Bruce Lee once said: Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. It’s an exceptional quote that is profoundly helpful when working with a financial plan. However, the difference between our current situation and Lee’s is that in the 60s, it was much harder to access information.

Now, we’re overwhelmed with information, and too much advice can derail even the most robust plans. Sifting what is useful from what is useless is exponentially more challenging than it was for previous generations.

And this is just when we’re actively looking for information and advice – what about all the times that our family, friends and colleagues offer unsolicited advice? You may not have been anxious about something, but now that they brought it up, you can’t stop thinking about it!

Elizabeth Scott, from verywellmind.com, says that anyone can be on the receiving end of unsolicited advice, and it doesn’t always feel helpful. Whilst it can be a life-saver, unsolicited advice can create stress.

People offer advice for many reasons, some of which are well-intentioned, others less so. As Lee alluded to, the key is being able to tell the difference and understanding a person’s motives can be especially helpful.

There are helpful motives, like altruism, friendliness and shared excitement – but some advice can come from a place of neediness and helplessness. There are more damaging motivations, including traits like narcissism, control, judgment, and drama. We’ve all experienced advice given from a range of these places and will continue to experience this, so we need to have a plan to create healthy boundaries to protect ourselves from too much advice.

Verywellmind.com suggests that when someone is giving advice to make themselves feel more powerful, there is underlying anxiety in their behaviour that we will most likely pick up on. We might be triggered to react harshly and accuse them of being manipulative, but this approach might backfire.

We need to take space from the situation so that we can respond from a non-reactive place. We can validate their advice and create an atmosphere of emotional security for both of us. The key is to validate without overidentifying. We can let them know we’ve heard them and appreciate where they are coming from without taking on the potentially damaging narrative.

To do this while proactively communicating a boundary around further advice, you might say something like, “Thanks for the idea. I have my own plan for handling this, but I really appreciate your perspective and will take it into consideration. Can I let you know when I need help in the future?”

If you have trouble setting boundaries without being reactive, prioritise working on your own ability to self-regulate. As uncomfortable as it may make you to continuously receive unwanted advice, if you can respond with compassion, the situation will likely diffuse much faster.

We’re all different, which means we’ll all approach things differently and make personal choices. In an unaware environment, this will always create conflict and stress, but in an aware environment, it creates opportunities for growth, collaboration and stronger relationships. 

P.S. If you’re the one offering unsolicited advice… “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

― Will Rogers

How much time do you waste trying to solve problems that haven’t happened yet? Many of us fixate on problems that might happen tomorrow, next week or several years in the future, and this is not what life and financial planning are about. Getting stuck in the future at the cost of living life to its fullest today is precisely what we’re trying to avoid! This is why we talk so much about being mindful.

Dr Susan David says that true mindfulness is when the mind stops insisting on being rational, stops being a problem-solving or indexing machine, and becomes more of a sponge than a calculator. It just is.

This is a beautiful take on mindfulness – seeing our awareness as a sponge to soak up what’s happening right now, to be present and conscious. It also helps us see our natural inclination to calculate, problem-solve and plan for the ifs and maybes in our future. Mindfulness helps our money in that it allows us to use what we have today in a way that will make our future-self grateful; in other words, it helps us avoid making choices that we might regret.

When we see planning as a way to create a specific future for ourselves, we limit ourselves to one perspective of our future, limiting our ability to accept different outcomes and causing heaps of self-sabotage in the process. We find ourselves stuck in old narratives and developing a cynicism toward ourselves and others.

This is not helpful planning; it’s destructive and impossible to stick to.

Instead, when we practice financial planning that is linked to our life choices, not our income, markets or products, we have to become more mindful of what our life truly looks like and how we’d like to make empowered choices for ourselves and our family.

Mindfulness with our money helps us see the world through multiple perspectives.

Multiple perspectives open up our financial conversations to be more inclusive, interwoven with the thoughts and feelings of those we love and trust, and this is incredibly empowering. Speaking with your partner, kids and parents about money means that you don’t have to shoulder the burden of “providing for the future” alone. It also allows us to draw on the strengths of the different money personalities in our family and reduce our blind spots.

Mindfulness with our money enables us to move forward with higher levels of acceptance.

It’s tough to move forward if we expect one specific outcome, and it doesn’t happen the way we expected. We will see this as an all-consuming failure. But when we can plan with multiple perspectives, we can move forward with a more profound acceptance of different outcomes. It’s not about accepting second-best or finding a compromise; it’s about totally changing our mindset around how success will look.

