The Financial Power of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
April 25th, 2009Let the dialogue begin! Starting immediately, this blog is open to comments.
Here are the responses from one of the three winners from the last blog’s contest. The writer is Marc from the Southern California area. Congratulations, Marc, on your gift of the one-hour Psychology of Money Intro CD.
Marc’s Story
1) Think of an example in which Prosperity Thinking manifested a successful self-fulfilling prophecy with your money or work.
“I have always believed in myself and my ability to manifest financial success (Prosperity Thinking). After teaching for seven years, my friends took me skiing, and I was hooked. The only challenge was that I couldn’t afford to ski very often on my salary. Fortunately, I learned that if I could get fifteen students to go with me, I could ski for free. I found it so easy to get the students at my school to go on my trips. I actually was able to develop this as a small business on the side. For the next ten years while teaching, I kept getting more and more students to ski. It became a highly enjoyable side business for me, combining pleasure with money.”
“Gradually, I branched out from ski trips to other venues. I thought it could be worth the risk of giving up my stable, relatively well paying career because of my passion to develop the travel business. After doing some soul searching, my passion and deep belief in myself (Prosperity Thinking) won out.”
2) Think of an example in which Poverty Thinking manifested a negative self-fulfilling prophecy with your money or work.
“Before reading your blog I could not think of any Poverty Thinking I had about my new career. I became successful right away and my trips were so popular that I added several new locations.”
“However, I now realize I did have Poverty Thinking that manifested a negative self-fulfilling prophecy and caused me to make a lot less money than I could have. In my business, I have a net cost and can mark up what I think is reasonable for my profit. Due to the financial fear I felt about the uncertainty of replacing my teaching income (Poverty Thinking), I minimized my mark-up. Despite being told by my customers “How can you charge so little for your trips,” I worried about people thinking my prices were too expensive. It took a number of years for me to overcome this type of thinking and to raise my prices.”
“The results: Since my overhead for each person was the same, my new prices translated into a dollar of profits for each dollar of increased mark-up. Since my original profit margin was so low, this resulted in increasing my net profits for the same number of customers by 50% the next year! These additional profits gave me more confidence (Prosperity Thinking) so I expanded my trip offerings and increased my profits faster in the following years.”
3) Briefly describe what you learned about money and/or about yourself from these examples.
“Despite my strong belief in myself, my Poverty Thinking in this one area caused me to charge too little for my trips. I could have made a lot more money if I had enough Prosperity Thinking to raise my prices sooner. Also, from doing the exercise, I now realize that my delay in raising my prices resulted in growing my business more slowly. Now, I can see how much one area of Poverty Thinking can reduce financial success.”
Even though Marc’s travel business has been very successful, his comments showed he understood how his Prosperity Thinking and Poverty Thinking produced different self-fulfilling prophecies that influenced his financial success… for richer or poorer, for better or worse.
What are your experiences with Prosperity and Poverty Thinking?
What interesting stories do you have to share?
Beginning next week, the coming series of blogs will be about Psychology of Money’s six psychological money traps that can undermine your goals. These blogs will give you a variety of tools to navigate the traps successfully so you can enhance your financial, relationship and life success.
We call these traps the RAPIDS. For those of you who don’t want to wait a full week before learning about them, you can get a sneak preview by watching Dr. Gottfurcht’s keynote speech on the YouTube video called Mackenzie University Part 2. They can also be accessed at our web site, www.psychologyofmoney.com
James W. Gottfurcht, Ph.D.
Zoreh Gottfurcht
The Power of Our Beliefs
March 31st, 2009This blog invites you to participate in a contest with prizes for the three people whose responses we believe will be the most beneficial to our readers. In order to allow time for you to respond and for us to select the winners, the next blog will be published in about two to three weeks.
Psychology of Money believes that although the global economy is beyond our control, there are many things we can do to convert financial stress and worry into confidence and empowerment. One of the most
Bruce Lipton, Ph. D., has been a cellular biologist for over twenty years. In his 2005 book, The Biology of Belief, he reports his breakthrough research about how when we truly believe something, we secrete a chemical in our cells. This chemical sends a message throughout our body to manifest the belief. It must be a genuine belief with which we truly resonate —superficial positive thinking or wishful thinking will not suffice.Examples include The Secret, Think and Grow Rich, Psycho-Cybernetics, The Power of Positive Thinking, etc.
This chemical actually influences how we program ourselves to behave in one direction vs. another, i.e. Prosperity Thinking vs. Poverty Thinking. When our beliefs help to create the result we are thinking and feeling, we call that the self-fulfilling prophecy. Many people have written best-selling books about how this phenomenon operates to manifest success with money and work.
Dr. Lipton explains how this chemical works in the human body with what is called the placebo effect. As most of you know, the placebo effect occurs when a treatment or medicine helps some people to feel better even though its ingredients are biologically inactive.
We found a fascinating study that demonstrates the power of the placebo effect. In 2002, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Dr. Mosely. He did a study of dividing patients needing knee surgery to relieve severe, debilitating pain into three groups.
The first two groups received different surgeries that were known to relieve the pain while the third group received “fake” surgery. Members of the third group were cut in their knees superficially with three incisions like the patients who received knee surgery and were then sewn up forty minutes later like the other two real surgery groups.
The two groups receiving the real surgery got better as expected. The surprise was the placebo group with the fake surgery had the same improvement. One of the patients in the placebo group who walked with a cane before the fake surgery stopped using the cane. More remarkably, he was actually able to play basketball shortly afterward!
How would you like to give up the metaphorical canes and crutches you’ve been using (i.e. your Poverty Thinking beliefs)? With your permission, participation and perseverance, we believe we can support and guide you how to do so in these blogs. The financial cost to you? Zero. The cost of your time? Minimal.
We invite all of you to participate. No matter how you’re feeling at this moment, you can seize this opportunity now.
Follow-Up Activities:
1) Think of an example in which your Prosperity Thinking manifested a successful self-fulfilling prophecy with money or work.
2) Think of an example in which your Poverty Thinking manifested a negative self-fulfilling prophecy with money or work.
3) Briefly describe what you learned about money and/or about yourself from these examples.
The Gift of Giving: E-mail us and win!
Just for fun, we will turn your responses to the above activities into a contest. We will give a gift to the three people whose responses we believe will be most beneficial to our readers.
The gift is the one-hour Intro CD to Psychology of Money ($19 value)and will include free shipping and handling in the U. S. This CD is the best audio or video introduction to our proprietary work and includes exercises, case stories and tools to empower your money mind set and financial success. It also includes Dr. Gottfurcht telling the unique story of what inspired him at age nine to develop Psychology of Money.
We, also, will publish the responses of one of the three winners of the Intro CD in the next blog.
Please send your responses to psychmoney@aol.com
What if your response is the one chosen to be in our next blog? If you would like to be personally identified, mention your name and city (or country if you live outside of the United States) in your e-mail. If, however, you want to remain anonymous, just say so.
In many of the upcoming blogs, we will share with you the specific Psychology of Money tools we use with clients so we may support you to enhance your financial, relationship and life success.
With appreciation, we are looking forward to hearing from you.
- James W. Gottfurcht, Ph.D.
- Zoreh Gottfurcht
