Since I was a little girl, I have been active. Growing up on a farm with horses and gardens and lawns, a lake near by and a mysterious, murky pond within wondering distance, lent itself to never ending physical activity, exploration and play.
Then, in college, I found my way into Oregon State University’s entertaining weight room (hello…young men, tank tops, muscles?) and the pool and discovered my first passion…fitness and nutrition. I was enthralled with learning about foods, what exercise did to the body and how, what vitamins we needed to stay healthy, and began to form what I now recognize as my ‘purpose’ in life…empowering others to be responsible for themselves.
So even though you think that my focus is financial education and teaching people about money, my focus is always, first and foremost, inviting you to think differently about money AND life. I love providing you with tools that help you continue to take ownership of your entire life and how it shows up for you.
Though Pay Yourself First usually has to do with money, today’s article involves ALL of the ways we need to pay ourselves first. Not just in the realm of money, but health, exercise, time to think, and more. I hope you enjoy this invitation to think a little differently today.
Pay Yourself First with Time to Think
If there’s one thing I know it’s that we all think too much. The problem is that we often think too much about the wrong stuff. The reason for this is two fold:
1. We haven’t learned how to control our thinking, and,
2. We create lives that are so busy that we don’t take time to practice controlling our thinking.
And yes, I do mean we create busy lives. We all have the same 24 hours in our days. It’s a matter of making priorities about how we SPEND that time. I haven’t met a human being alive that can’t find 15 minutes in his or her day to stop and just think.
The thing is…unless you have learned that you can, and must, control your thoughts, that 15 minutes won’t be productive or enjoyable for you. One of the best and easiest books to read on the power of controlling your thoughts is “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen. I read it years ago and it was great. It’s short and easy to digest.
Do yourself a favor and grab this book. Then go find make some time to read it so YOU can start taking time to think the right thoughts for you and YOUR life.
Pay Yourself First with Time to Eat Well
Let’s face it…if there is one believe, it’s that ‘we are what we eat.’ We’re also what we put on our skin, and what we breath, and what we drink. We can’t NOT be.
One of the situations that has always confused me is when parents are eating a great healthy salad but the kids are eating French fries. After all, they’re ‘just’ kids. What part of the fact that those kids grow into adults do some parents not understand. If you want to make a healthy adult, you have to feed the little adult healthy food. I mean, if you were growing tomatoes and feeding the plant poison, I promise you’d never get a single healthy tomato on that plant!
If you find yourself saying, “I don’t have time to eat well,” my suggestion to you is to ask yourself what part of you isn’t important enough to feed well? Do you not love yourself enough to feed that beautiful container you get to move about the planet in what it needs to be healthy?
Eating healthy isn’t rocket science and doesn’t take any more time that eating unhealthy food. And not knowing how to cook isn’t an excuse either. If I’m traveling and hungry, I can just as easily choose a piece of fruit, a container of yogurt, a roll and some carrots. And this is always less expensive than eating out.
So find a way to say thank you to your body by providing it with healthy nutritious food.
Pay Yourself First with Time to Move Your Body
As you already know, my first love is fitness. Anyone who knows me knows that before I do anything else, I take time in the morning to move my body. Sometimes that may only be 15 minutes of yoga, but I put my body through a routine of stretches that invites my brain to wake up and my joints to move. This frees up my creative juices as well and allows me to go into my day ready to receive whatever I’m attracting into it that day.
Our bodies aren’t meant to be stationary. This machine I’m typing on is one of humanities biggest double-edged swords. It has allowed us opportunities and information that was difficult at best before we invented the computer. On the other hand, it is changing the way we think and function with not only the world but each other.
Again, exercise isn’t rocket science. Stretch a little (buy a beginning yoga DVD), walk every day for half an hour, get an exercise ball to work those abs and back, do some pushups, etc. And you don’t have to go to the gym. Simply pay yourself some time every day to move your body and I promise it will pay you back in the long run.
Bottom line…move it or use it. The more active you are now, the more active you’ll be later.
Pay Yourself First with Time to Do Something Nice for Someone Else
After 52 years on this beautiful planet, another thing that I know is that when I do something nice for someone else just because I want to, it affects me as much as it affects the person I’m helping. And everyone who has ever attended my Train-the-Trainer workshop has always agreed.
You know that warm, yummy feeling you get when you do something nice for someone or make them feel great in some way? That’s your body telling you that you were just doing your purpose. And that warm, yummy feeling pays your body wonderful rewards in the form of stress reduction and happiness hormones.
So take a couple of minutes every morning and think about what you can do for someone else. Once you’re in the habit of doing for others, you’ll be amazed at how your world turns into a world where other people do things for you as well. Try it!
Pay Yourself First with Time to Love Someone
This might seem pretty obvious but it’s one of the hardest things for people to take time for. Again, our busy, busy, busy lives interfere most often with our most basic emotion, and need…love.
