Reflections from a Week of Training ---- Changing Behavoirs

Yea!!---I'm finally back in town and am not living out of a hotel. The first thing I did after getting home was to look for that jump drive --- and it was not found, so now I will be on the look out for it. Not to self always back up work. I use that jump drive for my personal documents so not just the topics from last week were lost. I have my fingers crossed that it will be found.

I wanted to take a few minutes and share what I learned over this last week in training. In my industry I have to take a lot of different trainings to maintain my license to practice but this week I took a class where I not only learned a ton but I also have a new out look. The safety training I took was very powerful - it wasn't about new policies or procedures, everyone knows what you have to do to be safe it was about behavior change and getting people to actually follow rules for the benefit of their life. It really hit home when Tuesday a crane accident occurred on one of our job sites - not because some one didn't know the rules but because they chose not to follow the rules and two lives were lost. To me that made the behavior change even more important. While there is absolutely no comparison to the loss of life or the injuries that occur in construction accidents, I started thinking on my way home from the training about how behavior is so important in all aspects of life, for example in personal finance.

Everyone knows the basic rules of personal finance ---- Live Below Your Means; Save the Rest ---- its pretty simple but a lot of people don't play by the basic financial policies and why is that- its because of thinking and behavior. One of the quotes that was used in the training was by Kenneth Foo and states "When you change your thinking, you change your beliefs. When you change your beliefs, you change your expectations. When you change your expectations, you change your attitude. When you change your attitude, you change your behavior. When you change your behavior, you change your life."

There was an epiphany for most people when they changed their thinking about personal finance and in tern that changed their beliefs, expectations, attitude, behavior and ultimately their life.

For me, I feel a little silly as a personal finance blogger because I'm not like most of the bloggers out there who are either in debt or were in debt but have changed their lives. I've never been in dept and can't pin point an experience or an event that changed my thinking. For me I think it was a gradual awareness that occurred when I was a child, I saw my mom struggling in debt and decided I never wanted to live like that.

Have you changed your thinking so your behavior changed? What caused your thinking to change?