Mindfulness with our money cultivates tolerance and self-kindness

Rational, problem-solving, calculative behaviour causes us to try and save all our money for future crises and expenses. Mindful sponginess allows us to see how we can invest in experiences and relationships that we enjoy today. This is not to say that we don’t invest for tomorrow, but it helps us find that healthy balance between enjoying life today AND tomorrow.

Mindfulness with our money allows us to practice non-judgement

A strong focus on our own lives, relationships, dreams and goals takes the focus off what others are doing and protects us from comparing ourselves to others. This is a powerful and all-too-often understated benefit of personal lifestyle financial planning. 

Mindfulness with our money equips us to rework old-narratives

To a large extent, managing our money has changed significantly from how our parents and grandparents managed their money. This is because money and life are linked – when life changes, money changes and when money changes, life changes. If we adopt a growth mindset with our money, we will find ourselves freshly equipped to re-think and re-build strategies to use our money wisely.

Ultimately, we need to slow down and create space to be intentional with our choices. This applies to life as much as it does to our money. By taking care of ourselves today, we take the first step to taking care of ourselves tomorrow.

Have you ever gone for a walk in the garden without shoes on? Remember what it felt like, as a kid, to come home from school – slip out of tight school shoes and walk barefoot? Whether it was on comfy rugs, soft sea-sand or lush grass, the sensation often felt so good because we were grounding ourselves.

A quick Google search will tell us that there’s a lot more happening when we walk barefoot. The exchange and release of energy are scientifically measurable, and the experience has a positive impact on our health.

As adults, we often forget to walk barefoot – and we often forget to keep ourselves well-grounded. Liz Fosslien, Author, Speaker, Head Of Communications and Content at Humu, recently shared some helpful thoughts on this through her LinkedIn profile.

She said that when everything feels up in the air, rituals can help us ground ourselves.

Research shows that rituals significantly reduce our stress levels. Psychologists have found that it doesn’t even matter what the practice is; simply doing the same thing at the same time can improve your mental health.

Whilst some of us do all we can to break free from structures and systems, the hidden truth is that structures can increase our sense of security and wellbeing. This means that it’s not the structures or rituals that are the problem but our connection to what they mean or represent. If we have little or no connection to the schedule or routine or feel like we don’t support the system implementing those routines, we can leave and create our own routines.

If we look over our lives, we will see that we’ve always had routines that help us stay grounded, and that’s okay! But, as we encounter change, our routines can be interrupted, leaving us feeling untethered and stressed.

It could be something as simple as saying to yourself, “My work is complete for today” at the end of every day of working from home. You will be affirming that you’ve achieved something for the day and that you can now let go and relax, focussing attention on other things in your life that make and keep you happy and healthy.

Maybe it means beginning your day with a 7-minute workout, or winding down at night with Wordle. It could be a weekly practice of reviewing your budget and planning the meals for the week ahead.

On the flip side, it can also be helpful to intentionally let some things go. Perhaps, instead of feeling untethered, you’re feeling overwhelmed with too much to do. Fosslien shared the story of a friend who, ahead of moving across the country, decided to order takeout for dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not worry about cooking. “I gave myself permission to put some parts of my life on autopilot,” she recounted.

If you feel like you’re losing track, perhaps you need some grounding. Let’s chat if you think that might help, but take a moment to consider the things you enjoy doing and the people you enjoy spending time with, and make sure you’re regularly making time for that. Oh yes, and walk around barefoot once in a while!

The root of our wealth is not in our income or our spending; it’s in our behaviour. Our habits make us wealthy, not the markets. Some have said that sound financial management comes down to spending less than we earn – but whilst this adage holds merit, it’s a lot more complicated in practice.

It’s complicated because people are complicated.

It’s not helpful to tell someone who is already relying on credit to get through the month, to spend less than they earn. Most often, in our experience in the financial planning profession, people find themselves in debt because life throws a curveball they weren’t expecting, and despite prudent planning, they have had to incur to make ends meet.

We need to stop feeling guilty for having debt, and we need to find ways to sustainably work towards healthier finances. This is difficult to manage when we have people telling us that we need to “save for a rainy day”, “invest for the long term”, and “pay down our debt”.

What we need is people telling us that where we are right now, having decided to improve our financial situation, is an excellent place to be. It’s a good place because our intention is right – and when we set a good intention, we can ensure that energy and resources flow towards that intention.

Saving and investing form part of this, but not often how we expect. Saving and investing are actually only powerful when we can form them into habits. Remember, the root of our wealth lies in our repetitive behaviour.

Saving and investing have many different features, but they do share one common goal: they’re both strategies that help you accumulate money. They allow us to consider what might happen tomorrow and ensure some of the money we may need will be available.

