Catherine Cornwall on the CQ Framework: Rewiring Your Money Mindset

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello, and welcome to the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today I am joined by a very special guest. Her name is Catherine Cornwall, and she is a success coach, a manifestation expert, a hypnotherapist, and a money coach. And we dive deep into the psyche around relationships with money, but also relationships in life and mental health and how it all stems and connects together. But if you are listening on YouTube, please do whack that subscribe button. And if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple, please do leave us a review and make sure you do go and check out upthegains.co.uk where we have over 250 guides helping you with your money too. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains podcast. So, Catherine, welcome to the Money Gains podcast. How are you doing? You well?

[1:08] Catherine Cornwall: I’m really well, Sammie. Thank you so much for having me on. Very excited to be here. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like for context, we met at an event that we were doing called Array the other week, and we had a really great chat. And I just was like, oh my god, this would be so cool to have on the podcast. So yeah, really, really excited to get chatting with you today. But for the listeners, if you wouldn’t mind giving them a little bit of a 411. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Catherine Cornwall and I’m founder of Catherine Cornwall Global. I am a money mindset coach, I guess, for want of a better word. Um, but I’ve got 20 years of finance background. Um, and you know, I am also a life coach and hypnotherapist. So combining the two specialisms really helps me to work with people on, you know, unblocking themselves when it comes to achieving those big financial goals.

[1:57] Sammie Ellard-King: What does a money coach do? What’s that actually mean? So in terms of money coaching, it really is what I would say life coaching, but with a financial angle to it. So in interestingly, all my clients ever come to me for are two things. They want more love in their life and they want more money in their life. And, you know, that I end up coaching people on either relationship and money andor both, um, which is why I’ve also launched, you know, my brand Love, Money and Magic, right? Because, you know, it really is all about that for most of the people that I work with. But a financial coach or a money coach is quite simply somebody that works with someone on achieving their financial goals. You know, they’re at point A and they want to reach a point B. They want certain things in their life, they want a certain quality of life, they want, I don’t know, to purchase something specific. It could be a plethora of different things. Perhaps they just want to completely and utterly have a makeover or stop doing certain things when it comes to the money that’s harming them, right? Whatever it is that it that that might be, whatever the outcome might be, a financial coach simply works with an individual on cultivating what that vision looks like and through putting in step-by-step goals, step-by-step actions that somebody can take to get them from point A to point B, whilst of course working on the things that blocks them from achieving the goal in the first place as they move through the relationship with them.

[3:29] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that. So, do you think that they’re intrinsically linked, love and money? Yeah, I do. I think they’re very intrinsically linked. Um, so the more that I work with individuals one-on-one or either in a group coaching setting, and the more that I do my own research, um, I realise that actually a lot of what blocks individuals from achieving the types of relationship that they want in their life, whether it be friendship relationships or healing relationships with family or romantic relationship, the same things that prevent them from achieving those things in their life, that quality of life that they look for in relationship, are the same things that almost block them from achieving the income level that they want in their life. So we all grow up, you know, with different pathways and we all have experiences in our lives that at the level of the subconscious mind actually teach us things about how the world works. And quite oftentimes we experience things in life that inserts limiting beliefs, I would say, inside of our subconscious, that means that when we’re out there in the world as adults, we’re just playing those same kind of limiting beliefs and limiting programs over and over again in our lives. And quite often, and what I learned through the work that I did with Marisa Peer on becoming a rapid transformational therapist was that there are really only maybe three core wounds that any of us carry, right, throughout our lives. And they’re beliefs that are not serving us, and they are I’m not worthy, I’m not lovable, or I’m not enough. And those same wounds, those same limiting beliefs affect our relationships as much as they affect our level of income and you know, ability to make more money or ability to hold on to money. And it it manifests in different habits and different people and different ways that we operate in the world per each individual, but really the core, core, root cause of what drives us to not achieve what we want to achieve is really pretty much the same in almost everyone that I work with.

[5:28] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s so interesting. So if I like let’s say, what do you see like is the most common thing that someone comes to you with and they’re blockers? What’s kind of the most common thing that you see in these individuals? So for me, in in terms of what’s blocking people, um I think block is probably the wrong word, but the way in which we hold ourselves back from achieving what it is that we desire is a lack of belief in our ability that we can. Yeah. And that stems from an underlying subconscious belief that many people are not aware of. And even when I, you know, we identify it, they sometimes are still resistant to it. And that is I am not worthy of the thing that I want. So consciously, we very, very much want the income and the lifestyle and the luxuries and the things, and we very much want this life for ourselves, right? Somebody who’s a goal setter will have already envisioned that for themselves. And then we go after it and we take action, but then there’s an underlying subconscious part of us which actually runs the show. It runs 90% of our mind capacity, right? It’s huge, drives how we show up in the world, is constantly telling us that we’re not worthy or we’re not enough. It’s it’s constantly running this subconscious kind of belief that holds us back, that ensures that when we’re on that path to wanting to achieve that goal, it sabotages us along the way. That’s where toxic habits and so on and so forth. So it’s almost people don’t step into their fullest potential because we have underlying programs within our subconscious that tell us that we can not have the thing that we desire.

