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Crush it, and rest; says Carl

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.

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When the goalposts keep moving

“The only way to find permanent joy is by embracing the fact that nothing is permanent.” – Martha Beck.

Over the last few decades, investment strategies have developed and evolved to move away from market-related benchmarks toward personal goals and outcomes. Modern investors are now creating plans that are more personalised and unique than ever before. The marketplace is innovating to provide models, funds and alternatives to whet even the most exclusive investment appetites.

However, even though we’ve tailored the investment goalposts to our individualised needs and expectations, external factors still play a role in how we plan and anticipate the future and the goalposts keep moving.

As a world-renowned author and life coach, Martha Beck reminds us that we need to become comfortable with constant impermanence. And whilst this can seem like an easy concept to embrace, when we see our investments drop or something happens to upset our plans, we can allow it to rob us of our joy.

We might be on a promotional track at work, attending training and putting in extra hours of study and upskilling, only to have our dreams crushed when our company can no longer stay afloat. External factors, beyond our control, will always impact where the goalposts are placed.

Most of us accept that life is not about ticking off milestones, but because our schools, companies, religious institutions and governments hold onto these models of conditioning and measurement, it’s hardwired into us to create expectations and anticipate them to be permanent.

Every day we need to embrace that nothing is permanent and that our joy in life is about so much more than a timeline playing out according to a plan. Life coaching is all about creating and promoting well-being to attain greater fulfilment through improving relationships, careers, and our day-to-day lives. The first relationship is the one we have with ourselves, and this is where we begin to find a robust and powerful joy.

It’s also found at the heart of a financial plan centred on us and not on markets or benchmarks set by others. This resilience that we are seeing is increasingly essential to succeed and persevere in our current social, political and economic environment. When the goalposts keep moving, we need to become as centred and grounded as possible so as not to be disillusioned and unsettled when we embrace that nothing is permanent.

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What’s costing you more?

“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.

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Dollar-cost-averaging

People often joke about the weather in Cape Town, saying that you can experience all four seasons in one day. And, if you speak to a local, you’ll know that regardless of how warm it is, they’ll always pack a sweater in case the weather turns. Still, as a top tourist destination, the weather doesn’t deter intrepid travellers; they keep returning. Investing in the markets is exactly the same; despite the ups and downs, sometimes, in a matter of hours, investors keep returning. 

For the unseasoned investor, the temptation to dump windfalls into an investment account or market allocation could cost them in the long run. This is because the fluctuations in market prices mean that you never really know if you’re buying at a high or a low in the market. The highs and lows only make sense months or years down the line. Ideally, you want to be able to buy when the market is down and when the market is up so that, on average, your money is growing with the overall curve.

This strategy is called dollar-cost-averaging. It’s the equivalent of keeping a warm top in the car so that you can enjoy the journey regardless of the weather.

It’s a strategy, however, that requires discipline and planning. Dollar-cost-averaging can save an investor from panic buying when they think the market will keep climbing or selling out when they think it’s bottomed out.

If you buy high and sell low, you will lose all your money. The challenge is that, whilst we know that buying low and selling high is a sure way to make incredible gains, we never know what the market will do tomorrow.

Dollar-cost-averaging means that the investor buys into the markets on a smaller but more regular basis than just purchasing a chunk of stock when they get a bonus or large payout. For example, instead of investing ten grand in one go, an investor can choose to invest two grand a month for the next five months.

Or, instead of only investing when you have a specific amount of money, you can choose to invest a smaller amount, more regularly. Not only will you benefit from the growth of dollar-cost-averaging, but you’ll also develop a healthy habit of investing part of your regular income rather than relying on an annual or quarterly lump sum that can be easy to spend elsewhere.

This is not the only way to leverage better returns in the markets, but for an investor who is not familiar with investing, it’s a wise approach to early investment strategies.

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Protection from too much advice

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

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Saving vs investing

Financial planning is a complex and integrated activity that is often simplified in an attempt to make it more accessible. When we look at it as a lifestyle rather than an annual exercise, it’s easier to begin to engage with our financial plan in a more meaningful level. Saving and investing are two disciplines that are core to the foundations of a solid financial plan, and for simplicity sake, they are often seen as the same thing. However – they are very different.

