2 Things to Quit If You Want to Get Out of Debt

There are two things you absolutely have to quit if you want to get out of debt. Neither one of them involves you changing your spending or saving habits, either!

These two things you need to quit in order to get out of debt come before any action on your part. If you want your efforts to get out of debt to really be effective, you must first make two shifts in your attitude. Only then will your actions propel you in the right direction.

1. Quit blaming the economy. Or the bank. Or the credit card company. Or your parents' bad spending habit that you unfortunately picked up. While you're at it, quit blaming yourself as well!

Blame isn't going to get you anywhere. Even if it did, the you that racked up all that debt is different than the you that's trying to erase that debt forever. So lay off the economy and lay off your parents. And if you want to get out of debt (or fix any other mess you have in your life), lay off yourself. Blame won't get you anywhere.

But responsibility will. That's why you have to take responsibility for your debt. Even on the off-chance that someone else ran up all your credit cards and you are irrevocably stuck with the bill, it's now your responsibility.

When you blame someone else, you frame your problem as something that someone else has control over. And when you blame yourself, you spend energy tearing yourself down.

When you take responsibility, you take control of your situation. Your mental attitude then empowers you to own your situation. Only then will you be able to do with your situation what needs to be done.

2. Quit dwelling on how deep in the red you are. It's good that you finally realized the full importance of what it means to be in debt. And it's good that you realized what it means to have your specific debt. After all, you can't adequately take care of a problem until you've identified it, and taken stock of how large (or small) it is.

Realizing how big your problem is important--but it's only a single step. And it's certainly not a process that will solve anything.

Nobody ever fixed their problems by thinking about how bad those problems were. Instead, they thought about how good their lives could be if they fixed those problems--and then got to work doing whatever they needed to do.

You activate the Law of Attraction every time you pair a focused thought with a strong emotion. Anyone who is in debt is likely to have some pretty strong feelings about it. But since you get more of what you focus on, it's better to focus on the happy feeling that you will someday get out of debt, than on the sad feeling that you're already so far in it!

I know how overwhelming this feeling can be--I was once over a million dollars below the black! But I eventually figured out that I wasn't going to change anything for the better if I worked for the good but dwelled on what was bad.

Take responsibility for your situation and spend your emotional energy on how good you're going to make things. Only then will you have the right frame of mind to get out of debt!