Invest in Yourself

We typically think of investing as buying stocks and bonds, real estate, and mutual funds, but how often do we make investments in ourselves. In the previous era of investing, we invested money in complex securities whose risks we did not quite fully understand in the hope for a better return tomorrow. Perhaps we would benefit from further investing in our own lives, our own talents, and our own skills so we could be positioned to thrive not as a consequence of luck, but as a result of knowledge, certainty, and clarity of who we are and what we will strive to accomplish and contribute.

How could you have benefited by going to a wealth seminar, or on a relationship retreat with your spouse? We need to consider the way we view our lives and the ways in which we invest our time, money, and resources. As many of us go through major transformations, now is the time to think about what we really want to do in our lives and bring attention to some areas that we have been neglecting because we were too busy to attend to them in our previous careers. With change comes opportunity, and we need to have the right framework in which to view these opportunities and create feelings of abundance. For example, perhaps it is time to pursue interests such as playing guitar and taking voice lessons, along with picking up old hobbies like oil painting and writing poetry that you haven’t focused on in many years. Maybe you form that band that you’ve wanted since you graduated college.
Instead of thinking about how bad the economy is, we all have the power to decide for ourselves that we, individually, are the only ones who have the power to decide how we can and should feel about what events mean to us. If we don’t develop the mental and emotional muscles to create powerful beliefs for ourselves, then we will undoubtedly get swept up in the chaos of the external world, but if we can condition our minds to see every moment as a gift and as a distinct experience unto itself, then we will see life less as a string of past experiences built upon one another and more about our ability to reinvent our lives moment by moment.

As Gandhi said, “Each night when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” We have the ability to recreate our lives upon every new day. We do not need to perpetuate the pattern of thinking that what we did yesterday should somehow dictate how we live our lives today, as if we always have to honor a sacred sense of the past for the purpose of continuity. Don’t restrict yourself like this. You can reinvent yourself into the person that you really want to be at any given moment. “With each day, a new beginning.” When we wake up in the morning, we have the ability to see our lives in a totally new light and see the world in a completely new perspective. Instead of succumbing to the whims of the media, your friends, your colleagues, lead your own path towards what you want for yourself. Don’t let others influence how you choose to view your life and how you choose to live.

We often are too quick to pass judgment without realizing the power of each moment and experience that we can learn from. It is clearly more comfortable when we have certainty about tomorrow, but sometimes we don’t have the luxury of certainty, so we have to embrace uncertainty and use it to develop new strengths and inspire new creativity and passion. In our beliefs is where we find our reality. If we spend our lives in fear, then that will be our reality, but if we instead choose to study the markets and understand what is going on and where the opportunities lie both in our personal and professional lives, then we can make any reality for ourselves that we choose. We must have faith and believe that we will make the right decision at the right time. The worst decision you can make is no decision at all, because it will mean that you will not have taken a chance and not have trusted yourself.

The way that we grow in life is to set high goals for ourselves and go try to reach them. This will push us and condition us to fight through the ostensibly “insurmountable” and turn it into the achievable. Sometimes being in the middle of the storm, as ominous and foreboding as it can be, is the place in which we can thrive best and learn the most about ourselves. We have to possess the mentality that God has a plan for all of us, and that there is real power in each day and moment that we experience. We must be prepared to take advantage of opportunities as they arise and can’t always expect the seasons to bring sunshine. We need to create our own internal sunshine and create opportunities for ourselves by getting clear about the kind of situation we’re in and decide what we can do about it to turn it into a positive.

This period of “uncertainty” might be longer than it has in previous years, so that in itself is an opportunity for us have more time to prepare. Take the time to get yourself strong mentally, take up some hobbies that you’ve been meaning to focus on that you love, but felt you haven’t had enough time to practice. It is during these times that we need to find the creativity and inspiration in ourselves and emerge stronger as a result. We all have so much in this life, and it can be so easy to overlook all of our assets if we spend too much of our energy focusing on our liabilities. Take inventory of what you do have, your health, for example, or your beautiful children, or a loving spouse, and find power and inspiration in those sources.

Let’s focus on the spiritual richness that comes from living in a state of gratitude. When you live in a complete state of gratitude, the shift of focus moves towards what you do have, not what you don’t have, and there are so many things that we take for granted every day that are miraculous gifts that we should be praising. If we have health and can read and can speak the English language and have food to eat, then we are all a lot richer than perhaps we think. There are so many people who came to America at the beginning of the 20th century with none of these skills, no money and they ended up creating prosperous lives for themselves. I know times are different, but there are many examples of when individual people or this country has had its back against the wall and we prevailed with hard work, self-discipline, honesty, and perseverance. It requires a belief that we can make something better from what we have today and turn our lives into the dream that we have for our future.