Six steps I learned this week from Natalie Dawson on rewiring the beliefs that keep smart people financially stuck.
Lessons from Natalie Dawson
If thinking about money makes you anxious, that’s not a character flaw — it’s a script. One written long before you were old enough to question it. This week, I came across Natalie Dawson’s framework for rewiring how you think about money, and I had to write it down. Here’s what hit hardest.
01- Identify Your Money Story
Every financial decision you make today is filtered through a story you absorbed as a child. Phrases like “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “rich people are greedy” weren’t just sayings — they were instructions your brain accepted as facts about how the world works.
Natalie shares how she grew up rarely hearing conversations about money, which left her not with a spending problem, but a fear of spending. She’d buy groceries in the smallest quantities possible, convinced she never had enough, even when she did. She once refused to replace a razor head for 12 months — not because she couldn’t afford it, but because her scarcity mindset told her she shouldn’t.
Research backs this up: behavioral economics shows that childhood money experiences predict financial behavior more accurately than income level or financial literacy. Your upbringing literally sets your financial wiring.
Try this: Ask yourself — How did your parents talk about money? How did money make you feel growing up? How do you spend now? Would you invest in a course or business for yourself? Rate yourself honestly: scarcity mindset, neutral, or entrepreneur mindset.
02 – Stop Treating Money as a Scorecard
Natalie recalls a dinner with successful entrepreneurs where people were casually dropping numbers — revenue, exits, portfolio sizes. She left feeling deeply behind and nearly restructured her entire business strategy based on someone else’s success.
“We are not running their race. We are running ours, and our pace has gotten us here — so trust the process.”
— Brandon (Natalie’s husband) — a line she says saved them millions.
Social media has made this 10x worse. You’re watching curated wins — revenue screenshots, cars, vacations — presented as if they’re the average. Your brain turns it into a personal performance review. The result: you either overspend trying to close a perceived gap, or you freeze because progress feels pointless. Neither is a financial strategy.
The fix is detachment — separating your self-worth from your net worth. The only meaningful comparison is between where you are now and where you were 12 months ago. That’s it.
03 – Shift from Scarcity to Abundance Thinking
Two business owners. Same industry. Same revenue. Same year: 2020, the pandemic. One cut marketing by 80% and froze everything. The other saw that every competitor had gone dark — and that attention had never been cheaper. They increased ad spend by 40%, hired two salespeople, and launched a new offer into the silence.
Twelve months later: one business was down 30%. The other had doubled revenue. The one that froze actually had more cash in reserve. The difference wasn’t resources — it was belief.
Natalie is clear: abundance thinking isn’t wishful thinking. It’s strategic. It means believing that your ability to generate income is never fixed, and that opportunities are always available if you’re not too afraid to look for them.
The question to ask before any money decision: Is this a strategic response or a fear response? They can look identical from the outside. If you’re not asking it, you’re probably not choosing — you’re reacting. And a reaction is not a wealth-building strategy.
04 – Think of Money as a Tool, Not a Reward
Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler coined the term mental accounting — the way we treat the same dollar completely differently depending on how we mentally label it. A tax refund feels like “free money,” so we spend it on luxuries we’d never pull from savings.
The label changes the decision — before strategy even enters the picture.
When money is a reward, you ask: What can I buy?
When money is a tool, you ask: Where can this generate the highest return?
That shift — repeated consistently over years — creates a compounding gap between you and everyone treating money as a finish line. Next time someone pays you back for dinner, don’t spend it carelessly. Give it a job.
05 – Invest in Yourself Before Anything Else
Natalie has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in her own education — and says she’s not stopping. The income gap between where you are and where you want to be is usually a skills gap.
Warren Buffett’s best investment wasn’t a stock or an acquisition. It was a $100 Dale Carnegie public speaking course — a certificate he hung in his office above his university degrees. — As shared by Natalie Dawson
He was terrified of public speaking. He structured his entire college schedule to avoid it. Then he realized it was quietly capping everything else he wanted to build: raising capital, attracting partners, earning trust. He did the course. The rest is history.
Your income is tied to the scale of problems you can solve. The bigger the problems you can solve, the more you get paid. You can’t solve big problems without investing in the knowledge to match.
How to start:
- Look at your last three months of discretionary spending
- Find where you could have set aside money for skill-building
- Research courses, classes, or events that get you in a room with people doing what you want to do
06 – Build Systems, Not Willpower
Willpower is a finite resource and an unreliable one. If your savings and investments require you to manually log in, move money, and make a conscious decision every month, you’ve created a recurring opportunity to make an emotional decision instead.
Natalie automates everything — investments, savings, debt payments — timed to each paycheck. She uses dollar-cost averaging: putting money in consistently, regardless of market timing, and letting it compound.
The goal is to remove yourself and your emotions from the equation. The money is still liquid. You’re still in control. You’ve just taken the decision out of future-you’s hands — because future-you will be tired, distracted, or tempted.
This week’s action: Decide what percentage of each paycheck goes to savings and investments. Set up the automatic transfers. Then forget about it. Check back in six months and let the math do its quiet, unglamorous work.
— ✶ —
Money is a result of the person you become. It’s not a reflection of who you already are. The only thing standing between your current financial reality and the one you want is the belief system running quietly in the background — and belief systems can be changed.
Credit where credit is due
All six of these lessons come directly from Natalie Dawson and her video on money mindset for entrepreneurs. I’m just the student writing it down. Sharing because knowledge like this deserves to travel. Go find her work — she goes much deeper.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here