The Broad Place Financial Blueprint

WELCOME TO THE BROAD PLACE FINANCIAL BLUEPRINT

I want to start this programme by asking you one question — and I need you to sit with it before you answer:

“Who are you?”

— The question that changes everything

Not your job title. Not your income bracket. Not your debt total or your credit score. Not your financial history or the mistakes you have made.

Who are you — really?

Because here is the truth that this entire programme is built on: your financial life is not just about numbers. It is about identity. It is about what you believe about yourself, about money, and about what is possible for your life.

Proverbs 23:7 says: ‘As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.’ That is not poetry — that is a financial principle. You cannot build a wealthy life with a poverty mindset. You cannot access the broad place while still mentally living in a small, restricted space.

So before we look at a single spreadsheet, before we talk about income streams or investment strategies — we are going to do something that most financial programmes completely skip: we are going to establish who you actually are.

WHERE YOUR FINANCIAL IDENTITY COMES FROM

The book ‘Understanding Money’ describes three primary sources of our financial behavioural patterns. Understanding these is the first step to changing them.

GENERATIONAL TRAITS

These are the money beliefs and behaviours passed down from those who raised you. You only teach your children what you know — and those patterns continue until someone in the lineage recognises the dysfunction and decides to change it.

You may have grown up hearing things like: ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees.’ ‘Rich people are greedy.’ ‘People like us don’t own property.’ ‘Save what you have because you might need it later.’ These statements, repeated over years, become core beliefs that drive financial decisions without you even realising it.

The good news is that you can be the genealogical changer in your family. What your forebears did not know, you can learn. The patterns they passed on unconsciously, you can disrupt consciously.

ASSOCIATIONAL TRAITS

You are significantly shaped by who you spend time with. Mike Murdock said: ‘Show me your friends and I will show you your destiny.’ Your associations influence your beliefs, your outlook, and the actions you choose to take or avoid. When you spend time with people who normalise limitation, struggle, and lack — those norms become your norms.

Equally, when you begin to position yourself around people who think expansively, who take calculated risks, who invest wisely and build businesses — that becomes your new normal. This is why community matters so profoundly, and why being part of this programme and this group is itself a financial decision.

LEARNED TRAITS

The environment, society, and systems you have grown up in teach you patterns. Many people have only ever known one model: get an education, get a job, work until retirement. There is nothing wrong with employment — but if that is the only financial model you have ever been exposed to, it becomes the ceiling on your thinking.

There are also wider cultural messages: that wealth is for a certain type of person, that talking about money is inappropriate, that wanting more is greedy, that debt is inevitable. These learned patterns can be unlearned. And that process begins right here.

YOUR FINANCIAL WOUNDS

Most of us carry financial wounds from past experiences. A failed business. A divorce that devastated our finances. A scam that cost us everything we had saved. Debt that spiralled out of control. A redundancy that came without warning. An investment that went badly wrong.

These experiences do not just affect our bank balance. They affect our confidence, our willingness to try again, our ability to trust financial advisors or financial partners, and our belief in what is possible for us.

The book ‘Healing for Your Finances’ calls this the ‘Miss Havisham effect’ — after the Charles Dickens character whose fiancé left her on their wedding day. She stopped all the clocks, never changed out of her wedding gown, and refused to let life move forward. She was physically present in the future, but mentally and emotionally frozen in a moment of pain.

Where have you gotten stuck in your finances? What moment are you still living in? What experience is still shaping decisions you make today — even if it happened years ago?

We will go deeper into financial healing in Module 2. For now, just begin to notice.