310 Holly Worton ~ How to Feel More Safe & Secure in Life

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! I’ve been thinking a lot about security lately, especially financial security. But I’ve also realized that feeling safe and secure in the world is really important – not just in terms of money and finance, and not just in terms of personal safety. So I thought I’d talk about ways we can feel more safe and secure in the world – in all areas of our lives.

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What You’ll Learn

How to feel more safe and secure in your life
Why this is important
How to get clear on just how safe and secure you feel today
How to envision what it would look like to feel safe and secure in all areas of your life
Questions to ask yourself to explore this topic further
How to get the mindset you need to take the actions you need to take to feel more safe and secure

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 310. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. I am thinking I need to start including outtakes, or bloopers, at the end of these episodes because I just introduced this podcast as the Business Mindset Podcast {laughing} and I had to go back and delete it before I recorded it properly. Clearly I still have mindset on my mind but, today, for this week’s episode, I am going to be talking about something different. Mindset is in the air, as it always is, but I am going to be talking about security, because that is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately, especially financial security and what that looks like to me. But I have also realised that feeling safe and secure in the world has been a big issue for me in many aspects of my life. It is something that I have done a lot of mindset work on so that I could make better decisions, and take better actions, to create a life where I feel more safe and secure. And I have realised that feeling safe and secure is really important not just for me, but for other people. And not just in terms of personal safety and money and finance but in all areas of our lives. So today I thought I would talk about ways in which we can feel more safe and secure in the world in all areas of our lives.

So, what are you going to learn today? I am going to be talking about how you can feel more safe and secure in your life, in all areas of your life. I am going to talk about why this is important. How to get clear on just how safe and secure you feel today in different areas of your life. I am going to discuss how to envision what it would look like for you to feel safe and secure in all areas of your life, because this is going to look different for everyone and I am going to include questions that you can ask yourself to explore this topic further whether it is journalling or just thinking about this.

So, let’s talk about feeling safe and secure. Why is this important? I feel like a great deal of stress that I have experienced in my life has been a result of not feeling safe and secure. I have had a lot of fears and issues around personal safety in my life and that has led me to make some decisions, both good and bad, in my life but it has ultimately created a lot of fears, this lack of safety and security. And I think this is a kind of flip side way of looking at things, I have spent a lot of time looking at fears in my life and doing the mindset work to clear those fears. The flip side is looking at safety and security and thinking about what it looks like to feel safe and secure in different areas of my life. What I need to believe to feel safe and secure in my life. What things do I need to have in place? Like practical action and real life things and what does that look like and what is that going to give me? For me, what that gives me, feeling save and secure in different areas of my life, it releases those fears and makes me feel less stressed, more relaxed, more confident that things are on track in life and I have got things organised and taken care of. I am starting to get things together in certain areas of my life, particularly the financial area and I will talk about that in a minute but it is making me feel that I have got things in place so that I can make better decisions in the future, and make better decisions based from not fear. I don’t know what that is instead, so I guess if I am not making decisions based on fear, I am making decisions based on love, but it is more like making decisions based from not just rational decisions, but also being able to hear my gut decisions and my intuition and not having frequency, that communication, that line of connection, messed up by fear, because I think fear can absolutely interfere with our decision-making not just the gut intuition kind of decision-making, but also the practical, rational, decision-making. Sometimes we just don’t make good decisions because fear gets in the way and makes us do stuff that is not in our best interest or keeps us from taking action toward the things that we want to take.

So, as I am talking — you can pause this at any time, of course, because it is is a podcast — but stop and think about how safe and secure do you feel in your life today and what fears do you have around your lack of safety and security that you might have in certain areas of your life? And maybe write down: what are the things that came to mind? So, in a moment I am going to go into the different areas of your life, but when I said: how safe and secure do you feel in your life what popped up for you? Was it money? Was it lack of support? Was it something to do with your business or career? What came up for you in terms of feeling safe and secure, or not feeling safe and secure? So, if you are life-coach-y type of person or a business coach-y kind of person, you are probably familiar with the wheel of life. I have talked about it before on this podcast and it is something that I have shared in different aspects of my work. So, when I was exploring this for myself, I thought the best way to analyse how safe and secure I feel in different aspects of my life is to create a wheel of safety and security. So, I have taken the different life categories, similar to what you would find on a wheel of life and I have adjusted them a little bit.

