00:22 CJ: Well welcome once again to the savvy musician show, this is CJ Ortiz and I’m the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Thrilled once again to be joined by her eminence, the lovely Leah McHenry, how are you?

00:36 Leah: I’m great, having a great day.

00:39 CJ: Good. It’s good to see you again. I always enjoy these, our challenge always to keep things as concise as possible because we have very similar outlooks on things, we’ve got so much that we love to talk about and so much that we’re passionate about and never-ending stream of subjects Leah, that we can always address here on the show.

We’re going to get really unique here today, talk about something called a poverty mentality which maybe a lot of our listeners have actually never heard of before. You and I know that from our certain spiritual type backgrounds. It’s something that we understand and personal development industry. It’s something that people understand but I think this is going to be super eye-opening for our listeners today and I believe that even though it’s great to know how to do so much about online marketing.

Sometimes, we can stand in our own way and hold ourselves back because of our belief systems and so one of the things I love about this podcast is that we’re able to delve in between both. We can talk about the practical ins and outs of the how-tos of online marketing but then we can also get into the psychology which in a lot of ways is even more effective because it makes you that unstoppable force. 

Before we get into that, I want to share just a student spotlight. Today is Lindsey Matheson who even though writing from Australia as she’ll say is not Australian. I’ve talked to her, she isn’t. But anyway, she says #win “Good day, I’m down here in Australia with the other band I work for, my Facebook likes ad have been so strong that people are coming out to see what my spooky metal band is about. In Australia mate, the fans have also said they’re excited for my solo album to come out next month and signed up for the mailing list. 

Even our flight attendant on this morning’s flight was a fan of just me. I can’t make this up, thank you, Leah, and team for all that you’re teaching me, this solo album launch is going to be something else.”

02:46 Leah: I’m so proud of her, she’s a personal friend of mine and you’re doing an amazing job, Lindsey, and I can’t wait for your solo album launch. It’s going to be fantastic.

02:59 CJ: I know she won’t mind us saying this but when she says there that she’s being recognized for just her, you’d have to understand that she’s a part of a very popular international heavy metal band. She’s one of many in that band. So, for her to be about to go and start her solo project, be on an airplane and the flight attendant recognizes just her, recognize any metal musician, let alone somebody who is just playing an instrument in a larger metal band built upon a personality like the band that she’s from. That’s pretty amazing.

03:32 Leah: That must have felt so good to see like wow, I’m my own thing and people recognize me for what I’m doing and there’s no better feeling than that, it’s really incredible.

03:43 CJ: It does make you feel like you do have things more in control that you can get your message out there and it can be done through the ways that we teach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Good for you, Lindsey, and many more great things to come as you’re faithful to this course. 

Anyway, poverty mentality, how to get rid of a poverty mentality, Leah, like I said, I don’t know that people quite understand what one is but I think we can begin the topic by talking about something that everybody does understand and that is the starving artist. Let’s begin there, you had something you shared with me offline, I’d love for you to read.

04:21 Leah: Yeah, I’ve done a podcast episode in the past where I did a book review actually on Real Artist Don’t Starve which was written by Jeff Goins and I know him personally, he’s a fantastic, generous man and him and I sometimes text back and forth and he’s just a great guy. He wrote this book and there’s a whole bunch of helpful things in there, it’s not geared towards musicians.

It’s just brought more gear to creative, the arts and music and all of it. One of my favourite parts of the book is the introduction, this whole concept that we have kind of been duped into believing that all artists have always been poor throughout history and they’ve always been starving, they’ve always been couch surfing and he kind of just bust that myth and I thought I would just read a little segment about this part. One of my favourite parts.

He said, “For centuries, this is what historians believed about the great Renaissance master, they’re talking about Michelangelo. They believed that he struggled like Vincent Van Gogh, he was just another starving artist, struggling to make ends meet. Michelangelo himself embraced this image, living frugally and often complaining about money. 

He once wrote in a poem that his art had left him poor, old and working as a servant of others. But it turns out that he wasn’t telling the truth. When Rab Hatfield dug into those old bank records, the truth about the Renaissance’s most famous artist was finally revealed. He was not struggling, at all, he was not poor and he was not starving for his art. A fact we’ve been getting wrong ever since. Michelangelo was in fact very rich. One record showed a balance of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a rare sum of money for an artist at the time, when he saw those figures, the professor forgot all about the Sistine chapel.

