Pick Your Moments, Take Stock, Then Take Action

That was an amazing year! There really is no other way to put it. I don’t mean to talk about the hot butter on my breakfast toast by any means, but I am truly hoping that each of you had the same fantastic 2014 that I did and are also looking at an even better 2015.

I know that each of us take moments in time to take stock – for some it is a day like December 31st or January 1st, for some it is a birthday, or an anniversary of some sort. While each new day can always bring new possibilities, we all know that these moments in time – these milestones – somehow make it easier or more poignant to reflect, take stock, and hopefully, prepare an action plan.

I, for one, am very thankful for this particular part of our human nature, though I will be the first to admit that there have been times when at these moments of taking stock I have not been better off, or necessarily happier, or maybe even better off financially than I was at the previous moment of taking stock. But, I will say this – I have definitely not let too many of these moments of taking stock pass me by without at least trying to make some type of change. I encourage each of you to do the same. By regularly reflecting and taking action, you will find that over time, you’re going to be happier and better off in so many ways.

While you can read the titles on my LinkedIn profile and clearly see that I don’t consider myself a life coach or a Tony Robbins of any sort, I do know that some of my greatest successes in life have come from simply observing and learning the course of action that others in a similar situation have taken, or not taken. For that reason alone, coupled with the fact that I know a large number of you are using today and tomorrow to take stock, I thought I’d share my method of reflection with you. There is nothing groundbreaking, nothing that you don’t already know yourself, but sometimes seeing it in writing can really help you get started. And, if I can humbly be a part of any positive change in anyone’s life by simply sharing my experiences, then I feel I am using my talents for good.

So, to break it down, there are only three steps: Choose your moments of reflection, take stock, then do something about it.

You can choose moments that occur annually on the calendar, such as your birthday, your wedding anniversary, etc., but I recommend that you conduct this reflection more often than just once a year. Maybe choose the first of every month, or the first Monday of every month, or find some reoccurring event in your life that can act as a great point in time for you to reflect.

Every six weeks, I get my haircut - like clockwork, every six weeks. My appointments are scheduled three deep and no matter what happens in the world and in my life, I know that if I’m still able to get out of bed in the morning and I’m still conscious, I am going to need a haircut. This makes it very easy for me to take a quick moment while I’m driving to my haircut, while I’m sitting in the chair, or at any time that day, really, to take a look at where I am and determine if I am better off that day than I was during my previous haircut. Find your haircut – find your regular rhythm with some regular event in your life and at every interval, you have a perfect opportunity to remember to reflect, take stock and then, take action.

Once you’ve chosen your moment, then every time it rolls around, you can take stock of the relationships in your personal life, the relationships in your professional life (including your job or your business), the relationship you have with your finances, or any other relationship in your life that needs attention. If you’re on the right track, this might not take long. It could be just a few moments of reflection to know that you’re in a better job than you were last year, or that there is more money in the bank this year than last year, or that there is less debt weighing you down than last year, or that you are closer and not more distant from the loved ones in your life. Granted, you may find yourself in a spot where some of these reflections are not going to be just a quick moment, but might take some actual in-depth thought and analysis. Either way, make sure that you take the time that you need to sort through what needs to be sorted out.

Lastly, once you’ve reflected, it is time for you to actually do something about it. Hopefully, you will find yourself in a spot where all you need to do is keep doing what you’re doing. Hopefully, you can just stay the course because everything is going great and you find yourself better off than you were at the previous moment of reflection, and hopefully, a number of consecutive previous reflection moments as well. But, if you don’t find yourself better off in any way, it is the perfect time for you to do something about it. It is as simple as creating a plan and then following through with it.

While it may take you a little while to get in the groove of conducting these regular reflections on your relationships, your career, and your finances, I can only suggest that you give it a try and see how it works out for you because those haircut moments have worked wonders for me.

Photo by David Mark via Pixabay

Back When You Had To Lick Stamps To Mail Checks

I’m laughing at myself because I just had what I would call a senior moment (can we still say that?) and wanted to share it with all of you. So, you know how you get solicitations for donations to charities in the mail and they’ll include a nickel or a dime or some other object to try to keep you from just throwing it away? Well, I got one of those a couple months back – honestly can’t remember which charity it was from – but that particular charity’s object for that particular campaign was a postage stamp. They say, hey look, we included a postage stamp so that you don’t have to pay the postage to send us money, all the while I am sure thinking that you’re not going to just toss the envelope because you’ll want the stamp, and maybe, just maybe, once you’ve opened the envelope, you’ll actually take a look at their stuff and feel more compelled to make a donation.

