This morning I woke up with an insane headache.
Full frontal attack.
I was still tired and thought, well, I’ll tough it out, maybe it’ll go away. After, oh, 2 seconds, I gave up, got up, and stumbled to the bathroom. I grasped the familiar bottle of Advil and swallowed a couple.
Went back to bed….then realized I had grabbed the wrong bottle of familiar Advil.
Advil PM. Not just the normal Advil. So you can imagine what sort of day I have had!
Operating all day in a fog is not much different from letting your financial life operate in a fog. Things get confusing, precious little is clear, and trying to have cohesive conversation is a futile excercise.
When there isn’t purpose to your money and your future, what, exactly, is the point?
We give so much of ourselves to our careers and our family, why would we not want to have a plan for where we are going?
Why would any of us want to leave our financial future to chance?
Sure, life gets busy, commitments and relationships consume our downtime (not a bad thing), but at the end of the day, when we take an assessment of what the day was like, do we ever come up short from what we expected or feel a sense of infutility?
Well, I definitely don’t want to oversell the peace of mind and sense of empowerment that comes with having a financial plan, but it’s hard not to see the value they provide.
When we connect what we are striving for to our daily efforts, things just make more sense. There’s purpose, which comes in preciously handy on a discouraging day.
Some clients know what their goals are and just need a plan to identify and map strategies to attain them. Others are fuzzy on what their goals are or what purpose their assets have.
That’s where a Values excercise comes in. It’s not a judgemental assessement of what your value set is and if it’s insufficient; quite the opposite.
It’s an assessment of the things that are important to you.
For example, do you value Acheivement? Wisdom? Health? Integrity? Spiritual Growth? Pleasure? Security? Close Relationships? Home Life? It’s not necessarily a Zero Sum Game, where a finite set of values exists. It’s more about prioritizing which values are the most important to you, then ensuring your goals are aligned to them.
Clients really like this excercise because it provides a baseline of purpose to the goals that may not have been able to articulate prior to the excercise.
So if you don’t know What It’s All For, what’s keeping you from taking a step back, figuring out the salient values, then aligning your goals?