Leah Gervais: Hey visionaries. Welcome back to the show, Leah here. And today I wanna talk to you about when abundance started clicking. For me, this is something that I’m really excited to talk about because I don’t think I’ve ever phrased it this way. 

And I, uh, think it’s really important to talk about because I think it’s something a lot of people work toward and they sort of wonder like, when’s it gonna happen? When am I gonna feel that way? When am I going to experience the transformation that I’m working to experience? And I wanna share when that happened for me. Um, as well as some things that I wish I knew beforehand or that I think would help other people to know about it. 

So I wanna paint a picture for you about how things were before and after, and how my life has changed since I really studied, studied the concept of abundance. Um, sorry, just one second.

So before I started my business, I didn’t really understand the concept of abundance. I grew up Catholic and I had studied the Bible, so I had sort of understood it in that sense. But by all definitions, I grew up with a scarcity mindset around money. I didn’t come from a poverty stricken family, but I came from a family that talked about money as if we would run out of it, as if there weren’t enough for it, or as if we needed to ration it.

 And in my parents’ mind, that very much was true. They had three kids. And while my parents made a living in which we never starved or went hungry, we did not have unlimited abundance. And they did not think we had unlimited money and they did not want to work, uh, in the way that they assumed we needed to have unlimited money and we just didn’t have unlimited money.

That’s just the truth. So that was my mindset on abundance for most of my, I mean all of my, all of my life. And in my young adult life, when I started managing my own money, having my own money working, all of that type of stuff, I very much had a scarcity mindset. And I very much kind of just had a broke- girl mindset. I was always looking at everything down to the penny.

 Um, I knew exactly how much was in my bank account at all times, and I stressed about money a lot. I remember being up in the wee hours of the morning wondering sometimes how I would pay my rent here in New York City, how I would eat. Um, I sometimes remember having just peanut butter and jellies for dinner or ramen noodles, you know, I’m sure a lot of college kids can relate to this.

But it went on for me a little bit longer. And part of that was because I lived in New York, which had such a high cost of living. And I also had exorbitant student loan payments around $700 a month. But the thing that, uh, I think did it the most was my mindset, my assumption that I had to live like this, that I couldn’t afford to live luxuriously, that I had a fixed income and that there wasn’t enough for me. That there wasn’t enough to go around.

And because I had these stories in my head about why that was, I didn’t have a trust fund, I didn’t have a graduate degree, I didn’t have the highest paying job in the world. Um, that’s kind of what was destined for me. That’s, that’s how I operated. So when I started my business, I started thinking about and getting excited about the idea that I could work for myself and have a limitless income.

And I remember reading stories of people making money online, even just a few extra a hundred dollars a month. And that seemed life changing to me, given what I was making at my nine to five job, which is around $45,000 a year.

 Um, and that seemed really exciting and I was starting to just get really down on myself during that time in my life because I just felt more broke, for lack of a better word. I know it’s a little bit, um, you know, harsh, but I just felt like I had less money than almost any one of my peers. I felt like either people had far less student loans than I did, or their parents were still helping them, or they made more at their nine to five jobs than I did. 

And honestly, almost all of the above was true. Um, a lot of people’s parents in New York still did help them.

My parents didn’t. After I graduated college. And even in college, I paid for most things on my own. Um, I had, you know, I I, they helped me with college very generously, but I still had loans from it. And I didn’t make much. I only was making $45,000. Most of my friends were making, you know, farm 60, 70, $80,000 a year at their jobs.

And, uh, no one was paying as much in student loans as I was cuz I was on a very expedited payment plan. I wanted to get rid of them soon, but I definitely paid the price of that. And I was stressed. So I was starting to get fed up with my situation and I was starting to get jealous of other people. And I was starting to just really, really crave a change. And I went into a whole, uh, year and a half obsession with personal finance.

I mean, there was not a book, a blog or whatever that I didn’t pour over, hoping that I could learn how to earn enough points to change my financial situation or sign up for the right credit cards or coupon my way out of it. I wasn’t really thinking about expanding my cash flow, which is key. 

Honestly, it’s the whole entry point to any of this. And that’s what I needed to do. When I eventually decided to start my own business and go all in, I then did the opposite of what any personal finance advice had been telling me or any of these blogs or book or anything like that. And I went into credit card debts. I didn’t have any money to do so, and I knew that I needed help with my business. 

