Improve Emotions and Strengthen Your Finances

Last week I started a new blog series on strengthening your finances by strengthening the various other parts of your life. The first topic was centered on your personal life, more specifically the physical aspects of your personal life. Today we’ll discuss the emotional part. You may be surprised to find out how much your emotions can affect your finances!

Emotional

Our emotions can cause our finances to blow up! Here are a couple of examples of how that can happen:

1. Low self-esteem: Mary feels ugly and unhappy with her appearance, and she starts spending lots of money on fancy clothes and new makeup, some expensive new perfume, botox treatments, manicures and pedicures every week, constantly changing hairstyles and products…. and on and on…
2. Stressed, looking for relaxation: Often people who feel stressed go shopping to relieve that tension. They get a rush from making purchases and often end up making impulse buys that they do not need and that can potentially damage the budget.
3. Can’t buy me love: Both men and women can get caught up in trying to buy affection, either from a significant other or friends and family. They may spend a lot of money taking everyone out to dinner often or buy fancy gifts that they can’t really afford. We’ll actually get into this more in the segment on relationships, but it does have to do with emotions too when we are seeking the feelings of affection.

There are many many more ways where our emotions can cause us to trip up financially, but here are some good ways to boost our emotional life and have a positive effect on our finances:

1. Try encouraging others. You’d be surprised at how their happiness or even a smile can brighten your day.
2. Think positive thoughts! You have control over what you think, and if negative thoughts are creeping in, replace them with positive thoughts. This may include focusing on the good things in your life and being grateful for what you have.
3. Be solution focused instead of problem focused. Working towards a solution will keep you from feeling hopeless and helpless, and when you succeed it will serve as motivation to keep going and succeed in other areas.
4. Smile when you talk to others and on the phone. People can hear that smile in your voice, and you will end up having more productive conversations. This in turn can boost your mood.
5. You may remember last week we talked about exercising to stay healthy. Endorphins that are released when you exercise can also improve your mood!
6. Boost your self-esteem: We all suffer with self-esteem issues during our lives. Try setting goals, take pride in your work, view mistakes as learning opportunities, try to stop thinking negative thoughts about yourself.
7. Start the day by writing down 5 things you are grateful for. Add to that list each day, and read the entire list often, pausing to think about each of the items on it.
8. Stop telling yourself you “can’t.” Especially with finances. Start telling yourself, “I used to struggle, but I am learning and I CAN manage my finances successfully.”

You are special. And you can do great things. Working to improve your emotions can help your finances – so start today and see what great things happen!

Tags: encouraging, exercising, finances, improve emotions, mood, positive, self-esteem, stress