Achieve Financial Success by Managing Someone Important – You!
June 10, 2011At work recently I’ve been assigned something completely different than anything I’ve ever done before, so I’m doing a whole lot of training to learn some new things. This has been a test of “can an old dog learn new tricks?” The good news is that it looks like it’s possible!
It was during one of the training sessions with Bruce (Check out his blogs every Thursday!) that he pointed out something that we all know, but never realize because we’re too close to it. Sometimes, we’re our own worst enemies. I have a tendency to overthink things at times. In the midst of training, I lapse into this mode and at times take two steps backward. It’s very frustrating when you really want to make progress but end up regressing. I’m living through that right now. I talk to people all the time who feel like they are doing this in their financial lives. I think this training experience is going to make me better equipped to handle people experiencing a similar thing financially. Here’s how.
One of the things I’ve learned is that for me to stop regressing and get the wheels moving in the right direction, I need to not beat myself up when I make a mistake. Forgive myself. Learn from the mistakes. Again remember to not beat myself up. And make a subtle change in the way I do things, let the bump in the road be a trigger to get me moving back in the right direction.
Can this lesson be applied to our financial lives? Heck, yeah. If you have been making progress toward your longer term goals and then do something financially that stops your progress and takes you backward a few steps (credit card spending, stop using a great expense tracking system, live above our means for a brief period, etc.), don’t beat yourself up. It happens. Forgive yourself for taking a step back, because if you dwell on the misstep you will be stuck there for a long time. Cut yourself some slack and rededicate yourself to the long term goals. Give yourself a few minutes to quickly analyze why you regressed, as a learning tool so that it can happen less frequently. Remember to stay positive and not beat yourself up in the analysis process. Then, make whatever change you need to make and move forward.
In a great business book (Switch, by Chip & Dan Heath), they talk about something called “action triggers.” An action trigger would be something like, “Right after I brush my teeth in the morning, I’ll put on my gym clothes and a hat (my bed head in the morning is ridiculous!) and go straight to the gym.” It prompts an action after a specific event. Studies show that people who set up action triggers for themselves tend to have higher success rates for completing tasks than people who don’t set these triggers. I remember one person I met with who was a “reformed shopper” and 2 years into paying off significant credit card balances (with 4 months of payments remaining), she went on a massive shopping spree and went from 4 months of payments to 7 and was in full fledged “beating herself up” mode when we met. I had just read Switch and as we talked about the action triggers, I decided to give her my copy of the book. Her shopping was, unbeknownst to her at the time, a trigger that went off during relationship crisis. She set a new trigger, to do something productive (gym, run, read a great book she’s had on her reading list) rather than shop. She created a positive response to a negative event that would have formerly been very detrimental to her financial situation.
I’ve learned to do that in training. I’m hoping that anyone looking for a way to create positive change checks out Switch and learns how to use the action trigger method of bouncing back from adversity.