Emotional Triggers that Can Affect Your Wealth
I have a question for you:
❔ How are you sabotaging yourself and keeping yourself from reaching your greatest potential?
❔ Are you sitting around feeling that something just isn’t right?
❔ Do you believe there is more to life than just existing?
There have been many studies done that show, no surprise, a lack of money can be a huge stressor in our lives.
Often these emotional triggers come up again and again in our lives. Sometimes we can be afraid of success, for example. Every time we begin to see it, we do something unconsciously that keeps us from our success.
You may have heard many stories of lottery winners. Winning the lottery could solve all our problems, right? If that’s true, then why do so many lottery winners end up bankrupt just a few years later? Could it be this feeling that they’re not worthy of wealth? Or maybe they didn’t have any wealthy positive role models, only negative ones?
In my financial advising practice, I’ve observed that having what many would consider great wealth doesn’t always reduce stress nor automatically lead to happiness. Having money, which gives us more choices and freedom in our lives, no doubt, can also sometimes amplify the stressors we have in our lives and the way we react to those stressors. If you feel constantly stressed and overwhelmed, our guest today can help us with that.
Denise Belisle is a Certified Mental Fitness Coach of Positive Intelligence. Her business is called In Motion Coaching and her coaching is based on the Positive Intelligence program developed by Shirzad Chamine who collected data from over 500,000 people to create this program.
What’s Inside?
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Rather Read All About It?Glory: Tell me about the positive intelligence program about? What's the background?
Denise: So, what it is, is becoming conscious of the thought pattern that we have in our brain and allowing us to quiet it down. And being able to change that into positive thinking. The way that works is, initially we do two months where they learn how to recognize those voices and give them names. I can give you some examples later if you want but give them names. And then also, once we identify them, then when they come around in our life, then we can say, "Oh, that's one of my saboteurs."
You know, for example, one is The Pleaser. We, women, are very good at being pleasers, we are always going to be upfront, helping everyone, helping our girlfriends, helping our neighbours, helping our children, and doing everything we can. At work, we'll be, you know, top of the line and always up front, to volunteer to do all the things we can do, right?
I mean, I don't want people to have the impression that they can't give. But what I found is that often we give, but then we have resentment. We give, and then we feel bad about it. Or if we decide to say no, we feel guilty.
But my program itself is to recognize those voices and then learn to deal with them in a more positive way. For example, let's go back to pleasers, you will learn to say no, and not feel guilty. And then reinforce yourself in a positive way that says, I want to take care of myself first, I don't have to give my heart out to everyone around me. And I want to be more positive and more respectful of my own time, and then help others when I can. When I have the time as opposed to stretching ourselves so thin, I can just imagine that a rubber band, when we're pleasers, we're just like a rubber band, extended and stretched and stretched and stretched. And when it goes wrong, poof, the rubber band breaks or, or drops and then you're hurt yourself. Right?
So what I explain to my clients is that what we do when we work with Positive Intelligence, and we do mental fitness, which is building the muscle of positive reaction, it's almost like going to the gym. If you go to the gym the first time and you're trying to lift a 50 pound weight, you won't be able to do it. But as you go, you progress from lifting, you know, 2 pound, 3 pound, 5 pound, 10 pound, 12 pound. And in the end with two hands, you might be able to lift 50 pound weights. But if you go just once, and you say Oh, this stuff doesn't work, I can't lift the 50 pound weights, and never do it again, because you're looking too far ahead.
So that's the same thing with mental fitness and Positive Intelligence. You can't expect to change your brain pattern and your habits in one day. It's something you have to build. It's something you have to practice every day, go to the gym every day and workout your positive mindset every day in order to enhance your life and enhance your way of thinking.
And so that's what my program is about. That's how it works and Positive Intelligence, well it's just transforming your life from being more negative to more positive. I think it says that we usually have at least three to one negative thoughts in our brain. And I think it's more like 10 to one these days. But if you analyze the brain and what to say to yourself. It's mostly negative.
