Go Bucket Yourself
Go Bucket Yourself
Unraveling the Emotional Complexities in Personal Finance with Dr. Michael G. Thomas Jr
What if money wasn't just about dollars and cents, but also about emotions, behavioral patterns, and family history? Dr. Michael G. Thomas Jr. joins us to share his wisdom on the emotional side of money, revealing the crucial role of grace, self-compassion, and empathy on our financial journey. From discussing systems theory to exposing the impact of avoidance and shame, Dr. Thomas invites us to examine our relationship with money and challenge our preconceived notions.
Can we truly connect with others without getting vulnerable about our finances? In this digital age, it's all too easy to join tribes without revealing our true selves. Dr. Thomas guides us through the complexities of community and connection, stressing the power of language and the importance of engaging in genuine discourse about money. We'll explore the challenge of negotiating different socioeconomic standards, and how insecurities can be passed down across generations.
The struggle of self-care and future planning is a tightrope we all walk, and Dr. Thomas offers insight on balancing this challenge. We'll explore the role of delayed gratification and frugality in personal finance and discover how to live in the present without compromising the future. To cap it all off, we'll delve into the cultural perspectives on finance, learning from the wisdom of different cultures and understanding that our stories are universal. Join us for this enlightening conversation with Dr. Michael G. Thomas Jr., and discover a new perspective on money.
Get in touch with Michael:
- Get his book: Black Financial Culture
- on Instagram
- on his site, blackfinancialculture.com
Resources mentioned:
Die With Zero - Bill Perkins
Stay in touch!
- 🌎 gobucketyourself.com
- Chris @bucketyourself on Insta
- Deb @imperfectprogress.me on Insta
- Get Deb’s book HERE
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Go Bucket Yourself podcast. We're super excited to be talking with Dr Michael G Thomas Jr today. I've been waiting a long time for this conversation. So he is a trailblazer in financial services, inspired to keep breaking through barriers to promote financial well-being and sustainable wealth creation in the black community. Dr Thomas is an author, keynote presenter, award-winning radio show co-host, financial literacy advocate, respected educator, and has captured audiences worldwide with his TED Talk on financial empathy. Despite all of these impressive achievements, his greatest joys are faith, family, laughter and nature, which we have in common. He currently lives in Athens, georgia, with his amazing wife, two extraordinary boys and a beloved golden doodle. What is your golden doodles name?
Speaker 2:Her name is Maddox. It should have been Griffey, but we went with Maddox because my wife's favorite baseball player is Greg Maddox. I'll be a lot of braves. I'm a white socks fan but, being a transplant, I've adopted the braves. We have season tickets and we're always at the ballpark, but King Griffey Jr is my favorite player. So this is her dog, maddox, is literally right here.
Speaker 2:She's my shadow, but it's her dog, but Maddox just queens to me, so if we end up getting another doodle, it'd be Griffey, so we'll have Maddox and Griffey at the house.
Speaker 3:Oh nice, We'll have a look out for that thing.
Speaker 1:Well, very good. Well, thank you so much for being here. We are excited for this conversation again. Is there anything I missed or you want to add to that? Tell us a little about yourself.
Speaker 2:No, not at all, honestly, really, anything that you mentioned at the end of the day is just really what I do honestly and areas where I feel as if I can serve and potentially add some value somewhere. But really, at the end of the day, who I am really revolves around faith, family. I love laughter it's like my favorite sound, quite honestly. So I enjoy being in spaces whether it's at work, at class and life in general where we can just laugh and enjoy the process honestly. But I think that those are the bigger things in nature. I could spend all day down at the creek with my camera and just be by myself and just taking pictures. So that's really at the core of who I am. Everything else is just a service element of me in terms of where I feel compelled and led to serve or where I feel called to serve, and so that's all that other stuff is really and yeah, just take it one year at a time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, kidding, I didn't even mean anyway.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the thing I like, michael, about what I believe today's conversation will be around, is like I like the nuts and bolts of financial discussions, financial independence, the math and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Like that's very black and white and and easy to consume. But one thing that I saw as we were, as we were getting ready to have a conversation, was talking about you talk about money, trauma and financial empathy and compassion and all of that, and so I'm excited to dive into that piece of it because, like you were saying earlier too, with money it's it's usually not just about the money, it's like what can money buy us? And usually that's that, that freedom or those connections and all of that. Like it's important for you to be with your family and out in nature and apparently go to some baseball games. So it's like those are the important things. You know, the actual dollars and cents isn't all that important in my opinion, but so, yeah, excited to have you on the go buck yourself podcast and excited to tackle those topics, so yeah, yeah, I've, I was saying before we pushed record.
Speaker 1:I actually met you at Fincon a few years ago. I was manning Diana's economy booth so she could go have a break, or whatever walk around.
