Episode 1145: Money Management Motivation

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,145 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:08] Deborah Heiser: I'm Deborah Heizer. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to mentor and be mentored is key.

[00:00:24] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott, me.

[00:00:33] Scott Maderer: it's where you look at the emotion of those things. That's what allows us to be motivated to take care of the basic needs and the safety, and do the hard work and remain motivated to manage our money until we get to a. Where we're able to do it and be able to live out all of those levels of beads.

[00:00:57] Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the [00:01:00] inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to. Then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:23] And today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about how motivation to manage your money is important. I share several tips on how to be motivated to manage your money. And I also share why you may not be motivated to actually manage your money. As we talk about stewarding your treasures.

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[00:02:09] The truth is most of what we do with our money. More of a marathon than a sprint, whether you're talking about building savings, saving for retirement, reducing debt, all of these sorts of activities are really long-term big goal. And they take a long time to achieve, but each and every moment of the day, the rewards for them feels relatively small.

[00:02:32] You don't see yourself growing much in those areas. It seems like it takes forever to achieve any of those goals. And that can be a problem because our motivation tends to wane. Whenever we see that. That's one of the reasons that I've seen people have a goal and work on it really hard for a short term, and then fall back into old habits and old behaviors and lose ground.

[00:02:57] The truth is when you think [00:03:00] about maintaining your momentum and your motivation over a long period of time, it's important to understand how we do. There was a study that was done a while back where they took three groups of people and they decided to give them a really monotonous, boring task. It was simply taking a sheet of paper that had tons of letters on it and circling the pairs of letters everywhere, where there were two letters that appeared side by side and were the same.

[00:03:30] You had. And every sheet that you got completed, you would be paid for that sheet. But each sheet that you turned in, the pay went down. So like the first sheet you got paid $10, the second sheet you got paid $9. The third sheet you got paid eight all the way down until you were just paid a bare minimum, like $1 per.

[00:03:52] The first group of participants was asked after you've done this, sign your name at the bottom of the sheet of paper, [00:04:00] and then turn it into this person over here. Who's your supervisor. And they'll review the work and make sure that you've completed it correctly. They ask you, have you done it? Have you done this right?

[00:04:11] You say, yes, you have. And then you put the sheet faced out on the desk. The second group of people had the same activity, but they were not asked to sign their name. And the supervisor would glance briefly at the sheet of paper and then place it face down on the desk. The third group of people didn't sign their name.

[00:04:33] And in fact, when they walked up to the supervisor, turned in the sheet, the supervisor barely even glanced up from the desk, grabbed the sheet out of their hand and immediately fed it into. At any time you could stop completing sheets and stop making money. So which group do you think was the first to quit?

[00:04:52] Most of us would say correctly. It was the group there where the paper was fed into the shredder because they didn't feel any value to [00:05:00] doing the task, even though technically they could just not even do anything on the sheets and just walk up every few minutes and turn in a sheet of paper and continue to stack up money over time, because nobody was checking to see that they'd done any.

[00:05:13] They still quit rather quickly. And if you had to ask which group of people kept at it, the longest, I bet you'd correctly predict that it was the group that was signing their name and having an interaction with the supervisor that kept at it the longest. But here's the interesting thing that second group of people, the people that didn't sign their name and had a minimal interaction, but didn't get it shredded quit almost as quickly as the.

[00:05:42] That had the paper shredded. It turns out that having ownership of your work, having something of value, having something that gives you an interaction and some autonomy and some value beyond just money, seems to be important for [00:06:00] maintaining our goals and our momentum. And that's true in general. That's true for most of our things.

[00:06:06] It's why getting connected. With what is the effort? What is the journey? What is the path? And recognizing the value in that can begin to bring motivation to what your. You might've heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the past. This idea that at the bottom, we have physiological needs, needs like food and shelter and water, these sorts of things.

[00:06:33] And then you have needs for personal safety next and then love and belonging and connection next, and then esteem both self esteem and esteem of others. And then the top of the pyramid is this idea of self-actualization. When you think about that is something to do with our motivation to know the truth is our bare psychological needs.

[00:06:56] Getting those met is usually our first [00:07:00] priority. And in fact, when you're talking about money goals, if you're not able to feed yourself and keep your lights on and keep shelter over your head, you're generally really focused on taking care of those needs and getting that to us. Now, obviously, eventually you get past that and then you begin to work on safety, needs things to give you predictability and control in your life.

[00:07:22] That's not just things like insurance and medical insurance and health insurance, and these sorts of things. It's also things like savings and being able to put some buffer between you and the rest of the. Honestly, a lot of times, this is the area where people start getting help because they feel stuck there because they're not able to move to the higher order needs, like love and belonging.

[00:07:47] Like the idea of feeling like you fit in. And yes, sometimes that requires money as well, but it also can be done through things like building relationships and simply spending time with other [00:08:00] people. So it's not just a money thing. And then self-confidence and esteem sorts of needs are next. These are about achieving your long-term goals that are deeper than just saving for retirement, though.

[00:08:14] That's part of it. It's about being able to establish a legacy, being able to establish connections with other people that go do. And then self-actualization is where we begin to recognize that our needs, aren't all, that's important that we can actually influence and impact others as well and connect to them.

[00:08:36] And here's, what's interesting. Those top level ones are where the motivation actually comes from. To be able to achieve the bottom level ones. It's when you recognize that, that connection to relationship that connection to other people, that connection, to be able to provide a legacy, it's where you look at the emotion of those things.

[00:08:59] [00:09:00] That's what allows us to be motivated to take care of the basic needs and the safe. And do the hard work and remain motivated to manage our money until we get to a point where we're able to do it and be able to live out all of those levels of needs. That is the key to money management. Motivation.

[00:09:23] Thanks for.

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