So I had to pay someone with a credit card.

That was very scary. But I also at this time started learning that I had a terrible relationship with money. And I didn’t think that I did because though I very much struggled with it and I felt like I never had enough of it, I always felt very responsible with it. I didn’t have debt. 

Like I said, I never went into consumer debt. I had student loans and I was very careful about buying things that were the best value and the best price and not overspending and not spending on things I didn’t need and getting creative with how I would get buy in New York and things like that. 

So I thought I had a good relationship with money, but what really started to become evident to me was that I just had a very scared relationship with money. I constantly felt like it was going to run out and that there wasn’t enough from it. It was constantly a stressor in my life. It was constantly keeping me up at night. It felt the opposite of supportiveTo me.

It felt like it was a stressor. It felt like it was my enemy. It felt like it was not there for me. It felt like it was never going to be reliable for me. And when I started to realize that I hugely mistrusted it, I really started to realize that that just meant that I mistrusted myself. Cause money’s not a thing. Money doesn’t have a personality. Uh, it, it really is just a reaction to our own beliefs and our own thoughts.

 So I started immersing myself in the personal development world as it pertained to money. I started realizing that I had lots of toxic, heavy beliefs about money from my Catholic upbringing beliefs that made me feel like it was a good thing to be frugal. It was a good thing to be quite responsible. It was a holy thing to not have that much money, that it was praiseworthy that I was just getting by.

And that if I were to make a lot of money that could mean negative things about me. Like I was greedy. I’m a con artist. Um, I, you know, I’m selfish. Uh, I’m doing things that I shouldn’t. Whatever kind of drama that we carry around with it, I realized I ended up having quite a bit of that. 

So I started seeing things differently and, and I really misunderstood abundance at first. I thought I understood the concept, right? There’s always more money, but then I would just go out and spend money to prove that there, that I could, that I had enough money. And that didn’t quite click with me either. 

And I’m gonna talk about what clicked here in a second. But the point is I started getting into it and I started believing it almost out of desperation because I was so sure that everything I had tried being responsible, listening to Dave Ramsey, listening to personal finance books, uh, paying off my student loans ahead of schedule, not going into debt, nothing worked.

I still didn’t have any money. I still felt stressed about money all the time. I was still up at 3:00 AM thinking about money. Nothing felt like I was relieved. So I almost gave this whole abundance mindset sh mindset thing, a shot out of desperation. But I also, on some element, I remember reading the Science of Getting Rich, which is a beautiful book about how money works scientifically.

 And it moved me, not because I enjoyed it so much, which I did, but it almost, it felt like something clicked that I always knew to be true but could never articulate things. Like money doesn’t make you evil. Money is literally a neutral object. Either you’re evil or yourself or you’re not. Um, you’re not here to be stressed. You’re not here to feel like you can’t afford things. You’re not here to feel scarce. You’re not here to coupon your way through life.

You’re not here to be up at three in the morning worried about something that other people have. And you can too. You’re here to enjoy things. You should be enjoying your life. You should be investing in yourself. You should be not even investing, but spending on things that you enjoy. You should be indulging. Life is here to be lived. God put us here to enjoy our life, to enjoy the world he created, to enjoy our relationships with each other. 

And when I really started peeling back the things that I wanted money for, a lot of them weren’t selfish at all. A lot of them were things like, I wanna be able to support my recently widowed mother who just lost her husband and is retired. Or I want to hire more people to work in my business and create jobs for them and create opportunities for their family.

Or I wanna invest more in my business so that it can grow more and more things can be spread and more people can hear my messages and things can change more. Um, and then some of it was, I guess what you would consider selfish. I want a pair of lutons. I wanna go to Paris. I wanna have bougie sheets for my bed, and why shouldn’t I? Right? 

Like, and do we really believe that all of those, those those things that we’re here to experience, feeling, feeling good about ourselves, enjoying the beautiful things in the world, meeting other people, experiencing other cultures, enjoying your night’s sleep, are we really gonna say that? That’s what makes you selfish? 

It feels very toxic to me to believe that those things make you a bad person. I think there’s very other clear things that make you a bad person, which are, well, I don’t know if I wanna go down that path.

