Practicing with the Euro

Do you find it difficult to discover the way your personality functions in your life? Then go shopping for an hour or so. Then you will no doubt find out what your personality issues are with regard to prices and currencies.

Let's assume you see a nice trousers. It costs Euro 59,95. The first thing you are likely to ask yourself is, whether this is expensive or cheap. And you would not be surprised to find yourself make the Euro calculation into guilders and find this is 132 'old' Dutch guilders. Depending on your financial situation you will consider this to be cheap or expensive.

Let's introduce an extra difficulty: the trousers was on a display which said: sale, from 79,95 for 59,95. Now your personality has to know how well he did for you in finding a bargain, 20 Euro in this situation. However, 20 sounds much less than the 44 Dutch guilders this used to be in the past. So it is likely that you find yourself recalculate here as well.

Since the currency change from guilders to Euro, your personality has lost his reference points. He takes a price and submits it to his standard references, for example 'one hundred guilders for a trousers is realistic'. The difference between one hundred and 59,95 is so big, he knows his reference basis is no longer valid. Now there are three options:

return to the familiar reference basis and recalculate each time you want to interpret a price in Euro into guilders, and make the 'old' comparison you are used to. You can get very old with this, however you also know for sure that you will be stuck with this for the rest of your life.
accept a new reference, and compare the 59,95 with 'something else' in the new currency. However, since you do not have a new reference basis for these things either (in the beginning because you have not bought any of these in the first place and paid in Euro) and you are likely to follow step one for these things as well, so this does not really make a big success. You have to have bought many things and not make the mental conversion that much in order to make a new reference basis really work for you.
stop with opposing and creating a new reference basis and ask your inner Self what to do, this option is not widely spread by the way ;-). This should not be mistaken for the option to 'forget' to convert and interpret Euro as guilders, which has made many people find themselves in trouble in the beginning!

You will find that you may get used to accepting the price of the product itself more easily, however, feeling 'good' about a transaction often has to do with the profit you made based on the price you paid (or when you believe expensive is important, the height of the price). And here something which is 2,2 as much simply seems at least twice as good (and you were used to this kind of differences and when you labeled them as 'good' or likewise, these are now more than cut in half and so they are 'less').

In the past you used to make these comparisons very fast and almost automatically, introducing the Euro also introduced an extra step here, which has taken away the speed out of this process, and now you can use it more easily for increasing awareness about the role of your personality, in this case with regard to prices.

1. perception: Euro 59.95
2. interpretation: with/without recalculating, outcome expensive/cheap/bargain
3. feeling: reasonably good
4. do something with the feeling: increase (difference times 2,2)