Why is my brain resisting a financial coach?
Your brain defaults to emotions versus facts
The last couple of decades has seen an explosion of research tapping into the mysteries of the brain. This has been especially useful in advertising, communications, psychology, and gaming to understand why humans sometimes act in ways that are clearly detrimental to their own wellbeing.
Emotions are deeply primal. And while we may think we are rational, we are not. Our brains do not default to information and logic, they default to emotions like motive, hope, desire, shame, resentment, and fear. Our brains have been problem solving emotionally for millions of years, but math, science, money, economics are just now happening on the scene for our brains.
One result of this is that our emotions can shortcut our logic. Once we have established a set of norms we feel comfortable with, our beliefs can be extremely resistant to change, even when scientific evidence completely refutes or undermines those beliefs.
So when your read an article online that says “Hey, put some numbers in a spreadsheet, do the math, cut expenses, and you’ll succeed in life”, your brain may not, actually rarely does, react the way you might want it to. After all, we don’t all read that article, rush to our computers, open up excel, and just fix our financial lives, do we?
In fact, trying to get most people to do a budget is an amazingly frustrating exercise. Research consistently shows that if we do the math, create the budgets, and follow a plan, we can succeed and become wealthy.
But we don’t.
Are we crazy?
Not at all. You’re just fighting your brains deep emotional foundation of avoiding conflict and shame, seeking immediate gratification and pleasure, and avoiding any information and data that conflicts with your beliefs. Your brain actually wants to avoid all the negative feelings associated with fear, pain, stress, and sacrifice. So it’s motivated to tell you stories and to guide your beliefs. Maybe those beliefs are that ‘everything will work out somehow’, or ‘I really can do this while not having to look at it’, or ‘I can just make more money and not worry about my expenses’.
At the end of the day, our brains do not connect with numbers and facts. We connect with emotions and experiences. To have any success at all, we have to connect emotions and experiences and success stories to the actions and behaviors and spending patterns we need to succeed.
A financial coach can help you navigate the landmine of emotions and facts, of feelings and numbers. Financial coaches can help you plan out how to make smart decisions, even when they don’t feel like fun decisions. But avoidance isn’t the only way your brain gets in your way.
Immediate gratification is hard to resist
The brain is also wired for survival. And the animal survival part of the brain is deeper and more primal than the logical part of the brain. Scientists have studied this duality of the brain to help understand decision making and conflict. The Marshmallow experiments were a series of studies to test the ability of children to delay gratification in order to receive a longer term award. In the experiment, a researcher placed a marshmallow in front of a child and presented the following options. The child could eat the marshmallow now and that would be it, or if they waited, a second marshmallow would be given to them, that they could enjoy later. The researcher then left the room for 15 minutes to allow the child to make their decision. The researchers then followed the children over the course of 40 years to see if there was any correlation between the ability to delay gratification and long term success in life. Perhaps not surprisingly, the children who showed an ability to delay gratification turned out to be more successful in life.
Even more interesting and applicable to coaching was a followup study conducted at the University of Rochester to determine if delaying gratification was a birth attribute or a learned attribute. What they determined is that delayed gratification is a learned skill that may be encouraged, or discouraged, by the stability of the environment you grow up in.
Accepting short term pain and denying immediate gratification in order to achieve a long term benefit has been shown over years of research to be both a positive predictor of success and that it is also a learnable skill. And yet, we know this is difficult because, so few people seem to be able to do it in real life. The animal brain wants things now for survival. The logical brain wants to plan and save and invest for the future.
Discipline matters and discipline pays off. But trying to do it on your own can be really hard, like staring at a marshmallow in front of your face, wondering if the reward will be worth it.
Having a financial coach in your corner to help guide you, help point out the duality of your choices, and make recommendations that reinforce financial discipline, is essential to sticking with a plan that will generate long term financial rewards.
In summary
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you see why even getting started on trying to improve your financial condition can seem so hard.. And that’s before you’ve even had a financial consultation.
Financial problems are difficult to talk about, your normal support network probably isn’t of much help, your brain is wired to seek immediate gratification, defaults to emotions over facts, and tends to hide and keep your own best advice from resonating with you. Even when we have clear facts that discipline and delaying gratification lead to long term rewards, our brains make it a struggle to get out of our own way.
There may be no other area of life outside love and passion, where the saying that “the first step is the always the hardest” more strongly applies.
Depending on where you are on your journey, it may be hard to schedule a consultation. It may be scary to choose a financial coach. It may be embarrassing to start sharing your financial problems. But take comfort in knowing and believing there are a mountain of reasons why it is hard. and that you can overcome them. It isn’t just hard for you. It is hard for everyone.. But the effort is worth it.
You want to change. You want to succeed. You’ve managed to suppress your animal brain and you’re thinking about long term success. Now you just need to find the right coach to work with. To find out how to choose the right coach for you, keep reading...
References
https://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification
Brain World Issue 4, Volume 9, Summer 2018 “Feelings over Facts – How influence really works”, by Lauren Migliore
