Talane’s Blog of the Week, October 2, 2006

Over-Responding

One of the first things I learned in coach training school was the concept of over-responding. This is not over-reacting, which is a knee-jerk response, but rather carefully thinking over the situation and then deliberately over-responding.

When something “bad” happens to us, it is often self-created (not always, but often). So we have to look at how we created this event in our lives. Was there some action on our part that led to this event? And how can we now prevent such an event from occurring in the future? Most of the time, people react to a catastrophe or blame others. Sometimes they respond to an event, but rarely do they over-respond.

Last week I shared that my husband and I discovered we were overspending—spending more money than we were earning for the past six months. A knee jerk reaction would be to get angry and blame your partner. “It is your fault—you spent all that money buying furniture we don’t need!” A response might be, “let’s stop spending going forward and postpone doing the loft renovations until we can save up the money”.

An over-response is to come up with a complete plan of action to solve the problem and make sure we don’t fall into this situation again. Here is ours:

We hired a bookkeeper to go over every single receipt, credit card and check purchase we’ve made since January to see exactly where our money went. The categories are specific, no more “Miscellaneous”. We will continue to keep these detailed records going forward.
We reviewed this detailed information together and determined where we could reduce expenses without reducing our quality of life.
We agreed to meet monthly to discuss our finances and come to joint decisions about major purchases.
We put a 30-day hold on all major purchases to eliminate impulse buying.
We each have the same amount of “mad” money that we don’t have to account to our partner for and can use to buy stuff the other may not appreciate or want. We both have the need to feel unrestricted and this gives us the freedom to go a bit “mad” without blowing the budget, or feeling we have to get permission to make a personal purchase.
We are contacting the bank to get extended overdraft protection or a line of credit to eliminate cash flow inconsistencies.
We are investigating borrowing to complete loft renovations.
We are both creating plans to generate more income, not just cut expenses.
I’m researching books on couples and money to see if there are other ideas we are missing that might be helpful.

Instead of reacting or simply responding, how can you over-respond to a problem in your life? Do more than “just enough” to solve the problem – think “permanent lifetime solution”.

All the best,
Talane