It is never too late to heal and change your life. It doesn’t matter how old you are or your circumstances. If you want to heal and change your life, it’s never too late. When we haven’t healed, we may be prone to bleed on people who didn’t cut us. We aren’t living our best life because we are still dealing with trauma. Many of us are still living in survival mode – which is only a phase intended to help you through struggle. It isn’t supposed to be how we live our lives.

It is far better to show up late, living the life you always dreamt of, than never doing it at all. The problem is, it is in our nature to stick with our same patterns and routines, even when they no longer serve us. We would rather play it safe and stick with the known, even if it’s awful. It’s the devil we know versus the devil we don’t.

If you have some healing to do, get started now. Maybe seeing a therapist would be helpful. Maybe reading some books about what you are struggling with will open you up to new perspectives on what you can do to heal. Perhaps finding a support community can help you feel less alone.

The important thing is to stop waiting for conditions to be ideal to make your move. You deserve to live a life where you are happy and victorious. Let your story of healing be the one the lights the way for others in the future.

As convenient or as good of an idea as taking out credit sounds, it is never a good idea. I suppose you can argue getting a mortgage is okay, and most of us, myself included, aren’t able to go out and buy a house with cash money.

Having had our fair share of debt over the years, like credit cards, student loans and car loans, I never realized what it was really like to be financially free until we were. Taking out student loans, getting car loans and using credit cards for vacations have become the norm in our society. And sadly, many of us go down that road not realizing how long those shackles will stay on us. We sure did.

When I was a teenager, I would ask my grandmother for advice on everything in life and money was no exception. She owned her own home and had paid it off well before my grandpa passed away. She was living off survivor benefits, social security, and her personal savings. All of this might sound like it was a lot, but it really wasn’t. But she was really good a managing her money and coming up with creative ways to save money and not worry about how she was going to pay her insurance, property taxes or monthly bills.

She grew up during the Great Depression and was one of nine children that her parents had. They were expected to do chores around the house. And when they were teenagers and able to work, they were expected to give their parents half of their income. Her parents didn’t want to take money from their children, but it was very difficult times, and people were barely scraping by.

For months my grandmother walked by a shoe store on her way home from work at night and saw a pair of shoes she loved. She couldn’t afford them, especially with her own expenses and giving half of what she made to her parents. One day when she got her paycheck, she decided to buy the shoes. When she went home, she was terrified about what her mother would say when she couldn’t give her half of her paycheck. When she got home, expecting the worst, her mother chuckled and said, “good for you. You’ve earned them.”

She learned a lot about delayed gratification, something I feel like we all struggle with in our society. My husband and I joke about the “Amazon elves” that deliver whatever we want overnight. But this applies to services like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, Shipt, etc. We can have many of the things we want, without having to wait long at all.

After years of working to pay off student loans, car loans and credit card debt, I will never, ever get back into debt. I didn’t realize what real financial freedom was until we were finally in a place where we didn’t have debt. Every now and again, we talk about buying a car to go overlanding in, and maybe we’ll get it at some point. But because my mindset has radically shifted when it comes to money, the only way I want to buy it is paying for it outright. And that would require a decent chunk of change that I’m not so sure I want to part with yet.

I’m grateful for the debt we had because it taught me that once you carry your own water, you will learn the value of every drop. Now I am much more selective in what we spend money on and really weigh out the consequences. We still have fun and buy things we want, but it’s always within reason and a budget.

Speaking of a budget, I recommend having a monthly budget, even if you don’t have debt to pay off. We like knowing where our money goes every month. If we don’t tell it where to go, it will be spent on things that we probably don’t need. We allocate for things we want to buy or if we want to do something, but it’s always in the budget as “monthly incidentals” or “cash reserves”.

The best financial advice I can give you, though, are three things:

1. If you currently have debt, pay it off as soon as humanly possible. Even if you are young and have a lot of time to pay off your student loans. Double or triple up on those payments if you can afford it each month. Do the same with car loans if you have them. We paid off our debt by prioritizing our smallest debts first. We paid the minimum on everything, with exception of the account with the lowest balance. If we couldn’t pay it off in full, we paid as much as we could each month. Any money saved on our budget in any other category for that month would go straight towards that month’s goal. Sometimes it took us months to pay off the lowest balance account, but that was our focus until it was paid. Once it was, on to the next one.

2. Strive to be able to live comfortably off of 50% of your monthly salary. I know that might sound impossible, and it might be right now. But strive to get to this place. If you can live comfortably with 50% of your net income each month, then you can allocate the other half for saving for a house, a car to buy outright, a trip you want to take, retirement, when the shit hits the fan and any charitable donations you want to make.

