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Your Money Story
David Krueger MD
You're writing a story that you may not know how to fully tell. It's a very personal story with its own history and language. It's highly visible to others but often not to you. As Loren Eiseley observed in The Unexpected Universe, "Reality has a way of hiding from even its most gifted observers."
It's a story that you talk about every day, think about several times a day. It is remarkably simple yet intricately complex. This story has an internal and external dialogue, a secret language, and encrypted messages.
It's complicated because some important aspects are emotional, unspoken, and even unconscious.
This story is about the longest relationship you'll have in your life. Your parents discussed it before you arrived; people will deliberate it after you die. Maybe you'll get ten years out of a car, perhaps fifty with a spouse, but this story you can never stop writing or living. You can't break up with it, run away from it, or coax into loving you more.
Even though it's unexamined and elusive--you orient life decisions around it.
When I spoke with a well-known self help guru, his response was, "You know, Dave, I don't know how to tell this story to myself in order to know what to change."
You alone determine the genre: fiction or nonfiction; tragedy or triumph. The story tells most about the teller.
This story ghostwrites every aspect of your life story. From what you eat and drink, to what you plan and play. Health, recreation, stresses—even the water you drink—are all impacted by this story. At times you've used this story to regulate your moods, increase self-esteem, influence others, or to soothe emotional pains.
And, how you live this story will be what you teach your children.
The villain or hero is the most popular legal substance to all people of the world.
It speaks to you. You speak with it.
It's your money.
A therapist once wrote, "Money questions will be treated by cultured people in the same manner as sexual matters, with the same inconsistency, prudishness, and hypocrisy." The year: 1913. The therapist: Sigmund Freud. Almost a century later, most of us have learned to talk more easily about sex, yet remain seclusive, embarrassed, or conflicted about certain aspects of our own money stories.
If there is any doubt, ask the hosts of your next dinner party what their annual income is. You probably won't see the next dinner with them. Ask how much debt they have, and you may not see dessert.
We give money meaning: we breathe life into it, give it emotional value, build a relationship with it and make it bigger than it is. Money can make any statement and carry any message.
Your money story is not your income, assets, expenses, or debt—it's your relationship with money. It's how you use money in storylines of what money means to you, says about you, and what you say with it.
It's a running dialogue about how much you feel you deserve and how much you're worth—even how much you're capable of. It's about what if you had more—or less. And what your sense of "enough" is.
Your money story has little to do with math. If money were about math, no one would have debt. You can fulfill a desire you didn't know you had by spending money you don't have. You can define yourself by acquisitions not paid for. You can even borrow based on how much money you will be lended rather than how much you can pay back.
A secret language becomes most developed by emotionally powerful desires. A desire is not quieted by its satisfaction; desires can be created by filling them. Being the legal tender of desire, money becomes the inkblot of the Rorschach test: when our eyes look straight at it, there is only a design on paper. But when offered the chance to imbue the design with meaning, the interpretations will be as wishful and varied as the fantasies of the respondents.
The messages will keep repeating themselves--people will keep writing the same money stories that imprison them--until they are listened to.
Money is a magnifier. Like adversity, it reveals character. Whoever a person is, excess money will exaggerate. If a person is a problem drinker, money will make them more a drunk. If someone is insecure, money will make them paranoid. If someone is caring and generous, money can help them become a better philanthropist.
Psychoanalysis, neuroscience, behavioral economics and strategic coaching each have a lot to teach us about change. And resistance to change. Emotional Economics™ is now available: the study of the interactions of mind and brain impacting money behavior and financial decisions. Our money stories tell us less about money and more about the human mind and its operations. When you think with one part of the brain and feel with another, you need a map. And a plan.
As we struggle to embrace change, many of the methods to facilitate change are contrary to how the mind and brain work.
What is the role of the mind and brain in money behaviors and financial decisions?
The answer: Everything.
The brain has a mind of its own and we are of two (or more) minds. The prefrontal cortex says: "Let's think about retirement savings." The limbic system says: "Let's have that second cognac and order the plasma TV."
Each part struggles over the same dollar, hopefully without tearing it.
