Ebenezer Scrooge’s Transformational Visit to the Ghosts of Christmas Past

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If you were given a magic wand to change anything about yourself that would improve your financial and emotional wellbeing, what would it be? This is a hard question. It is not about changing your financial circumstances through winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune, but about changing yourself – your beliefs, behaviors, thoughts, or emotions that could ultimately change your financial situation.

Would you change the way you react under financial pressure, the way you spend, the decisions you make? Almost all of us could find some ingrained behavior or difficult emotion that we would like to modify, improve, and transform in ways that would impact our finances.

What stops us? Transformation is not for the faint hearted. According to Victoria Erickson, author of The Edge of Wonder, "Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting, before becoming."

Erickson's framing of transformation doesn’t sound like something most of us want to sign up for. It feels easier to continue to bear the familiar pain of the present, rather than risk the pain of changing to something unfamiliar.

We typically only undertake transformation when the importance of changing can no longer be denied and avoided. No example of transformation is more well-known this time of year than that of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Within this popular Christmas fable lie some profound truths we can learn about the path to transformation.