Compass_Urban_623

Achieve Your Goals More Easily By Shaping the Path

Using money well is one of those things we never get fully right. We’re constantly trying to make changes, improvements. And the bigger the change, the greater the challenge.

That’s why I’ve been taking an in-depth look at the findings from Switch, Chip and Dan Heath’s excellent book on “How to Change Things When Change is Hard.”

In the first post, we looked at ways to overcome analysis paralysis and get our lost-in-the-details analytic side moving toward the change we want. In the second post, we examined how to tap the power of our emotions.

In this post, we’re looking at ways to Shape the Path toward change.

Tweak the environment

The Heath brothers talk about an experiment involving two groups of moviegoers. Group one was given an enormous bucket of popcorn. Group two received a somewhat smaller, but still huge bucket. The buckets were weighed before and after the movie. Group one ate noticeably more than group two.

The lesson? In many cases, it’s easiest to bring about positive change by changing our environment.

It wasn’t that members of group one were more gluttonous than those in group two or the products of poor parenting. It was that their popcorn containers were bigger.

There are all kinds of implications here for wise money management. For example, research has shown that the more television we watch, the less money we save. The researchers explain that frequent TV watchers don’t just see more commercials. They also regularly see people on TV programs living lifestyles that are more expensive than their own, and that tends to increase their spending on clothing, cars, and more.

You could tell yourself to save more, believe you should save more, and even want to save more. But changing your environment in ways that lead to less TV watching, like canceling your cable subscription or moving your TV to a less convenient part of your house, may end up being more effective. (One of the best decisions we made when we moved to our current home in 2012 was putting our TV in the basement!)

Here are some other simple ways to improve your finances by tweaking your environment:

  • Spending too much? Get off the mailing and email lists of all those companies that tempt you to overspend.
  • Having trouble sticking with a budget because you keep forgetting to record each day’s spending? Tape your Cash Flow Tracker to your refrigerator as a reminder, or even better, take your budget online via an app such as Mint.com.
  • Missing your bill due dates? Sign up for e-mail reminders from your credit card companies (yes, there is such a thing as the wise use of credit cards) or put the due dates in your calendar.

Build habits

As the Heaths point out, when behavior is habitual, it doesn’t require much willpower. But that begs the question: how do you build a new habit? The Heaths suggest the use of Action Triggers, which they describe as preloading decisions.

Planning to go for a run this week? Maybe you will; maybe you won’t. But if you preload the decision by committing ahead of time which day and what time you’re going, and if you think about what route you’ll take, chances are good you’ll go for that run.

As for financial habits,

  • Build savings by setting up an automatic transfer each month from your checking account to a separate savings account
  • Going out to eat with friends? Decide in advance how much you can afford to spend, choose a restaurant where that’s reasonable, and commit to that amount

Rally the herd

Much of our behavior is shaped by the behavior of those around us. Unfortunately, when it comes to money it’s tough to find very many people who are doing things well. You may need to settle for finding a handful of individuals who get the money thing right.

Jude and I have several friends like this. They live beneath their means with great contentment. Just knowing them and seeing some of the countercultural decisions they’ve made reinforces all that we believe about wise money management and encourages us to stay the course.

What about you?

What changes are you trying to bring about in your financial life? How could you shape the path toward the goal you’re pursuing?

Know someone else who would benefit from this article?  Please forward a link to my site.  And if you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe to this blog by clicking here.  Two or three times a week, you’ll receive ideas and encouragement for using money well.

, , , ,

Comments are closed.
Share This
http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js