Category: Blog

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Sustainable sanity

When we stand together, we can succeed together. We can support and encourage one another. But this only happens in our smaller, more intimate groups. The fourth industrial revolution has slowly edged us into a communication environment that is overwhelmed with information.

We are learning that whilst we can stand together in powerful support, we can also suffer together. A burden indeed shared is a burden halved, but if we’re not aware of it, the cumulative stress of those around us becomes additional stress for us.

This means that whilst we’re battling our own stress, we’re also taking on the stress of our collective unconscious.

This is known as the allostatic load: “the wear and tear on the body” that accumulates as we are exposed to repeated or chronic stress. As we scroll through our social media channels late at night (instead of getting an early night…), the algorithms feed us information that shows people behaving with less tolerance, forgiveness and empathy.

It’s because this keeps us scrolling for a few seconds longer. 

Mass media, for decades, has known that bad news sells. Social media has taken it to an exponentially higher level. It’s mentally corrosive and erosive, all at the cost of public interest – purely to remain interesting to the public.

It would be lovely to simply silence the onslaught of media and messages that cling to the virtual platforms that we use to engage with our family, friends, colleagues and customers, but we’re too far into the 4IR to turn back now. We need a different strategy to regain our sanity – and sustain our sanity.

Clean your feed 

Begin by boycotting the channels that happily fill your head and mind with a worst-case view of what’s going on in the world and, in the process of doing it, make you sad or angry.

Be more proactive on your social media channels. Hide or unfollow posts that are bating or triggering you.

Choose trust over mistrust

If we can break the natural circle of societal mistrust that has grown over the last decade, we can begin to rebuild a circle of trust in its place.

This isn’t about blind trust – if someone is being a bully online, we should shut them down. It’s about retraining our brain to realise that not everyone is out to spread malignant information. If we can slow down our reactionary time and squeeze in some reflection before responding, we can improve our ability to filter the riff-raff from the genuinely benevolent.

Avoid putting a spotlight on drama

We’ve become masters at making mountains out of molehills, and we have to keep our overreactions in check! Catastrophising is an extraordinarily debilitating trait because it is a trigger for anxiety, stress and depression.

Late night (or 3am) browsing is often a recipe for terrible decisions. We’re tired and emotionally vulnerable at these times – it’s not a great state for responsible online engagement. Put boundaries in place, both on what you’re seeing and when you’re seeing it.

In her blog – How To Stay Sane In A World Of Pain – Zoë Clews offers this advice:

Know what you’re in charge of – for good mental health, it’s important to understand these three areas: 

Locum of control – what time you get up, what you choose to put into your body, whether you pay your bills on time – this is you being in charge of yourself. 

Areas of influence – these are the things we can influence, but not directly control. They might include helping someone to quit smoking or persuading a friend not to go back to a toxic ex. Once we have done what we can to influence, we have to be ready to let go regardless of the outcome.

Things we can do nothing about – this covers things like whether an asteroid is going to destroy the Earth in your lifetime. These are the situations that really aren’t worth worrying about, and it’s these things that the media revels in telling you about. In the end, your anxiety and stress just feeds your sense of powerlessness.

If you really feel you can exert enough control and influence over something to make a tangible difference, then do it – the world needs more people like you. But be circumspect enough to be able to recognise when a situation is beyond your mastery.

We reclaim our sanity with intention, intention to do better and be better. If we just go with the tide of a dangerous shoreline, we’ll be bashed about by the waves and sucked in by the undercurrents. Every choice we make is a reflection of our mental health and will either help or hinder those around us.

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How much time is your money worth?

As we build businesses and seek to create various income opportunities, we are always confronted with the challenge of pricing. It’s a challenge because all of our situations are different.

Those with qualifications and experience often charge more for their time. But it’s not a sure way to work out billing and costs; sometimes people feel very confident in the value they’re bringing, so rather than looking at the time and experience they bring to their hour of work, they look at the value it brings to the consumer. 

Another differing factor is how much money we all need to make each month to provide for our families and responsibilities.