But it’s not like you’re harming someone else. It’s not like you are taking away someone else’s autonomy. It’s not like you are doing something at the cost of someone else. And so I truly believed all of these things and that really started to help me move in the other direction. 

But there was a very long time, and this is what I wanna focus on, where even though I was studying abundance, I felt like I was living the furthest thing from it. I was still in debt and my business was starting to make money, but not enough to pay off my debt. In fact, it was really only making enough money for me to invest back into it. 

And sometimes that meant even putting me into more debt. And I still had my student loans. I still had my nine to five job at the time and I just had to, I remember I felt like I was continuing to um, almost brainwash myself.

But I continued to do it because though it felt like that though, it felt like I’m telling myself one thing, but my logical mind believed something different. I continued to do it because I felt like I knew it was the truth. 

And I finally was willing to unlearn things that I had accepted as fact but weren’t fact things like I have to get a graduate degree to have a six figure salary. Or I don’t have enough experience to make the money that I want. Or I’m not ready for this. Or it makes me greedy to wanna have lu batons or whatever. Things I was so convinced were factual.

 I started realizing we weren’t. And so I had a good six months of studying self brainwashing, affirmations, journaling audios, things I still do to this day. And I was starting to believe it but not yet seeing it.

And I want to really speak to you if you’re in that moment today. I am working on believing this with all my might and still I’m not seeing it. That is what faith is. That’s the definition of seeing without believing. And that’s the hardest part. And that’s why most people quit. And that’s why most people don’t actually see it through.

And that’s why most people don’t experience it. It’s very easy to say you believe in abundance when you’re hearing what it can do for you. It’s a lot harder when you’re wanting to hear what it can do from you, but you’re seeing the exact opposite. And when you wobble in that every time you do, you repel it a little more because you are saying, I actually don’t believe, I actually don’t believe. I actually don’t believe it. So how can you reverse that and see it and say, I do believe, I do believe.

Even if I don’t see, I do believe even if it’s not happening right now, because I can’t imagine that we would have been put on this earth to suffer. Let’s get real. I did not believe it. I still don’t. 

That’s what kept me going, that hope, that hope, that hope that my life could be something more, that hope that more was out there for me, that hope that something actually could click for me, that hope that this would be my future if I just kept going.

 So around seven or eight months after I really started immersing myself in this way of thinking, even though like I said nothing had changed, the moment it clicked for me was when I went to Paris for the first time in a few years. I’ve been to Paris several times. That was poor phrasing. Let me give you a little bit of background on my experience with Paris.

I first went to Paris when I was 15 and I went with my family and just like anyone else I  fell head over heels in love with it because it is the most beautiful city in the world. Every part of it. The tastes of what you see, the architecture, the history, the language, everything. 

And I was so in love with it and so sure that I was meant to be there. While we were on our trip there, I pulled out my dad’s laptop. Now this was, you know, 2000, I don’t know, eight. It’s like he had one laptop between the five of us and he was using it in case he had an emergency work situation. And I pulled out Microsoft Word and I made a presentation on why he should uproot his family of five and his accounting business, his accounting firm, and move us to Paris like right then.

And I was looking up how to move a business into French law and how he could be a taxation professional under French law. I mean wild stuff. Google was barely a thing back then. And I gave them this presentation and they laughed at me. And then I realized they didn’t think I was serious. Why couldn’t they understand that I needed to be in Paris right then. 

But my parents, being supportive as they were, started to encourage me to look into study abroad programs in college. And also helped me consider being an A pair when I graduated college. But I was 15 at the time. So graduating college was a good seven years away. Even being in college four years from then was not an option. I needed to be in Paris then. So when we returned back home, went back to the States, I took it upon myself to figure out how to make this happen.

And long story short, I found an organization that accepted exchange students in high school in their junior year of high school. So I filled out the 40 pages of this application before even notifying my parents that I had found this or was doing it and basically knocked on their door one day and said, could you please sign this? I’m applying to go to France next year. 

They were supportive. They did, and I did. And I spent a year in France when I was 16. I learned French and still speak it to this day. And during that time I went to Paris frequently, which I was very lucky to do. And then I went once again right when I graduated college. And I always had loved the city, but I always had really seen it through the lens of the medium tourist. I’m not sure how to say this without being offensive.

