The Money Mindset Exercise
Check out our podcast that discusses this exercise further — Episode 14: Create Your Money Mindset Masterpiece
Get ready for a fun, creative exercise to help you connect to your money mindset and work towards your future goals! We developed this activity for our first Financial Wellness workshop and loved it so much, we brought it into our private client practice, and are now offering it to you here on our website.
Did you know that your money mindset is set at the age of 7? A person’s money mindset is their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors towards money. It defines how you think about money, and influences how you save, spend, and manage your finances. Even though our money mindset may be formed by the age of 7, we all can work on improving it.
In our financial literacy work—and our book Financial Wellness—we utilize expressive arts to deepen the engagement with our content. Expressive arts is a helping and healing process that uses the arts as its basis for discovery, change, and human expression. It offers a window into the self to aid in understanding, acceptance, and growth. Making art and creative choices can be a helpful way to process and express emotions and experiences, and creativity has the power to literally change your brain. We think it’s a powerful tool to pair with learning, and we want to share it with you to shed light on opportunities for change, help you reach future goals, and manage any difficult emotions that may come along for the ride.
The first part of making changes is to bring them fully into your consciousness and then you can begin to make new choices. As is said, “you have to name it to tame it.” If you aren’t aware of something or don’t accept the impact it may have on you, why would you work to change it? Today’s exercise will help you connect to you money mindset, recognize some changes you may want to make, and begin to make plans and build support for your ability to take action. Let’s get started!
Materials & Set Up
We are going to create some visual art. These instructions will walk you through the process of building a self-portrait of your money mindset. You will need:
a surface to write and draw on – a piece of paper, posterboard, canvas, or anything handy
tools for drawing & writing – markers, pencils, crayons, etc.
The portrait will have 5 layers of drawing and writing, each layer following a new prompt and using a different color. We will help guide your color choices by giving you a word to think about and inviting you to notice what color comes up in your mind. If color is not accessible for you, you can use shape or pattern to differentiate the layers. There is no right or wrong choice—creativity is personal and can vary dramatically from person-to-person and moment-to-moment. Just follow your own instincts, don’t overthink it too much, and let yourself be free to express whatever comes up.
Finally, we want to impress upon you that this is not about creating the most beautiful drawing or flexing your art skills. The goal is participation, not perfection. Allow yourself to fully engage in the process without letting an inner critic judge your work, and you will get better insights than if you try to fit a mold or please someone else. Ultimately the results will be for you alone, and they don’t need to make sense to anyone else or look good in a frame. That said, this is also an exercise you can repeat and refine, share with loved ones and facilitate further conversations, or use as a group activity with trusted friends—whatever speaks to you.
To help illustrate the process, we will use these two samples, but yours may look totally different and that is perfectly fine. To get started, sketch a blank form representing a head.
Layer 1 — Family Systems + Identity
The first layer is from the concept of Family Systems, a theory that individuals in a family form a whole system that impacts overall patterns of behavior, beliefs, emotions, and actions of the members. Applied to finance, the dynamics help us connect money and well-being from a relational context, explaining why clients function in the way they do with their money—how they think and feel, their core beliefs, and how they relate to others to motivate change. In our practice we use the mantra “Know Your Tribe” as the first step in understanding your own financial behavior.
A typical model of the family system (pictured) is a set of concentric circles where the center circle—the core—is representative of you, and as the circles move outward through your family map, the level of direct relation to you lessens, with the final layer being the most broad. Starting from the core, these tiers are:
You
Your Family at Home
Your Extended Family
Your Friends & Neighbors
Your Culture & Other Community
Moving to your drawing surface, consider the word “identity” and find a color (or shape) that best speaks to your identity and how you define yourself. Consider why you’re feeling this color—maybe it’s your favorite or maybe a different color is coming to your mind today.
Using your identity color, add details to your portrait to represent your identity and family system—images, text, patterns, etc. You can include any details that come up as important in your mind , including where you live, what you do for a living, and anything else that feels relevant to your identity and background. Take a few minutes to complete your family system and identity, filling the page however it suits you and adding in details to represent your face and how you’re feeling right now.
Layer 2 — Currency + Confidence
The next layer is related to currency. When we talk about currency we are of course referencing money, but more importantly we are talking about time. Humans trade time for money, so your personal currency is your time—or as is commonly said, “Time is Money.”
Time is valuable because it is limited and cannot be replaced. When you choose to do one thing, you give up the opportunity to do something else. This is called opportunity cost. Taking care of yourself and learning about money can help you make the most of your time and make good decisions about how to use it. We want to inspire you to value your time and use it to pursue your goals and achieve your dreams.
