The Mindful Millionaire: Overcome Scarcity, Experience True Prosperity, and Create the Life You Really Want

By Leisa Peterson and Grant Sabatier

Discover the Path to Financial Freedom and a Fulfilling Life

In the world of personal finance, the biggest challenge is the sense that there's never going to be enough. It is this mindset of scarcity, and not the amount spent on lattes, that holds people back the most from achieving their financial dreams.

In The Mindful Millionaire, financial planner and spiritual coach Leisa Peterson guides you to dig deeper and discover the root of your financial thinking to change not just the way you save and spend, but the way you live your life. Through powerful practices, compelling stories, and extensive research, this book meets you wherever you are in your money journey by exploring:



Where your current money habits come from and why you feel the way you do about money and success.

How to break the cycle of fear, grief, and shame that often surrounds your money habits.

How to write a new money story that inspires joy, satisfaction, and prosperity.

The most effective tools for changing how you think and feel about money.

What true financial independence looks like and how to discover the millionaire within.



"This book helps you realize your intrinsic value so your financial decisions reflect what matters most to you. This is the key to true financial freedom."—Ivan R. Misner, Ph.D., Founder of BNI and New York Times bestselling author of Truth or Delusion? Busting Networking's Biggest Myths

"If you've read other finance books and still felt empty, this is the book you've been waiting for."—Joe Saul-Sehy, Creator and Co-Host, Stacking Benjamins Podcast

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250261922

Leisa Peterson

Leisa Peterson is dedicated to transforming millions of lives through heightened financial consciousness. As money coach, strategic advisor, author of The Mindful Millionaire and The Money Catalyst. Leisa's journey is marked by an unwavering commitment to personal growth. Central to her philosophy is the conviction that abundance is an attainable reality for all.Recognized by Forbes as one of the pioneering "10 Women Driving Growth in Wealth Management and Investing," Leisa spearheads "The Mindful Millionaire" podcast and Youtube channel. Awarded the 2023 "Women Who Roar" Illuminator award by SRQ Magazine, Leisa empowers her clients through online workshops and transformative in-person retreats. Her insights can be found on Gaia Media Network, Wall Street Journal, FastCompany, The Week, and Huffington Post. With a three-decade tenure in finance, Leisa stands for people as they navigate the sometimes thorny intersection of money, identity, and vision, particularly during pivotal crossroads.Leisa lives in Sedona, AZ with her husband Tim. They have successfully launched two children-one studying engineering at ASU and the other riding high on her own successful entrepreneurial journey - but their favorite part is that both kids like to come home to visit.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Now that I’ve shared the premises of this book, let’s discuss where we’re going and how the process is going to work. The book is divided into three main parts:

Part I: A New Language for Personal Finance. In the first part, you’ll learn the keys to the Mindful Millionaire way of being. You’ll begin by understanding your current relationship with money so you can uncover the patterns of fear and scarcity that are holding you back. You’ll learn how to shift out of resistance and step into willingness. You’ll discover what prosperity means to you and the steps you want to take to bring more of it into your life. Through this process, the new language for personal finance will prepare you psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually to create financial wellness for yourself and your loved ones.

Part II: The IPROSPER® Process. The next part includes nine chapters that guide you through an eight-step process, starting with a navigational guide to walk you through what to expect. In each of the following eight chapters, I share one of the core principles that will help you transform your relationship with money. Each chapter includes an introduction, stories, and commentary to the stage of the process, along with exercise sections that include Mindful Moments of Reflection and Mindful Moments of Action. The principles in these exercises enable readers from all backgrounds, cultures, socioeconomic classes, religions, and so forth to learn how to transform their mindsets as well as their practical experiences with money. Think of this part as the main course for your personal development and self-mastery.

Part III: A Guide for the Mindful Millionaire. This part reviews what prosperity in real-life action looks like, providing you with guidance and suggestions for putting the tools and practices you’ve learned into daily application. Think of this part as the grand finale before you start your new life as a Mindful Millionaire.

PART I

A NEW LANGUAGE FOR PERSONAL FINANCE

1

A TALE OF TWO (MONEY) PATHS

Many children have big dreams of one day making the world a better place. I wasn’t one of them. Not that I didn’t want to help people. I did. But more important to me were all the ways I was going to be rich. I would think about it incessantly—the clothes I’d buy, the homes I’d own, the places I’d travel, the shoes I’d wear.

My dreams were filled with the life my parents could not provide but I badly wanted. The more struggles my family had with money and the more they fought about it, the bigger the void inside me grew and the more determined I became to earn money—lots of it. Putting money as my North Star made life simple: if I couldn’t have what I wanted when I was young, all I had to do was figure out how to get it later in life. It would fill me up and give me the satisfaction I didn’t think I could get any other way.

