Why aren’t you better with money?
And what I mean by that is, if you know what ‘the right thing’ to do is, why aren’t you doing it?
why aren’t you saving?
why aren’t you swapping to a better bank account?
why won’t you look at your banking app?
why haven’t you written a will?
why do you pay off your credit card just to run it up again?
Or any other myriad crappy things we all do with our finances and wealth. You are not alone!
You might be telling yourself it’s because you’re lazy, stupid or gormless, and it might be, I don’t know you. But I have met a lot of people over my life (literally, thousands of people walked through my shop doors!) and so very few of them were lazy, stupid or gormless.
Some of it will be a general lack of knowledge and education around finances which I’m aiming to help with.
But I suspect a lot of it is the history and experiences which have shaped your mindset and behaviour. There are a whole lot of factors which lead into how confident and capable you feel to understand and make changes: society, culture, religion, trauma and history.
How Trauma and Life Experience Shape Financial Behaviour
We’ll talk about all of them over time, of course, but one that piques my interest every time I think about it is the idea of trauma. In psychological terms, trauma doesn’t have to be a big, huge event like war or a car crash - though it certainly could be. Depending on how things are dealt with, something as ‘small’ as moving schools, being made redundant, a neighbour being scammed, could be trauma. All of these have the potential to create or exacerbate feelings and beliefs which directly affect how you move around money.
Imagine you move schools when you’re 13, leave all of your friends behind, smack bang in the middle of puberty and you have no idea how to make friends within a whole different teenage ecosystem. The clothes, music, makeup, slang and body language that made you popular before are just not right for this new place.
So you beg your parents for new stuff and they buy it, you make friends and now you know that buying new stuff creates safety for you.
Or they don’t buy it and you stay on the outside. Maybe you find a community with the weirdos and you’re never quite with the ‘in crowd’.
How might either of those feelings show up in your twenties, thirties or later? Might that knowledge affect what uni you choose, or partner, or career?
Remember when I talked about this belief-making-money-memory?
Not every money belief is a ‘bad’ one - even those created out of trauma. And in fact, your brain has been working, every second of your life, to keep you safe so every belief (even ‘bad’ ones which are damaging you or keeping you stuck) started out from a good place.
We’re not out here trashing your beautiful brain and the things that it does.
Financial coaching is about seeing a behaviour, probably one that’s causing you some stress otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about it and digging around to see if you can find the underlying belief or series of beliefs. We identify the good and bad bits so that you can mould them in your favour or smash them out of the park if needed and then replace them with something that fits you better.
What allows us to do this is neuroplasticity, not only are they doing their best to keep us safe but they’re flexible and adaptable. I love that for us!
Does that make sense? Has it brought anything up for you?
Love Eleanor. xxx
