After over two years of unemployment, Jim Moret finally had a job. A good job – he’d been hired as the chief correspondent for the television show, Inside Edition. He should have been happy . . . but his upside-down mortgage and mountain of debt had him desperate and scared. He writes, “ . . . the real prospect of losing everything you have worked for your entire life to achieve is devastating and utterly demoralizing.”
One dark night on a winding road in Malibu, he was struck by an idea. “You know, I could turn right (over the side of the canyon) and no one would know. It would look like an accident. My wife would get $3 million of insurance. It would solve all of our problems.”
If you’ve been reading along in my blogs, you know that, while reality is tangible and concrete, our perception of a given reality has a huge impact on what happens next. Our lives can be blooming with abundance and prosperity, but if we can’t see it, we’re likely to throw it away before we recognize it. The reality for Jim Moret was that he was – and is – buried by debt. His perception, that his life could be valued in dollars and cents and that there was no hope for him, that he was defined by his big house and lavish lifestyle, very nearly determined what would happen next for him.
We all organize our lives around four general themes:
- Fear and Scarcity
- Duty and Obligation
- Achievement and Success
- Abundance and Goodwill
Initially, Jim Moret had organized his life around the theme of Achievement and Success. He was a man of worth, because he had visible success and celebrity. When the former CNN anchor faced the prospect of losing all the tangible signs of his Achievement and Success, his theme changed to Fear and Scarcity. He didn’t know how to get his former lifestyle back, and without it, his life was worthless. He might as well just jerk his steering wheel to the right and end it all now.
For Jim Moret, the fact that he was even considering suicide shocked him into opening his eyes. He thought about his wife and his three children, and that led him to ask himself, “What if I had one day left, how would I view life? What’s important? What would I value? How do I look at friendship and love and gratitude and laughter and music and forgiveness and adventure? And none of those things had anything to do with money. Money was the root of my desperation.”
Jim Moret’s theme of Fear and Scarcity shifted to one of Abundance and Goodwill. He realized that he already had the most precious things in his life – he just needed to stop measuring his life by false values.
January can be a bleak month. The holidays, with their media induced illusion of peace, abundance and prosperity through commercialism, are over, and the credit card bills are coming in. Financial worries can stress relationships to the breaking point, and that negativity can infect all of your relationships. For many of us, Fear and Scarcity are the theme of the month!
Try to distinguish between facts and perception (facts as filtered by your perception). For example:
Fact: You own $30,000 in credit card debt.
Possible perception (distortion):
- You’ll never get out of debt.
- You’re mother in law was right about you — you’re a failure.
- You’re going to live in poverty during your retirement.
- Everything is terrible in your life.
You may have problems. You may even have very big problems. But you can’t confront challenges if you can’t see them clearly. Don’t allow a filter of Fear and Scarcity to distort the facts into insurmountable obstacles.
With his wife’s encouragement, Jim Moret was able to sort through facts and perceptions of facts by journaling, and that journaling translated into a book, The Last Day of My Life, that may help solve some of his financial problems. Hopefully his perception change will be a lasting one, and he will devote the remainder of his life to the theme of Abundance and Goodwill.
Confronting and correcting your filters is a critical step in transforming your life, but it’s not an easy step.
Roger,
It’s unfortunate that most people organize their lives based first upon fear and scarcity. This is true collectively too, and accounts for most of the world’s problems!