Transcript: The 8 Principles of Transforming Your Relationship With Money: Thuli Sithole

Here is the full text (plus summary) and audio of Thuli Sithole’s talk titled “The 8 Principles of Transforming Your Relationship With Money” at TEDxLytteltonWomen conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:

In this talk, Thuli Sithole discusses principles related to transforming one’s relationship with money. She outlines several key concepts to help individuals improve their financial mindset and create a more abundant life:

Taking Responsibility for Your Life: Sithole emphasizes that your current circumstances and experiences are a result of your own thought processes and emotions. She highlights the importance of understanding that you have the power to shape your life through your thoughts and actions.
Understanding Your Identity and Purpose: You’re encouraged to recognize your true identity beyond societal roles, such as mother or wife. Sithole advises defining your purpose and setting clear goals to maintain focus and direction in life.
Clearing Clutter: Clearing physical and emotional clutter from your life creates space for new energy, opportunities, and abundance to enter. Sithole emphasizes the positive impact of decluttering your environment and your mind.
Letting Go of Emotional Baggage: Unresolved emotional issues and negative beliefs can hinder your progress. Sithole encourages identifying and releasing emotional baggage to create a positive mindset and attract positive outcomes.
Forgiving and Gratitude: Forgiveness is discussed as a way to release emotional burdens and free oneself from negativity. Expressing gratitude for even the smallest things helps shift your focus toward positivity and abundance.
Embracing Positive Thinking: Sithole discusses the power of positive thoughts and affirmations to shift your mindset. By maintaining a positive outlook, you can attract positive experiences and opportunities.
Understanding Money as Energy: Money is seen as a form of energy, and its flow into your life can be influenced by your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Sithole stresses that by aligning your energy and mindset with abundance, you can attract financial success.

Creating Smart Goals: Setting goals is essential for maintaining focus and direction in life. Sithole suggests writing down your goals, understanding your intentions, and consistently reviewing them to stay on track.

All in all, Sithole underscores the interconnectedness of thoughts, emotions, actions, and outcomes in creating a fulfilling and abundant life. The principles she outlines encourage individuals to take control of their mindset and actions to transform their relationship with money and achieve financial well-being.

To learn more in depth, read the transcript below:

TRANSCRIPT:

Thuli Sithole – International Speaker

I’m going to talk to you, of course, in big bold letters, Women and Money. And I will tell you how I came to want to talk about this, how this is something that means so much to me. I didn’t just go pick it up from a textbook and decide I’m going to regurgitate what I read. This was a personal experience for me.

And with that, I’m going to share with you the eight principles of transforming women’s relationship, meaning your relationship, with money, including the men. But men tend to be better at money than we are, I’ll tell you why.

Now how I came about to figure this out, this whole women and money thing, and what goes on. Why is it that women don’t have as much money as men? Why are we so emotional about money?

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I woke up with excruciating pain, a toothache. Out of the blue, I had such a bad toothache. And I thought, I wonder what happens.

I went to a dentist, had a dental checkup, and the dentist was telling me that my wisdom tooth on top is growing down and there’s no other tooth at the bottom to counter it, meaning it will just keep on growing until something comes up. So the solution is to extract it.

Now ladies and gentlemen, I’m terrified of tooth extraction, so terrified. I’ve given birth to two boys, naturally without painkillers, but tooth extraction for me was like no waste. I’m not going to do it.

Went for a second opinion, same thing. Eventually, I decided, let me continue with the mouth rinse that was prescribed to me. I was on strong painkillers, every two hours I was on painkillers. And I’m not one person who takes painkillers, I believe in homeopathic medicine, so taking painkillers. The first time I took two disc sprints, I started seeing stars. I was actually high on disc sprints.

But anyway, knowing the type of work that I do, I’m a coach, I do a whole lot of metaphysical stuff. I went to look up what is a toothache, and a toothache means that I’m indecisive. I thought, okay, I’m at this point in my life, I think everything is perfect, so what am I indecisive about?

