn’t be thinking that, and there is no shouldn’t. Let’s let go of that and just know that we can connect to the part of us that’s way deeper than our mind, which I’ll go into in a minute that will help us to attract abundance in every sense of the word. We can almost fall back and relax into that knowledge because it’s totally possible, but it’s got nothing to do with what we think about. So we don’t need to get anxious about our thoughts. We don’t need to fight with our thoughts. We can let that go.
The second thing is the way we feel about money, which is more connected to the soul than the head. This is where the love comes in. I started to understand that money is energy and it’s an intelligent energy and that I wasn’t very nice to it. That made me feel quite sad actually that I’d, in many ways without realizing it, labelled money a lot of things, and none of them were really good. I’d done it unconsciously. I said things like I’m so sick of money or I just wish money didn’t exist.
Can you imagine if we think of this energy as being something that can feel and respond to our feelings and we treat it that way, I don’t think that there’s anybody, any woman that I know or I’ve ever worked with that would feel good about giving that energy off to something that’s intelligent.
When I started to see it like that, and I started to connect with it from spirit to spirit, I started to be way more conscious about the way I was treating it. Like you would a good friend or any other human. I noticed that in doing that, I was able to love it and love is the highest expression of our soul. I guess if you’ve got feelings on a sliding scale, low being anger, hurt, guilt, shame and high being joy, abundance, love’s like right at the top of that. When we’re in the love zone, our energy is almost like radiating. Everything that we want for ourselves, it is possible because it’s at that frequency that we are trapped it. When we can fall in love with money and everything about it, then we’re in a position energetically to call in so much more of it for ourselves and it’s a process.
For most it’s a habit of a lifetime that we’re changing. For some, it feels silly. We feel shameful because how many times have you heard, oh people that love money, they’re not good people. That’s because we assume that they love money more than people. They love money more than their family. They love money more than something, but that’s not what we’re saying here. We’re saying we can love money and we’re not taking that love away from anything else in our lives. We’re just choosing to love it.
It’s so true isn’t it. I love how you talk about money being an emotional intelligence because it isn’t about going to sleep, waking up and money just sits in your bank account. It’s how you are energetically.
It’s a bit like if you’re seeking love in a relationship, if you’re not in the right space yourself, because you don’t love yourself, then energetically, you’re going to be giving out vibes that you’re not ready to find love in a relationship.
I remember when I was a teenager, I think I was 19. I broke up with my boyfriend I’d been with for about four years. I was devastated and I didn’t love myself. All of a sudden I kept seeing couples everywhere. It was like, is it just me that’s single? Am I not good enough to be in a relationship? Even though it was my decision to end the relationship. It’s the same theory, isn’t it? Energetically we have to be in a position to understand that it is about building a relationship with money like it was a person.
For someone who’s reading this thinking, okay I don’t have a great relationship with money because I wasn’t taught good things about money or I didn’t have a good relationship growing up, I’ve self-sabotaged in the past, I’ve been in debt, I’m not good with money. They’re saying all these negative things, how do they move from that energetically to loving their money?
Good question. I think it starts with knowing exactly where you’re at and having that awareness to know what that looks like currently. It’s not one big leap. It’s a steady expansion.
A good gauge of this is let’s first look at how much space you hold some money in your life right now, energetically because we hold a space for everything in our life. We hold the space for love. We hold the space for money and generally the space we hold, the size of that space is determined by a previous experience, our beliefs. It’s like you were mentioning then. People that maybe have a bit of a small capacity for love, and that might be because in childhood they didn’t receive enormous amounts of love. There’s some stuff there that’s meant they’ve only got this in their mind, small space in their life for love.
Now when someone challenges that space, when someone comes along, that wants to love you ridiculously and showers you with love, it’s like this feeling of, Oh my God. You begin to unravel it. You begin to self sabotage it. We reach our capacity. It’s like a bandwidth sensor goes off and we start unravelling it because it doesn’t feel comfortable.
It’s unfamiliar, isn’t it?
Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a lady just yesterday that said to me, I know I need help because every time I hit £10K a month, I unravel it. Something happens, I smash my phone or I forget to backup my computer and lose data or I get sick. It’s that space, that limit has been hit.
Quite simply, it’s about stretching it a little bit, constantly. I think there’s practical tips to do it and then there’s more of the energy work and we’ve got to be using both of these hand in hand. I’m all for no BS sort of strategies, as much as I am the energy work, because I know that one without the other, it just doesn’t work. You’ve got to have a plan for both.
