Happy New Year! We have made it through and we seem to be climbing our way out of the ever spiraling hell in a hand basket disaster that was 2020.

As I think about the coming year, still full of health and financial challenges, I have been trying to hone in on what is needed to make it the best that it can be. Knowing that we will need to work our way out of this hole, how can we make the most of it. What are those ingredients that are most valuable to invest in?

Based on my research and Strive work, I believe there are the three core ingredients to setting a path towards success regardless of the unexpected landmines life may throw: Empathetic Understanding, Focus, and Practice.

Emphatic understanding opens the gate to constructive action, Focus enables us to direct our efforts towards specific goals and Practice provides the action and repetition required for impact. I believe that together these ingredients can help make 2021 the best possible year whether you are an individual struggling to figure out how to make ends meet, jump into a higher paying job, a new immigrant trying to develop a financial plan or a support provider helping clients deal with financial emergencies.

Let me explain each one.

Empathetic understanding

We are bombarded with a breadth of messages on how we can be better and do better with our money. Although articles like this recent Forbes one on How to Find Financial Stability in Uncertain Times provide good insights around having a plan, cutting costs, and building up cash savings, they fail to provide an understanding of the real context we are in.

The reality is that Canadians were struggling before the pandemic. We struggled with housing affordability, precarious work and increased debt. These struggles are the result of a macro level trends that are far beyond an individual’s ability to control their finances.

Covid19 has taken this reality and created a financial crisis for certain segments of our population. According to a recent Toronto Star article, 15% per cent of individuals earning less than $22 an hour are laid off or working fewer than half the hours they did in February, while the rest of the workforce has more or less fully recovered.

We need to truly understand context and that everyone’s context is different. We need an empathic understanding of our individual context and that of others. This is key to constructive action. It helps stop the shame of not being where one wants to be. It provides the space for problem solving, creativity and innovation. It is what helps us figure out seemingly intractable problems.

With empathetic understanding in place, we can move onto:

Focus

Here we can allow ourselves the space to think about what we truly want. We can dream and envision where we would like to be. We can focus and sit with our goals, truly understanding the time and financial investment required to achieve them. We can then problem solve and develop strategies that will effectively move us forward.

Practice
Once we have focus and clarity, we can invest in practice. Any journey towards a particular goal requires change - if our actions do not change, then our results will not change. And change is hard, it requires moving out of autopilot and investing in thinking, learning, building new processes, testing, and refining our approach. So, if you are a low income single parent, practice could involve carving out an hour each week to learn strategies others low wage earners have used to transition to higher income. If you are a stretched service provider with no resources, practice could involve carving out time to interview individuals from other organizations or departments to understand possibilities for moving forward.

With practice one can slowly but surely invest in new strategies, figure out what works and what does not, and take meaningful steps forward. It is these steps that will help us slowly build success despite the craziness that life throws at us.

I hope that 2021 brings us all a healthy dose of emphatic understanding, focus and practice.