3. Become anti-fragile. Don’t be dependent on any one source for your income. In our changing economic times, it’s crazy to put all your eggs in one basket. Create a side hustle for yourself. If you are good at writing, try freelancing on sites like Fiverr or Upwork. If you do graphic design or know how to edit video or audio, you can make some decent money doing it for others. If you are crafty, open a store on Etsy. The important thing is to have multiple sources of income, even if it’s a small one, so you aren’t just dependent on one source.

When I was a kid, I went rock climbing with my youth group. I had never done it before and I was so far from my comfort zone. I wrote about this adventure outside of my comfort zone in an earlier post. I learned a lot about myself suspended in the air on a cliffside that Spring.

I say this repeatedly, but it’s true: You cannot afford to live in potential for the rest of your life. At some point, you have to make your move. 

It is okay to be scared to be out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a nice place, but nothing ever grows there. By challenging yourself, you grow. And when you grow, the magic happens.

For many of us, we want to play it safe. We crave certainty. But life is meant for adventure, cultivating deep relationships, and understanding why we are here. How can you experience those things if you are unwilling to venture out to where those answers are?

Take the idea of a beautiful ship. Ships are meant to be in the open sea, discovering new places. While there is risk anytime you leave the safe harbor and navigate the ocean, if you leave the ship docked there, it will rust and rot. And the same is true for us. We are meant to constantly change and evolve. And the only thing we can really count on is change. It is always going to happen. So we can either choose to grow from change and doing things differently, or we can decide not to challenge ourselves and our life inevitably stays the same. Remember, if nothing changes, nothing changes. 

When we go through adversity and loss, we learn more about who we are and how capable, resilient, and resourceful we are. Even when things are really bad, maybe just getting out of bed the next day is a win.

As chaotic as a loss or adversity can be in our lives, there is an opportunity during these times to gain experience and learn more about ourselves and what we are made of. Living a comfortable life without any stress isn’t going to teach us how to overcome or how to be disciplined. It isn’t going to teach us how to cope, deal and get through things. It isn’t going to teach us how to love more, have compassion and understand how to discern things better.

For me, hitting rock bottom in an abyss of adversity taught me so many lessons and I am grateful for each and every one of them. I know I never would have gained more wisdom if I hadn’t gone through them. What have you learned in your times of adversity and loss?

Too many of us care way too much about what others think of us. While it is human to care about the opinions of the people we love, things can go off track fast when we start listening to other people’s opinions over our own.

In a previous post, I talked about the book The Four Agreements. In the book, the term mitote is used to describe a fog in the mind of a thousand voices, filled with ideas and messages from the world telling who you should be based on what the world says will make you feel loved and accepted.

The mitote can come from many places, including our own heads and who and what we allow to infiltrate it. When we allow someone who doesn’t lift us up or contribute to our life in a positive way to live rent free in our head, we gradually begin to second guess ourselves. Perhaps it’s second guessing something we did or maybe it’s even our own value as a human being.

Remember, people who continuously attack your self-esteem and confidence are quite aware of your potential, even if you are not. 

We tend to worry about what will go wrong, rather than go right. You see, to live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist. They play it safe, never having to confront the possibilities of falling.

The truth is, we were all born to fly. We all have a purpose here on this planet. We have no idea when our time is up. And we are perishable items. But it is hard for us to find the courage to fly because we are scared of what might happen. Maybe we are scared we will fall. Maybe we are scared of what will happen if we fly, too.

If you are struggling with spreading your wings, remember that it is okay to feel afraid. It’s okay to be afraid of something we’ve never done before. Having courage doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. It means even though you are afraid, you are going to do it anyway.  Remember, you are your only limit.

To have something you have never had, you have to want it more than you fear it. You have to be willing to do things that you’ve never done to make it happen.

You have to ask yourself, how bad do you want it?

Some of us are trying to be someone we aren’t because we think that is who we are supposed to be. If your younger, maybe your parents have an idea of what they want you to do to be successful – like go to college and become a doctor. Their heart might be in the right place, but maybe that isn’t who you are or what you want to do.

When I was in high school, I worked multiple jobs. I was always looking for ways to make money and save it for the future. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I wanted to be in a good place financially whenever I figured that part out.

One of the jobs I took, for a very short period of time, was a telemarketer. We were selling magazine subscriptions to support different charity organizations. As far as the kind of work it was in telemarketing, it wasn’t the worst thing to be selling. But I had a hard time pushing people when they said no. My supervisor was constantly coaching me on ways to push back when the person on the other end of the line declined the subscription. Some ways I was instructed to handle objections from a prospect just felt manipulative

The truth is, I hated pressuring people.

A person in a situation unsuited to their abilities or character.

Also, round peg in a square hole. A misfit, especially a person unsuited for a position or activity. For example, Ruth doesn’t have the finesse for this job; she’s a round peg in a square hole. This idiom, with its graphic image of something that cannot fit, dates from about 1800.

Know you limits and what you really want.

Why are you trying to be something you don’t want to be?