Author: Ifunanya Okolie

I am exploring how to become the best version of humanity.

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Money

Beware of the sunk cost fallacy

Photo by Elijah O'Donnell on Unsplash

Question: Have you ever sat through a bad meal because you’d already paid for it and leaving would seem wasteful to you?

Once, I had held onto a skirt that made me look bloated because I wanted to get my money’s worth. 

You may have heard the phrase, ‘cut your losses, ‘ it means to withdraw from a situation that is no longer serving you. Are you holding on to your job because you’re scared of the time and effort you’ve invested in it? Have you ever kept walking despite having the option to order an Uber because you’d covered a long distance and the oncoming vehicle might be your ride? 

Cut your losses if you’d paid a crazy sum for an item. Instead of crying over money spent, it’s more helpful to learn from your experience and make a note to watch out for next time.

If you’ve encountered something like this, then you have experienced a psychological phenomenon known as a ‘sunk cost bias.’

A sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.

Wikipedia

Sunk cost fallacy explains the inclination to continue to invest time, effort, and money into an endeavour because of the costs we’d already incurred. 

My Experience at Dodo Pizza 😱

Last weekend, I hung out with my friend, B, at Dodo Pizza. The Pizza restaurant is known for providing Pizza by the slice and whole Pizza, in Ikeja City Mall, Lagos, which is one of the things I loved about them — the freedom to buy a pizza slice instead of having to purchase a full box. Their vast food menu is something to drool over. This restaurant provides not just Pizza, but other meal options like Sausage rolls, Chicken wings, Cinnamon rolls, different flavours of Ice Cream, and the bone of contention – Dodster. I had always wanted to have a taste of their Dodster — A dish that boasted of fine dining and chunky delights. It looked like a Sharwama, but one that went to Grad school. However, on this day, they messed up my order, switching my Classic Dodster with B’s Beef Suya Dodster. 

I did not have an idea of what the Classic Dodster tasted like, but as I bit into the hot baked wrap, I knew that this was a case of a sweet dream gone stale. Walking over to the counter, I asked if what I had gotten was the Classic Dodster, and they admitted they had mistakenly switched it up. I asked that they fix it, but they did not. The pizzaiolo who had prepared the Dodster came back to me with a message from the manager – he couldn’t care less. Their poor customer service oozed as they bade me farewell while I left their restaurant abandoning the hot baked wrap I’d purchased.

One thing about my Dodo experience is that I was able to call it quits when I could, although I felt sad that I didn’t get to eat the Classic Dodster, and peeved that the Dodo team didn’t consider me customer enough to treat me well. 

It’s okay to call it quits when you can

Here’s the deal. It’s okay to acknowledge that we’ve made a mistake and move on. Calling it quits is better than holding on to that career that you loathe. It’s better to leave a toxic relationship regardless of how much time you’ve invested. If you feel like ordering an Uber, do it right away as the bus you keep waiting for isn’t coming. It’s okay to lose $1000 instead of putting more money into that investment with the hopes that this time would yield a better result.

It’s okay to know when to abort mission, sailor.

Concluding my Dodo Pizza Story

The chef had asked how I was sure I’d have liked the Classic Dodster if they’d prepared it. In answering his question, I wouldn’t know if I’d have preferred the Suya Dodster, but it would have been nice if I’d gotten what I ordered. Taking a second look at the menu, I also might have hated the Dodster because I don’t eat ketchup. If I’d ordered a second time, it might have turned to a case of the Sharwama that went to Grad school but couldn’t finish because it flunked classes. Either way, I might not get to try out Dodo Pizza’s Dodster again. 

Lessons from Sunk Cost Bias

  1. Think of a sunk cost as money you’ve spent and cannot recover. This way, you do not depend on it to make decisions that will affect your future.
  2. Stop, once you realize that it’s time to move on to something else.
  3. Past mistakes are irrelevant. Accept what’s happened, understand that there’s nothing you can do about it, and move on.
  4. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. The point of no return only exists in our head.
  5. Invest in something new.
  6. Track your expenses and future opportunity costs.
Categories
Mindfulness Reflections Work

When do we make out time to pause?