[7:13] Sammie Ellard-King: And do you think this is uh a social problem, or is this kind of across different levels of class or you know, different backgrounds? It absolutely is. It really doesn’t matter. You mentioned class there, it really doesn’t matter what your background is. You you could be the wealthiest person in the world and be deeply unhappy for the same reasons, right? It’s it’s it’s not a tri that’s it’s why actually money doesn’t buy happiness. Like it really doesn’t, you know, right? Money is a tool, money is an enabler, money is a limited, unlimited resource, money is a wonderful thing for us to have, right? It enables us to do so many things, it enables us to do so much good in the world, but it doesn’t buy us happiness. So there are plenty of incredibly wealthy people out there, or rich people, even that have a lot of money that don’t have happiness. And equally, there are people that don’t have a lot of money that are incredibly happy, but but want maybe the freedom, the variety, you know, the healthier choices, you know, that somebody with a lot of money has. So, no, it’s not attributed to any one type of individual. I believe we’re all here as individual human beings having a human experience, right? And our early, uh early years really form that psychological profile that we have going into adulthood. And that is what we are then. I guess the work that people talk about, you know, in the personal development field is really us coming back to ourselves again. It’s kind of, you know, washing away all of those layers of conditioning that we’ve picked up through our journey as young people and young adults.

[8:48] Sammie Ellard-King: Do you feel like a lot of it is like instilled habit that you kind of forcibly bring yourself to to accept? And essentially you just keep going through those same motions, and that that could be, you know, that you spend all of your money or that you don’t feel you have the ability to create that business or go for that idea. Is it is it like a habit thing, or is that what is that kind of where we’re going with this? Yeah, I think so. It’s it’s it is it is a habit. So so we we form habits. So we form habits around um habits are just really behaviours, right? And and behaviours are really just how we show up in the world. And and what informs our behaviours and our actions is our is our conditioning, right? And and a lot of that is is driven, it’s a lot of it’s learned behaviour, so it will depend on who we grew up around. It will be who we’re surrounded with now. You know, there’s a reason why the saying is, you know, you become the product of the five people you spend your most time with. Well, of course, because you know, you you learn, right, from the people you surround yourself with. So your network really is your net worth, right? Um environment is huge in informing our conditioning. So the types of parents you grew up with, who uh the kind of role models our parents were, our grandparents, you know, what was what was the conversation about money when you grew up, right? You know, when you’re in in at the dinner table? Are you, you know, are they talking about struggle? Are they talking about how money is scarce? Are they worried? Are they fighting over money? Is it in one hand and out the other? Or did you grow up around a dinner table where mum and dad are investing and they’re entrepreneurs and they’re into property, and and you know that you’ve always got an F, you know, and money is never scarce. Maybe they’re arguing over other things, maybe their relationship isn’t healthy, but it doesn’t matter, right? When it comes to the money conversation, those early formative years of how we grew up is really, really important. So our habits and how we show up in the world is really driven by a psychological profile. And it really is driven by a set of subconscious beliefs about ourselves and subconscious beliefs about how the world works at large.