Speaker 1:And because of the timing of that, I was really into this deeper conversation about money. Not that I'm not now Like if we talk about money on the show, we usually try to talk about this deeper piece of it, not just the nuts and bolts. Right, and you were, I think, the only person that came up to that booth to talk to Diana that was mentioning things like you know, money stories and money and trauma. And I got your card and I was like Diana, you've got to follow up with this guy. And so I've been wanting to speak to you ever since because I think it's maybe uncomfortable, like how Brene Brown says she's a shame researcher and then no one wants to talk to her, which I don't think is true anymore.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's maybe uncomfortable, it's less simple and cut and dry. But if you don't get to that deeper piece of money, there's really no change with behavior and money. And so, um, yeah, that's really where we want to dig in with you a little bit and and talking about money and trauma and this emotional side of money which a lot of people don't really connect. So I wonder if you could just kick things off with making a bit of those connections, like what does um? You know our family story, our history, maybe our trauma, all of that emotions have to do with money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. What's fascinating about this conversation is that I cannot, I can't, disconnect the neurological, the emotional, the behavioral elements of our lives from money. I just I can't. I've never been able to do that, which has always been incredibly fascinating to me how unemotional, right and robotic we've treated money for so many years. It's, it's been so much of well.
Speaker 2:If you just do this spending plan and if you just stick to it, and if you just invest even if it's in a um, traditional or Roth IRA, depending on where you are, and thinking about some of the tax consequences of those things, thinking about your financial stability right in terms of right and all these other elements, then we can look at a total market index 100, s and P 500 and really just set it for, get it automated, so on and so forth. In theory, yes, those can be optimal strategies if done consistently over time, but we still have to engage to keep an element right. The system, if done perfectly over time, could yield some absolutely fabulous results, but we, we still but we're still dealing with human beings that are incredibly complex, um internally, and then those internal complexities interact with the environment around them, right, that creates this interaction of something that leads to something else. So, for instance, if we're not thinking about money stories and what someone has done to basically navigate whatever it is that they've experienced, um, that interaction with a spouse who has a money story and has created their own way of navigating X, y and Z then actually lead to two people not understanding the other and completely butting heads and not being able to move forward, which can completely undermine the system that's been established, because now I don't feel like you're being fair. I don't feel like you're being fair. Then there's bitterness, then there's well, I don't know if I can see a future with us, and then we can completely sabotage and undermine everything that we're building, even though we have the perfect plan in place.
Speaker 2:And then we can extend that to family relationships and dynamics, or the lack thereof, or someone assuming, or the role that's been placed on them, that they're the rich uncle or they're the rich aunt, and because they have that label as their responsibility to fill and avoid and help everyone else, and that person feels that, even though they're trying to do the things that they want to do, that they're having this weight placed on them, but if they don't do it, then they're guilted and shamed within the dynamic of the system that they let that other person fail, even though that person put themself in the position of failure. These are all dynamics that make this process and this is just me thinking about this as a tip of the iceberg that make this process so much more complicated than just reading a textbook and assuming that, oh yeah, the strategy's there, I just need to do it. But how do you stay consistent in the midst of life and everything that's happening is really where I feel. That's where the win is. Those are where the wins are. It's how did you stay consistent, given that life continue to happen to you? That's where I spend a lot of my time helping individuals think about their barriers, internally and externally, emotionally, neurologically, psychologically, so on and so forth, because once we're able to define the barriers and the consistent patterns that happen in their lives, then we can begin this process of creating a holistic plan that helps to consider well, were there possible opportunities and solutions when these things arise?
Speaker 2:So, for instance, if we talk about trauma, generally speaking, what a lot of people don't understand about trauma is that trauma at its very core, it's how our brain wired itself in the midst of experiencing some extreme circumstance that we created an adaptive behavior for to protect ourselves. That's what it is. So when we talk about trauma, sometimes we just kind of keep it out in the ether and we don't really unpack it and say this is how your brain has been wired. So when you're navigating something, you smell something, you see something, there's a pattern that's developing. You're not even thinking about it. It becomes an automatic response where you're triggered emotionally and viscerally, and then what's happening in those instances is that you're triggered to then engage in this adaptive behavior that's always kept you safe, even though what you're seeing, what you're smelling, what you're sensing, the pattern is not going to lead to the same end and it's not a threat in the way that you once knew it. Your brain and your body can't tell the difference Right.
Speaker 2:So this process of dealing with trauma is literally a process of rewiring our brain, which is why and this is why I lead with with grace, I lead with empathy, I lead with compassion. If your brain has been wired in such a way, and where it's being reinforced by cues that may or may not be real, but you engage in some type of adaptive behavior which could be spending, which increases dopamine, makes you feel good long geners and you've been doing that year after year after year. That's firmly entrenched. So this, this process of change and growth that we all talk about in terms of if this person could just do this, if this person could just stay the course, well, we also have to understand that they're having to rewire their brain, and when people think about financial wellness and wellbeing as a process of rewiring our brains to optimal behavior, then we lead with a lot more compassion and grace, because each of us knows that there is something in our lives that is such a habitual pattern that you do it without thinking about it. Right, and to change that one thing it needed to be a healthy behavior, but to change that thing, that pattern about your life, would take so much energy and work and effort. Then we all didn't have the capacity to now empathize with someone when we start to think about it in that way.
Speaker 2:Rewiring of the brain taking time, and so the reason why I speak to trauma, I speak to neuroscience and the chemicals that are produced as a result, because I think that it when we talk about the human side of money, or really humans, humanizing someone and to really break someone's patterns and the way that they're engaging with something down to a neurological and biological response, meaning that chemicals are driving their reactions to something.
