15: Your Money Manual | The Money Love Podcast

[Music] welcome to the money love podcast. I'm your host and money coach, Paige Pritchard. If you're ready to uplevel your results and relationship with money, you're in the right place. Each week, I give you the tools to transform your mindset, manage your emotions, and achieve results with your money you never dreamed were possible.

Hi love, welcome to episode 15 of the money love podcast. I hope you're having an amazing Tuesday, and I'm excited because in today's episode, we are continuing our discussion on money and relationships. So we're going to be talking about your money manual. And talking about the manual, there is always a concept that precedes the manual, which we have to nail down first because once you understand the foundational concept of being an emotional child and being an emotional adult, the manual is going to make a lot more sense to you. So before we talk about the manual, we're going to talk about this concept between being an emotional child and being an emotional adult.

So I've really talked about this quite a lot on the podcast so far, but I just haven't referred to it yet as being an emotional adult or pointing out that that's what it is. But here's what I always tell you guys. I always tell you that bottom line, we are responsible for how we feel in every moment because we are in charge of how we think in every moment. Now, if you know the model, then you know this is true. So let me just give you a quick refresher on the model in case you missed me explaining that in a previous episode.

The model is the foundational tool that I use in my life coaching practice. And just as a quick refresher, the model states that there are circumstances of the world, the facts, the black and white, the things that happen to us, the things that we cannot control. And our human brains are going to have and offer us thoughts about those circumstances. Any thought that you have is simply just a sentence in your head. But a sentence in your head, or a thought, or a belief, is going to generate an emotion within you. Okay? Our feelings come from our thinking, and then our feelings are the fuel that drive everything that we do. So the next step in the model is actions. So actions are the behaviors that we either take or we don't take in response to the feelings that we're feeling. And then the last part of the model is our results in any area of life. So our results with money, with relationships. But your results are determined by the actions that you take. Okay? This is the CTFAR: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Results. And so when you know the model, you know that the above statement that I just said is true, that we are always in charge of our emotions because our emotions come from our thinking, from from our thoughts, and we can always intentionally choose our thoughts.

Now, let me just point out to you that this is pretty much the complete opposite of how most people live their lives. For many of us, myself included, the model is a stark contrast of where we were told our emotions come from growing up. So many of us were raised to believe that our emotions are at the mercy of things outside of us, that our emotions are caused and are controlled by other people, our jobs, the economy, who the president is, what our spouse does or says to us. And you know this because we are always saying, "When you did this, you made me feel blank," or "When this happened, I felt blank," or "When she said that to me, I felt blank." I mean, how often do we say things like that, right? And anytime that you find yourself doing that, what you're doing is perpetuating this disempowering construct that we do not have ultimate control and power over our emotions, and what we're saying is that other people or other things outside of us do. And that is the difference between these two ideologies. It's the difference between emotional adulthood and emotional childhood.

So let's start with emotional childhood. Emotional childhood occurs when we are reacting to or avoiding our emotions rather than taking full responsibility for them and choosing thoughts that we know will create more desirable and appropriate emotions. When we are functioning as emotional children, we are blaming other people for how we feel, for how we act, and for the results that we get in life. It's a state of dependence. It's a state of blame, and really, it's a state of ultimate powerlessness. And here's the thing, the reality is is that most adults are acting like emotional children. Hello, 2020. Have you been on the internet? And I'll be the first to raise my hand and say that I catch myself being an emotional child all the time. In fact, I had a coaching session with another coach last week who was coaching me, and she pointed out to me that I was being an emotional child in a particular area of my life, and she was 100% right. And I had to really check myself and realize that I was totally acting like an emotional child.

And something important to understand is that you're not one or the other. Okay? You're not either an emotional child or an emotional adult and just stuck there. In fact, I want you to think of it more of a continuum that you come in and out of. So I can be in a situation where I catch myself being an emotional child about something, and then I do some self-coaching and some self-reflection on myself, and I can pull myself back into being an emotional adult. But I'll just tell you this, being an emotional adult is challenging work. Okay? It's hard. Like I always say, blame is easy, personal accountability is really hard. And you can learn the skills of being an emotional adult, but you will still find yourself falling back into emotional childhood, and that's okay. Because like I said, most of us have lived our lives as emotional children, meaning that we are not taking responsibility for where our feelings come from.