Now, needless to say for any of you who know me, I opened that envelope, took out the stamp, shredded the rest of the contents and went about my day because while I do make contributions to charitable causes, it has to be to a place I know inside and out and definitely would never be to one that I have only heard of through a letter they sent to my house.

I know some of you may be thinking hey, wait a minute, is it OK for us to use the stamp, the coins, or the return address labels these charities send to us if we don’t send them any money? Well, you can all make your own decisions about that, but I have it on good authority from the folks at Money magazine that it is perfectly reasonable financial etiquette to use the items that have been sent to you without providing a donation because the items were sent to you unsolicited without any form of obligation from you to said charity. So I say, use those coins, use those stamps and use those return address labels to your heart’s content!

So, anyway, now on to my senior moment:

You youngsters out there may not know about two things. One is that we used to have these things called checks that we used to pay for stuff. It was a piece of paper not much different in size from a dollar bill that was issued by our bank that had our checking account number – see, that is where the name checking account comes from – printed on it and when we wanted to pay for something, say a bill that came in the mail, or for groceries at the grocery store, or to pay a friend you owed some money, we took out a pen and we wrote a date, the name of the person or company we were paying, the dollar amount in both numbers and in words (yes, we had to actually write out One Hundred Forty-Six Dollars and Seventy-Two Cents), a memo about the check if we wished and our signature all on this piece of paper. We then handed it to the person we were paying and they took it to their bank and then their bank sent it to our bank and our bank sent the money to that person’s bank and then that person’s bank gave them the money. This all usually took a couple days, sometimes even longer if there was a weekend in there, especially back in the days when banks weren’t open on Saturday mornings like they are today.

The other thing you all might not know, or remember, is that postage stamps used to not have that convenient sticky backing that they do today. Stamps didn’t used to be stickers, they, in fact, used to be stamps. They had this adhesive film on the back and what we used to do was actually have to lick the back of the stamp in order to activate the adhesive so that our stamp would stick to the envelopes that we were mailing. We did this stamp licking quite often back in the day, especially when all of our bills would come in the mail and we would write out checks to pay for them and have to lick upwards of 20 stamps a month in some cases.

So, don’t worry, I’m getting to that senior moment, I just felt that I needed to explain all of this to you so it would all make sense, especially if checks and licking stamps pre-dates you.

Fast forward to today and I have one bill – only one bill – that still comes in the mail and that I still, for some Godforsaken reason cannot pay online like every other single bill I have. It is the association dues to the city of Aliso Viejo and to top it off, it only comes once a quarter, so I am writing literally only 4 checks a year at this point. I had no idea when I got that book of 50 checks from my online bank for these crazy unforeseen eventualities of having to still write checks that it was going to end up providing me with over 10 years worth of checks!

So, this morning, I tear off the perforated slip at the bottom of the bill, reliving that nostalgia of the days before your ATM card was also a Debit Card, before you received your bills in an email and long before you could just go online and pay for everything and anything under the sun straight from your checking account. I find a pen, write the amount that I am paying on the slip, find that check book, write out the check to the association, stuff it all into the envelope and put the return address label that I sure as heck didn’t send any money to the charity for on the envelope and then grab that free stamp I got two months ago.

It’s a single stamp, one of the Purple Heart ones that says “Forever”, unlike the days of yore when your stamp only had the value that you paid for it at the time, forcing you to drive to the post office when they raised the rates and buy a slew of 1-cent or 2-cent or 3-cent (depending on how bad the post office was doing at the time) stamps to compliment the stamp you had already paid for before they raised the rates.  Remind me to tell you kids sometime about how I used to mail my tax returns to the state and the fed with a check using well over 30 1-cent stamps on the envelope.

This stand-alone Purple Heart Forever stamp is cut perfectly with the serrated edges, just like the stamps I grew up with – the ones that you had to lick – so, guess what I did? That’s right, I licked the back and pressed it against the top right corner of my envelope and guess what didn’t happen? It didn’t stick! So, I licked it again and I pressed it again. And guess what? I didn’t stick!

Had the adhesive somehow become ineffective during the stamp’s travels from the charity to my home in their envelope? Had it somehow dissipated or become inactive while it was sitting in my drawer for two months? This didn’t make a lick of sense! So, naturally, I flip the stamp over to investigate. It is then that I see the little curved swirl that is cut into – you guessed it – the thin paper backing that covers the sticky sticker backing of the sticker stamp. So there’s Old Man Savastano, licking the back of a self-adhesive sticker, trying to mail out his check because the damned city is the only entity left on the planet that will not let me pay their bill online.

In my defense, it looked just like a real stamp.

Image via United States Postal Service