Regardless of how we reach that “golden number”, the underlying view of all of these approaches assumes we will work out our billing based on a finite amount of hours in the day. So – if I need to earn forty grand, I need to earn x-amount per hour. The problem with this approach is that we lock ourselves into a certain amount of billable hours to cover our costs and make a profit.

The flip side of this coin is that we could say that if we work more hours, then we can earn so much more. If we’re not disciplined, we can become caught in a situation where we become overworked and unbalanced.

So – perhaps, instead of asking how much time we have or how much money we want, we can set a baseline of determining what our time is worth to us. It’s a simple change in perspective that places value on our time rather than how much money we can make.

This immediately places us in a position to start asking new questions about how we perceive and assign value. We start to think about other things that we would rather do with our time if we didn’t need to earn off each “working hour”.

It separates us from the spreadsheet of hourly rate vs hours worked and looks at questions of physical, mental, relational and spiritual health. Instead of weighing up the value of an hour against how much money we earn, we can consider how it has benefited our overall well-being.

As we open ourselves to these different questions, it’s much easier for us to start creating a life and financial plan to which we can feel fully committed. We can set metrics that are independent of market performance, intuitive to our goals and in line with the journey we’ve chosen.

So – how much time is your money worth?

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Learning leverages healthy decisions (3/3)

Readiness is key to learning something new. If we’re not ready to learn something… it will probably go straight in one ear and out the other.

That was a favourite phrase of parents and teachers alike – if we weren’t paying attention, they’d lay that line thicker than peanut butter on a slice of white bread. And, they weren’t wrong. When we were distracted, information went “straight through us” without taking seed. It was true when we were in school, and it’s even more applicable now as we engage in a daily onslaught of information dissemination.

Social media and news streams keep us engaged and entertained, but seldom do they leave us educated. This is why we keep making choices that we regret. If access to information were key in making healthy decisions, none of us would struggle with making the wrong ones!

It’s not the access to information that’s important; it’s the learning that’s important.

The best time to offer advice (a learning opportunity) is only, ONLY, when it’s requested. Essentially, this recognises that if we’re not ready for advice (not asking for it), there’s a good chance that we’re not ready for it – and it won’t stick.

In line with some recent blogs, this one offers four more thoughts on how we can leverage learning to make healthier decisions; for our money, relationships, career, and anything else that we value in life.

Embrace novel formats

When lockdowns and Coronavirus hit the world, it led to exceedingly tough times, but it also created an upswell of novel learning formats. Online learning platforms (free and paid-for), TEDTalks, YouTube channels and smaller community-centric groups all began to provide places to learn that, in many instances, were more effective than traditional structures of learning.

Practice mindfulness

A healthy mind is a powerful mind. In line with recognising how prolific and persistent the engagement of technology and social media is in our lives, setting aside time for mindfulness is profoundly grounding, healing and helpful. The gurus all recommend starting with just five minutes a day and building up from there. There are plenty of great apps to help you get started.

With a healthy mind, anything is possible.

School was simply the starting line

Graduation is about levelling up, not about completion. All lifelong learners recognise that school is nothing but the starting line of our true education. This is a simple paradigm shift, but once we internalize it, we’ll start doing things differently.

Play the long game

“The greatest riches in life – personal or professional – come from compound interest.” Sahil Bloom. The hardest element of benefiting from compound interest is that it takes time, lots and lots of time!

Lifelong learners play the long game; they know that lessons will continue to be learnt and that whilst the truth may not change, their perception of the truth will continue to deepen.

(All of these ideas were shared in a compilation by Sahil Bloom – @SahilBloom – on Twitter)

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Setting benchmarks

Whilst intentional reflection may happen at the end or beginning of a year or personal growth journey, unintentional reflection happens all the time. And, we barely notice it, most of the time. But, several times a week, if not several times a day, we measure ourselves against something or someone; we’re either measuring ourselves against others or ourselves.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, we set benchmarks all the time. It’s how we discern how well we’re doing, and we can either set internal or external benchmarks. There’s a place for both, but it’s important to start to acknowledge where we’re dropping our anchor. Like a boat on the ocean, we can’t healthily remain anchored in one place all the time, but there are good times and places to drop anchor between floating or sailing.