Now, if being an emotional child means that we're not ultimately taking responsibility over our emotional state, then emotional adulthood is the opposite of that. So emotional adulthood is knowing that your emotions are generated from within you by your thoughts. It's knowing that no one can ever make you feel anything until you have a thought about the circumstance, about the facts, or the black and white of the world. It means that you take full responsibility for every single thing you feel, no matter what someone else says or does to you. Okay? It is a powerful internal state of ownership. It means taking responsibility for our worst emotions, but also for our best ones. It means that we don't have to expect emotions to come from other people or from things outside of us. So this means that you don't expect love, happiness, purpose, fulfillment to come from your partner or from your relationship because you know that your emotions are created from within you. And this also applies to money, right? I've told you guys this before, but whenever you think that money is going to make you feel a certain way, you're being an emotional child because, like I told you, it's never the object. It's never the thing outside of you that makes you feel anything. It's knowing that the way you feel about money comes from your thoughts and beliefs about money.

Now, like I've said, and I'll say it again, is this easy? No, of course not. It's incredibly challenging work. It's going to be the work of your life. But like I said, it can be the most empowering and fulfilling work that you can do to take back ownership over your results and your life. You get to realize that ultimately, you are not at the mercy of other people or in the grips of things that you cannot control. I'll reiterate that: no one can make you feel anything until you've had a thought about it. Now, this does not mean that if someone does something or says something terrible to you, that you don't want to feel hurt, or that it's not healthy to feel hurt. Again, 50/50. I want you to feel your emotions. I don't want you to resist or feel like you can't feel what you feel. But the difference is that you own that the reason that you feel hurt is because you believed them, or that you had a thought that caused your own pain.

I like to use the example of the blue hair, right? If somebody came up to you, for most of us who don't have blue hair, maybe some of you guys do, but most of us don't have blue hair. So if somebody came up to you and said, "Hey, I hate your blue hair," you would just be like, "Okay, crazy. Like, I don't have blue hair. I don't know what you're talking about." You wouldn't be bothered by it. It wouldn't bother you. But if somebody came up to you and made a comment about an area of your life where you have a lot of doubt or insecurities, you would feel totally different. And again, it's not coming from the words that the person said. It's coming from thoughts about it. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, they're right." And that thought of "they're right" is what causes you to feel the insecurity, not what the person says to you.

This shows us that your emotional life is generated from within you. You get to decide what you want to believe and feel inside of you. You don't have to depend on anyone to act a certain way. You don't have to depend on the world to turn out a certain way. And it's our most powerful stance. When you know that, when you step into being an emotional adult, you are able to experience any emotion, and you know that the worst thing that can happen to you is simply having to experience an emotion. It's a place of ultimate power, ultimate control, and the level of confidence that this will give you in every area of your life, especially with your relationships, is insane. You can have ultimate authority over your life now.

Now, there truly is no other area of our lives where we act more like emotional children than we do in our relationships, right? I mean, think about this: how often do you blame your partner for making you feel a certain way, or for hurting your feelings, or for causing you pain? I want you just to start paying attention to how many times you place that burden on your partner. And when I learned this concept and I started paying attention in my own relationship, let me tell you, I realized that I was doing this a lot. So many times, I would be placing the well-being of my emotional state in Ryan's hands and acting like it was his responsibility. Countless times, and most of us do operate this way as well within our relationships, right? We believe that it's the other person's responsibility to make us happy, and that when we feel sad or angry or annoyed, it's their fault, and we believe that they cause emotions in us. And so because of that, we are constantly in control mode. We are constantly telling our partner what they need to do and what they shouldn't do, and our emotions are all over the place because, like we've talked about, trying to control other human beings rarely works. Most of us make other people pawns on our emotional chessboards. And this creates the dynamic that our partners are simply there to serve us, to meet our needs, to comply, to be who we think that they should be so that we can feel good, because again, our emotions come from them. That's what we believe, even though that's not true.

This is the state that so many people are in within their relationships. And when you're being an emotional child within your relationships, you are going to have a manual for your partner. So this is where the manual comes in. Let's talk about that. A manual is an instruction guide that we have for someone in our lives about how we would like them to behave so that we can feel good and happy all the time. When you think about it, manuals are always very self-serving and honestly, very selfish. Again, it's about us controlling the world so that ultimately we can feel good. And when you have a manual, you know that you're being an emotional child because you are tying your emotional well-being to someone behaving in a certain way. Most of us have manuals for many people in our lives. We have manuals for our parents, for our in-laws, for our friends, for our co-workers, but especially for our partners. The manual that we have for them is probably the thickest of all. And whenever I think about a manual, the visual that comes into my mind is I always just think about like a big thick binder with lots of tabs that we're carrying around in our brains. And the crazy thing is that many times, we generally don't even tell our partners what's in our manual. We just expect them to know what our expectations and our rules are, and that they should just know how to act and follow our manuals. And yes, well, it might seem very justified at times to have these expectations of our partner, it can also be incredibly damaging to the satisfaction and intimacy within our relationships because we all think that we know how other people should live their lives, and that is truly the number one source of suffering. If 2020 has not been the ultimate example of this, I don't know what will. I mean, like I said, hello, have you been on the internet this year? Really, when you look at it, anytime you go on the internet, anytime you go on Facebook or Instagram, it's a bunch of people being emotional children, imposing their manuals on other people, telling other people how they should live their lives. And as you can see, it causes a lot of pain and suffering for all involved. It's person after person imposing their manuals on others for how they think or how they should behave.

