It's All About Behavior Change

Indeed, finances and everything else is about our behavior. What we do determines what the results will be. Nothing comes without action.

The hardest parts of it are: 1. Most of our behavior is subconscious. We do not even know it’s there nor that we did it. 2. Starting and taking action.

Our brain is a superhero and a villain at the same time. It gives us superpowers to survive the day, build awesome stuff, gigantic skyscraper, submarines, toilets, computers, and whatever we humans came up with. And at the same time, we struggle with the same behavior as our Manchester did hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Because we most of the time run on autopilot. That’s the villain part. The actual program may differ between our ancestors and us, but the mechanism is the same.

Once we learned something and repeated it often enough, it gets a habit. And a habit is an automatic behavior. It is triggered by something called a cue, we do an action, and finally, our brain gets a reward of some kind, i.e., nice weather outside, so we drink an ice-cold a soft drink and get sugar and a nice fuzzy feeling as a reward. So refreshing.

We can learn those consciously and subconsciously. And the latter are the most dangerous ones because we are not aware of those. So, it can happen that our math teacher in 3 grades said that we are bad at times tables, and suddenly some other brainfuck multiplies this, and we start to believe we are bad at math.

Ten years later, it’s so ingrained that we believe we are bad in math, that we are actually bad in math. Now replace math with finances, money, or any other thing you struggle with.

Most of the time, it is our beliefs that make change hard. Imagine you believe your whole life money is bad, you are a bad spender, you never could save anything or so. Now, how hard do you think it will be to overcome it? Now, once you are in debt?

Sure, you can start with any tactic now and might have some mild success. However, when you do not change your behavior and your own limiting beliefs, you will eventually fail.

It’s so incredibly important to change your behavior if you want to get out of those situations.

Work on those plus the tactics, and you’ll make wonders come true.

You can dream, analyze, think, and plan all day long, but when you do not take action after that, it is senseless. Change does come with action. And doing some action is better than doing no action.

So, start with anything moving you into the desired direction and do it step by step. Daily baby steps like Bill Murray did it as Bob Wiley in “What About Bob?”.

Baby steps win.