We all practice black and white thinking. It’s part of being
human. Things are good or bad, right or wrong. That kind of thinking is
easy and quick. It doesn’t distract us.
We can make a judgment and get back to what we were doing.
However, we miss a bunch of good things this way. We miss all
the colors, we miss the nuance, we stay in the extremes. My experience is that people often do this
with their money.
We may not actually think of it as black and white thinking but
when we decide that “money is always hard to get”, or “I can never manage money”,
or even “money is too scary to think about”, we are practicing black and white
thinking.
When we do “one trial learning” such as “I had a bad experience
with a contractor, so I’m never hiring one again”, we are in black and white
thinking. When we decide we can either
pay down our credit cards OR save
money, we are in black and white thinking.
It’s old stuff, tried and true, familiar. Oh, and often it doesn’t
work well. It’s at the ends of the spectrum. Literally. See the color circles? They represent the color theory of
light. Black is actually the absence of
light. No light, no color = Black. White is the combination of all the colors
together. The actual colors, the
rainbow, if you will, exists between the absence of light, and all light. Color exists between the black and white.
It’s a lovely analogy for everything we can see and
experience. The color is in the
middle. It’s not at either end. You can be paying down debt and saving money
at the same time. It will actually help
you to believe that both are possible if you practice both at the same time. Something that didn’t
work you can try again in a different way. That’s how we learn isn’t it? We make mistakes and try again? You can take steps to have a better
relationship with money, and they don’t have to be big steps. They can be small
steps. We can be in the color,
experiencing the endless possibilities between the extremes.
Give it a try and see where you can shift a black and white to
some color.