In a recent article for bankrate.com, James Royal explains that while both saving and investing can help us achieve a more comfortable financial future, we need to know the differences to understand how each discipline helps our financial plan.

He says that the most significant difference between saving and investing is the level of risk taken. Saving typically results in earning a lower return but with virtually no risk. In contrast, investing allows the opportunity to make higher returns but accepts an increased risk of loss.

These strategies are necessary to help build long-term wealth: they’re designed to accumulate money. Saving is typically done through your bank with products like money market accounts and savings accounts. It’s a valuable part of your financial plan to create provision for emergencies, unexpected expenses or saving for short-term goals. Investing requires more complex products and integration and requires time and ongoing management to allow your money to grow. This is often what people refer to as “making their money work for them.”

Royal says that there are plenty of reasons you should save your hard-earned money. For one, it’s usually your safest bet, and it’s the best way to avoid losing any cash along the way. It’s also easy to do, and you can access the funds quickly when you need them.

However, returns are low, meaning you could earn more by investing (but there’s no guarantee you will). Returns are generally behind inflation, so for long-term prospects, where the cost of inflation becomes a factor, you can lose purchasing power of the amount saved.

So – saving is safer than investing, but it will most likely not result in the most wealth accumulated over the long term.

When you own a broadly diversified collection of stocks, you’re likely to easily beat inflation over long periods and increase your purchasing power. However – returns are never guaranteed, and this is where risk becomes a factor. Due to the size of the markets and options to invest in alternatives, risk is mitigated by investing in a broad selection of assets and classes.

Ultimately, a balanced and robust financial plan should include savings and investment strategies that align with your life plan, allowing you access to funds when you need them and securing financial independence for your future.

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How mindfulness helps our money

How much time do you waste trying to solve problems that haven’t happened yet? Many of us fixate on problems that might happen tomorrow, next week or several years in the future, and this is not what life and financial planning are about. Getting stuck in the future at the cost of living life to its fullest today is precisely what we’re trying to avoid! This is why we talk so much about being mindful.

Dr Susan David says that true mindfulness is when the mind stops insisting on being rational, stops being a problem-solving or indexing machine, and becomes more of a sponge than a calculator. It just is.

This is a beautiful take on mindfulness – seeing our awareness as a sponge to soak up what’s happening right now, to be present and conscious. It also helps us see our natural inclination to calculate, problem-solve and plan for the ifs and maybes in our future. Mindfulness helps our money in that it allows us to use what we have today in a way that will make our future-self grateful; in other words, it helps us avoid making choices that we might regret.

When we see planning as a way to create a specific future for ourselves, we limit ourselves to one perspective of our future, limiting our ability to accept different outcomes and causing heaps of self-sabotage in the process. We find ourselves stuck in old narratives and developing a cynicism toward ourselves and others.

This is not helpful planning; it’s destructive and impossible to stick to.

Instead, when we practice financial planning that is linked to our life choices, not our income, markets or products, we have to become more mindful of what our life truly looks like and how we’d like to make empowered choices for ourselves and our family.

Mindfulness with our money helps us see the world through multiple perspectives.

Multiple perspectives open up our financial conversations to be more inclusive, interwoven with the thoughts and feelings of those we love and trust, and this is incredibly empowering. Speaking with your partner, kids and parents about money means that you don’t have to shoulder the burden of “providing for the future” alone. It also allows us to draw on the strengths of the different money personalities in our family and reduce our blind spots.

Mindfulness with our money enables us to move forward with higher levels of acceptance.

It’s tough to move forward if we expect one specific outcome, and it doesn’t happen the way we expected. We will see this as an all-consuming failure. But when we can plan with multiple perspectives, we can move forward with a more profound acceptance of different outcomes. It’s not about accepting second-best or finding a compromise; it’s about totally changing our mindset around how success will look.