But here's the bottom line: other people's behavior has no impact on us emotionally until we think about it, until we interpret it, and until we choose to make it mean something. No matter what people do, no matter how they act or what they say, we do not have to give others the power to determine how we feel. This includes everyone: strangers on the internet, mom-in-law, co-workers, friends, and partner. Okay? So here's a dead giveaway that you are imposing your manual on somebody: it's when you use the word "should." "He should tell me he loves me more." "He should buy me something special on my birthday." "He should want to look at the budget with me." "He should know what I like." "He should want to get our debt paid off like I do." "He should support me in my new business venture." "He should make more money." "He should spend less time at work." "Should, should, should." These examples are very simple and brief, but the truth is is that most manuals are pages upon pages thick, and they are complicated, and they are intricate, and they are detailed. And like I said, rather than sharing our manual and our expectations with the person that they're about, we feel that the other person should just inherently know what our manuals are and comply.

Now, like we talked about last week, all adults have free will, which really at the end of the day makes our manuals very problematic because all adults have the freedom to behave however they choose. And this includes you. That's the beautiful thing about it. You're included. There is nothing you ever have to do, and there is nothing anyone else has to do for you. And it's very common now within relationships for two people in the relationship to sit down and then share with each other what their needs are so that then the other person can work to meet the needs of the other person. And the problem with this is that it creates a manual setup for disaster because the truth is, each of us is responsible for meeting our own needs. When you're in a relationship where you feel responsible for filling someone else's needs and they feel responsible for filling yours, there is constant manipulation and an effort to control one another so that in the end, really, nobody wins. And the truth is, you cannot control another person, and there is nothing that they could possibly do to make you as happy as you want to be. All of that power lies within you. And if both partners are responsible for their own happiness, and they can meet in the middle and have fun and purpose together, that is how the best relationships function.

So we have manuals in every area of our life for all people. We have manuals about health, we have manuals about politics, we have manuals about our careers, but we also have manuals for money. And so your money manual, think about it in this big binder, your money manual is the section or the chapter of your manual, of your rulebook, on how your partner should behave with money. So it's what they should and shouldn't be spending money on. It's how much they should spend on certain things. It's how much money they should make. It's how they should talk to you when you're talking about money. It's how involved that they should be in the financial planning. It's all the "shoulds" that you place on your partner when it comes to money.

Now, I get it. I can already hear some of you, you're like, "Okay, well, I mean, I really don't think I'm asking for a lot here. Like, I don't think it's very unreasonable of me to ask blank." So let's just talk about that. And I want to offer you a couple things here, okay? The first thing I want you to do with your money manual is just start paying attention and start realizing what your money manual is. What are all the rules and all the "shoulds," so to speak, that you have imposed on your partner that you expect them to follow? And then I just want you to ask yourself the question, "Why?" "Why do I want my spouse to make more money?" "Why do I want him to look at the budget?" "Why do I want him to stop spending money on blank?" And I want you to answer that question. Ask why, but then answer it. And I think that you'll realize that after peeling back the layers, it's ultimately because you are expecting the changed actions of your partner to lead to changed emotions within you. So again, emotional childhood thinking that your emotions are at the expense of someone doing something differently, of changing the circumstance, of changing another person. So you think that your partner should make more money. Why? Answer that question. Maybe your answer is, "So I can feel more secure." Okay, so then my question to you is going to be, "Why can't you feel secure with the amount of money that he makes now?" Right? Secure is an emotion, which means that it comes from your thinking. It actually has nothing to do with the amount of money that your husband makes. You want your partner to start looking at the budget with you. Why? Answer that question. Maybe your answer is, "So I can feel more connected." Again, the connection, the feeling, the emotion of connectedness doesn't come from your partner looking at the budget. It comes from your belief that that activity will increase the connectedness in your relationship. So looking at all of your "shoulds" and then asking yourself and answering the question of why, why you want him or her to do those things, is going to be really enlightening.

