How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs About Money with Nir Eyal

Tori Dunlap (0:00)

There are many beliefs that are currently sabotaging your success, and one of them is the most expensive thing you will ever tell yourself. But here's the thing my guest taught me today. These are not facts, these are beliefs, and beliefs can change. Nir Eyal spent six years researching how our beliefs get installed, usually before we're even seven years old, and how we can actually rewire the ones that are holding us back. In his new book, Beyond Belief, he breaks down why I am is such a loaded phrase, and how most successful people get comfortable with discomfort instead of running from it. If you've been struggling to get ahead financially, and you know that your brain is the reason, then this is the perfect episode for you. Let's get into it.

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So when you were six, your family got scammed out of nearly everything, and you watched what Losing Money did to your parents, and you spent your whole career studying behavior and belief. How much of this book is really that six-year-old trying to understand what money does to people?

Nir Eyal (2:46)

You're giving me goosebumps. Yeah, we're going deep, aren't we, Tori? This is great. How much of it? It's completely that. I mean, it's...

We don't choose our beliefs. At least most people don't. That was the revelation for me, is that we can choose. But most of us, we pick up these beliefs from our childhood, from what someone told us, from our culture, from our background, from the things that we repeated to ourselves again and again and again, we don't realize that actually our beliefs are installed into us.

Tori Dunlap (3:14)

I've realized in my own work around money that the vast majority of our money beliefs are cemented by age seven. So right around that same age that you went through that, talk to me about that concept of the beliefs kind of being baked in.

Nir Eyal (3:28)

When we grow up, we have these lenses that we use to see the world.

And the myth is that we see the world clearly. And the fact is, we don't see the world clearly. None of us can. That the world is filtered based on our beliefs. And I'm not talking figuratively. We have experiments where we can show conclusively that your beliefs dictate how you see reality. So for example, do you know that people who are on a diet see food as larger? That people who are afraid of heights see distances as further? That I can show you an image called a coffer illusion. Maybe you can put one on the screen later on, but I can show you this image, and based on where you grew up, based on where you grew up, you will either see circles or squares.

Same image, Tori. Doesn't that blow your mind? I can show the same image to two different people, and based on where they grew up, one will see circles first, one will see squares first. Isn't that crazy? So of course, if our backgrounds can affect literally how we see reality, they are going to shape how we see money and financial freedom.