In this post, I want to continue talking about money mindset. In last week’s post, we talked about how money beliefs are important because, with money, or really any other topic, beliefs drive actions. Those actions then provide outcomes. Those outcomes then produce evidence which either contradicts or supports that belief. If the belief is supported, it becomes that much stronger. Or if it’s contradicted, the belief has to be reevaluated.
The beliefs are the only part of the equation that we have complete control over. You might think you have complete control over your actions, but you don’t. There could be obstacles, limitations, barriers that prevent you. The outcomes might or might not be in your control. The evidence certainly is not in your control. But the beliefs are, in fact, it’s the only aspect of the whole cycle that you have complete control over.
Beliefs can Change
No one can tell you or force you to believe a certain way. That then begs the question, okay, if beliefs are important, of all the beliefs out there, which is the best belief that you can have? I heard someone say one time, the best belief that you can have is that beliefs can change.
That is very much true.
The best belief that you can have is, that your beliefs can change over time. Some money beliefs can change over time.
I’ll give you a couple examples just of how some of my beliefs have changed over time. Some funny, some personal, some money related.
I used to believe that deviled eggs were disgusting. They smelled kind of weird. They looked kind of weird. They felt kind of weird. As a kid, I just did not like them, but I like them now. That belief has changed.
I used to have a belief that possessions or things that you had, derived your value or your status.
I used to think that spending money was way more fun than savings or investing.
I used to believe that if I didn’t achieve a goal that I set, then I failed.
I used to believe -this is kind of funny. In eighth grade, I think I was in eighth grade, maybe seventh grade, right around there, we had a pep rally conference or assembly. And it was all geared towards, the presidential election. I think it was the idea of trying to get young people interested with elections. At the time, 1992, you might remember George Herschel Walker Bush. Bush “one”, was running against Bill Clinton, Governor from Arkansas. It was sort of the establishment vice the young guy, if you will.
And we did this voting thing and we cast our votes for who we thought would be the, the best president. And I thought at that time, I believed that Bill Clinton would be an excellent president. I had no idea why. I didn’t know what their issues were. I didn’t know their stances are. I probably didn’t even know where Arkansas was at the time, but I just thought, hey, go with the young guy. Our beliefs change over time.
I used to believe that 40 was old. You remember being in your twenties, or late teens, man – you think 40, you’re like over the hill. That’s your parents’ age or plus. Now, I believe it’s just halftime and there’s a whole second half that you have. And generally, it’s a little bit better.
I used to believe that insurance was an expense to be minimized.
Don’t pay you extra insurance. You want to minimize that as much as you can.
These are just some beliefs that I had over time, but the reality is that beliefs can change. And that’s what I’m trying to illustrate there. Beliefs can change.
Two Reasons Beliefs Change
Now, there’s only really two reasons why a belief would change. One is we’re trying to avoid pain. We’re experiencing pain, we’re in pain or we’re going to experience pain, and we want to get out of it, or avoid it.
The other one is pleasure. We want to experience pleasure, we want to have pleasure, we want to attain pleasure.
Now, the reality is it can be both over time. It doesn’t have to be just one or the other. If you’ve listened to our backstory of our financial journey, it started with pain. I was in a really bad spot and I didn’t want to be there anymore.
And we started changing. But it evolved over time to really have pleasure. We got to experience things, we’ve got to do things, we’ve got to have things. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It could be a combination of both. Which is why it’s important to have a really compelling vision of what you want the future to have, which we’ll talk about in a, in a future episode.
Stories Shape our Beliefs
One of the books that I’ve recently read this past year was this by Dr. John Delony. It was Own Your Past, change Your Future. And it really helped me out with a couple of things that I want to talk to you about today when it comes to the idea of belief change. In the book, Dr. John Delony talks about stories and how stories impact our lives.
He talks about three types of stories in that book. The first one is stories from society. The larger society or culture in which we live. Some examples might be that as Americans we believe that that freedom is a good thing. That’s something that’s kind of universal, that Americans believe in. Generally we believe that the power belongs to the people. The declaration of independence starts with “we the people.” We believe in certain laws. There are certain things that a society should do, and certain things that a society shouldn’t do. Like speed limits. Speed limits are a great thing. Driving on the right side of the road, another helpful law! Those are great things. If you’ve ever been to some foreign countries where people just drive all over the place, no matter what side of the road they drive on the sidewalks, you’ll come back to America and appreciate that people drive on the right side of the road.
