Written by: Mike Senecal
Edited by: Lillian Guevara-Castro
Reviewed by: Adam West
In a Nutshell: Humans aren’t computers, but when we think systematically about a problem, we’re often able to solve it. Unfortunately, the biggest problem we have is in our heads, says Sarah Centrella, best-selling author and CEO of the VIVIAMO corporate coaching company. Centrella’s nine-step life coaching system can help you understand yourself and what you want, transform your thoughts into actions, and live in the moment while building a better future. Centrella’s multimedia presence inspires her audience to achieve their goals — financial and otherwise.
Sometimes, you have to hit the reset button in life — for whatever reason. Here at BadCredit.org, we know better than most that financial issues prompt a lot of resets. There’s something about the finality of numbers that helps people realize they need to make a change.
For Sarah Centrella, best-selling author and CEO of the VIVIAMO corporate coaching company, money issues arise for unique reasons depending on the individual. But no matter where you are in life, you have something in common with millions if you feel stuck in a money rut: a pattern of thinking — a mindset — that holds you back instead of propelling you forward.
Of course, counterproductive thinking can affect your life in many ways. Centrella’s nine-step life coaching system, the Centrella Method™, helps us connect the dots between the financial challenges we see here at BadCredit.org and other areas of life, including career, relationships, and even personal fitness. If you feel events are controlling you instead of the other way around, the Centrella Method can help.
“Mindset is highly tied to financial abundance and can cause self-sabotaging behaviors that impede people from achieving their goals,” Centrella said. “My method can help you work toward a better future but also enjoy the journey along the way.”
Centrella should know. While a mother of infant twins and a 5-year-old, she faced bankruptcy, a home foreclosure, and the sudden loss of her marriage during the financial crisis of 2008. As her losses piled up, she was forced to confront her life at a fundamental level and take small steps forward even when she didn’t know where she was going.
One step led to another — and another. Now, Centrella helps others hit the mindset reset button through results-oriented personal and corporate coaching, a blog with a readership in the millions, and a popular podcast. She leads an online hub for coaching and connections and is a sought-after motivational speaker with three best-selling books under her belt.
“Whether you’re open to opportunities or blocking yourself financially, it all comes down to what you tell yourself and what you believe,” Centrella said. “The motivation will come once your goals are clear.”
Clarify Your Vision Through the 9-Step Centrella Method
Our team knows how financial issues can disrupt lives. For millions in today’s economy, a sudden emergency expense of a few hundred dollars can be enough to threaten a downward spiral.
Every quarter, U.S. consumer credit card debt reaches a new high above $1 trillion. FICO, the company that produces the most widely used model for calculating credit scores, reported in March 2024 that the average FICO score had declined for the first time in a decade.
The Centrella Method applies to specific situations and goals as well as to higher-level thinking about the course of one’s life.
“If you want a promotion, or to start a business, or to move abroad, you can plug in the nine steps and get the result that you want,” Centrella said. “Or, you can broaden the method to your entire life and ask yourself what you want your next five years to look like.”
Achieving your goal, whatever it is, requires being intentional about how you’re living your life and what you’re creating to enhance your future. Step five of the Centrella Method involves learning what Centrella calls “futureboarding” — her tool to help you visualize your wants and needs.
She didn’t think much about the value of the exercise when she began experimenting with it in 2008. Today, she realizes that futureboarding can have a potentially profound effect on the course of a person’s life by helping you put your dreams in physical form.
“Most people realize that visualization can be super powerful,” Centrella said. “It’s something athletes have talked about for years and years.”
Futureboarding builds on the vision-boarding trend of the early 2000s. People who create vision boards cut pictures from magazines and other printed sources to post their dreams.
Centrella’s hack updates vision boarding by teaching clients to search for pictures on Pinterest rather than in print. Connecting the dots through savvy Pinterest searches helps bring the vision you create in your mind to life.
“It becomes motivating because now, you have clarity. Now, you know what you want. Now, you know what you’re working for,” Centrella said.
Building Momentum Toward Success
However, searching for just the right Pinterest pictures to illustrate your dreams in all their glorious detail doesn’t finish the job. It’s what you do with your futureboard that counts.
That’s where Centrella’s concept of changing one’s mindset brings the most value to clients. If you’ve ever worked hard to build something — a business or even a new life — you know you need motivation.
A lot of times, people hit dead spots where they’re focusing on processes and benchmarks rather than the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Much of the Centrella Method focuses on getting over that hump.
“I believe in intention and in being super clear about what I want, why I want it, why it’s important to me, and why it makes me happy,” Centrella said. “Knowing that is where the motivation comes from.”
To that end, the Centrella Method includes tools and exercises to help participants interrogate their inner monologue, so to speak — that narrative running continually through our heads that can have more power over us than it should.
Becoming conscious of your inner voice’s hold over you, Centrella said, is the key to overcoming the analysis paralysis of having too much information and too many choices. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
The program then teaches techniques for redirecting your inner voice toward the vision of your futureboard by aligning it with what you now know you want. You’re not going to achieve the outcome you wish if your actions run counter to your goals.
Meanwhile, Centrella builds in exercises to teach the value of the here and now. The combination of modifying one’s behavior and goals toward self-actualization and acceptance eases the path to a resolution.
“It’s lack of vision that causes you to fear the unknown of what’s coming next in your life,” Centrella said. “But once you’re clear about what it takes to get you where you want to go, every day has a little mission behind it, and you get one step closer to fulfillment.”
Make Space for Possibilities — And They Will Come
Centrella argues that when people sync their actions and goals, they set themselves up for a spiral of improvement rather than a turn toward a crisis.
You don’t wake up and find you’ve achieved something overnight. But when you reach a little higher every day, it feeds your wins, so they bring more fulfillment over time. Getting into that positive feedback loop encourages the achievements and opportunities of the future to materialize as if out of thin air.
That can work no matter where you are in life. Here at BadCredit.org, we talk a lot about consumers struggling against economic challenges and using financial services to improve their lives. But even influential corporate leaders, including clients of Centrella, sometimes struggle for the “why” behind the effort they bring to their work.
“You open yourself up to possibility when you can think beyond today,” Centrella said. “If all you’re thinking about is what’s happening right now, you can’t see opportunity even when it’s staring you in the face.”
For folks interested in getting a handle on their finances, building toward a better future naturally encourages a better attitude toward money. People with money goals naturally become better stewards of their finances. They learn and engage in research and study to grow their assets through investing.
Then, when things are moving along according to plan, it’s time to take stock and realize the true purpose of lasting wealth: security for oneself and one’s family, now and in the future. That’s where Centrella will take you, if you let her, toward a future where fulfillment comes first.
“Looking at your finances from that perspective can really change how quickly you bring more money into your life,” Centrella said. “It also helps you do good things with it that change your financial future and, ideally, the future of your family.”