Photo by Lukasz Saczek on Unsplash

There are some posts you read on the internet that make you pause. One of them is from 8fit’s Coach Emily McLaughlin. Emily shared this on her Instagram page, and I have been thinking a lot about it.

“We aren’t here just to go through the motions or simply get physical. We are here to feel.”

Emily, Head Coach at 8fit

It made me wonder what the next step would be when we finally get what we want. What follows then? Do we stop chasing after sunsets or money or love or whatever it is that we have built our purpose around? Or do we find something else to chase then? 

T. S Elliot once said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

In this same regard, Lee Ann wrote: “We will never reach a point in life where we will have everything we have ever desired. The whole point of life is the launching of new desires and then aligning with those desires.”

Following from the two thinkers I quoted, If we do not get to a time when we would have it all, then, I hope we remember to make time to pause?

Pause –  the act of suspending activity temporarily.

thefreedictionary.com

Emily’s post made me reflect on the act of pausing. We do too much in the pursuit of our purpose. To make sense of this world, we are nurses, teachers, project managers, digital marketers, CEOs, venture capitalists, engineers, writers, etc. We have many interests, but sometimes our passions might not be our job, yet we need money, and in search of how to make ends meet, we dabble in many things and forget to make out time to stop momentarily.

Do you ever feel like you are living a monotonous life? You wake up with your alarm, rush to the bath, eat breakfast, go to work, get stuck in traffic, eat dinner, open social media, go to bed, repeat.

If you are anything like me, you do.

I will rephrase for those who work from home. Your alarm startles you, and you remember you have a meeting for 9:10 am. You rush to the bath, brush your teeth, run to the kitchen to fix coffee, open your laptop and join your call. You might not get to leave your house for the whole day, so you order in lunch and eat it at your desk. Work is over, you close your laptop, check-in on social media, watch Netflix, go to bed, and repeat.

When do we make time to pause?

Are we going through the motions, simply because? Do we go on and on even when getting on might not make much sense?

Life is difficult. We want what we do not have, and we go to work for it. Then, we have what we had been searching for, and we still keep the chase. It can be hectic to just get by the day, so when it gets to moments like this, remember to pause. 

When you are feeling very overwhelmed, and you feel the need to drag through to complete your day, stop everything you are doing and do something different.

This week, I woke up twice in a row without feeling like doing my morning exercises.

Monday passed by, and I tried to work out, but I could not bring myself to. 

Tuesday came, yet I was still too weak to do anything. Going to work in such state would have sucked, so I left everything I was doing and pulled my body outside, with my headphones, I went for a ride on my bicycle, and I rode the most challenging ride ever on a path I had never ridden before. It was tiring, but I felt sore and better after cycling. I was ready to work when I came back.

Sometimes, all we need to break the monotony is a change of events. If you feel like you are doing the same thing over again, try to do something different. If you are used to sitting in a particular place at a restaurant, sit somewhere else. Go on a different pathway if you have a specific path you love to take. Modify your routine, take a break, and most importantly, do not forget to breathe.

Categories
Becoming Failing well Mindfulness

A failing well series #1: Running

My first run with NRC
A blurry image of my first run with NRC

I will start by telling the story of how I started running – a sport I detested with all my might, how I have come to see myself as an athlete, and how I have grown to enjoy and see running as a beautiful sport. I will start with a running story because Abi Booth’s running story was what inspired me to start this series.

The Fear

When it came to exercise, I was a scaredy-cat. I thought exercise was for a particular set of people – that some people came with an innate desire to want to stretch, while some were not.

I had this mindset in secondary school during Physical education (PE) classes. PE was compulsory, and it also served as a punishment for latecomers and delinquents. Instructors asked offenders to run around the school field many times — an activity that left one breathless and gasping for air. I knew many people who fainted on the playground, and I knew people who came out tops — this further implanted the idea in my mind that exercise was for a selected few. My school chose the ones who did well to represent the school, but I did not come close to coming first, and I did not even come last. I was part of those who stumbled on the way. I did not understand why they made you do PE in school. What was I going to do with it?