When it comes to setting benchmarks for growth, it’s often healthier to spend more time with our internal benchmarks and maybe use external benchmarks for lighter references. It’s almost like saying: Look where I am now (external) versus look how far I’ve come (internal).

For someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, earning millions a year or selling a company for tens of millions is not really a big deal. But for most of us, it would be life-changing! Likewise, if we look at the performance in specific funds and compare it to the growth in our personal investment portfolio, we may not see a correlation. These are all external benchmarks that are easy to internalise and, if we anchor there, we may feel extremely disheartened in our reflection.

So, when we create a plan, we’re essentially creating a framework for internal benchmarks. These could relate to our financial situation, but they can also apply to every other area in life; personal relationship goals, studying, health, hobbies and community outreach. When we work on our internal benchmarks, it’s helpful to have reference to what’s going on in the world around us.

A poignant example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic that changed the world forever. If we had only considered our internal benchmarks and ignored what was going on externally, we would have felt enormous pressure to perform better. But bringing in the social, economic, political, and health issues of that event helps us to adjust and review our internal benchmarks in a relative context – and still be able to say, “Look how far I’ve come!”.

And, if we’d only anchored in external benchmarks, soley focussed on what was going on around us, we would have been completely overwhelmed. One of the reasons for this is that when we see the success of others, we only see the spotlight on the end achievements and don’t see the hard work, frustration, dissapointment and failed attempts that went in behind the scenes. We then assume that our own journey is not matching up.

If we want to measure our progress in a relatable and balanced manner, it’s important to understand the role of both internal and external benchmarks and learn to be comfortable with moving freely between the two.

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Building your business online

For many years the culture of all communication has been changing. Initially, many of us thought that the social media and digital branding space was merely a digital version of what we were doing in the real world.

But it’s not. It’s more complex and nuanced than we realise.

How we communicate with our family and friends has changed. And it also means that how we build our businesses has also changed. With a significant increase in businesses trying to engage more online since the global impact of COVID-19, understanding how to use social media to build a business brand and reach a larger paying audience is crucial.

Many clients have shared their stories of how they’re creating additional income streams and leveraging their social media networks to make these side-hustles viable. Single-income and even dual-income families find it even more challenging to cover expenses and manage their budgets. But starting a Facebook page just ahead of the festive season may not be enough to boost December sales. Launching an online sales platform in February may not break even until late July.

Social media is quick and relatively easy to set up. For the basics, it’s free, making it an attractive way to announce and promote your business. But despite the ease and speed of setting it up, it’s not a quick fix.

If you’re in this boat with your business or side gig, don’t give up just yet. In a recent conversation with Tim Slatter, an online communications strategist, he reinforced the old axiom of ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Having helped SMEs establish sustainable online brands for over a decade, he’s seen how every single business they’ve worked with, in a wide variety of sectors, all needed a minimum of 6-18 months to establish themselves online.

According to Slatter, this is because the complexity of online branding extends far beyond a clever marketing hook. It delves deeper into the why, who and what of the business value proposition (motivation, audience and message). Marketing hooks are great, but customers and clients are now looking for deeper engagement with a brand story.

In some other research, tactycs.io released a helpful article earlier in 2021 that seeks to answer the golden question: How long should my social media take to work?

The first thing, they say, is to understand what we mean by “work for me”. Are we looking for more sales, increased website traffic, brand awareness or relationship maintenance? This is important because it helps us understand what we want to achieve when building our business online, which in turn helps us set more realistic expectations.

Then, when it comes to setting realistic expectations, tactycs.io also ran a survey to determine what type of turnaround time an entrepreneur could expect on some of the current popular social media platforms.

These stats are pulled from their article:

How long does Instagram take to work?

Typically we recommend anywhere from 5-10 posts per week over a minimum of six months. Some have seen success much faster, and others have to put in closer to 18 months of consistent work to see success on Instagram.

How long does Facebook take to work?

A Facebook business page can take anywhere from 12 months to 24 months to become successful. Facebook pushes for supplementing your business page with ads or sponsored posts to accelerate the process.

