Welcome to the final video in my Financial Stress & Money Mindset series.
Over the past 14 videos, we’ve explored many different aspects of financial stress, abundance, mindfulness, and personal growth. In this final article, I want to bring those ideas together and help you see how they can become part of one practical approach to creating change in your life.
And perhaps it will inspire you to go back through the series again, because many of these ideas become more meaningful as you begin putting them into practice.
Awareness: Knowing Where You Are
I believe awareness is one of the most important foundations for change.
We can’t make deliberate, purposeful changes unless we’re present with where we actually are in life.
Think about looking at a map. You may know exactly where you want to go, but if you can’t find the little “You Are Here” marker, how can you know which direction to travel?
It’s the same with a GPS. Before it can create a route to your destination, it first needs to know your current location.
Awareness gives us that starting point.
Through meditation and mindfulness, we practise becoming present with our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and behaviours. We begin seeing where we are without immediately trying to escape or change it.
Understanding What’s Holding You Back
Once we become more aware, we can begin asking:
What’s limiting me?
What’s blocking me?
Why do I want so badly to get away from where I am?
Sometimes underneath our financial stress or desire for something different are deeper feelings of not being good enough, worthy, lovable, confident, or capable.
These limiting beliefs can operate subconsciously and influence how we experience ourselves and what we believe is possible.
Becoming aware of these patterns gives us an opportunity to begin working with them instead of continuing to live from them automatically.
Getting Clear on What You Really Want
From there, we can begin looking at our goals.
What do you really want?
And perhaps more importantly, what is the essence behind what you want?
Maybe you want greater financial freedom because underneath that goal you’re really looking for freedom, excitement, adventure, security, or peace.
When we understand that deeper motivation, we don’t have to wait until someday in the future to experience it.
We can begin bringing those qualities into our lives today.
This is where the 1,000-piece puzzle analogy becomes so helpful.
If your goal represents freedom, excitement, and adventure, then imagine every piece of that puzzle as an opportunity to practise those qualities. Instead of struggling through 1,000 unhappy steps hoping happiness will suddenly appear when you reach your destination, you begin creating the emotional experience of your goal along the way.
By the time you’ve finished, you’ve had 1,000 experiences of becoming the person you wanted to become.
Creating Abundance Along the Way
This changes how we approach abundance.
Instead of constantly focusing on what’s missing, we begin noticing what we appreciate and what is already good in our lives.
We practise gratitude.
We nurture the thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and experiences we want to grow.
As I described with the garden analogy, we become more intentional about which seeds we plant and which ones we water.
When an old limiting belief appears, we don’t need to judge ourselves for having it. We can recognize that there’s a part of us that may need some loving attention.
Little by little, we begin becoming more aligned with the person we want to be.
Because ultimately, what we consistently focus on and practise is what we become better at experiencing.
Becoming Willing to Change
If we want our lives to change, we also have to be willing to change.
As I talked about in this series, what got you here can’t get you there.
If we continue thinking, reacting, and behaving in exactly the same ways, we’re likely to keep creating similar results. Moving toward something new means gradually stretching beyond our comfort zone and becoming a new version of ourselves.
That doesn’t mean changing who we truly are.
In many ways, it’s the opposite.
It’s about letting go of the old patterns, fears, and beliefs that have kept us from being ourselves more fully.
As we do this, we can begin trusting our heart, intuition, curiosity, excitement, and the things that genuinely bring us fulfilment.
Your Point of Power Is in the Present Moment
Mindfulness brings us back to where change can actually happen: right now.
When we’re present, we can recognize when we’ve slipped back into an old pattern and make a different choice.
I used the analogy of an airplane in this series. During a long flight, the plane may continually move slightly off course, but it keeps correcting its direction.
We can do the same thing.
We don’t need to move perfectly toward our goals every day.
When we get pulled off track, we can notice it, learn from what happened, and ask:
How can I grow from this?
What can I change?
How can I get myself moving in the direction I want to go again?
That’s how we stay on track—not by never getting pulled away, but by continually learning how to come back.
Who Are You Becoming?
One of the most important questions in this entire series is:
Who do you need to become to create the life you want?
If we’re unhappy with where we are and believe reaching some future destination will finally make us feel good, we may simply carry all of our emotional baggage with us.
We need to learn how to handle where we are now.
Then, as we grow, we become capable of handling a little more.
And a little more.
Instead of waiting for the destination to transform us, we allow the journey itself to transform us.
Get to know the person you want to become and begin practising being that person now.
Meditation Helps You Return to Your True Self
This brings us back to meditation and mindfulness.
As we become more present and clearer about who we are, we can begin dropping some of the masks we’ve learned to wear.
Trying to fit in, people-please, prove our value, or continually be someone we’re not takes enormous energy.
Meditation gives us time to turn inward, connect with our body and feelings, and get to know ourselves again.
I encourage you to sit every day—even for 15 minutes or more—and practise focusing on your breathing and body sensations.
Because as you move toward your goals, challenges will come up. Old fears, limiting beliefs, and uncomfortable emotions will return.