By the age of thirty-five, I had achieved many of the dreams I’d set out for myself, and by many people’s standards I was wealthy. But the process of getting there—all the rationalizations for doing what I did to get the money—meant I had become really good at convincing myself that the end justifies the means, that as long as I got what I wanted, nothing else mattered.

THE PURSUIT OF MONEY

Chasing money, success, and fame is the epitome of the American dream. Reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; The Richest Man in Babylon; and Think and Grow Rich filled my mind with the idea that anyone could do it. You just had to learn the game. The deeper I went, the more I could feel myself compromising.

Like a drug addict who needed another and yet another fix, I believed that money was the thing that satiated me better than anything else. Getting rich was my siren song pulling me toward the rocks of Homer’s Odyssey. God help anything or anyone that got in the way of what I wanted. I was a woman on a mission. Rather than being pulled toward my death, I was being drawn toward my own emotional bankruptcy.

Earning money became all-consuming, requiring a lot of work, planning, and strategizing. I learned quickly that there were no shortcuts. The more I wanted, the harder I had to work to get it. Working for someone else left me putting in longer hours, taking on bigger projects, and assuming greater responsibility. My evenings became shorter and my weekends revolved around chores.

Perhaps you can relate?

If you’re like I was, you find that chasing money leaves you overlooking the true meaning of life. Depending on what you do for a living, this could mean feeling forced to compete and connive to get ahead, or fear of being passed over for a promotion or pay raise. If you’re self-employed, you may find yourself tempted to deceive to get the sale, out of fear of not earning enough to stay afloat. Other than those proverbial few who make success look easy, many find themselves feeling like they need to do whatever it takes to make money, no matter its toll.

At some point, you may ask yourself, Is any of it worth it? For some, the answer will be no, and they’ll make changes. But what if you can’t say no? What if you can’t back away? Perhaps your finances don’t allow it, others depend on you for their livelihoods, or you’re already so addicted to the money game, you can’t break free.

MONEY AND FEELINGS

Money is so powerful that it can blind you to the realization that you have a choice about how you live your life. On one hand, it makes sense you want to have more money, because it can be incredibly satisfying and brings feelings of euphoria and enjoyment. On the other hand, life can become so complicated and expensive that no matter how hard you work, you never feel like you’re getting ahead, nor do you ever feel like you’ve arrived.

Before the age of thirty-three, my main interest was climbing to the top of the corporate ladder. With this goal in mind, I became a business development executive at a large bank, where I managed relationships with a handful of the largest companies in the world. I was driven, logical, strategic, and not the least bit interested in my own emotional health.

My goals for success overshadowed everything, including my relationships, even with my three-year-old daughter and my husband. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of my ambition, and every decision revolved around getting ahead. I felt pride in my ability to stay focused and achieve my goals. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was anything but ideal.

Until one day turned everything upside down.

I was in the middle of negotiating one of the biggest deals of my career. Arriving home after a particularly long day, I found my mother and grandmother waiting for me. They asked me to sit down on the couch and proceeded to tell me that my estranged father had been brutally murdered. The shock of hearing how he’d been killed sent me into an emotional tailspin. Although my father had tried to be a good one, his many years of drug abuse combined with an inability to control his anger had caused my family to push him away. Now I was hearing how he’d been killed in a horrific manner, and all of a sudden my life no longer seemed to make sense.

After my father’s death, all I could think about was how sorry I felt for him. His entire family, including his mother, had disowned him, and then he was killed in a terrifying way. Strangely enough, I couldn’t stop thinking I was in some way responsible. The guilt and sadness consumed me.

As I fell deeper into my sorrow and grief, I began to untangle my life and question everything. Who was I? Why I was here? Why was I so tormented by negative self-talk? And what could I do to help myself feel better?

The more questions I asked, the more I realized I had absolutely nothing to offer myself, nor did I know anyone who could help me. I felt so alone I even weighed the point of my life and wondered if it was worth continuing. Feeling helpless was something I had resisted my entire life, and yet now it was staring down at me and I had no choice but to surrender into the abyss of unknowing. It was absolutely dreadful.

THE HEALING PATH

Up to this point, I was what you would call a do-it-yourselfer with just about everything. I’d never seen a therapist. Instead, I relied on talk therapy with friends. I’d mostly avoided religion and questioned anything that had to do with the idea of a father figure in the sky that deemed you a sinner. I figured that I already did a great job at talking down to myself and had plenty of naysayers who challenged me on a regular basis, so there was no need to invite someone else in, including the idea of a God who might judge me and see how messed up I was. This left me in a pickle when it came to figuring out how I was going to answer all these questions that were bubbling up