It’s helpful to think incrementally when talking about planning for tomorrow’s financial needs. If we hold an idea that we’ll make a bulk deposit into our savings or investments, we unconsciously do two things: we put it off until we think we have enough, and we see it as a big-in and big-out deal (kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme).

But, if we hold to the premise that wealth is built through good habits, we can start to see that both saving and investing work best when practised a little bit at a time. This means we don’t have to put it off; we can put a little bit aside each month – whatever we can afford. The amount is far less important than the habit we’re trying to develop. And, we’ll be less likely to make significant withdrawals on our savings and investments because we can appreciate how long they’ve taken to accrue.

Whether through our savings or investments, building wealth is best done, one brick at a time. This is how we build a firm foundation for healthy financial planning.

WHERE TRUE FINANCIAL PLANNING STARTS

One of the best ways to make any constructive change or difference in the direction of our lives is to take a moment to observe what’s currently going on. Life whizzes by so quickly that if we don’t check in with ourselves, we will find it hard to observe and articulate what has changed.

Financial planning, if done right, should start in the same place. Rather than beginning a financial planning conversation by talking about what’s changed in the market, or what’s changed with financial products, it’s more helpful to talk about what’s changed within our own life.

So often, it’s easy to get sucked into the financial happenings of everyone else, and then benchmark ourselves according to things that we cannot change or influence. This is when we run the danger of developing a toxic and harmful view of our financial situation.

If we think that everyone else is doing well because we see the lifestyle choices they’re making, we can feel like we’re falling behind or the only people struggling. 

We read on social media how other people are buying new cars, moving homes, or emigrating – we see the changes happening in their lives and can subtly start to think that perhaps we should be doing the same. But – it’s not about what changes in their lives. It’s not about what happens with the stock exchange or political unrest on another continent.

It’s about what’s changing in our own lives.

Financial decisions are linked to our daily lifestyle choices; we cannot separate them. Anything we choose to do today will impact our finances tomorrow. So, if we’re going to talk about financial planning in a way that is inseparable from our life, family and business, we need to focus on what’s changing in our own lives, day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month.

You may know that journaling is a powerful way to help us heal and sustain our mental health. Coaches, counsellors and psychologists all encourage their clients to keep journals to track their emotions and thoughts in a way that can help them observe behaviours and articulate the changes they’d like to make. This process often includes identifying behaviours that are sparked or triggered by specific thoughts or feelings.

When it comes to our finances, it’s not too different. In fact – in accounting, the record of business finance is called a journal, and each item is referred to as a journal entry. In personal finance, the journal is a little like your personal budget. It helps us understand where our money is going, and why.

Financial planning considers your budget, all of your assets and responsibilities and the potential risk of losing or limiting your income. It’s all about you and helping you navigate the journey of making better financial decisions.

So – your financial planning should always begin with a conversation about what’s changed in your life, not what’s changed in the middle of Asia. It should focus on your concerns, not those of your neighbours down the way. This is how we can work together to help you achieve and engage with a financial plan that truly benefits you and your family and changes with you.

Some people say that magic isn’t real, but what about the first magic words we’re all taught to say? No – not “abracadabra” or “zimzalabim”, although those are great words. Abracadabra is thought to come from the Aramaic phrase “avra kehdabra”, meaning “I will create as I speak”, and zimzalabim comes from the mythological tricksters, Zim Zala and Bim.

But, our most basic and formative levels of social etiquette (getting people to do what we want = magic) include the words “please” and “thank you”. Leading money gurus and coaches are increasingly aware that much of our sentiment and feelings influence our ability to create, grow, protect and share our wealth. Having a positive mindset around our money is instrumental in maintaining good mental health.

Many years ago, the phrase “an attitude of gratitude” became a popular saying. If we read the early Stoic philosophers, the themes of thought linking gratitude and wellness are abundant, reminding us that it’s not a new concept but possibly as old as magic itself. 

The link between gratitude and our wealth can be as simple as saying thank you when we receive a flow of money. It can be from a regular paycheck, an upward shift in our stocks, the sale of an asset or any other windfall or gift of generosity. Every time we open a statement or receive a notification from our bank or e-wallet letting us know that there’s more money now than there was a few seconds ago, we can say, “Thank you, money.”

The thought behind this practice is much deeper than simply acknowledging the money itself; rather, it’s about recognising the gratitude for what the money will mean to how you can be generous. When we see money as a flowing commodity that moves quite freely between us all, we can see how it connects and empowers us, and we can use it in a healthier way.

We can also say “thank you, money” when spending (paying it forward) money. Whether it’s for a basket full of groceries, school fees, a cup of coffee, dinner out with our loved ones, or a payment for our home, releasing that money with gratitude improves our mental wellbeing and our ability to sustain a positive mindset.

