Dr. Sally Palaian has 32 years of therapy experience and she joins Paula and Jon today for the first of a two-part series on changing your mindset. We use money as an example, but these concepts extend far beyond the financial world.
We learn mindset from our parents - some of it consciously, some of it not. What did you hear about money and class and situation when you were a child? Has it stuck with you? Kids are sponges for the information they get from their parents and he world around them.
The first step in changing mindset is awareness. You have to be aware of what you're doing and thinking, and how you're behaving. One you have that awareness, you can start making changes. Maybe it takes an outside perspective, like a friend, family member, or colleague. Producer Jon jumps in and shares how his wife was that for him. The second step is setting boundaries. Sally and Paula share some examples.
We also talk today about "abundance mindset" vs "scarcity mindset." It may be very difficult to shift from one to the other, but Dr. Palaian shares another "in between" state of mind. Not knowing. Don't assume scarcity or abundance, but let the world come to you.
More on Dr. Sally Palaian: https://www.positiveselfcenter.com/
Sally's book, Spent: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592856993
Paula's Website: https://paulachristine.com/
Paula's Email: Paula@PaulaChristine.com
Paula: Welcome to Beyond the Paycheck. I'm Paula Christine. Stop living paycheck to paycheck and start living the life you dream about by taking control of your money. I can provide you with the knowledge and the tools if you make the commitment to put them into practice. So one of the things that I struggled with is understanding my thoughts and process is about money and how that made me handle money in the future as I was growing up.
So when I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, so my parents were always struggling. I always thought that money was hard to handle, and I took that on for most of my life until I realized how to change my mindset. So today we're gonna be joined by Dr. Sally Palaian. Sally's gonna join us and talk about how to change that mindset.
How do you even understand where that mindset is coming from? So welcome, Sally.
Sally: Thank you.
Paula: Let's just jump in and talk about mindset. It doesn't really necessarily have to do with money. It's how is that your mindset determined when it comes to really anything in your life?
Sally: It's a good point that you brought up, is that it's really, we learn a million mindsets from our parents.
Just so happens that money sticks out because we have to function in the world with money. And so what we learn really sticks with us. Because it plays out in our own behaviors, in our own financial circumstances, ultimately, as we grow up into the world and become adults. But mindset is just, we're learning a way of being in the world from our parents.
We're modeling them and copy them. They instill it in us. They teach it to us over and over again by their own behaviors. So it's really not magical, but it's an automatic process that's gonna naturally happen, and we're gonna be little clones or little reflections of our parents' behaviors and thoughts.
They never implanted those thoughts in us. And other times it's like the way they behave. We start developing thinking patterns that go along with how they're behaving.
Paula: I always have heard those people the rich always get richer, the poor are always kept poor and we never have enough money. And when you grow up hearing that, you really start to believe it as a fact.
Sally: Absolutely. Some of those things are facts. There are systemic things that happen to people where they get stuck in different routes, socioeconomic, and they don't know how to get out of them. And so if they can't get out of 'em, they can't teach their children how to get out of them or that there's another way possible.
So kids just are sponges. They soak it in, we all soak it in. Our circumstances not only soak in their beliefs about money, but we soak in the beliefs of the financial circumstances that we're raised in. So if you were raised in certain circumstances, which is what you're referring to, the certain kind of belief system that goes along with that. We're gonna soak that up too. Not just our parents, but the culture around us.
Paula: So I've done a lot of work on myself in the last few years and one of those things I had to change was my mindset about a lot of different things. And I know a couple months ago I was meeting with my business coach and we were going over things, and he just looked at me, he goes, you're acting with the mindset of scarcity and with that mindset, you can't move forward.
So he gave me some tools on how to change that. But how does somebody get rid of that scarcity mindset and work towards a brighter future when money or anything really.
Sally: I am big on, I have a whole little system of looking at the concentric circles of things that impact our mindset. So the first one inside the middle of the core one is trauma.
If we've had traumas, it's gonna impact us in all different kinds of ways. Then, appearance, financial circumstances. Did the parents fight about money? Was it okay? Have cultural influences, all kinds of different layers of this, right? But the way to change that, I'm big on it's number one step, with anything. In any kind of change.
Change 101 in the therapy business is awareness. You have to be aware of what you're doing, how you're thinking, how you're behaving, what you're feeling before you can make any changes. So you have to be aware, call it for what it is. Be aware of the limitations it's brought to you in your life. The consequences that you've suffered because of this belief or this behavior.
And once you start having the awareness, then you can start tooling your life to make active changes away from that old behavior. Does that make sense?