It is not wealth, position, possessions, or even a chase of happiness that creates problems; it is when you lose yourself in the chase.
Your money story is a large part of your life story. Some of the money issues are really about money, but many are about other matters, private or even secret, hitchhiking on money. You write your money story and live it. You can revise it, or write an informed, powerful New Money Story™.
From the Introduction to The Secret Language of Money by David Krueger MD, a summer 2009 international release by McGraw Hill.
Information and registration for the seminar series YOUR NEW MONEY STORY™ and accompanying ROADMAP™ FOR FINANCIAL SUCCESS WORKBOOK please go to www.NewMoneyStory.com
One of my clients talked about her daughter leaving home for college. She was aware that her daughter had had a very sheltered and privileged existence when she called home after her frst week in school and said that she missed the Pineapple Fairy. My client asked, "What do you mean?"
"Well, it always seemed that there was a fresh pineapple in the corner of the kitchen counter when I was home. Now, I've been here a week and there is no Pineapple Fairy. In fact, if I want anything, I have to go get it," she said in mock desperation.
Many viewers of The Secret have assumed that it can generate the Pineapple Fairy. But just focusing your attention on what you want is not magical. If it were, the world wouldn't be so crowded with wishful thinkers. Focusing on what you want is not wishful thinking, and it is more complex than positive thinking. Disappointed practitioners ask questions about how long it will take for their desire to become a reality.
The phenomenon of the flm The Secret speaks to a secret that a small segment of the population has known about and prospered from for thousands of years. The secret is really not so secret. It is the Law of Attraction: you create in reality what you focus your attention on. Your life story is the outcome of where you focus your attention.
Focus is not enough. Action alone, for its own sake, is not enough. Focusing— and wishing—do not create and develop skills that people value in the world and will pay money for.
So here are the secrets behind The Secret: what it leaves out, why it works, and four principles to empower its application.
Why It Works
The Law of Attraction is based in neuroscience. Your mind is an energy feld and responds to focus. Where you focus your attention creates brain connections. Quantum physics tells us that each of us generates energetic frequencies or vibrations. We project energy in our emotions and thoughts that are the source of what and whom we attract, as well as the basis of our sense of well-being.
If you lay a nail and a paper clip side by side, nothing happens. When you take a magnet and stroke the nail several times from head to point, the nail itself becomes a magnet; it can then pick up the paper clip. Why? The molecules of the nail are aligned in the same direction, creating a magnetic feld. When all of you is going in the same direction—and focused—you have power.
The secret, rather than being about wishing for something and getting it, is about understanding and refocusing personal energy.
There is a subtle but signifcant difference between this principle and the notion that where you place your attention you manifest in reality. Magic is the backdrop of the latter concept. Your mind is a powerful goal-seeking mechanism. When you focus on a goal, your mind begins to fgure out how to get it. Your mind takes the focus as instruction to attract. The diffculty is not a lack of ability to focus, but a diffculty with intentional and conscious control over what you focus on. Your mind is preset to focus on certain things, and it makes that focus unconsciously and unintentionally. The automatic pilot of your mind—what it is preset to focus on—has to be consciously redirected.
The mental act of focusing attention activates brain circuitry. Paying attention over time keeps the brain circuits open and active. Focused attention plays a crucial role in actually altering the structure of the brain. With repetition, these chemical links actually become stable changes in the brain's structure.
This concept explains at a brain level why a solution focus is more effective than a problem focus. Focusing on possibilities creates new neuronal networks and pathways, while focusing on problems deepens—further etches—the already existing circuitry. These brain connections literally become mind-maps that subsequently infuence the reality that we see.
The real secret behind the secret is to ask the question, "How can I create …?" This "How can I?" question focuses attention on precisely what you want and enlists your full energy to fnd an answer and a pathway to achieve it. Thus the real secret moves from imagining and wishing to doing.
When results seem to be coming to successful people easily and quickly rather than by sustained action, you make your assumption by comparing your inside to their outside. Not an apples-to-apples comparison.
How to Make The Secret Work
1. The Power Is in the Focus
Here's The Secret deconstructed: Focusing on a vision will create structural tension in your brain—the tension between where you are now and where you want to be.
