I’m going to use an analogy to share this concept, and it might initially seem a little bit “out there”, but hang in with me.

When I was a little fella I used to get myself in trouble, a lot of trouble.  Maybe it was my big mouth and maybe it was my attitude, but I suspect it was a combination of the two.  Never mind how, I was regularly engaging in physical altercations that were not good for my health.

I remember the most embarrassing instance, and it wasn’t embarrassing because I got the poop kicked out of me.  Mum.  Yes, my dear mother felt she needed to rescue me from the clutches of the big brute who was teaching me the lesson of the day.  Talk about shame.  (That instance alone caused a few more fights!)

But despite that, here’s the point;  when I was in real trouble I learned to do whatever it took to survive.  I knew the situation was much bigger than I could handle (obviously linked to the size and strength of the opponent) and, therefore, I dug deep within myself and my natural survival instincts kicked in.

Here’s my first point:  When times and my circumstances were much bigger than I could handle and I was taking a pounding I did whatever it took to get home alive.

I was a little dude growing up.  All the guys in my school seemed to be growing faster and stronger than me, and they wanted to prove their early entry into manhood to the female species.  So guess who the subject of their evidence often ended up being?  Me.   I remember frequently lying face down in the mud, breathing through my ears as the assailant carefully placed bruises where the sun never shines or applied large massaging fists to my internal organs.  But while I was lying there I was thinking.  What would I be thinking while suffering at the hands of a bully?

“Never mind the pain of the current situation”, I would tell myself, “there will come a day when I will be able to dish out the beatings!”  This is the thought that gave me the strength to keep facing my battles.

As I grew wiser and bigger I could see the day of triumph getting closer and closer.  Fortunately for me I learned that this wasn’t the best way to resolve differences and I developed new answers to my problems.  But the key for me was looking to the future.

Here’s the second point:  The sun will always come out tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, there will be a sunny day soon.

How can you apply these lessons to your financial situation?

Firstly, if times are tough then life is about survival.  Do whatever it takes to get home alive.  By that I mean do whatever it takes to get to the end of the year in one piece.  This will require you to make cut backs.  It may require you to take on a little more debt than is normally acceptable.  It may even require you to sell assets and cut your losses.  I can absolutely assure you that survival will require you to apply discipline to your finances and apply more self-control that you ever have before.

So this is a time to go back to basics.  If you have worked through the Wisemoney process of ‘Taking Control of Your Finances’ then you will know what I am talking about.  This system that I have designed and taught to thousands of people really works!

I received an email just the other day from someone:

“Just wanted to let you know that I attended a Wisemoney seminar in 2005 and since then, I have paid off a student loan of $20,000, saved over $20,000 for a first home deposit and been on 4 overseas trips, each costing a few thousand dollars. The principles I learnt then are still with me today”.  From Sunita

So I urge you to get your hands on this system.  If you are someone who wants to learn to get control of your money, if you want to make it go further each week, or you want to get rid of debt – then do not delay.  People fail to survive because they fail to act!

Secondly, I would like to encourage you that there will be good times ahead for you financially.  It won’t always be tough.  Someone recently said to me that they had heard a statistic quoted that said that every household would suffer a financial crisis of some proportion every decade.  But the good news is that a crisis never lasts forever.  It comes, it teaches us a lesson, and then it moves on.

Did you catch that?  Can you see what your responsibility is in the circumstances?  It is this:  to learn the lesson.

In this situation I always encourage people to start to focus on the next year, dream and articulate what the future will look like when things get better.  Start to put down goals, be very specific about what you will be doing and what it will feel like.  This is not a ‘fluffy exercise for the dreamers’ this is an exercise for everyone.  This is how successful people move forward.  They create vision and they work hard towards it.

You see, for me when I was lying face down in the mud, my vision was being bigger and stronger in the future so I could give out the beatings!  I used to feel stronger just thinking about it.  Now I know that this is not right and I’m no longer thinking like that, but when I was ten years old it was definitely appropriate.

You can do this with your finances.  Build a dream board and begin to fill it.  Use the Financial Goals model that I teach in my book to calculate how much your goals will cost and what it will take to get there.  This is how you will focus on the future and gain the energy to get there.

I had a phone call out of the blue from a friend based in the United States the other day.  He was in a situation where someone had him in a ‘financial headlock’ and were threatening to punch his lights out.  And he phoned me for support and advice.  And the information I have given you in this article is the advice I gave him.

Trust me; this will work for you, as long as you chose to do the work.