Speaker 2:Because of the way that it really helps people to understand oh, I never thought about it that way and because now I understand it in this way, I can only imagine how much effort and intentionality it has to take to begin to create new patterns and behaviors. And when we create that space, it creates a space of empathy and a space of compassion where people can fail and them not shame themselves, because now they understand that the process of what I'm engaging with is that I'm overriding years and years of behavior that's literally wired in, and I think that's such an incredible and elegant way of thinking about this. Because then we have people who are engaging, people who aren't shaming them and creating a space for failure or setbacks, because that's a part of growth. And for individuals who are navigating the process of financial illness and wellbeing and understand that they are going to fall back into behaviors and adaptive ways that they've done things, because it's just, it's still innate that sometimes they'll do it without thinking about it.
Speaker 3:Michael. I love that and one piece that I really want to hone in on is that that grace, self-compassion component to it, because this is one thing I learned a lot with mindfulness. I think it's where I really hammered home. But when I'm trying to learn something new or try to do something new, the way I was raised was less about grace and compassion and more about just like let me instill in you how important this is through yelling or name calling or whatever those things happen to be. You know, in a small, small town culture football coach, you know they usually aren't steeped in grace and compassion and a lot of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:But what I love about what you're saying is when I was able to, in that mindfulness example, when I was able to just kind of like laugh it off, like oh wait, I'm thinking about, I'm obsessing about that thing again. I want to try to get back to this place where I clear my head, where I take a deep breath, where I just connect with the present moment. And when I was able to do that, it was so much easier to get back on the saddle again. Because when you fight yourself or you think like I'm such a failure I suck at this I bet Michael does this so easily and why am I struggling so much?
Speaker 3:So when you hear that component of the neurological element and you rationalize, just like how entrenched your patterns of behavior are, like for me, 43 years of living on this life and 40-ish of those, I was digging a trench and now I'm trying to go a different path.
Speaker 3:But damn, that trench is dug deep and it's easy to go through. So it's like, yeah, you flow back into that trench every once in a while. You know when you're kind of taken off guard. So, yeah, I think that's a key element is to be Be compassionate to yourself, be forgiving with yourself, try to just be playful with some of this stuff, where it's like you know if you can laugh it off, keep it light and just recognize like, yeah, it's an uphill battle, but hey, the where you're going is a great place. You've got some work to do and it's not just the numbers and sense type of element. And yeah, I think it's one of the more beautiful things of life when we can embrace that for ourselves and then engage that in community and connection like you're doing. So, yeah, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this a-ha that I sort of made when you were talking about using grace and compassion and empathy was the effect it would have on a nervous system that is conditioned a certain way out of fear. Right, when we don't use grace and compassion and empathy for change, either with ourselves or with others?
Speaker 1:right, Picturing that football coach yelling or someone saying just suck it up, we go back to that fear response like fight or flight, and then we go back to our conditioned response to the fear, which is sometimes counterproductive, but we still get a reward, like you were saying, chemically. So of course we go back to that. Yeah, so if we can start from grace, compassion, empathy for ourselves and for others, we're starting from a place where we will at least have more success at rewiring those processes than if we don't. And to me that's amazing, and you're really good at defining those terms and I want to dig into them. But I would like to ask you you defined, you sort of touched on a few, but are there some common themes in these coping mechanisms or money stories or ways that we navigate through money that you see come up, like you mentioned, the rich uncle or the spouses fighting. Cause they? What might be some of those common themes that continually come up that someone listening could relate to?
Speaker 2:Yeah, honestly, I think that the most common theme that comes up when I work with clients in particular, especially when they become emotionally triggered by something in terms of a neurological, limbic system, response is basically avoidance. That that probably is the most consistent and common thing is avoidance. And, unfortunately, when people engage in the fight response my frustration there is that if you're fighting but you're fighting the wrong fight, that can be even more damaging than avoidance. Right, this is somebody. Oh well, I'm, I've burnt all my bridges, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna rack up all this debt and all these credit cards and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, without my spouse knowing, take out a second mortgage of the home. I'm gonna do like I'm doing all these things, but it's an illusion of movement and it's not actually making the situation better, it makes it worse. So, even if somebody's being triggered in a fight response, if they lack the wisdom and the know how and it's under the umbrella of shame and fear and lie and betrayal and financial infidelity, then that's a. That's a completely different thing, and that's when I get the phone call where it's like hey, I had a young lady reach out to me during the pandemic. She had found out that her husband had gambled an inheritance away. It was like $150,000. And then he was doing all these different things to try to make up for it and to cover for it and all these other things that made it worse.
Speaker 2:But the thing that I see most often that people lean into is avoidance and as a person of faith, I'm even triggered when people say let go and let God Right, because sometimes what I feel is that they're doing is to justify or rationalize lack of action. It's to just let me, just put it in God's hands, right. I get it in the sense of I'm walking in my calling of God. I'm doing the things that God has led and called me to do. I can't necessarily control the outcomes, but I can navigate this space and do what I'm supposed to do and I'll let God do with my work as he will. Right, and it's all. It's no different than my students to say that I'm not going to study. Jesus, take the wheel.
Speaker 2:And I'm just going to walk in and magically get this A in this exam. It just has worked that way.
