354: How to Find Your Financial Freedom: The Importance of Understanding, Writing and LIVING Your Love Story with Money
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Release Date: 04/05/2023
382: Antique & Vintage Shopping in Barnard Castle, England + 5 Ways I Decorate with these Treasures
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
You know you've found a quaint English town when the name of the town has a beloved nickname personifying it. Barnard Castle, or Barney, as the locals often call it, is a small town in County Durham, so in the northeastern portion of England, and the population rests just under 6,000. Now, when I began to make my plans to visit England for this particular trip, one of my top priorities centered around finding treasures for which had finally concluded, as I wanted to begin to add the polish, if you will. So antiquing and vintage decor shops were on my radar, and I could not have been more...
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381: The Power of the Clarity of Our Intention AND Where We Direct Our Attention: Understanding Our Mind
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
We each have an amazing super power within us that when we understand how it works, transforms the quality of our lives. Instead of living in fear, constantly worrying and doubting the goodness of our fellow human beings or that our dreams can come true, when we understand how the Salience Network works in our mind, we unwrap a priceless gift. The salience network is the cognitive system the brain uses to determine what is important, so if we don't understand the components of and how it functions, we can be at its mercy and ultimately relinquish the keys to what will open the door to living a...
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380: How Rituals Enrich Our Lives IF We Choose and Engage with Intention
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Rituals, whether designed by us solely for ourselves, or legacy rituals, or relationship or group rituals that involve others, give us more than can be imagined to deepen the quality of our life than we thought possible prior to fully engaging and incorporating them into our lives. You may recognize Dr. Michael Norton's name, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, as he co-wrote a book I thoroughly enjoyed and often sited for over a decade on the effects of money and happiness with Elizabeth Dunn, (if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, as their work has...
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379: How (and Why) to Be Your Own Best Friend
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
"We are not born with the secret of how to live [well], and too many of us never learn it. There is nothing cold-blooded or mechanical about it, but there are many things we have to learn to do . . . the first thing is to realize we've probably been looking in the wrong place. The source is not outside us; it is within." —Mildred Newman & Bernard Berkowitz, authors of Befriend yourself and you have a friend for life. This simple saying, often expressed, while true, is often not understood as to how it can be possible. But the most awesome news I want to share with you today is that you...
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378: Choose to Compost Your Past: How the Arrival of the Spring Season is a Metaphor for Life
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
"Composting what was into what will be." Mother Nature and the cycle of seasons provide endless life lessons and nourishing guidance if we are wise enough to heed her teachings. More specifically, spring's arrival, the season as we all know that introduces itself after winter, the latter season of which for many of us can be frigid, keeping us more home-bound and bundled up far more often than we might prefer as well as to cause us to take stock of our home environment most directly and intimately. It was upon hearing the statement above in a recent yoga class that I immediately smiled. Why?...
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377: The Slow Productivity Approach that will Elevate the Quality of Your Entire Life, as taught by Cal Newport
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Author and professor of computer science at Georgetown University Cal Newport's latest book details exactly how and where in our daily lives and throughout the year we can apply the Slow Productivity approach and why it works. In today's episode I will be sharing with you 10 takeaways that caught my eye as areas of interest that I thought would interest TSLL readers/podcast listeners, and if what you discover here speaks to you, I encourage you to pick up the book as far more detail and information is shared. Throughout the discussion today, I will be dovetailing the ideas Newport suggests...
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376: Wise Investments: Understand the Difference between a Good Value and a Good Deal
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
The savviness of wise money management encompasses many factors, but one is an approach often overlooked or dismissed: Understanding the difference between a Good Value versus a Good Deal. Here in the states tax season is upon us, and so many of us may have money on the mind even more than we usually do; however, I often find myself at the beginning of the new year assessing my monthly budget, determining where I am gaining value or unnecessarily causing more tasks and draining money. Ultimately, whenever I sit down to assess my money, my goal is to do so less often, knowing I have invested...
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375: How to Become a More Skilled Participant in the Living of Our Life
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
The concluding note to readers that author, yoga and meditation instructor Deborah Adele shares in her book : includes the wish that they become more skilled participants in the living of their lives. And with the wisdom she shares in her book, she provides them with the tools to do just that. Having shared various insights here on the blog gained from her book, specifically in about , and as we conclude the two month-long series of 'new year, new life' as you continued along the way to making the change you set to bring to be as the new year began, I wanted to explore two simple, yet...
