Episode 7: How to safeguard the most important things in life

Dawn McGruer:

So welcome to Episode 7 of Dawn of a New Era, the Podcast: Chronicles of a Serial Entrepreneur, with myself, Dawn McGruer, digital marketing speaker, author, and trainer. Now make sure you head across to dawnmcgruer.com and subscribe to the podcast because there are loads of different episodes and lots of worksheets. Every single time I do a podcast, I will share my pains, problems and challenges over the past 20 years as an entrepreneur and some amazing tips to hopefully help you get past them and remove any barriers that will help you on your journey as a successful business owner.

Now, in this particular episode, this is going to cover something that is very, very important. Now, when we think about what’s the most important thing in life, what do we think of? Well, normally health, wealth, and happiness. What we need to do is go away and use the worksheet to see exactly where you rank and understand what the gaps are in your life because contentment and happiness is everything. It’s central to our wellbeing. We need to make sure as business owners that we protect these three most important things: health, wealth, and happiness.

Now, when we think about our health, this is about making time for you and doing all the right things. Now, when you fill in the worksheet, you can follow along and make sure that you are on the positive end of the scale for all of these areas. Now, think about it. When you think about health, we think about how we feel and how our bodies are. This is about investing in things like a health assessment. Making sure that you understand that your body is in the best tune it can be because that means you are going to be operating in the best performance and manner for your business. You can.

Now, when we think about wealth, in the last episode, in episode six, we talked about what is money to you. Now, again, very importantly, this is about wealth. This is about protecting you in your future. Are you set up for the here and now? Are you set up for the future? It’s really important when we talk about wealth that you protect yourself. Now, I meet so many people who don’t even have a will, and they have children. You have to think about protecting you and your loved ones. And when we think about wealth, this is about making provision. And although it’s a horrible thing to think about, things can happen that we didn’t plan for. So what you want to do is make sure that you’ve got insurance in place. You’ve got protection against these things like having a will and having contracts and documents, et cetera.

So one of the things I have is when I think about my health, first of all, I have an annual assessment. I also go back every three months, every 12 weeks to see my GP just have a quick checkup, make sure that I’m making improvements. Now, the plan I’m on is all about making provision for the future in terms of ensuring that I am looking after my health in the best possible way. So instead of waiting for something to go wrong, I’m actually putting in a positive energy around my actual health to make sure that I am limiting my risk as much as possible, and I am improving my chances of staying and being healthy for as long as possible.

Now, when I think about wealth, I have different things in place. So I have insurance, I have business interruption insurance. I have insurance built in that I do pay a premium for. That means if anything happened to me that it will pay for someone to step in to be me and to run my businesses. Because what happens if you weren’t there? Now, thankfully, over the years, I have got to a point in my businesses where I don’t need to be present, but depending on where you are in your journey, you may be the business and you have to prevent and protect against anything happening. I also have critical illness. Critical illness insurance means that regardless of what happens, if I got diagnosed with something awful, within a matter of days, I will get a payout. And then I don’t have this stress, this worry about where money is coming from. Yes, my businesses will earn, but there could be other things that I need to pay for that I hadn’t thought of.

So this is about doing a little bit of an audit on you and thinking about from your health point of view, are you proactively making sure that you’re in the best health possible? Are you proactively from your wealth making sure that for any eventuality that you’re protected because you wouldn’t go into business with a new business partner without contract. This is a difficult thing to think about, but even when we think about relationships, many people have said to me, “Well, I’m not married to my partner, but I lived together. We share assets and we share wealth. How does it work? What would happen if God forbid that we weren’t together?”

Well, when we actually got together, we did one of the most difficult things in history. We actually did a declaration of trust because when we bought our house together, we had to make sure that as we were merging our assets, that if anything happened, that we would walk away with what we put into the relationship from a financial point of view.

So it means that if that day did ever come and that’s hope, hope, hope, hope that that never does, me and my partner are happy. But we can’t ever plan for the future. And you may be happy now, but these things go wrong. So what would happen? So for me, this contract that took weeks to draw up, it was a particularly difficult scenario going through every single eventuality of what would happen and how things would be split, but it means now that we have a plan, a plan in place that protects both parties and is fair and honest and true. And it means that we wouldn’t have to go through any painful separation. It would just be a very kind of matter of fact in terms of the wealth. Yes, it would be painful from the emotional point of view, but you wouldn’t have the added areas.

