Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast—a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast, you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to uplevel your money and your life. I'm your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.
Hello, everyone! Welcome back. Today, I want to talk about a powerful, yet simple coaching tool that you can apply, not just to money, but to everything in your life. Are you ready? I call this “what happened” versus story. It's a pretty simple concept, and I'm sure you're already familiar with it, but we forget that this is just the way we see the world.
Something happens and then we make up a story about what happens. This is what human beings do. We are story-making machines, or as I like to say, meaning-making machines. The problem is we forget that we made up the story and we believe the story. We think the story is actually what happened.
Let me use an example from my own life around money. Matt and I finally invested in our first real estate property. We're super excited, but it took over a year to get to this place. It's because I collapsed the “what happened” versus the story. The story I told myself was that we didn't have money to invest in real estate. Now some of you might be thinking, “Well, that might actually be true.” The “what happened” is that we wanted to invest in real estate, but a first glance at our easily accessible cash, like our checking account and our brokerage account, had less money than most people would need to invest in real estate. I literally thought about those two balances and decided, “Oh, we don't have the money.” That feels like the truth, doesn't it?
I bet there's a lot of stories in your head right now about your money that just are not true. And I want to say that all suffering happens in the story. We forget that we made up the story. That's actually the good news because if we could make up that story, that means we could make up a new story. This is often the hardest part for us, and there's a reason for that. Here's why it's so hard to make up new stories, let alone believe them.
I need to give you a brief lesson into the difference between our primitive brains and our prefrontal cortex. But the tagline here is that our primitive brains, which kind of run on autopilot, don’t want to spend a lot of energy it takes to replace stories that we've been telling ourselves for decades. Basically, the brain likes to be efficient. It doesn't want to spend energy or resources if it doesn't have to. It’s so much easier to just replay the old stories that you've been believing and telling yourself for years. Even if these stories are preventing you from making more money, having more money, whatever it is around money that you would prefer over what you currently have right now. Unfortunately, our brains don't really care if the story isn't good for us; it just cares that it's efficient. Even though it might not be great for you, your brain's like, “Well, it's so much easier to just keep playing that old story. I'm just going to keep doing that.”
If this is the first time you're hearing about this concept, then I'm so glad you're listening. You have the ability to reprogram your brain literally, but it takes some practice because right now it's so much easier for you for your brain to continue to believe this old money story. We all sort of know that most of us have difficulty with new things, change, et cetera. It's jarring because our brains like to be comfortable. They like the familiar. If you can, wrap your head around that and have some compassion for your brain and yourself. Remember that these new stories are simply new. New doesn't mean dangerous even though sometimes it feels like these new stories you want to tell yourself or these new stories you would love to believe are dangerous.
If you think about the way our primitive brains have evolved over time, they haven't quite evolved to keep up with our modern, comfortable times. Back in the day, when we lived in the cave, certain things our brain does were very useful. Change was not a good thing. Change could mean danger, literal danger. A lion could be out there trying to eat us. Our brains really have kept us alive for this long, about 200,000 years to be exact. The problem in our modern day world is a lot of this brain programming--a lot of this automatic stuff that goes on inside our brains--just isn't that useful and doesn't really serve us today.
I personally have found knowing this is how our brains are wired genetically has given me so much freedom about the stories I've been believing for so long. It is freeing knowing that I always have the choice about the story I can create about what happened. We sort of know this is true because of our experiences when something happens. For example, a patient says something that you interpret as mean, and you talk to your friends about it, or your colleagues, people have different opinions about that same incident. You sort of know that that's the way things work, right? Something happens and you ask 10 people and they all might have 10 different interpretations. The only difference is that we don't think that we have a choice in the matter in terms of our story. I mean, sometimes we do because our opinions can change and they have over time, but it's actually a skill you can use on purpose for everything in your life.
This was a short episode but such an important tool. Let's recap what we talked about today. We have the “what happened” and then we have the story that we make up about it. Most of us live our lives on default and collapse the two things. In truth, they're actually two separate things. We think the story is what happened, but it’s not. The good news is we can decide and create a new story about what happened. If you think about the past or a thing from the past that happened, know that it has already happened. The only thing that still exists is the story about what happened. Lastly, this can be hard to change the story because of our innate brain wiring.
Hey, if you're a woman physician who is ready to take control of your money, you've got to check out my program Money for Women Physicians. It's part course and part group coaching and a hundred percent guaranteed to put more money in your pocket. Go to wealthymommd.com/money to learn more.
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The challenge, of course, is that our brains love to be efficient. Running this same pre-programmed information through your mind on repeat is a simple task for your brain. At this point in your life, it’s automatic. Teaching your brain how to take in new information is difficult, especially given how our brains are hardwired. But the payoff is profound. 
