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.

Many important questions in life involve money, and good choices can put us on the road to financial success. Bad choices, however, can lead to years of financial duress.

While the questions we ask ourselves may not involve investing in the latest hot stock, they may likely deal with more basic matters like identifying how we feel about money, managing our money, and what to do when facing financial hardship.

Learning how to make smart money choices early in life is the best way to ensure financial success in the long run.

We believe it’s healthy to begin this journey by identifying what we want. This makes it easier to craft a budget and make better choices. Knowing what we are saving for, and having a personal desire or connection to it, will boost our motivation to save or curb our spending in other areas.

The next time you’re out shopping, pay attention to the cues your body and mind give you. If you’re in the habit of paying for everything with a credit card, you’re more likely to overspend. Using a credit card for a quick trip to the mall doesn’t give you the financial freedom and security you’ll need later. Instead, make a game plan for how you will save money (or use your money wisely) on your next purchase.

Some people who feel trapped by the credit-card-spending-habit go on a cash diet. The basic premise is that you put aside all the cash you need for your budgeted purchases for the week, fortnight or month, and stick to that cash amount. It helps you physically see how much money you’re spending (and saving!!) without the detachment of a virtual transaction through cashless payments.

Setting financial goals is another way to avoid both impulse purchases and buyer’s remorse. Goals allow us to communicate and focus on the reasons why we will hold back from one purchase but indulge in another.

You can also share your saving and investing goals with your family and friends so that everyone can be aligned and offer support on your journey to financial independence.

The economy is suffering from the worst recession in decades. It’s more important than ever to make better money choices to contribute to the financial strength of your future self.

Are you wondering why some people get burned out while others don’t? What is the difference between stress and burnout? And, what can you do to manage stress and avoid burnout? 

Without a doubt, we are living in a time of significant stress and burnout and we need practical and self-loving ways to address this for ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues.

While stress and burnout are often confused, they are different. Identifying the differences is the first step in addressing the unhealthy thoughts and behaviours in our lives. Stress is a normal adaptive reaction to adversity, while burnout is a result of uncontrolled or excessive stress.

In both cases, the person suffering from the symptoms will be unable to function normally, however, the signs of burnout will include anxiety, mood swings, lack of concentration and brain fog. 

According to the American Psychological Association, heightened work-related stress is a significant contributor to burnout among U.S. workers. In a recent survey of 1,501 U.S. adults, researchers found that 79% had experienced some form of work-related stress in the month prior to the survey. More than half of these employees had felt the negative effects of work-related stress, including a lack of motivation, interest, or effort in their jobs. Among those who experienced work-related stress, 36% reported feeling tired, fatigued, or emotionally worn out, while 44% reported feeling physically exhausted.

In many cases, prolonged stress will lead to exhaustion and a diminished sense of satisfaction. Other early signs of burnout can include procrastination, taking out frustrations on others, and skipping work. The signs of burnout can be subtle, but it’s time to address them if you’re starting to experience these symptoms.

Burnout can occur for several reasons, but a poor work-life balance is possibly the most common and easiest to address. 

Finding creative outlets is one of the most important aspects of self-care, as is making time to investigate, explore and engage in things we enjoy. While work may seem like a grind and leave us feeling exhausted, having a hobby, sport, or other activity to unwind and spend time with family and friends can help us avoid the pitfalls of burnout. 

Identifying triggers for stress and preventing them is a helpful way to reduce the chance of returning to a burnout track. Try writing down the exact time and place when you experience a stressful event or activity. Review your notes regularly to avoid repeating the same behaviours, relationships, or situations. If you are experiencing chronic stress, it’s time to reassess your priorities and prioritise the things that matter.

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.

“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.