Dissonance can create motivation. And your brain, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Your brain will conspire to close the gap between your vision and reality.
The paradox is that we do not attract what we want, we attract what we focus on.
Your unconscious doesn't register + or –. It just registers the focus. A print or negative is the same image; your unconscious is the image.
The power of focus is that whatever you attend to or focus on, you align yourself to bring about—like the magnetized nail. Be specifc about what you do want— not just what you don't want in disguise. "I want to get out of debt" focuses on debt. "I want a reliable car" focuses on the idea that the car will break down and need repairs. Everyone wants more money, so wanting is not the key to having it. Focusing on scarcity attracts scarcity. Focusing on prosperity aligns your energy to pursue prosperity.
2. Know How to Ask and Align
Since the Law of Attraction is a law of energy, if you have shortages or struggles in your life, you need to ask two questions:
- Do you know how to ask? To align yourself with the ABCs: Ask. Believe. Create?
- Are you resisting in some way? That is, do you place resistance in a natural fow of energy—the harmony with yourself and what you want, including how you proceed to get it?
Thoughts or feelings that focus on these and other negatives can generate resistance:
- Doubt
- Unworthiness
- Questions of self-worth
- Limitation
- Fear
- Scarcity
If you are not generating what you really want, consider whether you're automatically focusing on what you don't want. This unconscious focus is often informed by the beliefs from childhood experiences that ghostwrite present storylines.
Alignment includes letting go of negative emotion and thoughts. When you suppress negative feelings or thoughts, they remain in the background, generate and subvert their own energy, and sabotage attempts to polarize yourself to positive experiences. When you release negativity, you dissolve the emotional charge. Then you're free to align yourself with feelings of joy, happiness, and peace. You reconnect with the positive energy without the impediment.
3. Take Strategic, Planned Action
The Law of Attraction won't give you what you want, but it will give you the energy to sustain the process to create what you focus on. It won't send a Brink's truck up your driveway, or align the Lotto balls for you. The magnetized nail just lying on the table does not get anything done. However, you can align your internal molecules by focus and purpose, to point the energy feld of your mind to specifc goals. It's a way to use your power to write the story you want.
If you want to attract a pizza, you can focus on a pizza, think about having it, and wish to manifest it. But just sitting there visualizing the pizza without doing something about it is relying on magic. If that's all you do, you won't manifest a pizza. If someone happens to walk into the room and offer you a pizza, it is not because of the Law of Attraction, it is because of what scientists call coincidence.
Sometimes people who have a strong belief in and need for magic convert coincidence into magic or into synchronicity. Synchronicity does exist, but the pizza's appearing isn't an example of it. People who need to believe in magic convert a coincidence into evidence. Luck is narcissism meeting chance.
When you focus on a pizza, you need to hatch ideas about what action to take in order to make your idea a reality—in other words, how to get that pizza. Focusing on what you want generates a motivation to act, coupled with the sense of how you'll feel when you get it, and together both elements can sustain the motivation to act. Then, a hard-work "miracle" occurs. As you become focused on what you want and think about the benefts and experience of having it, you will persist in the focus of your attention, the discipline, and the strategy to sustain efforts to pursue it. By this focus you will both have ideas and notice (manifest) people and resources that can help you achieve your goal. Sustaining motivation to act and developing internal qualities will help you act in an informed way.
The pen is in your hand to write your story. The world will not pay you for what you know. It will pay you for what you do. It rewards action. You need to believe
- specifcally
- strategically
- systematically
- consistently
Then, have a plan, and act on it. Once you act on a plan, you can always self-correct.
This particular secret behind The Secret is also ancient wisdom, captured best by my grandmother who said, "Wishes don't wash dishes."
4. Be of Value to Others
Your focus and your actions must bring value to others. This is the Law of Attraction applied: You have to give value in order to get value. You get back what you put out. to the universe" were enough, no one would still be wishing for more money.
5. What You Attract is Equal to What You Provide
The mantra of The Secret, according to the flm, is: Ask, Believe, Receive. You will have much more success by converting it to the ABCs: Ask, Believe, Create. The amount of beneft you receive depends on the amount of energy you dedicate to it.