With his curiosity peaked, he went to see if there were more bank records and there were more, many more. In the end, Professor Hatfield uncovered a fortune worth roughly 47 million today, making Michelangelo the richest artist of the Renaissance. To this day, this is a story that surprises us, we’re accustomed to a certain story about an artist, the one that says that they are barely getting by.

But Michelangelo did not suffer or starve for his work. A multi-Millionaire and successful entrepreneur, he was in the words of wonder in the list a ‘pivotal figure in the transition of creative geniuses from people regarded and paid as craftsman to people accorded a different level of treatment and compensation’. In other words, the master sculptor and painter wasn’t just some art school dropout struggling for his art. He was a rainmaker. 

When I asked Rab Hatfield what Michael Angelo’s millions meant for us today, he said, I don’t think it means a whole lot, but I disagree, I think this changes everything.” I loved that introduction and it’s quite a bit longer than that, but it goes on to talk about Michelangelo and dig into this a little bit more.

What I loved about it was I was equally shocked and surprised to hear that. That the guy who we’ve all perceived to be starving and working as a slave for other people, making all this art was really a multimillionaire, quite an entrepreneur and it was all under the radar. And then the whole book kind of goes off of that about hey, this doesn’t have to be the case for you either whether you’re making pottery or art or music or selling merch on Shopify.

Whatever it is you’re doing, this lie really that you have to be poor and helpless is just that, it’s just a lie, It’s a belief and it’s wrong.

08:12 CJ: Yup. That’s the important distinction there is this is a belief. In other words, that’s not objectively true and that’s why this is related to the poverty mentality. In the sense that they are two particular beliefs. Whether it be a starving artist or poverty mentality that will keep somebody trapped because if you believe objectively, in other words, outside of yourself that an artist must starve, that that’s just the reality. Like, rain must fall to the ground, that’s your belief.

Then you match that with a poverty mentality meaning a subject of inward belief about what your capacity is, what’s available to you, what’s going to work, all these sorts of self-defeating beliefs. Those two things combined are probably the greatest restraints on artists today as you said, of any kind. Of course, we’re speaking to musicians in specific but this is what traps creatives.

Because, as creatives, we’re very gifted to do what we do, right? In terms of art, but in the midst of that imaginative creative aspect, we can also dream up some pretty stupid beliefs about what’s true in the world, we can create some pretty elaborate stories and narratives about the limitations.

You know, you can listen to it in the way we talk, we’ll say, that always happens to me, you know? These things are always in my way, I’m always facing this, there’s never enough, there’s never this, always that. We use these hyperbolic descriptions that really don’t have any basis in reality, it’s just, we discount the good things that happened and we magnify the bad things that happen.

Whatever you focus on is going to get magnified whether positive or negative. It all depends on what you are giving your attention to. But like Leah just described, here’s somebody who people assumed, of course a classic artist that we all know about but you assumed that this guy was one of those starving artist and it turns out, not only the richest artist of the Renaissance period but probably would be one of the richest ones today too.

That’s a significant thing. Let’s start at the beginning. Leah, how do you look at a poverty mentality?

10:25 Leah: You know, I read several books on the topic and they weren’t coming from a religious background but just on the whole belief system that people have around money. Some people call it a relationship with money, I kind of find that’s kind of odd. Money is an inanimate concept really.

10:41 CJ: It’s an impersonal thing.

10:43 Leah: Yeah, I was finding it’s a bit of a weird phrase but I understand what they’re getting at, it’s really a one-sided thing, right? It’s like, how do you view money, how do you look at money, how are you raised, what kind of environment were you raised in that informed your beliefs about money, that’s actually probably one of the biggest factors I can even think of.

For example, if you grew up in a home where there really wasn’t very much money like mine. What’s the number one thing you always heard from your parents? We can’t afford that. We can’t afford to do that and a lot of ways, it does shape your view on the world and your view of money that kind of just gets drilled into your head that I can’t afford to do things. 

