Decoding the Secret Language of Money
A Conversation with David Krueger, M.D., coauthor of The Secret Language of Money
By John David Mann
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David Krueger has an unusually varied background. He worked for two decades as a psychoanalyst, served as CEO for two healthcare organizations, and has for the last decade been an executive mentor coach whose clients include multinational CEO’s, professional athletes and other prominent achievers. He is bestselling author of fifteen books and seventy-five papers and book chapters on success, money, wellness and self-development. (His Success and the Fear of Success in Women [Free Press] was ranked on the Master’s List of the 100 Most Influential Professional Books of the 20th Century.)
And one more thing: his regular column “Your Story” has been a favorite of Networking Times’ readers for years.
Dave has a unique perspective on the roles money plays in our lives. His approach integrates the insights of psychology, neuroscience, quantum physics, and strategic coaching to help professionals and executives write the next chapter of their life or business stories. His new book, The Secret Language of Money (which this editor had the delight and privilege of coauthoring) was just released in August 2009. — J.D.M.
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How did you come to your study of the secret language of money?
Let me tell you the prequel to that story.
Imagine a four- to five-year-old boy, no brothers or sisters, isolated on a farm two and a half miles from the nearest town, population 626, in central Texas. Three and a half feet tall and unemployed, with an active mind and nothing to do with it.
That little cowboy made up a lot of stories. There were dead outlaws all over the place.
But then I made a discovery—the kind, as James Hillman puts it in Soul’s Code, that ignites a life calling. On our dining room wall was a telephone, a big wooden box with a cone receiver and hand crank. In the country, you shared a party line with maybe five or six other people. We were “one long and one short.” And I learned, accidentally at first, that you could listen to stories.
Miss Dessi lived about two miles down calieche road, but for me she was only two shorts and one long away. She had the best stories by far, better than the ones I could make up.
Miss Dessi’s currency was information, and she was one rich woman. Even later on, when we became one of the first farm and ranch families in Miles, Texas to get a television, I found that As the World Turns had nothing on Miss Dessi. She and her friends expanded my world view.
Of course, I had to stay pretty close to the phone, and that cut down on my own story-making time. Miss Dessi single-handedly saved a whole lot of West Texas outlaws from an early death.
As I grew older I learned to listen to different kinds of stories. In medicine, symptoms are stories that beg to be listened to, rather than silenced or disregarded.
I still work on the telephone, but I’ve refined my technique a little. Now I only listen to people who know I’m on the other end, and they pay me.
How did you move from medicine to business and coaching?
During my two decades as a psychoanalyst, I became interested in money stories while working with executives. I began noticing the way their personal stories kind of hitchhiked on money.
For example, I would see people bargain with themselves: “After I make $1 million [or $5 million, or $10 million], then I’m really going to be happy.” If their goal was to make $5 million, then when they got there they would often up the ante and say, “Well, I’ll really be happy if I just get to $8 million and have that socked away.”
In the early 1990s, a few of my patients who owned businesses were working with Dan Sullivan, a high-level business coach in Toronto. He would get them to look at what they were uniquely good at, then coach them to do only that and delegate everything else.
I was fascinated...
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