[10:53] Sammie Ellard-King: So, how do we break through? Like, let’s say I come into you and I’ve got these real things that are holding me back from being the person that I want to be. I’ve got very clear views on what I want and what my goals want to be, but getting there is just impossible for me to picture me doing it. What do you kind of do to break these down? So I guess the number one thing that we work on with my clients is around the vision, of course, but you’ve already said that you know what you want, and that’s great. What’s really important when we’re envisioning what it is that we want for our life, it’s really important to understand why. What is our why for wanting it? And in the conversation that I have with anybody around their why for wanting the vision, it allows me to pick up on cues, okay? It’s like, is your why bigger than you? Is your why coming from your heart, or is your why coming from a protective ego load of shoulds? Do you do you do you want this because you think you should have this? Do you want this because somebody told you you would have this? Do you want this because it will, I don’t know, allow you to feel something that really you should feel without the having of it, right? So these kind of conversations I have with my clients just to just to weed out, you know, what’s your kind of motivation for wanting the thing that you want? Because if you want a set, if you want an outcome for yourself, but it’s driven by ego desire rather than coming from a higher place, then chances are it may not even be the right path for you. But chances are you might come up with a lot more resistance than whether it is, you know, true, kind of, you know, in your heart path. So we go through all of that. And the next step is okay, well, what are you doing up to now to get to where you want to be? Like what are you, how do you show up in the world? What are your habits? What are you doing? You know, we just have a conversation about how you’re living your life. What is your environment? What are you putting into your body? Do you exercise? You know, all of these sorts of lifestyle things that just give massive cues as to how it is, maybe just physically, that you’re holding yourself back from achieving the thing that you desire. And in the conversations I have with people, you just constantly pick up on language, right? The words that they’re using, you know, are they using negative terminology? Are they using words that are detrimental to them achieving the thing that they want? You can say things like, you know, when people say, I want this thing, I want this outcome, but then they start to almost seed that affirmation with something negative. You can pick up on that in a conversation with somebody. So we go through that. And then it’s a case of, okay, well, you know, tell me about your childhood. You know, tell me about what happened growing up. What was it like growing up? And that is where the really juicy stuff comes out. Because you can start to see perhaps where someone’s kind of patterning has come from. And then, you know, if somebody really wants to work on transforming the subconscious, I use what’s called rapid transformational therapy and I’ll use hypnotherapy to do a really, really deep dive kind of transformational session with somebody in order to start identifying where some of the negative beliefs have come from that they’ve got about their ability to achieve the thing that they want. And then we just insert new and empowering beliefs into their subconscious mind. And there’s other things and there’s other tools and modalities that I work on with clients in order to allow them to go on this transformational journey themselves. But a lot of what we do is just conversational, and it’s just there’s a saying that I really love, which is you cannot see the label when you’re on the inside of the jar. You can’t see the problem when you’re in the problem. And a lot of people come to me with problems, but they don’t see the solution because they just need to someone to mirror it back to them in order for them to sometimes and most of the time come up with a solution themselves on how it is that they need to get from A to B.

[15:34] Sammie Ellard-King: Hey guys, Sammie here. Just a quick one. If you wouldn’t mind heading over to upthegains.co.uk, hitting the subscribe button in the top right hand corner, and entering your email into the box. For your troubles, you will receive a free net worth calculator worth £25. Now, this net worth calculator, if you enter your assets and your liabilities, will tell you exactly how much you are worth today. Now, what you can also do is set yourself some financial goals and track your net worth along the way using this tool. It’s totally free. So head on over to upthegains.co.uk, hit the subscribe button, pop your email in, and you’ll be sent straight to your inbox in a matter of minutes. Now, back to the podcast. Do you feel like it’s like a lot of people have this kind of self-sabotage kind of mantra in a way? Because I feel like that was personally, just speaking purely openly here from a personal standpoint. I feel like I was in a a psyche cycle of self-sabotage up until you know, only till you know a few years ago, really. Not with money. Money, I stepped away from that self-sabotaging in my mid-20s and dealt with it. But actually, I self-sabotaged in in other areas of my life. Um, and it wasn’t until you know a couple of years in with my partner that I really sort of sat down and and and understood that about myself. And I could just see that happening in so many young men that I know. Um and I maybe it’s more of a of a of a of a young man, young, young, young men thing than it is a young woman. But um, yeah, I just wondered how how that sort of played out with some of your clients.

[17:15] Catherine Cornwall: So I guess it entirely depends on it’s it’s about the individual. And yeah, I think that, you know, young men and young women, men and women, have different societal conditions placed on them and different societal expectations put on them. They have different societal things that hold them back, and they have different societal things that propel them forward. And it is different. It is different for men and women. Absolutely, it is. I mean, the societal economic structure that we exist in creates different opportunities for different genders. You know, that’s just where we are. That’s why this huge amount of you know, gender diversity work is happening in the corporate world is to try and level up that playing field a little bit, you know, working on salaries and so on and so forth. But it just I I don’t I don’t ever go into any conversation with any of my clients based on gender and based on anything that I’ve assumed about their past, their conditioning, if I’m perfectly honest. Whilst it might manifest differently in the outer world for men and women, or we might have things that are kind of um push factors against us in society. The psychological patterns that the the the um limiting beliefs that we pick up are pretty much the same, regardless. Pretty much the same regardless. It just might have come at us differently. The life experience that gave us that might be different for for boys than it is for girls.

