What losing 8kgs taught me about money

Transcript

As I said in the title for today’s episode of the podcast, I’ve recently lost about 8 kilos and I’m in the best physical shape I’ve been in since having my kids on this journey. What I’ve noticed is that there are actually quite a few parallels between weight loss and managing your business finances. So, I thought I’d record an episode for you and tell you how losing weight has a lot to do with managing your money.

Now before I get started on today’s episode of the podcast. I want to be really clear I am not a diet or a fitness expert, so I’m not going to be giving you advice around what I’ve done to lose weight. Because firstly, as I said earlier, I am not an expert in this area and also what works for me might not necessarily work for you. But what I am going to do is share with you some of the lessons that I’ve learned on this journey and hopefully you can use these as guidance advice in helping you to get better with managing your money.

The power of mindset

Lesson #1 – 99% of creating change is mindset. It’s the actual action itself, the actual action that I took to lose weight is actually only a very small component of it, so much of it is the battle with your own mind and the stories that you have around why you can’t create.

So for example, I had been wanting to lose weight for a long time since my second child, which was over six years ago, I’ve really struggled to lose the baby weight. What I realised is that I had a tonne of stories about it.

• I’ve had kids, and my body’s just not the same as it was before
• I don’t have time
• I can’t since my car accident I’m injured and I’ll never be able to lift weights and get back to my goal weight again because of my injury.
• I can’t follow that eating plan. It doesn’t work for me.
• This is just what my body is like after kids.

For me to create this shift, I really had to revisit a tonne of these stories about I can’t and realising that actually what was going on is I won’t.

So what I want you to do. Is have a think? About your stories about money. I hear a lot of these in the work that I do so for example;

• I’m not good with money.
• I don’t have time.
• I don’t understand it.

If you’re wanting to create a shift, be it when it comes to your weight or your finances, one of the biggest things you need to overcome is your beliefs around what is going on, what are the stories that you are telling yourself on repeat? And often these stories, this voice is so powerful.

For me it was it’s like this is just a fact, for six years I’ve been unable to shift the weight so therefore, it’s a truth. And what happens when you tell yourself the same story again and again and again? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m not good at business finances.” I can’t tell you the number of clients you’ve said to me, Clare, I’m just not good. I’m just not good with money. They kept saying it again and again. And then as we started to unpick their beliefs and change the way they do things people like it’s actually not that hard once you learn how to.

So much of creating change in any era of your life? It comes down to mindset. The stories that you have around what is possible for you and reframing or rewriting those stories or beliefs to create a new reality around what is possible for you.

The key to being consistent with your systems

Lesson #2 – It’s all about the system. Now this is kind of weird, so if you don’t follow me on Instagram, I’m a a gym junkie. I have been pretty much my whole life. I love the gym. I’ve done different things throughout the years, from weight training to cardio to classes. All of the things. But this is the weirdest thing, I haven’t, actually changed the workouts or the frequency, or the length of exercises. I’m really not training that differently, so I do at the moment 4 x 30 minute sessions a week. The difference? The shift that has changed is that I am now being religious about. Pretty consistently my whole life done gym work or weights or some sort of training nearly my entire life. But now? I am being super, super strict about it. We’ve just come to the back end of the Christmas / New Year’s period and even through Christmas through New Year’s every second day, I have made the time to workout. Which is something that in the past used to be a bit like, too long. This year I’ve done quite a bit of travel with work. I’ve spoken into state, I’ve travelled overseas, and even when I’ve been away I have still consistently hit the gym. Like I said the workouts haven’t really changed that much, but the consistency has definitely up levelled now.

This is also very true when it comes to creating change in the space of your money. Sometimes people come in, they’ll reconcile all their accounts, they’ll go and gave a look at it they’ll get all fired up. And then they kind of take the foot off the pedal.

If you’re wanting to create sustainable change in any area of your life, consistency really is a game changer. And the other thing too is that consistency actually makes it easy. Yeah, because like in the space of weight or training, when you were inconsistent if say, you drop off for a couple of weeks, it’s totally fine by the way, but what I would find would happen is that you then gotta kind of catch up and get back to the same place again. And same like if you fall off the the “wagon” with your business finances when you come back in, it’s gonna take a bit more effort to get back to the same place.

I know this used to be me before I had a bookkeeper, I would often leave the reconciliation of my account sometimes till the end of the month and then it would be this big exercise to have to reconcile everything as compared to just jumping in regularly and staying across it, making sure that there’s not a big backlog you have to catch up on. I’ve met clients over the years who are months or sometimes even years behind on things like their taxes. So, consistency really is key to creating epic change.