And Positive Intelligence, what it is, is we teach you to transform that into a more positive mindset so that you can have more positive thoughts than negative thoughts.
Glory: So what are some of the ways that our inner saboteurs can affect us? How do we know when we need to bring in Denise?
Denise: When you tell yourself that I can make anyone like me, meaning that I'll be such a pleaser. I'll do so much everyone can love me because I'll do anything they want and everything they need so they will love me. So these are all signs that you are a pleaser. These are all signs that you you need to change your pattern because in the end you will live a life of resentment you will live a life of unhappiness.
People will say yeah, but for example, the Hyper Achiever. So yeah, but I need that Hyper Achiever guy to talk to me and to tell me that come on, you can go get it, go get the next certificate go get the next course. You can have 10 new clients this month, come on, you gotta go get it, go get it. And then we feel that we need that we need that motivator behind us.
But what we have to question is does it affect us in a positive way or a negative way? What if we don't reach our goal? What's the inner talk, then? What is the inner talk that come along? If you said, Okay, I gotta reach my 10 clients, or I want to reach a business that's worth $10 million, or I want to be able to invest $10 million, by the time I retire, so I can have a very fulfilling life or whatever the question is, but sometime we get that 10 million and say Oh, that's not enough, you know, I can do more. Let's, let's go for 15 million.
So instead of retiring at 55 years old, and you have done a successful business, you can sell it and have your 10 million in the bank and be happy. But then you end up saying, Oh, but what's another five years, I can make another 5 million in my business. But then you're never satisfied, it's never good enough.
Glory: And so the inner saboteurs are stealing our happiness. So can you give us a description of an example of three of the saboteurs? You hinted towards two of them...
Denise: Yeah, of course, of course. Like, for example, what I'm going to tell you about is The Judge, The Judge is actually the master of them all. He's not a saboteur, he is their master.
The Judge is that voice that you hear that tells you you're not good enough. Who do you think you are? Without me pushing you, you will be lazy and complacent. Without me scaring you about a bad future outcome, you will not work hard enough to prevent them. So that's the judge talking.
The judge is very good at judging others, it will say, "Oh, look at this guy, I hate that, you know, he made this million before me," instead of saying, "Wow, what a successful person, I should associate myself with that person, because I want to learn from them."
That's the Sage talking, but the judge would put them down and say "Aaah. He was born into money." But in reality, you know, we should become more responsible, for our own life and, and not listen to that judge. So this way, we can, you know, be more positive and more and more conscious of our own values, and not put us down so much. That's usually what the judge does.
And for the Hyper Achiever, for example, he is status-conscious. I have to be perfect, no emotion just go. He's like a bulldozer, he goes. And he has to achieve all the things that he wants to achieve without thinking of the repercussions that that might have on him.
And another one that I can bring up is The Avoider. And it's very rare that I had people do the test and the avoider is way at the bottom of their test. Because in some way or another, the avoider is always there because we want to avoid conflict and say yes to things one shouldn't want.
For example, in order to avoid the conflict with your partner, you will say yes, and be the pleaser, so that you can avoid that confrontation. Or with your children. If you have a child that is nagging and screaming and crying in the middle of the store, in order to avoid having that tantrum in front of all these stranger, you will become the pleaser and give the child what he wants so that he is quiet and that you're not embarrassed by this situation.
Also an Avoider can lose himself or herself in a comforting routine and habit that works on procrastination also, and not wanting to do unpleasant tasks. I like this joke example where I had to do this paper and I had to do this work and all of a sudden I got up, went to the kitchen and started cleaning the fridge. All of a sudden this fridge needed cleaning. Right? All of a sudden like you go get an apple or something. Oh look look at all those crumbs and you put up the rag and start cleaning the fridge and 45 minutes later..."Oh, I was gonna do that paper, wasn't I?" So situations like that.
