Ep #147: Identifying Your Money Motivators with Adam Day

Hello, empowered principals. Welcome to episode 147.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast. A not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, Certified Life Coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Angela: Happy Tuesday, my empowered leaders. I am so excited to be with you here today. I have a very special guest for you again. I’m really excited that we’ve been having all of these interviews. And today’s interview is with my personal financial planner. His name is Adam Day.

He’s a certified financial planner with an independent firm out of Cincinnati. And the name of his company is called Wealthquest. He is again, as I said, my financial planner. And I found Adam through Wealthquest. And the reason that I chose Wealthquest was basically because they are much more holistic in how they approach planning.

And one of the skillsets that I wanted to build in myself was not just a matter of learning how to balance my budget, approach my money from the numbers standpoint, from the spreadsheet standpoint. I really wanted to understand myself and how I think about money, how I think about the resources I have available to me, not just in my personal life but in my business.

And I wanted to have a better and a deeper understanding and a relationship with all of the resources I have available to me. And that is one of the things I love about working with Adam and working through Wealthquest.

So I asked Adam to be on the podcast to share his techniques with you and to talk about how the way we think and feel about the resources we have available to us and our schools, it really does impact. The way you think about the resources in your life is the same way you think about the resources in the school and the school budget and not just the money that you have at your school, but also the resources available in terms of staffing, people, tangible resources, all of those resources.

How you think about those and how you spend your resources really does impact the way that you lead your school. So in my conversations with Adam, I wanted to bring him on to have a conversation with him and to show you how the way you’re thinking and feeling about your resources really does impact the way that you lead. So without further ado, I want to welcome Adam Day to the show. Welcome Adam. Thank you for being here today.

Adam: Thank you so much, I’m excited to be here and chat a little bit.

Angela: Great. And we can use my experience and call it out as much as we see fit. But I really want to start with helping our school leaders understand how to approach their school budget, the resources that they have, and I think for most new school leaders, they’re so overwhelmed, there’s so much going on, I think the first question that would come to their mind is where do I even start when I am thinking about approaching my school budget and the resources that I have available, knowing that they’re limited for the number of students that I’m trying to serve.

Adam: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. And I think ultimately, you got to lead back to what’s in your core. And so I think as you and I have talked about not only your own stuff, but I know you’ve shared it on the podcast a lot really is when it comes to money and we’ve been talking a lot about decisions lately, and then resources, abundance, all of this stuff, it all starts with your thoughts and goes into your feelings.

And with money in general, all of us kind of have these inner motivations, or these kind of scripts. Brad Klontz is a fantastic psychologist that has dug into this financial behavior topic and developed these money scripts. And basically, we all have these inherently in us from a young, young age.

And I think the best example about these money scripts is if you have a grandparent or an older relative that has lived through the Great Depression, they’re going to pass on that you always, always hoard cash and hoard money because you never know when you’re going to have something again.

And if that gets passed on and passed on, generally, it either gets affirmed or denied through our experiences. And so we can carry all those through to all of our decisions. And so I think it’s important when you’re thinking about whether it’s school budget or just decision in general related to resources, to be aware of what your motivations or what your internal script is.

And that will help you approach these decisions, say alright, I’m coming at it from this way, or I’m going to be coming at it from this other way, and as long as you’re aware of that, it can help you kind of decide one way or another which way you’re going to go.

Angela: I love that because I think back to when I was a school leader, and I did not have any awareness about this whole money motivation thing. And by the way, what Adam and I are talking about is they have a little mini assessment that you can take for free. You just jump on and you take this kind of like a video assessment. It’s really cools actually. It’s really fun to take.

But what it does is it brings you some awareness as to why you make the money decisions that you do, or why you spend the resources in the way that you do. And when I was a new school leader, I had no awareness of this. So I’m looking at a spreadsheet, my secretary’s asking me what decisions do you want to make, where do you want to spend the resources, where do you want to spend the time and the money, and what products do we want to buy, that kind of thing.

And I didn’t realize I was making those decisions based on what’s been internalized for me from my childhood and from my family and all the way through my young adult years. So I didn’t realize that I was making those decisions – I mean, I made them to the best of my ability, but I was completely unaware more deeply of where those decisions were coming from and how I was coming to those conclusions.

So when I think back to that time, I was very frugal. I was newly divorced, and I was a single mom, and I was very frugal as a parent, just making sure I had enough for myself and my child. And so I can see now how I didn’t want to spend any money, and I was almost hoarding the money, trying to save it, thinking like, well, what if something big happens or comes up.

