How to Create a Successful Money Mindset with Chris Jarvis

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:16 — 43.1MB) | Embed

Making money is all about Mindset. Your beliefs about yourself and the world around you make or break you in the money game of live. I discuss strategies to create a successful money mindset in this episode with my guest, Chris Jarvis.

Chris is the Founder of Be the Giraffe and Giraffe Money, movements focused on helping families build wealth, character, and legacy across generations. He’s an entrepreneur, investor, leadership coach, and lifelong adventurer who believes climbing and business both reveal who we really are under pressure.

Through his work, he helps people lead with purpose, think long-term, and build lives worth passing on.

We dive into topics including:

Chris’ origin story about how he discovered his own money mindset.
How Chris’ childhood affected his mindset as an adult.
How to embrace and start to build a successful money mindset at any age.
Why people are so afraid of making mistakes and not fitting in that they don’t do anything interesting.
Why if you’re going to be successful you have to be willing to do things that other people aren’t willing to do.
The importance of finding mentors and other role models to give you advice and how to find them.
Why it’s so important to know WHY you want money; it’s not just enough to say you want money.
Why money alone isn’t a powerful motivator.
How to discover a deeper purpose in life.
How being of service to other people falls into your life and money plans.
How to get paid well by removing other people’s pain.
The concept of living intentionally instead of living blindly.
The one thing, above all else, that you must do to create a successful money mindset.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

The Origin Story of a Successful Money Mindset

Chris, it started by having little money. So, like a lot of people, it was wanting what you couldn’t have. When Chris grew up his parents were divorced, and his mother went to school and work and got food stamps. Let’s just say that they looked forward to groceries every Saturday.

Chris was awfully hungry on Thursday or Friday when the groceries weren’t there. Because of that he realized he wanted a LOT more from life. As Chris grew up he worked hard, got a sales job when he was in high school, started selling Cutco knives, and realized that he could get paid for performance instead of getting paid by the hour.

Chris burned all the boats and went back to a top 10 business school. He saw people with jobs he didn’t even know existed. He started meeting and hanging around people who made what he considered to be outrageous amounts of money. About that time Chris realized he was an entrepreneur, and just fell in love with the do it yourself, figure it out, and innovate lifestyle.

In hindsight Chris believes he was always an entrepreneur deep down. He became enamored with building, creating, and doing new things. He ultimately became a financial advisor to wealthy people. He wrote 19 books and hundreds of presentations about compensation stuff, because he was young, so he had to prove to people that he was smarter than they might have thought he was.

Then Chris realized that if you solve a problem for somebody, they’ll gladly pay you. If you solve a $10 problem, you can get paid a couple dollars. If you solve a $100,000 problem, you can get paid thousands of dollars. The math told him that the bigger problems you solve, the more you can get paid.

And so Chris started solving bigger and bigger problems and spending time around people with more and more money.

When Chris Became Consciously Aware That He Had a Money Mindset

Chris says he probably didn’t realize a “successful money mindset” was something until he was in his early 40s. He had been successful; he consistently made half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars a year in his 30s. Then he got divorced, lost everything, and got kicked out of a company he started when he had no money to defend myself.

With a lot of therapy, Chris then found this whole coaching world and started talking to people about it. That’s when people would tell him things like “You have a money blockage…” He realized he was still telling himself stories about money as an adult based on life experiences in childhood.

That’s when he started learning about visualization and other coaching practices. Chris is now 55 and has overcome those obstacles, but he considers that his realization was late in life. It wasn’t like he stumbled on some great knowledge when he was 25. Back then he was grinding it out like everybody else.

Chris says, in hindsight, that he was successful in spite of himself.

Successful Money Mindset Advice for the Younger Generation

Chris’ time in his 40s was the self-awareness phase of his life.

When he was younger he didn’t have access to insights and advice like we have today online. Now anybody with an internet connection get access to and advice from gurus in any subject. There are a lot of really good people out there giving really good advice.

To help people with their money mindset he built the “Wild Factor”, which is an assessment that helps people figure out where they are psychologically when it comes to money. You can find out if you’re an eagle, elephant, monkey, dolphin, penguin. What it essentially does is gets you to self-assess in about five minutes your own life, and it will will grade you on your health, your career, your finances, your relationships, and your fun.

It will tell you what your dominant animal is, it will tell you where your shortcomings are, and it’ll give you a 19-page report on how you can leverage your natural abilities to improve your life across all aspects, but specifically over your low ones.

Advice Combined with Action Creates Currency in Your Life

It’s things like that that Chris didn’t have available because he didn’t have the internet. Just to have some idea of how the way you were brought up affects the way that you make decisions or the way that you see the world, is fantastic. There’s no lack of free resources out there.

Big advice from Chris? It’s never bad to invest in yourself. That is the single greatest investment you can make. His advice to younger people is invest in yourself and understand yourself and realize that your brain is a super, super powerful thing when armed with the right resources.

Chris had a little bit of it. His advice on that is just, is dive into understanding yourself and invest in yourself because you’re the only person responsible for your success. Take the time to understand yourself and appreciate that we’ve all got our own abilities and superpowers to overcome our shortcomings.

And that’s just the beginning of the story!

Watch or listen to this episode to hear the rest of the story and get some golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Chris Jarvis is the founder of Be the Giraffe and Giraffe Money and author of 19 books and a TEDx Talk with over 4 million views. Drawing from decades of experience in entrepreneurship, finance, leadership development, and coaching, he works with founders and families who want to find the path from soulless success to intentional impact.

A lifelong climber and adventurer, Chris believes the mountains teach many of the same lessons required in leadership and life: resilience, discipline, humility, courage, and trust. His mission is to help people escape short-term thinking and build a legacy rooted in purpose, freedom, and intentional living. Whether speaking, coaching, or building new ventures, he is passionate about helping others become the kind of people future generations will thank.

Click here to learn more about Chris!

Click here to learn more about “Be the Giraffe”!

Click here to learn more about “Giraffe Money”!

Want more self improvement strategies? Check out “How to Raise Self-Awareness and Your Emotional Quotient (EQ) with Gordon D. Melville”