And I thought, and I thought, and every now and again, whenever you ask questions, whenever you set questions out to God, God answers you, in ways that you don’t expect, but you’ve got to be willing to listen.

So I listened, and I took it in, and I realized that I’m indecisive. I just got into a new relationship, and I realized that the moment I got into this relationship, my money just started going down, just down.

And I thought, okay, I want to work hard, I want to be a career woman, but also another part of me just wants to be taken care of. I want to be treated and spoiled and everything, I just want to be those girls whose men buy them Louis Vuitton bags, like really, I’m tired of working, tired of being a single mom.

And I realized that this was my battle. Now that I have started something here, subconsciously, I want to be taken care of, and I no longer want to take care of the money, and that’s where my emotions are intertwined, and I wasn’t decisive around that.

Money and Love For Me

But with that, is that money and love for me has always been a balancing act. And that’s got to go in the past, when I was young, my father was a hard-working man who was a surgeon, never at home, always on call, every single day, and as a young girl, I wanted the love and affection of my father.

And I remember I made a vow that I will never, ever work as hard as he does, because family comes first. I made that vow, but that’s the impact it had in my life.

And then I started realizing the passion of my past, that every time I was in a relationship, the father of my children, I had no career, I had no life, I had no ways of actually making income. There’s income, but it’s not sufficient to make me survive.

And when I’m single, I am thriving, I’m swimming in riches. And that was the pattern. And this took me, and I realized there’s so many women out there, perhaps you too, maybe your story is not love and money, but it’s something else. Women always, we compromise something about money.

Money for us is very emotional, oh, this earring is disturbing, this poor thing. Money for us is intertwined in our emotions. When a man asks for something, if someone, like I got a call a couple of weeks back, ‘Thuli, come speak, what’s your rate?’ Ah, ah, what’s my worth?

So in my mind, my rate is based on how I view myself, my self-esteem. It’s not loud out there, it’s subconscious. But for a man, he gives what he wants, he’s thinking, ooh, Jesus, at this time, I’m going to rip them off, 50,000, you know what I’m saying?

For a woman, it’s different. Even if you could charge so high, you would think, ah, but really, I think I’m worth this much. That’s what I’m here to share with you, eight principles to transform that relationship. Whatever it is that is holding you back, those emotions, they started back from when you were young, and I’ll share that with you as to why.

This is working hard, the African woman. The typical African woman works this hard, even harder for some. If you, as an African woman, have worked so hard all your life, you’ve bought children, many of you, you would be millionaires right now, I’m not lying to you, you’d be millionaires, right? You’d be millionaires.

Yet we toil and toil and toil, and there’s nothing for it. Look, one of the ladies just mentioned that we give birth to men, and yet it’s still a man’s world. How is that? I mean, does nature make any sense?

This is the life of a woman, because when a woman has money in her hand, she has an extended family to take care of, she has so and so to take care of, she has this obligation, she has this. The women oftentimes don’t spend money on themselves as last.

When I walk to the shops and I have extra cash and I think, oh, wow, I love those boots, I look at them and I think, wow, very nice, and I think I’ll come back later. But before I even leave that complex, thinking I’ll come back because I’m thinking I’ll come back the very next day, before I even leave the complex, I’ve walked past the baby boutique and I’m thinking, oh, that’ll look good on my boys, and I’ve purchased without even thinking.

We don’t take care of ourselves as much. And so a lot of men tend to think, don’t look for a woman, look for money. Women will find you themselves. Right? Yes, it’s true, women. We can sniff out a secure man anywhere out there. We can sniff out a rich man. It’s just a joke, but it’s true.

Women can smell potential in a man, so he might not be rich now, but you know you’re going to make him. There’s a saying that behind every strong man is a powerful woman. And a man is a head, but the woman is a neck, because yes, we are very good at bringing out that potential. We do make our husbands. We make them. True story. Yes, it’s a true story.