I understand it’s a tricky thing for parents now that I have kids that are getting a little older where you want to teach them stewardship and budgeting and like maybe that’s not a wise thing to spend your money on. At the same time, I’m also careful to not say things like that because I don’t want them growing up with the view that money is an unreplenishable resource. That actually happened the other day with like one of my youngest daughters. That’s right, she bought something with her money, we’re at the craft store and she bought something and it turned out to be – it was like a $3 squishy something or other. It broke and we had to throw it away and she was really upset about it and I just looked at her and said.

“Honey, it’s no big deal, you can make more money, you can make easily make three more dollars and buy a new one. This is not a limited resource. Money is a resource, there’s an endless amount of it in this world.” She was like, oh, okay. It was like if I hadn’t told her that, she kind of thought like that’s the end of my money, that’s the end of this toy and now I’m screwed.

12:33 CJ: Some people can believe that if they gain more money, it must be at the expense of someone else.

12:40 Leah: Right.

12:40 CJ: That’s why you start to blame the rich. The reason why people are poor is because of the rich. Of course, they can’t explain it, it’s just this causal relationship that they’re implying that because I get more, someone else is getting less. I’m taking from other people. That’s not true at all and I think it begins with your concept of whether there is abundance or there is scarcity. 

13:05 Leah: Right.

13:05 CJ: I think a lot of people are trained to think that there is scarcity in the world but it’s in the interest of institutions like government or special interest type groups or the media or whatever, to create a value for themselves and you can’t create a value for themselves unless you create this idea that there’s some sort of scarcity. That scarcity can be more than money. 

Was that a scarcity of justice? A scarcity of equality. Everything is always a scarcity, we’re always in a crisis that we’ve got to solve. There’s always a sense of lack instead of saying no. If anything, there’s an endless supply, there’s an abundance. I remember when I was a kid, they were saying in the end of the 70s, I remember, seeing this in Time magazine that we were coming to the end of oil, that we were going to be out of oil by the early 1980s.

I was selling coffee to people who were in gas lines back in 1974. We saw the lines, people waiting for two and three hours to get a gallon of gas. You can start to think, well wow, not too long after, there’s going to be an end of energy, an end of oil, what are we going to do? We’ll need solar energy. 

Well, of course, that was years and years ago and we’re still here and there’s still a plentiful supply but it’s more than that, it’s this idea that we’re going to run out of an abundant supply and even if we did, there is no solution beyond that whereas now, because at one time, there was nothing in the world but trees and water and rocks and dirt and mountains and grass and animals and that’s all there was.

There was no TV, there was no airplane, there were no cellphones, there were no recipes, there was no fire, there was no wheel, there was no nothing. Nothing, no stories, no movies, no music, no nothing, no art. But look at all that we created out of nothing but air and dirt and trees and rocks and that’s it. Here we have the word now at the apex of history and you and I are using tremendous powerful technology to do this podcast and communicate with the world. 

Where did all of that come from? Because you could have looked at that bare world thousands of years ago and say scarcity. There’s no way and try to communicate the Pharaoh that you’ll be able to pick up something like a smartphone and call somebody on the other side of the world and they had no concept of the other side of the world.

That means abundance is always there, it may not be where you think it is, it may be right after another great idea that creates abundance. There is no lack. It’s just a lack of belief, right? And a lack of true belief is what we call doubt and that’s what limits us.

15:55 Leah: Yeah. You know, I saw an example of that recently, I was doing a Facebook live with my good friend Brett Manning. I’m going to be speaking at his events in October, his vocal retreat, and we’re just chitchatting about the event and it’s not a cheap event to go to but you’re surrounded by some of the best people there and anyway, somebody in the comments was talking about – they just said, I don’t have the money and we’re like, we understand, we’re not trying to pressure you to come or anything.

They said no, I was giving them some examples of ways they could make some money on the side, things that I offer to give them a resource that we have called quick cash generation guide which is really just like think outside the box, be creative, there are ways to make money. Anyways, no. The money doesn’t exist. That’s what the person said. I said, thank you for my next podcast topic.

16:47 CJ: Yeah, that’s kind of where this came from didn’t it?

16:48 Leah: Yes, Brett said no, the money exists, it’s just not in your hand at the moment.