And then I had a conversation and also to be honest, my CFO at the time or the Chief Financial Officer, CFO, he was also a saver. So it kind of aligned, and it reinforced my wanting to save until I had a conversation with a colleague of mine who said, look Angela, these resources are meant to be spent for the children this year.

Like, the resources that come into the school for this year are meant to be spent for this year’s group of kids. And that really blew my mind. And what it did was it tapped into that – what is it? The contribution person or the generosity portion of me.

Adam: Generosity, yeah.

Angela: Yeah. And it made me realize, wait a minute, this money isn’t my money. It’s not for me. It’s for the kids and it’s for the school. And so understanding where your money is motivated or your resources are motivated by in terms of your thoughts really does have a massive impact on how you service the kids and the decisions you make for the resources that you choose for students.

Adam: Yeah. We developed this assessment, and it’s fairly simple. But we kind of were looking at all of these money scripts that are out there and we’ve been fortunate enough to deal with I’d say 1500 families on an annual basis and seeing all kind of different situations. So we get to pull from all those and we kind of aligned it and said there’s probably three different motivations here.

There’s somebody that’s going to lean towards generosity, there’s somebody that’s going to lean towards experiences, and then there’s somebody that’s going to lean towards security. So the assessment basically just scores you and says which one are you going to lean towards in certain decisions, in certain situations.

And so it really does help us as we plan for families and with families to understand where they’re going to lean. But I think you can take this across anything that has to do with finances and probably even more. So yeah, in your situation, not only is it the situation that you’re going through in your life, but also probably some things that were telling you back in history and where these motivations came from.

And if you would have known that hey, I’m security motivated most of the time, then you can say oh yeah, that’s kind of why I’m hoarding this cash. Because I am scared, that feeling is fear, and I’m scared we’re going to lose money. And if we lose money, then it can’t go to the kids and it can’t go to all of the things that we want it to go to. And that fear is driving the decisions and the results. And if you don’t know where that’s coming from, it’s really hard to make that decision.

Angela: Yeah, exactly. So school leaders out there, what I want you to really hear is that you have deeply rooted belief systems that you’ve brought with you to the job. And this is why it always bothers me when people say compartmentalize your personal life, your professional life, and separate yourself.

You can’t do that with these deeply rooted belief systems. You don’t leave them at the door. Your brain comes into the office with you. So you have to understand that the way that you’re thinking about resources in general, it comes to you to school, and it does really impact the way that you lead your school.

So the example that’s coming up for me right now is I think about the supply closet. The supply room at the elementary school. It was stocked full of construction paper and copy paper and just specific resources that teachers use on the regular.

When I was a teacher, I had principals who would lock that, and they would track every piece of paper and you got only so many copies. And I just hated that. I hated that as a teacher, but I can see now where that person was coming from, wanting to make sure that we were secure and had enough paper to get us to the end of the year.

And then I had other principals who they just let you go hog wild and then there was no paper for the end of the year, and they’re like, okay, I guess now you have to use the yellow paper because we’re out of white paper. So I experienced the two extreme mindsets as a teacher being led by a principal, and then from that, I tried to balance it out.

I tried to give people autonomy while just being mindful of our resources. So what’s one thing that leaders should know about money and their resources to help them feel more abundant, Adam? What’s your take on that?

Adam: I think the biggest thing is that awareness. I keep throwing that word out there, but we’re in such a world right now to where nobody is aware of what they’re doing. Marketers in general, if you think about all these giant companies out there, they are unbelievable at marketing and just tapping into our feelings.

And so we make decisions on these feelings, not knowing where the thought is actually coming from. And then also you’re left with inaction or a result or a product that you’re like, wait, how did I even get this? And so I think if you’re able to be aware and sit back and kind of just take a second and say, alright, where is this feeling coming from? What thought is provoking this feeling? What motivation is provoking this feeling? It’ll help you think about that decision.

I think the one episode of The Anatomy of Decision you were talking about, you had these decision defaults, right? And so it’s kind of the same thing. You have this defaulting decision that you’re going to make and without awareness, you’re just going to default to that every time.

And so with resources and financial resources in general, you’re still going to default to something. And if you’re not aware about where that thought is coming from, it’s really hard to make a decision that is not that default decision.

