Everything we know, believe, and feel is based on our internal thoughts. Positive thinking gives us extraordinary power over our thinking and ourselves (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

Some people are exceptional; they always seem to remain positive regardless of what lemons are tossed their way. You know the type, the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining, glass-half-full, things-will-get-better type of people. We love to have them around when we need their support, but we can also envy their seemingly relentless positive energy.

But – if our positivity is superficial and never permeates deep into our psyche, it can become unhealthy for us. It’s essential to make space in our lives for all the emotions we need to feel to avoid suppressing emotions and potentially becoming ill (dis-eased). This kind of surface happiness can be a little too nonchalant and detach us from what’s really going on in our lives.

It’s less about having positive feelings and more about choosing a positive attitude to whatever we feel. We cannot control our emotions; we can decide how to behave with those emotions – this is when we start to tap into that extraordinary power. Smiling is a proven way to physically start changing our attitude to uncomfortable emotions.

Smiling offers a mood boost and helps our bodies release cortisol and endorphins that provide numerous health benefits, including reduced blood pressure, stress and pain, and increased endurance and a strengthened immune system.

There is also growing evidence that the use of positive self-talk (following on from our smile and going a little deeper) can significantly improve how we tackle a challenge or approach a situation. Talk to yourself as though a friend, coach, or supportive colleague is offering you positive advice. This means that we don’t push out the emotions that we’d rather avoid, but instead, we approach them with a healthier attitude.

We must avoid feeling bad for feeling unfocused, bored, tired, overwhelmed, inadequate, excluded, exposed, anxious (and tons of other feelings!). Instead, we can internally acknowledge them and say to ourselves: “I know you’re feeling overwhelmed and tired, but you can do this. Rest if you need to, and start again a little later.” This creates space for discomfort whilst holding a healthy, positive attitude.

At the end of each day, we can reflect on our successes and achievements rather than dwelling on disappointments or perceived failures. Whether it’s in how we spoke with our family, landed a project at work, or even managed to achieve a finance, fitness or food goal – this practice helps us find the healthy positive.

It’s hard not to become fixated on getting things perfect. It may not be in all areas of our lives, but for almost all of us, we have skills, relationships and responsibilities where we want to show up as perfect. As Dave and Hester Vaughan (yourjourneyforlife.com) often say, “Messy, not perfect!”

This is a great reminder that we mustn’t fall into the perfectionism trap. If we do, we will find piles and piles of frustration. As the Economist wrote in a recent article (by Josh Cohen), society bombards us with instructions to be happier, fitter and richer. Why have we become so dissatisfied with being ordinary?

As a result, we’ve become fixated with ‘never enough’. We never seem to have enough money, time or material possessions, and we feel like we can’t start big projects because we’re not ready.

From Emerson’s provocative defence of “self-reliance” in 1841 to the rise of the self-help industry in the 1930s and the emergence of our own selfie culture, selfhood was regarded as our highest value and the object of our striving. Educational, aesthetic and financial betterment and the need for validation from others are the elements that form the perfectionist air we all now breathe.

Cohen writes that perfectionism “makes for a thin life, lived for what it isn’t rather than what it is”.

The imperative toward perfection remains as potent and pervasive as ever. In an article in 2017, two British psychologists, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, ascribed an exponential rise in perfectionism among the younger generation to the “increasingly demanding social and economic parameters” within which they struggled to make their lives. They also blamed “increasingly anxious and controlling parental practices”.

Social media creates additional pressure to construct a perfect public image, exacerbating our feelings of inadequacy.

This impacts how we make and communicate financial decisions. If we don’t look to understand the emotions and meaning behind our money, we will never be able to uncover the truth of messy, not perfect. Instead of embracing our true values and passions (called “ordinary” by the world), we perpetuate a culture where we are likely to grow dissatisfied with what we have and who we are. 

Managing our money and integrating it with a happy life requires us to recognise and accept that a happy life is messy, not perfect. Remember, the kid with the muddy clothes is the one who had the most fun.

[Find the original Economist article here.]

Every day we make decisions to live a life of our choosing. But yet, when asked about what our ideal life could look like, it’s often quite different from the one we’re living right now. Our decisions link our current life to the life we’d like.

With every decision, we’re either establishing a new boundary, moving a boundary or removing a boundary. Unfortunately, if we spend too much time removing boundaries, we will become increasingly frustrated, resentful, irritable and unhappy with our life.

This is where so much of our dissatisfaction sits: not having healthy boundaries.

When we’ve experienced a physical injury or disease, our doctors will most likely recommend some sort of routine to help us get back on track. Whether this is a routine for medication, exercise, rest, physiotherapy, eating or something else, it’s a way for them to remind us that boundaries are essential to regaining balance and healthy equilibrium.

Without boundaries and firm decisions that are intentional and connected to the life that we want to live, it’s hard to keep all of our good and healthy stuff in, so we will keep letting it slip away. It’s also easier to be distracted by things that aren’t adding value to our lives. We will constantly feel dissatisfied, no matter how hard we try.

Decisions are like lines in the sand. They’re just lines around us, and they will only be helpful and healthy if they’re connected to each other in a way that helps us build and sustain the life we choose. With this in mind, life is really a journey of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing boundaries by growing our awareness of the decisions we’re making, and why we’re making them.