So let’s start out with finance and money, so how safe and secure do you feel financially in your life? Do you have savings? Do you have an emergency fund? Do you have a pension? Do you have savings for retirement? Do you have investments and how long ago did you start saving and investing, because the earlier you start the more you will have when it is time to retire. Do you have an emergency fund? Do you have a one-month emergency fund of all the amount you would spend on your household budget, do you have that saved somewhere? Do you have a three-month emergency fund? Do you have a six-month emergency fund? How safe and secure do you feel? These are some of the things that you can have in place that will help you feel safe and secure in terms of money. Do you have life insurance? Do you have other kinds of insurance that can help make sure that you have the money that you need in case your health affects your business, if you have a business? If you are not self-employed, if you have a job, how safe and secure do you feel in terms of your salary? Because you are dependent on someone else for the money you make every month, you are dependent on your company making good decisions and not going bankrupt or having to downsize and lay off people. How safe and secure do you feel financially in your business, do you feel like you have got enough eggs in different baskets, so you have a variety of different income streams, that you are making money from different places? Because that is another thing that can help you feel safe and secure. On the flip side, do you have lots of debt? Do you owe a lot of money on your mortgage or student loans, or do you have lots of credit card debt? Take a look at that as well because those are things that can make us feel not so safe and secure. So take a look at your finances, this is something that I have been doing lately, I know I have mentioned this before, the Meaningful Money Podcast, but I have done the Learn How to Invest course which he offers, and I will link to this in the Show Notes, and because I am a member of the Learn How to Invest course I have now been upgraded or grandfathered into The Meaningful Academy, which looks at all aspects of money, not just investing. So this is something that I have been thinking about, all the different modules on that course have led to new books and new things and I have just read this book which actually you can get for free, and I will link to this in the show notes. It is by Paul Armson and it is called Enough: How Much Money Do You Need For The Rest of Your Life? And it is basically to help you figure out how much money you need to retire and make sure that you can keep the same lifestyle that you have or change the lifestyle, but make sure that you have enough money for the lifestyle that you want. So again, I will link to this show notes, the author will actually send you a free paperback of this book and I was going through it yesterday, I read about two thirds of it yesterday and I think it is really, really, useful. He actually has some software that you can get which will help you calculate really easily how much money you need for the rest of your life and he gives you a really huge discount using the discount code you get in the book, which is of course why he is giving you the book for free. I think it is affordable and it is worth having and I am going to be playing around with that for myself as well.

So I have been thinking a lot about my lifestyle today, what kind of lifestyle I want to have in the future and how I can make sure that happens. I have not always been responsible wth money in the past, I have lived in countries where the currency wasn’t very stable and so I wasn’t saving and where I could have saved in other countries I didn’t. For a long time I was living month-to-month and not putting money away, and that has changed, and it has definitely made me feel a lot more safe and secure. Now hopefully your money situation is a lot more stable than mine has been throughout much of my life, but that is something that I have learned. I used to have really, really, good money habits, and money practices and then my first business I had a business partner who had really poor money habits and I picked those up as well and it has taken me years to unravel the core money management practices that I was involved with for so many years. So, I feel like I am finally getting back on track and I am finally feeling so much more safe and secure financially and also just organised and less stressed. So to me feeling safe and secure leads to less stress so that is always a good thing — so that is finance and money.

What about health and wellness? So how safe and secure do you feel in terms of your health and wellness? If you live in a country where you have to pay for your healthcare, how are you doing with that? Do you have health insurance? Is your health insurance good enough to pay for your health care today and into the future? Do you have money saved for medical emergencies? If you live in a country where your healthcare is provided for you by the government, are you getting checkups? Are you getting checkups? Are you going to see the doctor? Do you feel like you have got a clear vision of what your health is like? If you are more into the alternative healthcare type of lifestyle, are you keeping up on that? Are you getting the scans that you want to be getting, bio-resonate scanning or whatever it is that you do? Are you getting your health looked at using whatever type of healthcare you prefer? And how do you feel about health and wellness, do you feel safe and secure? If you don’t, what would you need to do to feel secure about your health and wellness? Would you need to get checkups more often? Would you need to see a different doctor of see a specialist about something? What would you need to be doing differently that you are not doing now?

Relationships and connections – this is what I have called friends and family. How do you feel? Do you feel safe and secure in terms of your relationships and connections? So you can look at this a bunch of different ways, the first thing that comes in mind to me is, for ten years I was in a relationship wit someone who was also my business partner and that was a very violent relationship and it was a very unhealthy relationship and I felt very unsafe and very insecure about my life due to the fact that I was in this relationship with this person. And I have talked about this in different podcast episodes, so I won’t go into it too much but it was really, really, unnerving. There was a lot of gas lighting going on, I had no idea what was right, what was wrong, which way was up, which way was down, I was completely messed up in my head. So I felt totally unsafe and that has taken me a long time to recover from, it has been ten years since then and I am still doing therapy to clear some of that stuff. So you could look at how safe and secure do you feel in terms of your relationships? That could be your partner, that could be your parents, that could be your friends. Do you have any friendships with people who make you feel unsafe? Or do you have any relationships with family members that make you feel unsafe? It could be your family of origin or maybe you just feel unsafe about their future? Maybe they are not taking care of themselves and you feel worried for them, it could be that. So however you choose to evaluate, or consider your safety and security in terms of your relationships and your connections with other people and that might mean disconnecting from some people, that can be difficult to do but sometimes it is very necessary.

