Gails Blog

I remember when I was growing up, everyone used to tell me, “You can’t have it all. You’ll have to choose.” I heard it again and again, from everyone. Everyone, that is, except my mother who told me, “You can have it all, you’re just going to have to work hard for it.” Thankfully, I believed my mom.

You know, I still hear that old phrase: you can’t have it all. I was told I’d have to choose between raising a family and having a career.  Tell that to my kids who, as toddlers, would come running into my home-office, bare-butt just before they jumped into the tub.

I was told “You have to decide whether you’re a child or a grown up, and behave appropriately”. Yeah, right? Fact is, I’m pretty button-down when it comes to the detail of my business and financial life. But you don’t get much more free-spirited than howling — arrrrooooooooooo — loudly for a husband lost in the aisles of the local supermarket.

So I have it all. I’ve got a happy home life, a lovely husband, two kids I’d die for, work that I love to do (even at 4:00 a.m. in the morning, which is when I often write) and I’m financially free.  My life is in balance.

Balance, of course, is the ability to deal with myriad priorities, giving each just as much attention as it deserves. Balance means not working so hard at accumulating assets that you fail to spend time watching the children play. Balance means weighing the need for future retirement savings with the need for providing your partner, your children, your friends with fun and exciting experiences in the present. It’s about taking care of today and tomorrow. And it’s about satisfying your soul while you challenge your intellect.

Now, it’s pretty hard to keep your sense of balance when reality bites — when divorce, widowhood, disability, or unemployment contrives to push you off kilter. “Balance?” you shriek, “How can I have any sense of balance when I’m just barely making it from day to day, paycheque to paycheque?”  Ah, yes. Well, that’s where the plan comes in.

Balance isn’t something that happens. It takes work. It requires that you create a blueprint for your life. And it requires that you take control of the components of your life that you can control, so when you stumble over one of life’s bumps in the road you can pick yourself up and move on. It means planning like a pessimist so you can live like an optimist.

By taking care of the financial parts of your life , you’ll be covered for any of life’s financial disasters. Whether you find yourself suddenly living on one income, having to care for your aging parents, or dealing with kids who have boomeranged home, you’ll be prepared, at least financially, to cope.

By setting goals, you’ll be laying the blueprint for how you want your life to look. You’ll be creating the balance with which you want to pursue your dreams and achieve your purpose.

When I had my children and I moved from being a career-focused glamour-puss to being a much more balanced, whole woman. My babies were the catalyst for reviewing my life and deciding what I wanted to expend my life’s energy to achieve. I decided on a little of this, and a little of that. Some career, some learning, time spent nurturing my soul and my babies. In the process, I proved my mom was right.

I learned I can have it all… I just can’t have it all at the same time. Maturity has brought the ability to prioritize, to give a little, to negotiate with myself and others so that I can do what’s most important at a particular point in time. When it looked like my Malcolm was going to have to be home-schooled because his Asperger’s Syndrome was too much for the school system to cope with, I quit all my jobs, packed up and moved to the country (to cut overheads) and got busy figuring out what I’d needed to know. Luckily, in the process, I found a school that was up to the job. 

I do consider myself to be a very lucky girl. But I also know that I’ve been willing to take advantage of opportunities — even to make opportunities — that would take me to where I wanted to be next. None of it has been accidental.

Think about what you want your life to look like five years from now. Who will you be near to? What will you be doing? And what steps do you have to take financially to get to where you want to be?

Decide that you’re not going to feel bad, overwhelmed, stupid, stressed, or anything else negative about your money anymore. Instead, you’re going to do something about it — no matter how small those steps — so you can achieve your own sense of financial peace.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath and repeat after me: “I am more than what my financial statistics say about me. I can have anything I want, if I prepared to work hard. Today I want to ….”

Go ahead, fill in the blank.

 

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under Good ideas, Life Lessons, Take Control. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.