“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”
Jean Shinoda Bolen
There’s a great scene in the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes when he enters his mind palace, accessing stored memories to help him solve a case. According to Holmes, he often has to remove unimportant information (like knowing how many planets there are in our solar system) to make space for the important stuff.
Whilst the show overplays scenes like this to accentuate Holmes’ social awkwardness, it’s a good reminder that we need to focus on making room for the things that matter to us. During our formative schooling years, we learn loads of habits and form perceptions of how we believe life should look, in line with the curriculum, but not necessarily in line with who we are.
As adults, our lives are packed with things that don’t necessarily nourish our souls or bring us joy. At WellsFaber, we see these things as inhibitors to living in our wealthspace, holding us back from succeeding. This is why so many of us are simply surviving and not thriving.
Of all the things that bring us the most joy at WellsFaber, seeing our clients thrive is one of the most profound.
We need to either recover or discover what brings us joy, and for this, we need to be both reflective and introspective.
A journey of reflection
The University of Edinburgh offers six great ways to reflect, but the simplest is possibly the What? So what? Now what? method. Developed in 1994 by John Driscoll (often called the Driscoll model of reflection), it is straightforward to remember and can be applied to any area of life or experience.
In a nutshell, it looks at:
What? Our personal experience of the situation.
So what? The implications of the situation and how it affects us.
Now what? The action plan – how will we take control of, or change, our choices going forward.
This journey can help us recover something that nourishes our soul and brings joy.
A journey of introspection
Introspection is the examination of one’s conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on observing one’s mental state, while in a spiritual context, it may refer to examining one’s soul. One of the goals of introspection is to gain awareness – and discover more of ourselves.
Hopefully, this journey can help us discover something new that nourishes our souls and brings joy.
The final step is to make space in our lives for the important stuff which affects our financial and life plans. It’s a journey we can take personally, but it’s also something that we can help our partner, kids and parents with. When we can articulate the things that ignite our passions and add flavour to our experiences and relationships, we can make space for them in our lives – having the time and money available to explore and expand as needed.