Once you see it
Photo by Michael Podger on Unsplash
You know what’s not ideal when you’re in the middle of having your driveway replaced?
Rain!
Especially not multiple days of rain in a row.
But eventually, I know this project will be completed. And for a couple weeks, I’ll really enjoy my new driveway every time I park on it. Then one day, it will just become “normal” again, and I’ll wonder what I was so excited about in the first place.
As I can personally attest to right now – and as any homeowner will tell you – every home renovation project presents a repeatable pattern:
Excited to start
Frustrated by delays and surprises
Relief once finished
Enjoyment before normalization kicks in
Reflection on whether it was all worth it
Once you see patterns like this, you’ll start to notice them everywhere in your life.
Let’s use vacations as another example:
Anticipation of your upcoming trip
Taking the trip itself
Having some expectations fall short, some met, and hopefully some exceeded
Back to reality of day-to-day life
Letting time erase bad memories so you focus only the good ones
Life’s repeatable patterns include beginnings and endings, anticipation and reflection, with peaks and valleys mixed in between.
However, once you start to recognize the persistence of these patterns across your life, you gain the opportunity to assert more emotional control over their ebbs and flows.
When you can conceptually understand where you are in the process, you have a better sense of what might come next. And while the surprises that pop up along the way are always different, at the very least, they are no longer unexpected.
Recognizing these repeatable patterns in your financial life is the first step in beginning to better manage your emotions & response through those inevitable fluctuations. When you pair that recognition with your own financial framework that incorporates life’s ebbs and flows, you’re now able to zoom out and see “the big picture” when you find yourself in a valley.
And that’s a real game changer – especially when the alternative is making an emotional decision in the heat of the moment that you might later come to regret.