16:54 CJ: Right. We’re not talking about magical thinking either.

16:56 Leah: No, we’re not talking about, this is not the secret or power of manifestation. I personally think some of that stuff is BS because you can think all day long but unless you act and do things that promote some kind of, you know for every action there is a reaction unless you’re getting off your butt and doing something, I don’t think that sitting and daydreaming about what you want to manifest is really going to do a lot of good. So can we dispel that myth? 

And then there is another one I want to talk about after that. So what is the difference between believing that there is an abundance and just the universe is a Santa Clause and we’ll just give you whatever you want? 

17:33 CJ: That is an important point because you can fall into the other side of the ditch to where you do get into things like the law of attraction where you are saying, “Okay I am going to put myself in a passive position and I am just going to try to manifest with my mind, create materially through some power of belief or magic and this is going to materialize the provision or the abundance of the wealth or the perfect relationship that I need to create results. 

I remember seeing the actual movie on The Secret, which is not a new idea. It’s been shrouded in different ways over the centuries but they had things in there like using the power of the law of attraction to get a parking space up by front where the doors of the store. So it gets a little ridiculous as far as that goes but if you’re doing something like that where it is putting you in a passive state, then that is certainly not the kind of thing that we are talking about. I have always said the law of action beats the law of attraction every time. 

18:37 Leah: That’s it. 

18:37 CJ: In fact, I even posted a meme this morning that said mind over matter as long as the matter that we’re talking about is our own lazy ass then yeah, mind over matter. 

18:45 Leah: Exactly that’s the big point. I am not saying don’t think about the things that you want. There is a time and a place, you need to dream. You need to think. You need to be able to imagine the future. That is the entrepreneur spirit is to be able to imagine a feature that doesn’t exist yet and they come back to reality and make it happen but that’s the key part is making it happen, right? Because everybody else sitting on their couch trying to manifest through the universe. 

Whatever the heck they want and meanwhile they are just broke forever. So there’s got to be action behind that. You know one of my mentors is action creates traction. You probably make that up but – 

19:23 CJ: It’s so true. There’s this thing where you can get to a place that you don’t realize that you’re lack of belief creates a cynicism and because of that you actually repel people. 

19:36 Leah: And opportunities.

19:37 CJ: Yeah, you repel opportunities or like people who for example have the fear of success, which is a weird thing. We understand the fear of failure but fear of success is this idea that I don’t – I am afraid of the responsibilities and things that are a potential success might bring. I can’t manage all of that. I have never done that before etcetera, so I don’t want to be judged. I don’t want to be in that position and I have been doing everything on my own. 

So far nobody is going to be there to help me, which is actually the opposite. The truth is that, yes, people will rally to you if you are positive and if you believe that there is abundance and your actions constantly show that you believe that and in other words that you are out there seizing opportunities, you are out there hustling, you are out there doing those things. People watch you, experience that incremental success, they are going to be drawn to you like moths to a flame.

Because they want to be around people like that. They want to learn from you so yeah, positivity is always the best route. Always. 

20:35 Leah: Yeah and speaking of fear of success, one that really cracks me up that I really don’t understand like in regards to other aspects of life, I actually had a friend who said they were afraid of losing weight. They had a significant amount to lose. They are afraid of losing weight because if they lose that weight, they’re going to draw so much attention from men. I am like, “You’re single. Don’t you want that?” 

20:58 CJ: Poor thing. 

21:00 Leah: But people come up with the weirdest ways I feel like it is a version of procrastinating on something that they know they should do and something that would be good for them or part of their destiny or you know, people just find all kinds of very odd and weird ways to just not do the thing that they should do. So that one cracked me up. There is another myth that I think would be helpful to address and I think that there is a lot of this. 

It is very prevalent in today’s culture and especially in the musicians that I come across. That is the belief that money is the root of evil and that money will objectively corrupt everybody and that’s why artists should stay away from it because if you make money it will corrupt the art and all of that. So, there is some nuanced in there that we can dig into. What is your impression? 

21:49 CJ: Yeah, I think that people, they do have that belief that money is evil and again, you are taught this. This is not something you come out, out of the womb knowing innately. It’s the narrative that you are told whether it be by your crazy professor at college or your parents or some politician or things on the news, you are given this idea that somehow because you show them this, all the evil characters in a movie are always the rich the guy, right? 

