My Relationship with Money and the Three Laws of Performance

I don’t find it surprising that I have not written a single blog entry discussing my finances or issues relating to my income until now. What follows now is not a philosophy or s theory of people’s relationship with money or not even my personal philosophy of money. Here I am sharing my own relationship with money, the contexts through which I looked at money and how I transformed these contexts to generate new possibilities in the area of money using Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s Three Laws of Performance. Read my review of the book by clicking here.

No, I did not have any severe ‘problems’ regarding my income. As a university teacher working on a granted post, I have probably one of the most secure and one of the highest paying jobs in the country.  However, I still put off buying that new PC or more expensive model of the car or buying a bigger house. At the end of the month, I still have a feeling that I could have saved more than I have and invested this saving. Very often, I do not save at all, apart from what the deduction of General Provident Fund from my salary. I am also worried about my future. What if the Government decides to discontinue paying what it is paying now in future if it goes broke?  I am also worried about my habits of spending fearing what if my family and I have these habits but I won’t be earning as much as I do? What if something happens to me? Whatever little I have invested, I have invested- not surprisingly- in insurance. Besides, financial transactions occur to me as very boring and mundane. Therefore, I keep procrastinating going to banks or paying my insurance premiums.  I try to take interest in stock markets, buy books, but later abandon my interest in these things. I still leave bigger financial transactions like buying and selling house to my dad. I also feel a bit guilty about my lack of interest in these things and my ignorance regarding these things. What was my ‘Default Future’? In The Three Laws of Performance, the default future is the future, which was not inevitable, but that which is probable and almost certain to happen unless something dramatic and unexpected came along.  I would continue doing and being the same thing for long time to come in the future- I would be remaining worried, trying to adjust my needs according to my salary, struggling to save, remain fearful about being at the ‘mercy’ of the state and so on. 

Zaffron and Logan’s Three Laws of Performance provide a powerful technology for transforming the area where we feel challenged. It does not offer ‘strategies’ or ‘tips’ or even theories for boosting performance. It lays down laws, which govern our performance, and getting these laws provides an access for transforming our performance. The first law of performance is “People’s actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.” Our actions are correlated, not to the facts and reality of the situation, but to how this reality and facts occurs to us. The perception that everyone is relating to the same set of facts of the situation is what the authors of the book call ‘reality illusion’. 

So my fixed ways of beings (being detached, being scared, being bored and irritated, being weak and small, being irresponsible, being casual etc) and my ineffective actions (putting off buying things that I want, procrastinating financial transactions, struggling to save, not taking authentic interest in financial matters, inconsistent interest in the stock-market, etc.) are perfectly matched, in Zaffron and Logan’s words “in dance with” how the situation occurs to me. 

So how does the situation occur to me? Well, financial matters occur as ‘peripheral’ to my life, the inflow and the outflow of money in my life occurs as if it “happening on its own”. I am “forcing myself to take interest in the matters which occur as “mundane and tedious”, because I “have to”. I am struggling to ‘save’ money because I ‘have to’ in case the state discontinues paying what it is paying now or something happens to me. The situation occurs to me as ‘insecure’. I occur to myself as being at ‘mercy’ of the government and university authorities. 

The second law of performance says, “How situation occur to people arises in language”. How situation occurs to us arises in our conversations and verbalizing about the situation. These conversations usually comprise of the use of ‘descriptive use of language’. They are mostly made up of our ‘interpretations and stories of what happened in the past’, decisions about future, which we took in the past, our ‘already always’ internal dialogue consisting mainly of our opinions, evaluations and judgments,  and our persistent complaints. We do not ‘have’ these conversations, we ARE these conversations. They form the colored spectacles through which our perception of reality and facts is filtered. We cannot see these conversations, we can only see through them. These conversations are most of the time “‘unsaid and communicated without awareness”. These past-based conversations are the hidden and default contexts –our blind spots- in which situations occur to us. 

So what were my past-based hidden and default contexts in which my relationship with money showed up? “Thinking all the time about money and running after money is bad” ( I am making those who are financially better wrong),  “One should always be content with what one gets ( one is content usually during the first fortnight after the salary day ;) ) ”, “ Financial matters are ‘none of my business’?”, “ I am at the mercy of the government and authorities”, the transactions are ‘mundane and tedious” , “ I am dumb and not capable of minding my own finances”, “I am small and don’t deserve what I am getting ( earning around a lakh rupees a month for teaching Keats and Derrida? What are my students going to do with that?) , “I am a steno-typist’s son and I haven’t done all that badly (I making my dad small! I shared all this with him; by the way)”, “Business is not in our blood (as a Maharashtrian Brahmin blah blah blah) and so on were my conversational contexts. I was a “clearing” a space for scarcity and insecurity. My life was the life of adjustment and compromise. The default context on my financial life was the context of ‘surviving and fixing/changing”. Not that it was ‘wrong or bad’, but it was definitely disempowering very often. There was hardly sense of power, freedom, self-expression and peace of mind inside this context. 

