1 Brenda: Hey there. Welcome to Episode 26 of the Mind Revolution Podcast. I am your host, Brenda Terry. A big, warm thank you to you for tuning in today. And my wish for you, as always, is that wherever you are and whatever you're doing, that you're feeling pretty abundant, that things are just flowing your way and in that flow, you're finding goodness and satisfaction and joy. Things here in Reno have been awesome. I love living here. The weather is warm, and it is nice and dry, and there's a beautiful breeze in the air most of the days. And so it's fantastic. And the nights are excellent — starry skies, and the moon literally lights up the sky. So it's wonderful. Today we're going to have a great topic for you. We're going to talk all about money and that narrative of money and the things that we keep telling ourselves about money and how we can begin to mold what that is and how it is that we can begin to play with that energy so that we can create a money experience that is more palatable, one that allows us to enjoy all the good stuff in life. As you know, if you've been listening for a while, then you will know that my story on money — I don't know if it's typical, but I've heard it often. And that is, I come from scarcity. I grew up in Mexico in poverty with a family that did the best they could with what they had in terms of resources at the time and just basically worked really hard. And with the support and the love and the effort of our combined family — a lot of people — I was able to immigrate into the US as a teenager and have now learned to work with money in a very different way. But my story growing up was definitely of scarcity. It was definitely of a feeling of not having enough, feeling like there was never going to be enough. And that really shaped how I did the first, probably, 35 years of my life. And maybe even a little bit after. © 2019 BRENDA TERRY | Mind Revolution Podcast | #026 Rewriting Your Money Story 2 I connected with the fact that, at some point in my life, there was a story that I began to tell myself. Growing up, I didn't know the difference between what my experience was and what my experience could be. I didn't see that. Because when I grew up in Mexico, that's pretty much what we had. Everybody was poor. It was very much a hand-to-mouth experience. We all were there to survive, not really thrive. And it wasn't until I can to the US where I began to notice that not everybody lived that way. I knew that in my mind because I had images and television and magazines of what the promise was that was in America — living here and coming here and working here and how this is the land of opportunity. So I didn't have a reference for that outside of what was presented to me in Mexico, which is — I'm going to say — kind of spun on. I feel that way today. I feel very strongly that we're in a place that allows us to take an idea and create something around it that we can monetize. I really believe that. And yet back then, I had no idea that that existed. And then when I realized that it existed, I had no idea how I could get it, how I could make that happen. And I was still inspired, and it sparked this interest in me to go and learn how to create wealth. My very first job was at a fast-food restaurant. I was there for two years, and I got promoted very quickly within the company, as much as I could be for someone who was under age. And then, from there, I went to college, and I didn't finish college, by the way. Ron always talks about my two semesters at XYZ community college. And I'm like, it was all the education I needed. And so what happened was that as I was enrolled in college, I got a job as a server, and I became a server, and I quickly realized the difference between working hourly and then working hourly plus tips. I remember very clearly that my mom, who is college-educated, and me and how I brought home more cash than my mom did. And I was working about four hours a day, and I only worked about four days a week. And so that lit this fire in me to find out more about how I can get more of that green stuff. All of my life, we just knew, my whole family, how we lived, it was almost like we thought about money, and we just kind of salivated. It just felt like if we could have enough of it, then everything would be okay. And so I decided to then get into real estate. Eventually, after a couple of years of doing that, then I knew that what I wanted to do was to be in a career where I could really monetize my time. © 2019 BRENDA TERRY | Mind Revolution Podcast | #026 Rewriting Your Money Story 3 And ever since then, I have been a 1099 employee, have owned my business. I have been on that 1099. My thinking was always "You can keep your W-2. I will take my 1099 every day of the year." Because I really felt that that provided a lot of freedom. So for me, freedom was really important. And this began to shift my story around money. In my work, I work a lot with people's beliefs around money and how those beliefs really hold them back sometimes from achieving the things that they want to achieve. That story, that narrative that we're living in in terms of what money is... And I've got to tell that when I thought about creating this episode, the word, in my mind, was really that of prosperity. I have evolved in my thinking. And money now, to me, is something that's different than prosperity. I think that you can have money and not be prosperous. And I think that you can be prosperous and not have a lot of money. I have experienced both ends of that spectrum and can tell you that prosperity, to me, now it feels more whole, and it feels really congruent, and it feels like in it is money but prosperity is the umbrella. And for the purpose of the episode, I really felt that the focus really should be on money because money is the thing that we're dealing with every day. We're constantly working with money, or we're making money, or we're having money, or we're spending money. And so money is just part of the fabric of our lives. Years and years and years ago, people used to exchange things for other things. So you had people who exchanged livestock or grains or gold, and now we just have cash money, which sometimes is paper, other times it's plastic. Other times it's wire transfer or Venmo or PayPal or whatever those things are now. So we're doing things differently and the story remains. The story is the same. And story is really about how we experience all things money. Our story is the one that we write every day about money and what it means to us. It's what we say about it. It's what we think about it. It's what we believe about it, what we believe about other people having it or not having it. And all of that, based on all the work that I do, based on my own life experience, I know that those beliefs about money have everything to do with our beliefs about ourselves, our beliefs about the world and how it operates. I am working with a lot of people — I'm working with some young ones too, which is so cool. I'm working with a few 20-year olds and 21-year olds. And I am so proud of them. I'm so proud of them and so happy for them that they're doing this work now. © 2019 BRENDA TERRY | Mind Revolution Podcast | #026 Rewriting Your Money Story 4 And what I'm noticing is that even my people who are young and my people who for more in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, the general beliefs around money seem to stay constant. It's almost like we got the story of how we do money. We have that narrative, and that narrative came about as a result of what our parents' believe, what their parents believe. It could be something that was generational. And I can tell that in my family, it is definitely a generational belief. I can track and trace the generations all the way back and what it means to have money and not have money all the way to now. And with my clients, it is exactly the same. Those beliefs that we believe are not even our beliefs. They're our parents' beliefs or our grandparents' beliefs or society's beliefs.