Tag: zach rance

Categories
Awareness Blog Personal Finance

START PREPARING FOR THE TOUGH YEARS AHEAD

With gas prices now at an all-time high, food costs increasing and housing costs also on the uptick it’s important that you start preparing for the tough years ahead. Some of the biggest companies in the world including Apple, Tesla, and Coinbase have all frozen new hiring and some other large corporations are beginning to lay off workers. The recession is coming, so how do you prepare?

This week I posted a video on Instagram talking about how, in challenging times, the gap widens between the strong and the weak.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CeeiIUJpq62/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

It’s crucial that you start to implement systems that help you save money and that put you in the best position for when times get rough. The next few years are going to expose a lot of people in numerous ways. 

There are simple fixes to your current lifestyle that will help you deal with the shock much better so you don’t get affected as bad.

YOUR FIRST STEP in preparing for the tough year ahead of us is to create a fixed monthly expense sheet. Getting your personal finances in order is vital and this is the first step. This is a tool that will give you a precise dollar amount of what it costs you to live each and every single month. Your expense sheet should include your car expenses, housing expenses, insurances, phone bills, and internet – it should even include haircuts, air filters, paper towels, and trash bags.

Below is a picture of what my fixed monthly expense sheet looks like. Feel free to copy mine or you can go on Etsy and purchase a digital spreadsheet that automatically generates all your numbers for you once you fill them in. I recommend @mywealthdiary which I follow on Instagram here is a link to her Etsy store.

Knowing exactly how much money it takes for you to survive is the first step in your personal finance journey

It is a great move that you can take today to put yourself in a better position for the future.

THE SECOND STEP I recommend is saving a minimum of 10% of your income. Every single month or biweekly when you get your paycheck, you should be instantly transferring 10% of your income into a savings account. Preserving your cash is vital if you want to make it through a recession/depression.

These are two actionable steps that you can take immediately that are going to make your life 1% better and allow you to step into the greatest version of yourself for the future. I have many other opinions and ideas on how you can best put yourself in a position to succeed through the 2022 great recession so continue to follow me on all socials and if you haven’t already downloaded my Mental Health app: www.Lifecoachzach.App 

Email, me after you join the app so I can add you to my private Facebook group. 

Best,

Categories
Awareness Blog Optimize Your Life

HOW TO NOT BECOME DISTRACTED.

I recently sat down and had a conversation with author Nir Eyal of the best-selling book “Indistractable”. This is a book on how to control your attention and choose your life. A funny little story about this book. In 2019 right after it came out I went to Barnes & Noble and I took it off the bookshelf. It had a bright yellow cover with a Picture of a mouse scroll arrow type thing and before even opening the front cover I had a pretty good idea about what this book was about. I decided to sit down and look through it for a little bit. Before I buy books I always like to read the table of contents and look through a few of the chapters to see if it’s something that I can apply to my life. This book seemed very interesting and applicable to my life. It was the summer of 2019 and my real estate business was going pretty well, I was very busy and even though I felt like things are moving in the right direction I still wasn’t 100% clear on what I should be doing with my time and energy. As an entrepreneur building a business and working for yourself, it’s not always blatantly obvious what you should be doing. For example, should I be networking? Should I be knocking on doors? Should I be cold calling? Should I be creating contacts? Should I be sending out mailers to my neighbors? There are so many different options and not all of them have the same return on your time. Sometimes even though we have so many options it leaves us helpless because we are just too plain confused. Well as you can imagine it’s very hard to stay on task. These days with social media and our reliance on our cell phones it’s so easy to get distracted. After just 20 minutes into the book, I knew this was going to be a game-changer so I ended up reading the entire book in just two sittings at Barnes & Noble. Afterward, I immediately applied a lot of the principles to my life.

Here are the two things that have made the most impact on my life today from this book.