Angela: Exactly. Yeah. I can relate to that so much. I feel like I’m singing this song every week, but the awareness piece is the first step. And you can get by leading a school with unawareness, but I think what we’re really looking for here, it’s not so much your opinion of how money should be spent.

It’s really about creating a sense of certainty, that regardless of how much resources you have, regardless of how much money you’re given or granted to the school, or how much actually even power you have in terms of making decisions about money. Some schools, their money is completely decided for at the district level, and other people have a lot more autonomy.

Regardless of the circumstance of that, really understanding that what the goal is is to create a sense of certainty for yourself as a leader with your resources, with your money, with your time, with your everything that you have available to you, and thinking thoughts that bring you certainty so that you can make decisions that aren’t out of fear.

The hoarding thing definitely comes from the fear of not having enough one day. Projecting into the future. But if I spend it now, I won’t have enough for the future kids or if something comes up down the line in the school year, versus feeling and thinking I’m spending this money because I want to provide this service for this student, and I’m certain that if something does come up in the future, we will find a way to make it work and to problem solve and create a solution for that moment in time when it happens.

So I think about how much you’ve coached me on kind of this whole attitude of that balanced approach of having a plan and feeling abundant and certain, but then also making decisions based on a priority. We’ve been talking about this, kind of your money values and your belief values, and when you decide those values, then it’s easier to say no to the other stuff because you feel kind of grounded in your why, or why you’re spending something, or why you’re choosing not to spend something. Can you talk a little bit more about that whole process?

Adam: Yeah. And I think it’s same again for school budget and for your leaders that are listening to approach the same as you would in your family. We come at it, instead of a budget – nobody likes a budget. Let’s be honest. When you’re on a budget, it sounds bad, you’re like oh man, I can’t spend anything, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do that.

Angela: It’s restrictive.

Adam: Yeah, everything about a budget, it’s like a diet. Nobody actually wants to be on a diet.

Angela: No, ever.

Adam: And so we talk about it from a spending plan perspective. Because at the end of the day, you’re going to spend your money whether it’s now or later, and so you should have a plan for spending that. And that plan needs to start with your, what we call non-negotiables. What your values are as a family.

And so if you determine that hey, as a family, so just an example, we really are going to be about travel. We want to make sure that the kids really love to see different things and we see all kinds of experiences, that we have that time together. And so you better plan on spending x amount of dollars every year for travel.

And somebody better hold you accountable to it because it’s a value and it’s important to you. And it can be almost the same for a school and an organization almost to where you guys should have certain values that you want to make sure you take care of throughout the year.

So certain non-negotiables. In your example, we want to make sure that we have the supply closets always full, or we want to make sure every kid has a laptop, we want to make sure that during this crazy environment right now, that each kid working from home feels the same way that they do when they’re in school as much as possible.

Maybe that’s one of your values. So you need to plan to spend money for that. And it’s got to be okay to do that. And so that’s one of the biggest things is that you’ve got to be okay actually spending the money for that. And if you concentrate on these values and these non-negotiables and really spending money on those things, what ends up happening is you don’t spend money on the other things because you really are trying to spend money on the things that are important to you.

And so the little nickels and dimes are the things that we talked about before that you’re not aware of that you’re spending on, those kind of stop happening, which is really, really cool to see. And then what ends up really happening is you’re doing more of the things that are important to you anyway and then you start having more fun and having more enjoyment.

Angela: This is very, very important for people to hear. Because what Adam just said, it will make all the difference in how you use every resource you have at school. So when you have a plan and it’s based on your leadership values and you’re aligned, like your values are aligned to your leadership and your leadership – those decisions that you’re making, when they’re all in alignment, you know exactly what you need to spend the money on, why you’re spending the money, the value and the belief system behind that decision, and then you feel alignment.

So let me share what typically happens. The opposite happens in education. We get a bucket of money, we’re so excited that we have any kind of resources at all, so we hold onto it, but then problems start to come up. And we think, oh, I’ve got money, money solves problems, I’m going to – whatever comes into my email box or comes through my mail that looks enticing or inviting or promises to solve my problem, because I’ve got this bucket of money, I might as well use that.

And this happens at education across the board is we get buckets of money for certain – either a targeted group of students or our school at large, and because we don’t have the plan and it’s not aligned to the value system that we want, or the problem that we want to solve specifically, what we do is we kind of throw money at the problem and we end up putting a bunch of Band-Aids on.