So it is always that anybody that has power etcetera, however and so they shy away from trying to earn money instead of thinking, “Well wait a minute, if you are so adept at identifying good and evil then it stands to reason that you are the best candidate for that money because you’re the one who is going to know what to do with it.” You are the one who is going to know where to channel it but there are things if you want to say it’s an evil, it’s a necessary evil. 

In the sense that money and possessions and resources are needed in order to do anything whether it is thinking you’re most noble causes and they have to be funded right? You have to fund charity, you have to fund welfare, it all has to be done. Of course, you are always generous to spend the rich person’s money when it comes to feeding the poor. You know up the taxes on the rich, up the taxes on the rich because they will – well, somebody’s got to make that money. 

And nobody can take the money with them so it is always here. It is just a matter of whose hands it’s found in and it will be great if you have such a great idea of what something good and evil are then again, stands to reason that you would be the best candidate to have that. 

23:30 Leah: Yeah, a lot of people think that the saying money is the root of evil comes from the Bible and they’re wrong. It says, it’s the love of money that is the root of evil and I just want to make that distinction for anybody who is ever read the Bible or not read the Bible. I hear people who are big fans of the Bible repeating it completely wrong. They go around saying that money is the root of evil. No, it’s the love of it. 

So what happens when you love something? If you worship money and the money becomes your god that means it’s ruling you and you serve it, right? So, at that point, yeah it is going to corrupt you and I still believe that money will magnify who you are. So if you are a jerk and you add a whole bunch of money to that, you are going to be a bigger jerk than you were before. If you are a generous person who loves to give and you have a whole bunch more of money, you’re probably going to give a whole lot more. So I do think that it is a magnifier in that way. 

24:28 CJ: Yeah and you know speaking of the Bible, Jesus himself actually called it the god of mammon. You know so there is a sense in which God in the sense that you fully trust in what you have. You fully trust to the exclusion of all things else and nobody wants to see you get into that position. So that’s again as you said a while ago that is the other ditch that you get into where there’s this – you are almost falling again to this other side. 

Where there is an equal abuse that does as much damage as having a poverty or scarcity mentality but again, I think the important thing for people to note is that there is no way you’re going to be able to do anything that you want to do with your life of significance without money. I get these weird interest sometimes Leah, where I just start looking into just strange stuff and one of the things – 

25:28 Leah: I know that. 

25:29 CJ: One of the things that I’ve been checking out for the longest time is these nomad type people or minimalists or things like that. People who literally have like five shirts, three pairs of underwear and a watch. I mean they have almost nothing or they’re nomads and they are living in this very small vans or little chinooks or airstreams or something, RV type things and they are just traversing the country living on next to nothing. 

Just completely disjointed and whatever. To a lot of people that may sound appealing. I don’t think that is a great idea. To each his own, okay? I am not – nobody has to do things the way I say. However, I think if you take a broader view of life in the world and you realize that in order for a tree to grow it has to be planted, right? You can’t just keep plucking something up and sticking it over here and plucking up and sticking it over you and expect something to thrive and to prosper. 

And you can’t expect communities to prosper unless people are planted and they’re planning on growing, right? A family, they get married, they get their first house and they start planning on having their kids and getting involved in the community and participating in work and all of these sorts of things. They are helping to create an abundance of love and relationship and community and help and support and charity and all of the wonderful things. 

Now, who are you going to be a blessing to if you are traversing the country in a little RV all the time? So but it – 

26:58 Leah: Yeah, the nomad is not going to be able to build an empire. 

27:01 CJ: No, they can’t and I think we have to think that way. Again, myself I call it my trailer park aristocracy and that is thinking like the 1% in the sense that when you go to very rich families where wealth is transferred over generations and they have to do things differently than we do it down here in this level because divorces are very expensive, right? So they can’t afford that. They tend to marry within elite families. They don’t send their kids to public school. 