Speaker 2:So what I see more often than not with working with clients and even in some of my personal life is is leading into avoidance, not dealing with, not speaking, to not developing the capacity to address a particular issue, because my baseline is going to be in my baseline, and the reality is that, even though I may be aware of something, I may not, in that instant or in that moment, have the capacity to handle it Right. The beauty, however, though, is that when we walk in grace and compassion and even empathy, it creates a space for us to still be able to use our prefrontal cortex and say, okay, well, I don't have the tools, but maybe somebody I know does. It's a. It's a different line of thinking, because I'm not bounded within like Chris. You were talking about earlier, my internal self-talk and his internal narratives that I grew up with about self, about expectations, and then, worse yet, what happens if I don't live up to those expectations. Do I get love? Especially like? Like Chris, I think that we grew up in an era where our dads grew up in an era where it was just really hardcore be a man Like there wasn't. No, I remember when I was learning how to swim growing up, it was like you just got to get into pool and swim. There was no, this is how you float, this is how you begin. It was like either you do or you don't. Either you have it or you don't Right. And a lot of that was associated with the love that you would receive or wouldn't receive from the tribe. So if I know that in doing something I expose myself as lacking, then within my tribe, then that also means that I don't receive love Right, which is very fat to anything. So what happens is that when we engage and avoid it, what we're in effect doing is that we're hiding from the tribe, from the community.
Speaker 2:So now I want to break this out a little bit bigger in terms of what we understand about systems theory and I mentioned a little bit, I talked about this in the talk that I did at economy. But with systems theory, there are three elements of it Right, there's trust and reciprocity, there's dissemination of information within a system and then there's social sanctions. So when we're navigating a system of shame based on what the norms are within that system in terms of dissemination of information, trust, love, respect and reciprocity comes based on somebody's ability to live up to those expectations. And if you don't right, then there are these constructs within a system that will either make you feel welcomed or ostracized. So when people engage in chain way of thinking, what, in essence, that they're doing is that they don't even necessarily they can.
Speaker 2:I don't think that most people think that I'm shaming myself, right? I don't think that most people go there in the normalcy of their day. But what I do believe that people do when they engage in avoidance is that it becomes an adaptive response in terms of how they hide within their system so that they aren't ostracized or sanctioned in a way for not living up to some expectation, for failing. And this is the issue. If someone can't verbally and openly say that I'm struggling, that I'm failing within their system, you have nowhere to go. Right Now, that's assuming that your system is a closed system. In a closed system, that means you just have to deal with it, right? But what do we understand? Because we use this, this, this verbiage, in terms of when somebody goes ghost on you, okay, right, meaning that they've left the system and now they're operating in another system for the fear of being exposed in the system in which that they were existing.
Speaker 2:But the issue is that they never learn, that they never grow, they never develop the capacity to address the issues that they have. So what happens is, as they navigate one system into a new system, the same thing starts happening over and over again Social sanctions, not living up to expectations and they accidentally go into another system because there has never been space for us to allow people to grow and to fail and understand that. You know what I struggle with. That too. We never have those moments when people are struggling, where they can exist in a space to realize that they're not the only one that's going through what they're going through.
Speaker 2:And then some people don't want to be a burden on other people, not because they're not great people, people of character, or whatever it may be. Because of internal self-talk and the norms of their system, they could internalize that someone who is struggling, that the perception of that person is that, well, people don't necessarily love on them, they don't really care for them and they speak down on them. And I'm going through something right now and I don't want to be that person. So I don't even feel like I have the capacity to speak up and to express myself and to share my vulnerabilities within my system, because there's no space for the vulnerability in the system. Yeah Right, and so people.
Speaker 2:So when we talk about avoidance, I think it is so important that we not just think about avoidance as someone internalizing that they're wrong or they're the bad person, but also understanding that their internal self-talk and their perceptions of that I'm bad, I'm wrong, I need to penalize myself at times is because it's a byproduct of the systems that they navigate. So when we start thinking about this systematically, then it opens up a whole new paradigm. Am I contributing to the shame and guilt? Because I felt as if that shaming and guilting people was the appropriate way to get them to engage in a process of change? All right, right.