So the practical stuff could be things like, if you know from looking at the space you hold for money, let’s say that you think in the hundreds. You always think in a hundred, you set goal in the hundreds, then that’s the capacity you hold in space for hundreds of pounds to come into your life. If you’re thinking of a thousand, then thousands is your capacity, hundreds of thousands and so on. You’ve got to look where the goal is. What is it you really desire?
Then start setting the action and the practicalities to meet that instead. So that is going to probably require you to get around people that are setting goals that are 10 times bigger than yours. It’s going to require you to learn strategies that will lead you to goals 10 times bigger. It’s going to require you to up level your standards and execution in every way and start to really look at those action areas that if you ask yourself, if your goal is say a seven figure business, how would a seven figure CEO act compared to how I act, what flaws can I see in my structure, my strategy, my disciplines, etc.
That’s the practical stuff because to receive more, we’ve got to be more and do more. I don’t mean in a busy sense, but I mean, in terms of the standards. Then energetically, it’s about just becoming really conscious to begin with of your thoughts and feelings.
When I first started doing this, I started to notice how it felt when I handed money over, and it was anxious. Always anxiety and that feeling of lack of off because I’m parting with it. So just really little things. I started to have a “plenty more where that came from” mentally as I was handing it over. You feel so different just having that different dialogue because it creates a different feeling.
Work on it as if your relationship was needing repair. Let’s say your romantic relationship needed repair. What would you do? You’d spend more time on it. You’d be more loving. You’d speak to him more kindly. He’d appreciate you more. You’d show more gratitude. It’s exactly the same. Exactly the same way. I can remember sitting around dinner tables, feeling embarrassed to talk about money like a dirty word. But can you imagine if you were that embarrassed of your partner?
Really good point. That word collaborative kept coming up for me there, as you were describing that. If you’re in a relationship it’s about a two way exchange. When you were talking there about stretching that comfort zone or that glass ceiling, it’s how comfortable do you feel giving and receiving? Because some people actually find it easy to receive or to give some people find it easy to give, but not to receive. Some people find it difficult the other way around.
So actually bringing some conscious awareness to that is like that little key that just unlocks this door. I can spend £100 no problem, but maybe spending £10,000 to work with someone is difficult. But it’s stretching that comfort zone and breaking that ceiling.
Exactly and it’s trust. That’s the big thing in any relationship. If you’re not trusting, when he’s going to come back, when you circulate it, then there’s a lack of faith, lack of trust. What happens in relationships where there’s no trust?
What’s really frustrated me about lockdown is people going out and saying, well, how dare you charge these prices for your programs or your courses or things like that. If we stop the flow of money in the economy, then the economy is going to suffer. So we have to give value out to the world in order to get that exchange.
This is where one of the things I think for a lot of women is they feel icky about charging their worth for their services. How would you deal with that challenge?
Such a good point. You just mentioned that about the economy. Pandemics don’t cause recessions, people do. It always makes me laugh when people talk about the recession now. Winter is coming, buckle up. Actually there is no less money in the world today than there was this time last year. No one’s hid it in a vault and said that they’ll be keeping that now because of the pandemic. It’s still out there, it’s still circulating.
What makes it harder for people to receive abundance in times like this is when people start pulling back, preparing for hardship rather than forging forward. That’s true entrepreneurship. Forge forward, be a contributor. Create more wealth yourself and distribute it to help others create more wealth. Money loves to change hands.
It’s stagnant if it stays in one place so we shouldn’t be hoarding at the moment and preparing for winter, we should be forging forward. It’s times like now where the entrepreneurs separate themselves. They’re the ones that go on to contribute to the world in a really positive way.
So whether it’s because of the pandemic or because or times are hard that people are feeling like, Oh, maybe I should be cheaper. Maybe I should be cheapening myself. Maybe I should be giving my services for free. That’s not the answer to an economic crisis. It doesn’t make sense for you. It doesn’t make sense for the world. Nothing good ever comes from someone playing small, thinking small, charging small. It doesn’t serve anymore.
I could literally talk to you for hours about this subject. It’s such a good subject to talk about, but I would also really like to just use this opportunity for the last few minutes of the interview to just to fire some quick questions at you that are coming from my audience.
One of the questions I really love actually has come from Rachel Allen and she’s asked, are you happy?
I love that question. I am very happy, genuinely happy, but not because of the money. It’s important to highlight that because the money didn’t make the difference.
