Colour Your Way To A Debt Free Life
It’s a vast generalisation I know and I’m going to make it anyway.
As adults we so easily get sucked into the deep brow-furrowing belief that the important and serious matters in life – like money, health, careers, relationships, meaning and purpose, spirituality, contribution and making the world a better place – should be hand wringing affairs.
BS ALERT!
If we aren’t frowning, struggling and suffering
then we obviously are not taking it seriously.
In my first decade in corporate life, I honestly believed I had to un-couple my fun and irreverent chip in my brain every time I walked into the office. Heaven forbid if someone found out I actually laughed like a drain, though bad puns were funny, love playing with lego and still giggled when someone sat on a whoopee cushion.
Not only did I leave my fun bits at home I also left my creative bits under lock and key. Imagine admitting to my fellow engineers, auditors, accountants and the policy police that despite having no kids to blame it on, I had (and still have) a bigger collection of glitter, glue, colouring in pens, finger paint, stickers and fancy paper to make the local craft club look like weenies. Hidden even deeper was my cupcake making paraphernalia! How would anyone take me seriously if they knew I still loved to play!
“We’ve come a long way baby” – as the saying goes.
More and more research is being done on the necessity of creativity and play in enabling empowered decision making, maintaining motivation, significantly increasing effectiveness and efficiency and most importantly giving our lives joy and meaning. Adult colouring in books have become the gift of choice, colour and play areas are popping up in the most successful businesses with the understanding that when we play, we bring much more of our brain and therefore our potential to the party, enabling solutions to flow faster and the “serious” stuff happens quicker and easier.
It’s time to bring play and creativity into your money stuff!
Recently in the community group for the “Just Friggin’ Destroy it” programme – where our debt blitzing peeps hang out, share their debt liberation successes and give each other support – there was a discussion on ways to keep up the debt blitzing motivation, celebrate the little steps and keep the journey to debt free liberation fun.
And what a great discussion it was with the group sharing amazing creative ways in which they are making this very important (and dare I say serious) aspect of their lives fun and joyful.
Amongst the various brilliant ideas was an article by Amy Jones on how she used colouring in to clear $26 000 in debt.
“I take great joy in telling people I paid off my credit cards. All five of them. And it only took half the time I thought it would. It feels really, really good after dragging that debt around for most of my adult life. And to be extra honest—it’s also quite fun to share how I did it. It involved a Sharpie, a random piece of framed canvas, and smelly pens (yes, these sweet scented little loves).
Here’s how it began. In April of 2014 my tax guy, Steve, had a very kind, yet firm talk with me about how I needed to deal with my debt. I’d been in denial for some time about paying it off in earnest. It just seemed overwhelming so I kept putting it off—making minimum payments and pretending like it would disappear.
Unfortunately, unicorns saddled with cash were not coming. I needed a new approach. I also had this piece of framed canvas sitting around (as ridiculous as that sounds) and wanted to do something with it. One night, as I surrendered to the fact that it was time to be a grown woman, inspiration struck.”
You can read the rest of Amy’s story here….
That inspiration was to create a simple doodle drawing of recurring shapes (in her case swirls) with a black sharpie and then allocate a monetary value to the shape.
She decided each swirl was worth $100 and with each $100 blitzed from her debt she coloured in one shape. Each time she got to colour in a new swirl, she reinforced the progress she was making – us humans are addicted to validation of our efforts like sunflowers are addicted to the sun – and the motivation to complete the drawing (fun) rather than clearing the debt (serious boring stuff) kept her inspired to find more ways and more money to blitz her debt.
She did three other really important things to keep her debt blitzing on track and fun.
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She shared her yet to be coloured in picture on Facebook and told all her friends about her plan. There is nothing quite like a public declaration of a goal and the potential “shame” of not achieving it to keep us moving.
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She kept her picture in a place where she saw it daily to remind herself of her goal and how much blitzing her debt meant to her.
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She let herself really enjoy colouring in one swirl at a time, celebrating the seemingly small victory knowing that with every new patch of colour her debt was that bit smaller and her Net Worth that bit bigger.
What I love so much about Amy’s story, beyond her being debt free of course, is that by sharing her story she has inspired thousands of others to come out of their own debt closet, get blitzing themselves and change their beliefs about being bad at this money stuff by using fun creative ways to make money fun.
AND the fun doesn’t stop there!
This is the cool, woo-woo ripple effect magic that happens when we say yes to our dreams and do something about them. When you look after your own wellbeing you cannot not create expansion.
Amy’s inspiration and story has led to a new business for Amy with thousands of people asking her to share her doodles so they can use them to achieve their goals for everything from losing weight, to staying sober, to running a marathon and every conceivable goal. She now has a thriving online business and raving fans who buy canvases of her doodles in wonderful different patterns to achieve their own goals and claim back their unlimited lives.
So are you up for some colouring in fun?
To help you have fun breaking free from debt, or achieving any of your financial freedom steps - we have created a fun set of doodle frameworks for you to use.
Go here to get your free set of goal doodles
Whether your next money goal is to fill up your emergency fund, blitz your debt, get your security net in place, fill your investment pot with your whole tax free allowance, get your protection pate in place, achieve the next course on your financial freedom feast menu, pay for your next holiday in full upfront, have your money date, get your five wealth cooking tools in place etc… use these free graphic templates to create your own doodle drawings to colour in as you make your goal happen.
Please share your financial goal Doodle on Instagram or Facebook and remember to tag @thewealthchef so we can cheer you on, or even email us a picture of your work, [email protected]
Big Love,
Ann