The next category that I have come up with is support and that can mean again, whatever you want it to mean. So if you are a parent and you have got kids, what does your support system look like in terms of your kids, not just now, in terms of childcare, and schooling, and financial support for the kids, but also in the future? What if something were to happen to you? Who is going to take care of the kids? What if something were to happen to you and your co-parent; what is going to happen to your kids? I don’t have kids as you know but this is something that I worry about for my cats, so if you are a pet parent…we are just getting our wills sorted out and we have got an appointment with someone, so we have been going back and forth and thinking about this and I am thinking: what is going to happen with the cats? So I just contacted our cat-breeder and said: can I put you in our will because I don’t really have anyone that I can trust to take care of the cats if we both die. And these are little things, but little things that can cause stress in your life. Don’t under-estimate how small, don’t think you have to look at really big things, for someone they might think: you are worried about your cats when you die that’s ridiculous, but it is something that causes a little bit of stress in my life, so think about what little things or what big things or medium-sized things, might be causing you to feel insecure or stressed about life. So, support, who do you need to support? So it might not just be people you need to support like your children, but maybe your family of origin, your parents, or maybe you have people with disabilities in your life that need support. Or maybe it is supporting yourself with your own disabilities, what kind of support? How do you feel safe and secure in terms of the support that you have or that you need or that you want in your life? And what would make you feel more safe and secure in terms of your support that you have in your life? And what would you be doing differently if you had the kind of support that you want and need?

Spirituality and religion – I included this in there, and I am not 100% sure whether it is a good fit for this wheel of safety and security, but I think there are some people who are probably in a situation where they maybe don’t feel so safe and secure in terms of their spiritual path or religious. So perhaps you are involved in a group or something that doesn’t make you feel safe, or that you are not 100% sure about, or maybe someone you know is in a religious or spiritual group which you think may not be safe for them and maybe that is causing you stress, so think about that. Or how safe and secure do you feel about the religious or spiritual path that you are on like how aligned it feels for you, or how confident you feel about that group or that path being right for you. So again, you could evaluate this area in terms of what I have said, or it might be something else for you, so if other things are coming up for you when I mentioned these categories that are things that you hadn’t considered, or I haven’t mentioned, evaluate those as well.

Self-expression – so how safe and secure do you feel in terms of expressing yourself? There are things that I don’t necessarily feel safe and secure talking about. I just mentioned this previous relationship and business partner of mine, I don’t always feel safe talking about that, actually I never feel safe talking about that because I am still concerned about the effect that this person could have on my life. So I am careful about what I say, and I am careful about where I say it and I am careful about when I say it. I am always mindful of the fact that certain people could be listening to this or reading my blogposts, so I don’t feel safe about expressing all the things that I want to express in life and perhaps that will change in the future and perhapsI will be sharing more about some of the things that I have experiences in my life but for now I don’t feel 100% safe talking about all the things that I would like to talk about to you, so I am careful about that. So, what about you in terms of self-expression and that could be self-expression for your blog, your podcast, your art, your music, your whatever. Do you feel safe and secure expressing yourself whatever way you choose to express yourself in whatever way you choose to express yourself and maybe that is not just in creating content or art, maybe that is in speaking your truth, in speaking to other people, in talking to other people about how you feel and what you are experiencing. How safe do you feel doing that? And I am not saying that you should be able to say 100% what you believe in 100% of the occasions with 100% of the people in your life, because we need to know our audience and we need to know when it is safe to do certain things, but it is good to know how safe and secure do you feel expressing yourself in all the different ways in which you choose to express yourself. What could you do, or what could happen to make you feel more safe and secure in your self-expression? How would your life change once you felt more safe and secure in your self-expression? How would your life change once you felt more self and secure in your self-expression, what would you be doing differently if you felt safer and more secure in terms of self-expression?

Next category is lifestyle, now how safe and secure do you feel in your current lifestyle? Now I think this is going to have a bit of an overlap with money and finance, but I am going to roll with it anyway, because I think it is kind of different. How safe and secure do you feel in terms of your ability to maintain this lifestyle? Next week, next month, next year, into retirement and beyond? How do you think you are going to have to shift things up and what would make you feel safe and secure in terms of your ability to maintain this lifestyle or improve it or change it? Would you need to have more savings, more investments, more of an emergency fund? What would make you feel more safe and secure in terms of your lifestyle? And what would you be doing differently if you already felt more safe and secure in terms of your lifestyle?