But not all societies are the same, some societies don’t value freedom. They don’t believe in power to the people. They don’t have certain laws. Like in Germany, there’s parts of the autobahn that have no speed limit, as an example. And different societies have different laws. The society that you grow up in and the culture that you grow up in shapes your beliefs.
He talks about stories from society. He also talks about stories from your family. If you think about your family, the roles that take place in your childhood family, or maybe in your family now, and the scripts that go along with that. Examples might be something like: the oldest, the firstborn, the firstborn is supposed to be the responsible one. They are generally asked to help out the most and they often are asked to do a whole lot more. That’s the oldest role.
And then you have, the baby. The baby’s the most coddled and the most spoiled and given the most – at least according to the other siblings.
And then you have the ones in the middle. The forgotten children, the ones that, they’re not the first, they’re not the last, they’re just there.
Mom might play a certain role, or dad might play a certain role, or a grandparent or aunt or uncle. These roles and these scripts that take place shape your beliefs to some degree. And that because many years later, when the family gets together – maybe at a family reunion, and everybody’s 40, 50, 60 years old, and yet they revert back to those initial family childhood scripts.
It just happens because it’s ingrained.
Dr. John DeLony talks about the last story. He talks about stories of society, stories from family, and then he talks about stories from our self. And of the three of them, it’s the stories that we tell ourselves that are the most powerful for two reasons.
Number one, you trust yourself the most. You might not trust yourself explicitly, but you trust yourself the most. If somebody tells you something external to you, you then have to evaluate, do you believe that to be true in your mind?
But something you tell yourself something, it’s automatically true. It doesn’t have to be evaluated because you’re telling yourself it, therefore it must be true, because you wouldn’t lie to yourself!
The second reason that the stories from yourself are the most powerful is because they get repeated the most. Something that happens, you believe a story, and then you repeat it and you repeat it.
And the frequency of it, varies obviously. But the more you repeat a story, the more ingrained that story becomes, and the more powerful it is to shape your beliefs.
The reality is that stories are nothing more than the takeaways from an event. An event occurs, and then there’s the meaning that we associate with that event. It might be true, it might not be true, it’s just our perspective of what took place.
The Meaning of Events
I’ll give you two examples. One personal one, and then one you maybe have experienced. A couple years ago, I think I told you in our story that Erica was in the Navy Reserves and 2017 or 2018, somewhere right around there she got orders for a mobilization. She got a deployment; she got tagged for a deployment. That was in the event.
Erica had to leave us for about 10 months go do some training, to do a deployment, and then she would come back. That was an event. That was something that took place.
And then based upon that event some of my kids, for example, they kind of felt abandoned. They felt like mom left them, because she had to leave for 10 months or so. That’s how they took that event. That’s the meaning that they associated with it.
My association was that I’m a bad husband. I didn’t do a good job of providing my wife. My wife has to leave us to go do this thing because I didn’t provide well enough for us. That was the meaning that I drew from that event.
Erica’s meaning was, Hey, I’ve been in the reserve all this time. My number just got called, and it’s just something I have to do . That was her kind of takeaway. I mean, she didn’t like it, but it had to occur. One event took place, Erica got orders to go to a to do a mobilization. And three different people took three different meanings from the same event. Well, which one’s true? Well, it’s up to us to decide what’s true.
Maybe you’ve experienced this in your past, or you will in your future. You’re walking down the hall and you pass your boss, and your boss makes eye contact with you, and then looks down. He or she walks by and doesn’t acknowledge you, doesn’t say hi to you. That’s an event. You pass your boss in the hallway.
Well, what’s the meaning associated with that? You might think, oh, my boss is a jerk. He or she doesn’t like me. They don’t value me. He doesn’t even recognize me. Won’t even say hi to me. And that’s a meaning. And that could be true. Your boss could be a jerk.
But maybe the boss has something on their mind. Something they’re musing on a problem or deep in thought about something. Maybe they just come out of a meeting and they’re trying to process something . Or maybe they are looking down, because maybe they just got some really, really bad news about something that’s going to take place and they don’t want to transfer that onto you. You’re trying to read motives and intent of somebody.
