During the month of July, we will run "best of" content from the authors. The following article first appeared on January 27, 2010.

	ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph Grenny is the author of three bestselling books, Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations.    READ MORE BOOK A SPEAKER

  Dear Crucial Skills,

My husband and I have $40,000 in credit card debt. We've made all kinds of budgets and set all kinds of goals but still can't get together on this. We fight about it a lot and it's become a real source of conflict for us. We both want to get out of debt, but one bad deed keeps leading to another. How can we stick to our budget?

Signed,
Good Intentions

After a tough financial year, many of us have had to try to change our spending habits to help us weather everything from economic anxiety to a true financial famine. Fortunately, there's a lot you can do to change your good intentions into good behavior.

First, I'd suggest you and your husband play a game together. Let's call the game Name That Influence! The object of the game is to identify all the different sources of influence that are undermining your good intentions. You'll be shocked at how long the list is. Here are three questions to help you generate some specific answers:

1. What visual images in your home get you thinking about spending rather than saving? (Hint: Do you longingly browse shopping pages on the internet? Do you have a Library of Congress-sized stack of catalogs by a comfortable reading chair?)
2. How do your interactions and conversations with friends or family affect your thoughts, plans, and actions toward spending? (Hint: Is shopping a social event?)
3. What sources of influence keep you from immediately counting the cost of your spending choices? (Hint: Do you buy with cash? Checks? Credit cards? Do you have "one-click" purchasing enabled on favorite Web sites?)

Set a goal with your husband to come up with at least a dozen different influences that both motivate and enable you to spend more than you should. Be honest with yourself and recognize your role in your current situation. As you do this, something very important will happen. You'll realize the problem is not that the two of you are weak. The problem is that you are blind and outnumbered. You're blind to the many sources of influence that are shaping your choices. And the one source working for you (your willpower) is hopelessly outnumbered by the sources working against you. (If you read our book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, you'll find you're outnumbered 5 to 1. Not good odds!)

When you finish creating this list, your job is to change as many sources of influence as you can to support your good intentions. Dismantle those sources you know are encouraging your indulgence. Create positive influences that will keep saving top of mind, make it easier, and help you feel rewarded for following through.

For example, you could:

1. Make it a game. Create a progress chart for your savings goal. Keep it visible. Make a ritual of posting progress as a couple and generating the "completion endorphins" that come when you color in the next progress bar.

2. Banish temptation. Change your home page, delete tempting web pages, toss out magazines and catalogs or other "triggers" of spending impulses. Make no mistake—shopping generates dopamine in the same pleasure centers of the brain that cocaine does. You're fighting a pleasure-driven habit and your best defense will be to minimize the temptations.

3. Make spending harder. Eliminate any structural enablers of mindless spending. For example, research shows people spend far less if they have to fork over cash than if they can simply slide a credit card through a slot. You might try carrying nothing but cash with you for six months. You'll find this one physical change will profoundly affect your choices. You may also choose to undergo "plastic surgery" by cutting up your credit cards.

4. Change an accomplice into a friend. If shopping and spending are social activities, you'll need to identify your accomplices. For example, if you and a girlfriend enjoy a regular outing at a mall, you'll need to change that relationship. Eat some humble pie and let her know you are in desperate need of change. Ask for her help. If your husband is the accomplice, find a substitute activity you can do together. You won't succeed by simply eliminating social activities; you'll need to generate new ones. Our research shows that changing habits almost always involves engaging the help of at least two trusted friends.

These ideas may or may not be the right ones for you. But one thing I can promise you is that if you'll examine your situation carefully, you'll realize the problem is out there. There are myriad sources of influence working against you—and until you recognize and reverse them, you'll continue behaving in a way you don't want.

Joseph

related material:
vol. 3 issue 20: Lending Money
vol. 6 issue 13: Regaining Your Ground
vol. 6 issue 49: Financial Family Feuds

The following article first appeared on April 2, 2008.

	ABOUT THE EXPERT    Steve Willis is a master trainer and vice president of professional services at VitalSmarts. READ MORE   BOOK A SPEAKER

I was once asked to work with an executive team who believed they had mastered crucial conversations. They had completed the whole program in record time, while still allowing for "in-depth" discussion around which areas of the organization would benefit most from this new skill set. In fact, they were seriously skeptical that there was anything left to be gleaned from a review of the material.

They had experienced the Slim, Fast Training. They slimmed down the amount of content they had to cover by substituting "high-leverage" talk for many of the exercises. Instead of bolstering their competence through practice, they talked about how they thought they might use the skills. This way, they would get to the essence of the training in a much faster timeframe.

So when I started my session, I was met with a collective stare that conveyed this message, "Steve, our Crucial Conversations trainer, you can't teach us anything. Our minds are too powerful!" They had a pretty thorough, cognitive understanding of the material, but had they mastered it?

Instead of diving into a content review of the skills, we started with a practice scenario. They stumbled, bumbled, and jumbled their way through it. This was a lot harder than they had realized, but as they practiced, they got better at the skills. Pretty soon, they were sharing new learning insights and application tips, and they began to realize that in their haste to whiz through the material, they had shortchanged themselves by cutting out their most significant learning opportunities: the practice scenarios.

Sure they are tough. Sure they may feel awkward at first. But in the end, those individuals who practice are three to four times more likely to use the skills than those individuals who simply talk about the skills.