PRACTICE: What to do next if you can't bear to look at your budget
A mindful approach to figuring if you can afford to make big life decisions right now
Burnt Out? Stuck? You're Not Broken
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Burnt Out? Stuck? You're Not Broken – Find Your Discernment – Click Here To Work With Me –
Financial insecurity—or at least, the fear of financial insecurity—is the single biggest barrier keeping people from making the decisions that will improve their lives.
This is true of whatever the life decision is: I’ve seen financial fear stymie consequential career moves, convince people to stay in relationships for years past their expiration dates, and keep people from pursuing their big city dreams.
So, if it feels like you’re stuck on the path you’re on because of financial insecurity, or the fear of it, then this post is for you.
Let’s dive in.
Before we go on: I work with people on guiding them through their most difficult decisions. Click the button to book a free 15-minute call ↓
I’m going to start by giving you advice that most coaches don’t give: Don’t ignore the fear of financial insecurity.
This advice is diametrically opposed to what traditional coaching tells you. Two examples of how the coaching industry works with money:
Two terrible ways to handle money
1. To be a successful coach, you have to get people to part with all their money
When I got my coaching business started, I signed up with a client acquisition group. (I’ve talked about them before). I got a lot of (very terrible) advice about how to protect myself from the dreaded “price close.” In other words, I was never allowed believe a potential client who told me they couldn’t afford coaching right now. Instead, I needed to keep them on the phone as long as possible, irrespective of how many times they told me they couldn’t afford coaching right now, until they finally broke down.
Surely, I was taught to ask, there was a family member that could loan them the money. Maybe, I was supposed to instruct them, they should open a new credit card—no, no, no worries, I’d stay on the phone while they did that.
Be financially irresponsible, the advice was, because once you go through my program, that’ll feel like a drop in the bucket.
And listen, I have a very complicated relationship with client attraction. I do, in fact, believe that sometimes people use price as a self-excuse, to keep themselves from having to do the hard work that coaching requires.
In addition, I do believe that good coaching is a very good investment, that often a financial stretch is worth it to change your life. I also do believe that resourcefulness—in everything, including finances—is deeply important for making a new life work for yourself.
The most resourceful people, the people who are most committed to succeeding no matter what it takes, are, unsurprisingly, the people who most often succeed.
At the same time, anyone who tells you that you should just throw all caution to the wind cares more about their bottom line than yours.
Spend that money! (Photo by Zitesh Kaushal on Unsplash)
2. To be a successful coach, you have to part with your own money too
Example 2: Far too many trees have been sacrificed to a specific genre of self-help / get rich book. I call it the “manifesting money” genre, of which Amanda Frances’s book, Rich as F*ck: More Money Than You Know What to Do With is an exemplar.
In 278 pages, Amanda tells you to change your relationship with money, essentially throwing caution to the wind because when you raise your vibrations around money high enough, you will never want for more. Spend that money! she counsels. Don’t worry about it coming back to you! Money makes money!
I swear I’m not some curmudgeon. I think mindset is incredibly important in how we move in the world. Taking risks, making big moves under some uncertainty—they’re hugely necessary for getting unstuck.
At the same time, both of these approaches are quintessentially The Ostrich Effect. As we talked about last week, facing our finances can be deeply uncomfortable. It triggers a bias toward avoiding any conversation about them, even ones with ourselves.
What these approaches do is simply tell you to throw uncertainty and caution off the edge of the roller coaster car—which feels good for about 2 weeks, until the first credit card bill comes in.
(What these approaches also presuppose is a huge amount of privilege, but we won’t get into that here).
Is there a way to approach your finances mindfully?
Yes! Let me show you how.
Mindful finances
If this month’s posts have resonated with you. then I’d like to offer you a simple, mindful way to approach the difficult emotional negotiation that comes with facing your finances. In other words, what are you supposed to do if you don’t even want to talk about your finances with yourself?
Start small. What follows is four very simple steps that I want you to try for one week. That’s right, just a week. At the end of that week, I want you to tell me how it went! You can comment below, or you can email me directly at mark@markshrime.com.
Step 1: Don’t fix anything
First things first, don’t change a thing.
Seriously, that’s step 1. Make a commitment right now that you won’t try to “tackle” or “fix” or “improve” your finances this weekend. I’m giving you permission to not change a single thing.
One reason talking about our finances can be so emotionally paralyzing is because we’ve been taught to feel guilty about them. We’re always told that we could be saving more, planning for retirement better.
If only we didn’t buy that new phone, or, to use the by-now cliché example, if we didn’t order avocado toast for brunch, we’d outright own our houses by now.
And all that does is make us feel guilty. We “know” we’re supposed to be “better” with our finances, and we “know” that we’re not.
A recipe for shame. And there’s nothing that makes us want to hide from ourselves more than shame.
So, for the next week, I want you to commit to yourself that you will absolutely not change a thing. Don’t tell yourself you’re going to spend less. If you eat an avocado toast every Sunday, order it again this coming Sunday. Get that extra large chocolate-and-cardamom latte every morning on your way to work? Do it again this week.
Deal? I mean that, because the next step will make you want to change your spending habits, so commit to yourself that, this week, you won’t.
Step 2: Fact find
Now, write everything down.
Back when I was a competitive athlete, I became vigilant (probably pathologically so) about my diet. My reason at the time was that, the better my diet was suited to the exercise I did, the better I performed.
The only way to align your diet to your activities is to write down everything that goes into your mouth.
Same thing I’m telling you today. They say you can’t change what you don’t measure, so start measuring.
Carry around a notebook. Download a budgeting app (but don’t make a budget yet; remember step 1). Keep an Excel spreadsheet open. Collect physical receipts.
However you do it, for a week I want you to write every bit of your spending down. How much did brunch cost? How much went to your kid’s tuition? How much did you put in your 401K? How much did you spend on your car insurance?
Write it down, but that’s it.
Don’t try to categorize the expenses. And especially, don’t judge any expense. Do we care if it was required or discretionary, pre-tax or post, a business expense or a personal one?
Eventually. But for this week—just write it down.
Step 3: Add it all up
This one’s easy.
At the end of the week, just add it all up.
How much money, total, did you spend that week? Again, don’t try to categorize it, don’t try to decide which expense you should have shouldered and which you should have avoided.
Just a total.
Step 4: Self check-in
At the end of the week, how do you feel?
Let me know what you learned from this exercise.
After a week, do you notice some patterns? What are they? Comment below, email me, find me on social media. Let me know.
My suspicion—supported both by my own experience and by taking clients through this exercise—is that something will come up.
And if it does come up, and if you feel like you’ve got it in you, try the exercise for an entire month. If you don’t have it in you, that’s fully okay too. If nothing else, you have a week’s worth of hard-facts information. Information you could use as you navigate any big, consequential life choice.
Because the most important thing we can do for ourselves as we face consequential decisions is to approach ourselves with gentleness, acceptance, curiosity—the exact opposite of shame.
This sort of mindfulness, when applied to our finances, is what frees us to start to build the lives we want to build.
It’s not flashy. It’s not fast. There are no quick fixes.
But it’s deliciously beautiful.
Paralyzed by taking this step? You aren’t alone.
Let’s work on it together.
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