1. Think of an example in which Prosperity Thinking manifested a successful self-fulfilling prophecy with your money or work.

I have always believed in myself and my ability to manifest financial success (Prosperity Thinking). After teaching for seven years, my friends took me skiing, and I was hooked. The only challenge was that I couldn’t afford to ski very often on my salary. Fortunately, I learned that if I could get fifteen students to go with me, I could ski for free. I found it so easy to get the students at my school to go on my trips. I actually was able to develop this as a small business on the side. For the next ten years while teaching, I kept getting more and more students to ski. It became a highly enjoyable side business for me, combining pleasure with money.




Gradually, I branched out from ski trips to other venues. I thought it could be worth the risk of giving up my stable, relatively well paying career because of my passion to develop the travel business. After doing some soul searching, my passion and deep belief in myself (Prosperity Thinking) won out.

2. Think of an example in which your Poverty Thinking manifested a negative self-fulfilling prophecy with money or work.

Before reading your blog I could not think of any Poverty Thinking I had about my new career. I became successful right away and my trips were so popular that I added several new locations.




However, I now realize I did have Poverty Thinking that manifested a negative self-fulfilling prophecy and caused me to make a lot less money than I could have.
In my business, I have a net cost and can mark up what I think is reasonable for my profit. Due to the financial fear I felt about the uncertainty of replacing my teaching income (Poverty Thinking), I minimized my mark-up. Despite being told by my customers “How can you charge so little for your trips,” I worried about people thinking my prices were too expensive. It took a number of years for me to overcome this type of thinking.




The results: My new Prosperity Thinking resulted in increasing my net profits by 50% the next year!

3. Briefly describe what you learned about money and/or about yourself from these examples.

Despite my strong belief in myself, my Poverty Thinking caused me to charge too little for my trips. I could have made a lot more money if I had enough Prosperity Thinking to raise my prices sooner.




Marc’s comments showed he understood how his Prosperity Thinking and Poverty Thinking produced different self-fulfilling prophecies that influenced his financial success... for richer or poorer, for better or worse.




What are your experiences with Prosperity and Poverty Thinking? What interesting stories do you have to share?




Beginning next week, the coming series of blogs will be about Psychology of Money’s six psychological money traps that can sabotage your goals. These blogs will give you a variety of tools to navigate the traps successfully so you can enhance your financial, relationship and life success.

I call these traps the RAPIDS. For those of you who don’t want to wait a full week before learning about them, you can get a sneak preview by watching my keynote speech on the YouTube video called Mackenzie University Part 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S3UmXsoIhY. It can also be accessed at our web site, www.psychologyofmoney.com