How did you do with last week's challenge? Did you stick with fear and upset or did you find little things to focus on that made a difference? Even a small difference?
As fear and panic about the most recent financial perturbations seem to be spreading across the globe, have you found yourself caught up in the fear and panic as well? I know I have and it certainly can be scary. More accurately stated, I have focused on the negative goings on and have scared myself, and with apparent good reason. I know I have personally lost a large chunk of my savings over the past couple of years and my client work has dwindled as well, all of which makes it pretty easy to be scared.
However, I am "fortunate" enough to have been through several instances of "misfortune" in my life, starting as a kid, and extending through my adult years. One thing I have learned over and over again, is that "stuff" happens and the real key to handling the stuff isn't the stuff itself, but how I choose to respond.
So, once again, please forgive the blunt approach here -- it doesn't matter what happens to you, as much as it matters how you respond.
I know of which I speak, so allow me a bit of a shaggy dog story to provide some context.
By the time I was 18, my family had gone through bankruptcy twice -- not that we had all that much to start with -- just a 1200 square foot house and a few modest furnishings. Ozzie and Harriet were definitely uptown from us. That disappeared as my Dad tried to transition from employee to small business owner. Great craftsman, lousy businessman.
I wound up working 40 hours a week through most of my high school years, first mowing lawns after school and on weekends, progressing through a stint flipping burgers at the local A&W Root Beer and finally landing at Peninsula Music Center, selling records, guitars and sheet music. All that I earned went to supporting the family.
Perhaps surprisingly, I had a blast during this time. Sure, there was a lot of work and we had to find creative ways to feed the family on a few bucks a day. But heck, I didn't spend much time comparing our lot to the more fortunate families we knew. I just enjoyed busting my tail on those lawns and it was sheer heaven to wind up working for Chet and Betty Lane at the Music Center.
I wound up going to University of California at Davis, with a promise from my Dad that he would find the money to get me through. Well, that fell apart when he collapsed the first day of classes, wound up with leukemia and died within six months of being diagnosed. Enter bankruptcy number three thanks to one of those big insurance companies which denied both health and death benefits claiming his leukemia was a "pre-existing condition" withheld at the time he applied for the policies. Never mind that he took out the policies 19 years earlier. (Does this kind of financial abuse sound familiar?)
Back to working full time, this time in the school cafeterias washing pots and dishes. By the time I was a junior, things got a bit more complicated when I couldn't find housing I could afford, and wound up living in my car for a while. I literally lived on $1 a day.
The point of this little tale, is that I know a bit about getting through what some would call difficult times, and I would like to share some of these lessons with you over the next few weeks.
Let's start with this little teaser about fear.
Recently, I was teaching a class and after about 90 minutes, I asked everyone how they were feeling. The participants responded that things were good and that they were enjoying the class. I then asked them if they were aware of financial situation spreading across the globe. Of course everyone was. I then asked who had been impacted negatively, and just about every hand went up. From there, it was pretty easy to point out that despite what the press is calling global panic, everyone here had been doing just fine -- at least they were doing fine until they were reminded about the "crisis."
So, how do you go from "just fine" to "panic and crisis?" Well, that's the whole point. What if the only difference between "just fine" and "panic and crisis" is a question of focus and what you tell yourself? That's not to say that you may not be in the midst of financial hardship right now; it is to say that, in the paraphrased words of Viktor Frankl, "Freedom is that point in time just after they do something to you, and just before you choose your response."
What are you choosing these days? What focus do you have to help you through? What difference can you make in your own life?
I'd love to hear from you so please do leave a comment here or drop me an email at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.
If you want more information on how you can apply this kind of reframing to your own life, how you can take a few simple steps that may wind up transforming your own life, please download a free chapter from my new book, Workarounds That Work. You'll be glad you did.
You can buy Workarounds That Work here.
Russell Bishop is an educational psychologist, author, executive coach and management consultant based in Santa Barbara, Calif. You can learn more about my work by visiting my website at www.RussellBishop.com. You can contact me by e-mail at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.
Follow Russell Bishop on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Russell_Bishop
Some commenters wrote about how it's the system that's to blame, not people; I guess for me the truth is somewhere in the middle. The system is a mess and I'm the only one who can make changes in my life.
Having been through some similar situations to Russell's, my own story was not far from living in the car and one night maybe 25 years ago, a bunch of the wrong thinking spontaneously rose to consciousness so I could correct it. The lesson I got out of that one is emotion can be a magnet for some pretty strange thinking.
Things were never that bad for me again after that. I still get too emotional when it comes to money, though.
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I love it when you link peoples personal dilemmas to the larger forces in our lives...whether they be political, social, or metaphysical. Probably because I feel that so much of what we call human disfunction is not a result of badly created people, but systems that go counter to the personal needs of so many. We have built a society, a philosophy and a political system that is anti-human, and to make matters worse, blames the human being for not "adapting" to the disfunction.
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Here's the piece Cary wrote:
http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2011/08/14/dream_job/index.html
And that's precisely where Russell Bishop, and his fellow life coaches, are all wrong. They're trying to pin the responsibility for mental health on the individual in a society that has gone mad. They're reprising what was done by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union.
This isn't my idea alone. Chris Hedges, Barbara Ehrenreich (who blogs here) and many forward thinking mental health professionals like Thomas Szasz and Peter Breggin have said the same thing.
Watch Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC and you'll hear the same message, with eco-political underpinnings.
When the system is broken, peddling the old soap of self-help pablum just to make a buck is NOT helpful.
Life coaching, large group awareness training, mass psychotherapy, the Oprahfication of America - all these are manifestions of a society that has forgotten what Lao Tzu called "The Great Way".
He said that when a society follows the Great Way, people can figure things out for themselves. They don't need preachers and prophets, life coaches and priests. People are content to live simply, and don't need much.
We are so, so far from that - and our collective chickens are coming home to roost.
So what does a six figure money making life coach do, as his 401K and his client base shrink to a trickle? Does he double down on his efforts to sell what he has always sold before? Or does he take a deep breath, and take a step back, and try to discern what the real problem actually might be.
Said another way, does he remain a part of the problem, or does he become a part of the solution?
Fear and anxiety are not useful but sometimes unavoidable.
It is one thing to be young, poor, and to have your whole life ahead of you.
It is quite another to be at/nearing retirement, poor, and to know you may
not be able to work much longer.
I think talking about things is very useful. We need to know that we are all
in this together.
Invest for the long term and use an index fund, imho.