022 | Why You’re Struggling to Pay Off Debt

There’s one thing keeping you from paying off your debt or reaching your other goals. The good thing, though, is you have absolute control over it and can change it to get the results you want.

Lightly edited transcript appears after the show notes.

Topics Discussed

• what’s keeping you from seeing the results you want with your debt
• some examples of how it plays out
• what you can do to overcome it

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Resources mentioned

Lifestyle Freedom Starter Guide: https://www.rhothomas.com/start

Wealthyesque, Episode 2: https://www.rhothomas.com/one-thing-keeping-you-stuck/

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Email: hello@rhothomas.com

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Lightly Edited Transcript

Hey, friend. Welcome back to Wealthyesque.

Happy Friday. How are you? How was your week?

I hope you had an amazing week, and I am excited for our conversation today, but before we jump in, I want to share a win from a member of our Facebook group.

She writes, “I accepted a new job. No billable hour requirement and no client or business development. So excited. A law school classmate recommended Wealthyesque. Listening and dealing with COVID craziness, I really sat down and thought about what I want out of life. Amazing how things can fall into place when you set your mind to a positive change.”

I absolutely loved this post, and I am so excited for her because that is what this is all about. I want us to look at our lives and make sure that we are living in a way that we want to. That we are designing the lives that we want to live and not just living life by default, so kudos to you for taking control and living the life that you want to live. I am so proud.

So, jumping into our topic today, I want to talk about why you’re struggling to pay off debt.

And it’s not just debt. It’s why you’re struggling to lose weight or get up earlier or stick with a new habit or whatever other thing is happening in your life that you don’t want.

We’re going to talk about

• what’s keeping you from seeing the results you want with your debt
• some examples of how it plays out and
• what you can do.

The reason you’re not seeing the results you want with your debt, with your health, with anything that happens in your life is your thoughts. It’s your brain.

The brain is constantly processing and synthesizing information and trying to be more efficient, and when we are when we’re not intentionally managing our brain, then that efficiency can lead to results that we don’t want.

And we talked about this way back in Episode Two so if you haven’t heard that one make sure you go back and listen, but that episode was all about how our mindset is everything, how managing our mind is important to living the life that we want to live.

The main thing I want to pull out of that episode and explore here is that your thoughts create your feelings, which drive your actions, which drive your results, and your results always reinforce your thoughts.

We often take our thoughts as facts but they’re not. They are our interpretation of the neutral facts, of these neutral circumstances in our lives. Our brains tend to collapse our thoughts and the circumstances, and so we think that a particular circumstance causes us to feel a certain emotion, but that’s not the case.

It’s our thought about that circumstance and what we made that circumstance mean that causes the feeling.

I heard a great example recently, the example of when someone dies. We say like, “Oh that death made me feel sad.” But it’s not that the death made you feel sad. Say the person passed on Monday and you didn’t find out about until Wednesday, you weren’t immediately sad on Monday, right?

The death is neutral. Your thought about the death, what you make that death mean, is what causes your feeling.

And to further drive that point home, someone else seeing that same death or learning of that same death might feel apathetic about it because they didn’t know this person. Someone else still could be happy about it, you know, they maybe didn’t like the person or whatever.

So just reinforcing that it’s our thoughts that create our feelings, so not the circumstance itself, but our thoughts about the circumstance, that’s what creates the feeling.

When we think the same thought over and over, it becomes a belief. It’s just an automatic thought that we might not even be aware of, but that belief is causing us to feel a certain way, act a certain way, get certain results.

Our brain is constantly looking for evidence to prove our beliefs, and the brain wants to be right and so we hold on to evidence that supports our beliefs, and we ignore evidence that doesn’t.

This example isn’t quite the same, but to illustrate what I’m talking about, think about when you buy a new car. You think that car is just the best car, and you’re so excited about it. And then all of a sudden, it seems like everybody has your car, right? Everywhere you look, you see this car.

It’s not that everyone has the car, or that there are suddenly more of these cars. It’s the same number of cars. They were always there, but your brain is just noticing them more now. And all of this is happening in the background.

We’ve got so many different thoughts each day. Our brain is processing so much information, and we are reacting to the thoughts that our brain has on autopilot and don’t realize that those thoughts are the reason for the results that we see in our lives.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this plays out. Let’s say you have $100,000 in debt, and your thought is “my debt balance is enormous.”

That’s a thought. That’s your opinion. If you have $100,000 in debt, that might feel enormous to you. But, for example, for me, starting at over $670,000 in debt, and still having $300-something thousand, $100,000 doesn’t look so bad.

And for someone who has say over a million dollars in debt, my $670,000 probably looks pretty good. So it’s all a matter of perspective.

When you have that thought “my debt balance is enormous,” how does that make you feel? you’re probably feeling defeated, hopeless.

Then with that feeling, what action are you going to take? You probably aren’t going to take a lot of action, right? You won’t take action because you feel like there’s no point. It’s useless to try to pay off the debt because it’s not going to work out.

