Pillar 5: Momentum and Mastery, Stay The Course To Freedom
Ann Wilson
Financial empowerment activist, Author of The Wealth Chef and expert on the TV Series "Save Well, Spend Better"
Creating wealth is NOT a one-off event.
It's NOT finding that one investment.
It's NOT one job you land that sets you up for life.
It’s NOT building a business.
And most surprising for most…
...creating wealth has NOTHING to do with HOW you earn money, and everything to do with what you do with it between earning it and spending it.
Wealth is created by a nourishing ecosystem of behaviors and habits that gives you financial resilience, provides the mechanism for money to expand, protects you and your growing wealth, and guarantees your financial freedom.
There are 5 core pillars that make up this supporting structure, and I’ve been sharing these in the micro training series - the 5 Pillars of Financial Resilience.
If you haven’t yet watched the training on the first 4 Pillars, head off and do that now.
Pillar #1 is about understanding money and financial leadership and management.
Pillar #2 is knowing that only assets create your freedom and learning how to get them into your life and working for you.
Pillar #3 is understanding debt, and knowing the difference between consumption debt, neutral debt and expansion debt and what to do with each to accelerate your journey to freedom.
Pillar #4 is all about protection and the three layers of protection you need to put in place to protect you, your loved ones, your assets and your ability to maintain and create your wealth and freedom.
Now we come to Pillar # 5 - Momentum and Mastery and how to stay on the path to your Freedom.
Watch the training video now.
Pillar #5 wraps around everything else and it’s here we really start understanding that creating your wealthy life; being financial secure; becoming a great investor and a great manager to your money; claiming back your life, your freedom and your worthiness; and giving yourself full permission to live your one freaky, amazing, precious life, fully on your terms, with your money and your energy serving you rather than enslaving you…
...is 80% behavioral.
80% of wealth creation is
mastering this thing called ourselves
and only 20% is financial skills and tactics.
Breaking from a cycle of debt is easy, once you know the Blitz Your Debt strategy and how to put it in place.
Having the right protection is straight forward, when you know what is needed.
Plus, all these things can also be put on autopilot, so you can set it and forget it.
Your real wealth expands when you realize and accept…
Being wealthy is a journey you're going to be on for your entire life.
!! Don't be alarmed !!
If you’d hoped you could just tick off this money thing and move on merrily then this may feel like bad news.
If that was your hope, know that you’re not alone.
After all we’re repeatedly told money is a problem to be solved.
It's not.
Wealth and money matters are pervasive!
Living a wealthy life needs to become a part of who you are and how you live.
Your wealth must become part of your way of being and your identity.
Being wealthy is a character trait.
Not in an obnoxious “pimp your ride - look I’ve made it” kinda way.
That’s not wealthy at all. That’s deep insecurity.
Being wealthy is a character trait in so far as who you need to BE to create and maintain your wealth and your wealthy way of being.
WHO do I need to be, to be wealthy?
Is the question to be asking, not…
WHAT do I need to be wealthy?
There are 4 pieces to the “being wealthy” character trait puzzle, and with these embedded in your way of being, you will be able to stay on your freedom path and live your truest, wealthiest, freakiest, most fabulous life.
#1 Be Obsessed.
Your obsession to be free needs to become a part of who you are.
What are you obsessed about?
What are you focusing on?
Become so amazingly curious and absorbed by what a wealthy life is for for you that you cannot NOT create it
Keep asking yourself...
- What would I do if I were free?
- What do I really want my one crazy, freaky, fabulous wealthy life to be about?
- What do I believe is preventing me from living that life?
- What might not be true that I currently believe to be so?
- What am I taking a stand for?
- What am I saying yes to that I should be saying no to?
- What am I saying no to that I should be saying yes to?
- Where in my life am I letting myself be pulled and pushed in order to “fit in”?
How conscious are you about living this amazing glorious life and then giving direction to your money in a way that is aligned to that?
This is a constant enquiry for me?
This is my 16th year of freedom, where assets pay for my lifestyle.
I truly understand what freedom means for me. I know in my bones the experience and privilege of having freedom of choice and having the means to live life on my terms.
I am also fully aware that there is an emotional and behavioral freedom that I alone am responsible for maintaining, in order to stay free.
What, what, what do I really want?
Do I have the courage to step into that and to keep taking the steps no matter how scary and wild and unfamiliar the terrain feels?
It's subversive to want freedom and radical to dare to claim it.
