So you have a goal of improving your financial strength, but it seems like inevitably, the tasks of work and home life get in the way of you taking the steps necessary to accomplish that goal.
The strong feeling that you need to “get things done” that only help your current “to do list” versus getting things done that help your longer-term financial planning and success is very attractive.
It can pull us in like a magnet.
It’s generally easier to keep going along in one’s routine instead of breaking out of the mold and doing something new.
Of course there’s the non-negotiable “have to’s” that compete for your time, too, for example, preparing dinner for and feeding your children or taking them to soccer practice.
Not everything can be easily cleared out of your list of daily grind activities, but we can all agree that setting time aside, whether it’s 10 minutes a day or 2 hours a day or 60 minutes per week, is an absolutely necessary ingredient to achieving your financial goals.
Even if you were planning on making an investment where you didn’t need to do any work to build the income that’s expected to arise from it, you generally need to set time aside to research and learn about it.
And, if you don’t set that time aside, you’re likely not to go forward with whatever investment, business opportunity, home business, side income project, etc., that you’d ideally like to take part in.
Why? Because without enough knowledge of a business or opportunity we’d likely want to take part in, we’re rightfully hesitant.
So, to move forward and get enough knowledge and information to take the next step, we have to figure out what our blockages are on that path…
In fact, if you’re blocked on your journey to making more income, you HAVE TO find out what’s getting in your way or you’ll be in the same place a year from now, 5 years from now, and 10 years from now,
And that position is one that will not have solved your financial challenges.
And it’s one that won’t make you feel good about yourself.
There are a lot of reasons why people can be blocked on the journey to making more money.
To figure out what those are, you can take my Wealth Blocks Quiz.
And there are 4 main Wealth Block categories, designated by the MAKS acronym.
What's really sidetracking you?
This article isn’t going to cover all of those categories, but instead, we’ll focus in on when it is that people get sidetracked due to a lack of being able to prioritize your financial goals amid the many pulls and stressors of daily work and home life.
And we’re going to refer to this occurrence as The Whirlpool of Your Daily Grind for the obvious reason that the activities of your daily grind pull you into your status quo and that cause you to ignore and avoid the rescue boat of a new opportunity that is there to pull you out of your daily grind and into the safety of financial strength.
On some level, it’s unfortunate that we’re in an economic system that was not designed to give you more free time to accomplish your goals and fulfill your dreams.
That said, we know that for most of us, we have to find a way to break free from the bonds of the current economic structure, so that we’re not a victim of it.
For many people, that means they have to stop trading their time for money and start making their time and their money work for them.
So it requires figuring out the WHAT and the HOW.
WHAT financial vehicles will get me there and HOW will I operate those vehicles so that they arrive at their intended destinations.
The problem is that most people haven’t even put the key in the ignition to test drive a financial vehicle.
Instead, the vehicle is locked with the parking brake on.
They’ve stopped all progress toward their goals before they’ve even gotten started.
Now, if this feeling resonates with you, you probably already know it as your truth, but let’s be sure to look at 3 main symptoms of getting stuck in the Whirlpool of Your Daily Grind, so you can self-“diagnose”.
Symptom #1: The daily tasks of work and home life are always grabbing your attention, directing it away from your pathway to financial success.
Symptom #2: It feels hard, or almost impossible, to prioritize tasks on your pathway to future success as more than, or as equally, important compared to your daily work and home tasks that aren’t helping you achieve your financial goals.
Symptom #3: You start to think it would be too hard, or almost impossible, to break out of the Whirlpool of Your Daily Grind, just because you haven’t found the way out yet.
Now that you know what to look for as evidence of being stuck in the Whirlpool of Your Daily Grind, you need some “rescue boats”.
So, what do they look like?
Rescue Boat 1: Your calendar is your best friend right now, if you use it. If you write something in as a non-negotiable on your calendar and treat it as if it were a meeting that someone was going to hand you $30K cash at, you’ll show up for yourself. You can’t rule in or rule out an opportunity as being something possibly for you or not if you haven’t researched it. If you literally don’t have 60 minutes to learn something new, then you’ll have to get up one hour earlier or go to bed one hour later or do your research in the middle of the night while you’re stressing about having not met your financial goals.
Rescue Boat 2: Use your values to motivate you. This works very powerfully. I wrote a whole article on this, so, if you feel like your motivation is more of an issue than your ability to prioritize within a tight schedule, check out the article here. In short, if we don’t keep the reasons WHY we want to accomplish a financial goal in front of us, it’s going to be much harder to stay on task. However, when you constantly remind yourself of your reasons WHY you want to achieve something and also why it would feel like a real let-down if you didn’t accomplish a goal, you will have the motivation to get the important steps done.
Rescue Boat 3: Use a guide or a mentor to help you stay accountable. Ask the person who introduced you to a money-making opportunity to help you stay “on point”, or, ask a peer who is involved in something similar to help you. Worst case scenario, ask a family member who wants you to reach your financial goals to get on your case about it.
You might need to use just one of those rescue boats, maybe 2, and possibly even all 3 to “make it happen”, but then at least you won’t feel hard on yourself a year from now when nothing has changed for the better in your financial life.
You deserve all the riches in the world that you desire, but, you cannot have them if you don’t align with them in your thinking and in your actions.