Mindfulness with our money cultivates tolerance and self-kindness

Rational, problem-solving, calculative behaviour causes us to try and save all our money for future crises and expenses. Mindful sponginess allows us to see how we can invest in experiences and relationships that we enjoy today. This is not to say that we don’t invest for tomorrow, but it helps us find that healthy balance between enjoying life today AND tomorrow.

Mindfulness with our money allows us to practice non-judgement

A strong focus on our own lives, relationships, dreams and goals takes the focus off what others are doing and protects us from comparing ourselves to others. This is a powerful and all-too-often understated benefit of personal lifestyle financial planning. 

Mindfulness with our money equips us to rework old-narratives

To a large extent, managing our money has changed significantly from how our parents and grandparents managed their money. This is because money and life are linked – when life changes, money changes and when money changes, life changes. If we adopt a growth mindset with our money, we will find ourselves freshly equipped to re-think and re-build strategies to use our money wisely.

Ultimately, we need to slow down and create space to be intentional with our choices. This applies to life as much as it does to our money. By taking care of ourselves today, we take the first step to taking care of ourselves tomorrow.

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Need a little grounding?

Have you ever gone for a walk in the garden without shoes on? Remember what it felt like, as a kid, to come home from school – slip out of tight school shoes and walk barefoot? Whether it was on comfy rugs, soft sea-sand or lush grass, the sensation often felt so good because we were grounding ourselves.

A quick Google search will tell us that there’s a lot more happening when we walk barefoot. The exchange and release of energy are scientifically measurable, and the experience has a positive impact on our health.

As adults, we often forget to walk barefoot – and we often forget to keep ourselves well-grounded. Liz Fosslien, Author, Speaker, Head Of Communications and Content at Humu, recently shared some helpful thoughts on this through her LinkedIn profile.

She said that when everything feels up in the air, rituals can help us ground ourselves.

Research shows that rituals significantly reduce our stress levels. Psychologists have found that it doesn’t even matter what the practice is; simply doing the same thing at the same time can improve your mental health.

Whilst some of us do all we can to break free from structures and systems, the hidden truth is that structures can increase our sense of security and wellbeing. This means that it’s not the structures or rituals that are the problem but our connection to what they mean or represent. If we have little or no connection to the schedule or routine or feel like we don’t support the system implementing those routines, we can leave and create our own routines.

If we look over our lives, we will see that we’ve always had routines that help us stay grounded, and that’s okay! But, as we encounter change, our routines can be interrupted, leaving us feeling untethered and stressed.

It could be something as simple as saying to yourself, “My work is complete for today” at the end of every day of working from home. You will be affirming that you’ve achieved something for the day and that you can now let go and relax, focussing attention on other things in your life that make and keep you happy and healthy.

Maybe it means beginning your day with a 7-minute workout, or winding down at night with Wordle. It could be a weekly practice of reviewing your budget and planning the meals for the week ahead.

On the flip side, it can also be helpful to intentionally let some things go. Perhaps, instead of feeling untethered, you’re feeling overwhelmed with too much to do. Fosslien shared the story of a friend who, ahead of moving across the country, decided to order takeout for dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not worry about cooking. “I gave myself permission to put some parts of my life on autopilot,” she recounted.

If you feel like you’re losing track, perhaps you need some grounding. Let’s chat if you think that might help, but take a moment to consider the things you enjoy doing and the people you enjoy spending time with, and make sure you’re regularly making time for that. Oh yes, and walk around barefoot once in a while!

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Become a better networker

As our world becomes increasingly digitised, personal skills will become more valuable. Many salespeople call these the soft-skills and realise that the old-school hard-sell-skills are no longer as effective. People are less likely to be blown away by some widget and far more likely to remember the way that you’ve made them feel.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re in sales or not, or even in your own business. Networking is a skill that helps us build communities of value, and as we all know, communities are essential for our survival. Becoming a better networker will help in every area of life because, in today’s tiny world of digital space, communication plays a bigger-than-ever role in identifying, attracting, connecting and engaging with other people.

We see it all the time on social media, but we don’t necessarily realise what’s going on. It’s easy to try and self-promote through these channels, whether it’s a business you run, or you’re displaying personal growth and courses you’ve completed; this is often where our understanding of the power of networking grinds to a halt.

