Many important questions in life involve money, and good choices can put us on the road to financial success. Bad choices, however, can lead to years of financial duress.

While the questions we ask ourselves may not involve investing in the latest hot stock, they may likely deal with more basic matters like identifying how we feel about money, managing our money, and what to do when facing financial hardship.

Learning how to make smart money choices early in life is the best way to ensure financial success in the long run.

We believe it’s healthy to begin this journey by identifying what we want. This makes it easier to craft a budget and make better choices. Knowing what we are saving for, and having a personal desire or connection to it, will boost our motivation to save or curb our spending in other areas.

The next time you’re out shopping, pay attention to the cues your body and mind give you. If you’re in the habit of paying for everything with a credit card, you’re more likely to overspend. Using a credit card for a quick trip to the mall doesn’t give you the financial freedom and security you’ll need later. Instead, make a game plan for how you will save money (or use your money wisely) on your next purchase.

Some people who feel trapped by the credit-card-spending-habit go on a cash diet. The basic premise is that you put aside all the cash you need for your budgeted purchases for the week, fortnight or month, and stick to that cash amount. It helps you physically see how much money you’re spending (and saving!!) without the detachment of a virtual transaction through cashless payments.

Setting financial goals is another way to avoid both impulse purchases and buyer’s remorse. Goals allow us to communicate and focus on the reasons why we will hold back from one purchase but indulge in another.

You can also share your saving and investing goals with your family and friends so that everyone can be aligned and offer support on your journey to financial independence.

The economy is suffering from the worst recession in decades. It’s more important than ever to make better money choices to contribute to the financial strength of your future self.

Are you wondering why some people get burned out while others don’t? What is the difference between stress and burnout? And, what can you do to manage stress and avoid burnout? 

Without a doubt, we are living in a time of significant stress and burnout and we need practical and self-loving ways to address this for ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues.

While stress and burnout are often confused, they are different. Identifying the differences is the first step in addressing the unhealthy thoughts and behaviours in our lives. Stress is a normal adaptive reaction to adversity, while burnout is a result of uncontrolled or excessive stress.

In both cases, the person suffering from the symptoms will be unable to function normally, however, the signs of burnout will include anxiety, mood swings, lack of concentration and brain fog. 

According to the American Psychological Association, heightened work-related stress is a significant contributor to burnout among U.S. workers. In a recent survey of 1,501 U.S. adults, researchers found that 79% had experienced some form of work-related stress in the month prior to the survey. More than half of these employees had felt the negative effects of work-related stress, including a lack of motivation, interest, or effort in their jobs. Among those who experienced work-related stress, 36% reported feeling tired, fatigued, or emotionally worn out, while 44% reported feeling physically exhausted.

In many cases, prolonged stress will lead to exhaustion and a diminished sense of satisfaction. Other early signs of burnout can include procrastination, taking out frustrations on others, and skipping work. The signs of burnout can be subtle, but it’s time to address them if you’re starting to experience these symptoms.

Burnout can occur for several reasons, but a poor work-life balance is possibly the most common and easiest to address. 

Finding creative outlets is one of the most important aspects of self-care, as is making time to investigate, explore and engage in things we enjoy. While work may seem like a grind and leave us feeling exhausted, having a hobby, sport, or other activity to unwind and spend time with family and friends can help us avoid the pitfalls of burnout. 

Identifying triggers for stress and preventing them is a helpful way to reduce the chance of returning to a burnout track. Try writing down the exact time and place when you experience a stressful event or activity. Review your notes regularly to avoid repeating the same behaviours, relationships, or situations. If you are experiencing chronic stress, it’s time to reassess your priorities and prioritise the things that matter.

Carl Richards, the Sketch Guy columnist from The New York Times, recently shared an enlightening view on our hustle culture. Online engagement has increased our stress levels by making work, social pressures and media agenda more invasive than ever. We can easily believe that if we’re not “on top”, we’re not working hard enough. We need to go out there and crush it until we make it.

But the reality is that we generally crush it until we crash. Here’s some of what Carl shared on bahaviorgap.com.

“In 2017, I remember being tired. Really tired. And I remember being tired of being tired. In fact, it felt like I’d been tired ever since I read Andrew Grove’s book “Only the Paranoid Survive” back in the early 2000s.

That book was the beginning of a sea change in my thinking about work, business, hustling, and survival itself—so much so that I’d been working like a fanatic ever since.

Up at five in the morning? Tried it! Daily workouts? Yep. Paleo, bulletproof, gluten-free, cold showers? Check. Build a business, start a side hustle, dominate Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? Yeah, all that, too! Make my family a priority? Of course. Serve in my community? Definitely.

For 5,478 days, I’d been hitting repeat. And it just about killed me.

I know I’m not alone. 

It feels like we’ve been in the “Crush It Age.” Every time you turn around, somebody is crushing something.

Some dark corner of my mind used to whisper to me: “This is all true, Carl. If you don’t keep hustling, you’ll end up falling behind, and no one will listen to you. Ever. Again. Then, you’ll just be another failure, left to crawl under a rock, cold and alone to die!”

But then, I appointed myself King of Permission Granting. And my first act as king was to grant myself—and everyone else—permission to declare the Crush It Age finished. 

So, what comes next? The Age of Work Hard, Rest Hard.