The beginning — A little story about my grandmother and how her death moved me to run

My grandmother’s illness started in 2015. I remember coming home from my final exams in school to meet her sick. I remember the scary feeling that things were not going to remain the same. Grandma was present, but oblivious to what was happening around her. She did not know when I came in until someone told her, ‘Look, mama, It’s Ify. She’s here.’ And she smiled. A smile she has always reserved for me, her first grandchild. I asked what was wrong, but she could not make a clear sentence. It did not make any sense to me how someone’s body could, all at once, start failing them. 

From there, it led to many trips to the hospital, to her not being able to make coherent sentences, and to us having to feed her. She stopped walking, and we got her a wheelchair.

I don’t know what happened to my grandmother, but I remember a strong woman who instilled values and discipline in her grandchildren. I remember a hardworking woman who started taking care of my siblings and me when my mother died in 2008. My grandmother resumed parenting again when she was supposed to be retiring, and this meant she started worrying over what we were going to eat, how we were going to go to school. It was hard work 201. She went from a hale and hearty person to an invalid. She could not walk to the toilet or bathe herself, and she could not feed herself. If the grandmother that I knew could see herself in that state, she would have thrown a fit.

The last time I saw my grandma was in December 2020, when I visited her in a hospital in Ogun state. She had become a complete ghost of herself. She’d developed a brain stroke two nights before, and was plugged to a support machine. She could not tell it was me. 

On March 2, on my way to the grocery store, I received an SMS from my little cousin that announced my grandmama’s death.

I had many questions – How could someone suffer this much for so long? What was the purpose of the human body? Where did things go wrong? Would I suddenly fall ill too?

How I started working out

“Our bodies were made to move.”

“Globally, around 31% of adults aged 15 and over were insufficiently active in 2008 (men 28% and women 34%). Approximately 3.2 million deaths each year are attributable to insufficient physical activity.”

WHO – Physical Inactivity: A Global Public Health Problem

I started exercising out of fear of what would happen to my body if it ever breaks down. I had a scare once when I tried reaching for something underneath a couch in my grandparents’ house, and I felt a cramp build up in my upper back. However, my grandmother’s death was what incited the fear in me and spurred me into action. 

The fact that I did not understand what happened to her made things worse. She did not live a sedentary lifestyle because she was the most hardworking person that I knew. She always had lots of stuff to do – If she was not going to the market, she was on the farm, and if you did not find her on the farm, she was attending her peer meeting. I have also wondered if she died as a result of extreme stress. Whatever it was, I decided to become more mindful of the things I did. I started meditating, and I started running.

An attempt at running: The first try, my next run, and the lessons

I did not make it up to 3 yards on my first run before I started panting.

There were days when I would get tired and could not make it to the distance that I wanted, and there were days when I would end up in my running gear without going for a run. I’d love to get to a point where I can comfortably run three times a week. The last time I ran was yesterday, and before that, was my run on Friday. However, I believe I am making good progress.

I love going on the guided runs on Nike Run Club (NRC) with Coach Bennett.

One thing I have learnt from running with Coach Bennett is understanding that it is okay to run at a feel-good pace. He says, ‘Every run has a purpose.’ It is better to run for a shorter distance than aim for a higher one and end up feeling disappointed. ‘End the run wanting to run more,’ he says. The first run is all about wanting to do the next run.’ It does not matter how many times you go on the first run or the next run as long as you run at a comfortable pace.

Another thing I have learnt from Coach B is that it is crucial to always listen to our body. Our bodies are always telling us something, and we have to pay attention to be able to hear it. Running is fun as long as we make it fun. If your body wants a 1-minute run, take it for a minute run. If it wants to rest, let it rest. I always run solo because it helps me focus on my training and what I want out of the run. I am not sure I can run with other people, but I am willing to give it a try. 

The road to orange level

As a new runner, I would recommend Nike Run Club, as it is what has helped to build my confidence and get comfortable running. I am not sure I would be writing this if I had not given NRC a try. 

When I run, I feel the need to move. Sometimes, I don’t understand if I am running from something or towards something, but I feel my adrenaline pumping and pushing my body forward, and this beautiful feeling is what inspires me to keep running – understanding that I can get my body to move. 