After I uncovered all these interpretations, stories, complaints and opinions and distinguished them from facts and reality, extraordinary things started opening up. The third law of performance says, “Future-based language transforms the way a situation occurs to people”. The future-based language is the language of creating a future rather than living into the ‘already written/default future”. It is the language of declaration, promises and commitments. 

Earlier, I was not taking responsibility for the inflow and the outflow of money, I was not seeing myself as causing it, but after I put these conversations aside, I invented a possibility of being at the source, and being the cause in the matter of my financial life and not at its effect.  In fact, I could see that whatever financial life I was living was because of conversational contexts, which I had created.

Money is MY business now. I have invented the possibility of being confident and courageous. I can relate to my expenses as not something “wrong” to be reduced or to be fixed but as what they are as expenses. Instead of relating to the people who are wealthier than me as being basically’ corrupt and dishonest and hence to be kept a safe distance from’, I can relate to them as who they are – as possibilities. Instead of seeing money as ‘given and fixed number’, an inflexible box inside which I have to accommodate my needs, I see flow of money as something to be caused and created. I have also invented the possibility of being enthusiastic and interested in finance.  Hence, I am looking for various ways in which I can now cause and create money. Landmark Education Advanced Course says you win whatever game you play. I was playing the game of survival, fixing and changing and winning at it, now I am playing the game of creation and possibility. The games begin with a declaration ‘X is more important than Y’ (scoring more runs or goals is important than scoring less runs or goals). So the declaration I am making in the matters of finance is “the game of creation and possibility” is far more thrilling and enjoyable than the game of survival and fixing.  Zaffron and Logan talk about our lives as three act plays, where the first act is our past, the second act is our present and the third act is our future. However, they point out our first act has already written and shaped our third act, as we have put decisions and interpretations made in the past not into our past but into our future we are living into. Using Three Laws of Performance I am rewriting my third act. 

Confessions of a Middle-Bencher: My Life in St. Joseph E.T. High School

Even today I dream ( quite literally)  of entering St. Joseph High school building on a monsoon day. I still dream of being admitted to the  school and studying in the class. I can clearly see Maniar madam, our English teacher, threaten us with her 'high' English if we did not behave properly. I see late Mr. Prajapati, our Math teacher, holding his own left shirt collar with his right hand and zealously teach us Math. " Is this the way we are going to study?", he asks me angrily and flings my notebook on my face. He had a curious way of using ' we' for you. He was a tall, dark and stern man who sent shivers through the spines of many. His zeal for Math bordered on fanaticism and whatever minuscule math I have in me, is because of this man. He was not ' nice'. He was a brilliant teacher. He proved that you don't have to be 'nice' and 'friendly' to be an excellent teacher. I still see Mr. Khurshid Pathan, our then Physics teacher demanding the I complete my Physics experiment journals. My palms still sweat at the thought. Mr. Pathan, in total contrast to Mr. Prajapati was nice and friendly, and very popular with girls. I still see Mr. Gupta,  our jolly roly-poly Hindi teacher (who I discovered today is also a poet and astrologer) getting stuck on the descriptions of food in Hindi lessons and struggling to leave them behind. He got struck at the description of baked potatoes in Premchand's 'Kafan'.

I can still remember Mathew Kotnani, my friend, tell me with excitement that one of my sarcastic poems have appeared in the local youth section of the Indian Express. This was my first publication. After that I became a public nuisance, and with the advent of the internet and blogging in the twenty first century, I became a global infliction.

I can still see the chloroformed frog meant for dissection in the Biology lab regain consciousness  and jump on the screaming girls. Today, I suspect, one of the pretty girls from our class must have kissed it and it must have turned into 'fully awake' frog instead of a prince. Women, those eternal optimists, seem to keep on kissing frogs for a long time in their life, and by the time they realize that the frogs will be frogs forever, they have their own tadpoles to nurture. Talking of princes, I also recall one of my classmates whose surname was Champaneri, who often used to come to the school on horseback!

I joined St. Joseph English Teaching High School, Valsad, in 1988, for my eleventh and twelfth standard because I did not have a choice and it seems, St. Joseph's admitted me because they did not have much choice either. I studied in Bai Avabai High School for most of my life and there was  no English medium eleventh and twelfth standard for science stream in Bai Avabai school and St. Joseph's was the only school which had this facility in those days. St. Joseph's was the only 'convent' school in our area in those days. My sister had studied there till her tenth standard and it was located at a stone's throw from our residence. The principal Sister Clara Fernandes in St. Joseph was not very happy at the idea of allowing 'desi', ill-mannered ruffians from Avabai to run freely in the more disciplined and elite school. I remember her giving a very stern piece of mind to the entire classroom for bad behaviour,  and her focus was on certain girls who talked 'inappropriately' with the boys.  Till I entered the 'convent' I associated 'Sisters' with people who either tied rakhi on your hand or jabbed a syringe into you. I was an awkward outsider who even did not know how to tie a tie. 

