110 | The Start and Stop Cycle

So many lawyers get into a start and stop cycle with their finances.

They’ll be making some progress, but then they fall off track and give up. Then, at some point down the line, they get back on track but ultimately repeat the cycle over again.

This cycle is dangerous because it keeps you from building momentum and doesn’t lead you to achieving your financial goals.

In this episode, let’s talk about why we sometimes get into the start and stop cycle, the importance of consistency, and how to approach your finances to keep yourself on track and achieve your goals.

Topics Discussed

• what the start and stop cycle is
• why we have trouble remaining consistent
• what it takes to achieve your financial goals
• a great strategy to keep yourself motivated to achieve your goals
• how to approach your finances to stay on track with your goals

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Resources mentioned

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If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call. 

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Email: hello@rhothomas.com

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Lightly Edited Transcript

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. Today we are talking about consistency. I see so many lawyers get into this start and stop cycle with their finances where they’ll get started and they’ll be moving in the right direction making some progress and they fall off track. They quit. They give up. Many lawyers aren’t achieving their financial goals simply because they don’t keep taking consistent action toward their goals. The biggest reason I think this happens is people expect things to just work instantly these days. It’s an effect of the society we live in, right? We are so used to getting anything we want with instant downloads and free two day shipping, and we just don’t have to wait for things like we used to. So maybe you expect that you’re gonna start this new way of looking at your money and your finances and you’re gonna see immediate results and you’re gonna immediately be able to turn things around and it should just be easy the end and then that’s not what happens right? It takes longer than you think it should you think it should be going faster. You should be seeing results faster and you think it’s not working or you think is taking too long and then you quit or you give up. Some of my clients being super type A overachiever lawyers like you might be like I am. They’ll do this thing where we’re only a few sessions in and they’re beating themselves up for not having made more progress. And I have to remind them that they have been managing their money or not managing their money and a particular way for years, and a month or so a coaching isn’t gonna completely turn that around. It doesn’t happen that quickly. Although it’d be great if it did. I would love to be able to help people turn everything around in a single month. But that’s just not the way it works. Right? We’re rewiring your brain and the way you think about money and it’s not going to be a quick instant process. Another reason I think people often quit is they try to take what I call a crash diet approach to their finances. So maybe you’ve been doing the no spend months and respecting yourself on what you can and can’t buy and cutting out all the fun things you enjoy and only spending on necessities. But then what happens is you get burned out with that, right? You start to be like you need a break. So you take a break, you go back to how you’re managing money before and then it starts getting out of hand again, or it gets to a level that you don’t like. So you go back to the crash diet and you end up in this yo yo cycle similar to what happens with actual crash diets. You’re trying to take these actions that aren’t sustainable, that you don’t want to keep doing for the rest of your life. And so you can ignore it for a little while. But then you need a break you stop then you go back to it and then you stop and this whole back and forth. But doing something new for a month and then giving up you don’t see the progress you want as quickly as you want or doing the crash diet scorched earth and everything to get my finances on track and then burn out. Neither of those approaches is going to get you to your goals. It’s not about just trying this thing for a little while to see if it works. And you know, somebody actually told me that once they said they put some money in the stock market to see if it would work. There’s not just some trick to see if it’ll work. Investing as well. It takes consistent actions right? It takes being consistent putting your money to work for you not leave with a little bit and see if it works and what didn’t work, I’m gonna cash out. What’s going to get you to your goals is being consistent with the way you manage your finances over time until you achieve the goal. So changing the way you think about manage your money is going to take time, right it takes patience and we often underestimate how much effort it will take or how much time it will take to change the way we think or the way that we manage our money or to create a new habit to really get this new way of doing something ingrained. But if you’ve been managing your money and thinking about money in a certain way for 30 or 40 or 50 years, hearing one podcast episode or trying something for a month, or working with a coach for one session, or even a few sessions likely isn’t gonna undo all of that. It’s not going to be an overnight thing. It will take time it’ll take practice to consistently take different actions that will lead you to different results. And this process can feel kind of slow. Like the changes you want to see you can feel like they aren’t taking a long time, which is a big part of why I think it’s so important to celebrate yourself, which includes celebrating those smaller milestones along the way to the ultimate goal. So often we only want to focus on the ultimate goal and we’ll wait to celebrate until we achieve the big thing that we want to do. But when it feels like you’re not making progress, having those little celebrations along the way can help you keep going. Right when it feels like you’re not making progress you are so much more likely to give up. Then when you’re looking at your progress over time celebrating those milestones to hit along the way. Because those celebrations show your brain that what you’re doing actually is working, even if it feels like it’s not sometimes, right. I remember when we were paying off our student loans, and we’re just slogging along and it felt like it was never going to end it felt like it wasn’t working. It wasn’t moving. Or we could look back at what we had done before. Or I’ve told you before about how we had our spreadsheet where we kept track of all of our debts and we will highlight the debt in green what that was paid off and being able to look back and see how much green was on the spreadsheet versus what it was, you know, the year before two years before that helped us to stay motivated, right that’ll help you stay motivated because you see that the efforts actually are paying off they’re not in vain. But when you keep starting and stopping and starting and stopping and getting started them giving up again, you’re only prolonging the journey to achieve your goals. Not only does the start up cycle, steal your momentum, but you’re also building up all this evidence in your mind of all the times you failed. And we can say failed in quotations right? But all the times that you gave up all the times you didn’t keep going because it seemed like it was taking too long or it was too hard and it makes it that much harder to get going again. What if the only reason you haven’t achieved your financial goals yet, is because you keep stopping and not being consistent. I’ve talked before about how this whole money thing is a lifestyle change. So it’s not just this temporary thing you’re gonna do for a little while and then you can go back to what you’ve been doing right, go back to the way it was before. That’s how you undo all the progress you make. But you want to change the way you think about your money forever. You want to be thinking about your finances and your money management habit in terms of your overarching goals, and whether the decisions you make and the things you do moving toward those goals or not. Then you want to make the decisions and take the actions that do move you forward consistently until you achieve your goals. Consistency requires discipline. Discipline is a matter of making decisions and doing things you may not always feel like doing to achieve something you want more. Only you can decide whether your financial goals are worth doing those things you may not want to do at times or that may feel uncomfortable, but the truth is as uncomfortable as it might be to change our financial habits. It’s also really uncomfortable to be stressed out about your money all the time and not know you’re gonna overdraft your account and feel like you have nothing to show for all the money you’ve made to this point. Almost anything will work if you keep at it long enough. If you keep going if you don’t quit. Sometimes you’re going through implementing things in your finances and it feels like it’s not working. It feels like you never gonna achieve your goals. But you’re actually a lot closer than you think. But you’ll never know that if you just give up. Giving up is the only way that you ensure your failure. Most people aren’t willing to keep going when things feel hard. Most people would rather just give up right? They’re not willing to take consistent action even when it seems like it’s taking too long. Most people aren’t willing to keep going until they figure it out. But when you do the things that most people aren’t willing to do. You can live a life that most people can only dream of. And if you’re ready to get out of the start and stop cycle and start taking the consistent actions that will lead you to achieving your financial goals head to rho thomas.com/call. And let’s talk about how we can work together. Alright, so that’s it for this week’s episode. Come connect with me over on social media I am most often on LinkedIn rho Thomas and then on Instagram I am rho Thomas. Subscribe to the show and leave a review that would help more people to find it and take a second to think of a friend or two who could benefit from this information and share this episode with them. As we close out friend, I pray that you take the information you learned here, apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently, week after week, you’ll continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth and live the life of freedom and choice you deserve. Talk to you later.