Every time I go for a run, I keep learning new things about this sport, and I am always amazed at the things my body can do. There is so much to learn about my body, and I am here for all of it. I am glad I took the initiative to start running, and I am also happy that I overcame my fear.

Categories
Becoming Failing well Mindfulness

A failing well series: Intro.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

The best of us is not trying to be perfect but to know that it is okay to accept the lessons as they come to us, especially when they do not come on our terms.

Alexei Orlov on Failing Well

I am joining Abi Booth in his ‘failing well’ series, a series he started, to expose himself to what it means to fail. I will be sharing stories of how I intentionally participated in stuff that I wasn’t good at, my experiences, and my lessons from failing. This exercise would help me get to know me better, and also help me understand my reactions to ‘failing.’

What does failing well mean?

Failing well means intentionally using every stumble you encounter on your path as a component towards learning. In failing well, you celebrate your mistakes, and you look into your struggles, pick up understanding and knowledge, and you come out a better person. 

I remember how I had cried my eyes out when things had not gone according to plan at work. This experience, among many others, has taught me how very intense and passionate I can be with what I do, and how having anything less than perfection had seemed like failing to me. 

I keep teaching myself that I don’t have to be perfect here, hence, with this exercise, I want to mindfully throw myself into the deep end and explore things that I am not comfortable with doing. I will go to places that I haven’t let myself go to, and I will learn how well I can handle mistakes and how I’d react to letdowns and stumbles down the road. This will be very intentional as I am going to be writing all about my experiences doing these things in my part of the ‘failing well’ series. You can join in and tag me when you do!

Here’s to having fears and conquering them. Here’s to failing well. 🍷

Categories
Failing well Reflections

Oh, but if you never try, you’ll never know

Cross over to the other side of fear. Do it afraid
Photo by Sammie Vasquez on Unsplash

I moved into my new house at the beginning of July, and I’m still settling in. It’s a new city, a beautiful space with new challenges that I didn’t think to expect. I had been planning this move since December 2019, but it had not been successful – what, with the enormous demands from property owners in Lagos who prefer to have an empty space over letting their property to a single career woman? But this is a story for another day.

I’m not sure what mental space I was in when I shared that tweet, but I could make guesses. The items on my todo list? – Projects that leave me sleepless on many occasions at night, or the thought of having to start writing all over again? I let these thoughts consume me, not because I felt I couldn’t take them on, but because sometimes, I felt the weight too big to manage. Where could I possibly start?

1. Don’t let your fear drive you to the point of exhaustion.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about fear, it is that fear should be the fuel that drives us to do the things that we’ve always wanted to do. I think it is okay to be afraid. Our dreams can get too big that they frighten us, and yes, they should scare us – They should scare us into doing. I remember Shalv’s words to me on one of those days when we’d talk about fears. He said, ‘be careful not to let your fear drive you to the point of exhaustion, babe.’

Sometimes, we get too afraid that we end up not doing anything. I know this because I’ve been there. Thanks, Youper!

Since fear is not something we can control, we can decide how we want to use our fears to define our next course of action.

2. Vision boards are really helpful!

When I have an idea, I get so excited about it that I start talking all about it at once to my friends, and then the thought of how to execute it finally dawns on me, and that’s when it becomes frightening. Will this end up like other half-woven ideas?

One of the perks of working with creatives is you get to explore different ways of putting together your scattered thoughts. I learnt about using vision boards from working with Jana and Sarah.

Vision boards help you put together your thoughts using pictures and words. They really do work! First, you think about what you want – Your goals about the project, and you put them down. However it is, just put them down. I can hear Jana’s voice in my head – ‘Nanya, you don’t have to make it pretty. It doesn’t have to make sense right now. We’ll just go ahead to put them all down.’ And yes we did.

Visualisation is essential, and it helps you reduce all the fears and anxiety you had built up while your thoughts were still forming. Once you can visualise it, you can bring your dream to life. In this regards, I use Miro for brainstorming. 

