Category: Blog

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, was the first to say it. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” But listening is not always about what we hear; it’s what we can begin to intuit. When it comes to our feelings, we have to learn to become more intuitive and listen to what our emotions are trying to tell us.

Our mental health is increasingly under attack, it’s hard to find the time for our own personal growth, development and rest. As our brains get tired, our emotional intelligence and physical stamina both take a knock. The global lockdowns of 2020 held a microscope over our mental and emotional health as we saw startling changes in every system, from healthcare, education, commerce and politics to social engagement restructuring, with sports clubs, gyms, and extra-curricular activities mostly grinding to a halt. 

With very little external social input (and outlet) and reduced creative engagement, we were forced to find purpose and meaning outside of everything we once considered unshakable. We were forced to look inside and discover a host of emotions that are not often talked about outside of therapy. It’s helpful to take these conversations further and find common spaces to change how we think about things that may have a negative connotation for us.

Identifying and talking about our emotions helps us think differently and enables us to act differently. How we make, spend, insure and invest our money are all actions that are strongly influenced by how we feel.

Epictetus also said that we are disturbed not by things, but by the view which we take of them. This means that changing how we think can impact how we feel. Here is a short list of common emotions and an accompanying action that we can choose to employ instead of going out and spending (blowing) money or making poor financial life decisions.

1. 1. Sadness might be telling me to have a good, long cry. Letting out the tears is a healthy physical release to process what we’ve lost.
   2. Loneliness might be telling me I need connection. It is not about how many ‘connections’ we have on LinkedIn or Twitter, or Facebook. It’s about establishing a conversational connection with someone I can identify with, relate to and trust.
   3. Resentment might be telling me I need to forgive. Forgiveness is more about releasing myself than the other person.
   4. Emptiness might be telling me to do something creative. Rather than going out and buying more stuff, I should take a moment to explore my creative energy.
   5. Anger might be telling me to check in with my boundaries. Checking my boundaries is a proactive way to avoid the same thing happening again.
   6. Anxiety might be telling me to breathe. Breathing slower and deeper helps me become focused on what I can control.
   7. Stress might be telling me to take it one step at a time. I don’t have to do everything at once; I can break it all down into manageable, bite-sized chunks.

Learning to listen to our feelings is an excellent skill for handling all sorts of problems, not only our financial frustrations. It is a skill that will also help us notice what others might be feeling and grow in our empathy and sympathy for them.

From the stoics to the sentimentalists, most have one question in common: What is the meaning of it all?

Searching for purpose and meaning helps us come up with a reason for living. As Aristotle always said, our ability to reason is what makes us different to other animals. This sits at the core of Ikigai, the Japanese concept that speaks to our lives’ direction, purpose, and meaning. 

Quite literally, iki means “to live”, and gai means “reason”.

Ikigai = reason to live

It’s a beautifully simple idea that becomes increasingly complex as we investigate precisely what motivates us, guides our passions and helps us make a difference within our communities. In the Western systems of life, we often follow the expected path that is conditioned into us through our education. We don’t get to ask ourselves why, and more importantly, we don’t always have the structure to know how to deeply interrogate our lives to know what will lead to fulfilment.

Ikigai offers us this structure.

Ikigai is a systematic and cyclic way to explore the abstract concepts of satisfaction, delight, fullness, comfort, excitement and wealth.

The four entry questions we can ask ourselves are:

1. What do I love doing?
2. What am I good at?
3. What does my community need?
4. What can I get paid for?

For many of us, we only really ask the fourth question even though our colleges, universities and trade schools try to answer the others. But sometimes, it’s not the answers we need, but the permission to ask the questions.

Yuval Harari said that questions we can’t answer are far better for us than answers we can’t question. All the wealth in the world cannot help provide delight, excitement and fulfilment if we aren’t able to ask ourselves what we love doing, what we’re good at and discover what our community needs.

This is where we can begin to define and differentiate our passion from our mission, our profession from our vocation and see how we can integrate them all for a purpose and reason to live. 

This integration enables us to dive deeper into our life and financial planning, giving us key pointers and motivations for our decision-making and helping us communicate with our loved ones. We can decide what is truly important to us and why!