Or, you turn on Netflix and you're just gonna watch a half an hour episode. And three hours later, you finish the series and it's like, oh, I guess I didn't do that thing for what I was supposed to do or the work I wanted to do. So that's the Avoider also. So these are very interesting characters for me, the more I get to know about these characters, the more I laugh, because it just gives me a lot of joy just to realize how much lies these characters are giving us and how much lies they are bringing into our lives. That doesn't support us.
Glory: And just for our listeners, if you're curious as to see what your saboteur is, you can go to Denise's website, and I'll put a link in the notes. And it'll calculate out who your saboteurs are.
And I'm sure my friends and family will not be shocked to hear that my main saboteur is the Hyper Achiever, I know I was not.
So those are some of the saboteurs, the things that steal our joy, our happiness. How can our inner sage balance our saboteurs?
Denise: The Sage is living in the region of the brain that's associated with positive emotion, peace and calm, clear headed focus, you know, when you say you're in the flow, that things are just so easy, and you can work for hours. So the sage is really active when that happens.
You can see the big picture, everything is clear in front of you. And the Sage's perspective is, you have a situation, and then you can decide, is that a bad situation? Or how can I see the gift into that? It's like the yin and the yang, there's always a little bit of positive and every negative situation, and there's always something that's negative in every positive situation.
So that's why we should live our life with not being neutral, but not get hyper excited when something good happens and not get super down when something bad happens. And to ask ourselves, what's the gift?
For example, let's say you lost your job? Right? What is the perspective, is that bad? The saboteur says this is bad, the sage says this is a gift. And what is the real answer?
Well, the real answer is whichever you believe to be true. If you want to make losing your job a bad situation, then that's what you will believe. And when you see what's the gift, and that well, it gives me the opportunity to find a better job, maybe a better salary, better understanding, or maybe I deserve to have some time off because I have some severance pay. And then maybe I can take a month off and really recenter myself and really focus on what exactly I want to move on in the future. So there's all these perspective of the sage and saboteur balance where you have to evaluate like the almost as I said earlier, the yin and the yang like understanding where things are, and always find the gift in any negative situation where they will help you really have a more peaceful outcome into all your events.
And that's why one of my sayings is always it's all good. And I feel that it's all good. For me, it's something that I say all the time, whether something negative happened to me, whether something super good happened to me, I always say it's all good. These are years of experience that I have accumulated.
I've been doing meditation for 40 years, emotional intelligence for 30. And all of that is an accumulation of knowledge. And it won't take you that long because I've walked the path.
So now what I do is I help my clients get straight to the point and get straight to the result as opposed to, you know, when I say get straight to the result is not in a day, but in a short period of time. You can achieve that too. You can quickly reprogram your brain and change. So that's why the "it's all good." That's something for me. I can't change the past. I can't really know what's going to happen in the future. So today is now that's what I'm trying to live the most of my life being now and say, "It's all good."
Glory: It's all good!
Here's something I've discovered recently. Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about what I'm experiencing with this. I find that if maybe I'm being a hyper achiever, trying to accomplish something trying to get, you know, we're trying to accomplish something that just doesn't seem to get done. And then later on, if we just let it go, something else more wonderful happens, you know, we don't get that that client we were trying to get, but we get this much better client, we don't get that particular person we were trying to have a relationship with, but down the road, it's because this other relationship was waiting, too.
Is that something you've experienced sometimes with your clients?
Denise: Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I found that.
For example, there's a lady that I work with, when we first started talking, she had just had like, maybe a month before a lumpectomy. And she was living in a very negative and very non supportive relationship with her children with her boyfriend. With her work, it was very negative and not a good feeling type of relationship.
And, when we first started talking, she was depressed, she was in bed, she was debating whether she was going to have chemo and radiation post surgery. And she was looking for options. Basically, that's what she was doing. But she was obviously depressed, very, very unhappy, very unsatisfied with all the relationships she had in her life.
