Why a Lack of Resilience May Be the Real Reason for Your Money Problems

Sometimes money problems are not really about the money. If we could just focus on our money obstacles, we’d all be just fine!

“I just need to get my act together” and “I just need to make more money” are things I hear frequently from financial coaching clients who are dealing with feeling stuck, out of options, out of time, and have a scarcity mindset.

Decisions made in this mindset are rarely good for us in the long-term. And those decisions, in turn, just generate more crises, less choices, and more scarcity. Any time we try to intervene to somehow magically force ourselves to “make the right choices” we end up right back where we started!

The Answer Is Resilience

So what’s to be done? We build resilience! Resilience counteracts that sense of scarcity and crisis. Sadly, we’ve been given very few tools and strategies on how to grow our own resilience, and that’s an important skill to master.

I’ve developed a bunch of tools over the years, but I’ll just share a quick one with you.

Scarcity mindset lies to us, telling us that we don’t have enough, right? Never enough time, never enough bandwidth, never enough money, etc. I ask a pretty simple question in these times:

“Is this temporary, or am I going to live the rest of my life this way?”

This question is deceptively simple… our brains in scarcity and crisis (even a little crisis) tell us we’re always going to feel the way we feel right now. We get the sense that this hardship will last forever. This question gently pushes back on that lie while changing our perspective on things ever so slightly. That slight perspective change can give us the distance it takes to make even slightly better choices WITHOUT judging or shaming ourselves.

Shaming Yourself Is Not a Good Strategy

The underlying problem is that many of us are using self-judgment, pressure, and shame to try to make “good” choices. For many of us, this is the ONLY tool we’ve ever been given to make wise choices, so of course it’s the only one we use. The end result is that everything we do appears to be a failure, thus proving to ourselves over and over again that we deserve to have low opinions of ourselves, and that we cannot be trusted.

Which brings me back full circle to resilience. There is no difference between trusting yourself and being resilient.

Even if we can see the patterns in our behavior, understand where they came from, and understand that we may have never had anything else modeled for us, without the appropriate skills AND mindset to seek out or create new strategies and tools for ourselves, we are destined to repeat the “mistakes” we’ve seen others around us make. It’s hard not to feel stuck.

Change Your Perspective

Just like the little question above, anyone can use another question to reorient their perspective and have the courage to start or carry on looking for other ways to make choices. I’ll warn you though, this question requires you to use a little humor. Here it is:

“Has anyone in the history of all mankind who is dumber than me, with fewer resources than I have figured something like this out?”

-or-

“Has anyone in the history of all mankind who is dumber than me, with fewer resources than I have survived something like this?”

The answer, resoundingly, is YES!

This little reset can be like a breath of fresh air for the first time in a long time. With that little breath, and a little perspective change, anyone in any situation gets the benefit of being able to recenter and look around for other options and better options that they might not have seen when they are stuck down in crisis, scarcity, or self-judgment.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you feel stuck in your life situation? What’s causing this mindset? Have you been shaming yourself for years, thinking you’re not good enough to deal with your crises?