I don’t even care anymore. As A middle class tourist, we rented apartments, which is a beautiful way to see Paris. Don’t get me wrong, you can pretend to be French for a few days. And we went to just whatever local bistros there were and we biked around the city and we would window shop and really score at the h and m because it was cheaper there than it was in the US. 

And I loved that version of Paris. That’s the version of Paris I fell in love with. And there’s nothing not to love about that version of Paris. But when I went to the time that really changed my life, I was in that place where I had at that point been more stressed about money than ever before.

 But there was something about that experience where I walked around the streets of Paris and I remember feeling like I had literally put on rose-colored glasses because I all of a sudden saw the city for what not it was, but what it could be and who I could be in it.

And it became a metaphor for the potential that I had and for what I could experience and for what was at my fingertips that I never had seen before. All of a sudden I saw these huge, beautiful hotels in Paris that were world class five stars. And I realized one day I could stay at that hotel. One day I’d make enough money to pay for those myself, even though they were one or $2,000 a night.

 One day I would be able to be in one of the town cars I saw driving around the city instead of renting the bike or taking the subway one day I’d be able to go to one of the many Michelin star restaurants in that city that I started seeing left and right instead of the local bistro that I could find. I still love those bistros, don’t get me wrong.

But I started realizing this could be different for me. And one day I could go into those beautiful French designer stores like Chanel, like Valentino, Valentino’s, Italian, I guess like Louis Vuitton, like Dior. And I could afford them. Why not me? Why had I gone to Paris so many times and I hadn’t even ever seen those stores.

 Or if I had, it was only a, oh wow, that must be nice or oh wow, maybe in another life, or that must be for them but not me. Even if I wasn’t consciously thinking about those. So thoughts subconsciously, I was subconsciously, I was de dismissing them, dismissing them from being on my radar, dismissing them as places I’d ever go. 

And I just remember walking through the streets of Paris, which is so romantic. And every time I would turn a corner, it was like the world was opening a new chapter for me and unfolding more of what could be.

It was so beautiful. Now here’s what I wanna point out about this experience. I still had debt when I went to Paris at that time. My business still was not reaching six figures or five figure months. I still had a nine to five job at that time. 

So nothing about it clicking for me was because all of a sudden my money problems went away. And I say that because even now, having built, having made seven figures multiple times over in my business, having no debt, having been to Paris multiple times, having paid for those hotels, having paid for Chanel clothes and Louis Vuitton things and all the things I saw on that trip, having done all those things, there’s still always more money to be made.

There’s still more money problems I could have if I chose to think about them. So what we have to do is abolish the idea that abundance clicks when there’s no more money, stress.

Because that will never exist until you realize first that stress is a choice. Stress around money is a choice you make at any moment because there is more of it to be made. And the more you stress about it, the more you’re going to repel those opportunities from coming into your life. The more you’re going to block yourself from seeing the ways you can make it.

And the more you’re going to be in the self-fulfilling prophecy of feeling like you have to be stressed about it. You do have to be stressed about it if there’s no opportunities coming to you and you won’t see those opportunities if you’re stressed about it.

And that trip in Paris made me realize that was one, I’m actually gonna go through the four things that clicked, that made abundance feel like it clicked for me.

And what that did for me was eventually it did lead to hitting seven figures, quitting my job, all the financial things I dreamed of.

But it did it because of how this clicked. These things didn’t click because that happened first is what I wanna be really clear about. So here’s the things that I left Paris knowing and no longer feeling like I had to convince myself of or sort of, uh, brainwash myself into believing one there. There’s always more money to be made.

Always, always, always, always, always, always. And here’s the extra little kick in the pants. If you’re not making it someone else’s go get it. Two discomfort doesn’t always mean misalignment. So we talk a lot in personal development about feeling aligned and feeling in flow and feeling good. 

And then we kind of trip over ourselves when we don’t feel that way. And retract, even though sometimes being in discomfort in an uncomfortable situation is pushing us in the direction we need to go. For example, when I was in Paris at that time, I bought myself my first non-used Louis Vuitton bag.

