The One Where I Get To The Heart Of The Matter, And Hope You Do Too

C = D * V * F > R The Gleicher formula. A business model for change, but one that easily is adapted to your life. What is it? Change (C) can only happen when your dissatisfaction (D) times your vision for how things ought to be, or what you can do (V) times your first concrete steps to create or enact that vision (F) are greater than your resistant to those steps. In other words, if you're not motivated enough to really tackle what you want in your life then your resistance wins and change will not happen.

When your fear gets the better of you, you will never change. It was never the money. Not the numbers. Not the budget. Not the spending or the saving. Its was about us, who we were and are and what motivated our decisions and actions. Until we culled through your own personal garden of issues, our desire to fix our problems was short term. We tried numerous times to curb our spending; sell things we didn't need, look at our budget (bought books on budgets and management of money, software and programs). And it came in spurts. When the bills piled up and we felt like we were breaking, we got "real serious" about our spending.

But we'd go right back to our pattern. I'd get something at McDonald's or Chick-Fil-A or Wendy's for lunch, I'd buy a CD, something for my camera, get office supplies; Sonya would buy inexpensive shoes for the kids, clothes at Target, we'd eat out every now and then (to be with friends, etc). Little things. None of them wrong, but it gave us a small excuse to avoid real change. Change that went beyond numbers. We resisted a first step in a real direction toward change.

At the heart our problems was fear. Fear that we really couldn't get out of this. Fear that we'd never learn our lesson (why try? If you're going to try and fail, why try at all?). Fear that God was punishing us for our poor decisions and would get us out of it if He was finished his judgment on us. Fear of our kids being unhappy or being teased for having used clothes, old clothes, sack lunches, leftovers. Fear of not fitting in with who we see or where we live or what we hear. Fear of saying "no" to something as benign as dinner or lunch with friends (the chance to have a community, to escape reality).

So we justified our little indiscretions. But little things add up, and we never embraced a battle on our motivations. Why did I need to get some fast food? Why did I need to get another hard drive? Or lens filter? I didn't. I liked the convenience. The new toy. The feeling it gave me. But it never lasted long, and certainly every time I got another bill, new charges; that feeling vanished. We had to swallow our pride, jump into the fear and stop caring. Stop caring what someone else might think. Stop caring going for the little things — the easy things (the quick food, the impulse buy, the "sale" clothes). We cut deep. We got rid of cable, stop buying clothes, got food as cheap as we could, we asked for help (one of the most humiliating things to do was going to "free" clinics to get food items and clothing) and saved.

I started to value myself. My work. What I did. I stopped giving myself away. Stopped thinking I wasn't worth much. Stopped beating myself up, and giving myself an excuse to just plunge into the mess I started. And resistance was gone. And change came, in bigger ways than we could have even though possible. If you never address the deep issues that motivate your decisions -- the ultimate decisions that have gotten you into your problem. If you never stop making excuses for little things, never stop giving into fear (peer pressure, making someone or yourself happy for the insignificance of a thing) and start saying no, start dissecting what you need over what you want; you'll never change. I know; we know, because we lived in resistance. I truly believe, and it sounds about as hocky as unicorns skipping in a fields of rainbows, but God truly has blessed (I can't even say that without feeling like a cheese-peddler) the decision to stop resisting where (I believe) He wanted us to go. And hopefully, He will allow us to bless others.