Over the last two decades, we’ve been introduced, seduced and held captive by the overwhelming presence of digital communication. From the days when we promised ourselves we would ‘never get emails on our Blackberry’ to an age where we can DM, post, comment, react, share, support, subscribe, pin, tweet, self-publish, sync, stream, webcast, update, upload and download practically anything and everything.

We’ve moved from a chosen behaviour to listen and learn to a conditioned behaviour of reacting, responding and replying; and, it’s spilling over into our real-world lives.

With so many things in life, if we want to do them well, we need to pace ourselves, listen and learn. Learning can happen in many ways, including taking action, but if we haven’t listened properly, our actions will almost always be inadequate or inappropriate.

Becoming exceptionally good at anything requires hours and hours of learning and growing, and it requires focus, diligence and dedication. But, the digital world urges us to move faster whilst thinking and feeling less. This is why we find ourselves stuck or trapped in debt or with a string of poor financial decisions in our past and a lack of confidence to make better decisions in the future.

It’s why we struggle to connect through deep conversations and crave a journey of self-awareness and change on our own terms, not someone else’s agenda. Perhaps, we need to be reminded that it’s okay to simply listen and learn.

We don’t have to respond and reply to everything people say and do. We can let them be who they feel they need to be so that we can focus on who we want to be, making decisions that best benefit us.

It’s okay to listen and learn.

As Stephen Covey put it, “The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply.”

Have you ever watched a superhero movie where they show the origin story of the hero? It’s often a journey of going from ordinary and wanting so much more, to being extra-ordinary and not being able to cope with all of the responsibility.

A sense of overwhelming obligation can both distract and dilute the hero from being truly powerful in exacting the change they would like to see. And, although we’re not superheroes we can sometimes relate to this on a profound level.

There’s a quote by Robert Jordan that goes like this: “He was swimming in a sea of other people’s expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.”

If you are feeling constantly overwhelmed, almost to the point of drowning, it could be because of the extent to which you’ve allowed other people’s expectations to rule your life. On the website, orgcoach.net, they have a blog that helps us understand and deal with The Superman Syndrome.

One of the helpful tips that they offer is this: Honour your priorities

We are creatures of habit, and old patterns are hard to change, even when they no longer serve us well. Health care professionals note that we are so addicted to our fast-paced lives that it often takes a life-threatening crisis such as a heart attack or cancer to slow us down enough to gain the work-life balance we desire.

If you struggle to live a life based on your priorities and values, here are some concrete action steps you can take, beginning TODAY!

Action Idea #1: Discover what you love to do.

• If you had a terminal illness, what would you want to do with the time you had left? Write down your response.
• What’s holding you back from doing this now? Do you choose to wait for a terminal illness to come along before you make time for what you love most?
• Get your calendar out now, and schedule a time to do some of the things you wrote down.

Action Idea #2: Articulate your values.

• Jot down the names of 10-20 people whom you admire. They don’t need to be living, and you may have never met them or known them personally.
• After you’ve completed your list, write down the qualities that you admire in each person you listed. For example, if you listed Mother Teresa, you might describe these qualities: compassion, generosity, and unconditional love. The qualities that you admire in others are YOUR values.
• How do you honour your values regularly? What’s getting in the way of you honouring them?
• Pick at least one value that you choose to honour in the coming week. How will you honour it? If you will honour it in the form of an activity, be specific about what the activity is and schedule time on your calendar to make it happen.

Action Idea #3: Identify your priorities and passions.

• Pretend that you are attending your 100th birthday party and your closest friends and relatives have gathered to honor you. What would you want them to say about you? What would represent a life well lived with no regrets?
• What matters most to you? What are you most passionate about? Write it down.
• What one thing could you do–that if you did it regularly–would make the biggest difference in your personal life? How about for your professional life?
• Get out your calendar and begin planning to do these things regularly.

If you’d like a fresh perspective (and someone to help you design the life you want by aligning your vision, priorities, and actions), then let’s schedule a discovery call today.

We all have reactionary instincts, which can be quite different in various situations. We won’t always run from certain challenges (flight) or panic when confronted with a problem (freeze). Sometimes we may stand our ground and represent our deep values (fight), but in other cases, we could simply go with the flow in order to keep the peace (appease).

In her article “Everything I Know About Fight or Flight, ” Aurora Eliam describes how these hormonal cascades work succinctly. As individuals, the emotions that accompany the confusion and helplessness we feel when we experience fear or trauma will vary.

That said, the response to the particular emotion tends to be similar:

• If you feel anger or frustration when afraid, your likely reaction will be to fight
• If you feel terror or alarm when afraid, you’ll probably respond by flight
• If you feel anxiety or desperation when afraid, you’ll likely freeze
• If you feel dismayed or foreboding, you’ll try to appease

Whilst these can be reactionary, if we can learn to take a breath before acting (or reacting), we can condition ourselves to respond better in volatile, uncomfortable or challenging situations. There are many ways to start to reflect on our triggers, whether healthy or unhealthy, and these four classic trauma/fear responses are helpful in enabling us to identify our motivations and how they direct us.

And the sooner we realise that all of these will impact our financial situation, the better.