Loving someone doesn’t have to mean going out to dinner, taking them to a movie, making dinner for them, etc. Loving someone could be visiting someone in the hospital, reaching out a hand and rubbing a back for a few minutes, saying I love you, tucking a child in at night without your cell phone.
If love really is all there is, then if you’re not taking time for love in your life, you’re missing what is.
Pay yourself the opportunity to experience love today.
Pay Yourself First with Money for Your Older Self
This is the most obvious place to pay yourself first and the first place in your life where the practice can slip between your finger tips. We let all myriad of events and situations get in the way of providing for our older selves.
In our adult programs, we often do a visualization where we take people forward to talk to their older selves. It’s a profound experience for most people because they simply haven’t thought about it in the way we present it.
Pay Yourself First is the first lesson our campers learn when they play The Money Game and it’s reinforced with every round of the game. Over and over again, they get paid and pay themselves first. By the end of the game, they’ve got the idea!
There IS an older version of yourself waiting inside of YOU for you to do the right thing financially. If you don’t, that older person could be living a life of poverty, ill-health and unhappiness…all because you didn’t pay yourself first while you were young enough to do so.
If you’d like to listen to an audio of one of this visualization, click here.
OK, you’re on your own now to pay yourself in all sorts of yummy ways. I hope you enjoy it thoroughly.
Just something to think about…
COFFEE TIP I PROMISED YOU: How to get a .99 cent iced coffee!
Stop by one of those little convenience stores at a local gas station. Do the following:
1) Grab a plastic container they offer for the soda machine.
2) Fill it with whatever you want in your iced coffee: milk, specialty creamers (I LOVE the Irish Cream flavored ones:-), syrup if they have them.
3) Fill the container to the brim with ice from the soda machine (yes, to the brim…remember, you’re going to pour hot coffee over the ice).
4) Choose the type of coffee you want and just fill it with coffee instead of soda.
I did this last week at a gas station by the LAX and it was .99 and it was huge!
Last week I started a multi-part exploration of a great book I just read called Switch. We talked about the idea of ‘looking for the bright spot‘, i.e., look for what is already working to find clues on how to cause change in our own lives as well as create global changes.
I asked you three questions so that you would ponder what has worked for you in terms of your finances. A few of you shared comments. Thanks for that. It seems that setting a powerful goal is a great way to inspire change in human beings:-). You can still go back and comment on last week’s blog if you haven’t already. It really helps others see that they aren’t alone.
Switch to what you should focus on
Today I want to talk about another aspect the book discusses…the Heath brothers call it shrinking the change. I want to relate this back to the powerful goal that I just mentioned.
Picture this…
There you are…laying on your death bed (I think we should rename that) and if you’re lucky enough to be cognizant, you’re ruminating back over a lifetime of experiences and relationships, evaluating how ‘well’ you lived your life, if your life was a success or any number of other evaluation methods human beings choose to use at the end of their days.
Have you ever wondered what ‘success’ really looks like? I mean, really…we see this word everywhere and yet the definition of success is nebulous to most people. It’s often (we think) tied to how much money we end up accumulating (NOT) or what position we rise to in our careers (NOT) or even how expensive our cars are or how big our houses are (DEFINITELY NOT). Then if it isn’t these things, what exactly IS success and how do we measure it?
A better question I have found is, “Do we need to measure it in the first place?”
Humanity seems all too focused on this strange judgment process of trying to figure out whether we did life right or wrong. And it seems to cost many human beings their happiness.
Shrinking the Definition (i.e., inspiring change)
What if we define success this way…
Success is a measure of how we live each moment. If we enjoyed the moment, we were successful. If we didn’t enjoy the moment, we weren’t.
Problem with THIS definition is that as humans, we’d then be focused with some illusive measure of ‘ultimate success’ by trying to figure out if we actually enjoyed more moments than not. And this is where we corrupt the entire process all over again.
You see, by looking back to the last moment and asking, Did I enjoy that moment? we have a way of altering what we’re doing so that we can enjoy more moments in the future, not so we can have a measurement at the end of our days.
By shrinking the definition of success, we then give ourselves a pure goal…perhaps the most pure goal of all…simply enjoying our gift of time here on earth.
Financial Success and Shrinking the Change
I mean your change as in your quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. What is we stopped focusing on Financial Freedom and instead focused on saving a quarter today, fifty cents tomorrow and maybe a dollar by the end of the week? Then we do it all over again.
By shrinking the goal, we’ve made the goal much easier to reach. By reaching smaller goals, we feel better about our ability to reach goals in the first place. Then we simply, over time, start setting bigger and bigger goals (if you want to) or, as is discussed in more financial books than I could list here, you become financially free because you got really good at saving a quarter here and a dollar there, and then investing it of course.
