Behind me, my officemate groaned. “Hey. Can I pick your brain for a second?”
I spun my chair around. “Sure, what’s up?”
“I’m sending a project update, but it’s super late. How do I start this email? Sorry for the delay on this… um….”
“Or you could turn the sorry into a thanks.”
He frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“Flip the script,” I said. “Turn a negative into a positive. Don’t apologize for your actions; thank them for theirs. So instead of sorry for the delay, you could say thank you for your patience.”
His face brightened. “That’s amazing, thank you!”
As a finance blogger, I talk about money a lot. It happens with all sorts of people, from strangers at the supermarket to clients to my family circle. Every interaction is different. It might be a sentence in passing as we commiserate over the price of milk or an hour in-depth diving into their PocketSmith dashboard. Or it might not even be about money, but about all the other things that impact our finances, like values, attitudes, weekend events, the rising cost of living, or the kids needing new shoes again. Short or long, shallow or deep, one thing’s for sure: These conversations are more important than ever.
Some of you will know I have a category in my PocketSmith setup called “Regret.” These days, it gets very little use. Simply knowing that it’s there is enough of a deterrent. Its mere existence is that powerful!
The real beauty of naming a purchase for what it is, I’ve found, is that it flips a money decision around completely. It’s easy to see ourselves as victims of marketing, blame a bad purchase on that, and leave the shop feeling like rubbish (or trash, for our American friends). But stepping up and calling it out brings an element of control. We’re not victims; we’re agents of change. We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. It’s our call to make. And just like that, the decision is no longer passive but active.
That potentially bad decision used to be passive, hindsight-driven, negative, impulsive… and a whole string of downward-spiralling words. Now, just by calling it what it is and sticking a label on it, I’ve turned it into something active, forward-thinking, positive, and mindful.
Changing the way you phrase something can change your whole attitude toward it — as well as other people’s. By changing one sentence, my officemate didn’t just change the way he thought about a work delay. He changed the way everyone else on that email string thought about it, too. It would be logical for project delays to provoke reactions of panic and frustration. Instead, his email turned it into something that called to the good in people, provoking warmth, compassion, and even gratitude.
During money conversations, I tend to gently query people on their wording. A classic example is “I can’t afford it,” compared to my suggested wording of “It’s not in my budget this month.” The first is more passive and negative, focusing on the lack of. Let’s face it, if we’re always looking at what we don’t have, we’ll never be content. The second is active and positive. It says I have a plan. It says I’m taking responsibility for myself, my finances, and my life. It looks at what I do have, rolls up its sleeves, and gets to work.
The words we use have the power to shape us — our mindsets, our attitudes, our relationships to money. And we can change them.
I’ll let you in on a secret. I started the #30daysofgratitude challenge because I am, by nature, a sardonic woman with a dark sense of humor and the ability to see the downside of everything. You want a worst-case scenario? I’m your gal. But I didn’t want to always be that person. So I started a challenge based around gratitude, grace, silver linings, and optimism… and 500+ days later, I’m still going.
Ruth The Happy Saver herself, wrote a great blog post about people changing their self-labelled identities from “spender” to “saver” — and completely changing their finances in the process. I could go on. The point is, we can flip the script. Change the words and phrases we use to talk about money. Move from victimhood to agency. Stop looking at what we don’t have and instead focus on growing what we do have. Step away from passive-negative towards active-positive.
If changing one line of an email changes the entire reaction to that project, just think what changing our money language can do.
Rachel E. Wilson is an author and freelance writer based in New Zealand. She has been, variously, administrator at an ESOL non-profit, transcriber for a historian, and technical document controller at a french fry factory. She has a keen interest in financial literacy and design, and a growing collection of houseplants (pun intended).
