by | | Entrepreneurial Mentoring, Financial Guides, Mentoring, My Story, Others Story, The Blog, The Politics of Personal Finance
“Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s needs” ~ Frederick Buechner
To waste 30 years of your life working for a company that isn’t fulfilling your life purpose is s complete waste of three decades. When people tell me that they are overwhelmed by life, that’s usually a clue they are not in purpose. When you are in purpose, you have passion on your side. Passion ignites and drives you. It gives you the discipline needed to overcome every obstacle on your journey to your greatest aspiration.
Beyond the levels of satisfaction and fulfillment that come from living out your purpose in life, another reason why it’s paramount to get into fulfilling your purpose is that it’s the answer to increasing the flow of money into your life.
What is it that you do uniquely well and enjoy doing more than anything else? Perhaps you have something you do better than others. Or perhaps there’s something you so completely enjoy that it galvanizes you and brings out the best in you. To find your purpose, look no further than your passion. You can start that search by following these 6 guidelines I learned from Dave, one of my mentors:
- Get curious
Embrace the fact that you don’t know what your purpose is and simply begin to ask, “Why?” Why am I here? Why am I driven by “X”?, Why am I motivated by “Y”? Why am I passionate about “Z”? Develop a hunger to understand the new, unknown and unfamiliar.
- Engage
It’s tough to find passion without leaving the house. Hermits by definition are not passionate people for all of their energy isn’t being directed anywhere outside of their home. Passion is directed energy, and revealing it requires that you create opportunities to engage in new activities, meet new people and get out of your comfort zone. Get comfortable saying “Yes” when you normally might have said “No.”
- Get out of the details
Passion requires that you take a big-picture view of things and see things from the 30,000-foot level versus being stuck in the minutia of it all. Book an appointment with yourself on your calendar for this time of reflection
- Think back to when you were a kid
At one point in time, we all felt passion. Children have boatloads of it by default, but over time it has a way of slipping away. Spend some time mentally revisiting your childhood. Reflect on times when you were most engaged, vibrant and alive. What did you love? Why did you love? What did you want to be when you grew up?
- Recruit help
Sometimes we can’t see the forest from the trees. You may find it necessary to enlist the help of others to help you find your passion. Working with a mentor or a coach should be high on your priority list. Others that may provide insights for you could be a close friend or spouse/partner who can tell you when they’ve seen you really come alive. Sharing your quest with a professional or others will prove to be a valuable experience for you. You won’t regret opening up this way to others that can help you.
- Move on
An old dog lies half-asleep on the port of a general store, moaning and groaning in the sun. After watching him go on like that for a few minutes, a customer asks the store owner, “Why is your dog acting that way?”
“Oh, him,” the store owner says, “that’s Homer. Homer’s fussin’ cause he’s lyin’ on a nail.”
“Well, why doesn’t he move?”
“Cause it ain’t hurtin’ him bad enough.”
You can become so absorbed in your story of financial hardship that you can’t focus on anything else. When I lost millions to a Ponzi-scheme and the SEC wanted to hold me responsible for me and my clients’ losses, it seemed like I held onto that story for years much like a scarlet letter had been etched into my chest.
It’s easy to get into a rut of telling our stories of loss and how unfair the system is. Frankly, we’d tell that story over and over again to ourselves and to anyone who will listen….the boyfriend or girlfriend who left, the cheating spouse who wrecked your marriage, the scheming business partner who stole from you, the lousy boss, the job we can’t stand but can’t quit, the government, the economy….the list goes on and on
While there may be some truth or even a whole lot of truth to any of these stories, at the end of the day they are just that, stories. There comes a time in your life when you just need to move on, when you just need to get off the nail you’ve been lying on before you can see clearly enough to find your passion and ultimately, your purpose.
I hope you find these 6 guidelines helpful in your quest for finding your purpose. I believe there is no more noble cause in life. It’s been said that the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why?
Today, I stand on the sidelines, rooting for and cheering you on in your quest to find your purpose. It’s something I take very seriously and is a part of the work I do in my Total Money Language Mastery one on one coaching program. If that’s something that would interest you, take the assessment and then book a call so we can chat!
TAKE ASSESSMENT NOW
Out of all the gifts I could give you, the gift of finding and living into your purpose is one of the best ones I could pass onto you. It’s made a profound difference in my life and in the lives of the clients I serve. Here’s what one of my clients had to say:
“I hired Ike to be my life coach during one of the toughest seasons in my life! In just a few short sessions, he helped to guide me towards a path of success and purpose!” ~ Chanel E. Martin, CEO PNTHRClaw Consulting
Rooting for and cheering you on your quest!
“If a life unexamined isn’t worth living, perhaps the unexamined life is truly worth living? ~ Socrates & Ike Ikokwu
A life built around your purpose is really the only life worth living. It’s the life where purpose and passion meet to let money flow abundantly into you so you experience money and life abundantly.
You can embark upon that life by taking your first step and completing the assessment and then book a call so we can chat!
