by Renee leNobel | Sep 23, 2015 | Finances
I hate spending money. My Scottish-Dutch genetic makeup combined with my upbringing in a Depression impacted family has turned me into a person that gets anxious any time I head to the cash register. You know how some people call shopping “retail therapy”? Well, shopping has never been that for me. The act of spending money starts an internal debate going in my head about if I need to spend that money or not. A few things I’ve noted about internal chatter: it slows down my decision making, it tends (under-exaggeration) towards the negative and it keeps me up at night.
Then I changed because I got tired of feeling guilty and anxious all the time. Spending money happens on an almost daily basis. I was beating myself up everyday! It was mentally exhausting and I couldn’t keep doing it.
How did I stop the guilt and anxiety I had around money? I didn’t do much; all I did was make a decision. What I decided to do was to start believing in my spending plan.
I’ve always been a bit of a spending plan fanatic. Each month, I add up everything I spent during the month and I add it to my money tracking spreadsheet which I have had going for the past five years. Then a couple of times a year, I look over what I’ve spent and I update my spending plan for the upcoming year. My monthly tracking is not as onerous as it sounds, it takes me about two hours a month.
Even though I’ve always tracked my spending and I’ve created spending plans for years, I never really bought into the process. For one thing, I never went back to a prior year spending plan to to see if it bore any relation to my actual spending. Plus, I never critically looked at my plan to see if I was spending in areas that I wanted to spend in. I think I also never came close to spending what was in my plan. My spending plan was just a process I was doing that I thought I should do as an financially responsible person. I still agonized over every dime I spent and spending still made me feel horrible and guilty. All my spending plan was doing for me was consuming my time in creating it. I had this spending plan – but I was ignoring it and choosing to continue to feel bad when I spent money.
So I recognized that I no longer wanted to feel guilty and I also wanted my spending plan to be of use to me so I decided to start believing in it. How did I do this? I decided to analyze my spending plan and this is what I discovered.
My spending plan was based on my life and choices that I have been making for years. It was a financial reflection of my beliefs and values. After all, I do not spend money easily, so if it was spent and ended up in my tracking spreadsheet, I must have believed in it at least a little. My spending plan is therefore based on what I think is important to spend money on. I noticed that my spending stays fairly consistent year over year and also that I had built a cushion into my spending plan for unexpected expenses. Oh and another important part of my spending plan? I had enough money coming in to cover my spending going out.
So then I realized that if an expense is in my spending plan, it is ok to spend money on that expense. I’m even allowed to spend on the unexpected because there is a cushion in my spending plan. All this spending is allowed without the guilt!
This change to believing in my spending plan is taking time and I’m not completely cured of my money guilt. I still don’t like spending money but that doesn’t hold me back in my decision making anymore or lead to days of anxiety (well mostly). For example, September is a fairly brutal month for expenses for me. It is when all my large business expenses come due and when children related expenses like after-school activities, hot lunches and school fees kick in. Before believing in my spending plan, I would have been in paroxysms over this spending. I would have felt horrible for days on end and would have questioned my decision to go into business for myself. I might even have decided to pull the plug on my business. I would have been more focussed on stopping the money bleeding than on driving my business and life forward.
This year when things came due, I felt a little icky and I know I still complained about the high cost of doing business as a sole proprietor, but then I told myself, this is in my spending plan and therefore it is ok to spend. I am not going to make myself feel bad for buying professional liability insurance!
Do you have money anxiety and fears? The best cure is to start tracking your spending and to build a spending plan. If you don’t have a plan, then every time you spend money you might be questioning it and causing yourself anxiety. With a plan, you too can move forward with your life with clarity and decisiveness.
by Renee leNobel | Aug 27, 2015 | Divorce
Are you in the middle of a Transition Day?. Perhaps you feel like ?
There are two types of transition days. The ones where the kids leave to go stay with their other parent and the ones where the kids come back to you.
Let’s deal with the leaving days first…
The first thing to do is ensure your remaining minutes before saying goodbye to your kids are positive. Minutes? Yes, minutes. This is your first challenge, and it is a challenge. Getting your kids packed up and ready to go to the other parent’s house is stressful and added to that, kids rarely (in my experience) cooperate when getting ready. It is hard to remain calm when your kid won’t stop what they are doing to put their shoes on and it is made doubly hard when you would rather they weren’t leaving at all.