But if we realise that we can help other people talk about us, we can intentionally seek out spaces where online conversations are happening that may create the right context for us to engage. These could be community pages, forums or simply in our news feeds – if we know what tags to look for.

Some of this can get quite technical, but at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of humans trying to engage – and this is why becoming a better networker is helpful. Learning to ask better questions and engage with people one-on-one is one of the most valuable things to do.

In the same way that we might prepare some pitches and introductions before going to a conference, roadshow or in-person networking event, we can prepare and upskill before engaging with people on social media, video calls and direct messaging. We can see this as a virtual alternative to attending a live networking event.

Bob Burg, speaker and author, proposes a powerful list of 10 questions to ask a new prospect that he calls the ‘feel-good questions’. This list works well because it’s underpinned by the premise that people like to talk about themselves more than they want to listen to you talk about yourself. But for most of us, we’re programmed to think that the moment I get to talk, I need to say as much about myself as possible and convince the other person that they want to choose me. If the person you’re talking to is not ready for your product, service or skill set – it will probably go in one ear, and out the other.

If we follow the new narratives, where ​​people are less likely to be blown away by some widget and far more likely to remember the way that you’ve made them feel, then Burg’s questions begin to make a lot of sense. The more you can get people to talk about themselves, the better they will feel and the more likely they will be to remember their engagement with you in a positive light. 

This is one of the secrets to becoming a better networker: make people feel good about themselves.

Here are some of the questions that Burg suggests, and he recommends choosing only two or three at a time.

“How did you get your start in the business you’re in?”

“What do you enjoy most about your profession?”

“What separates you and your company from the competition?”

“What advice would you give someone just starting in your business?”

“What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail?”

“What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years?”

“What do you see as the coming trends in your industry?”

“What’s the strangest or funniest incident you’ve experienced in your business?”

“What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business?”

“What one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business?”

These are open-ended questions, and they’re all focused on the other person. If you can make people feel good about what they do, and who they are, they will most likely want to speak to you again, opening up the way for a conversational (more than simply a transactional) relationship.

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Building wealth, one brick at a time

The root of our wealth is not in our income or our spending; it’s in our behaviour. Our habits make us wealthy, not the markets. Some have said that sound financial management comes down to spending less than we earn – but whilst this adage holds merit, it’s a lot more complicated in practice.

It’s complicated because people are complicated.

It’s not helpful to tell someone who is already relying on credit to get through the month, to spend less than they earn. Most often, in our experience in the financial planning profession, people find themselves in debt because life throws a curveball they weren’t expecting, and despite prudent planning, they have had to incur to make ends meet.

We need to stop feeling guilty for having debt, and we need to find ways to sustainably work towards healthier finances. This is difficult to manage when we have people telling us that we need to “save for a rainy day”, “invest for the long term”, and “pay down our debt”.

What we need is people telling us that where we are right now, having decided to improve our financial situation, is an excellent place to be. It’s a good place because our intention is right – and when we set a good intention, we can ensure that energy and resources flow towards that intention.

Saving and investing form part of this, but not often how we expect. Saving and investing are actually only powerful when we can form them into habits. Remember, the root of our wealth lies in our repetitive behaviour.

Saving and investing have many different features, but they do share one common goal: they’re both strategies that help you accumulate money. They allow us to consider what might happen tomorrow and ensure some of the money we may need will be available.

It’s helpful to think incrementally when talking about planning for tomorrow’s financial needs. If we hold an idea that we’ll make a bulk deposit into our savings or investments, we unconsciously do two things: we put it off until we think we have enough, and we see it as a big-in and big-out deal (kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme).

But, if we hold to the premise that wealth is built through good habits, we can start to see that both saving and investing work best when practised a little bit at a time. This means we don’t have to put it off; we can put a little bit aside each month – whatever we can afford. The amount is far less important than the habit we’re trying to develop. And, we’ll be less likely to make significant withdrawals on our savings and investments because we can appreciate how long they’ve taken to accrue.

Whether through our savings or investments, building wealth is best done, one brick at a time. This is how we build a firm foundation for healthy financial planning.

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