Wealth Wounds: How They Cripple your Financial Success

Wealth Wounds, inspired by Anthony Robbins, is an interesting inquiry into the psychology of wealth creation. On the road to financial freedom, our major focus is to manage resources to create wealth.  An understanding of what wealth wounds are and how they can be healed and avoided is our focus today.

According to Anthony Robbins, if you do not have enough money in your life, it is primarily because you have not conditioned yourself for wealth.  Why people fail to achieve financial abundance is because of wealth wounds. There are seven wealth wounds that we must address in order to condition ourselves for financial abundance.

When we talk about conditioning ourselves for financial abundance, it’s quite similar to what athletes or sport people do before a major competition. The athlete in the best physical and mental condition succeeds easily. In that same light, our understanding of these wealth wounds and working on them will ultimately set us up for financial abundance.

1. Create Positive Associations

Associating negative emotions with excess money or financial abundance is a sure way not to succeed financially. There’s a lot of negative thoughts and association with financial abundance which we all inherited socially. Here’s some popular negative associations we have to do away with:

• I’ll have to work so hard to make money
• I’ll be old and grey before I make a lot of money
• Excess money isn’t good
• I have to be really smart to make money
• I have to take advantage of other people to make money
• Money won’t afford me the time to be with my family
• More money will lead to people judging me
• More money, more taxes
• More money, more problems
• Money is the root of all evil
• Excess money won’t let me make me heaven as it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle

The truth is lack of money leads to poverty, oppression and manipulation which are serious evils. An abundance of money can help you make a positive impact in your community and true wealth is based on giving value to people. 

Do you associate more pain to having more money than pleasure? You’re suffering from wealth wound #1.

Here’s an action point to begin your healing and conditioning process: Identify what beliefs you have that stops you from attracting financial abundance

2. Make Having an Abundance an Absolute Must

Failure to decide on your wealth target or to make financial abundance is a wealth wound that prevents us from success. The goal is to make money a priority not your god. Priority is key. You need to set your financial target.

You need to know the certain amount of money that will indicate financial abundance for you and work towards making it a reality. You need to know what amount you’re looking for. For example, sports people and athletes have an ideal weight target. If they exceed the target weight, they immediately do whatever it takes to get back to the specific figure.

This priority has to be same with your money goals. Make money a necessity not an accessory. Know the specific amount of money that will mean abundance for you. You don’t need your needs met, you need overflow.

Here’s an action point to deal with this wealth wound: Decide on a specific amount that represents financial abundance that you’re committed to achieve.

3. Build an effective strategy

We all need an effective strategy to create and manage wealth. Without an effective strategy, what we have is a real wealth wound. A great way to get started with an effective strategy for wealth creation, according to Robbins, is to model financially successful people.

These people already have a formula that works. All you need to do is study them. Find people who are successful and model them. It’s that easy.

You can’t be looking to the east for a sunset or wish for success like abracadabra. You need a strategy for financial abundance that states:

• how you will create it
• how you will invest it to make money your slave
• how you will use the money or share it

Find role models, people who are successful financially and find out what exactly they did to achieve their success and model them. It is not luck and they absolutely do not have two heads.

It is strategy. Become like an investigator or hunter of wealth strategies and study how it is made. Remember the only way to make money is to exchange value with others

Here’s an action point to deal with this wealth wound: ask yourself, do I have an effective strategy that will deliver my financial goals?

4. Consistently follow your plan

Failure to do this every day will affect your financial abundance plan. It’s a major wealth wound that affects most people. Once you have an effective strategy, you have to run daily with it in order to create financial abundance.

Compound interest on your efforts leads to financial abundance. It’s worthy of note that 10% of the world wealthiest control 84% of the stock market. You have to be a major investor not a major spender.

Investing daily at a conservative 5% return on investment can create abundance for you over a period of time. Saving money in a bank will only lose you money in the long run. Savings accounts pay about 0.09% interest and inflation takes it all.

Money isn’t for saving but investing. That’s the only way to financial abundance. There’s a parable from the Bible I’ll share later on to buttress this.

Here’s how you can deal with this wealth wound: set a timetable and commit to daily Practice and Follow up.

5. Study financial expertise

Relying on experts for financial decisions will lead to a major financial wound. You have to be the expert. Letting others handle your wealth is dangerous.

Experts make mistakes and errors. You have to be the expert yourself. All it takes is studying. Warren Buffett spends many hours daily reading financial reports. Compound that knowledge over a period of years and you’ll see why he’s a successful investor.

You need to have financial knowledge to have financial abundance. Knowledge of basic accounting, taxes, etc. is important. Especially in Nigeria, and you know why.

An action point is to ask yourself now: What do you need to learn to make financial decisions?

6. Be consistently focused

Financial Complacency happens you stop paying attention to your finance. Whatever you fail to use, you lose. The Parable of the talents in the Bible provides some insight into this wealth wound.

The merchant gave his 3 servants various amount of talents. 2 invested it and the other saved it. The ones that invested gained the master’s praise while the one that saved his talent was punished for it.

The law of finance, even in the Bible, is against saving or hoarding. It’s forbidden. Remember, wealth is created when we exchange value. Those who do well will be given more.

Never say you don’t have enough to invest. Time and energy are the two resources that are readily available to both the rich and poor. You must find a way to create wealth.

Hoarding wealth will destroy it. Don’t get so comfortable that you won’t invest. The only way to create wealth is to exchange value with more people. Financial wealth comes from consistently investing.

I have an acronym for RICH – Repeatedly Investing Cultivating & Harvesting and POOR – Passing Over Opportunities Repeatedly.

Here’s how to avoid this wealth wound: Keep a financial vigil. Pay attention to finances consistently.

7. Learn to turn financial crisis into opportunities

Even if you lose half or all of your fortune, you must understand that who you are is bigger than any financial crisis. Sometimes, you can experience financial downturn. It is part of life. You can do all the right things and overnight, crisis can happen and you can lose all your money.

Even the best investors lose money. Allowing failure to stop you from trying again will lead to a wealth wound that has no cure. That you failed before doesn’t mean you can’t succeed.

The past doesn’t equal the future.  Never focus on the failure. You can transform financial crisis to financial success if you learn to turn crisis into opportunity.

You need to have faith the size of the mustard seed. Losing faith is the ultimate wealth wound.

The only way to solve this is to: develop a belief in the core of your being that you are more than finances; that no matter what happens, that who you are personally is much bigger than anything that can ever happen to you financially.

In summary, wealth wounds are real. Having any of them will complicate and destroy your path to financial abundance. All it takes to succeed is the right mindset. You have to attribute more pleasure than pain towards making money and achieving your financial goals.

The goal is to condition yourself for financial success. The best way to deal with a problem is before it happens. Be pro-active and start working on healing your wealth wounds now. Don’t put it off for one day.

Success is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is a result of experience. Experience is often a result of bad judgment.

The true meaning of wealth is to show gratitude. What we do with our lives is a gift back to our Creator. Let today be the beginning of a new dawn.

Jim Rohn says, “You can have more than you got because you can become more than you are. Unless, you change how you are, you will always have what you got.”

Paschal Agonsi