And the reality is that person has, maybe they didn’t even see you. Just because they made eye contact with you, didn’t mean they actually saw you. Maybe they weren’t conscious of who it was and they just kind of walked on past you. My point is that there’s an event and then there’s meanings to those events.
Money Stories
And my guess is that you have stories because we all do about money that you’ve inherited from society, that you’ve inherited from your family, and that you’ve told yourself over time.
Some examples that you may be inherited from, or you’ve heard of from society is that that wealth inequality is unjust. “We need to change the wealth inequality in our society.” Maybe you’ve heard this, “everybody needs to pay their fair share of taxes.” Or “all the jobs are going overseas.” How about this, “Everything would be fine if it just wasn’t for this inflation. Inflation’s just destroying everything.” Maybe these are stories that we’ve associated meaning to, that we’ve taken from events.
Maybe you’ve heard some in your family. Maybe as a child you heard your mom and dad say “it’s not in the budget.” “We can’t afford that.” Maybe your mom or your dad kept information away from the other, and they’d say, “Hey, I’ll buy this for you. But let’s just keep it between us. Don’t tell your mom or dad.”
Or maybe you heard your dad say something like, “never put money in the market. You can’t trust the market. And for that matter, don’t trust banks either. Keep your money safe in your own home.” Maybe you’ve heard, “Hey, do you think money grows on trees?” I always got a kind of kick out of that one. Yes – technically, the paper does come from the tree, but…. These are stories from events have taken place. Maybe dad lost some money in the market, or his parents lost money in the market and the Great Depression or something like that. And therefore, you’ve been told never put money in the market. But you have to evaluate, is that true or is that not true?
Maybe some stories you tell yourself is, “I’m just not good with money.”
“I’m never going to get ahead.”
“My retirement dreams never going to happen.”
The reality is, those stories that you tell yourself, and those become the controlling narratives in your life. If you tell yourself you’re not good with money, guess what? You’re not going to be with good with money. If you tell yourself you’re never going to get ahead, guess what? You’re never going to get ahead because you’re going to self-sabotage because that belief is driving your actions, which then drives the evidence, which reinforces you, your belief of, “I’m never going to get ahead.” You do things that’s going to cause you to not get ahead. And the outcome, surprise surprise, is that you don’t get ahead. Which then reinforces the evidence of you’re not getting ahead.
That belief then becomes stronger. And that loop just continues. This is why you have to break the cycle of beliefs. And the reality is you have to evaluate, are these beliefs that you have true? Because otherwise you just continue to play them out.
Zig Ziglar used to talk about a story about a newlywed that got married, a husband and wife. At their first Thanksgiving time she made a ham, this new wife made a ham. And they brought this ham home and she chopped off the end of it and put in the oven. The husband’s like, what’d you do that for? What’d you cut off the end of the ham? She goes, you always cut off the ham. He says, well, why?
And she say, “well, I don’t know. My mom always did it.” They get mom on the phone, and they say, “Hey mom, why do you cut off the end of the ham? I got a new ham. I cut off the end, I put in the oven. My husband wants to know why we did that. And I said, I do it because you did it.” And mom says, “well, I don’t know why you did it. I don’t even know why I did it. I did it because grandmom did it.” They call grandmom, get on the phone and say, “Hey grandmom , I cut off the end of the ham, I got here for Thanksgiving and I did it because mom did it. And mom did it because you did it. So, we’re wondering why you did it?” And Grandmom says, well, I don’t know why you two did it, but my pan was too short.
<Laugh>
Three Powerful Beliefs
What happens is we do things because we’ve inherited the stories that we never take the time to evaluate, and they become controlling narratives and they play out in our lives. I want to give you three powerful beliefs that I believe that will enhance your money, beliefs, or really any other, other area of life.
Belief number one I want you to try to have, is that your beliefs can change. And change can occur for the better.
Your beliefs can change. Your life can change. Your money can change for the better. Proverbs 13:11 says, “hope deferred maketh the heart sick. But when desire comes, it’s a tree of life.”
Hope deferred. Hope is a belief or faith or intent. Hope. The hope the things of the future can be better. When it’s deferred, this is – it’s put off, when you don’t have it, it makes the heart sick. You have sadness, you have sorrow, you have depression.
