How To Fake It 'Til You Make It

We’ve all heard that old adage, to fake it ‘til you make it.

While being fake is generally not a great goal, the idea behind inhabiting the persona of someone you want to become does have some wisdom behind it.

In our financial lives, we’re most often trapped in a financial identity we inherited early in life. It’s the default of how we see ourselves with money, who we believe we are, and we rarely see outside that view.

If you grew up wealthy, you have a hard time understanding the stress and impact of financial insecurity.

If you grew up financially insecure, you have a hard time being confident of your own capabilities with money or even trusting money itself.

And more than that, you tend to manage money and live in a way that replicates what you’ve always been used to.

It requires decision, change, and intentional action to be different than everything you knew as normal until now.

Regardless of background, all of us can harness the wisdom of mimicking the thoughts and actions of others who are more financially successful than ourselves.

It’s simply a matter of asking good questions that help you inhabit another way of thinking of yourself.

What does a financially successful person think about shopping?

What do they feel about saying ‘no’ to a purchase?

Are they scared about investing?

Do they set limits on their spending and bills?

How do they decide the right things to do when they’re planning for the future?

We’re all in different circumstances, but when you’re making a decision with money, big or small, it’s useful to think about what a financially savvy and successful person would do – what the financially triumphant version of yourself would do.

We can’t create different circumstances by repeating the same thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. What got you here won’t get you there.

But when we purposely inhabit the mindset of next level ‘financial success,’ we can begin to reshape our reality.

Don’t wait until things are better to feel better about finances. It’s time to build the money identity you want now, as a means of creating the very outcome you’re hoping and waiting for.

It starts with your own habits of thinking, which drive the actions you take. What would a person more financially savvy than the current version of you think and do next?