I frequently work with people who are successful in nearly every aspect of their lives but still struggle with money.

Sometimes, the cause is deep-rooted money beliefs that began in childhood. Other times, their past money mistakes have kept them from having a healthy relationship with money. Sometimes, they’re just so busy managing different areas of their life that their financial lives get neglected.

Reflecting on this recently, I’ve realized that many of the skills we use in other areas of our lives can be directly applied to managing money—if we gain the awareness to do so.

Getting Healthy and Money

Recently, I hit the milestone age of 40 and realized that I wasn’t at all where I wanted to be with regard to my health. I was frustrated that I still hadn’t lost the weight I’d gained from COVID and had added a bit more from the stress of my divorce.

Money seems easy and straightforward to me. It’s not hard for me to keep my accounts organized, track my spending to the penny (shout out to YNAB, of course), and keep an eye on my net worth.

But my health? I wasn’t tracking anything, was emotional/stress eating, and my exercise routine was sporadic at best.

I realized that I was going to have to make some significant changes. Fortunately, I also realized that there were habits I’d established with money that could be directly applied to my health goals.

The Importance of Tracking

I started tracking key metrics to help me monitor my goals and it’s been just as insightful as tracking my cash flow. I’ve kept this simple and focused on tracking:

• Food (macros)
• Steps (aiming for at least 10k steps/day)
• Weight

I found an app I like to use, and while I’ll admit that I don’t love it as much as I love YNAB for cash flow tracking, it makes it efficient and easy (if you’re wondering, I use the MyNetDiary app).

I set goals that I know are manageable without resorting to extreme measures (no get-rich-quick or get-skinny-fast schemes here).

I worked on my mindset–giving myself grace–to better understand when I was eating for emotional reasons and identify better habits during those times (I’m pretty sure this was the food version of retail therapy).

Living a healthy life requires paying attention to all facets of your life, not just your job. Or money. Or food. Or fitness. Or even relationships (as important as these all are!).

(picture of wheel or facets)

Skills To Apply to Your Financial Life

If you find yourself struggling with money despite doing well in other areas of your life, you’ll benefit from taking a minute to think about why this might be.

What are you doing in your professional life or other areas of your personal life that might benefit you if applied to your personal finances?

Discipline

Of all the skills necessary for managing money wisely, discipline is the most important. Being “good” with money requires making daily choices. It requires you to do things often that you don’t want to do but know you should.

If you’re struggling with discipline in your personal finances (this typically manifests itself as overspending), look at other areas of your life where you’re showing better discipline. It could be getting to work on time, fulfilling commitments to colleagues and family members, or in the health and fitness space.

Try stacking personal finance habits like creating and keeping up on a budget with those things you’re already doing well.

Time Management & Prioritizing

I firmly believe that we have time for anything truly important to us. We each have a million things vying for our attention, but we have the choice of whether or not to let those things fill our time and energy.

The focus is not on whether we’re “wasting” time or optimizing every second, it’s on ensuring that we don’t let the little, less important things crowd out the time we need for things that are most important in our lives.

Managing your money should be a huge priority in your life. This includes being intentional about using your current financial resources as well as saving for your future self. I always recommend to my clients that they put a set time on their calendar and/or set reminders on their phones to ensure that they regularly check in with their finances.

Problem Solving

Regardless of the industry you work in, you’ve likely had to develop good problem-solving skills. Things don’t always go as planned, and that’s undoubtedly true with money.

This is also why having an emergency fund is so important (and why you’ve heard that advice a million times!). If you expect everything to go exactly as planned, you will be disappointed. But, if you have the ability to proactively mitigate the impact of potential problems, you’ll be much better off.

When unexpected things come up, don’t forget about the skills you’ve already developed to figure out how to proceed. Too often, people say things like “I’m just not good with money,” or “This was just an ‘off’ month, I’ll budget when things calm down.” Unfortunately, this perpetuates the problem.

Use those problem-solving skills you’ve already developed when forming new money habits.

Resilience

This leads me to the last skill: resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover from setbacks. Life is full of setbacks (I’m an optimist, but also a realist!). How much you let things derail you is often up to you.

Recovering from your failures is part of every aspect of your life, not just money, and it’s essential for getting your finances in order. I’ve found that a big part of resilience is allowing yourself to make mistakes, and simply trying again (and again…).

I’ve certainly had plenty of opportunities to learn resilience in my own life struggles.

Progress > Perfection

In my health journey specifically, I found that getting through the first month of changing my food choices was the absolute hardest. By giving myself the grace to have days that I reverted to old habits and not allowing myself to give up despite them (which is so easy to do!), I’ve made a huge amount of progress already.

Whether it’s getting a handle on your spending, navigating money issues in relationships, creating a budget, or saving an emergency fund, focus on making progress and not on perfection. Applying the valuable skills you already have can make a big difference in improving your financial life.

I’d love to know! What skills do you find are the most helpful for you when it comes to managing money?