… which is the secret of contentment.” This is what former Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan said in a recent interview with the Financial Times in response to the question whether he had made any pension provision. He went on to say that he would do cricket analysis on TV whenever he ran short of money and that he always made enough to live comfortably.
This is exactly what I try to achieve with my clients: clarity about your real needs and then finding the means to meet them comfortably. Imran Khan uses his passion for the sport, his expertise and experience to find those means long after being able to continue in his chosen profession, i.e. play cricket professionally.
I am sure most of us have a passion for something, with related experience and transferrable skills, to enable us to generate the means to live comfortably. It might take some creative thinking, way outside the box, to find out what this something is. And we might need the help of a coach, mentor or other confidant to get there.
And we may need to get away from the idea that the only way we expand our means is through working longer and harder, or indeed, that our job is the only source of our means. For me clarity about my needs and also my vision is actually the key. Once I know what those are I may be able to find ways to meet them without necessarily having to earn and spend more money.
For instance, if your vision is to live by the sea you might want to write down a list of at least 100 ways how that could be achieved. Write down every idea, no matter how absurd, impossible, immoral, illegal or otherwise undesirable. If you find that you do need more money just to live from day to day you might want to write down a list of at least 100 ways how more money might come into your life. Note that I didn’t say how you could earn more.
The idea behind this exercise is simply to broaden your mind. Among the 100 ideas might be the one that will work. My book “Making Friends with Money – How to start feeling wealthy without waiting till you’re rich” is the result of this exercise. I did it again more recently looking at ways I could diversify my business and thought that decades of motivational speaking could be turned into another income stream, and which I am now marketing.
I read in a blog recently that people like Richard Branson employ this technique. Obviously he doesn’t implement all the ideas that come into his head. It’s likely though, that he has trained his brain to think big because he knows one idea out of the 100 is going to be the one that strikes big.
Sanni Kruger is a finance coach helping people to become competent and confident money managers who live within their means without stressful money concerns. She assists her clients in reducing their debts whilst building up savings, as well as clarifying their desired long term vision and learning how to expand their resources to reach it. Her self-help book “Making Friends with Money – How to start feeling wealthy without waiting till you’re rich” is available from http://dld.bz/KsG4 .
Sanni is also a motivational speaker with over 30 years experience of speaking to groups of any size on a variety of subjects.
