Have you ever been sound asleep in the middle of the night having a pleasant dream and been rudely woken up by a dog barking nearby?

And then… just as you’re getting back to sleep, the dog barks again? And again? And it feels like the dog is never going to stop?

When this happens to me I go through my options…

1. I can try earplugs…but past experience tells me they don’t work because I still KNOW the dog is barking so I continue to hear the barking through the earplugs.
2. I can put on my earphones and listen to my iPod to drown it out as much as possible.
3. I can lay there and fume.
4. I can get out of bed, put on some sweats and go searching for the culprit and try and remedy the situation myself.

I am going to use this example to draw a metaphorical connection to money and our financial situations.

Financial Reactions:

I’ve talked about reacting versus responding in an earlier article. To recap… the way we ‘react’ to certain financial “events” is always related to our core money beliefs and what we make money mean about ourselves, our lives, our families, and life in general. Our reactions also have a lot to do with what we believe should be or shouldn’t be – in terms of money and wealth. Responding is essentially a thoughtful, or conscious, reaction.

Using the dog barking scenario as a metaphor, we can respond to a financial event in these ways:

1. Try to ignore it completely. (This seldom works because it always resurfaces, usually bigger and worse.)
2. Try to cover it up with false ideas of what’s happening in our financial lives. We can gloss it over, make it seem all shiny and fine but underneath it all, our financial situation still needs our attention.
3. We can whine that it should be a different way, get mad because no one ever taught us about money and investing and basically be financial victims for the rest of our lives.
4. Or, we can just get up and do something TODAY to change and improve the situation once and for all.

Now whether the metaphorical dog stops barking is another question. You may, you may not. Sometimes there are simply things out of our control. This is where our concept of ‘ultimate financial freedom’ comes into play and we’ll continue exploring this idea in the future. The point is that you CAN learn to make these uncontrollable things mean nothing at all.

Here’s an all too common example…

Let’s say you have spent the past 10 years spending more money than you have coming in and wake up in the middle of night to $40,000 of debt (aka “very loud barking dog”). You finally realize that you can’t handle the debt anymore, you can’t pay it off, you’re not making enough money to even pay the minimum payments and you lay awake at night listening to the dogs barking…perhaps even imagining them coming into the house and biting you to death.

But the fact is they can’t bite anymore. There IS no such thing as debtor’s prison and as wrong as all of those decisions you made were to spend money you didn’t have, you can’t change the past.

You CAN, however, change the present and the future by CHOOSING to do money differently right now. AND you can CHOOSE not to make the fact that you have learned a valuable lesson this way mean you’re a bad person or a stupid person or anything else for that matter. You just took a while to learn the lesson. Period.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.

The question becomes…what are you going to do differently from this day forward? There are simple answers to this question:

1. Choose to do money differently from now on.
2. Make decisions based on a plan, aka, a budget.
3. Make decisions based on how you want your future self to live. You DO know you have an older version of yourself living inside of you waiting for you to make the right best decision today, I hope.
4. Get help reframing what your mistakes and current financial situation mean (i.e., it only means you didn’t have the tools you needed at the time).
5. Learn why you made the choices you made in the first place and learn how to make new ones now and in the future. A great book to read and program to attend is “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” and Peak Potentials “Millionaire Mind Intensive“. I require all of my coaching clients to read the book and attend the program if it’s in their area.
6. Consider hiring a financial coach…and I don’t mean financial planner or advisor, although they are an incredibly valuable player in your financial team. I mean a financial ‘coach’. Someone who can help you discover the financial belief system that was driving your old self and help you craft a new belief system that will take you where you want to go now instead.
7. Practice, practice, practice breathing through this new shape until it feels like somewhere you can live.

The Anticipating Factor

Let’s go back to the dog barking in the middle of the night to explore further…

So there you are…laying in bed on night five after being woken up by the dog down the street the four previous nights. You’ve gotten up twice, put on your sweats, wondered down the street and asked the owner to quiet their pooch. The situation? It’s quiet. Dead quiet.

You lay there not being able to fall asleep because you’re waiting for the dog to start barking…again. But it doesn’t. The quiet remains. And still, you can’t fall asleep.

Why? Because your past experiences create anticipatory reactions in your body. You actually lay there EXPECTING the dog to start barking.

Comparing that to our financial lives, we often spend our days ANTICIPATING ‘the other shoe to drop’ as is often said. Even when things ‘seem’ to be going well, we just know it can’t be this good. Things can’t be all better. The situation is bound to get screwed up AGAIN. Right?

But it doesn’t have to be this way!

How to change your anticipatory response

If you Google “Anticipatory Response”, you’ll find a myriad of articles on ‘physical’ pain. But what about the emotional pain our anticipatory responses bring about? They are equally as painful and can be just as challenging to change as physical anticipatory responses.

So here’s the simple way stop expecting the dog to bark…

1. Focus on something else when you realize you’re anticipating the dog to start barking.
2. Know that this anticipation is all based on the past…not the present or the future.
3. Continue to focus on something else until you relax and fall asleep.
4. Repeat as necessary.

I know, I know…this is often easier said than done but the fact is…it IS a simple process. No one said it was easy. Learning the process is well worth the effort, I promise you!

Next time the dog barks in your financial neighborhood, how will you react? Will you be the victim or take charge and do something about it? Will you let it control the rest of your life or will you choose to learn from it, let it go and live in the peace and quiet of wise financial decisions in the future?

And finally, if another dog DOES bark in the future, will you be able to smile at it, knowing it’s just a temporary disturbance that you don’t have to react to at all?