[18:44] Sammie Ellard-King: So interesting, isn’t it? Like everybody has this unique psyche, and like I would just love to be in a fly on the wall in some of your sessions because I’m sure like some of the stuff that must come out for you, even like I’m sitting here thinking, wow, that sounds so interesting. I, you know, to work in that environment must be pretty cool. What’s really, really interesting for me, and I find this with almost every single client that I work with, particularly with hypnotherapy, and it’s the really juicy stuff that I go, oh, you know what, this is gonna be really good. I say, How was your childhood? And they’ll say, My childhood was perfect. Everything was fine. Mom and dad are lovely, you know, nothing happened whatsoever. You know, that was all fine. It was all fine. We got like this, let’s put it in the carpet. Because nobody wants to speak badly about their family. We love our family, we love our parents, and that’s a good thing because you know, nobody, regardless of what it is that happened, right? You know, it’s nobody’s fault. Okay, you know, we’re all human beings having a human experience here. So oftentimes we have what’s called big trauma and little trauma, okay? Big things that can happen that are major that everybody remembers. Then we have little traumas, and it’s the little tiny traumas are actually the ones that create the conditioning that limit us as we go through our lives, and we’re unaware of it because there’s a little trauma and we don’t think much of it. The conscious mind has kind of gone, I’m just gonna forget about that, you know, and park that one. When we get into the therapy session, the actual crutch of the hypnotherapy, and we regress back to different scenes in childhood. Some incredible things come up for clients, and it’s astounding that things come up that they had completely and utterly just either forgotten, swept under the carpet, or had never ever thought in a million years that it was linked to the problem that they have today. And that’s the major transformational piece, is when the individual’s mind makes that linkage between what happened to them in childhood and what they experienced in childhood, not what happened to them, but what they experienced in childhood, linked to the belief they have about themselves today. And that’s the most powerful part of hypnotherapy, and that’s how the subconscious mind works.

[20:53] Sammie Ellard-King: I um a therapist once told me it was a super interesting way of looking at this, and you know, it really put a lot of things in perspective for me, actually, was um when people walk into a therapy session to use the analogy of a wardrobe, and uh inside your wardrobe, all your clothes are thrown inside. Um, and what you do in therapy is you take every single item out and garment, you look at it, you discuss it. Where did you buy it? Where did you what did it do for you? And then you fold it back up and you put it away neatly, or you leave the ones that you don’t want to put back inside out, and you give those away to charity. And like I just found that so cool because you were almost like unpacking stuff, and I imagine that’s very similar to those like mini traumas where you would like pick up that t-shirt and go, Oh my god, wow, that was really a really very odd moment for me in my life, or very pivotal moment, and I didn’t realise.

[21:49] Catherine Cornwall: Awareness is power, like awareness is huge, and a lot of us uh uh are in pain because we experience and feel these ways, but we don’t know why. And therapy simply allows us to understand why, and then we can start to process that and we can release that and let it go. And then we can, you know, and in whatever program we’ve got running that isn’t helping us, that’s creating a toxic habit, we can then replace that with a new empowering belief about our lives that is conducive to the life that we now want to live going forward. It’s incredibly powerful stuff. But you know, whether whether we’re rewiring something around relationship or rewiring something around money, the subconscious pattern is the same. You know, you want to keep sabotaging yourself along the way. Well, it’s because you either think you’re not worthy, you’re not enough, or you’re not livable. Every single time.

