If we don’t stand for something, we will fall for anything. Essentially, our actions will either result from what we choose, or what is chosen for us.

Our days are packed full of communication and actions. From the moment we engage with our mobile device or open our emails, messages begin to stream in and affect us. We will either be triggered into action by what we engage with or choose to follow our own intended plan of action for the day.

When we look deeper into how and why we are triggered, we enter a complex world of psychology and psychoanalysis, encountering things like our ego, our hidden self and our true self. There are excellent resources and coaches to help us understand our personality and strengths. Ultimately, we arrive at a state of being more mindful and intentional.

When we consider intention and how it impacts our future self, it’s helpful to consider the difference between making choices and making decisions. A choice can be seen as the result of intentional mindfulness, and a decision can be expressed as an intentional response to consequences.

Choices connect us to our desired intention, values and beliefs and speak to rights, power and opportunity. Decisions connect us to behaviour, performance and consequences and focus on the act of needing to make up our mind about something. Neither approach is wrong, one is merely premeditated whilst the other is responsive; both can be intentional.

If we want to be successful in our choices and decisions, we need to assess our habits and our cheerleaders.

Habits are at the root of all of our worst and best decisions. It’s often said that it’s not the markets that make us wealthy, but our habits. This is true for every area of our lives – not just our finances. Our habits are so powerful because as we stand at the helm of our life, we determine the direction we will take. If there’s a storm, we can navigate around it or through it; if there’s land, we can go towards it or away from it. We make our habits, and our habits make us.

Our cheerleaders are those standing beside us to help us navigate and manage the ship. They’re our closest friends and family, our colleagues and our coaches. They’re the ones we choose to listen to, and their messages will either reinforce us or ruin us. They can help us see our blindspots and help us identify strengths.

However you want to enhance or improve your life, take the time to be intentional about how you choose what you will stand for.

We often don’t worry about something until we realise that it’s limited. If we have lots of something, it’s a fortune. If we don’t, it can become a focus of concern and anxiety. 

Young children generally don’t worry about much if their needs are met. With access to their parents’ love, attention and confidence, children have much of the social affirmation they need. When school starts and they are placed in a room with lots of other children with similar needs and only a handful of adults, they quickly become aware of social capital.

Within a few years, money becomes more of an issue. Realising we can’t have everything we want, when we want it, awakens us to the importance of financial capital. As soon as we are old enough to start earning money, we jump at the opportunity, whether babysitting, washing cars, a paper route, waiting tables or any other casual position.

With increasing age, our good health becomes harder to maintain. It can happen for some in childhood years; for others, it kicks in around their twenties and thirties when weight gain is the first sign of an ageing body. And, with significant health scares or ageing, our acute awareness of how little time we have left leaves us aware of our time wealth.

If we want to know just how wealthy we are, we need to consider all four of the types of wealth above:

1. Social Wealth
2. Financial Wealth
3. Health Wealth (Physical & Mental)
4. Time Wealth (Freedom)

Social Wealth

The amount of support for and from others that we enjoy is our social wealth. Investopedia defines social capital as a set of shared values that allows us to work together in a group to achieve a common purpose effectively. The idea is generally used to describe how members can band together to live harmoniously.

In a way, our social capital is our most important as it allows us access to the finances, health, and time of others in our social sphere. 

Financial Wealth 

Indeed, money doesn’t make us happy, but having access to financial resources to build and grow is essential to the contributions we can make in our social circles, in protecting our health and affording us freedom of our time.

Health Wealth 

When we assess our financial portfolio, we often see health in terms of medical cover for emergencies and chronic illness. But it’s so much more than that. It’s physical, mental and emotional, from every bite of food we eat to every word we read and repeat, from how we manage anxiety to how we manage our sleep; our health wealth is integrated into every choice we make.

Time Wealth

We had absolute freedom of time in our first few years of life, and we didn’t realise it until we traded it for schooling, working, and maintaining our health. We need to be intentional about reclaiming our power in this wealth area, and we do this through building our social, financial and health wealth. 

