Watching and reading about the current credit crisis over the past days and weeks has been fascinating, and to be honest, I’ve not yet reached a saturation point, probably because I continuously learn something new about the issue and finance in general. Even while doing other things it’s been in the back of my mind, so I guess in that context it’s not surprising that a recent discussion with someone about individual health behavior led me to a bailout analogy.
It seems that, unfortunately, some members of congress last week tried to use the need for quick action as a mechanism for adding extraneous things to the bailout bill while trying to pass them off as being necessary to fixing the problem. For example, infrastructure was mentioned as being part of the package – helpful for jobs, but it’s not relevant to loosening credit for businesses and consumers. In the same way – and work with me here – sometimes during a self-assessment people come up with a laundry list of ways they could improve their health, when in reality there may be only one pressing thing that needs to be addressed. Coming up with a comprehensive exercise and eating overhaul is part of a big picture goal, not something to achieve right out of the gate, so rather than going 0-60, maybe the first step is to set a goal of walking for 10 minutes every day during lunch (even if indoors), for example. I’ve been working with people long enough to have learned that this all-or-nothing mentality – “I have to fix it all now and be successful at it now or not at all” – rarely works for behavior change because a) a person can’t solve everything at once, and b) when he subsequently “fails” at that, the tendency is to give up. Not a recipe for long-term success.
So my advice to you and to lawmakers – which I’m sure they’ll take, of course – is to focus on a (the) dominant issue at hand, and then tackle the over-arching issue in phases when there’s been more time for exploration, reflection, and problem-solving.
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