[22:43] Sammie Ellard-King: So, how do how How have you got yourself into this? Because you have had a long career in finance, and you know, where did this all start for you? Like, was it was it young Catherine getting herself into this, or have you picked it up along the way? I wish it was young Catherine getting into this. I’m gonna save myself a world of pain, but no, that was not my journey. So um, yeah, so I I I would say I’ve had an interesting life. I I kind of fell into finance, if I’m perfectly honest. Um, I didn’t have the easiest of time. Um, my childhood was fine, you know, but humble upbringing, uh, you know, a very, very humble start. Grew up on a council estate in Wales. Um, I’ll be perfectly honest about it. In Barry, wasn’t it? In Barry, yeah, in Barry Island. Yeah, love it. Everyone will know that. Oh, Gavin and Stacey. I um well, you know, it it was it was good good times, right? As a child, you know, out there, you know, climbing trees, doing whatever. Um, but you know, during my kind of teenage years, which are the really kind of informative years, I went completely off the rails, like totally off the rails. Education stuff suffered a little bit, a lot. Um, I left school, you know, with practically nothing. I had dreams of becoming a barrister when I was a child, and all of that just completely went out the window. And then I’m like scrambling to go, well, how am I even gonna get, you know, something to get into work? Um, but you know what, I’ve always had a bit of tenacity and I’ve always been, you know, very driven and ambitious, and I don’t let a lot get me down. So I kind of recovered from all of that and went back to college and then fell into finance. I fortunately got a job dealing with investment customers for legal and general, and they took me on, and then I just, you know, rapidly worked my way up that, up that kind of ladder. And I took on my first management role when I was 22. So I worked really hard, you know, climbed that corporate ladder. But a lot of what I went through in my early years, I had just kind of swept under the carpet, you know, all them traumas, all the bad things that had kind of happened, I just swept it under and just carried on. I kind of almost used work and being ambitious, right, as a complete mask for everything that I had not dealt with. I had a really um difficult, toxic relationship in my early 20s as well that was, you know, quite abusive. So again, patterning was just picking up along the way, you know, more experiences, more traumas, more patterning, and I was just masking it with work, you know, just plowing through. And I got to my late 20s, kind of just on the cusp of being 30. And I had probably what was, I guess you refer to as a spiritual awakening. I had an awakening moment. Actually, I completely lost my shit. You know, a complete epiphany. My friends thought I was nuts, my family thought I’d lost it, um, and I left a relationship that I was in, a long-term relationship there and there, and when I’m moving to London and I just packed my stuff up and I left my job at Legal & General, and I went away from Vesco and I just left and I just went to London, which is quite a late bloomer to move to London, right? So you normally move to London in your 20s. But that awakening moment was me finally not running from the pain anymore because the pain had caught up with me. So the pain had caught up with me. I had what was like a bit of a mental breakdown, not really, but I had. And then, you know, kind of it forced me to really stop, pause, and start to look within. And I went on this crazy journey, which has been now 10 years of this, which is deep, deep, deep personal development work. Deep, deep, deep research, so much research, so many books have been read from all kinds of teachers that, you know, I’ve just completely and literally dove into the entire world of personal development and manifestation and spirituality and spiritual principles and psychology. I mean, it was just a whole world that opened up for me, which was really just a journey of me journeying back to myself, truly understanding who I was, truly understanding why it is that I had experienced the things that I’d experienced, understanding why it was that, you know, why it was that I felt the way that I felt, but actually how I could heal. And I became a self-healer through that work that I was doing. I became a better person. I changed my habits. I just learned, you know, that what I put out, I get back. So therefore, if I change what it is that I am internally, if I become the person that I want to be, living the life that I want to live, you know, that starts within. And I started to learn that, you know, the manifestation principles of so within, so without. So, in order for me to achieve those big goals that I wanted, that I that the other cat just would never have got to because she was in full self-sabotage mode, I had to become a better version of myself to get there. And that’s what the last 10 years have been. And probably about five or six years into that journey, probably about four or five years ago, I started thinking, I started getting really inspired. You know what, I’ve learned so much on this journey, I’ve achieved so much myself in this space. I really want to start sharing this knowledge with other people, which is all coaches do. We learn the things that we learn, and then we are almost compelled to share this with other people because duty-bound in a way. Duty bound, absolutely. For me to keep this to myself when other people have been where I have been and are still where I was, but actually with the tools and the knowledge and the understanding that we create our own reality with our thoughts and our feelings and our beliefs, and all it means is that we just got to change that within us in order to create a different reality for ourselves. How could I not keep how could I keep that to myself? You know, so yeah, compelled. And that’s why I set up the original brand, which was Clarity Queen, and I’ve since changed that to Catherine Cornwall Global. And more recently, just through many iterations, you know, and working with clients and understanding, you know, how people work, but also what it is that people want. That’s when I’ve married the two kind of, you know, the life coaching with the financial stuff. Became a qualified money coach through Octopus. Um, I’m now doing that, you know, outside of octopus. But combining those two things to really support people to achieve what it is that they dream and desire in the realm of love and money, you know, and that’s it for me. And that’s kind of where I’m at today.

[28:59] Sammie Ellard-King: Does it fill up your heart?

[30:09] Catherine Cornwall: It really expands me. Like it does. It just when we speak about this stuff and when we’re on panel or on stage or when I’m on a podcast and you know, we have the opportunity to talk about this stuff, it lights me up. Like nothing lights me up, like talking about this stuff because it’s empowerment, it’s personal empowerment. You know, we all want greater freedom. Well, freedom comes with empowerment. When we empower ourselves, we become more free. How do we empower ourselves? We become more educated. And, you know, we are simply conduits, you know, for this information that is available to everybody. We’re just here to just spread that information for other people to pick up and go on their own journey. I love absolutely everything about what you just said there. I like it’s gone and hit me right in here. Um, I’ll be really honest with you. No, it really has because I think just to have that moment in your life where you just went, no, like fuck this, and just like clean sleigh. And I’m gonna go and I’m gonna be the best version of myself. Um, and I’ve made that aha moment kicked off in my mind. And not only did you leave your job, you left your relationship and and your home, really. Um, to go out and experience and find yourself. And boy, is it that sound like sounds like you have, and um yeah, I just think that journey is just incredible. So, just absolutely hats off to you for for coming this far. I think it’s an absolutely amazing story.

[31:44] Catherine Cornwall: It’s you know, it’s it’s sometimes we’ve just gotta oftentimes we don’t do the things that we need to do or are compelled to do or drawn to do because we fear what people think of us, we fear being judged, we fear, you know, so oftentimes we stay in situations and places that are not facilitating our growth, right? We’re not getting fulfillment at all because we think we should. And I’ve learned along the way that actually I’ve carved out a really lovely life for myself. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sunshine and bloody roses, it’s hard work every day in the gym. It never ends, it never ends, and you level me down, right? And all that sort of stuff. But it’s worth it, it’s so worth it. You know, I feel so much more fulfilled. I have so many more tools at my disposal now to get me through those dark patches, you know. We all go through it like it’s like this, it’s not like this, it’s like this, you know. We’ve still got the ups and downs, but I’ve managed to carve that life out for myself by making the tough decisions and and going for it. Um, you know, and and if I honestly, if I can do it, anyone, anyone can do it. Anyone can.

