Are you living your best life?

In a previous blog (where has my confidence gone) I confessed that I had feared something and promised I would share that with you – it was a fear of loss, but more specifically it was a fear of death.

We all know we’re going to die, as are those around us but how many of us really accept it. I mean truly embrace it and live our best life. I don’t mean live life to the full and rush out and do all the things we feel we ought to do, that’s superficial.

What I mean is do you truly appreciate every moment in your life?

The fear I had of death showed me that I wasn’t living my best life. I wasn’t truly appreciating every moment of my life and yet death has always done its best to remind me. It has always been there yet I ignored it so well.

I’ve had a few close calls. In particular, I nearly drowned – twice (once when young learning to swim, the second time an adult on holiday) – then, recently in 2016 (shortly after the book launch) I wrapped my car around a lamppost and it was a miracle I walked away unharmed. Yet I still hadn’t fully grasped the message. Therefore in the space of a year across 2017 and 2018, death tried to reach out to me again and again until I finally grasped the message.

My beloved gran died of old age robbed by Alzheimer’s. One of my cousins died shortly after, losing his battle with cancer whilst at the same time I received news of a client who was fighting her own battle (and thankfully has won). Then I was told someone I care about deeply was suffering from mental ill health and had attempted suicide, and tried it again before the year was out – thankfully unsuccessfully. In January as everyone was recovering from their hangovers and making their New Year resolutions, two people I care about deeply lost their baby in its last trimester, and shortly later another two close friends shared the news that their step-fathers had died. I could no longer avoid death. It was there in plain sight to be seen everywhere I looked.

All this made me anxious but I wasn’t fearing death, what I was fearing was that I wasn’t living my best life. And whilst I did my best to turn up at work every day, it also encouraged me to think of this in the context of what I discuss in my books and blogs about money and success.

Death and taxes are a given, we can’t escape either of them.

It’s a known joke we all laugh about it, but very few of us actually grasp it. As an accountant & finance coach I know only too well that tax is most definitely a given! And on top of all that has happened, I am reminded in my gran’s old photos that my grandpa died at a very young age, and today as I write this blog I am 5yrs older than he ever was.

Life is precious so please don’t waste it on worries and anxieties.

All of your worries will be gone one day, none of it will matter in the end. Most of all please stop stressing about money and tax. In this western world, we live in, I clearly acknowledge that we do need money to pay the bills, mortgage and put food on the table but so many people buy stuff that we really don’t need. We buy it to feel good (and the marketing companies know this and they use it to their advantage) and the expenditure only serves to create more stress when it comes to paying for it all, in addition to the anxiety we feel of ‘having’ to keep up with fashion, the latest phone, fancy car or having a holiday of a lifetime.

In Successful Business Minds, I discuss this in more depth and I really encourage the reader to think twice about what money, tax and success really means to them, and I encourage you to do the same with money and especially success in terms of living your best life.

What do you really wish you will have experienced if this was your last year/ month/ week/ day? Is it a trip of a lifetime, or is just simply enjoying moments that are peaceful, joyful and filled with laughter?

Stressing about money, tax or death will not give you that. Accepting, embracing and letting go of the anxieties will.

Lots of Love, Helen x

Author of Successful Business Minds and 12 Step to Improve Your Cashflow

© HM Coaching Ltd