No way, they are trained to speak. They are trained in politics, they are trained in leadership, they are trained in literature, they’re trained in other languages, they do things to help preserve the fact that they have property and wealth and they know they are going to live out their lives and it has to be transferred. So you can’t have the next generation be a bunch of derelicts that are going to squander the resources that that family has right or wrong that’s what you have to do. 

So to me, I think there has to be that where you just think like you just said, it is about empire and you can’t think empire if you’re thinking like a pauper. 

28:08 Leah: That’s right. Actually, maybe it was you who recommended this book to me years ago. I don’t remember but one of the best books I have ever read that got me out of a poverty mentality and took me into multi-generational thinking pattern was Family Wealth that is the one, James E. Hughes and if you can’t read that and come out the other side going, “Holy crap I need to change the way I am thinking about my family and the future and what I’m building right now” I mean I don’t know what will. 

And you know they talk about the first generation that makes wealth it is such a huge thing. A lot of times what happens is they are not able to pass it down. It might get the second generation, they end up spending it away and the third generation, they’re back to square one and it had a little saying in the book and I forget how it goes. It was almost like a little poem or something because it is so repetitive and over and over and over throughout history. 

This is what has been the case. So you’re saying it is completely preventable if you just understand these concepts and implement them. This book is all about how to preserve generational wealth and man if musicians could just get a slice of that just a little bit and start implementing that in the way they build their business, think about the future. Music is one of those things that when you’re dead it will live on. So I mean there is no reason why you can’t build an empire. 

Look at Prince and Michael Jackson and these people who have died and look, they have these huge estates and these huge empires that are left behind and there are people managing it. It is still giving and employing people. It is wild when you think about it and it will continue to. 

29:40 CJ: Oh yeah, I think it’s funny that the one thing that I guess musicians do not have a concept of scarcity about that they believe there is an endless supply of is creativity. 

29:50 Leah: Yeah. 

29:52 CJ: So just apply that very same concept to the idea. In other words, there is a never-ending supply of creative ideas for you as an artist, for you as a musician. Why would you not think there is an endless supply of creative solutions for your financial state, for your music business, for anything that you’re facing in life? Why do you limit abundance only to creativity? What right do you have, what authority do you have to make that kind of judgment? 

What source are you appealing to that you’re saying that this is as sure as two plus two equals four? That there is scarcity in the world or you have to get past the idea that, “Yes, okay Leah, CJ, I believe that there is abundance in the world, okay? I believe that, fine, whatever but it is not for me” in other words, it’s that there is something in them whether it’s guilt or self-condemnation. It is this idea of deserve. “I don’t deserve success” and that is a terrible thing. 

When you restrain yourself because of guilt and self-condemnation and you say, “I don’t deserve it” you look at somebody else and they say, “Well they obviously deserve it.” It is okay for them it is just not okay for you. Like I used to tell people all the time, you know we often say that something is too good to be true. Your dream of being a musician is too good to be true. Well, it is not too good to be true because there is other people doing it. 

31:19 Leah: Yeah. 

31:20 CJ: So it is not too good to be true, what you mean to say is it’s too good to be true for you and then you need to ask yourself why. What is it that you have done? Because I can find people far worse people than you who have achieved so much greater success and the very thing that you want to, are they deserving? Obviously not and we can find it on the opposite end of things. So obviously deserve has nothing to do with it. It has to do with applying the proven principles that govern success in any area of life and if you do that with what keeps you doing it overtime is a belief in the fact that those principles will work and a belief in yourself that it is okay for you to go for it.

It is okay for you to succeed. If you need a permission slip, here is your permission slip from Leah and CJ you know? Here is your permission slip, go achieve your dream, believe, envision it, imagine it and work your little tail off day and night until you start to create those possibilities. 

32:22 Leah: That’s right. There you have it, you guys. I hope that this was enlightening for you. There is probably a lot more we could say on this topic but I want to hear from you if this opened your eyes a little bit to possibly beliefs that you don’t even realize were in you or if you felt enlightened by this discussion, please leave us a review. I would really like to hear from you, and I might even read it out on the next one. So please leave us a review and a comment on this episode because we can definitely touch on more topics like this if this is helpful. 

32:55 CJ: All right guys, so good to see you. Leah, let’s do this again soon. 

32:58 Leah: Sounds good, bye guys. 

33:00 CJ: Take care.