And then our first assignment, you know, if we can call it this way, was just get out of bed. And go lay on the couch if you want to, but get out of your bedroom, just to change the environment to change something. And then as we moved forward, it was get dressed, have a shower and get dressed, go lay on the couch if you want to.
So after four months of working with me, she had started back to hang out with her favorite girlfriends. She would work out three times a week. She made the decision to tell her kids that by the end of October, I think they had to leave the house and find themselves a place to stay. She had broken up with her boyfriend and met new people when she was hanging out with her girlfriends. And she had made a decision at work that says I'm going to come in once a week, but the rest of the time I want to work from home. And that was pre-COVID. And I want to work from home, which is not done very often. But she could do that. I mean, the work allowed her to do that type of work she could do from anywhere.
So all that together made her change her mindset changing the way she sees herself being more self-compassionate towards herself, raising her Sage in a way that she gave herself love. She was a big pleaser doing everything for everyone. And then she turned that around and started giving to herself. So she became happy and healthy. .
And I talked to her after the kids left. And she said you know, it was hard. But I'm so happy that I don't have them as a burden. We see each other at birthdays and holidays, but we're not, you know, I don't have to carry them on my back all day long and all that. And she had rekindled a relationship with her boyfriend, but on our own terms, and so she had found herself, literally and she had found happiness for herself. And then she was able to give to others and be happy.
Glory: That's wonderful. And I've heard you say, Don't be resilient. Be aware. What did you mean by that?
Denise: The way that works is when things are happening to you. You don't get hit. Like I see that like a boxing ring, like a boxer is resilient because he gets hit a lot. And then he falls on the ground and you get back up and he's there with his fist in front of his face and protecting himself and gets hit and goes back down.
With mental fitness or awareness, you know that the punch is coming and you move aside and you avoid it, you know that the next punch is coming and you move aside and you avoid it.
So that's the same thing with awareness is that you see your Saboteurs coming your way. And then you say oh, hi oh, my pleaser is on his way. You want me to help Jackie with the children this weekend and I don't really want to do that. I told myself I was going to have the weekend off and go out with my husband and have a great time. So it's like no, Jackie is going to find somebody else to take care of the kid.
And so that's mental fitness that's compared to resilience. Resilience is like you get punched and you fall down, you get back up. Mental fitness and awareness is that you see things coming your way, and you avoid the situation because you're more mentally fit.
Glory: And you can help our listeners become more mentally fit.
Denise: Yeah, every time we have a coaching session, it's almost like going to the gym.
Glory: That's right. And I love that it's practical, you know, just one step, change one thing, just a little bit more improvement, little bit more improvement eventually gets us to where we want to want to be. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
Denise: Well, do the test. I think it's one thing like, even if you do it on your own, there's a big description of every saboteur. After you do the test, you can get your result, and then you click on the link, and then you have all the saboteurs right there lined up for you. And if only that, it will start to build your mental fitness, it will bring your awareness towards your Saboteurs and how to handle them. So that's one thing that I could say.
And if you feel that after you read those descriptions, and after you realize that, Oh, my goodness, I'm such an avoider, how do I ever gonna get out of that? And then your second thought will be avoiding doing anything about it, obviously. But then if you work a little bit with your Saboteurs and say:
I want to have someone that will assist me into building that mental fitness, helping me make the changes I deserve to have in my life, helping me see all the good in my life as opposed to always see the negative, helping me with my relationship, helping me with my challenge at work, helping me making the right decision for my family and for myself
... then I'm there for you. I would love working with you.
I would love to assist you in any way, by coaching you and bringing you to a discovery that will allow you to be more serene and peaceful in your life. But that doesn't mean that you have to be less efficient and productive for the hyper achiever. But it means that you'll do it with more serenity, with more peace with more smiles as opposed to grinding through life. You will have a better ending, a better happy ending.
Glory: Merci, Denise, thank you for being on the Women's Wealth Canada podcast today with us.
Denise: You're very welcome.
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