My parents had what is called 'poverty thinking' and so did their own parents. In fact, my entire extended family suffers from this ailment. Not a single member of my family, as far as I know, has travelled outside of Australia. I'm the only one. Most of them haven't travelled outside of their own small towns or cities. My mum has a dream - to one day see Sydney. She wants to see the history of it. That's her dream, which she believes she'll never achieve.

What you believe is what you achieve.

I always believed I was somehow better than my family. Even as a teenager growing up, I felt I was destined for great things during my life. I learnt to keep my feelings quiet, because the expression of them resulted in my parents trying to convince me I would never achieve anything I wanted to achieve.

Their life was based on this attitude. They never achieved a single goal in their lives. Everything always went wrong, and they never had any money to do the things they wanted.

I grew up with this attitude. It was part of my programming, and it took me many years to first realise it, and then to start changing it. It's been such a struggle though, over the years. to move past this mentality, this attitude, this way of living. For many years I had poverty thinking, and had no money to do anything I wanted. It wasn't until the late 90's that I actually started getting somewhere.

You can't make money working for someone else. You have to work for yourself in order to have the freedom to do what is required to make the money. Only you know what's best for you. When you give up your freedom and your life to answer to someone else, you lose a big part of what it is to be you. Instead of being yourself, you're being what someone else wants you to be.

I went into business for myself a couple times over the past decade, but I was never successful. It was too hard, I didn't make enough money, I was wasting my time. These were all thoughts I had at the time. I still had poverty thinking, even though I was trying to break out of it. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that tunnel was too hard for me to get through.

It wasn't until I moved to New Zealand that I started really breaking away from poverty thinking. I had to move to another country to do it, with thanks to Michelle, the woman I moved here for. It was the very idea that I could actually get on a plane and fly somewhere else, live and work in another country, even travel to yet more countries, that started showing me that what I considered highly unlikely was not only likely, but being experienced by me.

There's nothing better to change your way of thinking than to actually experience what you once thought impossible.

As a result of my newfound freedom, I overextended myself. I was actually starting to make more money than I had ever made back in Australia, but overextending myself meant that I drove up my debts. I almost went backwards, thinking that I couldn't afford the debts I had. Poverty thinking was still leaving me poor, even though I had a high income from my desire to achieve more.

I had to restructure my finances in order to compensate for my misadventures, and it taught me some very valuable lessons in how to handle the responsibilities of effective financial management, something I knew nothing about until only a few years ago.

It's a fact that 95% of people who win the lottery lose all their winnings within 5 years. It's because they don't know how to manage that much money. They never learnt how, and when they needed to know how, it was too late. The only way to learn how to manage money is to earn it, to value it, and to make mistakes with it that are meaningful. Losing money that some lotteries commission gave you isn't meaningful, it's just disappointing. Losing money that you earnt is a disaster.

If you're going to become a millionaire, there's a lot of knowledge that you need to gain and understand about financial management before you reach that point. I believe that my life of poverty thinking has helped me understand what NOT to do with money, so that when I become entrenched in wealthy thinking, I'll know a lot more about how to deal with it.

Being a millionaire - or even generating extra wealth in your life - requires you to think like a millionaire. Do you think they look at how much they lack? Or do you think they look at how much they have? Thinking about ways of getting the big things in life will get you those big things. Thinking about how poor you are only keeps your poor.

Get out of poverty thinking and into wealthy thinking. Now. It's not a choice worth considering, but it is a decision worth making.