Warren Ingram and Dr. Marc Rogatschnig delve into their newly launched book 'Small Changes for Big Results,' highlighting the impact of unconscious influences on financial decisions. They offer a behavior change framework, using case studies and tools to help readers improve their financial behaviors. Emphasizing small, impactful mindset shifts, the book aims to simplify behavior change and enhance financial well-being.
Get a copy of Small Changes for Big Results here
Takeaways
For more valuable insights from the 10x team, click here.
Have a question for Warren? Don't forget to voice note your questions through our WhatsApp chat on (+27)79 807 8162 and you could be featured in one of our episodes. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Financial Freedom content: @HonestMoneyPod
Warren Ingram and Dr. Marc Rogatschnig delve into their newly launched book 'Small Changes for Big Results,' highlighting the impact of unconscious influences on financial decisions. They offer a behavior change framework, using case studies and tools to help readers improve their financial behaviors. Emphasizing small, impactful mindset shifts, the book aims to simplify behavior change and enhance financial well-being.
Get a copy of Small Changes for Big Results here
Takeaways
For more valuable insights from the 10x team, click here.
Have a question for Warren? Don't forget to voice note your questions through our WhatsApp chat on (+27)79 807 8162 and you could be featured in one of our episodes. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Financial Freedom content: @HonestMoneyPod
The Honest Money podcast is powered by 10x Investments, a licensed financial services provider. Consult with your financial advisor and let's 10x your future together.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Honest Money. It's a bit of a special episode for me today because we're talking about something that's really close to my heart. It's about how our behavior sometimes helps us with our money and sometimes it hurts us, and I'm definitely not a behavioral expert. So I'm very thrilled to have Dr Mark Rogashnik on the call with me. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, warren, good to be here. So you're a doctor and it's not a medical doctor. So maybe just to tell everybody, what are you a doctor in Best way to put?
Speaker 3:it, yes, is it in or of? I'm not sure. Actually, I'm a doctor in of psychology and I've spent far too many years now trying to get that academic qualification over the line. Understand what are some of the background experiences, life experiences, ways of thinking, patterns of thinking that influence the choices people make in their behavior. So it was an opportunity to formalize, through my psychological study, something that I'm just so fascinated by, and that is you know, how do people behave and why do they behave the way they do under certain circumstances. So it's definitely a good topic that's close to my heart.
Speaker 2:So the reason that this episode in particular is special for me is that you and I spent quite a few months giving birth to a special project and it's a book which has now hit the stores. And I guess both of us were saying, you know, when we started that it felt kind of unreal, like it was something that we had an idea of and there was some, you know, impact that we wanted to make by getting this book out into the world. And now it's out and I thought maybe we should just talk a little bit about the book and then, especially what we're trying to do and hopefully, you know, when you're listening to this episode, you'll get an understanding of why we think it was an important book to write. So just to start, mark, do you want to tell everybody the title?
Speaker 3:Small Changes for Big Results is the title, and I must say I mean it has been a bit of a surreal journey, hasn't it, warren? I mean, you've done many books before and you know what it feels like to be bestselling author, actually. But I have to say that the way that this happened so quickly, the excitement around this book, it did surprise me. And I've wondered well, why did it surprise me? And maybe it surprised me because I thought, well, isn't the topic of money and behavior and the psychology behind our behavior and the relationship we have with money? Isn't this just such a well-worn topic? Surely you know everybody's been writing about this and people are writing books about habits and about the ways in which we change our behavior and do things differently and choices we make. And I suppose I think we're right.
Speaker 3:Lots of books have been written on the topic, but it's clearly still a sticking area for people and maybe it's when I think about it, it's just offering a different angle and maybe a fresher perspective on the same big questions is what's attractive here. So it's very exciting and I think what stretched me I mean I must say what stretched me in this was when you asked me to help you. I only know about my own personal finances and I feel like I've done a pretty good job, but I certainly couldn't lean in any way around the sort of technicalities of that world that you're in. But then given an opportunity to think about, ok, but the intersection of the choices we make every day, how we spend money or save money when we spend money or when we find it more difficult to save money, even just those simple choices we have to make every day, must have some psychological basis. So what is it that's happening for us, in our thoughts and in our emotions that makes us make these choices?
Speaker 3:And that really got me intrigued. And so you know, ultimately then, writing the book with you just became more and more fun. And when you do anything that's fun, it just time flies. And I suppose what's emerged now is it's an accessible read, it seems, and something that we certainly both hope is going to make a tangible impact on people's lives. Because it has to be practical, right, warren? I mean it's got to be something people can pick up and do something with, to be practical, right.
