Crafting the Key to Unlock your Financial Success
Last time, I recounted the story of my daughter, her struggles on some exams and the distress it caused her. Go back and read it if you haven’t.
These were the lessons I pulled out from that example:
See failure as an opportunity to grow.
Take wins from another area of life and apply it to this area of struggle.
Humbly learn from those who go before you or are experts in the field.
Know which tricks and tips are effective for you.
Let’s apply these lessons to our financial life:
If you’re reading this, it is likely that your financial life is not where you want it to be. It’s causing anxiety, conflict, or depression in your life.
To see failure as an opportunity, you must first acknowledge - with courage - where you’ve failed.
Then ask, what areas of life have you seen success in, after struggling or failing? Are there lessons you could take from that successful part of your life and apply it to your financial life?
Humbly learning from those who have gone before you or are experts in the field means you must accept help, advice, and even correction from those who are successful in their financial life.
This is the one that I see that is both the easiest and the hardest task for people: It’s easy to access Dave Ramsey products, or YNAB teaching, or watch Caleb Hammer on YouTube and cognitively assent that they should do one or some or all of the things financial experts recomment. But the hard part is acknowledging what they are doing isn’t working, the change is painful, and they don’t embrace the necessary behavior change to grow and become a success.
Often one of the reasons that a client or person doesn’t embrace the necessary behavior changes is because they rightly understand that each person is different and what works for someone else won’t always work for them.
The problem with applying the “know which tricks and tips are effective for you” lesson is that it gives you the excuse to simply not try the tips and tricks.
And, especially in America, we apply a behavior change for a few days or few minutes, and when it doesn’t seem to work as quickly as we would like, we abandon it.
Let’s return to my daughter’s learning the stair-step method of spelling for her success in Latin. Initially she didn’t want to humbly accept Grandma’s instruction. Frankly, she felt embarrassed that she didn’t already have this spelling thing down. But when she tried it consistently and it resulted in a 100% on her test, she did feel a sense of accomplishment and found the momentum to keep trying that trick. It gave her hope that if she applies her trick to spelling, she’ll also begin to see success.
An Addendum:
You will establish Variations on a Theme
Variations on a Theme is replete within the musical world, which I have been a part of for most of my life. It means to take a core melody or literature story (in our case: a lesson) and alter it in a way that keeps it recognizable, while changing rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, or dynamics.
Let’s take a direct example: When I was first getting our budget together, I checked and reconciled it every day. I was devout to the lessons I had learned, and I put them into practice exactly how I had learned them. This is why Dave Ramsey is emphatic about his Baby Steps – you must adhere to the path before you begin varying your techniques.
It’s now been over 9 years that I’ve managed our budget so that we aren’t living paycheck-to-paycheck. This means that even though I haven’t always known the Dave Ramsey Method of Baby Steps, I had mastered our budget so well, I was able to move along them very quickly, and I understood the value of them in directing next steps that I needed. We have our budget under control, which allows us to look to what we want to do next (investing, retirement, kids’ education, vacation spending) and how to accomplish those goals.
Here's the caveat regarding Variations on a Theme: You must be completely honest with your failures and personal financial temptations.
If you aren’t being completely honest and vulnerable with yourself, you’ll continue doing the same thing you’ve always done – and getting the same result.
Crafting the Key to Unlock your Financial Success takes courage to honestly identify what actions haven’t worked in the past, and altering your behavior to create hope that you’ll financially thrive and triumph.
However, It is hard to change without someone coming alongside you. I know this not only from an academic and therapeutic standpoint, but also personally, as I’ve set out to achieve goals of my own. If you need me to come alongside you for guidance and prompting towards your ultimate goals, contact me here. I’m always happy to help!
(P.S. She received her latest Spelling Test back recently: From struggling to pass to a 90% A!)
