Ok. Hopefully, you’ve taken my advice and you are on the path to recognizing a pattern in your relationship with money. Good for you!
While you are doing that, allow me to share some sage advice on how you got here in the first place. You see, you didn’t just happen upon today. You have made literally millions of decisions that brought you to this very place. Each of us makes decisions all day long, every day. Like anything else, once it becomes a routine it may not feel like you are making decisions. You may just feel like life is happening to you. But I assure you that life is not happening to you. On the contrary, you are happening to life. That is, with each decision you make, each action you take and each thing you choose to do or not to do, you are shaping your present and your future. Which brings me to today’s topic. No matter what we do in this moment or any other, the only thing that is completely out of our control is the past. You do agree with me, right?
Well if we can’t do anything to change our past, then why do so many of us choose to spend the bulk of our time there? Every day I hear people talking about past events. “He said this. She said that.” Worse, I hear people telling me the reason something is not happening today is because of what happened yesterday. The truth is that whatever you want to happen today is not happening because your energy is in yesterday. If your energy isn’t present, how would you expect to be present? Being present is something that we are born fully capable of. We socialize that ability out of ourselves. Some of us recognize it and go through great effort to get it back. That re-aquired skill has a name. It is called success. And you can apply it to anything. Since this is a blog about money, let me show you the importance of being present in making good financial decisions.
If you were to look at your current financial situation and wish it was better, what would be the best course of action to get things going in the right direction? Well, lets compare money management to dieting or weight management. It seems that everyone in America has been on some sort of a diet at one time or another. So what is the best way to lose weight? The fact is, there are many great ways to lose weight. Not eating is probably the best way that I could think of. I looked it up and it is a fact that by not eating you will definitely lose weight. It is also a fact that eventually you will get sick and then you’ll die. But you have to admit, as far as losing weight goes, it is definitely the best way to do it. Most every dieter has fallen into the yo yo effect. You focus on losing weight, you lose some weight and then inevitably you gain it back. Why? It is because your focus is all wrong. Your focus should not be on losing weight. Your focus should be on attaining and then maintaining your optimum weight. If that were the case, you would not try to lose as much weight as you could as soon as you could. Instead, you would study what you could improve upon. You would learn better ways to prepare food. You would take out what isn’t good and replace it with things that are. It would become a positive and permanent patterned behavior. It would simply replace your current negative patterned behavior. But of course to do this, the first step would be to recognize and commit to changing your current negative patterned behavior.
The big problem comes when people are faced with this choice. Usually, you don’t want to recognize your current behavior because then you would have to own it. That is, take responsibility for it. I often wonder why that is so hard for people to do. Whenever someone does something that they think is good, the usual response is to take credit for it. Hang out in a corporate boardroom for a few hours and you’ll see what I mean. So if we take credit when we do something good, why do we have such trouble accepting responsibility for things that didn’t work out the way we had hoped? My feeling is that when things go well, we take credit in the present. When things do not look as good, we seemingly have a need to look into our past to find out why. No one appears to want to open that door. All kinds of scary things in there.
Well I have some good news for you. You don’t have to look at your past. Of course you can if you want to. It may even help you if you did. But if you find it scary or paralyzing, you don’t have to do it. You just have to change how you do things in your present and that will change your now and your future.
There are many ways to do this effectively. You can practice breathing, meditation, guided imagery or yoga. Those are all great long term ways to learn to be calm and present. For the purposes of making it easy though, lets try this. Just start catching yourself. Make it a game. Any time you notice your thoughts or words in the past, just stop and gently remind yourself that you need to return to now. If you are diligent about practicing this, I promise you that you will need to do it less and less. Being in the past is a habit. So is being in the present. Once you make being present a habit, there will be less and less time for the past.
So……we’ve reached the million dollar question. Great advice Dino. Thanks. But what does being present have to do with money?
Everything!
Get practicing and I’ll explain more in my next blog entry. Good luck!