Speaker 2:Warren. I mean, it's got to be something people can pick up and do something with. Yeah, you know, for me, looking at this, I feel like everything that we need to know about the technical side of personal finances has been written. And, yes, there will be new products and new ways of doing things, but the basis for what people need to know is available. There are lots of books. There are lots of podcasts, radio shows, websites, whatever it is. There is enough information available to teach people what they need to know around the technical side of money.
Speaker 2:And what bothers me, and has always bothered me, is, you know, the world kind of focuses on financial literacy. So and I'm not saying financial literacy is irrelevant, it's very important and I acknowledge it. It's, you know, I've kind of written books to help with it. But I often get, you know, this conversation someone will come to me and say you know, you should write a book that can be used at school and you should write a book that's aimed for students and you should do this and you should do that, always focused on literacy, financial literacy. And I think to myself, firstly, a kid at school. You know, if I want to get to them, I should probably you know, develop an app that teaches them about financial literacy, not a book, and also that a lot of that work needs to be done at home. And you know, with constant repetition, I don't think you teach, you know financial literacy as a one-month or three-month course. I think it's. You know it's something that should be taught over long periods of time and scaling.
Speaker 2:But the part that I felt was ignored and that's why we wrote this book was that I think we kind of disregard the person in the mirror. We often ignore that and you were saying it when you're making decisions about money every single day whether it's to spend, not to spend, how, when, on what All of those are critical to the way our money works over long periods of time, and I felt there was a gap there, that we weren't addressing the person in the mirror. And I've only been doing this for nearly 30 years now and I'm starting to figure out that the person in the mirror is easily the expert in the room, and it's not the financial planner, it's not the portfolio manager or the stockbroker, it's the expert in the room, is the person who understands their behavior best, and maybe what we needed to do was give them more tools, give people more tools to understand themselves and maybe to see examples of other people and how they've done things and you know it's wrong to say mistakes but behaviors that they've had and how they've got their position changed. And that, for me, was the value here was getting you as the psychologist to come in. Always scary for a financial planner to kind of show what's happened in the past and what I've done and then getting the very gentle nudges about well, you could have done this differently or you could have asked these questions, and that was important.
Speaker 2:But equally, to get a psychological framework for people to say hang on, actually there is a methodology to changing behavior, there is a way and a process we can all follow, and I think that's the key for this book. You know, that's what I'm hoping is. Yes, you know whether you read, you know 50 other personal finance books. I don't think many of them will address the way you think about money as an individual and the choices you can make, and sometimes you're making assumptions that are not true, that you can change your mind, and simply by changing your mind and looking at things differently, you could literally move your world in a new direction, and I know that gets overused. You know that phrase change your life. You know big results. But I think we can do that Well compelling.
Speaker 3:You know, when I think about the work that you've done for so many years and, of course, the work I've done too, but in the realm of financial planning, financial advisership, all the elements of this very broad spectrum of work in the finance world comes down to the individual choices.
Speaker 3:Part of what's clear is that we've got access to a lot of information that's available to us and it's conscious to us. So I think we can safely say that many people who've got a decent education are financially literate to a kind of a decent level. One could say that consciously, they've got what they need, the tools that they need. And that's a lot of the work that you've done and others do, and it's critical grounding work. But I think what we've tried to get to and what was interesting in writing this book was do we understand the unconscious influence on the choices that we make? So we have this sort of conscious awareness and we can, you know, think about our finances in a particular way. We can reach for a book, we can see steps that we could take very conscious. But there is this other competing force, which is the unconscious, which is the way that our emotions get triggered under circumstances where we are stressed or tired or feeling anxious, and when that unconscious force gets unleashed, who wins? And I think part of what you're saying is who wins is often the unconscious that you have. You know you just don't always have enough to stave off the unconscious need to go and buy that luxury item or go and spend that money to kind of fill something that we feel we need. And I think what we're really trying to do in this book is to say, hey, you don't have to be a psychologist to understand some of the unconscious forces that are going to come and try and counteract everything that you know. You can actually learn a bit more about yourself, what is likely to come up in certain circumstances, and then learn a strategy of making sure that your conscious mind, the mind that is well-informed and well-intended, wins, which is probably the best way for me to summarize what the book is trying to do.
Speaker 3:So you've got a lot that's very conscious, but let's make sure you can battle out the unconscious when it rears its head, particularly when you're most vulnerable, because that's usually the times where we feel this need, through the use of money, to fill or to balance out something that we feel is missing or that we feel we deserve or we need. We use money as our tool sometimes to get there Not always only money, but often money. And then we look back at the end of the week, at the end of the month, and we go but where did all of this leak to and why did I do that? I must stop doing that and our conscious minds try to convince us that we've got all that we need, which is a whole lot of books you could reach to, a whole lot of strategies, but actually what we're just missing is a bit of awareness of some of those unconscious forces.
