Examining Your Relationship With Money with Trevor Blattner
Examine Your Relationship With Money
I was recently talking about our relationship with money with Dr. Trevor Blattner at The Top One Percent Podcast. We appreciate his dedication to personal excellence, his generosity of spirit, and his faithfulness in the good of mankind. Thank you, Trevor, for your support of Leslie Inc, The Money Formula, The Happy Camper community, and The Women’s Financial Freedom Tour.
The number one challenge people face in their financial lives.
What inspired Leslie to write The Money Formula to go from expert to author.
A major lesson she wants readers to get from her book.
Tips for improving your emotional intelligence.
The big mistake Leslie made and what it taught her.
Advice for hiring competent employees.
Crucial habits leaders should adopt.
The key to being responsive instead of reactive.
Books that have had a major impact on Leslie.
How she defines success.
What she wants to leave as her legacy.
Exploring Leslie’s Relationship With Money
Trevor: Welcome to this episode of the top 1% podcast. We have a very special guest with us today. Want to make sure that I nail her name because I’ve been practicing it Leslie Juvin-Acker. Was that pretty good?
Leslie: That was great.
Trevor: Alright so we’ve got that out of the way. So Leslie is president and Chief Happiness Officer at Leslie Inc with over 10 years as a career development and emotional intelligence expert for global industry leaders including IBM, Adidas, and Facebook. Leslie has coached hundreds of individuals, helping them overcome divorce, career transitions and debt. As a survivor of working poverty. She developed the money formula to empower people to overcome poverty, believing that everyone is capable of financial abundance through her unique techniques, inspirational lessons, and charismatic personality. Leslie has grown a loyal following of happy campers, her message is happiness, and she helps leaders find their state of happiness with intuitive insight, practical advice and symbols solutions, and I want to add to that you have a new book coming out soon and it is called the money formula it’s going to be available for pre order starting September the 25th and it’ll be available everywhere. October the ninth and I’m really excited about talking to you firsthand about this book. So if it’s okay let’s just start there. Let’s Let’s start with the book and kind of get some maybe a little bit backstory on you, and why you wrote the book and those kinds of things. First of all, what inspired you to write The Money Formula?
Leslie: So this is the real story. The real the real story was, is that for over 10 years now has been helping professionals advance their career through helping them in every way, branding themselves, communicating themselves, salary negotiations, really putting their best foot forward in terms of developing emotional intelligence and their performance and their leadership skills. And in that process, I was helping these people make a lot of money anywhere, at least on average, is that the clients who began with me and you are now moving forward in their career, which many of them were recent college graduates from 2008, and on average, my clients make at least 30% more than someone who’s in the same exact job.
So these people are performing financially better than other people who didn’t get coaching and who didn’t work on their careers. And in that process, as well, I worked with a lot of executive level professionals, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Creative Officer, all these different types of leadership positions, and I was helping them make a lot of money, like going into millions of dollars, right, getting like $3 million bonuses, those kinds of things. And I was doing even for my husband, his last salary negotiation got $30,000 raise, you know, he went and one time he went from he made a $70,000 raise. So he’s helping all these people. But I wasn’t helping myself and I kept making the same amount of money, no matter how much or how hard I worked, and I could not break this financial barrier that I had created for myself, and I didn’t know what was going on. And so you know, the proverbial you know S*&t hit the fan. Why am I helping everyone? And I’m not helping myself. And then the answer hit me. And it was what I call The Money Formula.
Trevor: Hmm. Wow. So, okay, so the answer hit you. And we’re basically helping everyone else get over this barrier. This the ceiling of income, you know, increasing their income by 30%, those kinds of things. What is a conflict that people have with regards to money? What do you think is a challenge? Maybe the number one or one of the one of the biggest challenges they have in their financial life that you can help them deal with.
How We Think And Feel About Our Relationship With Money
Leslie: The number one complaint is how you think about money and how you feel about money and their settings are completely different sometimes. And we all have our unique relationship with money and we have these financial goals for ourselves, like, hey, I want to get a better car. I want to live in a better neighborhood so my kids can go to a better school. I want to I want to renovate my home or go on vacation.
And just enjoy my financial life. But then there’s all that baggage that we got from when we were kids and these beliefs that we’ve learned that we don’t even realize our self sabotaging. So, though that is the main conflict that people experiences, how they think and how they feel about money, and what The Money Formula seeks to do is to make those two the same. So that way, you’re of one mind and one purpose.