3. Check if it’s on the list ☑️

Jana, my colleague, said during our hangout one morning, ‘checklists save lives,’ and I couldn’t have said it better.

I started writing again. First, I registered a domain name, then I created an account on WordPress, and wrote everything I wanted to write about in a checklist. All of these didn’t happen in a day.

If your dream frightens you, put them in a checklist and try to focus so hard on working on one item that you eventually get to check it off your list.

4. Do it.

Yagazie Emezi said ’The only way you can do it on your own is to do it on your own.’ I will borrow from her words to say, the only way you can do it is to do it.

I know many dream weavers. One of them is Shalv, who is the most consistent person that I know. I’ll tell you one. This amazing person sent me songs of the day, every day, for ten straight months without flinching. Or maybe he did, but the songs didn’t ‘flinch.’ He’s also the person whom I share my many ideas with, and he’d ask if I’d noted them down. With many projects of his own, which he’s done a great deal of work on, I can’t say that I’m not inspired.

Another dream weaver that I know is my colleague, Biodun. He wanted a unique couch and a bed he saw on Pinterest. He would make a bed for himself and one for Alexa, his dog. And off he went to the market, scared of the uncertainty of how the finished work would be, but with heart thumping with excitement, he made a bed all by himself, for himself, and Alexa. I must admit that I’d doubted that it would come out okay, but the intensity with which he made these pieces of furniture inspired me. Alexa must have been proud when she saw her beautifully designed bed with bright led lights underneath and the inscribed letters of her name boldly written at the top of her bed.

To doing things afraid

Joyce Meyer said to do it afraid.

Fear! Has it ever been a problem for you, holding you back from moving into areas that could enrich your own life and the lives of others? 

Joyce Meyer, Do It Afraid.

Oh, but if you never try, you will never know. You will never know if you’ll do better as a writer if you never give writing a try. You will never know if you’ll make it to the interview stage if you do not submit your resume. If you don’t ask for that raise, how would you ever know that you won’t get it?

Because “everything we’ve always wanted is on the other side of fear”. We have to cross over, utilize it, channel it towards our passion, and then, we can have a great story to tell.

Categories
Becoming Failing well Reflections Work

You don’t have to be perfect here

THE GOOD PLACE -- "Everything Is Fine" Episode 101-- Pictured: Kristen Bell as Eleanor -- (Photo by: Justin Lubin/NBC)

I recently came upon this quote by John Steinbeck, and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

‘And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.’

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

If I were to tell a younger me, or a newly hired junior colleague, one thing, it would be: ‘You don’t have to be perfect here. You just have to be. We want you to be.

And why not? The way I see it, we let perfect get in the way of being consistent, which is one thing I wish I knew before entering the working space. We fall into the trap of thinking that the way to do good work is by having to be perfect for the job. Sometimes, we feel we are not qualified for a job because we did not tick all the requirements. This can lead us to stall in sending out our resumes. But, are companies really after perfect people?

What does perfect mean?

At various points in my career, I have sat with HR to go over the qualities we want our next candidate to possess. I have gone through a good number of applicants feedback from our engineering team and I’ve done my fair share of performance appraisals, but not once was the criteria for success being perfect. 

For me, perfect is a myth and every time we use the word, what we mean is ‘good work.’ To be on the right track, we need to do well at what we are assigned to do. We can’t do good work without committing positive performance over and over again until it becomes a thing – until it becomes who we are. 

When we say that someone has the perfect experience on their resume, what we mean is that they tick yes to most, if not all, of the requirements listed on the job posting. They can be found wanting in some areas, but the key thing is how much of a learner they are and if they have shown exceptional promise in their field.

Who would you work with?

We want to work with someone consistent in doing the things they know how to do. We want someone open to learning and not afraid to communicate what they want. We want someone that people can vouch for, someone we trust to get the job done. Someone who has shown resilience and knowledge in how they handled their previous projects because consistency is what gets the job done. Consistency breeds progress; progress brings results and sets you up for success.

And what does positive performance mean? Showing up on time, being trustworthy and reliable, being a great team player, being consistent – This is what comes up in performance appraisals, not how perfect we were on the job.