Speaker 2:So when somebody can rationalize within a system that, hey, this is how you get people to grow, this is how you get people to be better, but all it does is it causes people to hide the things that they need to grow, no different than when you're dealing with somebody who's an addict. No different than when you're dealing with somebody who is struggling with let's say, if they're struggling pornography, or if they're struggling with smoking or they're struggling with gambling. What happens is is that people navigate the systems and they present themselves as being happy and healthy and whole, and they start doing these things in secrecy because there's never capacity to actually deal with the vulnerabilities and a real process of change. This is no different than a way that, if people engage in self-optimized forms of money and the way that they spend, if the system forces people into a shame dynamic, then that person will present their representative to the rest of the world.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and they're behind closed doors. Amazon boxes are be delivered to the back door, not the front door, right? So we never really addressed what. Why is the person spending? Is it trauma? Is it a just a maladaptive coping mechanism? Because evidently there's a dopamine hit that's being triggered. I'm on the seminal high. I received the thing. I get it. It only lasts a couple of days. Now I need another thing and another hit of dopamine. So really, the issue is we have to dopamine reset in terms of what's triggering us and then how we respond to those things. But we can never actually get to the root cause If we don't create spaces of grace and compassion to actually understand what the real issues are. That oftentimes has nothing to do with money. Money is the way that people manifest what they are feeling internally, right, yeah, and, and, and. That's that's the beauty of the work that we do. When we, when we talk about finances in general, is I do it literally getting to the core of someone's life? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think like what's coming up is in a system of guilt and shame, there really isn't room for learning and growth, and so that's where avoidance becomes so common because there isn't a space within that system for learning and growth.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think and I I don't want to gloss over this at all because the the community, the connection piece is so critical to this. I think, kind of going back a little bit to your example of it's super helpful to understand that these neurological pathways were formed over years and years and years of us continually following the same pattern the. It's helpful for me to understand that, like it is baked within us to be connected and be welcomed by the tribe.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, if you look at it just from a purely evolutionary standpoint. Like if we didn't have the tribe, we were dead. So it's like if you're going to bring up something where it's like, wait, I don't think the system, the tribe, the community agrees with that and you're out. That doesn't just mean back in the day you went and found a new group on Instagram. That means you're toast. You know. You're out there in the Sahara on your own trying to figure this crap out. So we evolved to have this feeling of I need you. I don't want you to abandon me. I don't want to disrupt the system. I don't want to to draw extra attention to myself, because that might mean that if you see the real self, you're not going to like it and then I'm out and so, yeah, we hide and shame ourselves. We, we, we don't, we aren't able to get vulnerable, and when we aren't able to get vulnerable, we aren't able to be authentic. And when you aren't able to be authentic, like you just feel like you're living someone else's life.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, exactly, chris, I know I love the way that you unpack that, especially in the social media paradigm right, because think about, think about systems and the notion of community today. Community today is our capacity to engage with others safely, and oftentimes that means that it is very surface level community, meaning that I'm a part of this great community, but I don't have to be vulnerable within this community. I have a tribe without vulnerability, which is an incredibly fascinating dynamic in play. So think about it. There are individuals on social media right now who have platforms where they have 30,000 people or 50,000 people, where the individuals who are listening to this person feel as if that this is my community, this is my tribe, but there really isn't actually real authentic engagement in a way that you and I if we were just all the three of us, we're out and we're having a couple of beers or whatever it may be. We started talking about, maybe, political things and then we started talking about faith things and we started talking about the world, and I'm really sharing deeper thoughts of the way that I think. And this is the way I think and you're sharing deep thoughts about this is why you think, maybe, why you agree with this and why you don't agree with this. Real connection is about that process of finding these fits with imperfect pieces and like these imperfect dynamics that actually create this beautiful whole. And it's a robust way of being in real connection, because now I understand not just what we agree on but I understand where we disagree as well. But I don't take that to heart and I see that as being the complexity of who you both are and what's led you to X, y and Z, because it doesn't just happen and you're doing the same for me. How often do we exist in spaces where we can actually engage in real discourse without completely agreeing with someone? We don't. So even within a system that we navigate, even if we think that, oh, I have my tribe, we still lack vulnerability and people are actually even within the, even in the space of saying that I'm connected to these communities, feel more isolated and feel more alone than they ever have in recent memory, even though we have exposure to tons of people and I'm a part of this group or whatever it may be. But real fulfillment comes to. What you all are mentioning earlier is this but can I be me and exist in this group, even if people don't get like. When you have somebody who's a friend, we know where they're quirky and we're like, hey, that's Eric, that's Bill, but you'll learn to love them. That's Sharon, that's Susan, that's Erica, that's Ashley, but you'll learn to love her. Right? She's such an amazing, she has a course, I have my course.
Speaker 2:And the question that we're asking is how are we loved within our quirkiness and our uniqueness? And that's the crazy thing about all of this we shut away from being unique, to be homogenous, to be accepted, where uniqueness doesn't even. We say that we want to be unique, but literally what we're doing is following every trend and trying to be like every other person, to be ingratiated within his group. Where there is no authenticity, there is no uniqueness. Thank you, cutter. It's extraordinary to me, but in the diversity of our unique characters, our quirkiness, our backgrounds and our stories, I think that there's something meaty there and I think that that's something that we undermine.
Speaker 2:And if I bring this right back around to money, in terms of the avoidance, to where I see couples struggle more specifically, which is around the budget and budgeting, is because they start talking at one another about money and not to one another about money. So, for instance, one of the things that I do with clients, especially when we work on spending plans, is that I say you get to relabel everything. This is the template, your income we don't have to label that section as income. You label that section whatever you want to label it, and something that generally that is positive, that motivates them, that gives them energy. You get to relabel that because language and what they're seeing and internal self-talk about the thing matters. So if it's household expenses, I've had some people relabel their household expenses as family, friends, community and connection. Nice, it's a more elegant and beautiful way of thinking about it. So, in terms of having these things, it reinforces these elements.
Speaker 2:Now, why did you label that then? Right, well, because growing up, I didn't really feel like we had a place for family and friends and connection, and it was just always stress, it was always anxious, we didn't talk, we didn't eat dinner together. So, having the home, having the dinners together, having and creating a safe space why I'm working so hard to create this? My, why, my where, my values, where's that coming from? It's complicated, yeah, Right.