How long does Twitter take to work?

Twitter moves fast, do you? Because of the ability to engage with content as a business, Twitter can see a quicker road to success. But don’t be fooled; this doesn’t mean it’s easier… It’s become an expectation that you post on Twitter multiple times a day, engage with your direct audience along with others. That means you keep your channel live, respond fast, and seek out other supplemental content posted by others. This could take anywhere from four to 16 months.

How long does YouTube take to work?

Being the second largest search engine in the world has its benefits. YouTube is an extremely powerful tool and doesn’t require as much momentum as other social media platforms. A larger following certainly helps, but valuable content is CRITICAL here. For business-focused timelines, an average of six months to two years can be used for YouTube.

How long does LinkedIn take to work?

If you find yourself with a group of 10-20 extremely connected employees willing to help grow the presence, you can see some of the quickest growth out of all the social media pages. 

LinkedIn is filled with business-oriented individuals who are willing to engage/support in exchange for the same. The research suggests eight to 16 months.

If you’re looking to bolster your income, remember, it’s a lot like leveraging the markets for long-term investing; give your investment time to root and grow, don’t expect immediate returns.

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Don’t derail your finances

“As you slide down the bannister of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way.” Irish Blessing

When everything is going right, we often feel that something is about to go horribly wrong. Sometimes, it’s helpful to smile at our human traits and do all we can to avoid derailing our plans!

It’s so easy to fall into a self-sabotaging state, especially when things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped. But just because things don’t go the way we want them to doesn’t mean we need to derail everything. We can get back on track and stay on track.

First: Recall your intention

Getting intentional with a financial goal means creating a clear connection between what we’d like to accomplish and why we want to accomplish it. This connection is important to investing our time and energy into our success.

When you get off track, take a moment to step back and revisit why you set this financial goal in the first place. When we recall the inspiration behind our goal and why it’s important, we are encouraged to get back to working on it.

Second: Set realistic expectations

There’s nothing wrong with “hoping for the best” from your investments, but you could be heading for trouble if your financial goals have unrealistic assumptions. Working with investment professionals and financial advisors are key to setting realistic expectations.

Third: Anticipate tough times

Whether you want to get out of debt or you’re hoping to lose weight, change isn’t easy. You’ll encounter some days that are harder than others, and it’s important to accept that there will be a rough road ahead (or some splinters on that bannister).

Consider potential pitfalls and develop a plan for dealing with those times when you might want to give up. When you have a plan, you’ll feel more confident in your ability to keep going.

Fourth: Don’t do it alone

It requires a level of vulnerability, which is why many of us avoid this, but asking for help in either getting started on a goal, or to just be held accountable, can be exactly what you need to see it through.

Whether it’s your partner, friend, family member, coach or advisor, an accountability partner can help kickstart and sustain your progress. Don’t do it alone; appoint people you trust to be there to cheer you along when you’re feeling down or give you the push you need when you’re feeling stagnant.

Five: Mistakes are part of the process

Progress never comes in a straight line. Sometimes we may think that one step back means that we’ve gone back to square one.

Remember, you’re going to mess up sometimes. But rather than declare yourself a dismal failure, use your energy to create a plan to get back on track.

Don’t derail your finances when things go wrong or seem overwhelmingly impossible. Reach out to your support structures, be kind to yourself and take breaks when you need to. You’ve got this!

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Tired of being anxious about money?

Of all conversations about money, there’s a common emotion that comes up. It’s one that everyone feels alone in, that they’re the only ones to feel this, but time and time again, it appears in daily financial conversations, reminding us that we’re actually not alone.

This feeling? 

Anxiety.

One of the reasons for this is that we grow up thinking that our adult life will look a certain way. We think we will either follow in our parents’ footsteps or are determined to avoid their mistakes and hopefully turn out considerably better. 

But the reality is that no matter what our plans or perceptions were growing up, they seldom take that form when we’re all grown up. It’s not uncommon to see people sharing their social media stories about how hard their day of “adulting” has been.