Paula: Okay. So awareness is number one.
Sally: Always number one.
Paula: Awareness is the hardest, though. It is the hardest.
Sally: Yep. But we can implement or utilize our start asking friends family, colleagues for feedback and what they see about us.
Paula: Oh, that's a toughie.
Sally: Other people can see us.
Paula: What if you don't like what they have to say?
Sally: Usually we don't, people who care about us are gonna tell us the truth. That's what we wanna get. We can't see it ourselves sometimes.
A lot times our own issues are behind our back. It's like we can't see our back in the mirror. . So our shadow material, so to speak.
Jon: Can I jump in here for a second? What you're saying is really ringing true for me and that mirror for me was my wife getting that outside perspective from the way I'd always been.
We didn't have a ton of money growing up. And for the majority of my adult life, I worked in radio and radio is a notoriously low-paying job. So I had that scarcity mindset. When I started my business for a podcasting five years ago, I would take any little gig. I wouldn't say no to anybody. I was a people pleaser because I had that scarcity mindset.
Until I was able to successfully grow my business and now I approach things a lot differently. So what you're saying really rings true for me, right? That someone outside of you gave you some feedback.
Sally: You kinda wake up and you were open enough to take that feedback to start to reflect at yourself.
And so then you started setting sounds like limit or boundaries for yourself about what you would take or not take. Of how much money you were wanting to earn from how you've been working.
Paula: So is that step number two? Setting boundaries?
Sally: Yeah. Setting boundaries and starting to, if you're looking at scarcity and like financial underachievement or not believing that things are possible for you, starting to have some, yes.
Setting boundaries about not taking. Like I'm in the therapy business and I have some therapists that work for me and constantly trying to help them to not accept late cancels from people without payment. It's hard to do. But it's like honoring yourself enough to recognize, wait a minute, my time, it's valuable. I am worth something. My skills are valuable and I need to be paid for this. And if I'm not gonna be paid, I'm gonna take my bat abd ball and go play somewhere else and find something else to do.
Paula: Yeah, that's hard. Even when I started in the financial services industry, that was really hard for me because you're afraid where that next client is gonna come from. So you do take on things that you normally wouldn't take on. And you struggle and then eventually when you do succeed or when you decide that you want to succeed is when you stop saying, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to do this. And I think that goes with anything, even in taking control of your money.
The first step is, living on a budget. So you just have to make that commitment that's what you're gonna do and follow the steps to take control of that.
Sally: Let me come back to what you just said, Paula. It's very important what you just said. So you take on the people when you're not knowing when the next client is coming from that.
There is a scarcity thought. There's not another client. When we're believing that there's not gonna be another possibility for us, something better. So abundance, I think in terms of nature is abundant. Nature is constantly all I have to do is go in a garden anywhere and there's in the summer and there's weeds everywhere, right?
It never stops giving. It never stops regenerating, growing, giving us more life is the same way. We have constantly more opportunities. We can't even see half of them most of the time, so we wanna come from the abundance perspective. It's cliche too, but to override the scarcity thing, you need to have a shift in consciousness about, wait a minute, there is another client that's coming.
There's a better one. Someone else who's gonna pay me really well and is gonna be happy to pay me really well. Because they want what I have to offer.
Paula: I think that even if we take it back to just somebody who doesn't own a business, and just think about your personal life and how you manage money or even relationships, everything, there is something out there that is better.
You just have to have faith and belief and take steps towards making that happen. I'm saying it to you, but I'm also saying it to myself. Okay. . And I'm thinking cuz you know, I've been working on myself for a while and that's one of the things I do and tiny bit struggle with is I know it's out there and I'm like so close to having it and it's that scarcity mindset comes in and says whoa, wait a minute. But then you gotta put that aside and say, no, there's an abundant life out there for me. I'm not gonna think about scarcity anymore. I'm taking this step forward. Do I have that right?
Sally: Yep. Absolutely. And there's an intermediate step there that you can take in between.
There is that, I don't know. So there's, I believe there's scarcity. I think it's all not gonna happen. Then there's the place of, I don't know. And then there's the next step of something good's gonna happen. But if we pry ourself away from the determination, we think it's already determined.
It's not gonna work, there's not gonna be anybody, we're not gonna make enough. We don't have enough. We're never gonna get out of this world, never be done. This social class, whatever. If we're living there, we're gonna stay there. Okay. But if we can align to the idea that I don't really know what could happen for me, I don't know what's possible, why did I decide I'm the best person to decide this?