Another area that this might apply, like when it comes to creating more profit if you’re wanting to grow your revenue, are you being consistent into the imports that create the outcomes. So an example of this. Are you marketing your business consistently? I worked with a lot of digital marketing agencies, particularly over the years. What they will do is go out there, do a tonne of, marketing, get all these new clients, they’ll be overwhelmed, drop off their marketing and be serving their clients and then… If they lose a client too suddenly they then have to catch up again rather than just staying consistently showing up in their marketing on the regular so that they keep a constant flow of potential new leads.

Similarly with putting aside money for tax. Just stick with the process consistently and it means that you won’t then have those times where you’ve gotta play “catch up”.

Small changes yield big results

The next lesson, that’s been relevant to my weight loss that might help you to get better at managing your business finances is that small changes yield big results.

With my training, like I said, I’m actually still doing the same workouts that I used to do before, but what I’ve done is I’m going a little bit harder and let me share what I mean by that now. I’ve got basically a sweat phobia. I hate touching other people’s sweat. I hate when I sweat myself. So when it came to my training, I wouldn’t like to get sweaty. If I started getting like a bittoo hot, too sweaty, I would back right off training and again coming back to lesson #1 about mindset, I’ve had to shift that and say, do you know what? It’s normal to sweat and if I want to be training and seeing the improvement I do have to go a little bit harder.

Even though I’m doing similar things, I’m doing it better. In the book, if you haven’t read it so far, please go grab it, it’s a fantastic book, it’s called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And one of the things that he talks about with creating habits or changes in your life is the 1% shifts. Now I’ve definitely found that to be true on my weight loss / fitness journey and it’s the same when it comes to your business.

With getting across your business finances, maybe you do sit down and have a look at your expenses each month. I know for me, and I recently did this inside one of my challenges, I went a lot deeper and I was able to find hundreds of dollars of money that I was spending that I didn’t need to be spending even though I look at my business finances regularly, just going that bit deeper, I was able to save me even more money, which is adding thousands of dollars back into my business profit each year.

What are the 1% shifts that you can do to make the difference? One example of this was that when I first decided to set up a share savings account, I started to invest in shares we just started transferring a very small amount, I think initially it was like $20 a week and transferring that money up when it got to the stage where you can then go and buy shares. And in this last year, I’ve just been ramping it up bit by bit, transferring a bit more and I had a look the other day and we’ve got $40,000 in shares now and I thought that’s so cool that started really small and just ramping up that extra bit more and a bit more and a bit more has really yielded bigger results in time.

So have a  think about your profitability, your business success. How can you be more intentional? How can you add that 1%? How can you allow yourself to sweat a bit? What do your stories look like? How can you break down the story behind it and how can you start to make those little shifts really do have a compounding effect over?

Follow expert advice

The last lesson? That is a parallel to money. The last lesson I learned about all my weight loss journey about money, about managing your business finances is to take expert advice.

So my eating habits, the way that I am eating have come from a nutritionist. Again, not hugely different to what I was doing before, but again, just really like leaning into the advice of people that do this, that have that expert knowledge. And the second thing is using a programme from an expert in the area of body health and training and fitness again. Neither of these are new. These are things that I was doing using before. I’m still doing the same programme. I’m still working with the same online trainer. But it is leaning into advice from experts.

If the change you’re wanting to create is in the space of your health and fitness, go and get advice from experts in that space and if you are wanting to create change in the space of your money, lean in to expert advice like me from people who are experts in the space of money. Education around financial literacy is key if you’re wanting to create different outcomes with your money.

When I shared about our shares we’ve been growing, again, I don’t know the first hing about shares, so I went and I’ve signed up for a subscription from someone who does this as a profession, from an expert in this space to get their advice, which has helped to fast track the results or the growth that is happening. If there’s an area of your life that you are wanting to create change, go and get advice from an expert in this area and don’t be scared to pay for it. If you want to create change investing is a great way to have some skin in the game around creating different outcomes.

This wasn’t an episode about weight loss, but it kind of was, because when you were creating change in any area of your life, you have to do things differently to the way that you used to do it. And sometimes that looks like dramatic changes and sometimes it’s actually only small little shifts that start to compound over time.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of The Clare Wood Podcast. I have loved sharing this with you the parallels that there are between weight loss and creating change in this space of your business finances have a fabulous week and I look forward to chatting to you.