  1. Knowing what I am being distracted from. 

It’s impossible to be distracted if you don’t know what you are being distracted from! This was mind-blowing for me to understand. A lot of the times when I don’t really know what I should be doing I end up getting distracted, but it’s not really a distraction if I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Scheduling in a specific time for specific tasks is crucial! I now understand the importance of scheduling my day and not just to stay on task but to know what I’m being distracted from. 

2. Controlling external factors!

We get so many notifications on our phones whether it’s the new sale at Nike or fantasy football updates! Sometimes I’m driving on the highway and I get a notification and I look at it quickly to realize that I’m swerving off the road to check on a fantasy football player who got injured. I started to realize the importance of controlling your attention and the easiest way to gain more control is by controlling external factors. I decided to unsubscribe from all of the emailing lists I was on, I decided to turn off all my notifications on all my social media apps, I also started to realize what happens after you check your phone one time. Picking up your phone to check your Gmail ends up turning into scrolling through Facebook or Instagram for 20 minutes. This simple change of turning off notifications can alter the course of your day.

What are your biggest distractions? Are you aware of those inner triggers that cause you to lose your focus… I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… Leave a comment below.

Check out the podcast [here] with Nir where he goes in-depth on distractions. I hope you guys enjoy!

Categories
Awareness Blog

HABITS

“Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Rohn

When first working with a new life coaching client I try really hard to dive deep into their current habits and ask questions that will help me uncover not only their bad habits – but their good habits as well.

Habits are what you do on a daily basis automatically without having to think that ultimately become easier and easier over time.

Nothing is more important to success than habits and I’ll tell you why.

The first time you wake up at 5am its tough, the second time you get up super early its still tough but after a few consistent days under your belt beating the sun not only does it get easier but you start to enjoy it more as well. It goes without being said that having good, productive, efficient habits are important but the real power of habits is when you solidify a new habit to focus on the next. When that daily reading practice becomes so ingrained into your brain that you no longer have to think or try or feel obligated to get it done, that’s when the magic happens. Why is this so powerful? Well, besides the fact that it becomes easier and you no longer need to use your will power muscle or spend energy and attention on performing the habit the real power comes from the ability you now have to implement a new habit. This is what I want to focus on. Make a list of 10 habits that you think would benefit you overtime that would lead to living your best life, some of them might include a daily meditation practice, consistent exercise, doing the dishes as soon as you’re done eating.  Overtime incorporating new productive habits into your life will give you this new ability to always be adding new and improved ways of living that will ultimately lead you to greater success.

So, what are some of my habits? Well I have a few non-negotiables that I perform every single day, without fail and they include but are not limited to:

  • Make my bed (daily last 3 months)
  • Meditate (daily last 4 years)
  • Read (daily last 5 years)
  • Listen to audible instead of music (daily last 9 months)
  • Fast until 1230pm (daily last 4 months)
Incorporating a new habit is only possible when an old habit becomes automatic – can you see the compound effect at work?

You don’t cash in your results on your habits immediately, there is a lag from habit implementation to swing results. It takes time for your habits to show that they are working but there are some habits that you don’t need to expect results from because you just know they are going to work. I call this trusting the process and a few of my life coaching clients have a though time when they don’t see results immediately. Do not worry about results, focus on your actions. If a basketball team spent the entire 60 minutes of a game looking at the results (in this case the scoreboard) they would never be able to score a point let alone get back and play defense. Do not focus on the fruits of your labor focus on the actions of your labor. This requires a lot of mindfulness, its not easy to stay in the moment and give all of your attention to right here right now but this is required to make greatness happen in your life.

At the bottom of this blog post is a list of good habits that you can perform on a daily basis that when they become automatic will allow you to focus on new habits.

  • Waking up at 5am
  • Daily reading
  • Daily meditation
  • Making your bed
  • Exercising Cleaning the dishes after you eat
  • Putting stuff back where it belongs when your done using it
  • Getting rid of 1 thing everyday
  • Journaling
  • Setting your most important tasks for the day
  • Calling a friend
  • Writing down something that you are grateful for

“Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” “For every disciplined effort, there is a multiple reward.” – Jim Rohn