And that’s why year after year, there’s a new program or there’s a new curriculum, or there’s a new method. It feels like education is trying to solve problems with the money that they do have, but they’re not making those decisions on what is important and valuable. They’re not aligning those decisions with understanding who they are and what their money motivation is, and their alignment as a leader in terms of the values they want for the kids, like you were just saying.

Adam: Let’s be honest here, I’m speaking at this high level and I know it’s easy for me to chat about and give these ideas. But there are so many different things going on in these organizations and these schools. Different personality tests, different problems, fire drills every single day.

But I think you’re right. I think if you understand the core values and really what you want to get out of a particular year, half year, whatever you’re going on, when that money does come in, you say this is where we’re going to throw it first because this is the thing that’s most important to us.

Or something of that nature. And then I think it’s also important to, as we talk about these money motivations, if the whole school is behind or at least the leaders are behind these values, it’s easy for you to flex your motivations one way or another if you’re aware of them.

So if you say hey, the most important thing for us right now is man, we have to buy all of these laptops, or we have to spend money right now on this season of the school, and you’re security motivated, if you have that plan and you understand that plan is in place, it’s way easier for you to flex and say, okay, we can be a little bit more generous right now, or we can be a little bit more experiential about spending money right now, and I’m okay with that because I know where this is coming from because we have a plan.

Especially those security-minded folks, if there’s no plan, they hoard all day long. And so if you don’t know where these motivations are, and even motivations of maybe your colleagues and other people in the leadership team, you’re just going to go back to that fear and then you’re going to be putting out fire drills and you’re going to run out of money, or kind of that example you were talking about.

Angela: Right. And I can see, I think back to my experience with my colleagues. We had some of us who hoarded it, and some of whom, their school was doing all the fun things. They were like, that looks good, that looks fun, and I can see it now where they valued that experience. Giving the kids the most amount of experiential learning and fun experiences possible.

Like field trips and bringing people into the school and doing all of these big events, right? I can see now where they were motivated in that. And actually, that was my next question for you. As a school leader, when you’re dealing with your personal budget, you and your family get to make that spending plan and make your decisions based on your values no matter what.

That’s your business and your money. But when you step into the school, now you do have a responsibility to make decisions for your school, and sometimes those decisions won’t align with your natural tendency, your natural personality in terms of how you’re motivated.

So you were just saying something about being able to flex that a little bit because you have the plan, you can kind of lean on that plan to make decisions even though it might feel a little less comfortable.

Adam: Yeah. I think the plan, having a plan and not the plan, but having a plan and just something that shows you what direction you’re going to go or those values in place, if those are out there, it paints a picture for you of understanding what’s ahead. And I think the biggest thing that you talked about before of the decision making out of fear is really what gets you in trouble.

And for most motivations and most people in general, you’re scared of what you don’t know. And if you know what’s ahead, it’s easier for you to say okay, I see what’s ahead, I see probably the upside and I see the downside, but at least I can understand that and I can maybe flex one way or another because I know where it’s going to go and what’s going to happen.

If you don’t know that, then you’re always going to default to what that inner motivation is going to be. And our examples are more out of relationships with couples and families. And when you have – most of the time, what we see is somebody that’s security motivated and somebody that’s experiences or enjoyment motivated.

And the experiences and enjoyment person always wants to spend money on things right now because it feels good. And just as an example, I am enjoyment and experience. So I do a lot of stuff off of feeling, if it feels good, it’s like oh yeah, let’s take this trip, or let’s buy this thing or whatever. And my wife is security, so she’s like, hold the brakes, we can’t do that. Let’s…

Angela: We’re the flip. We’re the opposite. My husband is a security and I’m the spender.

Adam: That’s great. So the security person is always like, we can’t afford it, we can’t do that. We need to keep this. And if you have that spending plan, that’s the key to that because then the enjoyment person says okay, I’m at least going to spend this money in the future at some point for one of the values – I’m going to have fun at some point in the future and I understand that.

The security person’s like, okay, he’s going to spend all the money, but we’re not going to go broke because we’ve already planned to spend the money. And it’s going to be the same way in a school budget scenario, or one of these educational scenarios that you have to where if you have that plan, you can say if we spend it all on this experience and field trips and fun stuff to give the kids the best thing in this season right now, we’re not going to go broke.

We’re going to be fine because we have a plan in place. And then vice versa for generosity and security and all that kind of stuff. You say we’re either not going to run out of money, or we’re not going to give it all away and run out of money. Same thing.

