Over the years, I have realized how much my mental state has been crucial to other areas of my life including my productivity. My mental state drives my physical fitness or working at home with kids successfully.
So, it’s been no surprise to me recently that financial freedom could help address issues with my financial health. And how do you do it? By taking baby steps. Personally, I decided to follow the Dave Ramsey baby steps method, but I found that the biggest attribute lies in taking small steps to achieve the desired outcomes.
Let’s begin.
Why Baby Steps Equip You To Succeed
You may remember the Pick The Brain article, “How Small Steps Add Up to Big Goals: Achieve Your Dreams with “Little and Often””. In the article, you’ll see that writing just 20 minutes per day will result in a 70,000 word + novel or how committing to cook a couple of hours a week will result in hundreds of hours per year.
Why does Baby Step equip you to succeed? Because we are busy human beings. As a father of 3 young girls (and 1 on the way), I can motivate myself to do something big, but my actual bandwidth is much smaller than I expect.
I will start something, but soon realize that I cannot attain what I am pursuing. Instead of breaking down the task into smaller steps, I too often will let that task go by failing. You can find this in so many areas of life, but specifically in relation to your financial health.
Why Financial Health Is Important
Finances can be a major stressor in relationships and marriages. I was raised much differently than my wife when it came to finances. On a scale of saver to spender, I fell into a completely different spectrum from my wife. This can create conflict, but it can also provide opportunities to work through something together and become more aligned.
Finances can already be stressful before you tie in debt. Debt can be such an easy thing to get into, but a difficult thing to get out of. I speak with hundreds of people each year who have gone through a financial hardship, often considering bankruptcy. Many can easily themselves in a position with multiple short term payday loans owing hundreds of percentage points in interest per month. This can be debilitating, creating a funnel vision that is laser focused on debt.
Once I attained financial freedom, I realized how important financial health can be on your well being (and productivity).
How Financial Health Increases Your Productivity
Your productivity can be negatively or positively affected by your mental state. If you are constantly thinking about debt, how can you maximize your productivity in the workplace? You can’t. You can use this same principle for many things, but debt is a common distraction in America.
So, when you attain financial freedom through baby steps, you can also see your productivity increase in other areas of life. Is this relatable to you? Can you see that baby steps can help you achieve financial freedom and increase productivity? What holds you back?
Ben Tejes is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ascend Finance, a platform to help people achieve self-improvement in the area of personal finance. He writes on Christian Finance Blog where he covers such topics as Dave Ramsey and Debt. He also writes on topics such as Emergency Funds and Debt Payoff Apps to help people get out of debt and experience financial freedom.
The post How Taking Baby Steps Helped Me Achieve Financial Health appeared first on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement.