Speaker 3:So that's what's so exciting about. It was so exciting about writing. This was was getting your long history with the case studies of real people and then thinking carefully about some of the unconscious forces that might have been playing a role here, which either made your work better or kept working against what you were trying to achieve, and that, for me, that's kind of my happy space. So it worked out brilliant.
Speaker 2:And I keep thinking now about someone listening to this and wondering will this talk to me? And I think it will, because what we tried to do in the book was come up with fairly typical examples of real people in real life who, for example, overspend. And you know someone like me sitting down with an overspender and saying, look, this is how you budget and stop overspending and you'll be fine. You know, I realized probably five years into my career that that was really useless. That wasn't going to help someone who's overspending. But that didn't necessarily mean that I knew what the answer was or how to help them. And so you know, an overspender will look at this book and find, you know, one or two case studies that actually talk to them. And it was interesting.
Speaker 2:Mark, my mother-in-law's pinched my author's copy, so I haven't even had a chance to actually look at my own copy yet. It arrived by courier and she's taken it and she looked at me after getting halfway through and she said it feels like you wrote about me and I didn't. You know she wasn't a case study, but that was interesting to me because you know my mother-in-law is a farmer's wife. She's got no sense of financial literacy more than any kind of you, more than anyone of her age, and she feels that she was in the book. And that was interesting. Because I think what we're saying is you'll see yourself here and maybe you'll recognize some of the behaviors and for the first time possibly, you'll start to understand why. Why am I doing certain things, why am I overspending? And once you start to understand the why, you can do something about it. And that was the kind of aha moment for me. I thought, well, we're going to give people a few more tools, but if someone's recognizing themselves in the book already and you know I see it you know I'm kind of walking past the bookshops and can't help myself or go in and I'll see where it is and how it's doing on the rankings and it's ranking it's kind of in the top 10 of sellers. That's exciting because it means that people find some sort of meaning for themselves and if we can, we're giving them tools that they can kind of use and it is approachable. You know that's the point here. We don't want to write a book that's a psychological thesis or a financial planning summary and you know, kind of spreadsheet guru here, there's not a single spreadsheet in here. I don't think there is a single calculation, if I remember, and you know, I think you know if you've never read a book about numbers before, you will read this book and understand something about yourself and you might recognize your money behavior, whether it's good or bad.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. Someone who's an incredible saver might recognize themselves in this book. But an incredible saver might be a terrible spender and that sounds like a funny thing to say. But there are lots of people who have trouble spending some money on life and spending some money on living, you know, just a meaningful life, and so you know some people overspend, some people never spend, some people live in fear all the time. You know they're worried about the country, they're worried about the world markets, they're worried about war, they're worried about global warming and they live in fear all the time. They're worried about the country, they're worried about the world markets, they're worried about war, they're worried about global warming and they live in a state of fear all the time.
Speaker 2:And finding ways to understand themselves. Firstly, that they are living in this very heightened state of vigilance all the time starts to help them solve the problem. And we're not saying that you shouldn't be vigilant, we're just saying it maybe gives you a tool to understand yourself a bit better. And what was interesting for me was you kind of, when we started you kind of which I liked but it took me a while was you kind of threw a methodology at me and I started to realize actually, you know, psychologists have been studying behavior and behavior change for a very long time. I see it in running groups, you know, I obviously will. I mean, I'm not obvious, but for me I started to see parallels in the way that you know kind of counseling for addiction works. There is a lot going on that we can take from the world of psychology that's well established and well used and actually just implemented with money and I never knew that.
Speaker 3:If I had been given the opportunity to dive into this topic as much, that if you do start your journey of trying to understand behavior change, you could start to head down a whole host of different theoretical lines of inquiry, which sometimes start to look very different. They start to be a little bit confusing, and so part of what I felt was really important in this project was to demystify behavior change and to do that in a way that is accessible, that is evidential, it's been proven through research to work and, yes, thankfully we have a very powerful model and a model that absolutely makes sense when you apply it to trying to change a behavior, absolutely makes sense when you apply it to trying to change a behavior, and the reason it makes sense is because so many of us have tried to change a behavior and mostly we fail, and it's because we've tried to lean on an aspect or one foundation of behavior change rather than a host of foundations. In this case, we've picked three in particular, and I mean I'll share it with you because the Combi model. It allows us to think about and assessing not just how we do change but how ready are we for change. Oftentimes we tell ourselves something must change.