So without that plan in place and that picture on the horizon, everybody just defaults to fear and that motivation that they have, that decision default that you were talking about. And it just doesn’t help.

Angela: Yeah. It just made me think of two things. So number one, that plan is really important because it gives – no matter what your money motivation is or how abundant you tend to think, like the money’s always just coming in, no problem, versus oh no, we need to save it, the plan gives every plan basically – it’s like, I can see where this is okay because we have a plan for saving and we have a plan for spending, and we have a plan for enjoyment.

We’ve kind of hit all three areas, so we know for our school, there’s going to be some money set aside for just pure enjoyment for the kids to just have a lot of fun and just to get a really good experience, we’re going to set aside – we value, let’s say, professional development, we’re going to make sure our teachers are getting that support and resource that they need, and then we’re going to spend this money on laptops.

This year, there’s a million things. But the laptops obviously, it’s a really big issue in the country right now versus the haves and the have-nots, so to speak, and being able to level that one area of the playing field for the kids so they all have resources and technology, yes, one, that plan is so important, and two, school leaders, I think that there’s no perfect plan.

This is the other thing, and I think Adam spoke to this. There isn’t the plan, there’s a plan. And plans can shift and adjust as needs change, but to know there is a plan and to go with that plan and to share it with your teachers I think will help them see okay, this is how much we have for our supply closet, versus we need to buy laptops this year.

We’re not going to spend money on paper because one, you’re not in school, two, we need the laptops. So people can understand – I think bringing your team along is really important with that plan. It’s not just for you. It’s for everybody who’s involved.

Adam: And I think you’re right. I think back to this awareness, you can also call it vulnerability from a leader’s perspective to where if you’re vulnerable about the plan and even the values, I think people circle around that. And to your point, is it really important that everybody has more paper, or is it really important that everybody gets a better learning experience with a laptop?

What’s our core value? Our core value is that the student gets the best experience possible. Well, then we probably should spend money on the laptop and not the paper. And so if you’re vulnerable enough to say hey, here’s our values and here’s why we’re making these decisions, I think people understand that and they say, okay, I get it, I might be security motivated but I really understand where they’re coming from here because this is what’s important for this school and the overall values.

Angela: Right. So you can feel some discomfort with it, but you can agree to it enough to like, be at peace with it, to allow the spending to go the way it’s going. I do think it’s really important to share it with your teams about the spending plan.

It’s not something anybody ever told me about. I remember I had no idea how to do my budget and my secretaries – every secretary I ever had was so amazing. And I really just kind of let her run the show, and then she would do the PO forms and I would kind of review them and sign them.

But I didn’t feel like I had a grasp of my school budget or the spending plan, whatever we want to call it. It was definitely a budget. It was not a spending plan, let me say. We were told what to spend the money on, but we had a new CFO come into our district and he was like, wait a minute, none of you principals know what you’re doing at all. Are you kidding me right now?

And he was joking with us, but he took it upon himself to set up individual meetings and actually teach us what the budget was about, restricted funds versus non-restricted funds, categorical funding, it is a little bit complicated if you’re not familiar with it.

So I just really appreciated him for doing that. But what it taught me was there was so much about school leadership that’s not in your training, that’s not even on the radar of awareness, and this is one of them. How we think about our resources, specifically money, really does impact the way that we make decisions and lead our school.

So I’m super grateful for that and I’m super grateful for Wealthquest for coming into my life and into my business because it’s really helping me like, I have a clear plan, I’m not stressed about money at all anymore. I feel super abundant about where I’m spending and what I’m spending on.

And yeah, I do still have days where I’m learning, I’m still growing and figuring this all out, but it feels so much better, which is why I wanted to share it with the school leaders today. And this brings me kind of to my last question. This extra question popped up Adam, sorry.

But I was just wondering, what tips or strategies can you recommend for when the urge – if you’re a security person and the urge to hoard comes up, or you’re a spender and that urge to spend comes up, even though you have the plan, there’s going to be times where you kind of tip off the wagon, so to speak. Do you have any recommendations for people to, if they’ve made a mistake or if they feel the urge to do it and they’re contemplating, what can they do to kind of work through that?

Adam: We’re not perfect. So it’s obviously going to happen. I mean, we’re talking years and years and years of this motivation and this script being drilled into people. So oh my gosh, this is not something to where you can just change it overnight and be like, yeah, I’m going to talk about enjoyment right now instead of security or whatever.

