Connect to Your Future
Featured above: a colored page from our book Financial Wellness. Share your creations from the 5-year activity below with us on Instagram @colearningbooks and tag it with #5yearFinWell.
Humans are hard-wired with the basic need of survival, and finance is the main tangible resource we use to exchange our efforts for our survival needs, as well as to obtain some of the things that we feel we want. We also have a deeper desire or drive within us that can be difficult to connect to when we are focused on survival or cravings—purpose.
In our work, we are passionate about help free people from financial fear and live their lives with more confidence and purpose. In our book, Financial Wellness, we delve into basic concepts around personal finance with supportive wellness resources for self-exploration and care. We believe that learning to manage your money more efficiently will free up your time to pursue the life of your dreams.
The other side of this coin is finding this deeper meaning that you want to pursue. If finance is about planning, purpose is about dreaming. A common thread between these activities is connecting to your inner self. To create an effective plan, you must connect to your behaviors, super powers, and challenges. Pick up a copy of Financial Wellness to begin that journey. To pursue your dreams, you must connect to your identity, legacy, and self-care. That is the focus of this article, and we include an activity below for your journey.
Center Yourself
A truth in life is that you are your only predictable constant. People and things may come and go, and a lot of how that ends up is largely outside of your control. The best investment you can make is in yourself, your true predictable asset. We want you to learn to value yourself, depend on yourself, and care for yourself.
In the next section we will walk through a simple exercise to connect to your identity—who you are, how you define yourself, and how you want to live—and nourish your future. When we talk about legacy, we are talking about what you care about. What do you want to leave behind in the world? When we talk about self-care, we are talking about what makes you feel good. What do you do to help yourself feel good? As you work on these pillars—identity, legacy, and self-care—you will find they strengthen like a muscle, with effort and repetition, and that like muscles they also work together to support each others’ growth and efficiency.
Connecting with your inner self is a super power! Let’s tap into that power to look into our crystal ball. Grab a paper or something to write on and markers, crayons, or anything you can use to make marks on your paper or surface.
Activity: 5 Year Vision
Imagine yourself in 5 years. Imagine what you’d like to see, an idealized version of yourself. For this exercise, set aside finance and relationships. Imaging yourself in the future, ask yourself:
What do you want to be doing?
What do you want to have achieved?
Where do you want to live?
What do you want life to be like?
Consider what visuals come to mind. Can you see yourself? What sort of imagery comes up? Hobbies? Achievements? Locations? Spend 5 minutes sketching these ideas – either literal or abstract and representative. Use shapes, color, icons, and any other visual identifiers that speak to you, to draw a representation of your 5 year future. Keep this drawing in a safe place and when you find yourself feeling lost or alone, return to that vision. This is a pathway to which you can return when you need some direction or support. As your life inevitably changes, or your vision grows, or the mood strikes you, feel free to draw new versions or add on to your original creation.
Congratulations on taking the time to nourish your worth and connect to your purpose. Shape your life around these dreams. Imagine a future centered on yourself. You are the shaper of your future. You can do it.
My Vision Story
In June 2021, during a tumultuous time in my life, I connected with the 5-year activity. It was a surprise to me that I had never seen my path through this lens and had only thought of 5-year plans in the frame of my employment at the time or where I wanted personal relationships to go. At the time, my ideas of success had been tied to how other people measured me—how much money I made or my job title or relationship status or the people I spent time with.
This meant that my focus was not truly on myself, and I was living in pursuit of things that were largely outside of my control. My self-worth was rooted in other people or entities and dependent on their plans, judgements, and actions. Alone time was something I dealt with, not a piece of my self-care. Self-care? What self-care? I looked outside myself to define myself. Unfortunately for this viewpoint, we cannot control other people or make choices for them, we can only control our own actions and reactions, so depending on other people to define ourselves is a crapshoot. Naturally when my relationships and career did not grow in the ways I would have wanted, I felt like a doomed failure, and powerless to change anything.
The 5-year activity helped me build a new anchor for self-reliance, personal fulfillment, and direction in my life. A strong picture formed in my mind of making materials that people could use in their own time to learn new skills in a fun and approachable format. I had been working through some adult coloring books as part of my self-care routine and also reading through heavy literature to help connect to myself and overcome trauma that was holding me back. As part of my 5-year picture, I imagined making my own coloring books that incorporated some of this skill-building and self-reflective activity to make it more accessible and enjoyable for other people like me. My new hobby became drawing coloring book pages, and I used that as a default activity to fill my time and begin to enjoy the time I had to myself.
Now more than a year later, we have just published our first coloring book, Financial Wellness. I still spend my free time working on other coloring book activities and have a trauma based therapeutic one in progress that will be available in our shop in the future. My dreams are expanding to workshops and ways to connect to the community we are building. Alone time is my favorite time and I thrive on this gift. Whenever I find myself struggling with what I “should” be doing or what I have achieved, I bring out my five year vision and reconnect to the future I am building by connecting to my purpose.
We believe in nourishing your worth by valuing yourself, taking care of your mind and body, and building skills that you care about to achieve your goals. Financial literacy and wellness go hand in hand to help this personal growth and we are excited to welcome you to the journey!