Then, the result is that your balance barely moves year after year, which then reinforces your thought that your debt balance is too big.

When you believe that your debt is so big and you can never get out of it, then you’ll ignore and discount all the evidence to the contrary. So you’ll see people who’ve gotten out of debt and say it’s because of some special circumstance.

They have a bigger salary, or they don’t have as much debt, or they’re married, or they’re not married. All the reasons why they can do it and you can’t. But truly, the only reason is they believe they could and you didn’t.

And I know this isn’t you specifically right? But you know the people I’m talking about. They look at other people’s accomplishments and say things like, “Well, if I had XYZ, I could do that too.”

But that’s just not the case. It’s not about having these particular circumstances or these particular things in your life. It’s about your thoughts and the things that you feel, and then the actions that you take. All of that drives your results.

Another example looking at my own life. Before my husband and I had kids. We were thinking “debt is just normal. Everyone has debt.”

And so that led to a feeling of apathy. We didn’t feel one way or another about it. It just was what it was. So the action was, we were just paying the amounts that our student loan servicers told us to pay, you know, just paying the minimums, and the result was we still had this debt.

It’s just normal. It did not mean anything to us.

But then after our first son was born, we still had the same debt, right? The circumstance was still exactly the same, but our thought about it changed.

So, now, we thought the debt was a barrier to living the life that we wanted to live. And so ultimately we’ve paid off over $350,000 in the last four years almost $400,000.

And so that was a leap there. I didn’t go through the whole thing so it’s more like our thought was that the debt was a barrier, which then made us feel determined to pay it off, and then that made us research how to pay it off. That’s the action that we took. And the result was we found stories of people who were paying their debt off quickly.

Then, we had this new thought, “we can pay this debt off quickly.” So that made us feel motivated, which led to us taking action to pay it off: creating a budget, putting extra payments on it, etc., which led to the result that we’ve paid off almost $400,000 in the last four years.

So all that to show that debt is just a circumstance. It’s neutral. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not small. It’s not large. It just is. And we ascribe meaning to it through our thoughts, which ultimately drive our results.

But the good thing in all this is you can change your thoughts and ultimately change your results. And a lot of times we don’t get the results we want because we are just trying to change our actions. That might work for a while, but eventually you slip back into old habits.

So my clients have seen success because I help them change the way they think. They believe this desired result is possible and that changes the way they feel, which changes their actions, which changes their results.

And that’s the secret to it all. It’s your thoughts.

So, knowing all of this, what can you do. We’ve talked before about the importance of mindfulness, which is the ability to separate yourself from your thoughts. Some of my favorite ways to practice mindfulness that I’ve shared with you are prayer and journaling and meditation, but you need a practice that helps you see your thoughts because if the key to success is changing our thoughts, then we have to know what those thoughts are.

You can also back into this, so if you’re seeing a particular result, or you know you want a particular result, then you look at what action you’re taking or what action you need to take to get that result. And then what feeling causes you to take that action. And finally, what thought causes you to feel that feeling.

Once you know what thoughts are keeping you from reaching the results you want then you can challenge them. So is this absolutely true? Can you prove it?

Asking those kinds of questions helps you see where your thoughts are irrational, and that tends to lead to negative results. So you can replace those irrational thoughts with more rational ones that lead to the results you want.

And you want to make sure that the replacement is believable for you, so don’t try to completely turn it around on the first try. Because if that’s not believable for you then your brain is not going to accept it right your brain is going to ignore it and you still get the same results, you won’t get the results you want.

So if this is you. If you’ve been struggling with your debt for a while. If you make a good income but can’t seem to keep any of it. You are having trouble accomplishing some other financial goal. Let me remind you that I’m a coach, and I can help you. So if you’re ready to make progress, then head to rhothomas.com/coaching, and let’s grab a call to chat.

Okay, so let’s recap.

1. Our thoughts and beliefs drive our feelings, which drive our actions, which drive the results we see in our lives, which reinforce our thoughts.
2. Your thoughts are the reason you’re struggling to make progress on your debt or any other goals. If you want different results than change your thoughts.
3. Some tools to help you identify the thoughts that are holding you back include mindfulness practices like prayer, journaling, and meditation. You can also reverse engineer your results to see what thoughts are causing them. And then once you’ve identified your thoughts, you can challenge and change them.

Okay, so that’s it for this week’s episode of Wealthyesque. Thank you so much for joining me.

Come on over to our private Facebook community, The Wealthyesque Community, and let’s chat more about how our thoughts impact our results. You can head to rhothomas.com/community.

If you got value from today’s episode, please share with a friend who you think would also benefit. That would mean the world to me. And if you decide to share on social media, don’t forget to tag me. I am @iamrhothomas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Okay, friend, so as we close out, I pray that you truly see and believe the power of your mind and your thoughts.

I pray that you will do the work to identify and change the thoughts that are preventing you from paying off your debt or reaching your other goals.

And as always, I pray that you will continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice, you deserve.

Talk to you later.