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Love, Luck, Wealth

Credits

Produced & Edited by - Morgan Brown
‍Interviewers - Carrie Kwan and Lucy Kippist
‍Guest - Julia Scott

Are you ready to join a movement of business owning women?  Join Mums & Co today.

Episode 41 Transcript

00:01:36:18 - 00:02:03:20
Carrie Kwan
Money, money, money. How does even hearing that would even make you feel? Today's guest, Julia Scott, is the founder of Love, Luck, Wealth, a holistic finance consultancy. She's on a very clear mission to help more women make lots more money. Julia combines her skills as a feng shui practitioner with her accounting expertise to address the gap in the market for female income growth and wealth creation. We're excited to welcome Julia to Mumbition, the podcast today!

00:02:08:05 - 00:02:12:21
Julia Scott
Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.

00:02:13:00 - 00:02:27:03
Carrie or Lucy
We're great. Very excited to dive into our topic today. Of course, you know that we educate women on pitching with confidence, Julia, so can you please give us your best 30 second elevator pitch?

00:02:27:20 - 00:03:02:11
Julia
Okay, so it's my mission to ensure the world has more wealthy women. Money is power, security and choice, and that's everything a woman needs to thrive. But money is also emotional, and we each have beliefs about what's possible. These beliefs can limit us from reaching our true potential; they’re called money blocks. I help women let go of money blocks and put systems in place so that they can earn more, invest and build lasting wealth with ease and grace. That's pretty much what I do!

00:03:04:20 - 00:03:30:04
Carrie Kwan
What an awesome purpose! I hear potential. I hear this unlocking, because every woman has this potential. There's abundance already here. I'm really excited about the work that you're doing. I love how you also kind of go, it's actually emotionally difficult.

00:03:31:07 - 00:04:18:07
Julia Scott
This is why I started. I got the idea to start the business, because even though I was a finance professional, I found myself in a difficult situation when I got divorced and I didn't know where our money was. Even though I knew what to do in these situations, and I should have known better, I didn't do it.

That's because of the emotional aspect. This is when I realized that it's not about what you know. It's like when you go to the gym, you know you just have to go in order to lose weight, but we just don't. So it's not necessarily about what you know, it's the emotional side. So I try to integrate both of those aspects and make it specifically for women.

00:04:19:08 - 00:04:38:04
Lucy Kippist
Julia, I love the combination of your skill set. It jumped out at me as soon as I looked at your website for the first time. So your feng shui practitioner status, if that's the right way to put it? Then your accounting background, I find that just the most incredibly exciting combination.

00:04:38:18 - 00:04:39:04
Julia
Yeah, me too!

00:04:39:07 - 00:05:02:02
Lucy or Carrie
I can't wait to hear more about it. So obviously, feng shui informs the work that you're doing with women, in regard to their relationship with money. But I'm just wondering as well, how do those ancient principles guide the other parts of your life, like balancing your business with caring for your children?

00:05:02:21 - 00:08:42:20
Julia Scott
Everything is energy, I think that's what it all comes down to. Feng shui for those people who aren't sure what it is, it's an ancient art form of aligning the energy of your surroundings with your goals, to make sure you're always supported in life. There are nine principal areas of energy in your home that feng shui addresses, things like family, wealth, health, creativity, relationships, connection, wisdom, career and reputation.

When you're balancing a business and children, the main thing that I see, and that I felt myself, before I started this business, was that we often spread ourselves way too thin and we feel like we can't give either part of our life the attention it deserves. So when you’re feeling out of balance in any of these nine areas that I just listed, it's a sign that you're stuck energetically. I encourage people to take a look at their surroundings because your surroundings are a mirror of what's going on in your life internally.

If you step back and take a look at your surroundings with a fresh feng shui pair of eyes, you'll notice where and why you're stuck in your life. For example, if you have an office or work area, what is that set up like? Is it focused on work or is it focused on family? Do you have pictures of your children and all their drawings around your office?

It's a beautiful thing, but unfortunately it can distract you from doing your work and not being present in your work because it just makes you feel guilty because it reminds you that you're supposed to be a mum. We can rearrange our office in our workspace to help support us, to be able to focus and be present on the work when we're at work.

You might want to have one purposefully placed photograph of your children around, but fill the other walls with stuff that's inspiring for your business. If it's a piece of art or a photography piece, make sure it's got perspective and you feel like you've got room to go somewhere, like a picture of the ocean or something, something very vast and open.

Whereas if you've got stuff that is very sort of like mountains in front of you, that is literally in feng shui; art is literal. The energy that that art projects is literally in your life. So you will find that you have blocks in front of you if you have a bare wall or a picture of a mountain or something.