An example of this truer secret behind The Secret is that the amount of money you make depends on the amount of value you provide. And, of course, you have to ask for and collect what you're worth. While there is no Pineapple Fairy, you can create immense success with planned, strategic, consistent action that is of value to yourself and others.
6. Pay in Full for Your Success
A secret to success is that you have to pay in full for that success. If you get something for which you haven't provided value or beneft, you will still have to pay in some way. If you incur debt in order to purchase something before you've earned the money, you simply end up paying more for it.
So you might as well fnd out what the price is, pay it in full, pay it as soon as possible, and then enjoy the benefts of success. The price is always an energy, whether that energy is money, time, work, or experience.
7. The Secret behind the Secret to The Secret
People who truly enjoy getting what they want are those who have discovered how to enjoy paying the price. The enjoyment makes paying for it easy. The essential Law of Attraction is that the price is whatever you must give in order to create or attract exactly what you want. The antithesis is hoping and wishing with no energy input, which of course doesn't work.
Intention is a good start, but intention is not all there is to the Law of Attraction.
Here's the secret shortcut to The Secret: Find people who are already successfully doing what you want, getting what you want, and research what they are doing in order to do your own version of it. Ask. Learn. Question. But make it your story.
Excerpted from OUTSMART YOUR BRAIN: AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL
How Neuroscience and Quantum Physics Can Help You Change Your Life
© David Krueger MD and MentorPath Publications, www.NewBrainStory.com
TOWARD BRAIN HARDWARE OPTIMIZATION
Understanding Six Learning and Performance Styles
David Krueger MD
Also available as a PDF:
Scientists used to believe that brain cells and the connections were set early in life and did not change in adulthood. In the past decade, that assumption has been drastically disproved. Through advancement in brain imaging and other techniques, we now know that the brain as well as behavior can be trained, physically modified, and functionally transformed. The inner workings and circuitry of the brain change with new experiences.
Neuroplasticity and behavioral change occur within the context of individual styles. Some of these styles that appear more or less hard-wired need to be taken into account for optimum learning and performance.
Learning and Performance Styles
Self-management involves understanding yourself quite well: your strengths, weaknesses, learning style, working style, needs, and values.
Optimum learning and performance occur when you are in a specific state of mind matched to what you are doing. When you operate from your strengths, you optimize the potential for excellence.
In addition to recognizing strengths, knowing how you learn and perform is crucial for success. These learning and performance characteristics are styles; they can be slightly modified, but ultimately must be respected and strategically planned.
- Readers
- Listeners
- Writers
- Talkers
- Collaborators
- Loners
Some people learn best by reading, and need to see a text or pictures in order to really comprehend material. President John Kennedy was a reader who assembled an outstanding group of writers on his staff. Part of Kennedy's brilliance was in using these people and what they wrote to informat his decisions.
President Johnson had attained his reputation and success as a listener. When Johnson kept the same people on his staff after he succeeded Kennedy, they kept on writing. Johnson derailed his presidency by not recognizing that he was a listener, not a reader.
Some people learn best by writing. Beethoven kept copious notes and amassed an enormous numbers of sketchbooks, yet never looked at them when he composed. When asked about this practice, he said, "If I don't write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again."
Some people learn best by hearing themselves talk. This is a style I am quite familiar with. A significant portion of the material in my books comes from what I later jot down from teaching, presentations, and supervision of professionals— things that came to me in a different way from what I had previously thought or written out. "I don't write because I have something to say, I write to see what I have to say."
Some people work best in collaboration with others. Creative pairings and the dance of ideas are common for those who perform best in conjunction with others. Some collaborators work best as team members, succeeding in a system where ideas and implementation occur as part of a group.
Some people work best alone, preferring the purity of concentration and focus that they can achieve only in the quietness of working alone.
These predominant styles of learning—and none of them is all-or-nothing—constitute an important piece of self-knowledge and a way to facilitate performance for clients.
Copyright David Krueger MD and MentorPath Publications
Excerpted from OUTSMART YOUR BRAIN: AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL
How Neuroscience and Quantum Physics Can Help You Change Your Life
by David Krueger MD www.NewBrainStory.com