TRANSCRIPT
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Episode #16 - How to Think Your Way to Prosperity with Ellen Rogin
Eric Blake: "Most of what makes a book good is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Wendy McConnell: Welcome to the Simply Retirement Podcast with your host, Eric Blake. I'm Wendy McConnell. I love that about the books because it's so true. You can read a book at one point and then read it like ten years later, and it's completely different.
Eric Blake: Absolutely.
Wendy McConnell: What is it that we're going to be discussing? Are we going to talk about books?
Eric Blake: As a matter of fact, we are. I'm so excited about our guest today. Our audience may not yet be familiar with Ellen Rogin, but she is a rock star in the financial services industry, and I'm so honored to have her on the podcast.
Ellen is an authority on money, a financial intuitive, which I'm going to have her explain to our audience when we get to that point. She helps people reshape their relationships with money so they can live happier, more abundant lives. She's the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Picture Your Prosperity, and her newest book, Messages from Money: How To Stress Less Prosper More and Reshape Your Relationship To Money, which is what we're going to be talking about today. Ellen Rogin, welcome to the Simply Retirement podcast.
Ellen Rogin: Thanks, Eric. I'm so excited to be here with you.
Eric Blake: My first question, before we get into the book, is: What is a financial intuitive? I know my wife is much more intuitive than I am, as are most women. But when it comes to money, many women don't trust their intuition, whether it's because of past experiences or different interactions that had a connection to money. It impacts decisions. Tell me a little more about what you mean when you describe yourself as an intuitive.
Ellen Rogin: Well, let's talk about financial intuition first, and then I can discuss what I do with it.
One of the simplest definitions of intuition is that it’s knowing something without really knowing how you know it. There’s this thought that women tend to be more intuitive than men. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that all of us have hunches or gut feelings — that may sound a bit more masculine —but we don't always trust them.
I 100 percent agree that when it comes to money, women tend to feel less confident and maybe less trusting of that intuition. When I talk to women, they'll say, ‘I just have this feeling I'm not with the right advisor, or I shouldn't make this decision.’ When we can trust that intuition, we're usually guided a little bit more clearly, and when we don't listen to it is when we're upset, and we make a decision that we wish we hadn't made.
Eric Blake: Let's get into the book because the concept is so important. What was your inspiration behind the book Messages for Money?
Ellen Rogin: I was a financial advisor for about 28 years and sold my practice a few years back. I think I was always intuitive with people's money stuff, but had absolutely no idea that's what I was doing. I used to say things like, ‘I can tell if someone's going to be okay for their goals or retirement without even knowing anything about their money, just from talking with them.’
I thought at the time that I could hear how they were talking about money and just get a sense of whether they were good savers or overspenders. I was at a conference where there were a lot of coaches and speakers, and we were doing a program on tapping into our intuition and building our intuitive muscles. I was paired with this guy, and the way the exercise worked was that he was supposed to think about a money issue. I had my hands on his back, and he was supposed to turn around, and I was supposed to deliver a message. And when he turned around, out of my mouth comes, ‘F* you for thinking you can't be spiritual and have me in your life.’
Meaning money. I was talking for money. And he pulls this pendant out from his shirt and says, ‘Oh, my gosh, Ellen. This is the patron saint of poverty. One of my clients gave it to me.’ Looking back, I was thinking, ‘Why would anyone ever wear a pendant with the patron set of poverty?’ But he took it off, and I grabbed his hand, and we started walking together. And I said, ‘Oh, now I want to be with you.’ It was the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me because clearly, those were not my words coming out of my mouth. I don't swear at people I don't know, and certainly not in a professional setting.
I think that experience opened me up to having intuition about what's up with people and their money stuff, trusting that in myself. So now my process is that when I meet with people and do calm, intuitive money readings, I actually journal what I think of as the energy of money.
I find that some people say, ‘That doesn't land with me.’ That's totally cool. You can think of it as a helpful metaphor. I think we all have a relationship with money. We don't think about it a lot, but we talk about money in ways that anthropomorphize it. ‘Don't let your money out. Don't outlive your money. Don't be a slave to money. Make your money work hard for you.’ We personify it.
I find that it's really valuable for people to think about what kind of partner they are to their money as if their relationship with money was like a personal relationship or even a romantic relationship. Are you someone who is caring and respectful? Are you someone who maybe is controlling or envious? Are you a user with money? Like you want it to just show up when you want it? As an advisor, when people have a healthier relationship with their money, they make much better decisions than if it's swirling around in the background with a lot of unexamined beliefs.
Eric Blake: I think it's interesting that we stress the point that money is just an object, but there’s such an emotional connection for people. There was a social media post connected to a previous episode that pointed out that we all have our emotional baggage when it comes to money and asked whether people had ever considered how deeply-rooted emotional issues might affect their financial journey. And one of my clients actually responded to that.
