The ever so popular and overused excuse of, “I can’t afford it”; is it really true? And what if you are not motivated by money? When we use that as an excuse, is it truly that we can’t afford it? What I actually find that is true, is that comes down to two reasons, number one is, the person (yourself included) just doesn’t believe that they can create it. So you either don’t believe you can create it or you don’t have the ability to create it. The second reason is, it is not really a priority. When something is not a priority, you will not create money for it.
What is beautiful about this excuse is when we can be brutally honest about what’s really behind it, we can change it and we can create some extraordinary things. You have got to look deeper, either within yourself or with your clients or potential clients. If you are having a sales conversation with a potential client and they do not believe they can create the money for your program, then where is that belief coming from and how can you bridge the gap for them to see the possibility? Or when you are having that sales conversation, your potential client doesn’t feel like your program is a priority, then you want to go back and ask some bigger questions about what the gap. That is, where are they and where do they want to be and does your program truly bridge that gap? If it doesn’t then it’s not that they can’t afford it, but rather than being honest and saying that your program is not a fit for them, the “I can’t afford it” becomes the perfect money scapegoat.
So here is the thing I want to bring up, and this helps with both reasons behind “I can’t afford it”, whether you do not believe you can create it or it is not a priority; and as a bonus for those that are like me, if you are not motivated by money this will help with that too. Years ago, when I was first starting out in business the cool thing was to make a money goal, how much you want to make in a month, six months or a year. When I first started my list I just started spewing these numbers, because it was the sexy thing to do at the time. And month after month I wasn’t hitting those goals. About 5 years ago I started a new approach, but about three years ago I started doing it full time. I stopped setting money targets and started creating what I call experience lists. This was a game changer for me.
What I like to do is make a list of experiences, upgrading my living experience, the experience of having a hair stylist for all of my events, or someone to pick out my event outfits. The experience of travel and working from anywhere. Then I would start doing the research and I started doing the math, like how much does it cost to go to Kenya, how much does it cost to lead a retreat in Italy, how much does it cost upgrade my car, etc. By doing this I started to get that emotional connection and really creating the list of what I would like to experience over the next 30 days, 60 days or 90 days. You can set up whatever timeframe you’d like and when you create that emotional connection and put it in real time that is when magic happens.
If you are like me, then what you truly give a shit about is not the number but that it actually connects to you. What’s your connection to it, to that number, and you can actually see how this can happen instead of this kind of deer-in-the-headlights, like well how am I going to make $10,000 a month or $5,000 or $100,000 or whatever number a month. It’s just this arbitrary number, and when there is no connection to it, people just freeze and are like I don’t know how to do this. So when you flip it around and you can really can see yourself doing it, you see how absolutely it can happen and it’s much easier than you think so that is my business alchemy tip for you today. How you can go from “I can’t afford this” to what experiences do I want to create.
