recreatingreality.com

It is official!  We are in a RECESSION, and have been for a year.  The stock market took a nose dive upon hearing the news and several of the people I have been working with were ready to throw up their hands and throw in the towel.  I have never heard such moaning and groaning when the “R” word was confirmed.  Just the mention of the “R” word seemed to validate the tough economic times. 

Okay.  So, we are in a recession.  It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.  Perhaps, this is one of the toughest our generation has faced, but no one promised us a rose garden.  And, it is time that we stopped looking at the world through rose colored glasses.  The important lesson is that we get a second chance.  No matter how difficult times may seem right now, this is not the “end time.” 

In case you are wallowing in despair, I want to share a little success story with you.  Hopefully, you will want to kick yourself in the butt and get started on planning and ACTING on those plans.

Last January I began teaching a small group of people about goal setting.  We met once a week to talk about our goals.  No!  We did not allow moaning and groaning.  There was not time to worry about what could happen next.  It was time to take action.

The first pledge the group took was to take positive action.  There were no WITCH hunts.  A WITCH hunt is a “What If This Could Happen” worry session.  WITCH hunts lead to worry and worry is a waste of time and valuable energy. 

Let’s get the notion of worry out of the way right now.  First of all, worry surrounds us with WITCHes.  Worry does not deal with the now.  It deals with fear of all those things we can imagine a WITCH could do to us.  Worry overlooks the present and projects us into a negative future.  We live in the now.  We do what we can now, this moment.  If we properly tend to the now, the future will take care of itself.

I learned a simple lesson about worry when I was quite young.  To share the lesson with you, think about what you are worried about… right now.  Write it down.  Go ahead.  Write a statement of what you are worried about.  Put it into words.  And, for all you positive thinkers, this isn’t delving into a negative mental attitide or attracting negatives into your life.  The exercise is to designed to force you to state what is really worrying you.

Why?  Because as you sit and worry, which is the trap that many are in, you don’t really know what you are worrying about.  Your mind flits from one partial thought to another.  If someone asks, you will say that you are worried.  But, the truth is you cannot define exactly what it is that is paralyzing your mind and keeping you from taking action.  That is the nature of worry.  It consumes us without definition.  In fact, worry is the invitation to all WITCHes to inhabit our minds.

Once you know what is worrying you, decide if you can do something about it or not.  It is this simple.  If you can do something about what is worrying you, do it now.  If you can’t do anything about what is worrying you, forget it.  There is no need to waste time and energy dwelling on an imaginary problem that has not materialized and may never occur.  I know this is logic.  I also know that logic seldom works for those people who enjoy wallowing in self-pity.  You have to decide whether you want to move on or give up.

In our little group, there was one couple who found themselves deep in credit card debt.  They didn’t say much when we got together each week and they always were among the first to leave as soon as the meeting was over.  I really thought they would be among the first to stop attending.  However, they showed up each week, never missing a meeting.

Last week I received a call from the wife, asking if she and her husband could stop by one evening.  When they arrived, they announced that they would not stay long but wanted to share “something” in person.  Their story was a simple one.  They had been over $15,000 in credit card debt and had exactly $0 in savings when they first came to our little get-together.  That was 11 months ago.

Today, they have $0 in credit card debt and showed me the receipt from a $5000 CD that is earning a hair over 4% interest this next year. 

How did they do it?  They cut back on everything that wasn’t essential.  In fact, they watch the 3 broadcast channels and PBS rather than the 200+ channels on their cable contract (which they cancelled).  The wife had been to the grocery market with me a couple of times and apparently had paid more attention than I thought.  She told me that she had learned to save at least 30% at the grocery store by shopping wisely and when the store offered sales.  They had negotiated down the interest on two credit cards and had negotiated the pay-off on three more.  I should add that according to both, the lower credit card interest rates and pay-offs did not happen on the first call.  They called the credit card companies every month until they got what they felt they could handle.

The cuts they made in expenses are too numerous to go into, but they cut costs across the board.  In fact, I was amazed that in some areas they cut only $2.00 a month, but accumulatively they had cut several hundreds of dollars each month from their expenditures. 

I asked the couple what had motivated them to take action.  The answer was that they had seen the rise in prices and felt that times were getting tougher on them each month and instead of continuing to worry about the future (the WITCH hunt) they decided to take action.  In fact, I was surprised to hear the husband say that they had decided to look for the “greater benefit” of the recession.  Their greater benefit is that they bit the bullet early on.  They didn’t care what other people said or thought as they cut back. 

As the wife said, “They laughed at us.”  She smiled as she showed me their first Certificate of Deposit.