[32:54] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s a lot about belief. I I found that. Um, you know, I had this moment, it actually happened to me in COVID, and I’m sure it happened to a hell of a lot of people as well, is that they sort of realised, you know, I fell into the work that I was doing before. I was good at it, uh my family did it, I just it was everything I ever knew. Um, but it wasn’t filling up my heart, and that was the big thing for me. Like I felt like I had so much more to give. And um doing this type of work that I’m doing now and helping people change their lives through money, you know, I’m not hitting it in the same angle as you would do with the the life coach side. But just having, you know, when I get an email back and saying, Oh, I did X, Y, and Z and you know, thank you so much because this has happened, like, I just like I nearly, I nearly like burst into tears because it’s like it’s a different feeling of just changing someone’s life by doing that and and sending them home pissed in an Uber, which is what I used to do. So, like, you know, it’s a it’s a it’s just such a weird, weird, weird change for me. Um, but you know, here we are and and we’re pushing forward, and you’re so right, the road for me is like this every day. I’m like have to self-motivate and keep pushing myself to to keep going, because you know, someone somewhere out there is is really you know benefiting from what we’re doing. So I think that’s so important.

[34:22] Catherine Cornwall: It is Abraham Hicks. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that or heard of Abraham Hicks, but um, she’s she’s a very highly spiritual teacher that channels, you know, whatever, you know, a bit woo-woo, right? But she has a saying respect. We never get it done and we can never get it wrong, which I constantly hear that in my mind, all of the time, when I need reminding, when I’m hard on myself, when I think, my god, this is so tough. You know, there are just times when you just think, why am I doing this? You know, you can never get it done and you can never get it wrong. And that just means that we cannot be afraid to fail forward. Like we can’t get it wrong. Sometimes I would say the vast majority of the pain that we experience is self-created. We create it in our minds. Our minds are fabulous tools, but we rely on them too heavily, and you know, they can mess us up. They can achieve great feats, but it can also really mess us up emotionally as well. Um, you know, and us just learning to fail forward, but also thinking about all the times when we thought that the world’s gonna end, we quite literally think this is it for us, right? Whether it be close to bankruptcy, whether it be losing everything, whether it be going through a divorce, whatever it might be, and you feel so much pain, we’re we’re constantly safe. You know, we are always held, we’re always safe, you know, that there’s always a way out. Everything is figure outable. And you know, that mantra we can never get it wrong, you know, is true. You just can’t, you know, it’s just experience, and you know, it’s either a lesson or a blessing. That’s it, lessons and blessings. And when we start to view life through that lens of it’s either a lesson or a blessing, either way we’re winning. You can mine the lessons to, you know, learn and evolve, or you just, you know, you learn to just appreciate the blessings when they can. But it’s never all blessings, you know, it’s always rough with the smooth.

[36:17] Sammie Ellard-King: Seems like everything that we’re talking about here just stems back to one thing. It seems to be self-awareness. And it’s the more self-aware that you are, the more power you have to make better decisions for yourself. Is that is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, awareness is power. Awareness is everything. And in in this, in the world of achieving your dreams and desires and personal development, it is about the self. The more you know about yourself, the more you master yourself. That’s why people call it call it self-mastery. You know, the more that you master yourself, the more you can weather those times when the go-in is getting tough. You have the tools available to yourself, you know, you have the tools available in order to weather those times. You’ve been there before. You know, you know, this isn’t this isn’t the end, you know, you know tomorrow’s a brighter day. A massive amount of it is mindset.

[37:14] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, I completely. Emotional mastery. Mindset and emotional mastery, the two things we need to master the self. I feel like I’ve got my mindset in the right frame the last couple of years. My forever going journey, I have such a fast mind. And in I mean that emotionally. I have my emotions flicker from left to right, like uh up or down. I’m sure my my partner should say, you know, you’re up and down sometimes like a yo-yo. And it is totally true, but I’m trying to master that side of myself, and I know that if I can get that right, then there’s you know, I I feel like I, you know, I’ll be a much, much better person, both in in life and in business and and and you know, with my family. Is it that’s the struggle for me, I find. And it it stems into my own. That I feel like a lot of that I managed to master on the money side, um, and that’s been very helpful for me. Um, but outside of that, emotionally, uh, you know, in day-to-day life, I can be quite quick say you say, yeah, quick tempered, I think, in a lot of situations, but not in a like um not in a in a in a violent way, just in an emotional way. And a lot of it I won’t I’ll bottle up and I won’t talk about it. Um, and then it will kind of it can come flying out in the wrong ways. And so, yeah, being knowledgeable about that has been a challenge for me.

