Change your money mindset and uncover why your personal problems are the key to unlocking money mastery.

All your financial woes, all your credit problems, what if we told you it’s all in your head? Yes. Your money mindset is the problem.

The Health Coaching BizSHIFT  Season 1 was a summit held in March 2021. This article is based on an interview with Mindful Money Coaching  founder and certified money mindset coach, Ilana Jankowitz.

We inherit our parents’ behaviors, patterns, and beliefs as children. More often than not, these are unhelpful things we need to unlearn. It’s hard to do well when a little voice in your head is telling you, “I’ll never make money,” “I can’t do what I love,” or some version of “I need to work so hard.”

The first thing to do is figure out what these unhelpful behaviors are, where they came from, and how and if they are serving us.

Many of us were not taught good money habits as children. To add to that, our parents probably had their own money problems, so they couldn’t set the desirable example.

Identifying these habits is not always easy. That’s why Ilana always starts by trying to find out the emotion behind each behavior when working with clients.

She believes there is an emotion behind everything, whether it is eating a tub of ice cream when you’re trying to lose weight, or buying what you don’t need when you are in debt.

She then digs deeper into that emotion all the way to childhood to find the trigger.

Ilana identifies two causes of perfectionism:

The first one is procrastination. This is probably a result of something holding people back from accomplishing certain things. In this case, they’d rather do nothing because they fear it won’t be perfect.

A second cause results from real or perceived expectations. Humans have an innate need to please other people, whether that’s a partner, a child, and more often than not a parent.

This is especially true when we feel a parent’s love is conditional on us succeeding at something. This can be observed in people who grew up being compared to siblings.

Most people need a coach or a therapist to beat the constant need to be perfect. As a general rule, most of us don’t recognize these behaviors in ourselves.

Fear is not real.

Ilana compares it to watching a movie. When a villain is chasing their victim at knife point, we might even look away from the screen. That’s because our subconscious cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality. So we become afraid of what we’re seeing on screen, and our bodies immediately react.

The fear in our heads can be bigger than what it should be. That’s why Ilana believes fear is not real. It is often more of a confidence issue more than anything. That said, fear should be tackled as soon as possible without hesitation. Not acting leads to the fear steadily growing.

Many people, especially coaches go into business to help others. This leads to them not viewing their business as an ordinary commodity, which in turn leads to them being uncomfortable charging people too much money for their services.

While all these things might come into play, Ilana believes confidence is the single major factor:

That’s why Ilana helps many of her clients realize their value, and in turn the value of the service they are providing.

Another issue is changing our mind about money. We have these weird beliefs about not charging if we love what we do, or being uncomfortable talking about money. The truth is there is no shame in talking about money.

One of the best ways to deal with these money myths is by coming up with our own money positive money anecdotes. If that little voice is telling you, you don’t have enough money, tell yourself you have an abundance of it

There are eight Money Archetypes. Knowing your archetype can be the first step in understanding your money problems.

The archetypes are:

• Innocent.
• Victim.
• Warrior.
• Martyr.
• Fool.
• Creator/Artist.
• Tyrant.
• Magician.

To know which one matches you, take the quiz on Ilana’s website.

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