So how do you stay calm and not have your remaining minutes with the kids be ones that are filled with yelling? Practice. Practice telling yourself that this a hard situation you are in and practice giving yourself a break if you do yell. Apologise to your child if you yell and tell them why. Then remember to say you love them and that you will see them soon. Then remind yourself that you will get many more times to practice this skill and with time it will get better.
As you are getting your child ready to go to the other parent’s house, be aware of that feeling that may be rising in you that is going to lead to yelling. This is an opportunity to remind yourself that the kids are leaving soon and it doesn’t matter if they forget stuff or are late. It’s also a good time to remember that your kids are smart and this is a perfect opportunity for them to learn about natural consequences. You can help remind them about what they will need, you can help them pack and you can be waiting for them outside for when they are ready to go. Sit down and take deep breaths while you wait.
Establish a rule with your children that they must always look you in the eye to say goodbye. There is nothing worse than having your child run off without looking back when you get to the destination, whether they leave right from your home or a place you drive them to. You do not want your last memory before a 2, 4 day or even a week long stretch without your kids to be the back of your child’s head sprinting away from you as you think to yourself – “I didn’t even get to say goodbye! What if something happens to one of us!”
Then your kids are gone – you may have to be somewhere or not. You may have decided to fill up your time so you don’t think about your missing child or you may have excess time on your hands now that they are gone. If you have excess time, you may find grief starts to seep in. Allow the grief in and sit with it for a while. Powering through an emotion or burying it will mean you never learn to deal with it. Instead, if you face it head on and give yourself a break for being sad, you will find that eventually, with time, these grief periods will get shorter in duration.
Then remind yourself that it will never go according to plan. Things happen, so don’t beat yourself up if the plan you made for “how things are now going to be next time the kids leave” does not go the way you envisioned. After all, you made that plan when the kids weren’t with you and the push and pull of a relationship with kids never goes according to your plans.
That said, don’t give up on making those plans because eventually over time parts of them will begin to creep in (in a good way), to your transition days.
by Renee leNobel | May 20, 2015 | Divorce
When my ex and I first separated, I spent a long time trying to craft my emails to my ex so that there was nothing offensive in them. I did not want him to attack back as reading those attacks was pretty painful. How could this person that I had been a partner to for 20 years, whom I’d had children with, whom I’d put first in life, write these things about me?
So I spent hours crafting my emails to try to be clear and concise, without blame and without judgement.
I would still get attack emails back. There was always something that got misinterpreted by him.
I would try to defend myself and would again, take the time to carefully write my email and I would still get upsetting emails back.
This was brutal. He found ways to tear down all my defenses and invade my boundaries.
One day, something happened that put me over the edge. I was exhausted by this back and forth conflict. I needed to move on with my life and get out of this viscous cycle.
I started following the rules I created for myself:
- Keep emails short – five sentences maximum
- Wait a day or two after getting an icky reply before replying back.
- Do not defend myself, especially if he asks me to. I’m just giving him more opportunities to attack my values and beliefs
- Do not discuss my email communication between myself and my ex with others
These rules are very hard to stick to but I’m getting lots of practice and if you are recently separated, I bet you are too.
by Renee leNobel | Apr 23, 2015 | Divorce
“they say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!”
– George Orwell
I’ve been getting a lot of lessons lately about how time heals all wounds. People tell me it takes time, things will get better in time and I will look back on this and laugh in the future.
That said, according to other people (and the quote above), the hurt never really goes away.
I know my hurt and pain from my divorce has not gone away yet but I do feel back to normal on most days. But that is not what I wanted to write about.
I want to write about short term time because I’ve come to realize that even just ten minutes can be enough to make me feel better and it is knowing that fact that gets me through some fairly emotionally painful situations.
The first person to introduce this concept to me was my divorce coach. I had just found out that my soon-to-be ex husband had filed for divorce without telling me and then he refused to find somewhere else to stay. I’m not saying I didn’t play a part in this but at that time I was in shock. Almost anything could trigger me and put me into a state of anxiety or depression in those early days of divorce. Every other day, I was packing an overnight bag so I could go and stay with a friend so I didn’t have to be in the same space as my soon-to-be ex. As I walked away from my life and my kids (whom I’d never been away from before), I would get very emotional and I basically stayed in that state full time with reoccurring spikes on an hourly basis.
