11: How To Overcome Money Issues (John’s Story)

What Is This Episode About…

In this episode, we’re going to dive into the subject of money and why people call it the root of all evil. We will talk about our personal experiences with money, and how that formed and shaped the way we saw our realities.

The episode will focus on John and his money issues, how they came to be and how he overcame them.

It’s not specific to the yoga industry, but we have seen that a lot of yoga entrepreneurs have bad relationships with money. Whether that be thinking money is a bad thing, or they feel like they can’t seem to make enough of it. It all starts with having the right mindset about it.

Hopefully, the key takeaways from his story will help you look at your money issues differently so you can work towards financial freedom.

Key Points Discussed:

• The delight of being read to (00:49)
• John’s money lessons growing up (02:32)
• The dysfunction of struggling internally about spending money (07:27)
• Studying ways of being better with your finances (10:19)
• The turnkey experience that led to a shift (15:00)

Learn More About The Content Discussed…

Join The Facebook Group –> http://bit.ly/yogaentrepreneur

Atomic Habit by James Clear –> Get it here

When Was It Released…

This episode was released September 4, 2019

Episode Transcript…

Disclaimer: The Transcript Is Auto-Generated And May Contain Spelling And Grammar Errors

00:01          Money. Some of you just got excited and some of you just got a little disturbed. What is money and why do people call it the root of all evil? Well, that is a couple of questions that we are going to explore in today’s episode.

00:17          What’s up everyone? You are listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. I am Chris Yax, and I’m John Yax. We are part of a small group of yoga entrepreneurs who are committed to making a living, doing what we love, without feeling guilty about making money, or ashamed of being successful, because we know the real value of yoga and how the world needs it now more than ever. This podcast is here to teach the strategies and tactics so we can thrive financially as yoga entrepreneurs. We are the Yax brothers and welcome to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets.

00:49          Alright, John, this is a good one. I’m super excited. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for so long. How many of you have money issues? Really, a lot of us do, don’t we? I know I did forever and it still lingers. In fact, I’m reading a book right now. I say reading, I’m not really reading. I listen to books now. His being read to, I am too actually. That’s why… that’s why I know, but… And it just feels so good when someone reads something to you. I feel like I’m a kid again, but he’s taught… the book’s called Atomic Habits, and he talks about how, like you can have a habit, like this pre… this hardwired experience, and you can outgrow the habit, but you can never forget it. It’s always kind of there with you. It’s funny cause we talk about it in our teacher trainings, and we say like, you can like become the best version of yourself, and dismantle these patterns that no longer serve you. And, what it really, like the analogy is like, when you’re dismantling, it’s like someone screaming, the habit screaming at you. And over time it’s like a whisper. And what this book is actually saying, is that it’ll always be there and it’s always going to be a whisper. It’ll never be forgotten. So, I say I’m over my money issues, but honestly, I still hear the whispers.

02:00          But he has a way better control, like me, cause it was the same thing. I think Chris is going to ask me some questions on this one, so I was about to jump right into a story, and you guys would feel that, and I was like, “Okay, I want to tell the story, but I’m going to hold and let Chris ask the question.” Yeah, John. Slow your roll. I’m excited man. I’m excited. Right. Alright, so John, we had similar experiences growing up. I say that, but you’re four years older than I am. So I’m the younger, more up-to-date version… The rant.

02:32          So, honestly, you know, we went through similar experiences, but the way we interpreted them are obviously different, and how it formed and shaped how we see our reality is definitely different. So let me ask you a couple questions about what did you learn growing up about money? And it’s funny. I say, what did you learn, like explicitly, like did mom and dad tell you something like this is how money works or was it more implicit? Like you just saw them behaving and that was like, oh that’s how you behave around money.

02:58          More implicit. So we grew up in, I’m telling the listeners this Chris, cause obviously you know this, we grew up in a family of six. Stop listening to you after I asked the question. If you go to YouTube you’ll be able to see that. See Him actually stop listening to me start playing on my phone. He is so not interested. We grew up six kids. Exactly. It was actually a family of Eight, mom and dad and we had a 13 it was a little over 1300 square foot house. So you can imagine six, eight people living in 1300 square foot house. Our Dad is still a professional artist and he was back then and you had the terminology, a starving artist. We knew keenly what that meant. We knew very well what a starving artist was. And our mom, you know, obviously there were six of us, so she was a professional mom.