How we behave and show up is crucial to getting and keeping a job. Our reactions impact how we save, spend and invest, and how we communicate about and around money with our family and friends. Every life decision we make impacts our money.

As we identify why we behave the way we do, and how we arrive at our choices, we can start to choose how we might change them. In a blog on medium.com, the author offers these four helpful tips:

• learning about and developing healthy personal boundaries (a major concern for appeasers)
• developing safer and healthier self-soothing techniques and strategies for self-care (a major concern for flighters)
• controlling mood and managing emotional responses (a major concern for fighters)
• improving self-esteem and learning grounding techniques to lower anxiety and dissociation (a major concern for freezers)

If you want to experience more freedom in your finances, it’s helpful to explore how you can experience more freedom in other areas of life where you may feel like you have lost control, and learn to become healthily unattached to experiences and situations that are outside of your control.

There are many reasons why we try to do everything ourselves, from satisfying our need to be in control to trying to save costs, or simply “wanting the job done right”, all of us find ourselves doing too much when we forget, or haven’t learned to delegate.

Taxes and financial planning are two areas that we often feel we can go it alone, but inevitably find ourselves turning to a professional down the line and realise that the mistakes we’ve made can be far more costly than hiring an expert earlier on. For small business owners, this is often seen in tasks like building a website and marketing strategy, or trying to manage our own accounting and bookkeeping. For homeowners we see this happening when we try to rewire the house, fix a plumbing leak or sort out the dishwasher that stopped working several weeks ago.

Whilst these examples may seem humorous and relatable, sometimes the problems we need to fix are not just tangible or superficial challenges, sometimes they’re related to our mental health or close relationships. Sometimes we desperately need someone else to help us spot our blindspots, our unhealthy habits and the red flags that we’re not able to spot ourselves.

If you try to do everything yourself, you could very well be headed for either burnout or a complete meltdown.

Kathy Paauw from orgcoach.net, says that each of us has our own strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes. Not every task required along the road to success will be enjoyable. New challenges often involve things that are outside of our own expertise. Attempting to do everything ourselves – succumbing to the Do-Everything-Myself syndrome — is not feasible, since it takes too much time for each of us to learn and do everything ourselves.

As Seth Godin says: “You don’t need more time in your day. You need to decide.”  You need to decide what you’re going to focus on, and what you’re going to delegate.

Delegation helps us share the load, and it helps us communicate with others in a way that draws them in and includes them in our journey, whilst making them feel valued and making us feel valuable.

There are three types of tasks that we should identify to delegate:

1 – Tasks we don’t enjoy

2 – Tasks we shouldn’t do (because our time is better used doing something else)

3 – Tasks we can’t do (because we don’t have the expertise)

Remember, you can’t help anyone else until you learn to help yourself first. Delegation is not a lazy strategy, it’s a success strategy. The sooner we can identify the tasks that we shouldn’t be doing, the sooner we can stop doing everything ourselves.

Powerpoint presentations have become a vital tool in communication, whether it’s to source funding or support for new business ideas, presenting feedback to management or your team, sharing research findings or creating content for social media, knowing how to make powerpoints that attract, connect and engage with the audience has become a crucial skill for almost all of us.

But it’s more than just a skill, it’s also an art, and this is where most of us struggle. In an age where jobs come and go fast, and finding new work or building a social media presence is part of the lifeblood of our future opportunities, finding a few tricks to create better powerpoints is worth sharing. Chris Munn, who works at Fairfield Company, specialises in buying and selling businesses, and these are some of the tips that he recently shared on Twitter.

DESIGN MATTERS

For a compelling deck, your design matters. From the typography to the colours, using pre-made templates (or hiring a designer) is a great way to start. Canva.com is a super resource for creating presentations, and you’ll find them under the Design tab in the Office section.

USE POWERFUL IMAGES

Most people like to look at beautiful images, clever visuals or simple infographics. Don’t fight human nature. Stunning graphics and visuals are far more impactful than words on a page and can often communicate quicker and be remembered for longer.

FOLLOW THE 10/20/30 RULE

It’s really easy to get lost creating a presentation, especially if the template has 30-40 slides. But – keep it short!

The 10/20/30 rule is as follows…

-10 slides max

-20 mins total presentation time

-30 point font minimum

This helps you focus on the essential bits and keeps your slides easy to engage with, both in the presentation and as a PDF handout or resource (which you can easily share on LinkedIn carousel).

DON’T READ YOUR SLIDES

As Munn says, unless there are blind people in your audience, assume everyone can read. This is slightly easier when you’re using a minimum of size 30 for your font because you won’t be able to put lots of text or even full paragraphs into your slides. The slides are there to support the conversation you’re trying to spark, not to be the entire conversation.

TELL A STORY

This is probably the most fun when crafting a presentation that will be attractive and engaging. Don’t just lay out the facts and the numbers – tell the story of why this presentation journey is important. Try to understand your audience and find ways to make them feel like they’re part of this story – then you’ll not only grab their attention, you’ll keep it.

Being a success is not about keeping our jobs or maintaining a steady career path; it’s about living our truth and constantly exploring how we can add value to the world. We will have seasons where things run smoothly, and we’ll have seasons where we have to rediscover and reinvent ourselves, and hopefully, these skills will help!