As New York Times financial writer Carl Richards once said; Almost everybody has an idea of what the financial life of their dreams would look like. Almost nobody has a plan for how to get there.

This is why so many people feel anxious about their money. They know where they’d like to be, but they don’t know how to get there.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. It’s like when the doctor tells us to eat more vegetables and exercise for at least an hour a day; it’s information we know but don’t really have the motivation to do something about it. We can either wait for a crisis or choose to do something about it before the proverbial hits the fan.

Putting a basic, anxiety fighting financial plan into place begins really small and super manageable.

Here are four steps that we’ve talked about several times before but need to hear again.

First: Pay attention to your spending.

Some people call this budgeting, but it’s actually even easier. All we have to do is begin by paying close attention to how we spend money. It’s the first step to budgeting, but it’s also the first step to finding wasted money and learning to confront unhealthy spending habits.

Second: Find wasted money.

As Carl Richards also says: The hard part of saving isn’t saving itself. The hard part is finding the money to save. With life having changed so radically in the last 24 months, you might very well have subscriptions or memberships that you’re still paying for but not using. You might also eat in more, and find that you don’t need to spend so much on takeout. Or perhaps your family needs one less vehicle and can cut back on the payments, maintenance and insurance costs on additional vehicles.

When you’ve found wasted money, don’t simply find something new to spend it on; automate your savings, even if it’s 50 bucks a week.

Third: Automate savings.

Online banking makes this concept a dream. Set up a basic savings pocket that automatically pulls the money you were spending on gym or car payments. It’s not going to hurt because you didn’t use this money for anything else anyway. But now, instead of the money going to someone else, it will start to build up into your own savings account.

These are three things that you can start doing today. You don’t need to meet with anyone, gain approval or radically change your life. All you need to do is pay attention to your spending, find wasted money and automate savings.

Before you know it, you will feel less anxious about finances, and we’ll be able to have better, more meaningful conversations about money and the future.

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Avoid being overwhelmed by change

One of the biggest challenges with change is that it can be overwhelming. There are many reasons why we might be averse to constant change, but when it is just simply too much all at once, we will find ourselves overwhelmed and in this space, our ability to make healthy decisions is seriously hampered.

The secret to sustainable, non-overwhelming change is to approach it with the 1% rule. This rule basically recognises that we don’t need to be twice as effective to achieve twice as much. We only need to be a little bit more effective, every single day. Improving 1% and sustaining that change, and then building on it 1% at a time, means that our change will be exponential over the long term.

When we procrastinate and avoid change, we start looking down the barrel of a very intimidating gun and think there’s no way we can survive what faces us. But, if we choose to make small changes every day, we can avoid being overwhelmed by change altogether!

Consider two plants in a forest that have just broken through the soil and catch the early rays of sun on their leaves for the first time. If one plant will grow and take over the area, it doesn’t have to grow twice, three times or even ten times faster than the other one. All it has to do is grow a tiny bit faster each day.

With each day, the plant that grows faster will soak up a little more sunlight, absorb more nutrients and very soon, it will overshadow the other plant. It will most likely be significantly larger and healthier within a few weeks, just by growing a little faster every day.

If you want to change your financial situation, you don’t need to earn double your income or half your expenses. If you want to improve your personal relationships, you don’t have to find twice as much time in your day; you can improve by showing a little more interest every day and showing up 1% more than you do already.

If you want to improve your health, you don’t have to cut sugar, meat, dairy and gluten all at once. You can start by eating clean one day a week (which is actually 1/7, or 14%), then two days, then three, until you reach your healthy sweet spot. Within a few weeks, you’ll realise that you’ve achieved a goal that would have completely overwhelmed you and derailed your plan to change if tackled full-on at the start.

Changing your financial situation could mean changing how you save and spend or changing how you feel and talk about your money. These changes can be daunting, but you can avoid being overwhelmed by change if you can commit to making small changes every day.

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How do you measure financial success?

In a recent article from Morningstar, they raised two excellent points about measuring financial success.

Like so many of us, Morningstar believes that great investing advice means understanding our hopes, dreams, and ideals to determine what really matters. It doesn’t just focus on the finish line — it focuses on the journey. Great advice can help people reach their goals.