But for women, money is security, it’s our freedom, it’s our independence. And when we don’t have those, we are truly crippled. We lose our identity, we lose ourselves. I was once in a situation myself, my public figure, but at some point in time, I was so in love and so blinded by the rays of love that I quickly left my career, didn’t see how insecure this man was, jumped, and then suddenly I had nothing.

I was not earning anything at all, and all my streams, my networks somehow just started vanishing. And I became so dependent on a man, so, so dependent. If you’ve ever been in a situation, you know how painful a journey is, because that journey is not even about now you getting a job, it’s now about your self-worth, and it’s so difficult to come out of that pit, your self-worth, your self-esteem.

With women, money is about your emotions. How do you manage your emotions? You start with your thought process, you mastermind your thoughts. Now oftentimes when I give this talk, I give it in the course of a day, but I have to do it in 12 minutes, so I won’t go into too much detail, but I’m going to highlight for you how to tap into that.

The first thing you must know is that money is energy. Money is energy, just like love. We happen to have it in hard form in currency, but it’s energy, and that’s how you bring it into your life, it’s through your energy. Are you worthy of receiving it? If you are, it tends to come to you, right?

When you start feeling like you’re not worthy of it, it doesn’t. Or you ask for little, or you offer a service and then you start discounting to family here and there, and women do that a lot, you discount your services.

I once had a business where I was asked, so how much do you charge per hour? And it always fluctuated based on how good I felt that day. I never knew that’s how I felt, it’s just something that came up for me eventually when I realized that my relationship with money and my business is based on how I feel and my emotions.

So oftentimes, how you run your business is based on your self-esteem, your self-esteem that’s speaking. Money is energy, passes from hand to hand, one person to another, 20 rand for you buys you a movie ticket, 20 rand for someone buys them food and meal that perhaps might last them a week, 10 fish, who knows?

But money is different for all of us. And just as much as you manage your time during the day, you’ve got to manage your money as that energy for you to harness it. How are you going to attract it into your life? And how are you going to keep it when you have it? And when do you give it?

Be Willing To Receive And To Give

Oftentimes, one money, but won’t I give it? That’s why you’ve got to be willing. The first principle is that you’ve got to be willing to receive and to give. Many people don’t think about that. We think, ah, God is not giving me, but you’re actually not willing to receive.

How many times have you prayed and you said, God, give me a million baht, please, I’ve been asking, I’ve been asking, I’ve been doing this, I’ve done this, I’ve done that. And then you find 20 rand in a corner somewhere and you’re thinking, ah, man, change. God just gave the first 20 rand to be a million. It’s not just change.

A friend came by to say hello and they cooked food. That’s a value of money, of the abundance that you seek. Say thank you. You’ve got to be willing to receive.

When I started now climbing my ladder after leaving that relationship that crippled me financially, I then, um, I bought a new car and I was so excited. But when I was driving out of the dealership, I remember thinking, oh my goodness, I cannot come out of this dealership with this car. Why do everyone at work think that I have too much money?

Those are the emotions that women tend to go through, right? Suddenly you have money and you’re afraid of showing it. I started thinking that, what will people think? I have too much money. And that goes that I was not willing to receive. So it comes, but suddenly I’m now saying, uh-uh, God, thank you, but I’m going to park in the garage, let me go back to work, and that’s got to go off mine.

Many of us do that. Many of you, you buy tea, you buy cups and things for your house or something, but how many of you keep it for special guests and wait for those special occasions? How many of you have kept perfumes for special occasions? When do those occasions come?

Someone said perfume for when you meet that man, but just now you meet the guy and you know the perfume is still tucked in the cupboard. I’ve had perfume that’s actually dried up because it was waiting. No, it’s the truth. It’s the truth. You’ve got to be willing to receive.

And when it comes to giving, do not hold a grudge. We tend to have this biased grudge where it’s like, oh gosh, I don’t want to pay my health insurance, I don’t want to pay Discovery again. Discovery’s charging me $3,000 for medical aid for you, sometimes it’s more. But you have a grudge purchase. You don’t want to pay your taxes. You keep going on about ngandla, ngandla, as soon as there’s ngandla. Keep going on about that, that oh, my tax is going into ngandla. So what? Your tax also goes into contributing to other people’s lives.

