Hi, welcome to the excellent rider podcast. I'm Mélanie. I'm a certified life coach and I specialize in helping people like you get things done, find ease and motivation again, and get unstuck when you feel like you've lost your mojo. Today, I'd like to thank PA-pdcst in France, who left me a very nice review:

"Thank you! Thank you Mélanie, for giving clear pointers and simple, actionable ways to - over - achieve." That is a really sweet review, pA-pdcst. Even if your name is very hard to pronounce, I thank you very much for taking the time to go and leave the review, it makes a world of difference to me.

So I will be thinking about you as I record today, thanks! As I mentioned before, in May I'm launching my subscription service called the Make Over. And in the first month, we're going to focus on cleaning up your money mindset, because I want you to be able to make more money, to save more money or to pay back your debts or, or whatever targets you have for yourself, and to learn how to appreciate and enjoy the money you have without feeling stressed or vigilant or deprived all the time.

And so I thought that today I would give you a little teaser, a little preview of what we will be talking about in the Make Over to make you curious to come over and see for yourself. So I'm going to share with you some of the extracts from the workbook that you'll get when you join the Make Over. But first of all, I want to share how limiting beliefs work and why it's important to chase them and to clean them up and to get rid of them.

Let's say that you believe that "it's improper to ask". So at the same time, maybe you think that your salary doesn't really reflect the value that you're bringing to the table. And you start to feel frustrated with your salary level. And so there's a point at which you're going to feel annoyed enough, so that you're going to speak to your boss about getting a raise.

But since you have this limiting belief, "it's improper to ask", you're going to be feeling awkward, embarrassed even to be asking. And when you ask in an embarrassed way, you're not going to really dare to state all the great things that you contribute with and all the reasons why you believe that you do deserve a raise.

So you're not going to be asking in an effective way and very likely you're not going to obtain what you wanted, or you're not going to obtain everything that you could have obtained if you had expressed yourself more assertively. And because you're not going to get a raise or because you're not going to get everything you hope for, this will come to confirm your belief that asking is not the right way to go, that you should probably not have asked.

And that's how a limiting belief works. It creates a negative feedback loop in your life that puts an invisible glass wall in between you and where you want to go. It prevents you from exploring what would actually be possible for you if you only believed that it was possible.

If you can learn how to believe instead, "when I dare to ask, I'm an inspiration to others": you might still be a bit uncomfortable about asking for a raise, but you're going to do it so much more assertively. You're going to create the possibility for yourself to get a raise. And that's exactly what we work on in the Make Over.

We identify your limiting beliefs so that you can address them. And then I give you lots of ideas on what you could replace them with in order to create the success that you want to have. Which brings us to money, the topic we are going to explore in May in the Make Over. Money is an extraordinary topic because we project so many meanings, we give so many powers to money that addressing your relationship with money is a great shortcut to cleaning up self-imposed limits on a variety of core beliefs. When you clean your money mindset, you also address what you think is possible for you in life. What success you think you're allowed to have. You clean up a lot of issues that you might have in your relationship to your family and in the trust you have for yourself.

And that's because we make money mean a lot of things, even though money is just a tool, really. We believe it has the power to make us worthy, to make us safe, to make us free, to make us happy, to make us loved even; and many other desired states. But in fact, self worth, safety, freedom, happiness, love; all of these are feelings.

And as such, they're created by your thoughts, by your attitude. And most certainly not by your circumstances, such as how much money you have, or you don't have on your bank account. You know of rich people who are miserably sad; and you know of poor people who are content and happy. That's because it's their outlook on their situation that creates their feelings, not the amount of money that they have access to.

It's what they make their circumstances mean that creates their feelings. Not the facts of the situation themselves. Exploring what you associate money with; why; and the consequences that this has, is a great way to identify some of your most powerful limiting beliefs. To transform them. And by doing so, to open up possibilities for your life that you didn't think were available to you.