I don’t know about you, but this is so much easier for most people to handle. If you’ve ever been in a class (or taught said class) where the instructor led you through the terrifying exercise of determining how much money you’d need to ‘retire’ on if you were getting a certain amount of interest on that money, you know what I’m talking about. I’ve never seen so many human beings imitating the deer in the headlights stare before in my life.
It was in our first Money Camp for Grownups that I saw this look when Larry (bless his soul) walked our adults through this process. I took him aside after the workshop and made him process NEVER to do that to another human being. He agreed:-).
How will you shrink your goal(s) so that they are attainable and you look forward to reaching them, knowing that they are small enough to reach? All I want you to do right now is think about one goal you have…financial or otherwise.
Ask yourself if the goal is just too dang big. (We often let society dictate the size of our goal…stop doing that!) If the answer is yes, then shrink the goal so that the change that has to happen inside you is doable. Then figure out what you now need to do do to meet this smaller, bit-sized goal.
More next week. If you’re intrigued, go by the book!
Please leave your comments for others to see. Tell us how you will shrink a goal and how it will make changing easier for you.
NOTE: This information is brought to you Nina Ericksen of Surepath. They are a true non-profit that specializes in helping people get out of debt THE RIGHT WAY. Links to their programs are below…
It’s important to know the difference between Debt Settlement and Debt Management. Please review the information below so you can make a well informed decision about your financial future.
Debt settlement is a process of negotiating with creditors to accept payment that is less than the full amount of the debt owed. Funds accumulate in a special account until enough has been saved to pay off one creditor, and then the process repeats until the debts have been repaid. Watch this Today Show investigation on Debt Settlement.
A Debt Management Plan vs. debt settlement helps consumers repay their debts in full within 36-60 months. A debt management program is usually arranged by a third party credit counseling agency that negotiates lower interest rates, reduced finance charges and affordable monthly payments.
So what’s the difference?
DEBT MANAGEMENT
Negotiates with your creditors to reduce APR and finance fees.
One monthly payment made to SurePath, funds are disbursed to your creditors.
Stop collection calls.
No penalty on FICO score.
Receive financial education and an action plan.
Helps rebuild credit payment history.
DEBIT SETTLEMENT
Attempts to negotiate with your creditors to reduce the amount of debt owed. Some large creditors such as Chase, will not accept negotiations through a debt settlement company
One monthly payment made to settlement company until they’ve collected enough to make
Increased collection calls and chance of judgments and garnishments.
Credit score can drop 45-160 points
In the last decade, the number of debt settlement companies nationwide increased from 10 to over 500. Check out this study from theFTC regarding debt settlement.
“Beware of the Sharks that are circling,” said Joy Thormodsgard, CEO and President of SurePath Financial Solutions (CCCS), a non-profit credit counseling service. “Not knowing the difference between a reputable credit counseling service, a debt settlement firm, or a foreclosure rescue scam can easily cost the consumer $1,000 or more in upfront fees, leaving them deeper in debt and a credit report that is gasping for air. If you can’t make a big enough dent in your debt yourself, look for a legitimate credit counseling agency.” She further adds that agencies which claim “to cut your debt in half, etc.,” make her think, “if it is too good to be true….it probably isn’t true”
Check with your local Better Business Bureau and state attorney general’s office to see if there have been any complaints lodged against the debt settlement or counseling agency. Reputable firms will have certified counselors and be affiliated with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling or accredited by the Council on Accreditation for Families & Children.
For more information, contact them:
SurePath Financial Solutions
Consumer Credit Counseling Service
80 North Wood Road Suite 200
Camarillo, CA 93010
Phone (805) 437-7530
Have you ever been one type of person, yet know that being that type of person wasn’t going to ever get you where you ‘said’ you wanted to actually be? Financially or other wise?
Well, changing seems to require some magic on our parts and often we’re just not equipped with the right tricks up our sleeves to do the changing.
But then along comes a book…a fabulous book. And in that book, you begin to see what it actually takes to change yourself, change your relationships, change the culture, even change the WORLD!!!
I just finished one such book and I have to thank Stacey Sherman, one of our wise Creative Wealth Coaches, for the suggestion. THANK YOU!
The book is SWITCH: How to Change Things When Change is Hard” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Financial changes seem to be particularly hard for people which made the book all that more fascinating.
Riders and Elephants
This is the main theme of the book and it’s taken from University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Though it seems to the onlooker that the Rider is the leader, he can’t really accomplish any change without the willingness and effort of the Elephant.
The book goes into great depth about what has to happen in order for us to change ourselves, our organizations and even the world. I loved the book so much that the next few articles are going to explore different aspects of the book.
Finding The Bright Spots
One of the things that I really loved was their piece on looking at WHAT IS ALREADY WORKING to find clues on how to make change happen more organically and easier. They call this “Looking for the bright spots.”