They say that if we want to know what we truly value, we must look at where we spend our money. If this aligns with our Ikigai, then we know we’re creating a healthy structure for a meaningful life.

It’s nearly impossible to make it through an entire week without glancing at a blog, social media post or newsletter that reminds us about the pervasive and perpetual change in our lives. Hopefully, this blog won’t be one of those to add to the list. Instead, it will help us to identify the benefits of the challenges that we face.

Change can be sparked in so many ways, some of them are by our personal choice, and others are simply the way that life goes. When initiating change through personal choice, we can quickly feel like things should be getting better. We have chosen change that we believe will release us from unhealthy decisions and make our life easier.

But we immediately start to feel the discomfort.

Our journey of discovery, whilst exciting and new, is always accompanied by a level of discomfort. It can feel counter-intuitive. We’re making changes because of discomfort, and as we’re implementing and discovering the change, we’re exposed to further discomfort.

This feeling of discomfort is not bad.

When we’re tired and lacking energy, the discomfort can add to the overwhelming elements of life, but it’s not always a sign that we’re doing the wrong thing. As kids, learning new things is always hard. We accept that there will be a level of discomfort, from riding bikes and learning to write, to adjusting to social expectations and managing changing friendships. And through this, we learn and grow.

As adults, we should never stop embracing the discomfort of learning and growing.

Planning and preparing for change needs to include the anticipated discomfort that we will encounter to bolster our resolve to sustain the change that we want to see in our lives. When we sign up to study, we know that there will be the discomfort of writing tests and exams and presenting our ideas and research to panels of critics.

When we choose to be committed to a long-term relationship, there will be the discomfort of releasing our independence and learning to share our schedules, our hobbies, our interests, our money and our friends with someone else. The same is true of becoming a parent: we prepare for the sleepless nights, the sharing of our home and the increased financial responsibilities.

Any change that is worth the long-term benefit will have this wonderful journey of discovery and discomfort. Changing our spending behaviour, keeping to investment decisions during market volatility, and having better conversations with our family and our money all require personal journeys of discovery and discomfort. We mustn’t let the discomfort deter or distract us from continuing to learn and grow.

When it’s a question of money – everyone is of the same religion, or so said Voltaire. Like religion, there are many different perspectives on how it helps (or hinders) us. It’s probably one reason why people always say you should never talk about money, religion or politics at the dinner table. There are so many differing views!

It is not to say we should never discuss money; instead, it’s helpful to be selective about our timing and our company. Whilst we may all abide by the same transactional value and guidelines of currency, we will have very different cultural and emotional connections with money.

For this very reason, it’s a powerful conversation focus for relationship counselling, in the same way, that religion is. Our views on money impact every choice we make, including raising a family, spending and retirement.

But it’s not always the views we can see that influence our choices; it’s also the views that we can’t see. These are our biases. And they can profoundly affect our bank balance.

A modern, integrated religious thinker, Brian Mclaren, outlines a number of biases on his blog to understand just how complex our decision-making processes are and help us begin to ‘see what we can’t see’.

Most of us have experienced several, if not all of them, at some point in our lives. Here are a few of Mclaren’s biases.

Confirmation Bias: We judge new ideas based on the ease with which they fit in with and confirm the only standard we have: old ideas, old information, and trusted authorities. As a result, our framing story, belief system, or paradigm excludes whatever doesn’t fit.

Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t, can’t, or won’t notice.

Complementarity Bias: If you are hostile to my ideas, I’ll be hostile to yours. If you are curious and respectful of my opinions, I’ll respond in kind.

Competency Bias: We don’t know how much (or little) we know because we don’t know how much (or little) others know. In other words, incompetent people assume that most other people are about as incompetent as they are. As a result, they underestimate their [own] incompetence and consider themselves at least of average competence.

Consciousness Bias: Some things simply can’t be seen from where I am right now. But if I keep growing, maturing, and developing, someday I will be able to see what is now inaccessible to me.

Comfort or Complacency Bias: I prefer not to have my comfort disturbed.