[38:42] Catherine Cornwall: Yeah, and to your point actually about men and women and you know, mental health for men and women, it is it is different, right? Um, emotionally, we are definitely wired differently. And um, you know, a lot of the mental health problems that we see today are as a result of us not processing emotion. So a lot of us don’t press process emotion because we swallow it down, we sweep it under the carpet, we keep it suppressed, we bypass, we ignore, we love and light it away and pretend that everything’s fine when it’s not, right? It’s toxic positivity, it’s all of that stuff. And I think we’re I’m hoping that as a society, we’re moving more now into normalizing both men and women showing emotion. Because when you show emotion, you feel emotion. And when you feel emotion, the emotion goes out. Emotion is just energy in motion. So think about what we’re doing, right? By not feeling our emotion, we’re we’re we’re keeping it stored in our bodies and in our cells, and then it fests and it turns into disease, right? And it it poisons the mind. We have to express emotion because it’s energy. We have to release it, you know, we have to feel to heal. That’s another saying that I love. We have to feel to heal. And I’m hoping that as a society, we’re normalizing that now. But actually, a lot of the going back to the money conversation, a lot of the habits that we have that are not um conducive to you know good money management is emotional-based habits. You know, think about gambling, if you think about, you know, spending, overspending, even overeating, you know, it’s an emotional response, you know, because it’s it’s unprocessed emotion. And that is why there’s a part of us that’s in pain, which is why that then leaks out in a habit which is, you know, impulse buying, for example. I mean, it but even though you do the work on yourself, you you, you know, you still gotta check yourself. I bought a pair of Jimmy Choos at the weekends and I had immediate buyer’s remorse. I was like, what am I doing? I don’t need a pair of Jimmy Choos. I’ve got things I need to do right now with my I’m trying to be better, you know. I’ve got things I need to do, I’ve got these financial goals. What am I doing? I don’t need the Choos, you know. So it catches you all the time. Um, but self-awareness is key, you know, and I it’s interesting. I’ve been reflecting on it and I realised that I bought those shoes in a moment of weakness, and I wasn’t feeling emotionally good at the time that I bought them. It caught me.

[41:08] Sammie Ellard-King: I do the same. Yeah. I literally do the same. I’ve got a training problem. So and I I know that I buy them on a Sunday morning at about eight o’clock in the morning. If you look back, it’s when I’ve first woken up, it might have been a long week, or I’ve gone out on the Saturday night, yeah, had a couple of drinks, and then woke up feeling slightly sorry for myself, and I’ll I’ll buy, I’ll purchase. But understanding those triggers for me is what um stops me doing it now. I do this whole like, okay, you like them, put them in the basket and leave them there and then come back a week later, and most of the time I never buy them again. So it’s like that’s a really good self-regulation, you know, tool that you’ve got there. But again, that just comes back to self-awareness, doesn’t it? And I would spend unfettered before, you know. I’ve never I’ve I was I was always really good at earning money, not very good at keeping hold of money. So I was a big spender, and I’m still a big spender now, and I like to spend, you know, and I like to invest. Another big part of you know, one of the things I’ve had to rein in is risk taking. Like I’m a big risk taker. Personality-wise, I’m a risk taker, but also, you know, I’m wired towards that. But also, having spent 20 years in finance when you’re in the asset management, investment, banking world, and the numbers that you’re talking about are way, way, way, way bigger. And you understand investing, your kind of risk appetite is a lot, lot higher than if you knew nothing about investing. And I’ve taken risks that have burnt me, big time burnt me, because I haven’t regulated that, you know, I’ve and I’ve acted on impulse. So combining the fact that I have a very high, very high tolerance for risk and you know, having emotional kind of impact.

[42:49] Sammie Ellard-King: And you’re an emotional investor. Completely, yeah. Yeah, I’m an emotional investor, which I’ve which which again, we never get it wrong, we never get it done. It’s either a lesson or a blessing. I’ve learned from that, you know, but that’s the important thing. You can make the mistakes, I guess you can call them. You can lose a lot of money, whatever that looks like. It’s your capacity to bounce back from that, is what’s really important. And I think, you know, it doesn’t matter that that’s happened to you, is your capacity to learn, adjust, and do different and do better in the future. And that’s what the personal development journey is all about. That’s what growth is about. But if you’re stuck in the same cycle and doing nothing about it, then you’ll move no further forward and you won’t achieve those goals.