So what is money? Money is just a shared belief. It's an agreement that humans have that a specific object - a shell, a certain quantity of a certain metal, a piece of special paper, or a few lines of codes even, now - that this specific object has a given exchange value. Money is an elegant system that makes it easy to trade goods and to assign value to a broad range of very different products and services.

It's just a concept that we, as a society, all agree to believe in. As such money only exists in our minds. And because it exists in our mind, it's the perfect support for all the meanings we want to project onto it. What I will show you if you join the Make Over is how these different interpretations can shrink or amplify your capacity to create, to explore, to expand your life.

And this is why it's important to intentionally choose what you want to associate to money. And I also show you how to do that. If you need proof that the amount of money that you have in life is a result of your money mindset, an easy one comes from looking at people who have won large sums of money at the lottery.

There's a very interesting statistics that shows that a very large proportion of lottery winners have spent their entire jackpot within five years of winning. If you do your own little research online, you're going to find a variety of studies on that topic and the exact percentage that you will find vary depending on the country. Something between 45 and 70% of people have spent their entire jackpot within five years of winning.

But one trend is clear. It's not because you win a lot of money that all your troubles are suddenly over. A whole new set of problems actually open up. Here are a few quotes from a documentary on French winners of 1 million euros or more.

"It's a headache. It's so much stress. I'm terrified to lose it all now." "Who can I say this to? People will be jealous or ill at ease. This will attract swindlers." "If I give money to others, they might appreciate, or they might feel slighted. I don't know what to do." "I'm not going to be seen as me anymore. I'm not going to be seen as a human. People are only going to see me as the winner of millions. They're just going to see how lucky I got.

And I will never be able to say if I'm feeling okay or not." "I know nothing about money. It's a world I know nothing about, and now I have to manage it. I have to learn how to manage it." "I have rich people's problems and I cannot share them with anyone. It sounds ungrateful to say I have problems." "I don't deserve this money. I'm ready to give it back." "Whom can I ask for advice? Whom can I trust?"

When you get rich quick, it triggers a lot of questions on your identity: won't people change their view of me? Will I be able to maintain normal relationships? Am I not going to trigger envy? It's easy to feel completely stuck; miles away from the carefree life we dreamt off when we imagined winning millions. The main question that these new winners of 1 million Euro or more mainly asked themselves is, whom can I share this information with? Whom can I tell that I have won this money?

What will people think about me now that I have access to what many consider as the solution to all their problems? And although you have probably once played with the idea of winning the lottery, actually experiencing a sudden change in wealth is in fact very stressful. It's actually equally stressful, regardless of whether the change is a significant decrease or a significant increase in wealth.

The beliefs you have are suddenly at odds with reality. You're not ready to embody this new identity. You, with a lot of money. You need to stretch your self-concept, the way you see yourself, so that you can feel at ease with the amount of money that you suddenly have. When you start to pay attention, you notice that so much of your relationship with money has nothing to do with money and everything to do with what you believe about yourself.

For example, your relationship with money has a lot to do with whether you trust yourself to execute what you have decided to do. It also has a lot to do with whether you think highly enough of yourself and the value of your contribution to ask for a raise or to increase your prices. It also has to do with whether you love yourself enough to figure out all the ways to finance your dream life even when it seems difficult, because you believe that you're worth it.

These are just a few examples. Once you've thoroughly explored your attitude to money, as you will do in the Make Over, you will finally understand your behavior and your results related to money. Do you seem to attract it and earn it easily, or are you always working for free and losing checks before you get a chance to cash them?

Do you retain money or do you push it away? Do you save and save and save even to the point of not having money for things that you'd like to do? Do you always carry a debt; and when you're about to pay off one, jump into another? Have you several times gone bankrupt on business ideas that seemed sound and profitable?