I was asked actually on a different podcast about this very thing. The question was, what point did you feel safe and happy? They were looking for a certain amount of money to be the answer. There isn’t one. That will never bring you happiness, joy or stability or safety.
What brings me enormous amounts of happiness is two things. One, knowing that I will always be okay and that’s not because of the money in the bank, it’s because I’ve learned how to create wealth. If you know that you’ll sleep at night, because money can disappear, you can invest it badly, but that never leaves you. The second is knowing that I’m making a difference in my work because money in the bank would be nothing without the differences being made. Then you would have a full bank but an empty heart.
I love that. Jess has asked, a difficult one to answer in a quick environment, but tips to do it again from the ground up, what would be your top tips? If you were starting from the ground up, what would be your biggest lessons?
Number one, success loves speed. Slow and painful or fast and painful. Slow and painful is so much more painful because the longer people leave it to have the success that they’re meant for, and I believe everybody’s meant for it, the more you start thinking this isn’t going to happen, this is too hard. Just do it fast. It doesn’t matter if you do wrong, you’ll learn as you go. Don’t be perfect.
Success loves speed. I think that’s a great takeaway. What’s the best advice that you’ve ever been given? I know you did a Facebook live just this week, actually on the worst advice you’ve ever been given, but what’s the best advice you’ve been given?
When I was having quite a down day with people’s opinions, because everybody’s got one, haven’t they? In the early days, when you have no success, no money, just a dream and a bit of a plan, which is quite a rough plan, and you haven’t got all the answers and your knowledge and skill sets at its lowest, you are the most vulnerable to other people’s opinions.
And unfortunately I wish the world wasn’t this way, but it is. 98% of people aren’t living an extraordinary life. So they think mediocre. When you share grand plans with them, they will think nothing of giving you their mediocre opinion. I just had a barrage of it over time and I was chatting to a mentor and he looked me dead in the eye and I’ll never forget it. He said,
“Michelle, only ever take advice from someone that you’re willing to trade places with because you will become them if you buy their advice.”
It was like a light bulb going off and that’s become a mantra. I just look at someone now if they’re giving me an opinion and if I’d be happy to buy your life right now and become everything that you are and everything you have. If the answer’s no, then it’s okay to leave it on the table.
Amazing. I love that. That’s fantastic. What’s your next goal? What’s next for you, Michelle in your business and your life?
I think my goal every year for the last few years has not necessarily been to earn more. A lot of my goals where I set financial goals were set before this. For the last three years now it’s been more about maintaining that level of incline impact, but working less.
Do you have a strong morning routine in order to stop you from getting into burnout?
Yeah. I have a really, really good morning and evening routine that is just that simple, dead quick. I found all these long, complicated morning routines. I couldn’t stick to them.
I mix it up regularly as well because most entrepreneurs are the same as me. We are driven by variety. We get bored really easy. So if it’s the same routine for more than a week I’m board, so I’m making a conscious effort to change it up, but it always involves exercise, gratitude, strong intentions and nature.
How do you go about choosing a mentor to work with?
Yeah, great question. It’s such a personal choice and I think that there is no one mentor that’s right for everybody and it doesn’t matter what they know what they’ve achieved.
There’s a few things that I think you need to know about them to make a decision. I think first about achievement a hundred percent because I genuinely believe, particularly in a mentor, not so much in a coach, but in a mentor you need to have not just knowledge, you need to have wisdom of what’s likely to happen when you apply that knowledge and all of the pitfalls that you could fall into. So it needs to be someone that has created the level of success that you’re looking to go on to create.
Their core values need to be the same as yours too because I’ve had mentors previously, they were amazing, all my mentors have been amazing. I’ve never had a bad experience. I’ve learned something from all of them, but there’s been times where the level of achievement has been there, but the core values have been slightly different.
The video we did yesterday on social media where I was talking about burning out, because one of my mentors told me that I’ve got to work until I was bleary eyed if I want it to be successful because one of her core values was that. That made me really ill and it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t her fault necessarily. It was just, there was a bit of a mismatch there. So I think spending some time to work out what the values are alongside that achievement is really important.
Thank you so much. If anyone would like to reach out to connect with you, where’s the best place for them to come and find you?
Anywhere on social media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube.
Resources:
Join The Money Circle membership
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Join Catherine’s Facebook Page and FREE Facebook Group
My Online Courses – Investing for beginners from £1
Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Follow Michelle on her Website
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The Secret (Book)
The Secret (Netflix)