Here’s a question – Have you ever delayed sending out a project you were working on because you felt it had to be good enough before turning it in? Did you ever get to turn it in?

Perfect does not come up in performance appraisals. 

In an article on Entrepreneur.com, Neil Patel wrote, ‘Trying to make something perfect can prevent us from making it just good.’ He further stated, ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’ 

Progress is what matters. Are you consistent in what you signed up willingly for? Why do we aim for perfection? Is good bad? Why can’t we aim for good work and take it from there?

Look at it this way – You finished watching a cooking show and you are fascinated by how Ronke of 9jaFoodie prepared her Afang soup, so you decide you are going to make yours exactly the way she described the steps in her video. It is going well, as you keep following the steps until you get to ‘Add a tbsp of oil which is equivalent to 15 ml,’ but you don’t have the measuring spoons. Yes, you have a regular spoon, but there is no way you can know for sure if what you have is equivalent to 15ml as described in the video. Does this spoil the chances of the food coming out good? You have two options – stop and throw the food out or continue with the process.

When we wait for perfection, it never comes. If you’d waited until you bought a measuring spoon, you might never have come around to cooking your Afang soup.

When we remove the need for perfection from the equation, what’s left? 

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Steve Jobs
Read: ‘A beautiful reminder about the power of showing up consistently…’

When we remove the need for perfection from the equation, all that’s left is good. Go on, be kind to yourself, and do good work. You are in the good place, and everything is fine.

Continue to be consistent and keep showing up. You don’t have to be perfect here. You just have to be.

Categories
Mindfulness Money Work

How to practice mindful spending with Google sheets

Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

Until I started mindful spending, I didn’t understand what made me so apprehensive before salary day. Salary day was a day I always waited earnestly for because I’d spent everything from my previous salary, and a day I would later come to dread because I would spend all my monthly income trying to balance the past month’s debts. Later on, I’d try to improve on my spending, but it still didn’t matter because I wasn’t spending effectively.

Before I started mindful spending, I tried to remind myself of how much I needed to spend and how much I needed to save. The mind forgets, which is why we need reminders in our daily living. I drew up a plan that I visit every time to remind myself of the reason I started in the first place. A solid plan should be repeatable, organized, and agile.

What is Mindful Spending?

Mindful spending is being intentional about the way you spend your money and how your spending supports your goals. Satisfied Spending calls it lifestyle-based money management.

It is creating healthy spending habits that take you closer to your goals, instead of having your blood pressure rise when you think about what you’ve just purchased.

When you start spending mindfully, it becomes a part of who you are. You start asking yourself questions like these before moving money out of your account:

  1. Is this item in my shopping list?
  2. What is my reason for wanting to spend this money?
  3. What do I intend to achieve by saving this amount of money?
  4. Does making this purchase support my goals and needs? 
  5. How do I intend to achieve my spending goal?

I’ve come to understand that many people are not comfortable with engaging in money conversation. However, it’s okay to own up to the fact that our spending habit sucks. Every other thing follows from here.

I started mindful spending with Google Sheets. Google Sheets has a budget template that I customized to my preference. With the 50/30/20 rule, I created a planning sheet that helped me organize my spending into different categories. 

50/30/20 Rule of Spending/ Saving Mindfully - Winged Time Traveller
50/30/20 Rule of Spending/ Saving Mindfully

The 50/30/20 budget rule states that:

  • 50% of your net income should go to your Needs, e.g. Fixed expenses such as rent, work transportation, health, bills, and utilities.
  • 30% of your net income should go to your Wants, e.g. Lifestyle or flexible expenses such as food, travel, shopping, and even black tax, etc.
  • 20% of your income should go to your Financial Goals, which includes all kinds of savings and investments.

The 50/30/20 rule is ideal for me because it’s helped me with simplifying and organizing my finances. With the planning sheet, I was able to see how much I needed for what, and how much I should be saving.

I have prepared a monthly budget template for August that you may want to customize to your preference. Click on ‘file’ to make a copy.

Download your monthly budget template now

Confronting Black Tax with Mindful Spending

In simple words, black tax is the tax every first child pays for being born.

