For the full interview please listen to the most recent CM Group- Free Lunch Podcast, Episode 81 “ Having a Money Mindset with Melissa Houston”
Colin and Greg: First of all, just can you tell our listeners where you're joining us from today, Melissa?
Melissa: Absolutely. Fellow Canadian, I'm joining you from Ottawa, capital of Canada.
Colin and Greg: Well, “the capital out east” – I’m just joking. It's good to have a Canadian on the show. We've had a number of Americans recently and it's nice we can speak the same language.
Melissa: I was really excited when I saw that this was a Canadian podcast because I too deal mostly with Americans and it's so fun to talk with fellow Canadians because we're doing so many fantastic things up in Canada as well.
Colin and Greg: Well, that's great. Why don't we kick off Melissa with just how did you get where you are today? Tell us your story.
Melissa: Absolutely. So it's a little bit of a convoluted story. My first career was in social work. I had been working in social work for about five to six years, but I felt it was a very high burnout career path and talking with my dad, it was like I didn't know what to do. I remember my grade 10 business teacher telling me, “Oh, I think you're good at business” and my dad was like, “Well, accounting is a very respectable profession”. So I ended up registering for business and I eventually ended up majoring in accounting and got designated. I'm very analytical, but in my career path, I really noticed what I was doing was it felt very much like introverted work. Even though I'm an introvert, I have an extrovert part of me, which is part of the social work side of me where I really wanted to help people. I noticed when I was working in public accounting, when we were helping small- and medium-sized business owners understand their books, they would come in, they would get their books assessed and their tax returns completed. We would sit down and we would give them really good, valuable feedback on what was going on in their business. I could see the disconnect right there where I realized they don't understand what we're telling them. So I really wanted to go out on my own and start exploring that and really helping business owners and filling that gap of that lack of education where we hear so much in the personal finance space about managing our personal finances. But I also wanted to talk to them about managing their business finances and how they can create so much more profit in their business when they understand their business numbers.
Colin and Greg: With a background in social work and just to share a little bit, my wife is a social worker, my parents are both social workers and my sister-in-law is a social worker. What I've found, and it sounds like you’ve found, is that in our role as Portfolio Managers, Investment Advisors, we actually tend to do a lot of counseling. You're just talking about how in the accounting world you end up using maybe some of your social work skills in counseling business owners – is that right?
Melissa: Absolutely, and actually, that is something that I really put at the forefront because money is such an emotional topic for so many people. We all have money stories, and I really tried to talk about the emotion behind it and how their mindsets are affected by the emotion that they're feeling and how they could inadvertently be holding themselves back in business because there's such a negative relationship with that money. So that's definitely one of the first things that I talk about with my clients is developing that healthy relationship to money.
Colin and Greg: What is that? So what do you mean by a healthy relationship with money and how do you help people do that?
Melissa: Everybody has their own money stories. I've never met two people with the same story. Quite often, just for example, I was working with a business owner not too long ago who felt like it was really a negative thing to want more money in their business, then what they needed to live because they had been told that rich people or wealthy people were not nice people. This is the conditioning that they had in their childhood, but they didn't realize they were carrying it so strongly until we started talking about it. They were like, “That's right. I totally to deserve to have a piece of the pie.”, and getting over those mindsets that are holding them back in business. There's other people who I've worked with who have a real fear of selling, not themselves, but their products, their offerings. It becomes a very personal thing and it becomes very guilt ridden – asking people for money for their services and reframing those kind of thoughts to ensure that they're not holding themselves back in their business. A positive money mindset is definitely somebody who can see money for what it is, and money is really a tool that we use for exchange of goods and services. When you have a positive relationship with money, you can get into that growth cycle and understand that having a lot of money is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot of good things you can do when you're creating wealth for yourself. You can choose to share it with your family, friends or keep it for yourself, build a not-for-profit or whatever it is that motivates you.
For more questions and answers with Melissa Houston please refer to our Podcast.
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