Who knows? . I like to get people into that curiosity place. Let's just see what can happen from this. What else can grow here? Maybe I don't have the right idea about this. I don't really know. And letting that being in that suspended place. For me, it's been very helpful just to be in a suspended place if I don't know.
And then watching for the signs, I like the universe or whatever, watching for the signs of what's gonna come to me.
Paula: The opportunities, yes.
Sally: I used to have a big fear about, because if I go on vacation, I lose my income cuz I don't, I'm self-employed. I used to have a big fear that if I took off too much time and I'd fret and I'd save up the money, I'd have the money for the vacation.
That wasn't the thing. But the thing was always I'm losing my income and this was always very scary. What's gonna happen? Everything's gonna go away, whatever. And then I started, I took a two week trip many years ago. I took two weeks off. This is a really big deal for me to take two weeks off and went overseas.
And then I made the commitment to do this trip and then, like maybe two weeks before, I started getting a lot of new clients and I was like, wow, this is starting to work. Like I made the commitment, I'm gonna do this really good thing. And then the universe is telling me, even before I go, I'm not just coming home to new people, even before I go, I'm getting new people.
This is pretty cool. When I take care of myself, the universe will give me the message back that it's working. That's how I feel like exquisite dialogue with, I take action steps in a new direction for myself, and then I watch what happens. And I believe that 100% and that's exactly how I'm trying to live my life.
Paula: That's great. But I still get that tiny bit of, it's so funny cuz I'm, I was just reading a little bit about that this weekend, that tiny little part of you and that just. Wait a minute. And you just have that tiny bit of self-doubt. How do you get rid of that and go, Nope, it's gonna be okay. Is it something you're just acknowledging and moving forward?
Sally: I encourage people just to acknowledge it and move forward. It's there. So there, here's my self-doubt. I'm doing something new. That's why it's coming up. So there's gonna be another counter force inside me that's gonna try to pull me back.
Of course, every time I wrote to a new level, there's gonna be a little resistance or a counter force that's gonna try to pull me back to the other place. So recognizing that's there. Okay. Yeah. Here we are. We have this self-doubt. It's hard for me to trust 100% fully. It's a new territory for me. And keep moving.
Paula: Yeah. I feel like we're doing a Paula therapy session today. . I'm getting a lot out of this.
Sally: That's, Hopefully other people I'm sure they will.
Paula: Yeah. I think we all struggle, trying to move forward and getting rid of the self-doubt. And I do believe, I think it's, everything that I've read in the research that I've done and the people that I've worked with, it is so simple as saying, Hey, you know what?
I'm not gonna think that way anymore. I'm gonna move forward. Even if it pops in for a second, I'm just, it's okay, right? I acknowledge you're there, but I'm gonna move forward.
Sally: Right. Because I don't really know I, that not knowing place for me has really been helpful because I feel like I am my worst thinker for myself.
So if I can let go of my own thoughts of what I think it's gonna all be and stay in that not knowing really wild, wonderful things happen for me.
Paula: Yeah. No, I like that. I don't know what's gonna happen. Yeah. I think that's the part that I was missing, right? We envision everything to be like we want it, and there is a universe out there that says that we have a life of abundance. It's just how we choose to get there. And you can't get there when you're thinking scarcity.
Sally: Exactly. I was young in my recovery and putting myself through school. I got this little pin, it was a Guatemalan, those little Guatemalan dolls.
Paula: Oh, I have one of the little worry dolls.
Sally: The worry dolls or whatever they are, there was this thing that came with it said, measure your wealth by how many friends you have.
And it helped me to shift out of a scarcity about money into the areas of my life that I did have. That I was rich beyond what I ever dreamed possible for myself. Yet there's many different frameworks to come at. And if we can look at all the different ways we're wealthy too, is another way to frame this.
Paula: Yes, I agree with that. And when you reframe it, abundance comes in your entire life. Interesting. I've really enjoyed this and I think you really did help me. I'll send you a check.
So how does somebody reach out to you? Because I'm not the only one that's struggling. A lot of my friends I know and people were all working, trying to change our lives. So how did they get a hold of you?
Sally: The way to get a hold of me is through my website, positiveselfcenter.com, or our phone number is (248) 645-5960.
Paula: That'll all be in the show notes, so anybody that wants to just look in the show notes, they'll find that information. I've really enjoyed talking with you.
I know next week you're gonna be back and we're gonna talk about money and. So Sally will be back next week to talk about that topic. If anybody wants to get ahold of me you can reach me at paula@paulachristine.com or check out my website at paulachristine.com. Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you next week.