What we’re ultimately saying is that we’re grateful that we have the money we need, to do what we need to, at that moment. This is why it’s so much deeper than just the momentary transaction. This approach speaks to how we received the money and have kept it; it recognises the people involved and the opportunities with which we’ve been gifted.

Would you consider yourself to be financially intelligent? Depending on how you answer that, here’s another tough question: how much do you trust yourself to manage your own finances? Often we find that after answering the second question, clients want to go back and reanswer the first! And, that’s okay.

As Ken Honda suggests, there’s more than one type of financial intelligence, and we can work on both to be happy and prosperous.

Honda, Japan’s no. 1 money teacher, helps people understand money’s true role in their lives and manage their feelings towards money. In his approach, he speaks to Money IQ and Money EQ. We have found that most people only ever discuss Money IQ or the practical accounting, money-making, investing side of money. Unfortunately, we’re never really taught how to have conversations about Money EQ — our emotional intelligence about money.

We need a healthy balance of both Money IQ and Money EQ. High Money EQ allows us to develop a much better relationship — not only with money but also with the people in our lives — and at the end of the day, all of life’s most important chances and opportunities come to us through people we know and meet.

Here’s how Honda unpacks the different stages of integration of our Money IQ and EQ:

#1 Low Money IQ – Low Money EQ

People in this category are fraught with money stress, finding themselves in a perpetual state of scarcity with seemingly no sign of upward mobility. This is where most of us begin our journey.  

#2 High Money IQ – Low Money EQ

The vast majority of people fall into this category, knowing the mechanics of money, but the idea of money still carries some emotional baggage.

#3 Low Money IQ – High Money EQ

People in this category tend not to have money stress, but they don’t always have a good handle on their wealth. Interestingly enough, if you find yourself in this category, getting to the next and final stage is a lot easier!

#4 High Money IQ – High Money EQ

Here, we strike the ideal balance between handling and growing your wealth and enjoying everything our money can do for our quality of life.

There are many ways to move from one end of the spectrum to the other, and having a financial adviser help you along the way will make the process significantly easier! As we journey together, you will hopefully begin to face your finances with positivity, confident in your ability to fulfill your goals. Even after a stumble, moving forward will become much easier, freeing yourself from constrictive viewpoints about finance to avoid sabotaging yourself. 

You will also find it easier to focus on what you can control and detach from what you can’t control.

At the heart of everything, we find relationships. Most of these are unintentional relationships that happen situationally, but some are relationships that stem from our choices. From the moment we enter the world, we will have a relationship with everyone and everything: from the space around us to the people who are present and how each made us feel.

While these connections are as old as life, the Scientific Revolution sparked Newton’s insight in 1687. He discovered that when two bodies interact, they apply forces that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. This is known as Newton’s Third Law: the law of action and reaction.

In other words, everything is related to everything. It’s science. And, as sentient beings, our relationships influence our thoughts, feelings and actions (or reactions…).

Have you ever noticed how something as simple as the weather can affect your feelings and choices, or how the energy of someone else in the room can fill you with hope or totally deflate your sails? What about coffee, sugar, meat, milk, gluten and soy – what is your relationship like with them? What about your money, job, family – how do these relationships leave you feeling and influence your choices?

Sometimes these feelings are legitimately influenced by external forces of attraction; sometimes, they start in our head. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that attempts to modify thought patterns to help change moods and behaviour. If negative thoughts begin in our head, we can hopefully end them there too.

According to a recent blog on healthline.com, CBT is based on the idea that negative actions or feelings are from current distorted beliefs or thoughts, not unconscious forces from the past. These patterns can form into several categories of self-defeating thinking (also known as cognitive distortions).

These may include:

• all-or-nothing thinking: viewing the world in absolute, black-and-white terms
• disqualifying the positive: rejecting positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason
• automatic negative reactions: having habitual, scolding thoughts
• magnifying or minimising the importance of an event: making a bigger deal about a specific event or moment
• overgeneralisation: drawing overly broad conclusions from a single event
• personalisation: taking things too personally or feeling actions are specifically directed at you
• mental filter: picking out a single negative detail and dwelling on it exclusively so that the vision of reality becomes darkened

When we can identify and observe these patterns of thinking, we can do something about them! This means that if the stock markets crash or someone crashes into our parked car, we can re-train our brains for healthier reactions.

We can learn to manage and modify distorted thoughts and reactions, and accurately and comprehensively assess external situations and reactions or emotional behaviour. Practising accurate and balanced self-talk will help us reflect and respond appropriately. So the next time you’re talking to yourself – see if you can retrain your brain and feel healthier.

<Click here for more on CBT>

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.