I was a committed middle-bencher. Unlike backbenchers and front benchers, I lived in the grey no-man's land of 'averageness', both in terms of intelligence as well as in terms of capacity for naughtiness. I was in the same place as far as looks were concerned and I marveled at my friend Abhay Thosar's wicked coolness at his being one of the handsomest and smartest kid in the class. He hardly got carried away by girls doting on him. Many of my friends from Avabai were there: Chinmay and Hoshedar for instance. I made new friends with Abhay, Sanat, Rajesh Jainval, Vivekand Pandey, Amit Purohit and Mathew Kotnani for instance. One of the good things about St. Joseph's was that unlike my one year at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Ordnance Factory, Chandrapur, I was not bullied or humiliated.

This was the period when asthma became more chronic, and started to pervade my life. I remember this was the period, when on insistence of  one Shri Prabhuji, a family friend and a local holy man, I started doing all sorts of trick to get rid of asthma. He suggested that I wake up very early in the morning, study for the twelfth standard with my friend Chetan Patel, go for jogging, or go cycling to Tithal Sai Mandir some five to six kilometers from my house, do ' alni' fasts or salt-free meal days , count beads chanting Gayatri mantra, chant Hanuman chalisa, water basil plant or go to Shiva temple on Mondays. Obviously, all this did not work. I remember sitting on the veranda in the afternoons on the days when I could not attend schools due to asthma attack and watching students of St. Joseph, especially the girls, return home.

People expected me to do well in the exams. I scored fifty-odd percent. Baba believed that a person who knows a bit of English and knows stenography will never die of hunger and there was no point in doing B.Sc and work in a factory  in Vapi as a chemist from eight in morning to six in the evening. On his suggestion, I took up B.A with English course from Valsad. People were shocked. Arts was seen as the lowest rung of the educational Varnashrama with medicine and engineering at the top. I never even dreamed of doing doctorate and teach in one of the best universities in India. The middle-bencher was basically a day dreamer, and not a dreamer. He sat in the ambivalent middle of the spectrum, and doodled away cartoon characters in his rough work book. He is not difficult to find, just look around you.


( St. Joseph English  Teaching High School, Valsad, is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee in December this year)

The Landmark in the Journey of my Life

I took Landmark Education’s basic programme ‘The Forum’ last year and my life is no longer what it used to be. People keep asking me what the hell is this and why the hell are you promoting it all over the place? Answer to the second question follows from the answer to the first.

Landmark is first and foremost a very intensive workshop.  Here we are taught how to redesign, recreate and reprogramme our entire life into something much more fulfilling, effective and powerful. The programme does this by helping us to see for ourselves what is holding us back and what is creating the mess of a life we are living. More importantly, once we see what is holding us back and creating problems in our life, we are taught how to overcome these things. This is done with hands-on approach, where we work on our problems; see for ourselves what is creating them, and how we can do away with them. We are shown ways about how to go about doing it.

What Landmark does is it enables us to locate our own ` blind spots’-the zones of being which we have not seen and which not only have caused misery and suffering in our life, but also have enabled us to get results which we have been getting  all these years in rather unfulfilling ways

It is not `spirituality’ as we know it and it is not psychotherapy. It is applied philosophy.  The philosophy that owes a lot to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and language. Philosophy not as reflection or meditation or theorization, but as actual living in-this-very-world, our day-to-day life.

 Before Landmark, though my life would appear alright from outside,  I was on the verge of total emotional and physical collapse. Life seemed a prison house.  I felt I was trapped in all the agonizing relationships including the ones with inanimate beings like my Pc or my two-wheeler! I felt that the decades old asthma, embittered relationships, depression and abysmally low self esteem resulted in a life of misery. I had gathered huge amounts of RDX in the form of hidden anger in the cold storage of my soul which would not be seen but occasionally would blow up in the face of people close to me, especially my mother and my wife. I was on the verge of a divorce and nervous breakdown. I had to consume hundreds of milligrams of corticosteroids for my asthma every day and I was on antidepressants and medical counseling.

My work at the college was deeply affected. I had great difficulty in meeting deadlines and what ever I did was a messy thing.

Today, I have cleared my storage space of the RDX. My wife says that I don’t store up my anger and explode. I am no longer a monster. Confidence is no longer an issue. I manage asthma with minimal medications. I exercise and eat healthily. My relationship with my wife, mother and myself are no longer bitter and full of anger. My marriage is no longer on the verge of divorce. I have discovered great amount of peace within me.  The huge baggage of agony I was carrying around in my life has vanished and I feel incredibly light. I don’t find the work at college a burden anymore. Landmark has given me with a vision and ability to do whatever I want to do. It has created a huge difference in my life. I am back on my feet and raring to go.  I am completely in control of my life now.

That brings me to the second question. Why the hell are you advertising for these guys?

Almost daily we share many things with people we know: the films which we enjoyed, the restaurants we feel people should check out, the schemes in market which are worth going in for, and the news we feel people should know. Are we marketing these things then? In a way, yes and in a way, no. We are promoting these things which would benefit the sellers- we are giving the word-of-mouth kind of publicity free of cost. All of us are marketing things daily- by talking about them or by wearing them or showing them to others.  But then we do it because we feel these things are VALUABLE and hence should be SHARED with people WHO WE VALUE in our life.  

So folks, here is the programme which can transform your life as it has done for me.