TAKE ASSESSMENT NOW
With Abundance & Fulfillment,
Ike
by | | The Politics of Personal Finance
To be called a tax or not to be called a tax, that is the question (in my Shakespearen voice) that the Obama administration now faces in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on June 28, 2012. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you should have heard by now that the high court, by a 5 to 4 majority, rejected the argument that requiring Americans who aren’t covered by insurance at work to buy insurance or face a fine was an unconstitutional expansion of federal power.
With the decision in, there are at least two questions you should ask yourself. The first is do you feel the government should have the right to mandate health insurance coverage for you as an individual? And, the second is will this ruling be a benefit or a burden for you? Insurance needs aside, I can tell you that I don’t feel the government should be allowed to mandate that I purchase anything yet alone purchase insurance. Since when did the government become the deciding factor as to what is in my best interest? Judging by the fruit or lack thereof in their ability to determine what’s in their best interest yet alone the constituents they serve, I have no confidence in them determining what’s in my best interest. It’s almost as bad as New York Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on the sale of greater than 16 oz drinks. These are all small signs of the end of capitalism as we know it when we keep giving the government more and more powers to control everything we do. Soon it will be a democracy for the “controlled robots” by the “controlling congress” as opposed to a government for the people by the people. The sign outside the borders might as well read “Welcome to the United Socialist States of America!”
Regardless of your opinions on the matter, this ruling is a direct contrast to a 2009 interview Barack participated in when the reform bill was doing nothing more than sitting on capitol hill, hoping to be a law one day. ABC News correspondent George Stephanopolous sat down with Obama and asked directly why he didn’t consider this motion a tax.
[ Source: Total Frat Move and Politico.com ]
Chief Justice John Roberts, a remnant judge from the Bush era, crossed party lines to suggest that the reform was not an individual mandate, but an additional tax and should be treated as such. When one takes a step back and realizes that because of the law, anyone who doesn’t get health insurance would owe 1% of their income to the IRS, it sounds an awful lot like a new tax to anyone with a semblance of common sense. Now while I’m a Certified Public Accountant and have worked in Tax and Financial Planning for the past 16 years, you don’t have to work in my field to realize that this is a new tax.
So, despite past promises and assurances, Obama has failed to be clear with the American public yet again. Whether you agree with Obamacare or not, by imposing a new tax on the American people without giving them an appropriate description, Obama has either A) purposely misled us, or B) doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about. Either way, I think you should be a bit concerned.
You know I saw a couple of pictures on Facebook that were indicative of probably the President’s sentiments on this issue. The first one was a picture of him in a board room with what seemed like cabinet members laughing their butts off with a caption that said:
The second one was of him in what looked like perhaps his office with a very serious look on his face and one of his classic poses…you know the one where he has his arms crossed with one arm towards his face with this very serious look and a caption that read:
Don’t be surprised if Obama whips out another can of executive privilege from his oval office kitchen cabinet to deal with this incident.
You know while we may not be able to agree on the merits of Obamacare, we can at least agree that it’s a tax. So let’s talk about how this tax hurts your ability to win the money game:
- On January 1, 2013, the Medicare tax will go up by 0.9% for individuals earning over $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers, $125,000 for married individuals filing separately).
- Also on January 1, there will be a new “Unearned Income Medicare Contribution” of 3.8% on investment income of those earning more than $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers).
- Beginning January 1, 2014, there will be a new $2,500 limit on tax-free contributions to flexible spending accounts, and employers with more than 50 employees will face a penalty of $2,000 per employee for not offering health insurance to full-time employees.
- Finally, the threshold for deducting medical and dental expenses rises from 7.5% of adjusted gross income to 10%. This will make these expenses even harder to deduct without help from advanced strategies like Health Savings Accounts or Medical Expense Reimbursement Plans.
In concluding I can’t help but say: Now that we all know it’s a tax, how do you think the President and his Henchmen…I mean cabinet members will lie their way out of this one? Are you comfortable with the President mandating health insurance for you and will it be a benefit or a burden for you? Chew on that for a while and in another blog entry, I’ll discuss an “April fools trick” the President played on the American people with the passage of his Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
by | | The Politics of Personal Finance
If you think about it, there are many people who make a career and a very good one might I add out of being a politician. However, where does one actually learn to be a politician? I mean I know there are political science majors out there but I can’t remember how many politicians I’ve seen out there that actually were political science majors. A high percentage of politicians were formerly lawyers and many of them come from wealth. That in and of itself is an interesting fact to note.
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by | | The Politics of Personal Finance
If you’ve ever listened to a financial guru, financial expert or other authoritative figure in the financial services industry, at some point you’ve probably gotten to hear them talk about politics in some shape, form or fashion. Why is that? Are financial experts “in the closet” politicians? Do they aspire a different life in politics? Or, is there some interrelationship between money and politics that far too often, many fail to pay attention to? I surmise it might be the latter but let me not influence your thinking. All that I ask is that you check out my articles and posts on the subject and form your own opinion.
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