3 Strategies to Overcome Financial Self-Sabotage
And The Subconscious Cause of Financial Self-Sabotage – Why Most Professional Sports Stars Go Broke!
It’s a fascinating statistic that a disproportionately large number of professional sports- men and women will end up broke within a few years of finishing their career.
A whopping 78% of former NFL players go bankrupt or are under financial stress, after only 3 years of retirement (according to Craig Brown, an NKSFB Sports Business Division partner).
For basketballers it’s not much better with 60% of former NBA players become bankrupt within 5 years of retirement (according to a Sports Illustrated article).
And it’s too easy to put this down to poor money management, especially as sports stars have access to the best financial advisors going. No, it is much more likely that what’s happening is their early, subconscious identity around being poor simply returns with a vengeance.
The Importance of Your Financial Identity
Do you see yourself as rich? Or poor? Or somewhere in the middle?
The way we see ourselves—our identity—around money is a major, if not primary, reason why we either have a ton of money or we don’t have much. And that identity is largely formed in childhood.
During the first seven years of our lives our subconscious mind is absorbing all the environmental stimulus telling us who we are meant to be if we are to be accepted by our family or carers. And beyond that we will mimic the most common behaviours in our environment; including holding the predominant thoughts and beliefs about money.
This drive to fit in with our early environment can rear its head in destructive ways later in life, especially if we experience poverty, abuse or other potentially detrimental conditions. Because even if we have success or create wealth with our talents, skills, knowledge or services, if we have a deep seated financial identity as being poor, we will unconsciously do whatever it takes to return, to regress, to that identity.
Since being broke in childhood is so familiar to many sports-stars, if their early mental conditioning is not addressed, they still have a subconscious compulsion to re-create the conditions they are most familiar with: in this case, being broke.
And this is a big reason so many once uber-wealthy sports stars go broke so soon after their careers are over.
When your numbers come up…they can go down too!
The same financial self-sabotage can be seen in lottery winners too.
Lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within 3—5 years than the average American (according to the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards).
And nearly one-third of all lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy (CFPBS).
It’s a good warning for any of us who seek to raise our financial stature to be mindful of that part of our mind which controls up to 97% of our behaviour: our subconscious mind.
“It’s better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”
Oscar Wilde
How do we STOP financial self-sabotage?
So how can we prevent ourselves from re-creating our childhood conditions, if we wish to maintain our new, better off, financial standing in life? We have to reprogram the subconscious mind. And we can do that by doing these 3 main things:
1) Defend your environment.
Since the subconscious doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality, and since it absorbs everything we see, driving us to mimic the most common behaviours, we’d be best to not watch TV or movies about people going broke, broke being admirable (for its own sake) and broke being something that inevitably happens when relationships break down. Any dramatisation which presents a message normalising—in any way—going broke as a normal part of life is poisoning your subconscious. Turn it off.
2) Nourish your subconscious mind.
Read the books on generating and maintaining wealth. Listen to the podcasts by the experts on money management. Watch the YouTube videos of Bob Proctor, Napoleon Hill, Louise Hay and more, each saying the same thing in their own way: change how you see yourself and money and watch how your new reflection sparkles like diamonds and gold on a Lamborghini dashboard. Fill your mind with empowered thoughts and beliefs about finances, money, wealth, investing—all of the ways we conceptualise, collect and grow currency.
3) Speak only of your financial success.
Your subconscious is always listening—especially to yourself. Like all things in life, money tends to ebb and flow. But by concentrating on the flow, and not even speaking about the ebb, you direct your attention to more flow. There’s no need or benefit in cursing your bills: pay them with joy and gratitude. Instead of haggling for the best price every time you go into a shop, pay the full ticket price without protest or fishing for a bargain. By learning to change the way you speak about money, eventually your subconscious mind will catch up and your new abundant talk will be your new familiar.
As you make the shift from a scarcity mindset to abundant thinking, and as you grow to appreciate the power of self-fulfilling prophecy, you’ll never pay any mind to the plight of the poor professional sports retirees, wondering what happened to their fortunes.
YOUR fortune is safe in your well nourished subconscious mind.