Start With Your Values
A client told me she struggles to make decisions when there are so many we face on a daily basis. What do I spend money on? Where do I sacrifice? Where should I choose to prioritize my time and energy?
I helped her identify her core values- the things that are most important to her. She identified family, education, and physical/mental health. When we identify our core values, decision making becomes much easier. That’s where we can choose to focus our time, energy, and money.
For example, I have never been interested in flashy cars or clothes or shoes or purses. Spending money on those things would not improve my life in any way, would not increase my sense of joy or wellbeing. However, my health is very important to me and I really enjoy hiking and healthy eating. I have decided that I will not even look at the price tags when I am buying hiking shoes or organic fruits and vegetables. These things will bring immense value to my life and I will never regret spending money on them.
I told my client that she can stop spending on things that are not important to her. Anything that could potentially increase the value of her experience with health, education, or family should be a green light. She wanted to start meal prepping so she could feed her family healthy meals but also spend more time with them rather than spending hours in the kitchen each day. She told me she struggles to spend the time on meal prep because it seems like such a big chore. I encouraged her to make meal prep super easy to start off with, remove as many barriers as possible. Try spending the extra money on pre-cut vegetables, just for one week. I suspect that if she starts the habit of meal prepping, she will find a stride that works for her. However, if she never starts, she will never receive the reward of having more time to spend with her family and being able to enjoy healthy meals all week.
Similarly, she was struggling with spending around her education and a feeling that she was not worthy of the money sacrifice. We talked about the value that her education brings to herself and her family. What would it look like if she imagined turning the dial way up on her spending around education? She said she would buy an app that reads her textbooks to her so she could improve her retention of the material and print out her textbooks because she finds it difficult to read on the computer. I could see her face light up when we talked about these ideas. She began to recognize that if she could make it easier to do her schoolwork, she would be able to spend more time with her kids. Win-win!
Sometimes in life we experience a sort of decision fatigue, having to make so many daily decisions each day about what to prioritize, what to sacrifice. Having a system in place can cut down on these daily decisions and allow us more mental energy and time to spend on the things that actually add value to our lives.
What are your core values? What are the things you really value and enjoy? How can you turn the time and money dials way down on the things that don’t add value and way up on the things that make life meaningful to you? Develop a system around this idea and you will see a massive shift in your life.