Connect to the idea of “confidence” and notice what color comes up in your mind. What other colors, shapes, and patterns come to mind when you think about feeling good about yourself? Using your confidence color, add details to represent things that you feel confident about. It may include: skills and talents, comforting activities, events, people, anything that brings the feeling of confidence. If anything that comes up that you DON’T feel confident about, you are invited to write it down and cross it out, rejecting that negativity from your portrait. Take a few minutes to flesh out what you value in yourself and for yourself, perhaps finding inspiration from the family and identity items you already added, or maybe finding new and separate ideas.
Layer 3 — Goal Setting + Future
Our third layer is where we tell you to “Always be a Goal Digger.” This is an underlying theme of all of our work, and it means: keep making goals, keep investing in your future. Research has shown that writing down goals makes them easier to attain. Goal setting involves creating a plan to motivate and guide oneself towards achieving a specific end goal. Setting ambitious goals leads to higher levels of performance. Oppositely, setting achievable goals allows you to feel the potential of success.
Think about your life, goals and dreams, and how you feel about the future. What color do you picture when you think about the future? Use your “future” color or shape to add details to your drawing that represent your life, dreams, and goals. If your goals reference other items on your portrait, try to squeeze them in near the related item. Take a few minutes to record your goals, using images, text, patterns, and anything else that comes up.
Layer 4 — Net Worth + Achievement
In the fourth layer, we are encouraging you to celebrate your progress and “Know Your Worth.” In our practice we encourage clients to calculate their net worth—the total value of your assets minus your debts. Tracking and understanding your net worth can help you make informed financial decisions and achieve your goals. It is common for emotions to rise up when people look at their bottom line, but it is important to remember that it is only a snapshot of your financial situation at a given moment and can be improved over time. This is the same sentiment we want you to take on with any goal, to shake off fear or shame and allow yourself to celebrate the progress you’ve achieved thus far.
Think of the word “achievement” and choose a color to represent it in your drawing. Let your mind fill with visuals that reward accomplishments—trophies, ribbons, stars, stickers, smiley faces, and any patterns, shapes, or imagery that comes to mind. Using your achievement color, reward all the goals you recorded on your portrait with a rewarding image. You made goals! Look at you goaling up. After you’ve given yourself some well-deserved proud vibes, follow up each goal with details to your represent things you can do to begin working on each goals. They can be big (“secure funding”) or small (“make a donor list”), broad (“find donors”) or specific (“email pitch to previous donors”), whatever comes up for you as a step you can take.
Take a few minutes to celebrate your goals and make plans for steps you can take toward them, placing the new details near the goals that they reference and using text and/or imagery.
Layer 5 — Shame + Strength
The fifth and final layer is about shame, which is something we see a lot of people experience when it comes to finance. But want to tell you, there is “No Shame In Your Game!” This exercise is part of the work you can do to banish shame, which includes: increasing your knowledge about finance, focusing on your own financial goals and situation, shedding light on negative emotions, and remembering that everyone makes mistakes—but you are taking the time to learn from them and move forward positively.
It takes personal strength and self-compassion to overcome feelings of shame, so think of the word “strength” and notice what color comes to your mind. One source of strength to combat negative thoughts is to develop positive self-talk. When you notice self-doubt or an inner critic piping up, talk back to them—however it feels right to you—to counteract that negative internal dialogue.
As a final layer of support in your portrait, use your strength color to add supportive imagery and mantras to encourage your ability to achieve your goals. Try to target the inner challenges you see coming by visiting your achievement steps and combating any negative thoughts that come up. If you hear “this is too hard,” you can respond “I can do it!” If you feel like “this isn’t important enough to focus on,” you can say “I deserve to focus on what I value!” You are welcome to be as aggressive toward that negative voice as you care to be. Take a few minutes to wrap up your portrait with these words and images of support and strength.
Conclusion — Reflect on Your Work
Once you are done with your money mindset self portrait, take a few minutes to review your handiwork. What do you notice? Is there something missing? Is anything taking up too much space? What do your color or shape patterns say to you? Did you draw or write—or both? What kinds of shorthand did you use? Which parts felt positive and which felt negative? Did anything surprise you?
Spend some time investigating the choices you made, how they made you feel, and what might be behind them. You may learn new things about yourself, or you may strengthen things you were already aware of. Either way you have moved another step forward in creating and supporting the money mindset to achieve your dreams. Good job and keep goaling!