03:46          And so we always had everything we needed. We didn’t feel like we were “wanting” for stuff. Like mom always kept a clean house and always, you know, she always made it beautiful and dad did his best. So, but the reality was that we were living paycheck to paycheck and when things like Christmas would come, our dad was scrambling, scrambling to try to get enough money to, uh, to be able to get gifts for everybody and have a Christmas. And so we didn’t, when we were so young, we didn’t realize this. Our parents separated when I was six, Chris was two. And that is when things really shifted for my understanding of what money is and the perception of scarcity really have grown up in a family that, that were literally struggling. So very soon after that separation, we were on welfare.

04:41          I literally remember getting government cheese and I just thought they were big blocks of Velveeta in the fridge. And we were like, no, we agree. We have real cheeses all the time. This is awesome. And just didn’t being at that age. And as I got older and started realizing, hearing mom struggling when she was paying the bills and like just, she was animated with it and she was just vocal with it and just, and so I had this perception that you need a con, like if you want to get a handle on something, you need to understand it and control it so that you don’t get stuck in those same patterns. So I had a really dysfunctional relationship with money kind of on the other side of it where I was like, no if I get it, I’m gonna hold onto it and make sure that I’m not struggling with my finances.

05:24          Funny when you said the, uh, when you had like mom was very animated about it and didn’t like hide it from us. I remember like right when you said that, I was like, I remember the sound of her opening up a bill and being, I just don’t know where it’s gonna come from. Oh my God. I was literally back there at like six years old listening to her and being like, are we going to die? So what’s the specific, so you’re like the way you got wired, hearing all that was like, I need to control it and I’m going to hoard it and going to like, when I get it, I’m never going to let it go. Is that what you’re like that was the idea behind it. Yep.

06:02          Well was more of that I need to, I need to be way more, I’ll say way more. I mean I need to be structured around it in ways that like, so at 16 1617 I bought my first car and I was able to do that because I understood that if I want to do bigger things, I can’t rely on our parents to try to help us with these bigger purchases. And so when I was 16 not only did I buy my first car, 16 or 17 617 but I went on my first international trip when I was 16 I went to Costa Rica and surf on a surf trip, paid for it myself, pay for my first car myself. So I did these bigger purchases, these bigger things because I understood that in order to really understand finances, even being young. So my rudimentary understanding of finances was, hold onto it in a way that you’re able to do bigger things with it. Right? So I held onto it and I was like, okay, I’ll spend a little bit here, a little bit there, but I wasn’t like going off and blowing it on stuff I didn’t really need.

07:09          Okay. Let me stop you right there for a second. Cause this sounds, that sounds like pretty healthy. Like okay, I know that I have to rely on myself. So like you’ve learned self for lions and I’m gonna save and then I’m saving. So now I have the ability to do bigger things and then you’re doing those bigger things. It doesn’t sound dysfunctional to me. What was like

07:27          what, what’s the darker side of that? So that’s the external. The internal was when I had to make a purchase. So like I’m saving up for a big surf trip or I’m saving up to buy a car, I’m saving up for some bigger thing and I have to make a purchase. I have to make a hundred dollars purchase of something else that popped up that I did like a, I’ll have to buy clothes cause I, I’m school’s going to start soon and I’m going to hug. I better buy some clothes. That internal struggle when I needed to make sun and I’m bigger purchases like a trip or car or something like that. But the mid purchases that were a hundred, a couple of hundred dollars, was it any purchase or like, or no, it was, it was, it was like a pack of gum. Did that freak you out? A little purchase.

08:14          It didn’t freak me out, like pack of gum or go out to lunch with friends or something like that was fine and it didn’t affect me. But if I had to spend a couple hundred dollars then I started battling inside. I was like, okay, I’m not like this. Spending this couple hundred dollars is going to now put me into a place of struggle because now I can’t get to my goal and I’m going to end up at the same place that my parents ended up where I’ll be struggling to actually make ends meet. So it was actually a real thing though. Like did you, was it that was that $200 purchase actually gonna like potentially cause you to not be able to pay bills and like your lights get shut down or it wasn’t a reality at all. It was saying this is the dysfunction of it. This is the internal struggle was a simply an old pattern from seeing our parents struggle and seeing how they reacted to finance.