Speaker 2:And then when I have couples sit down and create their labels, what it then does is that it helps them to unpack the why. So now we're not just looking at a line item, we're looking at maybe somebody's hurt, somebody's fear, somebody's anxiety, and the spending plan gives them an option Before we talk about anything spending. I usually don't do that for maybe two weeks because I want them to just spend time thinking about the language, understanding the why and the where of that language. So now I can embrace, I can engage in this process of doing a monthly or bi-weekly or weekly spending plan with Grace, understanding your sore points, understanding your why behind these line items, understanding where you may be neutral, where it doesn't even care, like, if we're going to cut spending, we can cut spending there. It doesn't trigger anybody. So that's where we start. Yeah, right, so you kind of create the space for it.
Speaker 2:But what happens is that when individuals are talking at each other about money and it's just purely about money right, you see where I'm going with this it literally the budget then triggers a neurological response that kicks up cortisol, right, creates a visceral response. And if somebody's adaptive response is flight, then they're going to flight. They don't want to talk about it, they don't want to sit down in the budget and do the spending plan. If somebody, if the other person's adaptive response is fight it's, why don't you want to sit down and do this? We need to do it. And then what's happening is that we're triggering each other to move further and further on the extremes of our emotions and we never get close to it at all.
Speaker 2:So again, this is again another process where we're thinking about systems, different personality types and behaviors, and not actually creating the groundwork and the foundation to be able to engage in healthy interaction, basically what we understand internally about one another, systematically about one another. And then how do we do this and create a safe space for the both of us to do this effectively? We completely miss it. So what happens is we literally, then, are encouraging seas of people to engage in a process we're not even equipping them with the tools to successfully navigate it. So what does that mean? At the end of the day? It means that we can get people to start budgeting, but to get them to enjoy it, to get them to continue to do it, to get them to see it as something more than a zero sum game.
Speaker 2:We don't do that one, because if you ask most households today whether or not they do budget or not, the vast majority are going to say, well, we kind of have like a makeshift thing that we do, but we don't really talk about it because we can't talk about it. We just know that if we talk about money, we're not talking for a week or a week and a half. I would just rather avoid that altogether. So we kind of get into that space. And then too, if they are doing it, do you enjoy it? Yeah, whenever I ask that question, do you enjoy the process with your partner sitting down? How does it make you feel as you're navigating it? And then, beyond that, once you've done it, do you actually stick to it? Because that involves more communication, accountability and all these things. So it just reinforces more engagement with something that I don't particularly enjoy doing right.
Speaker 2:And so, again, when we think about avoidance, when we think about how we're wired or how we're creating new wiring because of that dynamics of our relationship, somebody could have been absolutely good with talking about with money and happy about doing it, but then now they're with someone where it just creates tension.
Speaker 2:So over time what happens is that they're being rewired in a very different way, because now anxiety is starting to increase within them because they don't even know how this is going to go and they're already going to assume the worst before they start the process.
Speaker 2:So, like all of this kind of like coupled into why creating that space is so important, because sometimes these things that are adaptive responses aren't necessarily things that are born out of our childhood. They can be born out of the systems and interactions that we're engaging with right now and we're creating new adaptive responses right now to tension and all these other different things that we're navigating, which then could actually become traumatic if someone then leaves that relationship and now they're with someone else. Right, we left system, yeah, into the new system, and now we're carrying that tension and that anxiety around money because of what's happened and we're anxious because we don't know how this is going to go. So we assume the worst and it not just doubles down on everything, right, and it's just it's. It's this very fascinating way that we navigate things where we really need to step back and really create space within systems, within ourselves, to allow ourselves to feel what we feel and to create this space for the opportunity for something to go well. Thank you.
Speaker 1:All the systems talk is reminding me of something you touched on in your economy speech a little bit, which we don't always talk about. We've been talking about systems and what we perceive as negative financial behavior and how that creates shame and guilt in the system.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's unfortunate. It's no different than a kid who, let's say, first generation college student, where it's the kid's idea that, hey, I want to go to college. I want to try to help my family do all these different things. But if, within the system, it causes for the family to become very, very fearful of their son or daughter going to college Because so, for instance, let's say, you grew up on a farm, right, nobody goes to college. They want to say, graduate from school. They come, they help out, they work on a farm. The fear could be that if my son or daughter goes to college, they're going to get new information. Somebody's going to put all this mumbo jumbo in their head. Right, they're not going to think that the work that I do or that the farm is good enough anymore. That literally is their insecurities that are being exposed at that point in time. But their insecurities are being transferred onto the child, right, when the child's idea is, hey, I want to pursue some other things to potentially better position. I've seen my mom and dad work hard, literally working from can't see to can't see, and I just want to be able to create a better life for them. Right, but that gets lost in translation because of the idea of someone becoming another person in another system. Right, and we can talk about this from socioeconomic status. So if you have someone who's low socioeconomic status and you have someone who's middle class and you have somebody who's upper class, each of these particular groups has a perception about who the other person is right. So what happens is that if you have an individual who's coming from a lower SES, who doesn't navigate systematically, individuals who are strongly entrenched, middle class, then what happens is that person begins to start to adopt middle class norms of being and doing an explosion. Right, which then kind of makes you an outsider, because middle class norms don't help us survive within a system. We have to adopt other elements within our system for survival, and it's no different than you have somebody who's middle class who, for whatever reason, falls into maybe situational poverty, and then the norms that they use in a middle class don't work anymore. Now you have to adopt lower socioeconomic norms just to be able to survive, because middle class norms don't work here. Right, because it's a completely different system that we're navigating. So you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2:And what I found for me personally and I talk about this in my book, where my mom has closely watched me for years drive my 2005 Toyota Camry and, like every time I would come home, she was like boy, you ain't got a new car yet, why are you still driving? I know you got it. I know you got it, like that's always like I know you got it. I was like mom I don't like having bills. I would rather take $400 to $500 a month and invest it. Or I like seeing money grow, not money go, like that's just me. So for her, it took her a long time to wrestle with what I had adopted as a new norm for me, and I had to be even socially indifferent with my family and with my mom, because I couldn't allow for her energy to cause me to pivot away from what I felt to be me being true to myself, to appease the sensibility of my family, because I knew that they would celebrate me for X, y and Z.
