With over £13bn predicted to be spent over this weekend, it’s worth taking a moment to focus on the process of buying.
So what is going on in our heads in relation to buying?
Welcome to strategies. Strategies govern everything we do and our behaviours. We have strategies for everything that we do in all contexts. Examples ranging from shopping, buying, parenting, relaxing, forgetting (its true!) eating, wealth, sports, tidying, navigation, spelling, learning, motivation, selling, love, attraction, relationships, tying shoe laces, locking your front door to name just a few.
Some work for us, some work against us like procrastination. Strategies are everywhere operating out of our awareness. The sooner we can become aware of our strategies, the sooner we can make change and get in control.
What Are Strategies?
Strategies are a series of steps we take in our head (we are unaware of) resulting in an outcome or decision. In terms of buying, we can go through a number of strategies resulting in buying an item. The buying process starts from building motivation to buy an item through to decision to purchase along with convincing self and then reassuring self it’s absolutely the right thing to do! Thing is, if it’s not the right thing to do and we are not reassured then the purchase is returned.
Just imagine strategies are a bit like an electrical circuit linked to a light bulb, going from A to B to C in that particular order to arrive at the light bulb switching on which in the case of a strategy is a decision. If we don’t follow the sequence of steps correctly or get them wrong the light bulb will not switch on and we can end up looping round again (and again). Ever catch yourself doing the same thing time and time again and puzzled when you get the same result (like checking you have locked your front door)? Or feeling stuck in procrastination going nowhere? That’s an unresourceful strategy. So frustrating!
The good news is that we can identify, edit and change strategies that are unhelpful, quickly. Imagine having a strategy (series of steps) for buying high ticket items on a basis of as soon as you see the item, you feel good about it resulting in decision to buy. This can be unhelpful as there is no thought process involved so if holding onto money is a challenge then this strategy will not be helping.
Lets think about changing the series of steps to buy a ‘high ticket’ item to make the process more resourceful. For example what if there was an extra step to slow it down to really think about what it is that is being bought. This might be in form of checking the item against some pre-set criteria, such as price and level of need. This can slow the strategy down and impact upon the decision (eg decision made not to buy and save money). So if you want to get in control of a relationship with money, then we will want to identify strategies involved and make some changes.
By understanding and getting in control of strategies for buying and other behavioural challenges allows our Coach Practitioners to really make a difference when working with clients. So we spend valuable time during our development programmes learning about strategies, identifying strategies and how to change unhelpful ones.
