The 43-year-old does not hail from a wealthy background, but is from Newcastle, “a working-class town in Australia” and was brought up by her mother Vicki, a single parent.
Duffield-Thomas came to London in her twenties and in 2010 left the corporate world in consultancy and event management to start her own life coaching business. Married and with three children, she also set the goal to make a million dollars in revenue by the time she was 35.
“I achieved it a few weeks before my 36th birthday and now make millions every year,” she said. “One of my proudest moments is meeting Oprah and telling her that I’ve broken the cycle of poverty and dysfunction in my family.
“When you change your money mindset, your thoughts of scarcity and lack are replaced with deep peace and trust. You feel safe and supported and abundant. You’ll feel a deep shift in your body: an expansive feeling of more ease and core stability in your nervous system.”
She shared seven things you can do to stop feeling anxious and start feeling good no matter how much you have in the bank.
Regulate your nervous system
When you feel broke, you can get into a negative spiral and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby you start to see yourself as unlucky. You need to get yourself to a place where you feel calmer and more centred so you can take positive action rather than being paralysed by anxiety.
Start by focusing on the knowns in your life and create some certainty for yourself. No one knows if the interest rates are going to rise. Our governments and corporations are not giving us any reassurance and in the last few years with Covid, we’ve had no certainty.
You can’t control what’s going on externally, but you can control what you focus on – what decisions do you have control over that feel more certain? Where do you have the most agency about your money situation? Start there.
Identify your money blocks
Explore ways of starting a “side hustle” and then notice what money blocks pop up. Money blocks are our beliefs about money which stop us from earning what we want.
The most popular one is that you have to work hard to make money. We know this makes no sense because people who work very hard don’t necessarily make the most.
For those of us who grew up in a pre-internet world, we have a very particular view of what work can be. You go to a job, you put in your hours and you get paid for those hours.
However, post-internet, we have lots of different ways that people can earn money, but our minds still haven’t quite caught up with that. I see people who make money from being able to self-publish books or create their own courses and it breaks our brain a little bit to think that you can make money out of doing something that you love.
Start exploring enjoyable ways to earn money on the side and challenging the money “blocks” that might arise.
