Category: LIFE

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.