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The Longest Relationship of Your Life
publication date: Jan 5, 2010
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author/source: David Kruger, MD
By David Kruger, MD
 You’re writing a story that you may not know how to fully tell. It’s a very personal story with its own history and language. It’s highly visible to others but often not to you. As Loren Eiseley observed in The Unexpected Universe, “Reality has a way of hiding from even its most gifted observers.” It’s a story that you talk about every day, think about several times a day. It is remarkably simple, yet intricately complex. This story has an internal and external dialogue, a secret language, and encrypted messages. It’s complicated because some important aspects are emotional, unspoken, and even unconscious. This story is about the longest relationship you’ll have in your life. Your parents discussed it before you arrived; people will deliberate it after you die. Maybe you’ll get ten years out of a car, perhaps fifty with a spouse, but this story you can never stop writing or living. You can’t break up with it, run away from it, or coax it into loving you more. Even though it’s unexamined and elusive, you orient life decisions around it. When I spoke with a well-known self help guru, his response was, “You know, Dave, I don’t know how to tell this story to myself in order to know what to change.” You alone determine the genre: fiction or nonfiction, tragedy or triumph. The story tells most about the teller. This story ghostwrites every aspect of your life story. From what you eat and drink, to what you plan and play. Health, recreation, stress — even the water you drink — are all impacted by this story. At times you’ve used this story to regulate your moods, increase self-esteem, influence others, or to soothe emotional pains. And how you live this story will be what you teach your children. The villain or hero is the most popular legal substance to all people of the world. It speaks to you. You speak with it. It’s your money. Consider these questions: • What’s your money story? • What would you ideally like your money story to be? We give money meaning: we breathe life into it, give it emotional value, build a relationship with it and make it bigger than it is. Money can make any statement and carry any message. Your money story is not your income, assets, expenses, or debt — it’s your relationship with money. It’s how you use money in story lines of what money means to you, says about you, and what you say with it. It’s a running dialogue about how much you feel you deserve and how much you’re worth — even how much you’re capable of. It’s about what you would do if you had more or less of it. And what your sense of “enough” is. Your money story has little to do with math. If money were about math, no one would have debt. You can fulfill a desire you didn’t know you had by spending money you don’t have. You can define yourself by acquisitions not paid for. You can even borrow based on how much money you will be lent rather than how much you can pay back. A secret language becomes most developed by emotionally powerful desires. A desire is not quieted by its satisfaction; desires can be created by filling them. Being the legal tender of desire, money becomes the inkblot of the Rorschach test: when our eyes look straight at it, there is only a design on paper, but when offered the chance to imbue the design with meaning, the interpretations will be as wishful and varied as the fantasies of the respondents. The messages will keep repeating themselves – people will keep writing the same money stories that imprison them – until they are listened to. It is not wealth, position, possessions, or even a chase of happiness that creates problems; it is when you lose yourself in the chase. Your money story is a large part of your life story. Some of the money issues are really about money, but many are about other matters, private or even secret, hitchhiking on money. You write your money story and live it. You can revise it, or write an informed, powerful New Money Story. About the Author  David Krueger, MD is an Executive Mentor Coach, and CEO of MentorPath, an executive coaching, training, and wellness firm. His most recent book, The Secret Language of Money, was released by McGraw Hill in August 2009. Visit his website www.TheSecretLanguageofMoney.comFor more information and registration for the seminar series Your New Money Story and accompanying Roadmap For Financial Success Workbook, please visit www.NewMoneyStory.com |