In this Age, we’re still hustling. But we’re also resting. In fact, we’re trying to be as good at resting as we are at crushing things. We’re becoming pros at turning off social media, getting great sleep, working less, and living more.

We’re making “being rested” cool. So when people ask how you’re doing, you can say, “Sit down. Let’s talk about it for a minute because I have time for you, my friend.” At a minimum, you should be able to answer, “Rested, and how are you?”

I know this sounds like crazy talk, but we can do it. Let’s make it a priority to be human again—to work hard and rest hard without buying into the idea that we’ll fail at life if we rest.”

Before you sit down at your desk, check your diary or log in to that next online meeting, give yourself permission to take a walk outside. Go get some sun, fresh air, Starbucks or anything else that will remind you that you are in control of your decisions. Rest doesn’t have to be passive; active and intentional rest is healthy and brings balance to our hustle culture. 

Crush it. Rest up. Repeat.

“As soon as we become aware of money, we develop beliefs about it, beliefs we cling to, sometimes for the rest of our lives, often at the cost of our souls.”

– George Kinder

What’s costing you more: what you do with your money or what you believe about your money?

For many people, the beginning of financial planning involves the creation and maintenance of a budget. A budget is a practical and helpful tool for understanding and having a say in what we do with our money, but it doesn’t really answer many questions about how we feel about our money. The challenge with only working with the numbers and not the beliefs and emotions is that any budget exercise that doesn’t follow on from a deeper introspective conversation is arduous to sustain.

As Kinder also says, We have gotten stuck thinking of money as about counting, about numbers, something abstract done by banks and accountants.  The truth is, money is a much larger topic—it involves our whole human nature.

We need to address beliefs that we’ve held onto from our earliest experiences with money. Just like a budget can help us change what we do with our money, a lifestyle financial planning conversation can help us change how we feel about our money.

In a 2011 interview, Kinder said that human growth has to mirror the growth of our relationship with money, because money enables so much of our lives. If we agree that money is this personal, then perhaps we need to stop focussing on the practicalities of our financial situation and start to look at the conversations that we’re having with the people we trust about our money. Not only will this help us identify and change how we feel about money, but it will also help our family know that they too can change how they feel about money.

Working with a trusted financial adviser assists you with these conversations and increases your financial wellbeing. Research shows that people who have worked with an adviser for 15 years have up to three times higher returns on their investments.

One of the main reasons for this is because people who choose to work with a financial planner, coach or adviser are intentional about ensuring their financial wellbeing. The money beliefs we adopt as children can leave us feeling guilty, anxious or unworthy regardless of how much money we make. As experts learn more about imposter syndrome and other self-sabotaging behaviours and biases, we can see how much they impact every area of our lives.

The sooner we can see that wealth is more than just the money in our account and that being healthy is more than just what we see on the surface, we can begin to change the way we think, feel and behave.

Bruce Lee once said: Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. It’s an exceptional quote that is profoundly helpful when working with a financial plan. However, the difference between our current situation and Lee’s is that in the 60s, it was much harder to access information.

Now, we’re overwhelmed with information, and too much advice can derail even the most robust plans. Sifting what is useful from what is useless is exponentially more challenging than it was for previous generations.

And this is just when we’re actively looking for information and advice – what about all the times that our family, friends and colleagues offer unsolicited advice? You may not have been anxious about something, but now that they brought it up, you can’t stop thinking about it!

Elizabeth Scott, from verywellmind.com, says that anyone can be on the receiving end of unsolicited advice, and it doesn’t always feel helpful. Whilst it can be a life-saver, unsolicited advice can create stress.

People offer advice for many reasons, some of which are well-intentioned, others less so. As Lee alluded to, the key is being able to tell the difference and understanding a person’s motives can be especially helpful.

There are helpful motives, like altruism, friendliness and shared excitement – but some advice can come from a place of neediness and helplessness. There are more damaging motivations, including traits like narcissism, control, judgment, and drama. We’ve all experienced advice given from a range of these places and will continue to experience this, so we need to have a plan to create healthy boundaries to protect ourselves from too much advice.

Verywellmind.com suggests that when someone is giving advice to make themselves feel more powerful, there is underlying anxiety in their behaviour that we will most likely pick up on. We might be triggered to react harshly and accuse them of being manipulative, but this approach might backfire.

We need to take space from the situation so that we can respond from a non-reactive place. We can validate their advice and create an atmosphere of emotional security for both of us. The key is to validate without overidentifying. We can let them know we’ve heard them and appreciate where they are coming from without taking on the potentially damaging narrative.

To do this while proactively communicating a boundary around further advice, you might say something like, “Thanks for the idea. I have my own plan for handling this, but I really appreciate your perspective and will take it into consideration. Can I let you know when I need help in the future?”

If you have trouble setting boundaries without being reactive, prioritise working on your own ability to self-regulate. As uncomfortable as it may make you to continuously receive unwanted advice, if you can respond with compassion, the situation will likely diffuse much faster.

We’re all different, which means we’ll all approach things differently and make personal choices. In an unaware environment, this will always create conflict and stress, but in an aware environment, it creates opportunities for growth, collaboration and stronger relationships. 

P.S. If you’re the one offering unsolicited advice… “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

― Will Rogers