You may not be aware of it, but you’ve got to be willing to give. And you bless it. There are times where I feel like I don’t feel like paying this parking attendant. What are they doing here? Parking is free. You know when you come out and they do this as if you never knew how to drive. And then you have to give them five rand or two rand.

At a time when I feel like I’m holding a grudge, I literally just bless it. And I visualize something good and say, may it bless them abundantly too. Let go of the grudge. Because when you don’t do that, you’ve essentially said, God, cut me off five rand less. Is it going to come back to you? No.

But bless it, and it does something for this guy. Even if he gives his boss 40% of it. But if you bless it, it comes back to you in many different ways. You can’t track those ways because it’s energy. Bless it. Think about it.

Next time, if you’re going to give money, and if your grudge is so bad, don’t. Don’t give. Hold back. But don’t ever pass on money with a grudge. It’s like loving someone. It’s like being in a relationship and you’re not in love with the guy. You just don’t even want to kiss him or touch him or do anything. And they feel it, right? It’s energy. It’s energy.

So don’t ever be willing to receive. When you receive, say thank you. And when you let go, bless it. Bless every transaction. Bless that you’re at the bar and you’re buying this. Bless everything that you part with. When you see a bill, say yay, thank you. This is another proof that my kids are actually in school. Private school’s expenses.

So don’t go on about woo, this is tough. It’s proof, thank you God, it’s actually possible that my kids are in school. Bless everything that comes to you in that way.

Take 100% Responsibility For Your Own Life

Second thing is that you’ve got to take 100% responsibility for your own life. For everything that has occurred to you. And your life is the way it is now. You’re experiencing it the way you are now, simply because of the thought processes you have created. Anything that has ever happened to you, there’s no such thing as happened to you. Everything that is around you that you’re experiencing, you created.

You might say, oh, what? There are people who say, but so-and-so was raped. How did they create that? Your subconscious mind, your thoughts. There are some people, for instance, they’re always, always hijacked. They’re always broken into, like one thing, one bad thing happens to them, after one, after the other.

And that’s simply because their mind is stuck in that space. And it’s not to say bad things are good, but it’s to say that you can’t shift your subconscious mind and your state of mind into a space where you start attracting things that feel good for you. You can’t turn lemons into lemonades. State of mind.

And it starts off with circumstances happen to you. You perhaps get retrenched. You feel like, oh, my goodness, my life is over. I won’t be able to pay my bills. Your thought process is that. You start thinking, like, you’re not worthy anymore. Your friends won’t invite you out for drinks or whatever it is. You’ve got thoughts about it.

And your thoughts bring out feelings. You’re depressed. You’re sad. You’re angry at so-and-so. Perhaps you’ve broken up with your spouse, like I did, and you start blaming them, and therefore the relationship fell apart. All the feelings that start coming up. And then you manifest, number four, your actions.

Your Actions

Your actions that determine your outcome. What are your actions? Being depressed, you’d rather sit in bed all day. Or you won’t talk to anyone. You won’t take any calls. Those type of actions, the inability to act for yourself. From there, that’s your outcome. What’s your outcome? Your kids haven’t been to school because you’re refusing to get out of bed. Or you haven’t eaten. You’ve lost weight. Or you’re ill now.

And remember, your thoughts manifest illnesses. One of the ladies mentioned morning sickness, like the acute morning sickness. To tell you the truth is that morning sickness is your thoughts having manifested fear, and your body now has manifested physically that fear becomes nausea and throwing up. That’s fear.

Every pregnant woman actually experiences fear, because experiencing a new baby within you is scary anyway. But some have it worse than others. And then there are women who don’t have it. Because maybe their support systems are better, or their thoughts about the whole process are better. But we’re all different.