Speaker 3:Oftentimes we tell ourselves something must change but we may not actually be ready to change, meaning that the circumstances around us may not make it possible for us to make this change. We may actually not have the energy, or it might have been a difficult period of time, so I don't feel like I've got the capability actually right now to make the change. So if I keep telling myself you must change, you must change, but the opportunity to change and the capability to change, if they're not there, then I should rather wait. I should rather think carefully about when I begin this change project.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, what happens is we move forward with this long history of failed behavior change projects, which is quite demotivating, and many people ultimately do give up you with insight into change readiness and then how to progress your way through change and how to build very specific strategies that can boost one of these three elements, which is the opportunity to change, the capability to change and the motivation to change.
Speaker 3:And in that model sort of the three legs of behavior change give you something to grab onto and we give you a chance to actually create a plan, something that you can kind of look at, that's outside of your head, something that you can go back to something you can share with someone else who can go yes, you know, congratulations or keep going. This is just a small setback, or have you done this yet? That accountability that we get from including people socially in our change project? So we, you know, demystifying behavior change was, I think for me was a challenge, but in the end, it's probably the piece that will make the biggest change for people is that they can actually follow something which many times we don't actually have when people speak about change, which many times we don't actually have when people speak about change.
Speaker 2:So for someone listening, the interesting part for the two of us as authors is we get, you know, no one tells us what to write and how to write, et cetera. We get unlimited scope there. But I had a bit of a smile on my face when I asked Mark the first question, much at scope there. But I had a bit of a smile on my face when I asked Mark the first question, which was the title of the book, because we didn't get much say in the title and we got no say really in the cover. And it's so interesting, you know, just to give a little bit of behind the scenes if you're thinking about it is some people you know think that we spend our lives thinking about the title and you know, know, what we know is mark, and I know our topics very well, but we're the furthest from marketing experts and, and so the book is called small changes for big results, uh, and and it's got a fabulous yellow cover which, uh, which I initially loved, and then I think you did as well, mark, and then we had some second thoughts and then, when we saw it in, well, for me in the shops now because my wife's mother's got the real book. But now that I've seen it in the shops I love it. So the fact that it's yellow and colorful and bright it kind of makes me feel warm makes me feel warm and hopefully that you know that allows you, if you're going to buy the book.
Speaker 2:You know that this behavior changes. It's not as scary as you think it is. It can happen in little micro steps, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and when you look back, one day you might have changed the entire direction of your life. And it's not a miracle. This is not an American self-help book, you know, written about rah-rah, you know, giving you kind of a motivational speech that you know in a week's time, you know is worthless. This is about meaningful ways of really changing the direction of your life.
Speaker 2:Mark, I didn't prepare you for this because we surprise all new guests to the show with my favorite question of a first-time guest. So if you were to meet your 18 or 21-year-old self now, with the benefit of time and experience, what would be the one life lesson that you'd love to kind of teach yourself? And it doesn't have to be about this book or about money life lesson that you'd love to kind of teach yourself, and it doesn't have to be about this book or about money, but if there is something that you'd love to kind of go back and just tell yourself you know a life lesson, what would it be?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. I think what I'd probably go back to is the following, and that is, mark. I think you might have overestimated what you can achieve in a week and underestimated what you can achieve in a year. It's to slow down, be in the moment, open to all the opportunities, without this kind of underlying, relentless pressure to feel like I'm always moving forward towards something which I'm not always that clear on. So I think it would be to just take the time to embrace the moment that I'm in but, at the same time, do that in the pursuit of the things that I love. And if I want to know what I love, it would be just the things that give me joy and raise my energy, which is something that I probably only learned, you know, a long time after my 20s, unfortunately, but at least I feel like I've got that now.
Speaker 2:I think that's fabulous. Thank you, mark, and thanks so much for your time and for the conversation. I think we might break a record for the longest episode of Honest Money, mark Rogashnik you can find him in any good bookstore right now or on any online bookstore, and I appreciate writing the book with you and I think it was a real journey. And thanks for being on the show as well. I think our listeners have definitely taken something away from this.
Speaker 3:Thank you, warren. I have to say the opportunity was unexpected and I feel really humbled that you invited me in to co-author this book with you, and I have no doubt it's going to be a big impact on people's lives.
Speaker 2:That's honest, Manny. Thank you so much for listening. The Stradivarius violin is considered to be a big impact on people's lives. That's honest, Manny. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1:The Stradivarius violin is considered to be the most emotive instrument in the world. That's why you'll often hear it in investment ads, adding drama and the utmost importance to their philosophies, or for the announcement of a fancy new fund manager 10X. Investments don't need dramatic instruments to seem impressive. They let the results sing for themselves. So 10X your future without the drama. 10x is a licensed FSP.