Anytime I started to explain my situation to anyone, like my divorce coach, I would relive the pain and start crying so my coach taught me a trick so I could calm myself in order to function. This trick was called tapping or EFT and there is a lot of theory behind it and how it works, but all I know is that it stopped me from thinking the thought that was making me cry and injected five to ten minutes of time into my life. After tapping for as little as five minutes I was always more calm. In a lot of situations I was laughing at myself as people wondered what the heck I was doing.
As time went along, I started learning new techniques and strategies, such as meditation (which I still struggle with), stopping what I’m doing and starting something else, writing and just being in the moment and letting the emotion flow through me. All four of these techniques involve time and I’ve noticed over the past two years that I always feel better after having taken some form of time.
What I’ve also noticed is that it is this recognition of how time saves me that makes my days easier to get through. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn as I’m a type A personality and I’ve always tried to use my time efficiently and in the past, sitting on the coach and staring at the wall was not what I considered efficient.
Now, instead of getting bogged down in emotional pain and fighting my way through it so I can be efficient, I let time do the work. If I’m having a bad moment, I use one of my strategies to inject time.
If I’m in conflict with someone, such as sitting through a mediation session with my ex-husband, and we are stuck, I will get up and take a five to ten minute break.
If I’m in conflict with someone and it is turning into a back and forth argument over email. I stop myself from replying for a day.
If I’m just generally sad, I will cry for twenty minutes or for however long it takes until I feel like doing something else. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly actually), after twenty minutes of crying, I always feel like doing something else.
If I’m angry, I sit down and write an email to the person I’m angry with, and then I send it to MYSELF.
I tell myself what I now know to be true. I may be sad, angry and feeling like things are hopeless, but I know in two days and maybe even just one, I will not even be able to remember that emotion because I will be feeling good again.
by Renee leNobel | Apr 15, 2015 | Divorce
In the years leading up to my divorce I used to get together with my friends and we would (ahem – occasionally) sit around and discuss how irritating our partners were being at the moment.
As things got more dire between myself and my ex-husband this became the only thing I ever really talked about. I kept a mental list of how I had been wronged by my ex and I would go around and get everyone’s opinion on whether I was being reasonable or not. I got very good at explaining everything that had happened to lead up to the latest incident and I prided myself on how I was interpreting the situation in a fair and objective manner. When I got the support I was looking for, I felt even more justified in feeling (just a tad) sorry for myself.
I used to think this strategy of talking out my grievances was an effective self-care strategy until I realized one day that while my friends and family love me and support me, they could do nothing to stop my ex from doing the things that upset me. In fact, no one could. One day a huge wave of hopelessness overtook me as I realized that I would have to deal with this unreasonable person for a very long time (my children are young). I like to think of this list of grievances as complaints I had taken to the court of my brain. They had been filed with the court, argued and decided with the help of a jury of my friends and family. I was waiting for my ex-spouse to be sentenced.
On this day when the wave of hopelessness overtook me, I had projected this catalogued list of grievances into my future. I would have to deal with this unreasonable person who would continue to do things that upset me for the rest of my life and I realized he would never be sentenced for his wrongs in a way that would satisfy me.
That day I knew I couldn’t continue as I had been.
I started to keep track of what made me feel the worst.
I noticed that when I immediately surrounded myself by people after an upsetting incident and ranted and complained it took a lot longer for me to get over the incident. In fact, people would ask me how I was doing a few days later and that would trigger me to relive the incident and I would get upset at the injustice of it again.
I also noticed that when I ranted and raved about the incident in an email that I sent to myself, it slightly helped take away my urge to rant to others.
I noticed that if I tried to pick out positive results of this latest incident, I also got over it faster. For example, I really have to thank my ex-spouse for helping me learn how to deal with difficult people. This may sound cheeky and like I’m being factitious, but no one can get along with everyone and prior to my divorce I would either get along with everyone or avoid them. I cannot avoid my ex-spouse and so I am learning how to deal with him so I don’t feel upset. This skill has changed my life.
I noticed that if I spent my time gathering evidence for the court of opinion, I had no time to focus on my personal growth and happiness and entire days of my life would be lost to feelings of anger.
And I noticed that when I stopped talking to my friends about incidents they went away from my brain.
So the next time you find yourself gossiping or complaining about someone, ask yourself, who are you serving?
