I started learning this phrase back in 1996. I was deep into an audio series called Prosperity Consciousness, and around the same time I read Money Is Your Friend. I later bought the rights to that book, sold over 10,000 copies of it, and shared the stage with its author well over a hundred times in my career. That season of my life is where I first understood what it actually means to have a dialogue with money.
Here’s the simple version: your dialogue with money is the ongoing conversation between you and your ability to create money. Most of us were never taught to create money, we were conditioned to trade time for it. Punch in, punch out, trade your hours, collect a check. That’s not creation. That’s survival on a loop.
Value Isn’t What You’re Told It Is
I collect things. Vintage currency, rare coins, a couple of genuinely museum-grade baseball cards. I do this because it teaches me something every single day: value isn’t given to you by a system, value is recognized.
Take an old $20 gold piece I own. Circulated, worn, still worth thousands today, not because of the shine, but because of the weight. The gold underneath doesn’t care how banged up the coin looks on the outside. It’s the same with people. We carry weight, old feelings, old stories, old trauma, and we mistake the wear on the surface for the value underneath. The weight doesn’t devalue you. It’s often the very thing that proves what you’re made of.
I also own two Mickey Mantle rookie cards. One of them I paid $90,000 for in 2015. Today it’s worth six to eight times that, and if it were graded even one point higher, we’re talking millions. Nobody looks at that card and argues about whether it’s “worth” something. The market simply reflects what was already true about the object. That’s the exact shift I want for you with money: stop negotiating your worth with the world, and start recognizing it the way collectors recognize a rare card, plainly, and without apology.
The Real Devaluing Happens Inside First
Before I ever built a business, I was rock bottom. I was an all-state athlete in three sports, I played two years of college basketball, and I torched all of it with alcohol, drugs, and self-sabotage. I became a dealer because I thought if I could cheat the system, I’d finally feel like enough. I didn’t feel like enough. I felt worthless, and worthless people don’t create wealth, they chase relief.
I got clean and sober in 1988. That single decision is the actual root of everything that came after it, not a business strategy, not a sales technique. Sobriety gave me back the one thing addiction had stolen: the ability to respond to my life instead of just reacting to it. That’s the whole game. Reaction is conditioning. Response is power.
When you’re numbing out, substances, compulsive spending, doom-scrolling, whatever your particular exit door is, you cannot access your best thinking, and you certainly cannot access your best earning. Your dialogue with money is a direct extension of your dialogue with yourself. If the internal conversation is “I’m not enough,” don’t be surprised when the external bank balance agrees with you.
Letting Go Is the Strategy
Real wealth isn’t a hustle tactic. It comes from:
Letting go of the darkness you’ve been carrying
Letting go of the trauma your body has stored
Letting go of the brain fog that keeps you reactive
Letting go of blaming other people for where you are
When you actually let that go, something shifts. Bob Proctor used to call it the vacuum law of prosperity, when you clear space internally, the external circumstances that match your new state start showing up. Not magically. Practically. Clear-headed people make better decisions, keep better company, and spot opportunities that overwhelmed, foggy people walk right past.
Find People Who Are Already In Alignment
Stop rebelling just to rebel. I did that for years and it cost me a career, my twenties, and nearly my life. If you’ve got that rebel energy in you, channel it, into building something, into leading people by example, into a business that turns your energy into income instead of into wreckage.
Find mentors. Find people who are already living in the frequency you’re trying to reach. Your environment either reinforces your old dialogue with money or it upgrades it. There’s no neutral option.
The Bottom Line
You are the asset. Not the coin, not the card, not the dollar in your wallet, you. The more clearly you see your own value, the more you’ll attract people who see it too. That’s not a metaphysical claim. It’s the same principle that makes a worn gold coin worth more than a pristine sheet of paper: real value doesn’t depend on how new or polished something looks. It depends on what’s actually there.
Change the conversation. Change the outcome.
— Jeffery Combs, President & Founder, Golden Mastermind Seminars, Inc.