Hi everyone.  I hope you are all keeping safe during this pandemic, and as important, staying present.

When we were doing our radio show this week I had a thought which I wanted to share with you in this article.  When I realized the importance of this article, I had it in my heart to share my thoughts.  So I am going to start this article by asking you two very important questions - 1.  Is the current corona pandemic really to blame for your financial situation?  2.  How does it serve you to hold onto this belief?

So let us deal with the first question - is the current corona pandemic to blame for your financial situation?  To answer this question I am going to play the what if game with you.  And it works like this - what if the pandemic is not to blame for your current situation?  What if the pandemic is only a magnifying glass?  What if you are to blame for your current situation?  What if your current situation is the result of all the decisions you have made in the past, and the pandemic just tipped the scale?  What if the understanding of this could change your whole financial future?  I will get back to this last question soon.

For now, let us move onto the second question - How does it serve you to hold onto this belief?  Well for one, it takes the responsibility away from you.  It allows you to sit around and blame, just like so many others are doing right now.  But is that really serving you?  Is that really serving the future you?  When we blame, we play the victim, and we take all the power away from us.  When we take responsibility, we become a creator and take all our power back. 

To explain this further, I would like to turn to the work of Dr. Carol Dweck.  If you have read any of her work or studies, you will know that she talks about two types of mindsets - a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.  We will start with the fixed mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, then you believe that all achievement is always the result of either talent or luck.  A great way to understand this is looking at professional sportsmen and women.  In her work she used the example of John McEnroe, who, although he was a great tennis player, could have been even better had it not been for his fixed mindset.  Whenever he lost a tournament he would never look within for the cause, but he would always look outside and blame.  It could be anything from blaming a breakup with a girlfriend, to not feeling 100% healthy the week before a tournament.  Because of this mindset, he never looked within to see where he could improve for the next tournament.

A growth mindset, on the other hand, would do the exact opposite,  A growth mindset personality, after loosing a tournament, would not look outside of themselves for the reasons.  Instead, they would look inside to find what they did which did not work, and how they could do it better the next time.  In other words, they do not rely on talent or luck, but rather on hard work.  They work on identifying what went wrong and how they can improve on it.  

So getting back to the question on how the understanding of this could change your financial future.  If you currently have a fixed mindset about your financial situation, you are going to blame the pandemic without realizing the truth - that the pandemic might have highlighted your current situation, but it is not the cause of it.  Taking just the past 5 years, if you had made different decisions, could your current situation have been different?  If you had saved more, invested better, educated yourself more financially, created more streams of income, would you have been better suited right now to weather the storm?  Although you would have taken a hit like so many billions around the world have, would you have been better suited to stand up strong and move ahead through this pandemic?  Only you can answer this question.

And the way you answer this question will go a long way towards creating the change you seek in the future.  If you still believe that the pandemic is to blame, then you are going to do little to change things in the future.  The world is going to change around you, but you are going to mostly remain the same - in other words you are going to be waiting for the next crisis to hit you, where you will once again put all the blame on that.  If, on the other hand, you are willing to adopt the growth mindset, then you will ask yourself what you can do different from what you have done in the past, and you will crate the change which will propel you forward.  The choice is yours.  Not making a choice is still making a choice.  I invite you to use this opportunity to reset your financial future.  If you have lost everything, then it might just be the best place to restart.  As the world is seemingly hitting the reset button, why don't you do the same?  As the old saying goes - today is truly the first day of the rest of your life.  Decide that you are going to make better choices,  Decide that you are going to get as financially educated as possible.  Decide that you are going to create the habit of paying yourself first.  Decide that you will change - starting today.