Ep 51: High-Income Thinking: The Mental Habits That Multiply Money
What really separates high-income entrepreneurs from the masses? It’s consciousness.
If you want to increase income, you have to upgrade the thinking that drives your decisions, your habits, and your capacity.
In Episode 51 of The 30-Day Year Podcast, Dave and Jacq Conway break down the mental habits behind high-income earners and explain why most business owners stay stuck under $1M. They walk through the first habit of financial freedom, increasing income, and the 2 hidden levers that control it. You’ll learn how income is driven by the quality and quantity of your service, why irrelevance is the real enemy, how entrepreneurs drift out of sales consciousness, and how to increase capacity without burning out.
They walk you through what actually separates the entrepreneur who stays stuck under $1M from the one who crosses into $3M, $5M, and beyond… and they give you a practical set of habits you can start using immediately.
If you are a business owner who wants more revenue, more momentum, and more capacity, without burning yourself into the ground, this episode is for you! Tune in now!
Key Takeaways
Income growth starts when you accept that it’s a thinking game (0:02:07)
Right out of the gate, Jacq says increasing your income is not just a strategy conversation, it’s a habits and thought conversation.
Once you accept that income is created mentally first, you stop trying to “push” your way forward, and you start upgrading the mental foundation that determines your results.
The difference between under $1M and $5M+ is not effort (0:03:20)
Dave says that when he used to be under $1M, the thing that changed everything was his thinking. What’s really fascinating here is how he describes the shift when earning a million dollars a year became the new “normal.” At one point, Dave says $1M felt like climbing Mount Everest… and then goes on to say if they earned only a million now, they’d be in big trouble.
Your current income level is a reflection of what your mind has accepted as normal. And the moment you expand what feels normal, different decisions start to become obvious for you! Very exciting!
The two levers of income: Quality and Quantity (0:06:20)
Dave says he loves using money as a measurement metric because it’s trackable and it tells him, in a very simple and clean way, whether the quality and quantity of his service are increasing. He says your income increases from two places:
Quality: how good is your service, and what outcome does it produce?
Quantity: how many people are you serving, and how often?
If his service is getting better (quality), his money and income tend to rise. If he’s serving more people or expanding capacity (quantity), his money and income tend to rise.
So for Dave, money is basically the scoreboard that answers one question: “Is the quality and the quantity of my service increasing?”
If you want to really grow your business, you must make the shift from “doer” to “thinker.” (00:07:38)
Most entrepreneurs are stuck in a “one-man band” role. But if you stay in the doing, you stay stuck. Even if you’re very talented and hardworking, there is a ceiling.
But once you release control, and you get comfortable with bringing other team members in to do the “doing,” it frees up your time so you can start looking at the broader scope, and become the “thinker” in your business. Thinking about the business, thinking about money, thinking about service, thinking about systems, thinking about what actually moves the needle. High-level thinking!
Here’s the first habit of increasing your income: Set the number! (0:11:26)
When Dave starts breaking down the habit of increasing your income, the first step is almost embarrassingly simple:
How much money do you want to earn?
Set the number! He explains that once the number is in your mind, your thinking starts organizing around it. It begins to pull more thoughts, more ideas, more actions into alignment.
This is where people mess up: they want to “know how” before they commit to the number mentally. This is a mistake. Dave says it doesn’t work that way. You don’t need the how first. The “how” follows the commitment once you are clear on the number you are going after.
The core habit stack for increasing income (0:16:58)
In this section, Jacq distills the “increase income” habit into these four mental habits:
Set a clear goal
Provide service that leaves people with the impression of increase
Receive and implement feedback
Increase capacity through repetition and scale
Want to increase your income even faster?
Dave shares a simple next step: build a money consciousness on purpose!
If you want help installing these habits, Dave invites you to join the free 21-Day Money Momentum Challenge to start rewiring your mind for more income and better results.
Final Insight
There is so much more Dave and Jacq cover in this jam-packed episode… you’ll hear Jacq’s “Pilates teaching” story and how it ties into staying in the arena long enough to become world-class… how mastery comes from repetition and feedback… and what “money consciousness”, “sales consciousness”, and “service consciousness” really is… and how to use this awareness to multiply your income!
If you’ve been scaling, hiring, building, or trying to break through an income plateau, this episode has found you at just the right time!