That’s why it takes courage.
You’ve got to be brave (and perhaps a little mad) to do what it takes to break free and stay free.
When we accept that we really only have this one precious, amazing, extraordinary life, the need for courage dissipates.
When we know this, we accept that there really is no other option but to do whatever it takes to make it the most incredible, free’est, expansive, wealthiest life possible.
I know there's a plethora of different belief systems about what there may or may not be after we pop our clogs and shuffle off this mortal coil, and the only thing I know for sure is THIS LIFE, right now.
If there is something beyond this, well hell, what a huge big juicy bonus, but I’m not going to risk squandering THIS life.
WARNING: NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED
Do you have the courage to answer these next questions?
- How much of THIS life has already been wasted doing what you think you should be doing instead of what you want to be doing?
- How much of your one precious life has floated away while you’ve been distracted by other people's agendas?
- How much of your freaky glorious life has been flushed down the drain while your time has been consumed by trying to earn money, instead of creating wealth?
- How much of the money that flows out of your life are you spending consciously in a way that brings you great joy?
- How much of your financial, time and energy resources are directed to living the life that represents your souls truest expression?
- Are you obsessed with being fully you?
Perhaps right now you're thinking…
Q1: “Wow Ann, isn't that super self-absorbed?”
Q2: “What would the world become if everybody just thought about themselves?”
A1: Yes it is!
A2: I believe the world would become a significantly better place if everyone finally took radical self responsibility for their joy and lived honestly.
Imagine a world where people took full responsibility to live their life in deep alignment to their truth.
Imagine a world where people stopped looking to anyone else to rescue them.
Imagine a world where we stopped asking someone else’s permission to do what we want to do.
Imagine a world where people put down their victimhood and instead picked up their creativity to create and live ordinary extraordinary lives.
I truly believe so much of the frustration and anger and excessive consumption that is devouring and destroying our world, stems from a devastating emptiness rooted in constant self betrayal of our truth.
We could right so many of the devastating wrongs we have wrought on our earth, on our wildlife, on each other, if we finally laid down our desperate seeking of external validation and instead chose ourselves.
When we each take responsibility for our joy, for our turn on, for our wealth, for our happiness, for our safety, for our wellbeing, for our self expression and know that nobody else is responsible for any of it...
...that is when we are finally free.
No government, no partner, no kid, no sibling, no pet, no friend, no parent can do this for us.
We are the only ones responsible for the life we're living.
Living life from this truth creates the potential for a whole new wealthy way of being for us all.
Become obsessed with yourself!
Become obsessed with your truth and gather up all your courage to step through the doors that take you there.
#2 Cultivate a Nourishing Environment
Does the environment you reside in fill you up or deplete you?
- Who do you hang out with?
- What are the prevailing conversations you have around money and investing and wealth?
- What do you choose to consume and put into yourself in terms of information?
- Do you wake up in the morning and switch on the news (or flick through your social media feeds) and consume all the drama and chaos being flung around?
“the stock market's going to crash”
“millions of people have lost their jobs”
“we are going into recession”
These things can all be true, AND it’s our job to remember they are just tiny droplets of truth in a gigantic ocean of truths.
These truths exist alongside the truth that…
- millions of people are thriving and creating unprecedented wealth right now;
- we are in a more abundant, prosperous, and higher overall quality of life for more people than at any time in human history;
- there is more opportunity to live our freeset and truest lives now than at any other time;
- successful investing is NOT governed by the news of the day but by a set of principles that have stood the test of time.
We have the responsibility to ensure our one precious freaky life is fueled by inputs that nourish it.
Am I saying, be completely lala and disconnected from the news?
Actually, yes. ??
The media is not designed to make your life full and wealthy.
All media is a very curated set of content driven by fear and chaos, designed to make you feel uncertain and helpless (and consume to try and feel better).
There’s a saying..
You are what you eat.
I believe it goes wider than that..
You are what you consume.
There's an infinite number of things you can choose to consume (emotionally, mentally and physically) and what you choose determines your lived experience.
Ask yourself?
What am I choosing to notice in the world?
We all choose to notice certain things that align to our beliefs or models of the world. It’s called our confirmation bias.
Is it a wealthy world?
Is it a world of limits and scarcity?
Is it a world of enough?
Is it a world of not enough?
Is it a world of collaboration and joy?
Is it a world of dog-eat-dog?
Is it a caring generative world?
Is it a scary reductionist world?