Conservative/Liberal Bias: I lean toward nurturing fairness and kindness or towards strictly enforcing purity, loyalty, liberty, and authority, as an expression of my political identity.

Catastrophe or Normalcy Bias: I remember dramatic catastrophes but don’t notice gradual decline (or improvement).

Cash Bias: It’s hard for me to see something when my way of making a living requires me not to see it.

Conspiracy Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that relieve us, pardon us, or portray us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators.

It’s a hefty list, but if we can begin to identify and observe biases that keep us stuck in unproductive behaviours and patterns, we can ask ourselves: How can I start to let go of that?

This is a journey of progress, not perfection, made richer and more rewarding by the relationships we enjoy and share. By working on our own biases, we will not only improve our bank balances, but we will enhance our relationships and have considerably less cause for indigestion at dinner time!

“Where did our weekend go?” Have you ever found yourself asking this question on a Sunday night or a few minutes after hitting snooze for the third time on a Monday morning?

If you do – you’re not alone! Studies show that many people struggle with Weekend Anxiety Syndrome (WAS) or the Sunday Scaries… there are a couple of reasons that can contribute to our stress and anxiety over weekends, and these are generally linked to two key areas: too much sleep and lack of activity.

Yes… that’s right – TOO MUCH sleep and TOO LITTLE activity. It sounds counterintuitive, but as you page through the google search results for WAS, you will find a bounty of research articles that encourage consistency of sleep patterns and positive, restorative activities.

As we slide into Friday, it’s easy to think about all the things we’d like to accomplish on the weekend or deliberately plan to do as little as possible. But as Sunday evening arrives, if we haven’t achieved Friday’s aspirations, we are left with a knot in our tummies and a pervasive sense of failure.

Dr Luke Martin, clinical psychologist and project manager at Beyondblue, says that WAS may be a side effect of modern life. “We’re so time poor, there’s a lot of pressure to get our weekends right,” he says. “On social media, everyone lives the perfect, busy life, so it’s easy to think there’s something wrong if your life doesn’t measure up. On Monday, when everyone’s comparing notes from the weekend, and you feel like yours doesn’t measure up, then your body doesn’t like that, which can cause anxiety.” (dailytelegraph.com.au)

It’s not like our weekends aren’t busy. We complete one task after another (cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking) and then poof, Monday is here! Chores expand to fill the available space, especially if we’re trying to catch a lie-in, an afternoon snooze or binge that series that everyone keeps telling us to watch.

Having read through a few blogs and articles, a few practical ideas can help us reduce our Sunday Scaries and win back our weekend.

1. Create a weekend bucket list. Chat with those in your home and family and ask them what types of activities they’d like to do over the weekend. These could be hikes, neighbourhood walks, visits to the beach or a local nature reserve. Perhaps it’s to start learning a skill like painting or music, or maybe it’s focussed on things like gardening and crafting. Once you have this list of ideas, plan to achieve one or two every second weekend.
2. Regulate your sleep patterns. This practice applies to both the weekend and weekdays too. Some research refers to our change in sleeping over the weekends as Social Jet Lag, likening the exhaustion that we feel on a Monday morning to a long-distance flight through several time zones. If we go to bed later and wake up later over the weekend, we will feel tired on a Monday.
3. Stay off social media. Much of this has to do with the psychological impact of seeing what other people are busy doing. This feed of photos and emotionally engaging content makes us feel like we’re not doing as much as everyone else. It also saps precious time and energy that we could be engaging in those awesome ideas in our weekend bucket list.
4. Plan ‘weekend’ activities for the week too. In every strategy to get more out of life, we find that balance is a crucial element. If we think that ‘fun stuff’ can only happen over the weekend, we will constantly struggle with WAS. Planning a midweek movie night, dinner with friends, an early evening walk can all fit into our weekly schedules and help us realise that we don’t have to live from Monday to Thursday, wishing it was Friday already.

We can have all the money in the world, but if our life is not fulfilling, our money will mean nothing. When it comes to financial planning, we have to include life planning so that we can make the most of what we have instead of falling into the trap of simply trying to ‘make more’.