And this was scary. It was exciting because I, I did, I had made the money to do it, which was more, I mean that bag I think was like $1,500 and that was for a long time almost as like that was a paycheck to me. But I was starting to make thousands of dollars in my business and I decided to use it to buy that bag even though I still had a bit of debt.

And it’s easy to see that and be like, well, I was making money. So, you know, of course I did that. Of course it was easy. It was not easy. It was very scary. I was very, very uncomfortable spending that amount of money on myself. Cause I never had, and it still was tapping into some of that Catholic programming where you should feel guilty for buying nice things for yourself that you don’t need.

Other people could use that money for something different. Um, who am I to spend that when I still had debt to, to pay off, et cetera. So that was uncomfortable, but that didn’t mean that I shouldn’t do it or that it wasn’t aligned for me to do it. And I remember even asking how long until I can return this or can I return this in New York? And you can’t, you have to.

 You can only return from the stores in France. Like I could return it at another Louis Vuitton in France, but not in New York. And I remember almost going back the next day and returning it cause I was so scared. And now I look at that bag and it’s like, oh my God, I’ve never been stressed about having that date since I bought it. I’ve just always made more money. And I paid, believe it or not, I paid off my debt even having bought a Louis Vuitton before, it was totally paid off.

The third thing that clicked is that money is a value tool. This was a great abundance lesson for me. I think in the beginning I thought that abundance would just mean I’d always have every dollar to do whatever I wanted and never be stressed about it. 

And what I realized is that having an unlimited source of money, not amount of money, but source of money means that you only need to spend money on things that you truly care about. And if you don’t like something, a good example is, I used to spend money on Ubers all the time when I started making money. Cause I felt like that’s what I should do.

Cause now I have a successful business, but I actually don’t like riding in cars around the city a lot of the time because it takes an incredible amount of time. Whereas the subways often much quicker.

It’s not the cleanest thing in the world and sometimes you see some crazy stuff on it, but time is a very high value of mine, especially being a new mom. So spending money on an Uber, just cuz I can afford it doesn’t make sense to me. I value my time more and therefore I’m happy to take the subway here and there. 

That was a big thing that clicked for me in Paris as well. It was like, oh, money just gets to help me care more about what I care about, helps me have more of the time that I wanna be doing things and more of the things that I enjoy and less of the things I don’t. That’s truly what abundance means, not frivolously spending money because you can, like a lot of people on the internet are doing frankly. 

And the final abundance thing that clicked for me on that trip and that I really wanna leave you with because this is what Paris showed me then and shows me time and time again, the world is out there waiting for you.

There is a whole world of play, of fun, of joy, of deliciousness, of infinity, of infinite money, infinite possibility, infinite opportunities at your fingertips. It is on the other side of your scarcity. I think so often we have these visions for our life. I envision that I wanna go to New York or to France or to wherever destination. I want this kind of business or whatever you have. I want this amount of money, I want, I wanna do this thing.

But then you don’t because you think you’re not ready for it. And no one is going to hand those things to you. Only you can raise your hand and say, I am sick of hearing my own excuses. I am going to choose to act abundantly even if I don’t fully believe it yet. And I’m gonna make this happen. And you should because life is short and there’s a lot of amazing things out there waiting for you to explore and revel in them.

But it’s hard to do that if you don’t believe you can or you don’t believe it’s meant for you to do so. So I hope that this episode helped you see where you might be a blocking abundance in your own life. Hopefully it helps you see where you might be closer to it than you thought. Hopefully it helps you see what it looks like to truly believe it in a different way than you might have thought, which might have been just, I have unlimited money.

 And hopefully you see the power of having your own business having a limitless income. And when you do the mindset work, the things that you think abundance feels like can happen for you, that you have to go all in, stop with the halfing, stop with the halfway stop with the sometimes foot on the gas, sometimes foot off. It will not move you forward. It will not move you forward. Just picture a car driving from point A to point B. 

The one that’s going and stopping and going and stopping is getting there in an eighth of the time as the one that is keeping their foot on the gas, not looking around them, not seeing what’s in there, blind spots or whatever. Going straightforward. That’s what you have to do.

All right, I hope that this helped you and I hope that this inspires you. I will talk to you soon, visionaries. Have a great rest of your day.

Your Biggest Vision’s Daily Checklist for Visionaries;

Free Download!

Click here to download the checklist