Today we’re talking about money and how to feel less anxious about your finances.

 
There are three different answers, and today we’re covering the first one.
In order to feel less stressed about money, you have to figure out how to be grateful.
When I travel to other countries and I see the way other people live, particularly in more developing worlds, I start appreciating the subtle things in life much more, things like water, clean air, or bridges, that we usually take for granted. In this money-hungry, money-driven, go-go-go society, we often forget to take that step back, and really relish, and be grateful for all these things that we have, because not everybody has them.

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about putting life therapy into your schedule.

 
A lot of times people say: “I’m too busy, I can’t,” and that’s actually the heart of the matter. If we don’t own our time and if we’re not in control of our life, we have a problem. In order for us to be effective in any area of our life, it’s really fundamental that we’re in control of our own time. How we spend our time is how we spend our life.
For example, if we wake up, and we’re rushed, and we’re just reacting and reacting, and doing and doing, we’re never going to be as successful, or achieve all the things that we want to achieve, because we’re not setting intentions and being proactive about our needs.
So if we believe that self-care is something that we truly need in our life, which we all do, we need to figure out how to schedule it first. If we think of our time as a bucket, and we have rocks, pebbles, and sand, what often happens is that the sand goes in first, leaving no room for the pebbles or the rocks. Self-care needs to be the rocks. We put those in our schedule first, and then all the other things get filled in around it.
In order to make it easy for you, I see all my clients virtually. I’ve got you on Zoom, I’ve got you on the phone, I’ve got you on Skype, however it is that you need. We meet each week, and then you schedule your life around that. And I’ve got you, just like a trainer at the gym. The accountability is so important when it comes to taking care of yourself – you do many more reps when someone’s there telling you what to do.
So, if you’re feeling ready to set up a session with me, please go to my Sessions page.

Let’s talk about working with your spouse.

 
So many people say: “Don’t do it, don’t work with your spouse, it ruins the relationship!” I’m here to tell you it is possible, but it takes serious work.
One strategy that I have found particularly helpful in working with my spouse is acknowledging that there are two hats in your relationship. One is a business hat, and one is a relationship hat. You can even go and buy the hats and put them on each other’s head, because it’s really important to know which hat you’re wearing when you’re interacting with each other. This comes from the notion that how you treat a colleague is very different than how you treat your spouse. So when you’re discussing business, you treat your spouse, or your partner, or your loved one, the way that you would treat a colleague, which generally isn’t emotional. Your relationship, on the other hand, has a lot of emotions.
So it’s very important for you to distinguish: “Am I talking to you as my business associate, or am I talking to you as my loved one?” And when you understand that, and they understand that, then it makes everything easier.
Another strategy that I’ve actually used is that when I write emails to my husband, the ones that are personal are written with loving language and start with “my love,” while the ones that are business, are written more professionally and signed with “sincerely”. It sounds silly, but it actually puts me in the head space of treating him like a colleague when we’re discussing business, and he knows how to respond.
The final strategy is that we can talk about business only between 9:00AM and 5:00PM. Before and after that, I will literally be sitting next to my husband, with a question about business, and I will take out my phone and write him an email, so that we can schedule a time to talk about it. That’s what I would do with a colleague. If I just sit there and talk about business whenever I want to, it will take away from our relationship time, and that’s not healthy for anybody.

There’s a lot of stigma around mental health.

 
People often say: “Oh, I don’t need therapy, I don’t have some mental illness.”
But, essentially, what it comes down to is that we all have feelings. Every single one of us. That’s the core foundation of our lives, we feel things. If we don’t have the skills to deal with those feelings, it manifests in a variety of ways. Just because you think you’re not bipolar, or depressed, or that you don’t need help, it doesn’t mean that you actually know what to do with your feelings.
Unfortunately, we all have unhealthy, dysfunctional ways of dealing with feelings. Most of us are staring at a screen, and that’s a big avoidance behavior. Another unhealthy way of dealing with feelings is self-medication.
When was the last time you put your screen down, and you just hung out with you, and you were okay, and you were comfortable in your own skin? The distractions of screens, the eating, the drinking, the shopping, all this overindulgence that we do, that keeps us from being with ourselves, essentially messes with us.
If we take away that stigma around mental illness, and we realize that all of us need to take care of ourselves from the inside out, that we don’t just naturally wake up happy, and that we need to do the exercise to be able to feel that way, then therapy really feels like a valuable and necessary investment that we have to make in ourselves.