I have a decision I’m considering. It’s a money decision. As I was thinking it through, it gave me an interesting perspective.
I have spoken to a few people close to me about this decision to get other perspectives. I made a spreadsheet to ensure I saw the decision clearly and realized I had strong feelings about how and why to make this decision.
I stopped for a second and asked myself, “Why do I feel this way?” It made me think about my relationship with money and my beliefs surrounding money decisions. I looked again at the spreadsheet and thought, “This is a math problem. So why do I have such strong feelings?”
It was a great exercise to learn about myself. I realized I had developed many of my beliefs, like most of us, long ago when my situation and priorities differed. So why am I holding on to them? It’s because it’s easy to stay the same and hard to change.
My takeaway is that many closely held beliefs that served us well at one point in our lives may hold us back at some future point. This doesn’t mean your values have changed, but how you view your careers, relationships, money, success, friendship and priorities can all change and, frankly, should change.
When deciding or reacting to someone or something, I look for opportunities to ask myself why I feel a certain way. If you journal, this can really help. I talked about this at Schnizzfest since it relates to self-awareness — journaling how you feel about situations versus a diary of what happened.
I hope this is what becoming wiser looks like, but only time will tell.
