Today I received a postcard from Andrea on her holidays. Andrea, a twenty four year old P.A. called me some time ago, clearly very upset. She was spending more than she could afford, and the worry was making it worse, and she had to do something before it became a disaster. She described how she’d developed a habit of “going nuts” with money, and later regretting it.
We are often too close to our own issues to see them objectively. We tend to describe our own problems either as one small aspect of them or in vague generalisations. As a mentor and coach it’s vital to explore and make sure that I’m dealing with the real issue and not a red herring. “Going nuts” obviously meant something to Andrea. I needed to find out what.
During our conversation, it was vital that we discovered exactly what “going nuts” with money meant to Andrea in order to be able to address it.”Going nuts” included spending money on lavish presents for other people, giving generous donations, buying designer clothes and other luxuries, followed by ”the big regret”, usually the following day. I wanted to know the types of situation that led to her “going nuts”. I started by asking her how she felt physically when this was happening. Initially she described the “restless, busy” feeling in her hands needing to do something, and a “heavy” feeling in her shoulders. Those feelings subsided when she was spending money. We explored that last few times that she had “gone nuts” and the situations going on at the time. Whilst initially she couldn’t connect situations to these circumstances, it began to dawn. These situations included: when she felt expected to stay late at work, after her boyfriend tried to “speed things up between them” , and when she felt the house was in a mess. I asked her to describe her feelings in each of these cases, and as I expected, they were very similar - being pressured, being taken for granted, feeling she had to do something she didn’t want to, and being very uncomfortable about something that was about to happen. It seemed clear to me that the feeling in common with these situations was of “having no choice”. When I asked her about this, her voice changed from anxious and tearful to one of realisation, “Yes, that’s exactly right- having no choice – when I’m being pushed into what someone else wants.” This was the “eureka” moment I had been looking for and felt we could deal with this problem very quickly. It was clear she was using money to rebel and so she was taking her feelings of oppression out on her bank balance. I showed her how first, to develop awareness of when she was being given no choice, and second, how to use some cool tools to enable her to deal with them appropriately.
Before she left, we made sure she could use what she had learnt, and she went away beaming.
Andrea’s overspending was the symptom of another problem – feelings of oppression. In order to resolve the spending she needed to take control of her situation, rather than being sucked into other peoples’ agendas. If I had merely helped her stop spending, she would have found another potentially more destructive means of venting her feelings of oppression. What I did was enable her to know when she needed to do something to resolve her problem, and gave her some cool tools to do it. She knew that her heavy shoulders and busy hands meant that she needed to deal with a something!
A few weeks later Andrea rang excitedly to tell me of her successes. Sounding like a different person, she described negotiating with her boss to have an assistant to help with the increasing workload, and in the meantime agreed with him to limit her overtime to an hour a day. She managed to articulate to her boyfriend why she was uncomfortable at visiting his relatives, and he promised to tell them it was only early days in their relationship, and slow down the whole “boyfriend pressure thing”. As for the messy house… she laughed loudly at this: she realised she had the choice of “being a slob and too embarrassed to answer the door”, or using the visualisation work we had done together to imagine the pleasure of a clean tidy house. She found this hugely motivating, and used the reframing techniques we’d discussed, to reframe “housework drudgery” as “a great work out” with a clean house as a side effect. She was just about to ring off when she proclaimed , “– Oh, and I’ve saved up almost a third of the cost of the holiday I’ve booked and I haven’t regretted a single purchase since we met!
I added the postcard she sent me from her hols to my treasured collection. It simply read, “No pressure!”. What a lovely start to the day!