As the first child of my family and the first grandchild on one side, I understand the responsibilities expected of me. Thinking about these responsibilities can be very overwhelming as you receive a text sometime in the middle of the month asking for money. You have a job, so nobody wants to hear you don’t have money. And heavens save you if they have an inkling of your monthly income. It’s okay to say you don’t have, but what about next month, and the upper month?

What I did was allocate some money for black tax under my ‘wants purchases.’ And in case the need is more than I budgeted, I wouldn’t do otherwise because I don’t have anywhere to unearth the money from, do I?

How do you measure what works with the monthly budget template?

As you spend and save, make every change in the sheet. At the end of the month, check back to see how much you’ve spent in the month. It’s okay if you spent more than you budgeted. The key is to take small mindful steps which in turn makes a big difference.

Make a copy of the sheet for next month with adjustment to your spendings. For example, if you budgeted N40,000 for food and you spent more than the amount you budgeted, adjust the expense for next month to the amount you spent this month and follow from there.

If you spent below the amount you budgeted, make the same changes.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please fill out this 1 minute survey if you downloaded the monthly budget sheet. I’d love to follow up with you to make sure you find the budget template helpful. Don’t forget to follow my blog so that you don’t miss any blog posts from me. Also, remember to share with that friend who needs this most. Thank you.

Categories
Work

Do You Have a Brag Book?

Photo of a girl writing in a brag book
Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

I haven’t always been my biggest cheerleader. I suffer from impostor syndrome, which I’m beginning to learn happens to the best of us. My colleagues would be quick to tell how much of a hard worker I am. 

But the thing is I don’t give myself enough credit. I hear the voices of the internal critic in my head loud and clear every time I strive to do my best at a job. 

The thoughts that run through my mind whenever I’m working on a project with a team makes me doubt the effort I give, and often when they need my contribution on an idea, the critic who lives within me guffaws. The only thing that’s helped bolster my confidence before giving a presentation or during my performance review is having my brag book with me.

It doesn’t help especially during this COVID-19 period when there’s no clue about what the future will look like, or if there’s still anything like tomorrow. I mean, what use is a plan when you’re not sure if you’re going to survive Coronavirus?

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt from using my brag book

  1. I’ve learnt that if the thought runs through your head about whether you deserve a position or a responsibility, then you truly do. Nobody deserves this position better than you, and if there was such a person better than you for that job, why isn’t this person in the seat?
  2. I’ve learnt that it’s okay to toot our own horn. If you don’t, nobody might, and it’d remain like that until somebody does, which might take forever to happen. People forget things, and who’s better at telling your stories than you do?
  3. I’ve learnt to walk into a performance appraisal meeting with my brag book. It’s okay to reach for the note when you’re not feeling worthy of being in the room. More than twice, I looked through my brag book, and it helped me remember something that helped me with getting my confidence back.
  4. I’ve learnt not to wait until I complete a project or until a boss pats me on the back before adding my little wins to my brag book, after all, that’s why we call them ‘Little wins’.

My brag book is a place I enter every little detail of what made me happy at the moment with my job or something that I thought I couldn’t do, but I did. One could call it a little memoir of wins. Like, the time I wanted to go for a run, but my body was pulling me back. Running for seven minutes made me feel happy with myself, and that’s something for a brag. Once, I took it upon myself to work on developing a tool that would make the project management swifter for the team. Having that initiative and starting was a win for me. I added it to my brag book. 

Sometimes, I go through my brag book and marvel at the things I let myself do. I’ve dabbled in a lot of things quite alright, but the truth is, I took the step, and I covered grounds. Looking back, there’s only so much I could do, and I did those things. 

Having a brag book would help so much in a time like this. COVID-19 has made it very easy for the mind to fall into thinking traps that make us doubt ourselves even more. During this period, reading our brag books would go a long way in uplifting our spirits and helping us see why we were chosen for a particular role, and why we deserve every good thing in life.

Do you have a brag book? Could you share what you’ve included in it and how it’s helped you?

Update as of February 19, 2023: I’ll be creating another post soon that expands on the topic of this post. It will include inspirations on ‘how to create a brag book.’ Stay tuned for the link!