But when desire comes, it’s a tree of life. Desire that things can be better. It’s a life-giving force that can play out tremendously in your life. It’ll help you derive the pleasure you’re trying to get or away from pain. But if you don’t have the belief that it can get better, you just stay in that pain, and you never achieve that pleasure.
Belief number two that you should consider having because it’ll enhance your money, is the belief in personal accountability.
Going back to Dr. Delony’s book, the title says, own your past. Own your past. You don’t have to like your past, you don’t have to appreciate your past. You could have not enjoyed your past, but you have to own it. You have to recognize that you are where you are today financially speaking, because of the things that you’ve done in your past. If you don’t like where you are, it’s because of the decisions, actions, choices, and behaviors you’ve done in your past. You are a sum of the total decisions you’ve made with your money in the past. And if you don’t like what you’re getting, you have to do something different.
Doing the same thing and expecting different result is the definition of insanity. If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting. If you don’t like it, you have to do things differently. Because you are where you are today because of the things you’ve done in the past. It’s personal accountability. You have to believe that.
The third thing is you have to also believe in personal agency. Agency is the idea of where’s the power come of change? What’s driving your life? It can be an external thing, or it can be internal. If it’s external, then something or someone else is driving your life. If it’s internal, you believe that you have the power to change things. You have the power to decide what your future is going to be.
Like I’ve said, many people this, a lot of times in the past, the decisions you make in your household have more impact on your money than the decisions made in the White House. People think whatever takes place in the White House is going to change my life. And it might, but in a very, very small way, but the decisions you make in your house are going to play out in a large way in of your financial future. You have to believe that you have the power and you can make the decisions to enhance your financial life.
Because I hate to tell you, there’s no calvary coming. There’s nobody going to come and save your life in any aspect, money or anything else. You have to do it.
Now you say, okay, I don’t, I believe that I can believe that things can be better, but I don’t really get these two last things. Personal accountability, personal agency. I don’t really believe in those. Well, let me ask you this.
Consider This Use Case
Today’s, it’s August 2023. If you could go back 10 years to summer of 2013, and you could redo the last 10 years, would you have done things differently in your financial life? Would you have done things different financially in the last 10 years? My guess is you would answer yes, I think we all would.
Okay, well, what are some things that you would’ve done differently?
Maybe you would say, “well, I would’ve saved more. I would’ve paid more attention to my career, would’ve tried to make more. I was more intentional and diligent about my money. Would’ve done a budget, I would’ve communicated more my spouse. I would’ve invested more, would’ve saved more, would’ve gotten out of debt, would’ve made this decision differently, would’ve taught my children more, etc.
But here is the thing, those are things that you would’ve done differently, that you had (in the past) the power to do. Well, if you were to go back and redo them, that means you had the belief at the time to make a decision or not. And it means you had the power, and the drive to do it, and you chose not to, or you chose to, which means you’re responsible for it. And that’s the idea.
Hopefully, this proves out that if you could go back 10 years ago, if you would’ve done things differently that you could have now, you as maybe have said, well, I wish that, President Obama would’ve did this, or President Trump would’ve did that. But you have no control over that.
But if you would’ve done things in your life that would have driven different outcomes, you have agency in your life and you have to take personal accountability of where you are.
Three powerful things that you can incorporate in your life will very, very much help you when it comes to money, the belief that change is possible for the better. The belief in personal accountability. And the belief in personal agency.
A Micro Action
We’re going to talk more about these things in terms of identity and money scripts and some future episodes. But I want to try to give you a micro action here that you can maybe do this week won’t take you a long time, is take a little bit of time and reflect upon the money stories that you’ve inherited and the money stories you’ve told yourself. Some money stories from society, maybe just one, a money story that you’ve inherited from your family. Maybe just one And a money story you tell yourself.
Take a moment just to write that out, write it on a piece of paper, and then just look at it and evaluate it. Is this true? And is this serving me? Are these beliefs that I had these helping my financial wellbeing or is it hurting it?
And I think that’ll help you, because beliefs, drive actions, which derive outcomes, which cause evidence to reinforce that belief.
I hope this is helpful for you. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out and connect with me.
And until next time, I hope you have a great day.