So I think just allowing it to happen is okay to do if you know it’s happening. And you’re not going to be able to catch everything before it happens. Any decision that comes up, you’re going to make mistakes. This decision is going to happen from a place in your brain that you don’t even know it’s happening.

And this actual skill of stepping back and almost looking inside of your own head and seeing what’s happening is very, very tough to do. So it’s going to happen. These things are going to happen. I think the more you have the plan and the more you have these values, I think the mistake is smaller when you have some more of this awareness.

But I think you just come back and you say, oh man, that was probably a bad one. You chalk it up to a failure. Obviously I think people understand failure and you’re going to fail, and you come back and say yeah, that probably wasn’t a good idea, let’s learn from it next time, let’s see why I failed or I failed because I was just going off of my internal motivation.

So unfortunately, there’s not a lot of tips and techniques to just fix this because it does take a lot of time to just step back and say, where is this coming from? I would 100% start with what are your motivations. So again, I know you talked about it, but we have that – it’s a free assessment for the public.

Like you said, it is fun to see and it comes with a six-part quick video follow up to kind of explain what they actually mean, how they work in relationships, and so I think it’s great for people to take. There’s no solicitation afterwards, I promise.

Angela: No, this is really just an awareness piece. It’s the only company that I’ve ever seen who brings your awareness to why you’re making the decisions that you are. That’s all that it does. It’s eye-opening and it’s fascinating. So if you’re into it, definitely check it out.

Adam: This is such a fun topic for us just across the board because the industry for so long has been talking about numbers and math and that’s the easy part. We can pull up Excel. Anybody can do the numbers and math if you just spend five minutes on Google.

The hard part is the behavioral finance part and understanding why the heck you purchased something on Amazon that you had no idea you purchased and no reason why you did it. And then why you’re in debt, all this kind of stuff. And that’s the thing that we need to be talking about in the industry. And so I hope this assessment helps not only people, but the industry kind of start pushing people in that direction.

And I think what I have gained from our conversations is knowing that some of these tools can transfer to things like organizations and the educational leaders that listen and hopefully, these values can be used to help these organizations out.

Angela: Yeah, exactly. I really see the need for this in education and in educational leadership. It’s not something that was ever, like I said, it wasn’t on our radar. It wasn’t even my awareness to know, not only about myself, but how it transfers over to why I’m deciding what I’m deciding.

And I can just think back to so many times where I was like, well, that sounds good, that was it. That’s not very in-depth decision making. So I wanted to dig into why we’re making the decisions we are and why we’re feeling – like a lot of my clients, they’re feeling a lot of frustration about what the resources they have versus what they don’t have.

And that’s where kind of my work comes into play where we start to get into why you’re feeling that frustration and where it’s coming from. But what you’re talking about is that basis, is that foundational, kind of that core belief system of why we’re feeling frustrated about – when we’re frustrated, we’re thinking the money should go somewhere else than it currently is, or that we should have more than we actually have, and coming to terms with okay, what do I do with the resources I actually do have and how can I create a plan that helps me calm and feel centered and grounded knowing no matter what comes my way as a school leader, I’m going to serve my kids in the best way that I can.

Adam: And I think that frustration, and I’m sure you talk about it all the time, comes with the things that you can’t control, allowing that to come in. And I think having a plan helps with that abundant thinking with resources to focus on the things you can control and putting dollars to those things.

And if you take time to figure out alright, what’s important to us as a school and as an organization, how can we focus on controlling those things and letting the things we can’t control just happen. And so I think you’re exactly right. That’s where those frustrations come from for sure.

And abundant thinking is really, really hard to do. And again, you’re battling with things that you’ve dealt with your whole life that could be motivating you. So yeah, it’s important to just control things you can control.

Angela: Exactly. And I think it’s because our brain has so much evidence to prove why scarcity is true. And we have to actively engage our brain in the other part. And I think that’s the difference between budget and spending plan.

The budget is that scarcity, control, constraint, what you don’t have, very restrictive kind of a mindset, versus this is what I have, here’s what I want to spend it on, here’s why I want to spend it on, this is what I have where I want it to be and I don’t have to worry about the other stuff because I have the plan and it’s based on my values and I can rest assured knowing that regardless of how much money I have or how many resources I have, there is a purpose to it all.

