00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 700 of the inspired stewardship podcast. Hi, I'm Ella Hawkins, author of cracking the leadership code. 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 lead well is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this,
00:00:31 the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. one of the ones that's overlooked a lot is environment. You know, how do you allow things into your environment that affect the way you spend money? This is as simple as do you watch marketing messages and I'll give you a hint. I don't care how isolated you think you are. You see marketing messages because it's embedded.
00:01:07 Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast. Cool. Learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
00:01:39 In today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about what the open Gates model is, how this applies to how we use our money. And I give you an example of this model and how it can apply to improving your finances. As we talk about stewarding your treasures, wouldn't it be great if you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime,
00:02:04 it turns out you can. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission will come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. The beginning of today's podcast, I'm going to cover the open Gates model.
00:02:28 If you've listened to Wednesday and Thursdays podcast, you've heard this already and you can skip ahead about eight and a half minutes to get past that. And we'll, then we'll talk about applying it to finances. So one of the models that I like for framing and thinking about coaching and building habits and self-development or change when it comes to looking at ourselves and thinking about how we grow and how we change.
00:02:56 It's an idea that I first learned about from a coach mentor of mine named coach Tony. And he talked about this idea of open Gates. See that the idea that a lot of coaches have is they focus on changing one kind of behavior. Maybe they, they focus as a habit on helping people build a new habit through building up tiny habits. In fact,
00:03:22 Tony first started looking at coaching and building habits when he invented a, uh, a habit tracking app that has since gone on to become coach.me. And this idea was that we could start with tiny Keystone habits and begin over time to build up on those and you would see change and growth, but then he began to look at this over a large number of people using this app.
00:03:49 And he began to look at how many people were consistent and successful in changing their habits and what he found this, as he began to study this, it was somewhere in that, you know, eight, five to 15% set range, somewhere between five and 15% of the people seem to be successful in building a new habit. And that often even when he brought on coaches,
00:04:12 the coaches would try to, to attack that habit through sort of a single piece of advice. And the epiphany any that Coney had is the truth is that the, the coaching that we do, the change that we make has to be more complex than any one single piece of advice for any of us. It's the reason why perhaps you've seen somebody else successfully begin to go to the gym or change their health or change their money or something else.
00:04:41 And we think to ourselves, I want to do that too. And so we asked them, what did you do? What was successful for you? And they share the one or two or three things that they did, then you try them and you fail miserably. And so the framing that, that Tony came up with and it, and it comes from other research that comes out of NLP and some other things like that was that really,
00:05:04 and truly we are made up of a series of things and they're not, hierarchial, it's not like one thing comes before or after another, but instead they're all necessary. They're interconnected. And this includes our mission, our identity, our belief, our capacity, our habit, and our environment, and that to successfully have change happen. All of these have to be open.
00:05:30 All of these have to successfully be addressed and different times, different ones of us have different ones of these that are open or closed or available for change successfully and different ways. So if you begin to figure out that you want to build a new habit, then you're attacking that habit gate. But if your capacity or your belief or your environment, or your mission,
00:05:57 or your identity are not ready, then that habits not going to stick. And oftentimes for many of us, one or two of these Gates, sometimes even three or four, all of them are closed. And we have to begin to address opening all of them before we can make successful change. And for many people, coaches and therapists tend to focus on mission,
00:06:22 identity and belief while trainers and weight loss coaches, or athletic coaches. These kinds of people spend their time on capability, habit, and environment. I mean, think about it a lot of times, when you think about like a life coach or career coach, they spend a lot of time helping you figure out why what's important to you. What matters to you?
00:06:46 That's around these ideas of mission, identity, and belief. Those are really all kinds of beliefs about ourselves and others. By if you get into the more tactical, the more practical the application, the actual execution of things, then you tend to be working around capability, habit, and environment. But the interesting thing is it's not one or the other.
00:07:09 It's all of these that are important. So real quick definitions, you probably kind of came up with definitions in your head for each of these. But to give you a little bit of framing environment is literally the external things around you. It could be as simple as setting an alarm on your phone, how much time you have availability. It also could be certain physical activities or physical access to a computer is needed.
00:07:34 If you're building something around computers, habit is the idea of incremental change over time. It's the consistency piece. It's not just one and done, but continue to work at it over time. Capacity is about the skills and strategies that we use. It's both the tactical, the little day to day stuff and the strategic, the bigger picture strategies that we use to actually improve or change in an area.
00:08:03 And then when we transitioned to belief, belief is about those internal beliefs that we have about ourselves and about the world, including the ones that we don't even know are there, the ones we haven't ever articulated to anyone. And then identity is a type of belief, but specifically it's the beliefs you have about yourself. So belief is more about how the world works and identity is about how you work.
00:08:30 And then mission is about what's important to you. What you really value, not what you say, you value, but what you really value. This is why sometimes when people begin to change habits, they stopped doing it because they figure out that there's something that's more important to them, something better for them to do. And all of these are part of this open Gates model.
00:08:54 Like so many things, the way we use our money has a lot more to do with what we believe and what we think and our mission or identity, these three components than just our habit capacity environment. But as I've been talking about all week, both are tied together. How these six different components work together has a lot to do with how we use our money.
00:09:20 Again, think about it. If you've been struggling to have a budget, been struggling to live on a plan, if, if you've hot, certainly facing way too much money at the end of the month or this feeling of I wake make way too much money to be this broke. And a lot of times we've been doing the same thing over and over again.
00:09:40 We, we've got a certain amount of capacity in terms of the things that are coming in and going out, we've even set up habits and routines. And oftentimes I know people that are doing a budget every month, religiously, but still struggling to live to that budget. And I think that's in part because they haven't looked at these other Gates. We often think about habit and culture passively.
00:10:00 When it comes to our money, you don't make more money, spend less money and set up those routines of checking it regularly, looking at my bank account once a day, whatever that could be a good thing or a bad thing, but you're doing it. But what we don't look at is these other areas. So for example, oftentimes when I have clients come to me,
00:10:21 one of the first things we begin to look at is this mission gate. What is it that they truly believe in? What is it that they truly think is important to do with their money, both in the short term and in the longterm, how does they do with their money, lead them to being able to live out their values and their priorities and their mission that we call that plugging into their,
00:10:43 why? Finding a big enough reason to do the hard things that it's going to take to change what we do with our money. Sometimes I discover that people have an identity issue. It may be because of their family of origin. For instance, if they grew up in a household with a lot of money, they may have this feeling that, you know,
00:11:02 it should come easy. We should be able to just make a lot of money and do whatever we want. If they grew up in a home without a lot of money, oftentimes that affects their mindset around how money works and the scarcity nature of money. So either one of those can affect their identity and their beliefs about money and play out in the money that they're dealing with themselves today.
00:11:24 One of the ones that's overlooked a lot is environment. You know, how do you allow things into your environment that affect the way you spend money? This is as simple as do you want, watch marketing messages, and I'll give you a hint that I don't care how isolated you think you are. You see marketing messages because it's bedded into every TV show,
00:11:48 into every radio show it's embedded into every time you stop at a grocery store or stop to get gas, we're marketed to a lot in our culture today, no matter where you live, marketing faces you at some level and lit paying attention to what we allow into our environment. What is it that we choose to focus on and pay attention to has a lot to do with what we do with our money.
00:12:16 So when you begin to realize that you're struggling with your money in one area, but you're doing quote unquote, the right things with money, probably take a step back and begin to look at these other examples and see how that applies to you and your specific situation so that you can live out what you really want with your money. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast.
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