Our fortune is not just the balance at the bottom right of our monthly bank statement or acquired total assets. It’s so much more meaningful and purposeful when we can see the areas in our lives that accrue and attribute value and make us fortunate.

Have you ever gone down a rabbit hole on social media? You know, that moment when you see something triggering and you click on it, and then scroll down through the comments, becoming wholly engrossed in a conversation that turns out to be a waste of time and emotional energy. While we’re in that moment, we’re often completely unaware of how it’s affecting us. Catastrophising is a little like that.

We can all be affected by catastrophic thinking to differing degrees. It happens when we ruminate about irrational worst-case outcomes, assuming that the worst will come true.

For example, when we get a sore throat, we might leap from one disastrous medical condition to the next, ending in our impending doom from some rare and awful disease. Or, when someone doesn’t reply to our text message, we immediately start to assume the worst and run down a track that ends in our removal from every social group.

Perhaps there is a significant crash in the markets, and we assume our investment portfolio will be wiped out, or we lose a large client, and we think our business will crash. If these patterns sound familiar, don’t panic – you’re not alone.

Many of us engage in this type of self-sabotaging thinking at very manageable levels, we snap out of the catastrophe-coma and vow to never do it again (until the next day…) and carry on with life. However, there are times when catastrophising can become a debilitating reality. Various research has linked this more profound experience of catastrophic thinking to other conditions, such as chronic pain, chronic illness, or poor mental health.

If we are prone to depression or high anxiety, then catastrophising might very well be much harder for us to identify and manage. If we are in constant physical pain, this too will impact our mental health and render us more vulnerable to crippling thoughts. Some articles have shown that it’s not just psychological as it can affect the physiology of the brain.

The first step to managing catastrophising is to identify it. Many of us do it without realising it, so the sooner we can observe this behaviour, the sooner we can change it. As with most mental concerns, therapy is beneficial, and so are mindfulness practices and meditation. These are reflective processes that break down our repetitive thought patterns and allow us to decide which habits we should develop and which to abandon.

We can also intentionally surround ourselves with people who help us make better decisions, who understand what is important to us and can lovingly support us when we fall down the inevitable minefield of rabbit holes ahead of us. Most of the battle ahead is fought in the mind; if we can take steps to protect not only how we think but who we allow into our headspace, we will be stronger, safer and happier.

One of the hardest questions to answer when it comes to financial planning is: How much do I need?

There are two ways we can look at this. Either, I believe that my external circumstances will eventually reach a point where I have earned enough, and I’ll finally feel that I have enough. Or, I will come to the realisation that my wants and needs are based on my own personal perceptions.

It’s also difficult because no matter how we see this, external or internal, we will most likely continue to vacillate between the two. This is because our head seldom wants what our heart wants, and our heart seldom wants what our head wants. Even when we can discern the difference between a want and a need, the goalposts keep shifting.

There’s no list of one hundred things every family must have – it’s incredibly personal. And this is what makes financial planning so complex. We can’t actually answer the question “How much do I need” because that answer will keep changing.

This is why we need to find better questions to ask, and we’re doing that with some success, but it still doesn’t always help when we’re sitting staring at a Black Friday special and wondering if we should impulsively add it to our basket.

At this point in the conversation, it’s important to remember to be kind to ourselves. We will always make impulse purchases, and that’s okay. The dangerous territory lies in what habits we’re forming. If we’re habitually buying things we don’t need and spending money too carelessly, we will find ourselves in a place that is tough to change.

Here is a great way to leverage better money habits in our purchasing behaviour: create space to reflect on your purchase.

This is how:

1 – Be a basket case: once you’ve decided you want something (or need it…), put off purchasing for a day or two. For online shopping, leave it in your basket for 48 hours before proceeding to the checkout.

2 – Quarantine it: leave it sitting in the garage or your spare room for three days after buying it. If you’re no longer convinced it was a worthy purchase, send it back to the store.

3 – Last in, first out: if you buy a new one, give the old one away. The more clutter we accumulate, the harder it is to appreciate what we have.

These tips help us create space to think about how much we really need and can be powerful practices in developing habits that make us wealthy.

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.

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)