So, this is where we’re going to start and I need your help to get the ball going. This blog post is a participatory post and I need your help.
I’m going to pose a 3 questions and if you would do me the honor of posting your valuable answers via the comments section, I’d appreciate it very much! This way the bright spots will be here for all to see. Here goes…
Question # 1:
When is saving money easy for you? In other words, do you need to be in a particular situation, have a certain type of job, live in a certain type of place, be making a certain amount of money, be in a special mindset, have a powerful goal to work for? Whatever it is, WHEN is the act of SAVING easy for you?
Question # 2:
When you have made changes in your financial habits in the past, what was the motivating factor? Did you set a goal, take a class and learn new information, get a lecture from a parent, etc. What exactly motivated you to actually make that change?
Question # 3:
What financial habit comes easy for you and why? Is is saving a percentage of your paycheck, shopping sales, using coupons, etc.? And it can be any habit that involves money.
OK, that’s all we’re going to do today. I can’t wait to read all of your answers!
Most of us have taken a walk around town or along a path and come across a breed of dog that we didn’t recognize. If we’re curious, we look at the owner and ask, “What kind of dog is that?”
Most dog owners, if they are of the proud dog parent group, will happily stop and tell you the breed of their dog (even if he’s a mutt or a mix:-), a little history, where they got it, etc. We listen, happy to learn a little bit about a new type of dog, pet the dog a bit if we’re so inclined and then say our goodbyes. We then walk one way and the dog and owner(s) walk the other way, probably never to meet again.
Human’s habitual need to classify
Imagine if we did this with people? Ah, you see where I’m going? We DO do this with people. (My boyfriend, Steve, despises it when I use two do’s in a row:-).
When we see someone with a strange looking face or we hear an accent or language we don’t recognize, we’ll often ask him or her, “So where are you from?”
Hammer of Financial Justice
Now there’s nothing wrong with this. As long as our curiosity stops short of the judgments that often (not always) follow.
For instance, I have several Jewish friends and they can’t stand the stereotypes that say that all Jewish people are spendthrifts.
I have an Indian friend who tells me that people ‘expect’ him to have a ton of money because so many tribes are involved with casinos these days. However, he is a hard-working man, just like most of us and doesn’t have a ton of money, yet.
Financial judgments are hard to overcome
Our subconscious financial beliefs, e.g., I could never be rich, making lots of money takes a lot of hard work, rich people are greedy, etc., have so much control over how much money we end up having or not having in our lives. And making these financial judgments about others plays right into those beliefs because it is the beliefs that cause the judgment in the first place.
A personal example:I’m not sure if I’ve shared this before, but last year while visiting my mother, I heard her say, in response to an article in the paper, “Those rich bitches…” I was shocked and had no idea where this came from. I also noticed my nauseous response to her words.
After a similar response while I was visiting her recently, I decided to bring it up…if nothing but for my own edification and curiosity as it relates to growth around my OWN financial beliefs.
I said, “So I have a question. Why is it that you have this ‘thing’ against rich people when you yourself actually grew up as the rich girl in your town?”
She was sort of shocked by my question. She didn’t rebuke it. She wasn’t defensive. She just sort of sat there pondering the question. The end result was that she wasn’t really sure.
We didn’t go into it any further though the question led to her telling me several stories about how her mother helped many of the neighbors in the little town where she drew up. At 76 years old and unhealthy an unhealthy 76 at that, I didn’t see any need to probe further. I suspect, however, that she will ponder if further on her own.
Your financial belief wealthwork (i.e., homework)
1. Simply watch what you think and say and feel about people who have more money than you. Notice I did not say RICH or WEALTHY. We often have powerful judgments about any who (we suspect) has more money than we have.
2. When you catch yourself in one of these moments, stop yourself and ask, “Wow, I wonder where THAT came from?” Thought it’s not necessary to always know where the unsupportive belief came from, it can be quite enlightening if you can figure it out.
3. Take a piece of paper and a pen and create a more supportive, dare I say positive, belief around what you were thinking, saying or feeling. Example: If you think rich people are greedy, think instead, “Rich people donate a lot of money to others in need.” Because they DO!
4. Give yourself some time to let your beliefs change. Old habits, and judgments are essentially habits, die slowly and must be replaced with new habits, i.e., supportive thoughts replacing the unsupportive thought.
OK, now go out there and start paying attention to yourself. I promise you’ll be very interesting. We all are.
There is nothing sweeter than seeing the work that you have created being taught in another language changing children’s lives in another country as well as your own.
Here is a video about our Creative Wealth’s Brazilian licensee, Silvia Alambert, who has been busting her tush to get The Money Camp, which uses The Money Game, into Brazil. I am SO proud of her. I hope you are also!