Categories
Mindfulness

This is how Mindfulness is Helping Me Find Peace

“Small things — if not corrected — become big things, always.”

Benjamin Hardy

A few months ago, I wrote in my notebook, ‘I want a better understanding of what I want to do with my life.’ I had been battling with procrastination, a feeling of emptiness, and I wanted to be able to hold myself accountable for all of the things that were happening in my life.

I wanted clarity. I wanted to be more intentional with my life.

I started my first mindfulness journey in December 2019 by deciding to become more present with the way I was spending my money. 

I was not necessarily a reckless spender, but I didn’t understand what mindful spending was. I wasn’t paying attention to how I was spending my money or where my money was going, and this made me incredibly sad. I always looked forward to saving a good percentage of my money as I entered a new month, but when the new month came, after saving on Cowrywise and Piggyvest, I’d ask myself the question, ‘Where did all my money go?’

I started tracking my expenses. Google Sheets has an awesome budget template that I customized to my preference. When I discovered that I could do this with Google Sheets, planning my finances and expenses became easy. I didn’t need to enter my bank data on some app. It felt like I designed the app myself, and I could do the rest of my budgeting on the go while entering the expenses I’d just made at a Grocery store.

But that was not all. As this aspect of my life improved, I felt I could do anything I wanted. My budgeting wasn’t perfect, there were times I’d fail to enter a record, but then, I’d recover myself, sit at my desk, and go over the sheet until I’d added all entries. It’s not easy to break a habit, but it felt good to be able to stay on top of my finances.

The next part of my life I started looking forward to improving was my health. I am not obese, but I became conscious of the fact that I was gradually losing control of my body, and that I needed to do something fast. It was in March 2020, and I’d just checked my weight. I felt mortified to learn that I weighed 73kg. I didn’t even know I could go that far, and I take all the blame. I hadn’t been doing much activity, given that my job didn’t require me to leave the comfort of my home; I work remotely, and I could decide to stay indoors for a year, working on my computer without needing to go outside. I sought the help of online services to do my shopping for me, and I only went out when there was a need for it. 

As a result, I decided to start a morning workout routine. I downloaded Nike Run Club and some two weeks after I’d summoned up courage, I made my first run. Breathless, and not making it to 50 meters, I walked back home. My second run was two days later and better, on a Saturday morning with Coach Bennett, who made it more comfortable, as I ran the first 22 minutes without stopping. 

And that, my friends, is how I started my mindfulness journey. I’m sticking to a daily routine while measuring my progress. This morning I checked how much I weighed, and I got 67.2 on the scale. 

If there’s one thing mindfulness has taught me, it is identifying my top three priorities and focusing on them one after the other.

Today, I thought about journaling the little steps that I’m taking to finding peace, and here we are. This is my second blog post, and these are bits and pieces about me. 

Categories
Becoming

Welcome to the winged time traveller blog!

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end”

Michelle Obama

Hey, everyone! Welcome to my blog.

My name is Ifunanya, but for the sake of this blog, I’ve chosen the name ‘The Winged Time Traveller.’ It’s a name I got from Tumblr, and I’ve loved it ever since.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked in various roles, including legal assistant, administrator, teacher, software developer intern, content creator, and social media manager/digital marketer. My journey has taken me to fascinating places, where I’ve met amazing people and gained valuable insights. Through this blog, I’ll share my experiences on work, travel, mindfulness, finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, and even a sprinkle of philosophy.

A quote from R.M. Drake has always resonated with me: ‘In the end, she became more than what she expected. She became the journey, and like all journeys, she did not end, she simply changed directions and kept going.’

In addition to this blog, I also own a platform for creatives called Creatives Around Us. It’s a space where I share unique stories of people who are changing the world through their creativity and community.

This blog is for people who have embarked on many journeys of their own, as well as those who are still finding their feet. It’s a place to share experiences, learn together, and find inspiration in the stories that have become a part of me.

Psst, check out my ‘now‘ page to see what I’m up to these days.

Enjoy the ride with me.

Nanya.