The house is on fire! Keep calm!

With the increase in energy prices across the world, I see people trying to find ways to generate more income. Most of the approaches center around finding a hobby or skill that can be leveraged in the hope of making more money. I do not think adding more tasks to your plate should be the first way to increase your income in hard times. Take into account I am not a financial advisor, an economist or a therapist. I am just a normal guy with some thoughts that could be helpful.

Speaking out of my own experience, I do not think adding more to-do's in the hope of making more money is feasible long term. We are under a lot of stress and anxiety as it is. Never mind the lack of sleep, poor eating habits, maintaining or even neglecting relationships. Adding more tasks in the form of your side-hustle will not decrease stress and help foster healthy relationships. It will most likely give more stress and anxiety and add to all the other unhealthy decisions. Not to mention the negative impact it will have on your finances, which might have been constrained already, before the increase in energy prices. 

There are five things that we can do that might help us get through hard times with a bit more clarity. Please understand that these are not new ideas, but rather pieces of wisdom I’ve learned from others that I feel are applicable to these times. This is not to make you RICH! These are tools that could help you gain some perspective of where you are, how to take inventory of your resources and navigate through a difficult financial season. We want to prevent the sense of hopelessness and help you work more effectively without burning out emotionally, spiritually, and physically. 

Here are the five things: 

1. Know what you believe

2. Look at your finances

3. Get your house in order

4. Cut responsibility that is not yours

5. Solidify your inner circle

1. Know what you believe

I feel this is fundamental to everything else. What do you put your faith in when the outcome doesn’t look promising? If your belief is built on truth, it can't be shaken in uncertain times. Knowing what you believe helps build the solid foundation you need to keep standing when the world around you is spinning. 

Faith gives guidelines to resist the temptation of easy fixes. For example, gambling has a way to entice. It promises an increase in wealth with little effort. It is designed to pull you in and to create false hope. It does so by stealing the little bit of resources you have left.   

Your beliefs will give you the cornerstone to build from and to take responsibility for the things in front of you. They will teach you not to run from the problem, but to be honest while facing it. Social media, alcohol, drugs all have a way about them that numbs or hides the problems. Belief in truth will illuminate the lies.

Accepting that God is in control in hard times and that His knowledge and power outweighs all human understanding is not the easiest thing to do. Our beliefs, then, reinforced with knowledge, will be led by faith in these circumstances. 

2. Look at your finances 

Laying out your finances is not an easy task. It shows you, in numbers and data, what is important to you. Money is no longer a fiscal object in our wallets; it turned into numbers on screens. Those little numbers have a way to disappear when not well taken care of. 

We look at our spending to see what luxuries we can cut, what essentials we have to pay. Luxuries will be things like streaming services, daily coffees and eating out. Essentials are things like your house, car, fuel and paying off your debt as soon as possible (even if this is done through special arrangements or minimum repayments). A good way to to start this conversation is by asking the question: Do we really need this?

After all the luxury-weight has been shed, we need to start working looking at income versus expenses. We create a budget and we STICK to it. 

Budgets are there to make sure we get the information of what our actual financial position is so that your imagination doesn’t create irrational fears of bankruptcy. We are also making sure we don’t attempt side hustles we can't afford.

This gives us a clear starting point. If the destination might need to be adjusted, we will be able to course-correct. For example, when you look at your finances you might see the insurance on your car has not changed. This might be a good time the get a new quote. 

We don’t want to live in fear of money (or lack thereof), but the fear of the unknown is much greater than facing the problem head on. It is not easy and can create anxiety just before attempting it, but see the anxiety through - it will be worth it!

3. Get your house in order

With us being connected 24/7 to anyone or anything, it is hard to find the boundary line of where our place of safety is. The internet is accessible in every room in our house. Work is a place where we feel we have to constantly prove our monetary worth.  We need to look at what is interfering in our place of rest and safety. What is pulling our attention away from resting and feeling safe in our own home. A place of safety is well organised and is void of chaos. 

It is hard to be in a calm mindset if your house is filled with disorder. As it stands, we struggle to make good life decisions while well rested. Let's make sure we don't make those decisions while suffering from a lack of sleep and unhealthy eating habits.

Don’t get me wrong, if you have kids disorder is one of the ingredients that form a vibrant family. In that disorder, make sure you do not bring the 'fight of day to day' into the healthy chaos of family life.

Getting your house in order is making sure things that are broken get fixed, clutter gets sorted.

You don’t need the three-month leaking tap to still be on your to-do list. This takes up too much mental capacity and steals attention you could have given to your family or other challenges. Fixing a leaking tap can save you from a flooded house. Just saying.

Once everything has a place, is fixed and cleaned, it will be a joy coming home. It will feel like a place of rest where you can recuperate.

A clean house (or even smaller - a desk or just one room) makes way for mental clarity. In difficult times, a clear head is invaluable.

4. Cut responsibility that is not yours

The art of saying 'no'. 

Cutting responsibility that is not yours is very hard. Most of us like to help. This means we will take responsibility from a co-worker's hands to make his or her workload lighter. And perhaps, sometimes, the need to take on extra responsibility comes from the fact that we do not trust someone else with a task they were assigned. Either way, when our capacity tapped out, we need to off-load misplaced responsibilities.

The problem of taking responsibility for someone else’s work is that it takes our attention away from what's actually ours. Our work is in danger of being placed under more time constraints than it was intended - amping up the stress and anxiety. Let the others do what has been assigned to them.

The same counts for being available on a personal level. Take stock of your emotional capacity. Sometimes, we need to stop taking responsibility for friends' and family's problems. People need to learn how to figure things out on their own. This is very difficult, I know, but when we step in for others too often, it cultivates a co-dependent relationship and the result is that no one ends up functioning optimally. You are not their mom or dad. Let the adults be adults.

We only have so much time and resources. We need to focus these on our responsibilities. Solving our own problems first might just give a helpful blueprint to others in solving theirs. An instruction about oxygen masks on planes comes to mind.

5. Solidify your community  

We are not meant to go through life solo. Community is there to help look out for blind spots and things that cause harm. It keeps us on track. In unexpected hardship, community helps carry some of the weight. We need to know who is in our corner.

Make sure you can trust those in your close community. If you phone, will they pick up? When you entrust them with personal information, will it be front-page news tomorrow?

A community is not there to solve your problems, but rather where you can voice your problems, frustrations and needs. A community that listens well has a way of offering solutions you didn't expect. You may have experienced this: as you are talking about your problems, the answer comes or the lie about the magnitude of the problem gets exposed. This happens when a loving community listens well.

We need community. We need each other - whether to move a couch or to talk through things.  Remember, it is not only on the community to help you through. You are not a leech! It is your responsibility to contribute as well. Community goes both ways. 

6. Walk

This is just a fun bonus. Take walks. Around the block. Or in the wild.

It will help more than you think. 

Everything here is meant to give you something that hard times tend to take: capacity. Capacity to stand in the midst of challenges. When we are in the thick of it or on our way into a storm, we want to find solutions to help solve the problems we might face. The only problem is we cannot predict the future. We plan as best we can, but with limited information.

The first step is not adding more. It's removing what doesn't belong. This helps to give us a clear indication of which steps would be applicable to our situations - while limiting the chances of burning out along the way.