Speaker 2:And I always found it incredibly fascinating that if I went home today and I pulled up in a brand new 2023 Audi, tricked out and all these other different things, tons of people would come over to the house. It's like Mike's home and guess what? He got this Audi. It's nice and everybody's coming over because they want to see the ride. Nobody wants his ass me when I've gone home. You know what, mike? You've been driving this car for almost 17 years now and you haven't had a car note in God knows how long. Like what are you? What are you?
Speaker 2:if you don't mind my asking what are you doing with the extra money? Yeah, no, nobody's ever asked me anything about anything as it relates to. I see you're doing this, but what's your, what's your thought process, what's your play here? Why are you doing this and what are you positioning for yourself? I'm curious. But everyone will celebrate the Audi, everyone will celebrate the chain. If I had a nice chain or like nice fancy jewelry, or if I purchase a really, really big home, because you can visually see it right. But within a system that I come from, wealth creation is never celebrated. That's why people don't do it.
Speaker 1:Even positive change, or our perceived positive change, can and will have some pushback and there's a way to push through that and navigate on beyond it. And really cool to hear that you're not just leaving the system for a new system but you're using your patients an example to create change in that system. Before we wrap, I want it. There's so many things we could talk about, but we're like already at wrapping time and I just want to touch on this other really good tip.
Speaker 1:You had One of my favorite moments from your speech where you talk about centering yourself in the moment and realizing that you were actually being triggered from the past, and so then you sort of pulled yourself through these questions where you were, where you asked am I still bounded by this in the present? Right, and that may be like you have to upgrade your car to show your community that you're doing well. Am I still bounded by this in the present? Do I have agency now over you know my life and do I have resources now? And so I like those three questions and that process of centering yourself and asking yourself if you're still bounded by that previous experience, if you have agency over your choice and your action now and if you have the resources to take the action that you see as positive now. So I just wanted to make sure we hit on that before. I think, chris, you have some questions to kind of wrap things up and bring them back a little bit. I don't know if you had something else you wanted to touch on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, as we land the plane here. Michael, one of the things we like to do on the Go Bucky Yourself podcast is just in a way to get to know our guests and have our audience get to know our guests by asking you know, like is there something on your bucket list or your dream list that you have you know aspiration to do? Tell us a little about that, we'd love to hear it.
Speaker 2:That is a phenomenal question, I think, for me, the I would love to visit as many countries as possible in Africa, actually.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:I would. I would love to explore the entire continent of Africa. That is that would. That's something that's on my bucket list and something that I'm already working on creating a annual experience where I just get to go and just kind of explore the continent. So that would be, that would be the big thing for me as it relates to that. Beyond that, honestly, I've just about anything that I've wanted to do up to this point in my life I've done it, and so, if so, if there's anything that I could say that would be the epitome in my bucket list, is not to wait, not to wait to live. That that, to me, is.
Speaker 2:It's something that I struggled with for a very long time, because I'm such a future oriented person and I still struggle with feelings of guilt around doing stuff for myself because I am. I am such like responsibility is such a huge part of my life narrative and story, even as a child, that I oftentimes feel that if I'm doing something for myself, I'm preventing myself from being able to serve or to help somebody else, and and finding balance in that has been something that I've really struggled with. And if, honestly, if it weren't for my wife, I wouldn't have taken many of the trips and done many of the things that I've done up to this point, quite honestly, because I can always find a reason why now to yeah, if you can always invest more, you can always save more. You can always think about like there's there's no end to this process, and I didn't, I didn't know how to say this is, I'm doing enough, enough, and that's, then that's, and that's something that I still wrestle with. It literally causes me to feel a certain way.
Speaker 2:And it's I don't think that that's ever going to go away, but my capacity to go around that thing gets bigger and I get better with it in terms of how I navigate that. But really, my bucket, my bucket list is being more present into things that I want to do and stop pushing everything off to the future. It's like when this happens, I'll do this, when this happens, I'll do that. Why can't I do it now? I can't do it now, yeah, and it's not going to prevent any of the future things that I'm doing. So learning how to be more in the present is is is the epitome of my bucket list.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one thing that may be helpful, because it was helpful to me and it sounds like we can. We can probably fist bump on a few of these things of like well, why the hell would I spend $500, you know if, compounded, it's like that's a quarter million dollars, you know someday down the road. But anyways, the book die was zero was a great, great. I won't call it an antidote, but a great boost to my journey into being able to say like, look, there is enough money right now I can spend the money. I don't maybe grapple with it as much as like maybe you or Deb would as far as like this money could be used better other places. It's my biggest milestone in my life. There is a way to deal with this.
