Do you invest in yourself? Find out how Hewins and Wipfli Hewins help women invest in themselves across the country.
Hewins created the Invest in Yourself Luncheon series last year to help educate women on key fiscal and personal strategies that can add great value to their lives. This event also serves as a helpful forum and place of support for women to connect with others from a professional and personal perspective.
The focus for my 3-part blog is Clarity. According to Merriam-Webster’s definition, “Clarity is the quality or state of being clear: lucidity. Lucidity is clearness of thought or style.”
Clarity occurs when you understand what you want to accomplish and how you can accomplish it.
It’s a simple enough concept that is sometimes clouded by confusion, emotion and fear that can get the best of us. Past events can also have a tremendous impact on our perception and decision-making process today.
“We are disturbed not by what happens to us, but by our thoughts about what happens.”
-Epictetus, Greek philosopher
Growing up, I was overweight and shy—what some may consider a “nerd”. When I was younger I used to love to swim. I could stay in the pool for hours! At age 12, I was getting ready to jump in the pool when a boy well-within the water yelled at me, “Don’t jump in the water! You’re so fat all the water will come out of the pool!” I panicked and quickly left. I refused to get into the water.
Since that day, I have barely put on a swimsuit or gone near a pool. I gave up doing something that I enjoy and love because of some boy’s adolescent cruelty. Although that frightened pre-teen isn’t who I am today, that event still has a great impact on how I make decisions and perceive my experiences.
Whether an event, movie, song or even food, certain experiences from our past have a tendency to stay with us for the long-haul, and continue to impact us greatly in various facets today. These experiences can influence us to make decisions based on perception rather than reality—that the water in the pool would shatter the laws of physics and completely empty, rather than doing the expected and what is quite normal regardless of size or technique.
The financial media has done a tremendous job of exploiting people’s emotions and fears by distributing a multitude of negative messages throughout the day. They disseminate hundreds of stories bombarding people on even the most microscopic tremors of the market, economy, unemployment, hardship and on and on and on. Unfortunately, the media at times gets the facts wrong and stories may propel from unreliable sources. In reaction to these stories, people both in and out of the financial industry frequently panic and buy or sell investments out of fear.
How can we make sure we make decisions based on fact, especially when dealing with our finances? We spend the majority of our lives working to build a nest egg and should not allow singular decisions to have such devastating financial impacts.
This is where it’s important to have Clarity and work with a Financial Advisor you can trust. A Financial Advisor can be a guide or coach to help you review your finances clear of obstructions and misinformation. They can help ensure you are making decisions based on what’s best for you, not based on emotion or fear.
If you work with an Advisor or are in need of financial guidance, make sure you ask questions to find the right fit for you. This is your hard-earned money, don’t leave anything to chance!
Stay tuned for part 2 of my blog on Clarity. I’ll discuss further how we can gain Clarity by looking at things from a different perspective. Remember to always Invest in Yourself!