Now, after doing this exercise, you might have some areas of your manual that you like and that you want to keep and that are important to you, and that's totally fine. It's just knowing that it's your manual. And so I want to make this very clear: you can absolutely, and I encourage you to, communicate your "shoulds" to your partner. It's going to be really hard for your partner to follow your manual when they don't even know what's in your manual, when they don't know the rules and conditions that are being put on to them that you are expecting them to follow. So make your manual known. Communicate your money rulebook. Make all the requests you want. Okay? Knock yourself out in that department. But here is the key differentiating factor: do not allow your emotional well-being and happiness to depend on whether or not your requests are met. When you do that, you are setting yourself up for trouble. We start banging our heads up against the wall trying to manipulate other people to behave in the way we want so that we can feel better. And again, this just creates a spiral of pain and negativity. So make your requests known. Make your manual known to your partner, especially your money manual. And after you make these requests, I want you to listen to your partner's perspective and feedback. Is there a reason that they haven't been doing it in the past? Did they simply not know that that's what you wanted them to be doing? Do they just flat out not want to? Do they have another way or another system that they think is more effective? Do they see a different side or viewpoint that you don't? Gather that feedback from them. And regardless of whatever their response is, I want you to know that when we can release all the rules and all the expectations that we have, and we can simply just listen to the other person, when we hear what's going on for them, our relationships can change for the better. We can start understanding them from a different perspective that isn't clouded by our own thinking and by our own expectations.

So here is an exercise that I want to leave you with. I want you to think about your partner and money. And then I want you to write down all of the things that you want your partner to do ideally when it comes to money. In a perfect world, if you could mold your partner into anything you wanted when it comes to money, what would that look like? Write that down. Everything they do, all the qualities that they have, what it would look like. Once you have that list, next I want you to consider what you think that you would feel, the emotions that you would feel, if your partner did all of those things and did them voluntarily and happily. And remember, all of your feelings come from your thinking. So after you identify how you think it would make you feel, I want you to ask yourself, "Okay, what would I be thinking if my partner behaved in line with the way that I want them to behave when it comes to money?" Really think about that until you can identify one main thought that you would be thinking. My next question for you is, can you still think that thought that you just identified about your partner without them having to follow your manual? Because if the answer to that question is yes, then you've won. If you can answer yes to that question, then you don't have to wait for your partner to change to feel better. You can feel better on your own accord. You can decide that I'm not going to make my life about the way that I believe that I'm entitled to be treated. The only thing that I'm entitled to is taking care of my own emotional life and my own brain to make sure that I'm thinking thoughts that serve me. You will discover so much freedom and so much power when you realize that you can stop trying to control the world and the people in the world to feel differently than you do. Abraham says, "Freedom only comes when you decide that you don't need anyone or for anything to change in order to feel better." And guess what? Your partner is going to appreciate it as well. When we can start letting people just be who they are, when we don't try to control others, and when they feel safe to be their true selves, that is when we step into the most authentic and intimate versions of our relationships. We can be much calmer when we don't make the actions of other people mean something negative. And another byproduct is that we can really hear them out. We can get their perspective on things. We can hear their side of the story. We can understand why they do or why they don't do what we've requested of them. And this is such a more effective way to handle things than slamming down and pounding our fists on our manuals and demanding compliance.

So I want to ask you a question to close this out. Are you willing to give up your manual? Are you willing to let go of your expectations and focus all of that time and energy on creating the best life that you can? Again, I know this is hard and it's challenging work. It is not easy to do. But if you can do this, you will find that your life is enhanced by people being around you who genuinely do the things that they want to do, rather than doing things because of you emotionally manipulating them, or doing things because that's what they think they have to do in order to make you happy, because they're doing things in an attempt to follow your manual. I promise, if you are willing just to consider this and to give it a try, I think that you'll find that it really does change everything. It really is the path and the way to creating the most genuine, authentic, and intimate versions of our relationships, not just with your partner, but with everyone in your life.

All right, that's all I have for you on this one. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the money love podcast. If you're loving the podcast, then I want to invite you to join me in the Overcoming Overspending Membership. It's where we take this work deeper and apply the concepts and coaching from each week's episode into your own life. By being a member, you have exclusive access to my Overcoming Overspending process, 10 monthly live coaching calls with me, a private podcast member-only community, monthly money topic and challenge, bonus courses, and so much more. There's nowhere else like it out there to level up your finances and life. Simply go to overcoming overspending.com and you can enter in the code MLP3 at checkout to save $30 on your first month inside the membership. See you inside.