Your thoughts can also manifest. If you start feeling your throat is sore, essentially that means that you’ve held back words. You perhaps wanted to express yourself. You wanted to say something to someone. And you held back. Then you get a sore throat. When you cough, you truly held back a lot.

Yes, it’s that checking. It’s that seeing. And then you’ll realize, I’m now in a position where I’m now making sure I express anything. If anything doesn’t make me feel happy at all, I have to say it. I have to say it.

But then from there, if you don’t like the outcome, if you don’t like the cold you now have, you’ve got to go back to your thoughts. Shift your thoughts. Shift your mindset. Be more positive. Do things that make you happy. Listen to music. Jump. Listen to music. Positive music. I now have in my playlist, I only now have positive music and the playlist on my iPod is written as Pump It Up. I’m going to pump it up.

And I pump it up in the car. And before coming here this morning, I was pumping it up. My volume got louder. Then I started thinking, oh, these speakers in my Mini Cooper are not enough. I’ve got to buy speakers like these other dudes in the township. Because I want to pump it up. That’s how I raise my vibration.

I also enjoyed that we had a conversation. I also enjoyed that we had a comedian because it’s another way of raising your vibration. When I was going through a very difficult time after separating with the father of my children, I went to watch Trevor Noah and I laughed. And laughing raises your vibration. So these are ways to raise your vibration. Positive things in your life.

Be Clear Why You’re Here

The third principle, I’m going to have to move faster. You’ve got to be clear why you’re here. What is your intention? What is your purpose? Who are you?

Some of you have come in here with strength, with purpose. Gentleness. Kindness. When I’m in a room, I bring grace. That’s how I know myself to be. And therefore, everything that I do, I’m now conscious to do it gracefully or with grace.

Who are you? Do you know who you are? What is your identity? And I’m talking about that depth. Your soul. I’m not talking about you being a mother. I’m not talking about you being a wife. Who are you on the inside? Not what people tell you what you are. When all of those titles are gone, what are you left with?

If your child is no more, what are you left with? If your husband is no more, what are you left with? What is your identity? And as for women, we tend to wrap our identities around our families. First comes the husband, where you, of course, like me, you leave your career, everything else, and you suddenly become him.

When people are looking for him, and they can’t find him, they call me. Then you know you’re in trouble. You become your children. When your children move out of the house, you have no sense of purpose anymore because they’re no longer there.

Decide who you are, and that will clear the path for you to create your purpose and do things purposefully. And some of the women have discovered their purpose is by accident. But life is constantly evolving because your purpose can never be a constant thing. Your essence is right throughout, but you also evolve as you go along.

One moment you’re a banker, next moment you’re now a philanthropist. But your essence is the same because everything that has happened to us is there to teach us a lesson and we need to move forward with it.

You’ve got to set goals. Set goals, people take it for granted, but setting goals keeps you on the path. You keep your eye on the prize. And that means that when life happens to you, when someone passes on, or when Eskom does load shedding again, or when something happens, you don’t lose focus on your dreams. You must constantly review your goals, write them down.

Writing them down is powerful. Last year, June, I remember writing a goal that within the next three months I’m going to have 200,000. Like cash, it’s going to come some way. Whether I play the lotto or I do something, but I’m going to have it here, like that, cash, cash, instantly. And I manifested that.

And then I remember thinking, geez, I didn’t dream big enough. I shouldn’t. Didn’t dream big enough. But now I know, and that’s why when I go through these things and I share my experiences, I’m able to say, dream big. Write your goals down.

Identify Your Inner Blocks

Identify your inner blocks. Like I’ve shared with you how a vow that I made when I was young is what blocked me from creating my money happiness. What is it that is blocking you from the past? Guilt, depression, anger. Your emotional baggage is something emotionally in you that is holding you back.

Now, I’d say that by the time a child is eight years old, everything that has happened to them up until that point, who they are emotionally is who they will be repeating that cycle for the rest of their lives.