It's all quite fascinating and most of it is quite common sense really, but we just forget because we're in it. Sometimes we need to step out of things and just take a look at our surroundings with a different intention to be able to see what is supporting us and what's not supporting us.

Just look at your surroundings. I notice that, Karrie, you have some mountains behind you, which is great because that's supporting you, right? But you don't want them in front of you. Do you see what I mean? Big difference.

00:08:42:20 - 00:09:03:22
Lucy Kippist
What happens if… Hang on, I’ll pan and show you. I don't know if you can see that. I have two little boys with me, they’re obsessed with army figures. Last night they made the most elaborate army configuration all over my desk that's in front of me.

00:09:04:03 - 00:09:54:09
Julia Scott
It's hard when you're working from home for this reason, but you just need to have some discipline around setting the area up when you're about to start work. Maybe it is a multipurpose space, so it's okay for them to play in there when you're not working, but when you start working, you need to clear that away or your mind will keep going back to, “What are my boys doing right now?” You'll keep remembering. Which is not a bad thing, but as I said, if you want to focus on your work and be present with that for the short amount of time that you are dedicating yourself to that, it just really helps to have the discipline to set up your space to support you.

00:09:55:21 - 00:10:08:07
Lucy Kippist
It's so fascinating. It sounds like being intentional. Yeah. You can be intentional in your mind, but you're saying you also need to be intentional in how your space looks.

00:10:08:21 - 00:10:46:17
Julia Scott
Oh, yeah! The look and feel of your space. Lighting is important. If you're struggling to find something to put on the walls, you can put up your accreditations to remind you that you are entitled to work in this space and to quieten that imposter syndrome, remind you that you've done the work to be here. You can put photographs of people you aspire to be like, who inspire you to do better in your career. Vision boards, all sorts of things.

00:10:47:12 - 00:11:03:16
Carrie Kwan
Two things that run through my mind, and I'm so glad that I tidied this room yesterday. Yeah, it wasn't just mountains behind me in the artwork. There were mountains of laundry.

00:11:03:16 - 00:11:04:15
Julia
Ah yes, different kinds of mountains!

00:11:05:22 - 00:11:29:10
Carrie Kwan
I’ve got two well-placed frames of my family in front of me and we're all smiling and happy. It is fascinating. I think that with less clutter, I'm more focused as well.

00:11:29:11 - 00:12:56:05
Julia
Oh yeah, clutter is the biggest thing. Decluttering is always the first thing you do. If you're ever feeling stuck in any area of your life, just pick some kind of space in your home and just declutter it. For me, my go to is always the fridge. So if I'm feeling stuck, I will literally just spend 5 minutes and I'll go in and clear out whatever I can and I'll set an intention as I'm doing it, to make room for new ideas to come for me to move.

It might be something as simple as washing your hair or shaving your legs. Anything that declutters anything from your body, your mind, or it could be electronic. You could spend 5 minutes decluttering your emails. If you're the kind of person who's got 7000 emails outstanding, I guarantee you if you clear that, things will shift instantly.

If you're waiting on an email from someone, it'll come. If you're waiting on a phone call, it will come. It's all energetic and it's not woo woo. This is all science backed now, because it's all based on quantum physics and how like attracts like. If you're stuck in a dense vibration of clutter, that's what you're attracting; denseness, and otherwise known as being stuck.

00:12:56:05 - 00:13:10:16
Carrie Kwan
Now your work shines a light also on the complexity of money. So in terms of our relationship to that, do you think women have a different experience to men in this area of life? What's going on here?

00:13:12:09 - 00:15:46:15
Julia Scott
Just going back to connecting with money, I like to think of money as your lover. I want him to stick around, to commit, to be loyal, fun and always there for me. They say that you should always give out what you receive.

I treat him the way I would want him to treat me. I pay him attention, I think nice thoughts about him, I expect the best and I include him in my plans. If you don't pay attention to your lover, he'll go somewhere else; that's my philosophy. For thousands of years, women haven't been paying attention to money. Not because they didn't want to, but because just that up until recently, in the last 40 years or so, we haven't been legally allowed to freely attract, manage and grow our own money.

Whereas men have been practicing money since the days of Mesopotamia, since money was first invented. So for women, I think we forget that money as a concept is relatively new. So of course it's going to be different energetically, emotionally, in the knowledge that we have.

It's just so easy to forget how far we've come in the last 40 to 60 years. Women only received the right to vote 100 years ago, and up until the late seventies, women couldn't apply for a loan or a credit card without a man cosigning, even if she was a breadwinner. That was not that long ago, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, the history of women's rights has a massive impact on our beliefs.

We are literally the first generation to have control of our own money and we need to go easy on ourselves and realise that this is new and there is a reason why you're feeling uncomfortable in your relationship around money. It doesn't mean that it can't change because it's just a matter of gaining the knowledge, becoming aware of the fact that energetically, we've got all this imprinting from our ancestors that money was not something that women did.

