Twenty years ago, Jill Wright was in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. Through focus and hard work, over the years she and her husband built a nest egg that allowed them to retire in 2018 at ages 50 and 53.Jill heard God’s call to help other women repaint their own financial future and was eager to answer it. She left her corporate job and became a Financial Confidence Coach. Jill loves helping women give up shame around spending so that they can stop stressing about their money.
She helps strong generous women go from feeling weighed down by their finances to feeling in control so they can focus on being present and supporting their family.
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I used to avoid conflict. Why did I avoid conflict? Because I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable— I was afraid I would hurt someone’s feelings, or worse, that my feelings would be hurt. I was afraid I would be embarrassed. I was afraid I would make a fool of myself. I was afraid I would look stupid. One thing I really didn’t want to do was to cry in front of other people, which I always saw as a weakness of mine. So I didn’t speak up for myself or others.
When I avoided the emotions I didn’t want to feel, I would use a buffer between me and my emotions. The definition I found for buffer when I searched Google is lessen or moderate the impact of. Buffering helps us lessen the impact of our emotions with another activity, chemical or neurotransmitter. That typically looks like overeating, overspending, overworking, overdrinking, binging on social media or any other false pleasure or temporary distraction. We typically identify buffering by the impact. It is indulging in these activities or false pleasures to the detriment of the results we want in our lives. Buffering has a net negative result.
Most of my clients, myself included, use or at some point used buffering as a way to avoid their emotions.
I buffer to avoid the emotions I feel. I sometimes buffer when I’m working. Sometimes I feel dread about a certain task on my calendar, so when I get to that point in the day, I’ll immediately go to the kitchen. Even when I worked in an office, I would get up, go to the vending machines or to the snacks I had in the breakroom refrigerator that I had brought from home or to the cafeteria. I wasn’t hungry, but I was avoiding that task and buffering to avoid feeling insecure or bored or whatever I happened to be feeling. But that didn’t help – it didn’t make it go away. As a matter of fact, it only made me feel worse because I still needed to do it, PLUS I had just wasted time and put more pressure on myself, PLUS I most likely just consumed some empty calories – that’s what I call a net negative effect – that’s not the result I was looking for.
Instead I can notice that emotion, I can feel it and I can use it to identify the thought that is causing it, then I can question that thought. When I do that, I take back my power and move forward by consciously deciding what I want to believe in that moment, what I want to feel and what I want to do to get the result that is best for me. I can be intentional about what I think, how I feel and what I do so that I can create what I want in my life.
That’s how I arrive at my highest and best self – through repeating that process over and over and over again – in order to teach my brain on how I want it to operate more efficiently and more effectively.
I invite you to try this – if you have any questions, please post them below or on my Facebook page at www.Facebook.com/MoreMoneyCents.
#Buffering #JillTheMoneyCoach #MoveForward #BeIntentional