But now you have tools.
You’ve practised noticing when your thoughts pull you away and gently returning your attention to your breathing.
So when something triggers you in everyday life, you can do the same thing.
Come back to your breath.
Come back to your body.
Come back to the present moment.
And from there, you can realign with the person you’re becoming and continue moving forward.
Moving From Surviving Into Thriving
One of the deeper themes throughout this series has been the nervous system.
When we’re continually stressed, worried, fearful, or overwhelmed, we can spend much of our time operating from the sympathetic nervous system—our fight-or-flight survival response.
In survival mode, our system is primarily concerned with keeping us safe.
That’s why meditation and awareness are so important.
When we sit, breathe, notice our surroundings, and become present with ourselves, we’re repeatedly giving our nervous system the message:
It’s safe to be here. It’s safe to be myself.
As that survival response begins settling, we have greater access to creativity, curiosity, enthusiasm, and the ability to see possibilities and solutions.
Instead of simply coping and surviving, we create more space to thrive.
The Answers Begin Within You
Ultimately, so much of what we’ve explored throughout this series comes back to developing a deeper relationship with yourself.
We are feeling beings. If we spend our lives trying to avoid uncomfortable emotions while chasing the feelings we want, we’re continually trying to escape the experience we’re having right now.
But our point of power is here.
The more comfortable we become being present with ourselves—the pleasant feelings and the difficult ones—the less we need to live from old survival patterns.
And that’s why I believe the answers we’re searching for are often already within us.
As we become present, listen to ourselves, work through our limiting beliefs, and align more closely with our true selves, we become better able to recognize the direction that’s right for us.
Then abundance becomes less about chasing something outside ourselves and more about being present enough to recognize and move with the opportunities already around us.
You Now Have Tools to Navigate the Journey
Challenges aren’t going to disappear.
As you move toward something new, old fears and beliefs will sometimes come back. You’ll get triggered. You’ll occasionally lose your direction.
But now you have tools for navigating those moments.
You can notice what’s happening.
Return to your breathing.
Feel what’s happening in your body.
Recognize the old pattern.
Learn from it.
Course-correct.
And continue moving toward the person you’re becoming.
You don’t have to get it perfect. You simply keep returning to yourself and taking the next step.
That’s really what this entire series has been about: becoming more conscious of how you’re creating your life and learning how to participate in that process more deliberately.
Explore the Complete Financial Stress & Money Mindset Series
If you’d like to go deeper, I encourage you to go back through the complete series from the beginning. Each video explores a different part of this process—from awareness and limiting beliefs to goals, gratitude, mindfulness, nervous system regulation, and becoming the person capable of creating the life you want.
Going through the series again while actually practising these ideas may help you recognize things you didn’t notice the first time.
Financial Stress & Money Mindset Series:
https://hypnotherapyvictoria.com/financial-stress-money-mindset/
FREE Self-Help Mindfulness Series
One of the most valuable things you can take from this entire series is a regular mindfulness practice.
My FREE Self-Help Mindfulness Series is designed to help you strengthen many of the skills we’ve discussed—becoming present, recognizing limiting patterns, working with difficult emotions, and learning to return to yourself when life pulls you off track.
It can help you:
•Become more present with your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations.
•Recognize limiting beliefs and automatic patterns.
•Calm your nervous system and move out of chronic survival mode.
•Develop greater emotional resilience when challenges arise.
•Reconnect with your intuition, curiosity, and true self.
•Practise returning to the present moment and getting back on track.
The program is completely free and doesn’t require you to sign up.
When You Need Some Deeper Support
Sometimes awareness and mindfulness can take us a long way, but we may reach patterns or challenges that are difficult to work through on our own.
If financial stress, limiting beliefs, self-doubt, fear, or other subconscious patterns continue getting in your way, I offer a free 1-hour video consultation. We can talk about what you’re experiencing, how it’s affecting your life, explore some of the possible underlying patterns, discuss what you’d like to change, and look at how my approach may be able to help you.
It’s also an opportunity for us to get to know each other and see whether we’re the right fit to work together.
Counselling Hypnotherapy
Through mindfulness-based counselling hypnotherapy, I help people work more deeply with subconscious beliefs, emotional patterns, and the responses that can keep them feeling stuck.
I work primarily online, as well as in person for people in the Victoria, BC area.
Counselling Victoria
Hypnotherapy Victoria
Moving Forward
I hope this series has helped you see financial stress and abundance from a different perspective.
The goal isn’t to somehow become perfect or never experience fear, doubt, or challenges again.
It’s to become more present with yourself.
To recognize when you’ve been pulled off course.
To listen to your heart and intuition.
To work with the beliefs and emotions that arise.
And then to return to the present moment and continue moving in the direction of the person you want to become.
The more we learn to be present with our experience, the more fully we’re able to actually experience our lives.
Thank you for joining me throughout this Financial Stress & Money Mindset series. I’m really glad we’ve had this time together, and I look forward to seeing you in the next series.
I wish you an absolutely wonderful rest of your day.
Arne Pedersen