It's a very different experience for men as opposed to women. When it comes to money for men, it represents power. For women, that money represents safety. It's new and it's something that we're fearful of getting wrong.

00:15:47:06 - 00:15:57:07
Carrie Kwan
Julia, is there a money tip or perhaps a habit that you'd like to share with any women listening right now in the first few years of, say, starting a business?

00:15:57:22 - 00:20:05:07
Julia Scott
Yeah, I've got five actually! First of all, you need to make a plan, I call it a financial vision board, use it as your North Star. Motivation and keeping yourself motivated is key when you're starting a business. There's studies done out there that confirm that you're 42% more likely to reach your goals just by writing them down and reviewing them regularly.Work out what the end result of your business looks like financially, write that down. It's only numbers, they can't hurt you, it doesn't matter if you get it wrong. You can make it as big as you like, but you need something to start with. You can't just expect it all to just be awesome just from day one, it's going to take a while.

The second one is you're not in business unless you're making a profit. Know your actual numbers as well. It's perfectly normal for a business to take a few years to make a profit. But as long as you have a plan and you know that you're on track on that plan and it's going to eventuate in the next couple of years, then you will get there. Invest in yourself to stay motivated. Have a system to review your numbers regularly, not just at tax time. Knowledge is power and fear preys on the unknown. Make your numbers known to yourself so that you could dissolve that fear. Even if you don't think you're any good at numbers, stop saying that and start forcing yourself to say out loud, “I am getting better every day at numbers,” or even jump straight to “I am excellent at numbers,” because this kind of stuff makes a big difference.

Thirdly, there's nothing wrong with charging for your work, so get over feeling awkward about that. Practice stating your prices with confidence, stop bartering, stop random discounting and charge you with. A lot of women have a lot of trouble with charging their worth because we're wired to nurture and we want to care for people all the time. But the fact is you can care for more people if you charge properly and have that income and consistency coming in, and then you'll have overflow and surplus and you can use that to care for people, and you can do it with longevity and you can help even more.

So the fourth one I just ran into, is the more money you make in your business, the more people that you can help. There's nothing bad about making massive amounts of money. Money means power, the power to live the life that you desire, the power to help others and the power to make change in the world. So money in the hands of women, like all the listeners who are here listening to us today, is a good thing.

Finally, the most important one of all is to pay yourself first. Silo your income automatically as it comes into your business, allocate fixed percentages to separate bank accounts so you're not tempted to spend everything on your plate, because whatever is in your bank account is not necessarily profit, I think that's the biggest problem a lot of people who are new in business have. There's a lot of expenses coming up around the corner that they might have forgotten about and they just see the money there. We’re tempted to just spend whatever's on our plate, so to speak, so separate your plates.

00:20:05:07 - 00:20:19:09
Lucy Kippist
Yeah, that's a powerful explanation. I was also thinking, listening to you speak, I think money represents opportunity as well as security, it gives you choice.

00:20:19:09 - 00:21:29:23
Julia
It does, and this is something we need to remind ourselves of. Aspiring to want more money in our lives is not this is not a bad thing. Money doesn't change who you are, it simply amplifies your values that you already have. This is another reason why I personally believe that the world does need more wealthy women because women do money differently, we spend it differently, we have different priorities. We're wired to nurture, protect our families and keep people safe, and that's a good thing. So why not? It's not bad to want money. If anyone out there is feeling guilty for wanting to make lots and lots of money, please don't. Because we need people like you to have more money in the world because it's been a while and it's time for women to have a go at this.

00:21:31:06 - 00:21:57:10
Lucy Kippist
100%. Just to take the conversation in a tiny little direction, just in terms of you and your own way of balancing all the aspects of your life, is there something that you do every day or every week that helps inspire all this wonderful ambition of yours to help you to protect your your wellbeing so you can continue to do the work that you're doing?

00:21:58:13 - 00:22:23:23
Julia
I think everyone should have a system for the way they wake up in the morning, because we all need goals. There's been so many studies done about all the successful people out there in the world, they always have a ritual.

I like to start my day with 15 minutes of meditation. I do some journaling and then I'll spend 10 minutes reading something inspiring while I’m drinking my coffee. I think those kinds of rituals are very important because the world is very busy and we need to learn how to connect back to ourselves and trust ourselves, especially for women.

Women are very powerful on the intuition front. I think we've lost that skill of connecting to our intuition, so I think it's so important to try and build that muscle of connecting to your higher self and being guided by that, because when you're authentic to yourself and your own purposes, you can't help but win, you can't help but do good. It's when we follow the rules that the people around us want us to be like or what we think that they would like us to be. That's when we get stuck and when we start feeling depressed and not elevated and we don't want that. I think you always know the right answers when it comes to money, when it comes to anything in life, so I think it's really important to do that.

