Achieving Financial Freedom
How We Sabotage Financial Freedom (or Almost Anything Else) - Part 1
By Van K. Tharp
May 10, 2006

We start off with a clean slate. Do you remember what it was like to be a little child? Most of us don’t, but Alex went through a hypnotic exercise in which he recalled his early childhood. What was his life like? What did he remember?

He had the feeling that he was born innocent and authentic. He never pretended to be anything other than what he really was. Why should he pretend - that was all he knew.

As a little child, Alex was like a sponge; he tried to take in everything possible. His natural tendency was to play, to enjoy life and to be happy. He simply tried to do what felt good and avoid that which did not. Life was so simple. Alex didn’t understand how simple it really was, but he was a happy child.

But as Alex grew older he began to learn language, and that happens to all of us. He began to learn nouns that told him what things were. This was a cat and that was a bowl. So now he had names for what he perceived. He also started to learn verbs, so he could define activities. As a result, he could ask for what he wanted, which he thought was a great skill. Saying, “Mama, I want milk,” could be a very useful statement for a young boy.

Learned Beliefs:

By the time Alex was five years old he understood many abstractions. And this gave him a wonderful ability – he could understand things and explain why events happened. Of course, his explanations were just something he made up or got from his parents, but nevertheless Alex could make up stories about his life. He could decide what was good and what was bad – what was right and what was wrong – what he should be and what he shouldn’t be. Those things all began to appear in his life. He started to learn the ways of his parents and the significant people around him. Alex was developing judgment.

Alex could watch what other people did – his mother, his father, his sister, and anyone else who came into his life – and learn from that. Alex’s parents had very strong opinions, and he wanted to be like them. They also had opinions about him, and he believed each of them.

Once Alex started school, his teacher started telling him how he should be, which implied to Alex that he was the opposite of what he should be. Here are some of the things Alex learned at school. Perhaps, you’ve learned some of the same things.

There are winners and losers in life and we need to work hard or we’ll become losers. Alex needed to work hard to be a winner, which Alex assumed to mean that he was a loser.

Later, Alex discovered that no matter how hard he worked at certain things, he could not do them well. So he must be a loser. How would that make you feel if you were Alex? Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience yourself.

There was a right answer to almost everything. If Alex could get everything right, then he would be a winner. He had to be right most of the time to get a good grade. And even if he was right more than half the time, he could still fail. In fact, only a few people are good enough to get “A’s” – the rest have to settle for lesser grades. And that meant that they might not be successful in life. They were losers. This made Alex feel terrible. Did you have a similar experience?

If Alex did “this,” he was good and got rewarded. But he didn’t always get a reward, so perhaps that meant he was bad. In fact, sometimes he was definitely not that way and he was punished. More and more, Alex began to consider himself a loser.

By this time Alex's parents were also teaching him how he should behave in order to be seen as good. But he was not always that way, so perhaps that meant he was bad. Did you get this sort of education from your parents? Most people do.

Alex learned that in order to get the promised rewards and avoid punishment, he must start pretending to be what he was not. He wanted the rewards and attention so much that he would pretend to be whatever others seemed to want him to be and do whatever was asked of him.

But no matter how hard he tried, Alex still often failed to get rewards when he wanted them – he was not consistently successful. As a result, he started to believe that perhaps he might be what they said he should not be – a loser. No matter how hard he tried to be good at sports, he wasn’t. Alex was the last person to be picked for a team, so he must be a loser. His teachers wanted his handwriting to be neat, but it was not. Thus, Alex concluded that he must be a loser. Pretty soon he started to feel badly about himself. Inside his head, he constantly told himself that “I may be a loser, but I’ll do whatever it takes to prove that’s not the case.”

Perhaps you’ve had some similar experiences as you were growing up. Did you? Perhaps you couldn’t be everything that your parents and teachers expected you to be. Perhaps you decided that you were also a loser. Did you?

Even when we decide we are a loser, we often still strive to be a winner. But who are the winners? In this paradigm, the winner is the person with the nice sports car. The winner is the politician who wins the election. The winner is the major league sports hero. The winner is the person who runs the successful business. It’s the person with the big house. It’s the person with lots of toys. It’s the person with lots of money.

And what’s the next result of all of these teachings. Not only do we all strive, within the accepted definition, to be winners. But we all also strive to have the most toys, the most money, the best car, and the biggest house. And because we want to get over the pain of feeling like a loser, we want these things now to ease our pain. Does this seem familiar to you? It should because almost every human being goes through this sort of indoctrination. We all learn the game of money, in which the winner is the person with the most toys and the most money. And, of course, we want to be winners.

In Part Two we will discuss the result of all of this indoctrination and it's impact on our authentic selves.

From Van K. Tharp's newest work, The Little Book on Financial Freedom. Look for publication Winter 2004.