To change your financial position, the first thing you need to do is examine your attitude, beliefs and thoughts about money. It is only the belief that money is a scarce resource that makes you feel inadequate to create more to achieve financial freedom.

The belief that money is a scarce resource is fundamentally unsound. From basic economics we know this. If money was a scarce resource, economies would never increase or decrease - only the wealth distribution would change. What causes economies to grow is the relative output and productivity of the country.

To cultivate “right thinking” regarding money, you need to reassure yourself that there is always plenty of money. Have you ever stopped to imagine how much money there is in the world today? How many hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars? There is definitely no scarcity of money. What you need is to change your perception of how money can be made available to you. Instead of worrying about how little money you have, you need to be saying, “How can I create more money today?” You need to expand rather than contract.

Wealthy people think expansively. They will make money regardless of whether the economy is going up or down. They look for opportunities. They are proactive. They are not afraid of failure and know that sometimes failure is part of the learning process.

My favourite story of one man’s refusal to give up is about a man who wandered through life aimlessly until he turned 31. He then decided to start a business but was bankrupt in 18 months. He then ran for local government and was defeated badly. He started another business at age 34 and went bankrupt again.

After recovering from a nervous breakdown at 36, he went back into politics and again ran for local government. He lost again. At age 43, he ran for Congress and lost. He tried again three years later – and lost again. Two years later, he ran for the Senate but was defeated. Later, he was badly defeated when he ran for his party’s nomination for Vice-President.

He tried again for the Senate, but lost. Finally, at 51 years of age, he won his first elected office – the President of the United States of America. He was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln later admitted he had a lifetime battle with fear and depression, but would never quit.

Wealthy people keep trying, poor people stop – or never make the attempt in the first place. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing” Helen Keller inspires us.

Here are a few useful tips:

• Fully utilise your own special skills and abilities. We all have special talents and traits that are valuable to others.

• Do those activities that utilise your special talents everyday, even as a hobby. Then you can gradually build them into a new venture opportunity.

• Invest in some extra training, if necessary, to improve your skills to qualify for greater income-producing opportunities.

• Change your own internal income ceiling. The best and surest way to do this is to reprogram it. That is why affirmations and visualisation exercises are so effective. We all have a subconscious picture or belief about what we can or cannot have, and sometimes we just get used to having only what we have had in the past. We need to stretch our beliefs. Write out new goals. Plan for new opportunities. Read inspirational books on goal setting and achievement.

I believe that in all of us, regardless of age or physical health, we have special talents and skills that are valuable to others. At age 81, film star Kirk Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke that rendered him powerless and speechless. After many months of intensive therapy, Douglas regained his speech and wrote a book called, My Stroke of Good Luck, describing the positive opportunities he gained from his illness, and later returned to making movies. No physical situation is detrimental to you if you use it as an opportunity for growth, learning and expansion.

Life will always throw up little challenges for you. You can succumb to them or you can continue regardless. Nothing can stop you when you have the right attitude and right thinking.

Extract from The Money Program: How to Manage the 6 Stages of Wealth. Click here >>