09:06          The moms specifically reacted to finances. That was embedded in me. I didn’t have a problem doing small purchases at all. It wasn’t a big thing because I balanced that piece out. But then if all a sudden it was like, oh I gotta spend a couple of hundred dollars because I want to do, I want to get clothes, I want to take my girlfriend out or do something, something bigger, it would tweet me inside. It would twist me inside them in ways. And this is the crazy thing that was, ’cause it’s a really great question Chris, is the craziest thing is that it didn’t actually matter. Like I had enough finances where whatever big purchase I was talking, what’s still going to happen? Maybe it pushed it out of a month or so, but it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t change the reality of what I felt inside based off old patterning that I saw a grown-up.

09:52          So how did you get over it? Like I mean like we talked about in the beginning, like in the book atomic habits, he talks like you, you’re never gonna forget the habits that you had or the patterns. It’s kind of the language we’re using right now. So did you, so it’s not like completely wiped from your memory and like this new pattern that’s been developed. How first, so two questions. One, what did you do to overcome it and do you still feel it?

10:19          First question, what I do to overcome it is studying finances, like not, not, not in depth, but like I didn’t take any finance courses or anything like that, but like studying ways of being better with your finances and there’s so much, there’s always strategies guys. There’s tens of thousands, hundred thousand strategies out there. There are ways of like how do you organize finances? How do you sit, like simply organize your finances? Like what do you do week to week? There’s envelope theory or envelope strategy where you just, you every week you have an envelope and you put it in your envelope for your groceries, your envelope for your gas, your envelope for your miscellaneous purchases, and you use that as a structure, right? It literally at some point was like literal envelopes, but now you can do the whole same thing on like with apps and digital products that you can just structure your money that way.

11:09          So that studying what other people that are, that are successful in finances do on as their regular habits. Like what do they do day-to-day? So like what, like if you start saving money, what do you do? What should you do when you say money? Like you and I are studying with some Ninjas in this field right now. But back in the day, it was like, oh you should start an IRA. Simple IRA or start or you have more money to start it off. There were like these ideas that, that we now know are tragically misguiding us, the stock market just, it’s going to be [inaudible] anyway. Well, that’s for another, that’s for another pocket. This was like a big thing for me. I was like if people are out there doing it and the biggest is so let me bring it back.

11:50          So I don’t want to get so detailed with it cause that’s not really the question. The question is like in order to start to break these internal habits, my Go-to is to study from people that understand the thing. So for example, if I have issues around finances, I study finances so that I don’t get caught up in the emotional response to it, that I’m doing it in a way that’s strategic and that is that proven outright? That’s a framework behind it. Just like eating right. Eating is a great example. Like so many people like I need to eat better, but they’re not using any proven strategy to actually eat better and there are thousands, tens of thousand, hundreds of thousands of strategies to eat better. Right. And it just, it all comes back down to that of like, all right, what is, what are very effective strategies to eat better? What a very effective strategy. All of our major stuff around what are effective strategy around relationships. This is a big one for me too. I was like, okay, study from people that are, that have frameworks that lead to success and relationships, that frameworks that leads to success and finances.

12:50          So you studied, but at some point that’s still just conceptual. Like you can learn what other people did and you can study their models but that isn’t going to correct the or like realign you to a better way of being was like so, and let’s bring it back to like here we are yoga entrepreneur. Like here we are yoga entrepreneur secrets. So we invested a lot of money for the first studio that we opened. Like it was, we put our house on the line. That’s a huge, now there was hundreds of thousands of dollars put down to be able to invest in our future. Had you had already at that point felt pretty comfortable with that type of like purchase in quotes, quotes and quotes, quotations or did that like almost drive you insane

13:37          that, it’s funny you asked this question. I had such confidence that decision was one of those decisions where my inner compass was like pulling. I wasn’t, we weren’t, I wasn’t pushing in that direction. I was being pulled in that direction. So much so that I, that I was like, this is exactly what we have to do. So there was, it didn’t come up at all for me when we did that. We had made that move and it was like our house on the line, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line and I didn’t have a, it didn’t even come up at all. It didn’t come up in a fascinating here. Right. Is that crazy? And so right, like probably a year, year and a half after, I think two years after, when I first met Elizabeth, my wife, we were in the dating phase and we went to a surf shop to buy some stuff and she found some cool stuff for herself.

14:24          I was like, no, don’t, no worries. Get whatever you want. And she, she got a bunch of stuff and, and it was, it was the same thing. It was like a couple hundred hundred dollars, 150,000, $200 maybe. So I can’t even remember what it was. And it tweaked me like it came up so loud just screaming and like, and my whole demeanor shifted. She got back in the truck cause I was in the truck just like hanging out, doing something. She having, sorry, I got a bunch of cool stuff and blah blah blah. And all of a sudden I was like in a bad mood and she was like, WTF? Like what? Like that means what the fuck by the way, we don’t cuss but I just wanna throw it out there. If you have any little ones listening, turn it. You can keep it up now. Cause I already said it.