Trevor: What’s interesting about that, too, is you’re saying that I think a lot of married couples think and feel about money differently from one another. Yeah, that’s a big deal. Yeah, I think they usually talk about how you know, divorces many times related to money and I think maybe it’s not always necessarily related to how much money you have.
Leslie: That’s what I talk about in my book is is my personal stories that I once I did my Money Formula and figured out oh my gosh, what were those blocks I realized that I was painting this picture of my husband as financially and competent I created this reality of him not being really financially competent and making good decisions. When in fact when I realized as I started to look at the truth of the situation, I realized that my husband makes really good money. He’s very financially responsible. He’s really great with money and I had created these beliefs based on what I had learned from my belief about men and fathers and providers and once I eliminated that then our relationship completely changed because I wasn’t seeing him with these types of lenses that I had had from before.
Trevor: We all have a specific way we view the world you know for a lot of its from childhood so to be able to understand that is huge for sure. Oh yeah. What is the what is one major takeaway you want readers to get from this book and and what’s a big a big lesson that you wanted to have when they read this?
Leslie: Well, the biggest takeaway is that we, in so many ways are owned by our subconscious thoughts and beliefs. We are struggling to make changes in our lives. Like I said, like you said, I grew up in the Americas working poor and in the south and Jacksonville, Florida, which still today holds the largest amount of people in the working poor population wise. I want people to realize that you could have this background and I have this background to struggling financially and maybe you have a wealthy background, right? Maybe you do. But we still learn these things, and we still take them into our lives. And we are so controlled by those beliefs and the history and what this book seeks to do is to help us kind of detach yourself from that history and what I want them to learn into changes that we have a relationship with money and that needs to change first so we can change how we feel and think about it and how we relate to others around money, how we relate to our spouse, how we relate to our kids. How we relate to our parents or relate to our bosses. When we take away that power, nobody can have power over us. And we can feel like we’re in control of our financial situation.
Trevor: Hmm. Yeah. You’ve got to understand that you do have hang ups about money before you can fix them. Right? Yeah, recognize it for the first step is being conscious of this finance and financial limiting blocks.
Empowering Women’s Relationship With Money
Leslie: Totally. All right. Tell us a little bit about the Women’s Financial Freedom Tour. What’s that all about? Well, the women’s financial freedom tour is really about empowering women. Women are graduating college and higher education at a higher rate than men. Today, we control 80% of the consumer spending in the United States. We and we control 60% of the nation’s wealth. Women are becoming millionaires or numbers and but yet we are experiencing conflict with our relationship with money. And we need to find a better way than just saying, Oh, it’s men’s fault.
We need to find out what’s happening in terms of gender disparity when it comes to money, what is really happening here? I don’t seek to solve all of this problems. I seek to help women understand how they think and feel about money, bring in some financial experts to really give the facts and to help women create a conversation that makes them feel good about being a wife or a mother or a single person and embarking upon their career but doing so in an abundant way so we don’t feel like we have to fight and struggle to make a buck.
Trevor: Yeah, women are. I look at my wife as an example because they’re a major contributor to the global economy the way that it is now. I mean I even remember when I was a kid it was a slightly different you know, I mean the way that the word the working families. And now women are a big part of it; sometimes the major breadwinner in the family.
Leslie: 44% of households women are the sole breadwinner
Trevor: Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge number. 44%. So I think this is a really, really important kind of mission that you’re on. And as far as this Freedom Tour goes, where can people go to learn more about Women’s Financial Freedom Tour and work and they were, you’re going to be happening.
Leslie: Okay, so we’re we are going to be doing many of these but our first leg is in October and November in North County, San Diego, we will be inviting women to meet us in different locations. And we invite women to become community organizers, which is what we’re calling them to bring us into their homes, their businesses, get some books, meet other women, the experts here from me find out the stories and began to really start to feel better about money. So we can go to Women’s Financial Freedom Tour, learn more become a community organizer. And of course, this is not just limited to women. If you’re a man and you’re listening to this and you’re like, hey, maybe I need to hear some of this. Maybe I want to be a part of the solution which many men are then come but we really want people to be open about discussing their emotional and psychological hang ups with money so we can start making some good decisions.
Trevor: All right fantastic San Diego’s my favorite city in the United States by the way. How can they preorder The Money Formula?
Leslie: Come change your relationship with money at TheMoneyFormula.LeslieInc.Org
Visit Part 2 of this interview talking about purpose, emotional intelligence, and burnout.
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