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374: What I Have Learned in French Class, So Far - part sept (7)
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Bonjour à tous ! Just last week, I concluded FR 105 with Washington DC's Alliance de Français, a Zoom/online course that met twice a week, two hours each time since just after Thanksgiving. You may remember that Part Six of this series was shared during TSLL's Annual French Week which shared what I had learned through FR 104 and 103, and now it is time to share some progress! Thankfully, there has been progress and while I chose to take Everyday Situational French this fall due to my travel schedule, this once-a-week meeting provided me the opportunity to keep the French language on the tip...
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373: How to Nourish Your Creative Being: Cultivate An Artistic Hearth & Home
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
"Part of art making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over—and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful . . . a life lived within productive patterns. The life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home." —David Bayles & Ted Orland, authors of In unforced or unexpected moments, ideas, solutions...
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"To have a good relationship with money, you must know who you are and what your purpose is in this world." —Kate Northrup, Money: A Love Story
Find your purpose, exercise your courage and you are on your way to financial freedom. Simple AND true. Not easy, but definitely doable.
For many of us, we were taught (or it was modeled) that money and how to approach money successfully is to solely look at it logically, requiring tangible proofs in order to know we are successful - the amount of money in our checking account, a lack of debt, the amount we have saved in our chosen mode of savings, the value of our quantifiable assets - our home, our business, etc., etc.. Don't worry, I am not going to say, being without any money in the bank is okay as long as you have [insert whatever non-monetary example you have heard], because it's not true. We do need money to live and live well; however, to only look at the numbers is to dismiss the powerful engine of creating the financial freedom you seek. Our lives are not Money Ball. While a wonderful film and a very successful approach to winning in the game of baseball, when we only look at the numbers, we lose the core of what living well, a life of true wealth, is all about, to lose ourselves in the sole pursuit for more money or having a certain amount of money in the bank before we [insert your big dream here] is to live without trust in the universe, to live without trust in ourselves. Again, do not worry, I am not going to say, ignore money and pursue whatever fleeting fancy your heart desires and the money will follow, but sort of, I am, it just doesn't happen overnight, or within the window you would like it to.
When I picked up Kate Northrup's first book Money: A Love Story, Untangle your financial woes and create the life you really want, it was the book I was looking for for some time but I wasn't able to find it because likely, the most important lessons wouldn't have landed with such great effect. The truth about what financial freedom is while yes, having to do with the monetary concept of literally earning more than you spend, it also involves the fuel for making money and that is not logical or literal monetarily, it comes from finding and living a life of true contentment. And as we have talked about for years here on TSLL blog and podcast, stepping onto the path toward cultivating contentment begins with being courageous enough to get to know yourself, to dig in and learn the helpful skills that all of us can learn if we choose, and then with what we discover, being brave about the next step that may be entirely different, or even slightly different than the path we were originally on.
"As with any relationship, the key to dealing with your financial woes lies within." —Kate Northrup, Money: A Love Story
The path to financial freedom, something that upon reading Kate Northrup's book Money: A Love Story, I discovered that what she shares overlaps in multiple ways with how to live simply luxuriously.
First, what is financial freedom?
As Kate Northrup defines it, "To wake up every morning and do whatever calls to you, whatever the heck you feel like doing, is connected to your ability to feel free from financial strain and to be open to what your heart is telling you."
The moment I read this definition, I had specifics in my mind of what this looks like for me, so what I am going to ask you to do right now is to write in your journal, on your phone in the Notes section or anywhere where you will be able to check in and remind yourself when doubt seeking financial freedom is possible for you, what it is you want to be able to do without financial restrains holding you back? What do you want to be able to do that your heart is aching to do, but you aren't able to financial make it so? What would your daily life look like, what would a typical calendar year look like, so vacations, work projects, home life, etc.?
PAUSE - seriously, write this out somewhere. See your future life on paper. It can happen. It CAN be your life. It all begins with the story we accept as possible. And I want you to know, and tell yourself that it is so, that you can live the life that continues to speak to you.
Let's dive in to writing a Love Story with Money that brings you to a life of Financial Freedom.