But what exactly does this look like? How do we measure financial success and reach our goals?

According to the latest research, true financial success comes from two viewpoints: actual financial progress (the numbers) and financial wellbeing or empowerment (the feeling of success or security). These are both important to this conversation as the evidence shows we must achieve both.

A good place to start is to consider our financial progress and our financial wellbeing on a scale of 1 to 10. They can be independently rated as the one will be fairly objective (based on the numbers) and the other will be fairly subjective (based on our feelings). Looking at it in this way can also help us understand which we currently value more than the other and help reframe our perspectives.

For some of us, we will find that if the numbers are good, our feelings are good. For others, we might find contentment regardless of the numbers.   

To demonstrate the evidence, the graph below compares people who feel empowered by their finances with people who don’t. It shows empowered people had mostly positive experiences with their finances, even in the lowest income ranges. Those who felt disempowered were less happy than their peers and didn’t reach the positive range until their annual earnings were well above $100,000 (US-based stats).

 

Source: https://www.morningstar.com/lp/when-more-is-less 

Traditionally, financial planning and advice have centred around “crunching the numbers”. This was because it was perceived as more of a management function and not a relational function. In recent years we have seen a shift from financial planning being a transactional engagement to being more relationship-centric, with products and services taking a back seat along the journey and the advisor riding upfront with their client.

Instead of being on the sidelines, we are partners in prosperity on your road to financial success. The lesson here is fascinating: A sense of financial wellbeing—as well as the money itself—may be the key to success in our financial lives. So, please reach out to me if there are some behavioural traits, such as reinforcing good investing habits, that we can help with. 

Even if you have enough assets to withstand a reasonable economic shock, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be anxious about your finances. On the other end of the spectrum, some of us aren’t in the greatest place economically, and despite best intentions, we still spend with abandon because we feel fine about our finances.

If we want to be truly successful, we must find a balance between the two.

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Learning leverages healthy decisions (2/3)

“I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” Winston Churchill

So often, after about 12-14 years in conventional schooling systems, all we want to do is “get out”! There are exceptional educators out there who take time and energy to nurture not only the minds of their learners but their whole well-being.

They’re the ones who take note, take care and take kids seriously. But ultimately, these experiences lightly pepper our schooling years, and for most of the time, we’re taught the curriculum so that we can reach the milestones and earn a grade.

As Winston Churchill wisely noted, there’s a difference between learning and being taught. As we continue to learn along the path of life in our adult years, we can find that the breakaway from the scholastic structure can be a breath of fresh air for our learning journey. And – embracing this can help us make healthier decisions for our health, relationships, and finances.

Take Breaks

The methodology of schooling can cause us to work for long periods on a project without taking breaks. Taking breaks can be the easiest, most effective unlock for learning and growth. Breaks allow us to assimilate what we’ve been working on and consider different ways to tackle the next steps.

Whether this is our daily routine or when working on special projects, taking breaks (for a few minutes or a few days) can help us make healthier decisions and be more creative in our problem-solving.

Learn from Strangers

The best way to learn from strangers is to engage in conversations with new people! Standing in line at the licensing department, travelling on public transport or even simply hanging out at the local park opens up opportunities to meet and talk with new people.

Every conversation with a stranger is an opportunity to learn something new. When we are aware of this, we can observe our behaviour and become more present in our conversations with strangers. 

Seek a Stimulating Job

It’s not always easy to land a job that you find challenging and stimulating, but since we spend so much time at work, finding an intellectually fulfilling job is a huge advantage to leverage our daily learning to make healthier decisions. Even if you don’t love everything about your job, finding ways to improve how your job is done can be equally invigorating, and we can learn so much in the process.

Remain flexible

Lifelong learners are always willing to change their mind. The more we learn, the more we realise that it’s not the truth that changes, but our understanding of that truth that deepens. 

Superficially, it could seem like we’re changing our minds, but rather, we’re changing our position and growing our minds. This is why it’s better to find questions that can’t be answered than to hold onto answers that can’t be questioned.

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