Why are we constantly pursuing money? Do we want money for money’s sake? Does money guarantee happiness, and is the pursuit of money a goal worth pursuing? We put a lot of pressure on our ability to make money. Sure we need to make money to live and provide for our families; I’m not saying that’s not important. But somehow, along the way, we lose sight of ourselves. Money becomes more important than our values or, maybe more accurately, becomes our only value. Money at its core is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the person who’s holding it. Our behaviors dictate our actions, our thoughts dictate our identity, and our identity influences our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.
Simply put, we can make all the money in the world, but if we don’t work on ourselves and have the proper perspective, it won’t mean anything. When you work on yourself, everything else comes into place. Investing in yourself is the best investment you’ll ever make. Having all the money in the world won’t provide happiness or freedom unless we can see money for what it is, a tool at our disposal. It is not the solution; we are the solution. It is time for you to change your perspective.
Key principles for changing your perspective
1) Let go of the illusion of control
We all constantly thirst for control, which can be highly useful in life; taking responsibility for our actions and being accountable is a great thing, but not accepting the reality of how much we can control leads to disaster. What we believe we can control directly impacts our identity. If we can control outcomes and the outcomes are “bad,” we have failed. In order to change our perspective, we need to understand what we can really control, which spoiler alert isn’t very much.
When we sit back and think about it, what do we actually control in our lives? Can we control how others perceive us or our actions? What about the weather, the stock market, whether we get the promotion, and our relationships? The reality is most of life’s outcomes are out of our control. So the question is, what do we control?
We only have direct control of how we choose to respond to a given situation and our conscious thoughts towards people or situations. Financial and personal peace begins with releasing what you don’t have control over and mastering what you do.
Let’s get practical. Let’s say you are going for a promotion at work. Are you in control of getting the promotion? Sure, you have influence over the promotion by how hard you work and your job performance, but ultimately you do not decide whether or not you get the promotion. So focusing on the promotion is wasting time on what you should be focusing on, bettering yourself. Anytime something we want is outside of our control, our answer should be to look inward, and finances are no exception. To get what we want, we must focus on what we can control.
2) Replacing Trying with Training
I think I use and hear the word try in some form at least 100 times a day. “I tried my best.” “I’ll try and do better.” “I am trying to stick to this diet, but it’s just so hard.”
According to the Merriam-webster dictionary, try is defined as “to make an effort to do something: to attempt to accomplish or complete something.” We need to completely get rid of the mindset of trying. Trying implies an action that is not in line with your identity. When we say try, we leave it up to willpower which will inevitably run out. Trying also is glued to a specific pass or fail outcome. (add more)
We don’t want to try on anything of importance.
Instead, we want to train. Training is defined as “to teach so as to make fit, qualified, or proficient: to make prepared.” Training is connected to your identity. If you try to run a marathon, the odds are you will fail. If you train for a marathon, you will succeed. Our mindset is critical, and we need to be people who train.
The same is true in finances. If you try to get out of debt and become financially free, the road will be difficult. If you train yourself to be a financially free person, you will inevitably become financially free. To learn more about what makes people financially truly free, check out this article on the seven characteristics that all financially independent people share.
3) Embrace and Accept rather than avoid Avoid and Deny
Self-awareness is critical to changing our perspective. If we don’t understand our typical patterns when handling difficult or stressful situations, we don’t give ourselves a chance to overcome them in the future. We like to think of ourselves as self-aware people, but our actions and thoughts often don’t support this narrative.
It is natural to avoid and deny problems, but unfortunately, problems thrive in the dark. When we face a difficult or stressful situation, we will typically avoid or deny it, and sometimes if we are really on top of our A-game, we do both. It feels more comfortable not facing the unknown head-on and challenging ourselves to endure. This is especially true in our financial lives. We are on the edge of bankruptcy, but we refuse to make any changes. We don’t want to take a look at our spending habits because it is too scary to face the mountain of debt.
The first step in dealing with any problem is accepting that the problem is there in the first place. The second thing we must do to change our perspective is to realize that the obstacle in front of us is the way forward. I love how Marcus Aurelius puts it, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Every obstacle provides us a unique opportunity to grow and improve ourselves and the world around us, or it can be another stumbling block that we can’t overcome. The major shift occurs when you realize that you get to choose which way you want to look at it, and that choice will dramatically affect every area of your life.