Adam: Yeah, I think you are 100% spot on. I think we work with two exercises. One I think you’re probably familiar with from the life coaching school of the writing down all the things that you want, but some of them have to be things you already have. And I think what’s really great about that is switching your mind to say wow, I really do actually have these things and I don’t need them anymore.

And so it helps with some abundant thinking. Writing down what you’re grateful for every day has been something that I’ve done a lot and that helps truly with saying okay, this abundant thinking, I’m not scarcity thinking anymore and we can afford to do these things and create things that we want to do and really value. So those are two little things that have helped a bunch with us and clients, this shift from that scarcity mindset to that abundant mindset.

Angela: Yes. And so listeners, I’m going to leave you with this. Adam just referred to an exercise I learned as a certified coach through The Life Coach School, and I’m glad you reminded me of it because it’s really powerful. So that is this; I want you to list 25 things that you want for your school that you actually already have.

Because what this exercise does is it shows you that you do have many things that you want for your students, you want for your staff, and it creates a very abundant mindset around the resources that you actually have. I know it’s easy to list the 25 things that you want that you don’t have, and it’s not to say that you can’t create a spending plan and build some of those priorities into your plan, and you would want to prioritize that for sure.

But showing your brain that you have 25 things that you actually want, maybe you do have one-to-one laptops for all of your kids. That would be a number one thing to put down on the list. Maybe every teacher has their own laptop and their own resources to be able to work from home.

Perhaps your district is offering school lunches to students in need of food. All of those things, whatever is working, make sure you give your brain equal air time of the things you have, that you already have, versus the things that you want and you don’t yet have. And that will bridge that abundance between what you want to have and what you already have.

Adam: I think that’s great. And I think we can link to this also in the notes, but if it does help people, we have one other course that’s out there that’s free to the public and it’s Creating a Family Vision. Again, it’s built for families but you could easily take some of the techniques and kind of use it in an organization to say what is our organization’s vision, what are our non-negotiables and those kind of things and work through that as well.

Angela: I think that’s a great idea. So school leaders out there, if this is a topic you want to learn more about, Adam, why don’t you tell them, where can they find these resources online?

Adam: Yeah, our website is the best to find everything. It is wqcorp.com. So wqcorp.com. And not only is all our information on there, but we have a library of podcasts and videos and resources and the money motivator assessment is in there, how to create a family vision is in there. So they can go check out as many things as they want.

The spending plan, the whole podcast on the spending plan is in there. We talk about abundance and a lot of these concepts that I think you’ll be familiar with, so it’s all out there on the site.

Angela: Yeah. So listeners out there, you can download – I know you can go to the money motivator. It’s wqcorp.com and the money motivator is right there. You can take the free assessment. There are other resources that are completely free.

And I can guarantee you, you can apply these things to your personal life and your professional experience at the district level or at the site level. You can create a vision with your school or a vision with your district on a spending plan, like what your values are. And maybe your school has one, maybe your district has one. But if not, this might be a nice place to start, so be sure to check it out.

Adam: Yeah, 100%. I think so. And if anybody has questions on any of this, all my contact information is on the website. So I’m happy to help.

Angela: Perfect. Thank you, Adam. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here. This is a topic we’re not talking about in schools and I’m excited that we have decided to share this and to bridge the gap between what we think about our own money and how that impacts what we’re doing in terms of leading our schools.

And I think this conversation is going to be so eye-opening, and it’s going to be the first time that people have thought about resource abundance in this way.

Adam: I hope so. It was fun, fun to talk about.

Angela: Yeah, it was great. Oh my gosh, I’m so glad. And you know what, I’m a work in progress, so Adam’s going to be working with me on the regular to figure out my own money motivations.

Adam: You’re doing great.

Angela: It’s been rough. It’s been hard, but it’s been fun. And I actually after going through it, I just feel so much more ease and I’m so less afraid to look at my numbers. I’m actually seeing them grow. The business is growing bigger than ever this year and it’s way more fun when the money is flowing in.

But before that, you have to – and this is something else for the listeners out there. Understanding that you have to do this work before you have the abundance, you have to create abundance. It doesn’t come from the things you have. It comes from the way that you’re interpreting them and experiencing them and using them.

And I have really learned that lesson through the work that we’ve been going through the last few months. So Adam is amazing, go check out the website, wqcorp.com. And I thank you again for being here, and hopefully we’ll have you on a future podcast.

Adam: I love it. I love it. Thanks.

Angela: Great. Thanks so much. Take care.

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