Changing How You Feel About Credit Cards
Thursday, January 10th, 2008Many people hear the phrase “credit cards” and immediately feel a wealth of negative emotions. This can cause stress in your daily life and reduce your ability to use credit cards effectively in your life. In order to be someone who has credit cards that work for you, instead of against you, you need to change the way that you feel about those credit cards. To do this, you need to take a good hard look at the negative emotions that you have about credit and work to turn them into a positive mindset.
For example, one feeling that many people often have about their credit cards is anxiety. They are concerned about the debt which they have already accumulated and they feel anxious about their ability to pay it off. The feeling that you want to turn this into is confidence. You want to think about your credit card debt and feel a sense of confidence that you are going to be able to pay off that debt in a reasonable amount of time. The best way to do this is to get organized about your credit cards. If you know how much you owe and you have a specific plan for paying it back, you won’t feel anxious about the debt.
Another emotion that people frequently feel about credit cards is guilt. We are often told that credit card debt is bad. Or we might feel that we shouldn’t have used our credit cards to get luxuries for ourselves. This is a form of buyer’s regret that is specifically associated with the use of credit cards. The feeling of guilt needs to be replaced by a feeling of power. Start thinking of credit cards as a way to get what you want for yourself. Understand that credit cards are there for you to use to move yourself forward in life. They are a tool that expresses the power you have to control your own destiny. In addition to battling the feeling of guilt, having a sense of power will battle the feeling of powerlessness that sometimes accompanies the use of credit cards.
There are many different negative feelings that you might have about your credit cards and the debt that comes along with them. To start having a better relationship with your credit cards, you should spend some time seriously thinking about those feelings. Sit down with a journal (or a best friend) and work through all of the feelings that come up when you think about your credit cards. Write them down on a piece of paper. On the opposite side of the paper, write down the feeling that is the opposite of each of those emotions. Your goal is to figure out how to achieve the opposite (positive) feeling so that you don’t have negative emotions about your credit cards.
