Written by: Michael Neill, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
A few years back, I was sitting in the garden outside the home of a very wealthy coaching client, enjoying a few minutes of quiet while they finished up with another meeting. When they came to join me, we sat together for a bit before heading up to the patio for a light lunch and surprisingly heavy conversation about money.
They were struggling to come to terms with issues of their own perceived financial irresponsibility, wastefulness, and a sense of not deserving all that they had. Giving it all away and living a simpler life was not a possibility, however, as they also had fears of not coping with a lack of money and becoming the equivalent of “a bag lady on the streets”.
Ironically, I had had most of the same thoughts myself in the preceding week, albeit with a few less zeros attached to the numbers involved. So while I knew how they felt, I also knew that it couldn’t possibly be money that was at the core of our apparent dilemma.
I shared with them a quote from the enlightened Scottish welder Syd Banks that I have always liked:
“Mental sickness is created when we put feelings onto objects. But if you can see the objects without the feelings, then you are healthy.”
In other words:
A lack of money is no more the source of insecurity than a lack of umbrellas is the cause of rain.
It reminded me of an article by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner written in the 1940’s about the development of superstition in pigeons. As with Pavlov’s earlier experiments which showed that dogs could be made to salivate by associating the ringing of a bell with the delivery of food, Skinner initially recreated similar effects with pigeons.
But he then had a different idea. What would happen if the delivery of food happened at random intervals? Would the pigeons still develop associations? If so, to what?
By hooking up a timer to a food delivery mechanism, Skinner and his colleagues noticed that whatever the pigeon happened to be doing when the food arrived was repeated. For example, if it was tossing its head from left to right, it would then continue doing that in hopes of “calling forth” more food. If the timer happened to deliver food again while the pigeon was doing its dance, an association was formed. Soon, the pigeon became absolutely convinced that their behavior was causing the food to arrive, although in actual fact the two events were entirely unrelated.
As Skinner wrote:
The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.
There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances.
The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball halfway down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.
How does this relate to money and insecurity?
The physicist David Bohm said “Thought creates our world and then says ‘I didn’t do it.’”
Psychologically speaking, this points to the fact that our moment-by-moment experience of life is and can only be created via thought. We live in the feeling of our thinking, but we think we live in a world where objects, circumstances, and other people are the source of our insecurities, emotions, and moods.
So like the pigeons searching for an external cause of their food delivery in hopes of being able to better control it, when we want to control or soothe our own fear and insecurity, we tend to look outside of ourselves to find its source. And one of the most culturally agreed upon “sources” of security is money.
But what if the link between money and insecurity is more superstition than fact? What if doing things to accumulate money in order to create feelings of security is as random and arbitrary a set of behaviors as a pigeon dancing in an attempt to create food?
The nature of a superstition is that it’s non-disprovable. Once the apparent cause-effect relationship between a person, place, or circumstance and the way we feel has been sufficiently reinforced to be accepted as the way things work, our brain then dismisses counterexamples and/or explains them away through mitigating circumstances.
Imagine the pigeon’s storytelling process when their dance doesn’t produce the food they are hoping for: “I must have missed a step”, or “sometimes it takes a few tries”, or “it only works when it’s not raining”.
When it comes to the apparent connection between money and security, we dismiss and mitigate our experiences in exactly the same way. When money doesn’t make us feel safe, instead of questioning the fundamental equation, we justify the fact that it isn’t “working” by telling ourselves the story that “I must not have enough of it yet”, or “it’s because the economy is really volatile at the moment”, or maybe even because the gods are punishing us for some transgression.
But the reality is so much simpler. The reason our strategies to soothe our insecurities by making more money don’t work is that there was never a cause-effect relationship between money and security in the first place. And when money stops looking like the cure for insecure thinking or the cause of whatever it is we think ails us, it goes back to being a convenient means of facilitating the exchange of goods and services.
When money is just money to you, you’ll naturally begin to have a healthier relationship with it. You’ll learn how it gets made without worrying about what it makes you. You’ll find it considerably easier to enjoy everything you have without having to worry about having more.
The point is this:
We feel insecure because our insecure thinking seems real to us; we make money because we are making a valued difference in the world.
Anything else is just superstition, no matter how real it may seem.
Michael Neill, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Michael Neill is an internationally renowned leadership coach, author, speaker, and thought leader. He has worked with executives and teams from Disney, Google, Netflix, Pixar, Public Health England, and more, challenging the prevailing mythology that stress and struggle are prerequisites to creativity and success. His TEDx Talks, bestselling books, podcasts, keynotes, training, and retreats are designed to unleash human potential with intelligence, humor, and heart and have inspired and impacted millions of people at the United Nations and on six continents around the world.