Next category is business/career or job/profession and again this is going to have some overlaps with finance and money. So, how do you currently feel in terms of security in your business or career or professional life? What would make you feel more safe and secure in your business and professional life? And how would your life change if you felt more safe and secure in this area? What would you be doing differently that you don’t do now? What would that look like to feel totally safe and secure in terms of your business or career? Would you have additional income streams? Would you have additional passive income streams? Would you have a job? Would you have a little side gig where you were creating additional income streams that don’t involve you relying on your job? What would you do? Would you take out insurance? What would you do so that you felt more safe and secure in terms of your business and/or career? That’s in terms of money, perhaps if you have a job there are things that you can do to ensure your future in the company that you work for, different projects that you can take or making sure that the people on your team and your superiors know that you are doing a good job with what you are doing. Think about what you could do to make yourself feel more safe and secure in your job or your business.

And then those are the eight categories that I have come up with but maybe there are other categories that you have thought of, as I have been talking about these things? So if there is anything else that has popped into your head whether that is an area of your life or different things that you could do to feel more safe and secure in other areas of your life, write that down, think about it, explore it. And then take action, so don’t just think about this stuff, plan what actions you can take, plan what you can do differently to take take different actions so that you can feel more safe and secure in your life and reduce stress. Now of course there is a mindset aspect to this: what do you need to believe to feel more safe and secure in all these areas of your life? Who do you need to be to take the actions that you need to take in order to feel more safe and secure in your life? As always, do the mindset work that you need to do, either with yourself or by hiring a professional so that you can believe the things that you need to believe to take the actions that you need to take to feel more safe and secure in your life.

I think it is also worth looking at priorities, of these 8 different categories, and the other categories that you may have added, which ones are most important? What is the single number one category that is important for you to have under control, feeling safe and secure in that category, so that everything becomes a little bit easier? It might be money and finance, it might be health and wellness, it might be lifestyle, business, career, figure out what the order of priority is for you in terms of categories, pick the most important one and start working on that, take that action first. Because I am going to include a free download of safety and security for you to print out and do on your own, but I think it is really important to not get overwhelmed by this and think: oh my God all these areas are terrible, I need to fix all of them, all at once. Don’t worry about that, pick one, work on it and then pick the second one, work on it and then go from there, but break it down into little chunks and step-by-step do the things that you need to do so that you can feel more safe and secure in all these areas of your life.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the safety and security that routines can give us. So I always talk about the morning routine that I have and that really helps get me set up for my day. A lot of people have evening routines that they do before bed, I do not have one, I would like to have one but the way I have organised my life right now it is not that easy to slot into. So I have been going with a longer morning routine. Also routines throughout the day: how you set up your days? As you know, because I talk about this all the time, I use Google calendar and have recurring tasks and time-blocks and all sorts of things set up in my calendar. Now, I shift those around, I just got a client this morning that I hadn’t planned, but it was someone who was a recurring client that comes back every now and again, she sent me a message on Monday saying: can I have a session this week ,we fitted her in for this morning and we didn’t get all the work done that we want to get done and so we have got another session on Friday. So that has meant that I have had to shift things around, which is fine. I love doing that so I can help this person but that means I need to be flexible with my schedule and get the things done that I need to get done around the extra sessions that I have booked into my calendar this week. So have a schedule that you can shift around but have some kind of routine because that can really, really, help you feel more organised and like you have a structure that will give you lee-way to play with. I find that routines, really make me feel a lot more safe and secure.

So that is all for now, I hope you found this interesting and useful, if you have any thoughts that you would like to share with me, or any experiences, please drop me a line and let me know, you can email me at: [email protected] or find me online and get in touch there. I would love to hear from you, I really, really, like to hear from listeners so I would love to hear your story. And that is all for now, thank you so much for listening, if you enjoyed this episode please let me know, or please leave a quick review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to this podcast, it would really, really, mean the world to me and help me out in terms of getting more visibility for the show.

Remember to visit: http://HollyWorton.com/310 for the show notes on this episode including the free download for the wheel of safety and security and when I say free download I mean it is free, I am not going to ask you for your email address or to sign up for my list, or anything, you can do that if you want, but you can get the download for free. And, as always, in a couple of weeks the transcript will be up for this episode so if you are the kind of person who wants to listen or find the notes, read the notes because you remembered something that I said, go back and look for the transcript it will be there in the show notes. So thank you very much for listening and have a fantastic week.