Speaker 3:I'm pretty okay sometimes spinning on myself, but I still want to delay that gratification and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, there's, that's just the shadow side of you know, the frugality that has got us some achievements and wins in life. But you have to recognize that shadow side and you have to recognize the balance that's necessary. Otherwise it can just be just as detrimental to save, save, save, invest, invest, invest and forgo life for some other day because, like you were saying, men in your family at 55, 60 may meet with some some early on disease that may impact their ability to live, and it's like, yeah, take those moments to live today. And so I just want to thank you for being on today, michael, so many.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:This could be like a whole series of conversations, like there were times where I'm like, okay, I got this note and this note and this note. I'm like, man, we're not going to cover all these things. So I appreciate you being on, appreciate you for you who are and serving our, serving your community, serving our community in general, in at large. You're doing great work, man, and you are enough, and I want to appreciate you for, for, for what you're doing.
Speaker 1:And your wisdom is definitely going to resonate and I'm sure people are going to want to get in touch with you, know more about you and get your book Black Financial Culture Building Wealth From the Inside Out, which we didn't really have time to dig into, but we got into a lot of concepts. So how can people get in touch with you, learn more about you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I would actually lead people to the the blackfinancialculturecom website, so you can definitely get in contact with me there. You can learn about the book there. Black Financial Culture there are three different meanings to that. The first meeting is in the black financial culture Right, so the whole notion of being in a red, the reason why we had Black Friday, so on and so forth. The second notion behind black financial culture is in complete absorbing of all the spectrum of light. Oh, I love that, right, so like.
Speaker 2:If you look at the book, it's so complex there's no nuance. It's in using so many different theoretical perspectives and ideas and concepts. I'm literally distilling all of this light and capturing it within the book. And then the last element is black culture in general, which is me, through the my lens of navigating what I perceive to be black financial culture in Gary, indiana, as I'm growing up as a child and how I'm wrestling with and internalizing these themes, not to say that that is black financial culture in general.
Speaker 2:And I end the book with individuals being able to define what they want their financial culture to be, not what I tell them it should be, and I think that that's an empowering. It's like I trust you enough to make the best decisions for you and your family, and I've given you some tools, some ideas to ponder on and think about. It's your money. You do what you want with it. Just consider the outcomes of your choices. That's where it ends. So, even though it utilizes a lot of references that I grew up with I was joking with someone the other day like this is why it's important, because if I'm writing a book and I'm trying to target people from back at home and I'm using musical references, I'm not going to talk about the Eagles.
Speaker 1:Oh right.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to talk about Led Zeppelin, even though I know those things and I'm familiar with those. My mom's going to look at that like boy. We grow with the OJs, we grow with the Temptations, Like, like they like. So when we're thinking about stories and where they're sticky and how they land, you have to start with what people with people are familiar with. Yeah, right, that's just like if you were to write a book, you're probably not going to use 227 as a cultural reference in the book.
Speaker 1:I remember that yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you're speaking to it to a predominantly white audience, you're not going to use that as a reference in a book to associate a theme and an idea, right. So the beauty is is that, even though I speak to black culture in general, I think it's such an amazing expose, so to speak, for anybody to pick up the book and to read it and to think about narratives and cultural, cultural references and really understanding something more about other, so that we can create a space for compassionate empathy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, that's the whole point, right.
Speaker 2:So the beauty is that I got a lot of people reach out to me and say, well, you know, I know I'm not the intended audience. I was like, why not, right? Like if I like? My little guy the other day was reading a book on golden doodles and we were at a grocery store and somebody said, oh, that's a really cool book. It's like what are you reading? Yeah, I'm trying to learn all about golden doodles and things that nature. Not one person said, oh well, why aren't you reading a book about all types of dogs? No, I have a golden doodle, I want to learn, yeah, golden doodle. And then the last I'll leave here.
Speaker 2:What was fascinating with me about even the title of my book is that there have been several books that have come out that have talked about financial Jewish culture and I've yet to see one response from anybody to say, well, why is this just about financial Jewish culture?
Speaker 2:If you know what I'm going, like everybody that I've seen in the comments that are reading this book, then yeah, I need to pick this up. I want to understand what the Jewish community is doing about money. Not one reference to this isn't about me and my culture, but it was about how can I learn something about this culture to benefit self, and my thought process is I want to change that paradigm. Why can't we look at something that says black culture, understand that as a part of the whole and understand that there is something that we can glean from this that can benefit self, even though I may not directly come from that, but I understand that there could be value there, and so that's what I'm challenging. All the things in the book are universal. It's just that I'm using references and stories and things that nature that resonate with what would be considered a black experience, but it's something that everyone can benefit from oh, very good, thank you for sharing your story here, and I absolutely appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we learn more about our own narrative by hearing other people's narratives, just like in your book black financial culture. So we appreciate you. This has been so good. We could keep going for three more hours.
Speaker 2:Thank you, michael, I love this.
Speaker 1:I love this so much. Thank you Right back at you.