[43:34] Sammie Ellard-King: I love this. So let’s talk a little bit about before we wrap up, like a bit about your. So you mentioned some of there, some of your, some of your, you know, you’ve been burnt by investments. What’s some of the investments that you’re making today? And so the investments that I’m making today are very sensible investments. So, you know, I’m investing, I’m investing in, you know, index tracking funds, right? And thinking about medium to long-term investments. Um, you know, I’ve got a mix of, you know, interest-bearing cash as high as I can get it. You know, I’ve got um some debit, I don’t haven’t got any credit cards right now. I’ve got because I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to change my behaviour around that. I’ve been in places where I’ve been massively over-leveraged, so I’m not going to over-leverage. I’m actually de-leveraging at the moment. But I’ve got, you know, a debit card that gives me, you know, a percentage back on spending, you know, so I’m trying to be savvy, you know, and I’m keeping it low-key on the investing. And that’s pretty much it for me at the moment. I’ve got, okay, I’m a liar, I’ve got a tiny bit in crypto. I mean, it’s tiny, tiny. I lost multiple five figures in crypto, and I have zero desire to get back there. Um, I did not time it right at all. Um, but you can’t time the market. It was a ridiculous thing for me to think I could do. Um, and you know what, we live and learn, right? We live and learn from these mistakes. But um, no, nothing in there. I definitely believe in crypto. I definitely do believe in the technology, I believe in the whole space. It’s just for me right now, in I guess, my season of where I’m at with my money management and me reigning in my ridiculous appetite for risk. I’m gonna stay away from the ultra high risk assets and just, you know, stick to my app investing. You know, I love Moneybox. I’m not advertising Moneybox, that’s not advice, by the way, but I, you know, I really like using Moneybox. Um, you know, and obviously I understand that landscape very well. And, you know, I’m happy to choose a high risk profile, you know, within these uh within these investing apps, but that’s about as far as I’m gonna go on the risk taking on investing. And I think going forward, I do want to make some lifestyle changes. I’m gonna be moving back to Wales, which is exciting. Oh wow, that’s amazing. I’m not gonna buy straight off the bat. I’m gonna give it a year. And I’m probably gonna get back into the property market. I have had properties previously, I’ve offloaded them, but I’m probably gonna get back into um property and Investing, I think, rather than buying. I’m not gonna buy and hold. I think I’m gonna buy and flip. I’d like to turn that. I don’t know. It feels good to me, you know, to try my hand at buying and flipping. So that’s really the plan for me around investing. How about you?

[46:07] Sammie Ellard-King: Uh good question. I’m uh I’m 8020. Um I think we spoke about this actually before, but yeah, so I’m indexed funds, and then I um I love individual stock picking, but I I I’m like you, I could get so carried away. Five years ago, it was 80-20, the reverse. So I’ve been rebalancing as much as I possibly can for the last five years to try and get that background because I was way over-leveraged on some on some severely high-risk, high-tech software companies, which would go up a hundred percent in four months and then fly back down again. So it’s like it’s one of those things. So, but you know, as you say, you you you live, you learn, and you move forward. And I think it’s because I’ve got older now, like in my 20s, I was like, yeah, I’m gonna be, you know, the next big stock picker, and da da da. But realistically, that’s just not right. You’re never gonna be that person unless you’re like the you know, some ultra smart, smart guy with with with knowledge of the future, it’s just not true. So um, yeah, so I’ve been sorting myself out, and you know, obviously I have a partner in a house now to think about. So, you know, I want to make sure that I’m moving forward in the right way. And if that takes longer, then then so be it.

[47:24] Catherine Cornwall: Yeah, I I agree. I think for me, you know, taking the lessons forward for me is really at the moment about increasing cash flow and getting you know, practicing what I preach to my clients around. Yeah, probably money management. I think I should start doing that now. But no, I mean seriousness. Yeah, we have to you have to practice what you preach. So we have to be in integrity, right? So so that for me is the focus right now. But you know, I’m I’m probably I’ll definitely still take risks in the future, you know. So for me, you know, what is what is the saying? If you risk nothing, you risk everything. So we’ve got to take some risks, but it’s about knowing where those boundary lines are, because there are boundary lines there, it’s not overstrapping. 100%. I’ve just jumped off a cliff with my with this business now. You know, I had a you know a high-paying job as a director role in a in a very high-performing hospitality business. But I just thought, nope, that’s not for me. I’m jumping off and do my own thing and then build my businesses to the point where you know they’re giving me enough cash flow so I can then invest in in property and diversify my income streams. And that’s like the the number one goal for me right now is like I’m just so laser focused on the business, and and you know, that that’s that’s what I want to do, and that’s the point I’m at in my life. But you know, everybody’s different and and everybody goes on a different journey. And so I think that’s highlighted by what you’ve been saying today. And yeah, it’s just been a very, very brilliant comp uh, you know. I think a lot of people will take so much away from this. Um, and that’s why I was so, so, you know, we had to get you on because I I knew it was gonna be 45 minutes of pure gold. So thank you very much. I really do appreciate it.

[49:03] Catherine Cornwall: You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Pleasure, Catherine. Take care.