Do you break out in hives at the thought of creating - and sticking to - a personal budget? Yeah, you know you should have one, but does it feel like a constraint? Does it feel like the long arm of the law, preventing you from doing the right-now things you want to do? Perhaps that's the whole idea behind a budget - a Big Brother looking over your shoulder and smacking your hands - but perhaps it's not. What if, instead of bemoaning giving up 5 specialty coffees and a massage every week, you were focused on what your extra cash is going to do for you? What if you framed budgeting differently inside your head?
Recently in one-on one coaching, a lot of client conversations have been around budgets, schedules, and tools to help these two major functions work effectively. Written goals work in a similar way for some people. Budgets, schedules, and goals create opportunities for accountability. Let's be real here - which is the bigger deal to you - the accountability or the opportunity?
While they appear to be completely rational processes, scheduling, budgeting, and goal setting can tap into the feels, and it can take you by surprise. The process of setting any of these frameworks for behavior can reveal excitement, or resistance and fear. Accountability and opportunity tend to tap into the two versions of child ego state that are holding a running commentary inside your head. This commentary is louder in some people than it is in others, but it's there nonetheless.
The natural child is creative, upbeat, funny, full of ideas (and sometimes mischief!) The natural child wants to go for it, especially if the rewards are evident and coming soon. The natural child sees the opportunities and becomes excited, motivated to act.
The ego state of the inadequate child worries. He or she knows that keeping score means that there exists the possibility of losing, of not measuring up to expectations. Moreover, when the performance criteria are being set by someone else, this version of the child ego can become resentful. There is a feeling of resistance to the constraints, of what can't happen, of what they are not allowed to do.
What if your budget were really about making sure you had the funding to go on a vacation, or to buy a new car? What if your calendar were created to make sure you have time to play tennis every day? What if more of your goals were about the "want to" activities and outcomes in life rather than the "shoulds"?
Sure, there are times when you have to suck it up and choose something for the group that you would not choose for yourself alone. When you are inside a business, the business needs are typically at the top of the list, and yours come after. In our lives we're not islands, with only ourselves about which to be concerned. There are coworkers, spouses, children, and other things to consider.
There is a piece of this issue, though, that relates to whether or not you have defined what it is that you want. You'll be pulled around by schedules, and budgets, and by other people's goals until you develop some of your own. You identify them, and then you choose them. Once you do that, all of the tools transform from handcuffs into scaffolding, to support you as you engage in labor toward the things you love. And that changes everything.
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