Of course there’s fitness. I have a personal trainer and he used to be a rugby player.

He's very loud and I see him twice a week and I also do Pilates twice a week.

00:24:01:19 - 00:24:57:07
Carrie Kwan
I love that. I am very glad that you were generous in providing such amazing thoughts and they do really resonate, I think, with a lot of the women that we support now in our membership. Charging your worth and aligning the fact that this is actually exactly how you need to make your impact and to make not even the impact, but the biggest impact, you owe yourself that.

The only way we can do that is to have the capability and resources to keep growing, so thank you. You've given some fantastic tips, which I also feel are ways that inform your relationship with risk and running a business. But is there a process that you might have in place now to protect yourself as your business builds?

00:24:58:18 - 00:27:07:03
Julia Scott
Yeah, of course. You've got to have the right legal structure. For some people, if their business is really new, they might not have the money to set up a company. But you always need to just keep in mind that you need to protect your personal assets, which is what a company does, and also protect yourself from the debts of other people. Especially if you're living with somebody else romantically and you're considered de facto or you're married, people forget that you are not only sharing in your wealth, but you also are responsible for each other's debt. So if your partner gets into debt and your business is doing really well and it's in your personal name, if something happens to him, you could be responsible for that.

So just protect yourself, ensure you have the right insurance, ensure you have the right policies and disclaimers in place on your website. Always have a stash of cash for a rainy day and have a financial vision board because whatever you focus on grows. Like I said before, you need to have that North Star.

I'm not a big believer in focusing on minimizing expenses everywhere. I think sometimes you need to pay what you need to pay to move forward and grow, but focus on earning more money. You need to have the money coming in.

Finally, know the difference between good and bad debt. So good debt is when you spend money or you get a loan to invest in something that's going to add value to your business, and bad debt is something that, you know, once you spend it, it's gone.

00:27:07:03 - 00:27:24:22
Carrie Kwan
I love, love, all those scenarios, you're actually planning for different scenarios that might occur and putting a little bit of a plan in place for each of those to deal with those different types of scenarios.
00:27:35:22 - 00:27:49:07
Lucy Kippist
As you know at Mums & Co, we talk about harmony as being a triangle of our ambition, our livelihood and our wellbeing. Could you describe what the shape of a good life looks like for you?

00:27:50:20 - 00:30:09:06
Julia Scott
I write about my good life every day. Like we talked about before, when you write down your goals, they’re 42% more likely to come true. Every morning as part of my journaling, I write out the goals for what my business looks like in five years time, how I'm feeling, and I write it as if it's already happened.

It's always in flux, it always changes because parts of it come true, it actually does. I look back and it makes me laugh to myself because I'm like, “Wow!” I will write down that I have customers saying, “Oh my God, you've changed my life and I'm so glad that I've met you”. They literally text me or email me those exact words and you can't make this stuff up, it's so powerful. I'm continually growing that and we're here to grow, as I said, there's no shame in that. Always aim for even higher and think as big as you can.

I remind myself that we owe it to the women who came before us. Our mothers, our grandmothers and our great grandmothers, to live our life to the best of our ability with purpose and passion and it's important to remind yourself of that. We are very lucky to be here, as I said, we are the first generation of women who have had this financial autonomy. My goal is to provide for my family and generations to come with ease and grace, to acknowledge the gratitude that I have for life as it is in the present.

Even when things take a downturn, I remember life's happening for me, not to me, to respond rather than to react, and to never make a decision out of fear. I do that by following my intuition, even if it's difficult to do so because it's never wrong and it always works out. I think that sums up what a good life looks like for me.

00:30:37:14 - 00:30:38:00
Lucy Kippist
Julia, it’s been an absolute pleasure listening to you, I think I could listen to you for hours. Thank you so much for joining us on Mumbition the podcast today. If you’d like to find out more about the work that Julia does, you can find her on Instagram @loveluckwealth, she’s also on LinkedIn.

If you haven’t already, please come and join the thousands of business owning women just like you at mumsandco.com.au

00:30:41:01 - 00:30:43:06
Child
How can I get more pocket money?

00:30:43:18 - 00:34:05:01
Julia Scott
How can I get more pocket money? Well, money, as I said, is energy. Whenever you want more of a certain kind of energy, you have to vibrate at what you want. You have to add value and money is what you get in return for adding value. So I would ask my child, how are you going to add value to our family?

Usually it might be doing a chore or something, you know, but this is just setting them up for business success, this is what a business is. A business is a transfer of value and money facilitates that. That's all it is.

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