She was originally from Australia. She came over here at 30 years old; her husband left her. She couldn't afford to keep making the house payments and she ended up in government housing, but she didn't let that control the rest of her life. She went on to have a great career, earned six figures, and retired. Now she and her now-husband travel wherever they want to. That's what inspires me. It's part of my passion for what I do.
One of the things you talk about is having a relationship with money. Can you tell me more about what you mean by that and how shifting this can make a difference in your life and even your business if you're a business owner?
Ellen Rogin: I think it's helpful to make a distinction between scarcity thinking versus abundance thinking. Scarcity thinking tends to be fear-based: ‘For me to win, you have to lose. There's only so much to go around.’ It's aggressive competition. It can show up for people who are genuinely good people, but when something good happens to a friend of theirs, instead of being totally excited, they’ll ask, ‘Why isn't that me?’ Or they'll either judge their friend or judge themselves.
That's scarcity thinking. It feels bad and restrictive. Abundance thinking is thinking that there's more than enough to go around. It’s generous, collaborative, and optimistic. You can certainly do okay or very well financially while being a scarcity thinker: it just sucks. It's hard. Why would you want to worry all the time? That you're going to lose what you had? Compare that to the client you just told us about, who said to herself, ‘Oh my gosh, I had this bad thing happen, but look what I did. I rebuilt. I'm traveling the world now.’ When we can move into abundance thinking, it’s a really good step toward having a better relationship.
When you catch yourself being in scarcity thinking — because we all have that, right? Even I do. But the more quickly I can move to the other side, the better things feel and the better the results I get.
Eric Blake: I think it would be a great idea for you to share some of the things that you do when you catch yourself thinking negatively. How can you snap yourself out of that, or steer yourself in the right direction again?
Ellen Rogin: I like to think about this in four different ways because there are four different parts of our financial life that this can impact. The first is being aware of what you think and say to yourself about money. Because some of it is just the water we swim in. There's no awareness at all. It's just that the world is scary, or that money's hard, or whatever belief someone's telling themselves.
One of the things I like to ask people is if they know what the word abracadabra means. Do you?
Eric Blake: It's related to magic and something appearing.
Ellen Rogin: It’s got Hebrew and Aramaic roots, and it translates into, ‘Our words matter.’ It ends up being like magic for things you don't want to have happen or magic for things that you do want to have happen.
So if you catch yourself thinking or saying something you really don't want to have happen like, ‘Oh, my God, what if we go into another global recession, and it's like 2008 again, and I lose my job and blah, blah, blah,’ an easy technique is to say, ‘Cancel clear.’ So, ‘Cancel that thought, clear it away, and replace it with something else instead.’
Sometimes it can be that easy. It doesn't have to be years and years of therapy, not that there's anything wrong with that. But sometimes, we can just get rid of a limiting belief by being aware of it. So, that's the first part, being aware.
The next part is being clear. This is where a good financial advisor like you can really support someone by asking, ‘Where do you want to go? When is your retirement? Is that what you really want, or do you love what you're doing and just want to have the money so you know you could retire?’
Then comes care, which is taking care of the material part of money. We live in a material world. It's nice to talk about the ethereal side of things — our beliefs and our attitudes — but we live in a material world, and this is where a great financial advisor can help you make sound decisions.
Once you've taken care of things in your financial life, the last part is sharing, and that’s about generosity. One of the things I like to say is that generosity precedes prosperity. When people are super freaked out about money, they tend to hold on tightly to things, and one of the best ways to move from scarcity to abundance is to loosen that grip a little bit and ask how you can be a bit more generous with your financial resources. Having a plan for how much you could give. Being generous with your energetic resources, whether that's volunteering or if you're in business, how many referrals are you giving to people?
So, as a high-level overview, it's Aware. Clear. Care. Share.
I call it the recipe for prosperity pie, but if you look at these four areas, almost all of the discussion is in the care area, which is important. This is doing a spending plan, having good asset allocations, and doing retirement projections. It’s crucial. I'm not saying that it’s not important. But if we're not looking at the beliefs you have around money — where you want to go, whether it is meaningful for you, how it fits into your whole life — then it's actually harder to meet your goals.
Eric Blake: I one hundred percent agree. That's one of the conversations I try to have very early on, making sure that we're on the same page, that money is a tool and not the end result.
Asking those questions about why money is important and what they want it to do for them, sometimes those conversations are hard because the clients haven't thought about it before. I think that's where a book like yours can start opening up that thought process.
Ellen Rogin: I would reframe this a bit. Abracadabra, and our words matter, means that in addition to money being a tool to help you grow your goals, how do you have a really great relationship with money? Not only is money a good partner for you, it can have a seat at the table. But how are you being a good partner for money as well?
