Investing Where to Start: Your Financial Blueprint

Today I’m going to talk about investing and where to start. 

A wonderful first step to explore when you want to begin investing is to explore your relationship with money. You have an automatic reaction to money. We all do. This is your financial blueprint or your financial programming. 

We all have a blueprint for money. This blueprint drives how you react to money. It’s what you’ve learnt about money up to this point in your life. It’s developed over time and was influenced by those around you as you grew up. 

Most blueprints we have, such as work, stress, marriage, and driving have become so ingrained in us that we don’t give them much thought. Our financial blueprint is the same way. When we interact with money, we automatically react how we always have. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless how you’re automatically reacting isn’t working for you any longer. 

Your financial blueprint is your automatic reaction to money, or your financial programming. And there’s a formula to this programming:

Thoughts lead to feelings > Feelings lead to actions > Actions lead to results

Thoughts Lead to Feeling

Have you ever found yourself thinking about a memory and without even realizing it, you’re feeling anxious, worried, sad, happy, etc. I can close my eyes and think back to when I passed my drivers test and got my license. A smile actually comes to my face when I’m thinking about it as I was so freaking excited at the time. It makes me happy thinking about it to this day.

This same process happens in the present. Something happens to you and a thought will pop into your head about it. Almost simultaneously, you’ll have a feeling about this thought.

For example, I woke up this morning and looked out the window to see that it was raining. The thought that popped into my head right away was “really, rain again”. And the feeling I felt was disappointed. I mean it is considered the rainy season right now where I live and we do average 1677mm or 66 inches of rainfall each year, but I’m often optimistic that it won’t rain when it’s predicted to rain.

Feelings Lead to Actions

So we’re walking around, doing our usual daily things and we’re continually experiencing all these feelings. This is normal. Sometimes we’re aware of these feelings and other times we might be on autopilot and just powering through our to-do list (if you fall into this latter category, check out this post here). Believe it or not, these feelings can dictate our decisions, or the actions we take.

Let’s continue with my example from above. I woke up this morning, looked out my window to see that it was raining and felt disappointed. What decision did I make? Today I decided to dress warmly, throw on my raincoat and boots, grab an umbrella and take the kids to the zoo. Other days, I throw on comfy clothes and grab a good book and drink a pot of coffee (these are both awesome choices in my opinion).

But you can see the two different decisions, or actions I could take based on my feeling of the rain. 

Actions lead to Results

We make so many decisions each day, most of which are automatic. This means that we aren’t necessarily aware of all the decisions we make. Have you ever walked away after dinner and couldn’t remember if you turned the stove off?

So here’s the kicker, if you find yourself unhappy with something you're doing or not doing, it’s a result of a decision you made (or didn’t make as not making a decision is actually a decision). 

With my above example, if I chose to get into comfy clothes, grab a good book and stay home all day, I can’t be upset with the result of not going to the zoo because I didn’t take action that would lead me to go to the zoo today.

Now What

As I mentioned before, we all have to interact with money and you will automatically react to it how you’ve always done. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless how you’re automatically reacting isn’t giving you the result you’re happy with (such as: living pay cheque to pay cheque, not having an emergency fund, haven’t started saving for retirement, etc.). 

If you want to change how you react to money, you must change how you think about money. The same goes for any one of our other blueprints. I guide you through how to do this in my Financial Blueprint Workbook found here. The workbook goes through how your money blueprint was programmed, any pain points you may have, and how to reprogram your financial blueprint to eliminate those pain points.