When I was 12 years old, I was told by an English teacher that I’ll never amount to anything in life. Told that to me straight. And I went through my life reliving that story because I trusted her, I believed her, and I thought I was unworthy, I won’t amount to anything. She said to me, my English was so bad, but look at me, I’m standing and talking.

And so how that manifested was that I went from one relationship, one bad relationship to the next. My money choices were bad simply because the way I believed myself to be was that I’m unworthy and therefore I will recreate situations that keep reinforcing the belief that I’m unworthy.

When you shift your beliefs, you create a life where you keep reinforcing it that you are better. That’s why they say when you’re positive, you bring positive situations to you and therefore you reinforce the situation that I’m successful. I am healthy. And whatever it is that you also affirm that is positive.

So let go of your emotional baggage. It’s not serving you. It’s something, perhaps you’re aware now, something you’ve been living over and over and over. It’s not serving you. Let go. Let it go. It impacts on the decisions you make in your life financially too.

Clear The Clutter

Clear the clutter. Yeah, who’s got offices like that? It is so important that part of getting what it is that you want in abundance, remember money is energy. You’ve got to clear the clutter and create a void for a new energy to come in. For money, for love, good health.

Clear the clutter. Clean your rooms, your drawers, your cabbie holes. Let go of stuff that you don’t need or use anymore. And this is something that I went through too and I promise it’s amazing to go through this. But right now it’s winter because I did this last year in winter. Right now it’s winter and I look for something and think, give it away.

At least I can’t take it back now. But it felt so good to give away because it did open my path. It opened me up too to that possibility of giving. Whenever I see this young lady for instance whom I gave a lot of my clothes to and she stands at the traffic lights there selling stuff, I always just think, wow, she looks great. So it feels really good. Clear the clutter. Give away your stuff.

And lastly, you’ve got to forgive. Spoke about the whole lemonade thing. When you forgive, you’re not doing it for the other person. You’re doing it for yourself.

And when you do so, when you decide to forgive, don’t expect to go to someone and say, hey, I’ve decided I’m going to forgive you. I know it’s been five years but I’ve decided I’m going to forgive you. Or how do you expect them to react?

You forgiving someone is for you and it’s your business. Between you and your God. Between you and your thoughts. It’s for you. It releases you. It does nothing for the other person. It releases you.

So you’ve got to learn to forgive because forgiving also clears that emotional baggage. Just like I had the emotional baggage of the teacher for instance who told me that I’ll never amount to anything. Had I been carrying that and wanting my revenge with her, I wouldn’t be anywhere.

But if she had to see me now, I forgave her a long time ago. So forgiving you allows that emotional clutter to get out of the way. It at least releases some of it. There’s also physical ways of helping you to release emotional clutter which I can’t talk about now but one day.

Express Gratitude

And then of course you’ve got to express gratitude for everything in your life no matter how small or how big. Express gratitude. I mentioned earlier that you find a 20 rand in a corner in your bed. Say thank you God. I’m going to treat myself. Ice cream. Say thank you to the waiters and waitresses who have been serving us outside. Do you say thank you to any of them?

We take small things for granted. Do you say thank you to your petrol attendants? They’ve checked your car. They’ve made sure it’s road worthy. When was the last time you called a close relative to say hey thank you? Do something to express gratitude and appreciation. When you do that you fill yourself with more love and that allows you to also give. Because gratitude allows things to come to you. You attract that energy of money. It’s a positive feeling.

So ladies and gentlemen money is energy. It’s not something that’s merely in your wallet and when it’s not there it’s gone. You can always attract money into your space. Abundance into your space simply by thinking it. Simply by clearing your space. Clearing your clutter.

These are the eight principles of creating success for yourself. There’s a lot of work to have to declutter and let go of emotional baggage. It didn’t take me just a few months or weeks. It’s been years of hard work. But I can guarantee you that having done all of that I can testify that this is the way to go. Do not go bear branches on your back and work that hard.

Yes, work hard but smart. It should be comfortable for you. I work four hours a week and then I have time for my children. I don’t have a nanny. It’s possible to work and be happy and live in abundance.

Thank you.