Manage Your Money to Feel Good About It

10 years ago, a friend invited me to join his co-ed soccer team. They were short on female players, and willing to lower their standard to include this particular female who literally had never played soccer. Not unless you include the one family soccer “game” I remember playing in my childhood. 

I remember it only because it was recorded by my Uncle George on a fancy camcorder—hello, early 90s!—and because there’s an awkward family interview after the soccer game. Also, I put quotes around “game” because mostly it was my siblings and cousins and me chasing each other and a soccer ball around, laughing hilariously.

So anyway. Devin invited me to play, and I accepted. I even bought shin guards for the occasion. Driving to the indoor soccer field, I was 50% excited and 50% terrified. The feeling persisted as I arrived and tried to act like I knew what I was doing when I put the shin guards on and pulled those tall socks up.

And then I sat on the bench as they started the game, a place I secretly hoped to stay the duration of the game. But since they were short on players all around, I got put in the game. My crash course instruction on the rules* of soccer only did a little to calm my nerves. 

Something about off-sides, the throw-in, where the heck various positions are supposed to stay...so much to remember. And from where I was sitting on the bench, it was totally overwhelming and totally not sticking. I felt legitimately bad at soccer.

And then it was my turn to go in and be a terrified substitute for one of my insta-teammates. So I went in, and stood approximately where someone yelled at me to stand and did what I’d been watching them do. And guess what? I wasn’t terrible and even assisted on a goal! 

Proof of my astonishing success as a newcomer? They invited me back. 

You are never going to feel good at something you are not doing. 

What does this have to do with anything, you might ask? Well, it’s representative of just how scary or undesirable or hard so many things look from the outside. 

Or how incompetent we feel at them. But here’s the thing, you are never going to feel good at something you are not doing. 

This is true for everything: cooking, eating healthy, writing, reading, thinking deeply, practicing music, building a business, building stuff, playing sports, and certainly managing money. 

If you’re just sitting on the figurative bench when it comes to your money, chances are very high that you may feel really bad with money. Watching your debts and overspending and lack of tracking and planning run around on the soccer field while you sit on the bench, will have you thinking that there’s no way you want to be put in the game; it all looks too messy and complicated.

But you can change that so super easily.

You get out there on that field, and from the position of a player you actually get to do cool stuff and effect change in your financial situation. If you’re thinking “I’ve tried it before and it didn’t work,” were you actually on the field or more like wishing things to be different from the sidelines? 

Maybe you legitimately tried, and feel like you failed. Or maybe succeeded, but then failed. Either way, I invite you back on the field with all your skills and willingness, and if you go all in, this time you get to feel really good about your results. 

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*Speaking of feeling good about something, I’ll have you know I seriously spelled rules, “rools.” I’m obviously a real good speller :-)