When we can see the link between decisions and boundary setting, we can start to be intentional with moving from a frustrating life to a fulfilled life; we can move from feeling dissatisfied to feeling dedicated and committed to something in line with our passion and peace.

Stress can be an incredibly powerful motivator. Most of the time, we see it as a negative, but that’s because our days are generally overwhelmed with stress. And, our coping skills have evolved to help us survive in environments very different (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). Our mind protects us from harm and further stress by telling us that “we can’t”.

Coping with everyday life is complex and learning to make healthier decisions is a lifelong journey; it’s not something we can learn in one blog, book, podcast or TED talk. Every day we need to learn how to show up in a way that changes our focus from what we can’t do, to what we can.

From how we relate to our family and feel about making luxury purchases to engaging with clients and customers and managing our money, stress always crops up. We can try to avoid it (nearly impossible) or view it as an opportunity to develop and exercise our character.

Psychological research in sports, business, and beyond has identified approaches, skills, and tools to help us cope, overcome, and flourish.

The ABCDE model, developed by Albert Ellis in the 1950s, provides a reflective framework that supports us in changing our emotions and behaviours by identifying irrational beliefs and swapping them with rational ones.

1. ADVERSITY – Acknowledge the activity or adversity that is triggering. For example, not getting the raise you were hoping for or losing a pitch with a new client.
2. BELIEFS – Recognise the irrational beliefs that come to mind when you face adversity. For example, you may believe you are worthless or not good enough and never get anything right.
3. CONSEQUENCES – Recognise the consequences of those irrational beliefs. For example, you may give up trying or decide to lower your standards and start accepting second-best.
4. DISPUTE – Dispute the irrational beliefs and replace them with rational beliefs. For example, you can remind yourself of all your happy clients and customers and the excellent work and acknowledgement you’ve achieved and received in the past.
5. EFFECT – Notice the effect of your new beliefs and the confidence you have to change your situation. For example, you could approach your boss or prospective clients and find out how to do better, or you can keep yourself open to better opportunities that lie around the corner. 

Ultimately, we can’t stop our emotions from running amok. Still, we can interrupt them and become more intentional about what we believe about ourselves and how we will choose to respond in stressful situations.

There are many other strategies, including having a coach or mentor to help you see your blind spots (and irrational beliefs). For many years, financial planners have begun to play a strong coaching and support role to their clients, and as such, together, we can work towards helping you push a little harder or take a healthy rest when you think that you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s okay to listen and learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action Idea #2: Articulate your values.

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

Action Idea #3: Identify your priorities and passions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 – Tasks we don’t enjoy

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

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

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

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

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

DESIGN MATTERS

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

USE POWERFUL IMAGES

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

FOLLOW THE 10/20/30 RULE

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

The 10/20/30 rule is as follows…

-10 slides max

-20 mins total presentation time

-30 point font minimum

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

DON’T READ YOUR SLIDES

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

TELL A STORY

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

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

In recent years our cellphone and mobile device usage has increased significantly. In a recent Irish survey, it was found that the average smartphone user picks up their device more than 50 times per day; a third of people check their phone within five minutes of waking up and 70% within the first 30 minutes. So, if you feel like you’re on your phone a lot, you’re not alone!

One challenge with this 21st-century phenomenon is that many of us, when on our phones, fall prey to “doom scrolling”, the act of consuming a large amount of negative news. We flip through our notifications and then tap on our favourite news or social media app and start scrolling in search of a dopamine hit. This self-sabotaging behaviour can negatively affect our mental health if we are not careful with boundaries or healthier device practices.

Some experts recommend creating boundaries, like taking a break, turning off your device and going for a walk in nature, or deleting social media apps from your phone and replacing them with healthier apps. And these are great, but inevitably, we’re going to find ourselves late-night scrolling or playing one more round of Candy Crush. Perhaps the strategy needs a two-fold approach, one for boundaries and one for better uses.

YouTube is a fantastic platform that can either be an incredible time-waster or a free university. If used strategically, it could turn your phone into a virtual teacher. So, when you’re next sitting down to scroll (after taking a healthy break), here are some ideas of YouTube channels to follow that will make you smarter.

CrashCourse (@TheCrashCourse) – 13+ million subscribers

The Crash Course team has produced more than 42 courses on various subjects, including organic chemistry, literature, world history, biology, philosophy, theatre, ecology, and many more! 

Practical Engineering (@HillhouseGrady) – 2+ million subscribers

Practical Engineering is all about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by civil engineer, Grady Hillhouse.

Y Combinator (@ycombinator) – 450k + subscribers

Twice a year, the Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($500k) in a large number of startups. This channel shares the lessons learnt from working intensively with startups for three months to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

Skillshare (@skillshare) – 420k+ subscribers

If you’re looking for a random melange of creative inspiration, Skillshare is an online learning community for creatives.

Numberphile (@numberphile) – 4+ million subscribers

This channel is all about making numbers and maths fun, taking on unusual perspectives to help us see how shapes and numbers play an integral part in our daily lives.

Remember – it’s important to have downtime, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you want to spend some time mindlessly scrolling; just make sure it doesn’t become an unhealthy habit that you can’t break.