Monday Morning Motivation – Afraid
(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Afraid
Today’s Monday Morning Motivation is going to be a bit longer than normal. I’m also going to tread a bit into the sensitive area of faith; AND, I’m going to draw a connection between the stock market and faith. Hopefully this introduction has you sufficiently intrigued that you want to read on….
While I’m not famous, I do have several “quotes” of my own which I would like to think have the potential to become famous. At the top of the list is:
- All things in life come down to faith over fear
A few weeks ago a new sermon series entitled “Trials” kicked off at my church. During the first sermon, Jeff related that nothing can ruin a good trial like fear. His point was the following:
- We all will face challenges in life. Those challenges are NOT going to be made easier by being afraid. Rather, fear is going to keep us from facing and overcoming the challenges. Only when we put faith in our ability to get through the trial will we be able to move through the trial.
Sounds an awful lot like faith over fear…
Let’s look at the stock market for a bit less “heavy” demonstration of this concept.
When you think of the financial markets and money in general, you can quickly become scared beyond belief. While your 401(k) statement may show six or seven figures, do you REALLY know that the money is there? When the guys on CNN talk about “crashes” and show frazzled traders on the floor, does it elicit a sense of fear in your chest? Thoughts like these will scare you silly if you allow them to live in your mind.
The only way to be at peace with the stock market is to put your faith in the system and let this faith “remove” the fear. For me, it’s easy because I believe two things:
- There will be more people on this earth twenty years from now than there are today
- The world economy will be bigger in twenty years than it is now
These two things give me confidence that investing in the ever growing world is the right thing to do for my long term financial future. Does that mean it is easy or a smooth ride? Nope. But it does mean that I am NOT afraid to invest. My faith in a growing population and a growing global financial market allows me to overcome the fear that arises from the daily fluctuations of the market.
We are all going to face challenges in our life. These challenges will sometimes seem unsurmountable. These challenges will bring up a sense of fear. Fear is a survival mechanism that we CANNOT get away from. I would offer that we will only be able to get past the fear associated with these challenges by drawing on faith. There is NO standard way to do this – that is why faith is such a personal thing. That brings us to this week’s question:
- Is it better to go through life being afraid or to go through life embracing faith?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.
Curt
Blog posts from this past week:
At F5 Financial Planning we focus on helping individuals and families find balance between faith, friends and family, fitness and finance. We make sure that they have the financial freedom to enjoy those things in life that are important to them. And while we believe the left-brain facts and data are critical; we work with our clients to get them in the right state of mind to focus on the goals they want to achieve.
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