I’m not saying we should all sit in a circle with our fingers in our ears singing kumbaya, waiting for the unicorns farting flowers to dance around us…
What I’m suggesting is to choose to not get sucked into one version of truth, being a world of scarcity and limits.
If you fill your life with information that tells you we live in a world of complete scarcity, where everybody's out to do you in, and you can only have if someone else doesn’t - that’s an exhausting, scary place.
AND, that's what you're going to create and experience.
Notice what you are choosing to see in the world.
When I catch myself drifting off to the “dark side” and getting sucked down by many of the devastating truths of our world, I make a choice to fill my reality with another set of truths to bring myself back to my enoughness centre line.
I go out into a public place and choose to notice all the little moments of joy and acts of kindness that are constantly going on around us.
I notice a person helping another down a flight of stairs, another giving a homeless person a sandwich, another giving a stranger a smile as they walk past each other, two people laughing, a woman bending down and giving her dog a loving stroke, a driver giving the car guard a tip, a child skipping, a man singing along to the music only he can hear...
… all the moments of everyday wealth and joy, always there if I choose to notice it.
When I choose to notice love, there it is.
When I choose to notice opportunity, there it is.
When I choose to notice pain, there it is.
When I choose to notice desperation and fear, there it is.
That's the irony of freedom.
We all have the freedom to turn our attention to whatever we choose.
We get to tell our brain what we want to see and experience.
Most people are telling their brain to go and find them things to be offended by, to be afraid of, to be scared about, to beat themselves up with.
What are you asking your brain and your mind to find evidence of?
You have the freedom to control what you put into your life.
Use this freedom with discernment.
We live in an extraordinary abundant world of amazing people doing many beautiful, amazing, generous, courageous, abundant things the whole time.
We live in an extraordinarily terrible, frightening, world of brutal cruelty and hardship with many scared, desperate people doing devastatingly awful things to our earth, her animals and each other the whole time.
All of this is true.
You are free to choose which world you get to live in.
You choose by how you consume.
- What books are you reading?
- What TV do you choose to spend your time on?
- Are you taking financial advice from people deep in debt?
- Are you talking about investing with somebody who's never invested?
- Are you letting scared people vomit their fear on your dreams?
Taking responsibility for this thing called YOUR ONE PRECIOUS LIFE, means protecting it and ensuring what gets in is only the stuff that will nourish it.
It’s your job to prevent the poison getting in.
Radical self responsibility is knowing that at the end of the day…
Nobody is Coming
This is one of the most devastating and glorious truths, which if we fully comprehend is also the most liberating.
When it comes to our money and finance, we are consistently told a story that we need to find a Knight in shining armor to come clickety clicking into our lives, on his money horse, to deal with THAT STUFF!
Would it be nice if we never had to worry about all that messy confusing stuff?
And for us women, we will have finally “become that princess”, when we have that knight to hand all this stuff over to so we can finally be free and happy.
We're told this is the story we should be living, endlessly. We’re fed it in fairy tales when we’re young, we’re fed it in chick flicks when we’re older.
We're told this tale by the financial industry that needs us to need them. “Thank heaven I’ve found that lovely financial advisor who will deal with this complicated stuff, and then I'll be okay.”
Nobody is coming!
Nobody else can look after your financial wellbeing, because it's your responsibility.
Oh my God, that's so scary.
Yes it is and it's also so exciting.
??Listen up…
The reason why nobody's coming is because you are already here.
You are it!
You are already here!
You are the one you’ve been waiting for!
Claim that, step into that, come back to you and know that everything you need to live your greatest, amazing life is already within you.
Give yourself permission to live your glorious, freaky, wealthy life and accept the responsibility that comes with the privilege.
Freedom will only be there when you claim it, when you choose it and you take responsibility for it.
In the comments below I’d love to know:
- What does self mastery mean for you?
- What in this article resonated with you?
- How does it feel to know, “nobody is coming because I am already here”?
If you are not financially empowered, you will be overpowered.
If you do not have a powerful foundation of financial resilience supporting you, you cannot live your greatest, fullest life.
There's an urgency and a criticality to getting this in place.
Time moves on regardless of whether we are ready or not.
You can do this.
Each day take baby steps to getting this amazing ecosystem working for you.
Big wealthy love
Ann
Veteran | Sales and Business Development | I help to connect global defence customers with world-leading weapons systems and capabilities
3 年So true! ‘First make your habits, then your habits will make you’