Do you always rely on someone else to provide for you? Does the idea of learning how to track your money or how to invest it terrify and confuse you? Do you spend every penny you ever make, no matter how much you earn? Did you inherit money and keep quiet about it for fear of what people might think of you? Do you need to have the latest watch and this fancy car to feel that you have succeeded?

These are just a few examples of money attitudes that prevent you from feeling fully alive, fully happy, fully exploring and expressing your potential. The counter-intuitive thing to know is that if you expect money to solve your problems, you won't make any; not enough, at least to help you address those issues.

It's the other way around. It's because you're not solving your problems that you don't have money. I have chosen money as the first topic that we will focus in the Make Over because it's a subject that makes it quite easy to get very powerful insights about yourself and makes it relatively easy to free yourself from a few core limiting beliefs that you might have about yourself.

And what's possible for you in this life. So how to make more money? Well, to create more money in your life is an action. As any action it's fueled by your feelings, which are themselves created by your thoughts. It's your beliefs about money that drive your feelings and therefore your actions and your results about money.

I just want to insist that the only thing that creates results is action. It's not enough to just analyze your thoughts. But working on your thoughts will help you shift to new beliefs, which will create the kind of feelings that will make it easier for you to take the kind of action that you were not taking up to now, because you were not aware that it was possible, or maybe you considered it impossible or difficult to undertake.

If you've been trying for a while to make money - for example, you've been putting up a vision board and looking at it regularly and thinking positive affirmations of wealth - and yet nothing happens. That's because you have not addressed the core beliefs that are going against your financial ambitions. You thought you were doing everything that was prescribed, but nothing changed.

And that's because you haven't identified and cleaned up those core beliefs that actively go against your conscious desires. Those beliefs have been thought so often that you don't even notice them anymore. Just like the air you're breathing: it's there. And it's so obvious and so expected that you never think about it unless it's pointed out to you, like the daily worksheets in the Make Over will help you do.

To conclude, I just want to give you a quick highlight from the method I use in the workbook to address your money mindset. First, I help you identify your money profile. So I don't believe in profiling people.

I don't think that there is a, you know, you don't fit in a box. I think everybody's unique. But there are some typical behaviors with money and it helps a lot to have an idea of where you typically land in terms of earning and attracting money to you, in terms of spending, of debt, etc. etc.

So I ask you questions to identify the typical behavior that you have with money so that you can use this profile as a base to use the rest of the workbook. This information is only for you to know. You don't have to share it with anyone. And it's just an extra insight to help you make the most out of the workbook, the daily worksheets and the online workshops that we will have around the topic.

And I also give you a description of what is sound relationship to money looks like. So you can assess where you have a sound attitude and where you probably need a makeover. So to free your relationship with your money, we follow a double approach in the workbook to clean up your money mindset. On the one side, it's a general top-down approach.

And then on the other side, it's a specific bottom-up approach. So, how does it work? Well to address your general money mindset, you're going to work on your general beliefs around feeling safe, feeling free, feeling independent, feeling powerful, etc. with some targeted exercises that you can do at your own pace.

And then from the bottom-up, to address your money mindset around specific financial activities, such as earning money, managing debt, saving, investing, etc. You're going to have worksheets to play with. And there's one worksheet for every day for the duration of the month. So I hope that this little preview made you curious to join the Make Over.

And if it did, you can just go to my website excellentrider.com/makeover M A K E O V E R in one word. And you can sign up for the waiting list so that you're informed about the opening as soon as it goes live. And we're going to open on the morning of May 02. I hope that you found this episode helpful. If you did, and you want to help me reach other people who need to hear this, the best way is to share it.

You can tip a friend and you can leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you want the transcript, it's on my website: excellentrider.com/podcast. Thanks a lot for listening today. And remember that even when you can't get yourself to do what you want, even when you're stuck in negative emotions and unpleasant thought loops.

And even when you don't believe it, especially when you don't believe it, you're not broken. You're not flawed. And you're definitely not jinxed. You're just learning how to be an excellent rider. There are no bad horses, only untrained riders.