How to Use the Window of Resiliency to Make Better Financial Decisions
By: Morgan Blackman
Tags: Decision Making, Finance, Money Management, Money Mindset, Resilience

Let’s face it. Making financial decisions can be the driving factor in the average person’s dealings with emotions such as fear, stress and anxiety. Let me just say that, it sucks and nobody is exempt from life’s woes surrounding money and feeling financially secure.

There is financial wellness method i’ve recently come to learn about and it’s called the Window of Resiliency. Don’t worry — you’ve probably never hear of it and rightfully so. It’s not a cute term that you’d find often thrown into your everyday conversations anyway — but it’s use can be significantly effective in helping us to navigate our personal relationship with money and becoming more self-aware before making financial decisions.

A lot of the times when people make poor decisions with their money it’s because we are making these decisions out of poor emotional states. Low vibrational feelings such as anxiety, fear, depression, stress and self-doubt are often the culprit. These feelings — often subconscious - are what creates the perpetual cycle of making poor financial decisions, keeping us in a state mental poverty, living paycheck to paycheck and often living above our means. The irony in making emotional and impulsive financial decisions is that it even further causes us to be more anxious and stressed out about our financial situation. 43 per cent of Canadians are financially stressed, and just 22 per cent consider themselves financially “comfortable.”

What is the WOR?

The window of resiliency is an emotional awareness scale from 1–10 that helps determine what state of arousal we are in when it comes to making financial decisions or are responding to a particular financial situation. When it comes to our finances, it’s important to notice when money is making us feel uncomfortable by defining states of arousals.

How does on realize when they are in a state of hyper or hypo arousal and how can we find balance when it comes to making our own financial decisions?

This my job as an intuitive wealth coach to help millennial women notice when their anxieties or fears come up around money and how to in that exact moment subside our negative emotions and connect more with our heart center to make more of those aligned and intuitive decisions. Of course, in any efforts to manage our emotions it’s usually something that takes time and a lot of self-reflection and doing some inner work, but I think that just by being aware of your emotions in the present moment is crucial to giving yourself the chance the set yourself up for success, instead of failure.

The State of Hyper-Arousal

In a state of hyper arousal you would fall between the numbers 7–10 on the WOR scale. This occurs when you are having a more intense sense of anxiety and stress in a situation and so tend to make more emotional and impulsive decisions with your money. This can look like, for example, someone who emotionally decides to go shopping and buy a whole bunch of non-essentials because they just had a fight with their boyfriend. Or, maybe even someone who likes to emotionally eat because they aren’t happy with their life right now and/or body. There is always an indirect correlation of people having poor money habits based on poor performance in other areas of their lives. Which is why it’s so important to constantly be keeping ourselves in check, and to in that moment really ask ourselves, where would I rate myself right now in this window of resiliency?

The State of Hypo-Arousal

When people find themselves in a state of hypo-arousal these are usually people who tend to avoid their finances and numb out. You don’t want to budget, you don’t want to look at financial statements and you sure as hell are afraid to invest your money. People who also tend to be very stingy with their money fall into this category, because they have a scarcity/poverty mindset. They are afraid that the money they put out into the world, won’t come back to them in return. If you do not believe that you are held by the Universe and that whatever you intentionally by with purpose, will not come back to you in abundance is a great indicator that you lack trust in yourself and in the energy of money.

The Optimal Range for Resiliency

The optimal place where you want to land on on the WOR scale is between 4–7, and if you realize you’re not within that range, then you know there is some deeper work to do. Whether it’s in that moment or at a later time, to see why you are making the decisions you are making that’s later going to negatively affect your finances. A tool that I would highly recommend using to become more self-aware of where you are operating all times within your WOR is to meditate. The benefits of meditation are endless, but I would say the greatest benefit in learning to quiet the mind is that it instantly helps to de-stress in any given moment.

Instantly if you’re feeling any negative emotions such as anxiety, fear or doubt and you feel alot of tension and mindless chatter in your headspace — you want to start taking deep breaths. This can be simply breathing in for four seconds, and then breathing out for another four seconds or five or six. Usually, the longer you inhale, hold and exhale your breaths — the better. A simple meditation can easily help you to seek awareness amongst an emotional storm. The more you begin to incorporate therapeutic practices like meditation into your daily routine, the less likely overtime you will be to make impulsive and emotional decisions.

Photo by Oluremi Adebayo from Pexels

Additional tools and resources for maintaining an optimal WOR

Other tools or therapeutic practices you can start to incorporate that have more of a long-term effect on your decision making behaviors is using alternative wellness and therapeutic approaches such as EFT Tapping and Meditative Journaling. Of course, there are also small habits you can build into your decision making processes to prevent yourself from making poor financial decisions. Things like going for a walk around the block or waiting 24–72 hours before making a purchase are tried and tested reinforcement measures that actually help people to relax and calm their bodies before making impulsive financial decisions. Chances are that after that walk, you probably don’t have that urge anymore to go on a shopping spree.

Personally, the easiest thing that I try to do and what’s worked for me is just removing the temptation or trigger object altogether. So if there’s regular e-mails that I get from a makeup store I really like, and there are always flash sales going on — the smartest thing for me to do is to simply unsubscribe from all company e-mails. Lately, i’ve also been having a phase where I like to order takeout, and I must admit i’ve been getting a liiiitle carried away. So what i’ve started to do is get into the habit of always having water near me and if I’m feeling hungry and tempted to order food I simply have to finish drinking 1L of water first. By the time i’m done, I feel less hungry and eager to order out and end up whipping up something smaller in the end. So figure out and identify what your triggers are and how you can remove the trigger or commit to an additional step to take before making that final financial decision.

Like I said, it takes a lot of self-awareness to build up a strong financial muscle and that’s why using an effective method like the Window Of Resilience approach in the moment, can actually help you to determine what state of arousal you’re in and using the above mentioned tools to move yourself into a more balanced state of financial decision-making.

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If you’re ready to create a S.M.A.R.T goal after reading this blog post, here’s a link to my customized S.M.A.R.T. Goal worksheet. You can also sign-up to watch my free masterclass on “Saving While Living Your Best Life”, to learn about all the savings hacks and tools that will instantly have you saving more money today - without having to even budget (gasps). You can catch the masterclass replay here .

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