15:00          Sorry about that. But she was like, what’s going on with you? And I had like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Like for an hour I was trying to play this like, no, nothing’s wrong, nothing’s wrong. And then she was like, we gotta talk. Like what happened? That was the turnkey experience for me. That was the shift. I was like, I literally like, I’m in love with this woman. I have, my finances are fine. I’ve at that point I hadn’t studied as as much as I had. Now, but I was still like in what was not in a place of struggle at all. I was doing the things, we had the studio rock and roll and we did all these things in life that were like great and six we’re already successful that at that point and, and it came up and it was the craziest thing.

15:43          It was just a literally just a pattern that shifted me that I accepted because I wasn’t conscious of it. It accepted right. And I’ve moved into this say depressed but this like downstate all of a sudden for hours. And at the end of that, that night I had a heart to heart with her. And like this is, this comes from growing up with nothing from seeing my mom struggle from not getting any information about how to work with finances from my dad as far except for the fact that that the universe will take care of you, the universe at the 11th hour of every single month, law of attraction will step in. You just got to ask. And it was, and at that moment I was like, this is not how I want to live. I am not going to deal with this anymore. I don’t have to.

16:26          The reality the facts are here and the feelings do not match the facts. And so when that feeling comes up, I’m going to face it dead on and decided that moment whether I’m going to accept it or not. And so that was the big turnkey for me. That’s gold. The facts and the feelings, right? The facts of my life are not aligning with the feeling. If I look at the facts, the feeling I have doesn’t make sense because the factual information shows me that the feeling I have is actually not relevant or appropriate to this situation at all. Yeah. So let’s bring this home. What would you say for people that have similar issues, like you are better as like that or whereas dysfunctional around money. If you are, oh I, no offense to any of you utter and complete offense to John. I accept that you won’t be able to see this, but I just punched me here.

17:29          So we have to see it in order to do something about it. And most of what’s driving us is unconscious. The patterns that drive us are unconscious. They’re working in our subconscious. And so we just get these urges to do something right. We get these urges to like to react a certain way based off circumstance. So the very first thing we have to do is be able to see it. We have to get real with ourselves. And when an emotion happens, we have to look at that emotion and say, okay, what’s going on here? This doesn’t match the facts. My feeling doesn’t match the facts. I need to look at what’s happening because there’s a pattern that just took me over. We’re living in unconscious on skillfulness and we need to get into conscious unskillful ness

18:13          to be aware of what you weren’t prior aware.

18:15          We gotta be aware of it first. The best tool for this course is meditation to be too, even if it’s small amounts of it every morning, sit for two or three minutes. Because when we practice paying attention, then we can catch ourselves. When those feelings come up. We can pay attention to what’s actually happening, how we’re feeling at that point. The next step is to have conscious skillfulness. It’s literally literally deciding in the moment, do I want to feel this way? Do I want to feel so cause we get to choose. I do. I want to do, I if I could have a choice right now and if I’m able to identify it then I actually do have a choice. But if I have a choice right now, what I choose to feel this way and if not, then we need to change it. And the three best ways of changing it or to change your state, change your story or change your stories to have a strategy with it. Right. This is Tony Robbins One oh one

19:08          state story strategy. That’s awesome. I think the next episode should be you interviewing me about it cause I um, I have like almost the exact opposite experience of how the very same, it’s just so fascinating. The very same situation. Like we were literally living the same circumstance and how I interpreted those events that John just talked about. It came about in literally the 180 degree opposite way. So maybe that’ll be our next episode. Yeah, that might be a good one. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening and taking part in this conversation and as always, if you liked what you heard, please rate review, subscribe to it. It means a lot to us.

19:46          Thanks so much, everybody. Peace.

Yes, Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and be sure to tune in for the next one. Thanks. Peace. Thanks. Yes, thanks so much for listening to Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets. Do you have a question that you’d like us to answer raw and uncut on the podcast? If you want your questions answered, all you need to do is head over to Apple Podcasts, and do three simple things. One; rate and review telling us what you think of the podcast. Two; in that review, ask anything you want related to yoga, and three; if you want to shout out, leave your Instagram handle or name and that’s it. Then listen in to hear your question answered Live, raw and uncut. Join us next time on Yoga Entrepreneur Secrets Podcast. Thanks.