Eric Blake: You’ve talked about journaling and meditating when it comes to changing your thought process, or at least understanding your thought process when it comes to money.
Ellen Rogin: We have something like 6,500 thoughts a day spinning through our minds. We're chatty, chatty, chatty. In the book about how when I moved to New York to go to graduate school, I had a really annoying roommate who just never shut up. It drove me crazy. I couldn't wait to get out of that living arrangement.
Sometimes we have that roommate living in our heads all the time, and it's not always giving us good information. One of the ways to quiet that annoying roommate down is to have a little bit more mindfulness practice and to meditate.
I one hundred percent believe that what made my business successful and was one of the best things I ever did was start a meditation practice because we can't hear our own good intentions or our own intuition if there's all this chatter going on all the time. They’ve found that, even after only eight weeks of about 12 minutes a day, people who have a regular meditation practice can quiet that internal chatter down. And once you can be a little bit more quiet, you're able to make better decisions. I think it's a really important tool. People don't necessarily think of it as a financial tool, but it's really hard to do your best work when you've got a client who is just spinning in their mind and can't actually hear the good advice that you're giving them.
It can be simple. People think, ‘Oh, I could never do that. I can't sit still.’ Let me get rid of one belief that people have about meditation that isn’t true, and that’s that your mind is just quiet and it's still, as if you're a monk, meditating 12 hours a day. Sometimes I'll sit for meditation, and my mind is going through stuff the entire time. Meditation includes noticing that your mind wanders and bringing it back, but you can do walking meditation. Runners say running is a meditative process. It can just be a few deep breaths. It’s just a way to get present.
Eric Blake: That's kind of the way I am. I try to set aside 10 minutes every morning, and I'm still not very good at it. My mind just wanders, usually to something related to a client interaction or a conversation, could I have said that better or done this a little bit differently. That's usually where my mind goes. But like you said, it's just practice and trying to get better at it and doing it.
For me, it's during my workouts in the morning. I'm an early morning person, so that's where the meditation comes in: just clearing your mind and focusing on something else. But it's hard.
Ellen Rogin: You can't do it wrong, you really can't, so when you say you're a bad meditator, there's no such thing as a bad meditator. And the fact that you're doing it is fabulous. It's a beautiful way to start your day instead of what most people do, grabbing their phone and looking at the news or email. That’s an awful way to start your day. Studies have shown that people who watch even five minutes of news in the morning are less happy by the end of the day than people who don't
Eric Blake: Well, because it's always bad news. There's nothing good that happens, at least not that you see on the news anyway.
Can you talk a little bit about the journaling aspect? I know you shared some different prompts and ideas on how to journal in the book, so if you wouldn't mind touching on a few of those key suggestions.
Ellen Rogin: For sure. And let me start by saying I was a resistant journaler, and then I saw some research. One study involved people who were laid off from a job, with one group of them told to journal for 20 minutes daily for just five days. The other group was not told to do that. Six months later, 67 percent of the journaling group had new jobs, while the same was true of only 27 percent of the non-journaling group. So there are real benefits.
There are two journal prompts I'll share. One of my favorite ones for people who own their own business is, ‘Who should I be in touch with?’ Cause that's tapping into that intuition, and then they follow up with them, right? The worst thing that can happen is you say, ‘Hey Eric, I was thinking about you today. I hope you're doing really well.’ Then Eric would say, ‘Oh, that's cool. Ellen was thinking about me today.’ Or even better, it might turn into, ‘Oh, that's so funny. I was thinking about you too. Let's have a conversation. I've got this opportunity for you,’ or whatever it is. So who should I be in touch with today?
Another one that's really good, especially if people are starting to develop their own relationship with money, is to journal to money. ‘Dear money, what would you like me to know?’ When I do this in workshops, people get beautiful messages. On Saturday, I was with a group, and many of them had something like, ‘I've got your back. You're gonna be okay. Everything's fine.’ That's so reassuring because we can spend a lot of time worrying.
Eric Blake: I know that one of the things I really loved about the book was the goal-getting process and why money itself can't be the goal, and definitely not more money. That can't be the goal. Talking about the what and why of beliefs and who else wins. I know you've touched on a few of these things, but in terms of putting it all together into what you call the goal-getting process, can you share a little bit more about that?
Ellen Rogin: For many years, most of the goals we were coached to focus on were money goals, asset goals, or the number of new clients. And not that that's not a benchmark or that you shouldn’t focus on that, but what I found for myself, and I found true for most of the people I’ve talked to, is that, in and of itself, those goals weren’t motivating. What was more motivating was when they could get deeply in touch with why they cared about it.
Why did they want to make more money? Was it because they could serve more people and know that they’re really easing their suffering for them? Was it that they really wanted to send their kids to college?
Knowing why you want to do something and who else wins with that is really important. Even a goal like running a marathon. You might think, okay, this is a physical goal. It'll be a great accomplishment. But you also think, who else would win with that?
I’ll give a personal example. The first couple of marathons I ran, our kids were really little, and I thought, well, maybe it would inspire them. And both of them just ran the Chicago Marathon. They did phenomenally well, both of them, in the same year of their first marathon. The last several I ran were to raise money for charity; one of them was for the American Cancer Society, and I ran with my sister-in-law, who has since passed away. She had ovarian cancer. One of my clients was a photographer during the race. She got a picture of my back, and I sent it to Andrea. She responded with a note saying, ‘Ellen, you can't imagine how important this is to me. I always thought I’d be able to run a marathon, and obviously, I can't now. And I'm going to cry. I felt like I was with you on your back. Wow.’
So it makes our goals so much more meaningful when we can have someone else there, and I think going from goal setting to goal getting makes it about what you believe about it. For years, when I'd work with my business coach at the end of the year, we’d do goal setting, and after about six or seven years, I realized I was walking around with the belief that I never reached my business goals. Well, that’s not a helpful belief, right? If you can shift from a goal to a belief, it’s more helpful.
Eric Blake: Excellent. There's one other piece that I want to make sure we touch. It’s giving people the okay to daydream, and you talked about the five-step deliberate daydream process. Can you share a little bit about that as well?
Ellen Rogin: The reason I call it a deliberate daydream is that I had been to Ghana a bunch of times, working with a scholarship fund. One of the recipients was a young man named Mustafa. We were walking through the community one day, and he said to me, ‘Auntie Ellen, is it okay that I daydream?’ And I answered, ‘Everybody daydreams. What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, ever since I was little, I would imagine myself going to university. And I didn't even know anyone who ever went to high school because, at that time, you used to have to pay for high school in Ghana. Now the government pays for it. But I would picture it and how I would feel. Most of my daydreams had me ending up graduating with an engineering degree.’
I realized that he was doing the visualization process that I'd been teaching for years without knowing anything about it. Part of the process, and I'm such a believer in the power of our minds, is to first of all be clear. Where do you want to go? Then, in your mind's eye, imagine accomplishing that goal as if it's happening right now. Where are you? What does the air feel like? Who's there with you? Every detail. Are there aromas in the air? Notice how you feel as you're achieving this goal, and then think about your first next step. We have to take action. Visualizing things is fabulous, but we usually have to do the work too.
Eric Blake: I want to make sure that we share where our audience can find your book, Messages for Money, and how they can connect with you and learn more about what you do. Some of the one-on-one stuff, the speaking engagements that you participate in. How can they learn more about you?
Ellen Rogin: Thank you so much. Messages from Money is available on Amazon, and you can get it in the audio version, Kindle, hard copy, or whatever way you like to consume your reading material. If you go to www.messagesfrommoney.com, you can learn about my account, my intuitive financial consultations, and more in general also about me at www.EllenRogin. com. And if you go to www.ellenRogin.com/goodies, you can download a free copy of my first book.
Eric Blake: We're going to make sure we put all this in the show notes, so if anybody missed anything, we'll make sure you know where to get it. Thank you so much. There are so many more topics and nuggets that I think we could be talking about from the book. I’m actually considering this being the book I share with new prospective clients, whether they work with us or not. I think there's so much they can get out of your new book.
Thank you so much for joining us today. Please be sure to connect with Ellen and buy her new book, Messages from Money. Thank you for listening. I also wanted to have Ellen on to discuss her book because it’s going to be part of a special event. Our Third Annual International Women's Day event is going to be on March 8th, and this book will be included as part of our raffle prizes, as her first book, Picture Your Prosperity, was last year.
Our objective with this event is very simple. It’s a celebration of women. This is not a seminar. There's no sales pitch. As I've said many times, I’m the man I am today because of the women in my life, so if you're in the DFW area and you’re interested in joining us, please go to www.Blakewealthmanagement.com/IWD2024 to learn more and RSVP.
As always, please visit our website if you want to learn more about us, but I wanted to wrap up this episode a little differently by sharing my favorite Messages for Money quote from Ellen's book:
"I'm so grateful for you. I know you're on the path to prosperity. You've already shed many of the limits that have kept us apart in the past. Please know and always remember that I am here for you. Let's have fun together and do meaningful work. In the world. I am walking this path with you."
Wendy McConnell: Very, very nice. I love it. Thank you both. Thank you for listening today. Please like, follow, and share this podcast with your friends. Until next time, I'm Wendy McConnell.
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