Now, when we think about the last one, happiness, what does this mean? So I have a happiness plan. Now, everyone will laugh and joke for me that I have a spreadsheet for everything, but I probably do. When I think about happiness, it’s about not getting caught up in the mundane. For me, with the way that I work and the way that I work in businesses, I love it. Business for me is like a hobby, right? So I can get drawn in, and as much as I plan my day, I’ll find something else to do. I could go through my to-do list, but then I’ll be onto the next thing. I want to launch something. I want to create something. I want to develop an idea. So I’m constantly on the go and my brain is constantly going 24/7, but I need a separation.

So from my happiness point of view, I have to create things into not just my week or my month, but my days that actually gives me a change of perspective because I don’t sometimes realize how embroiled I am in business. And none of us want to be a business bore. We need to have other things in our life that make us truly dynamic, but fulfill us from a personal point of view.

So what do I do? Well, I think about exercise. I think about how I get up in the day and what makes me happy. Now the sad thing is for me that just sometimes having a coffee and sitting and just doing nothing, that makes me happy. Having time just to read a magazine, a trashy magazine. I just love to just take my mind away from things. I don’t always have to be reading educational items. I do sometimes just want pictures of mundane gossip and trash. Yeah. So these are things that make me happy. So I love doing Pilates. I love doing my fitness training sessions. It gives me another dynamicness and another kind of area of me.

And the more that you do in your life, it just makes you a really nice multifaceted person where you have a lot to talk about. But also what I find is I have a lot more to give. The more I do, the more I can give. The better I feel about these three areas of my life, the better I can put in. And we’re all been through times. Me in particular, I’ve had a horrendous year, and I think a lot of us have, and this is not even to do with COVID for me. I’ve had a horrendous year. For anyone who knows me and listens to this podcast, you will know that my life was flipped upside down in January. And it changed my life forever. And it’s really upsetting. And it’s almost Earth-shattering when these things happen, because it just hits you out of nowhere. And I literally felt like I had been hit by a truck. I didn’t even know what to do.

For me, I have a huge amount of need for certainty and clarity. And it makes me feel complete. When I don’t have that, I feel destabilized. And I feel like I can’t give, and I can’t pop back in when these things are not in the pots for me. So when I think about my health, my wealth and happiness, my happiness is central especially when something hits you.

Now, if you are going through something that is particularly painful or something that’s just traumatic or just you’ve experienced a change in business that’s just really rocked your world, it doesn’t matter. Nobody has the monopoly on pain or problems. It is all relative and yours is as equally important as anyone else’s. So this is the time you have to take back and think about you. And I’ve had to do a lot this year where I’ve had to step back from things and say, “I’m sorry, but I need to think about me. And I need to think about doing things that are for me, not just doing things because I feel obliged, not doing things because I said I would do them.”

So taking that step back and regaining the control and thinking about how this affects you, how you’re going to overcome it. Now, this is not about wallowing in your self-pity. We’re all allowed our few minutes of wallow and things per day, but this is about making positive changes of trying to kind of spin it and just think, “Right, okay. It’s happened. How do I get over it?” and trying to get them rid of some of that negativity.

So when I feel like I’m going down a negative feel, or I feel just a bit overwhelmed with everything, I go to my happiness plan. My happiness plan are all the things that I like. And it could just be having that coffee, going to Starbucks, having a timeout, could be listening to some music. It could be meditating. Whatever you want to do, your happiness plan needs to be there because you need to be able to rely on something and you need to have go-tos every day that will just pick you up, right? And if any of you have had something happened, come and join us in the safe space, right. We have thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners in Facebook, in the Business Consort, marketing, motivation, and mindset. We share experiences. We talk about these things.

No business, no life is plain sailing. And sometimes you just need to know that someone else is there to just support you, to be with you and to understand. We maybe can’t solve it for you, but we can for sure come together and be a community to help each other.

So I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. Slightly different one, but I want to be sharing, as I say, some personal experiences. And I really truly feel a need that showing up on social media, showing up in things like my podcast and being authentic and being true to myself and to you and showing you that I am human, I am massively organized most of the time. And a lot people say, “On social media you come across very organized and professional.” And I don’t want that to put people off. Yes I am, but I’m human. And I have a heart and I have traumas too.

My life is not plain sailing, and so I do understand. And if you want to come and share with us where your business is at, come and join the group. We are here to help. And I just hope you took something positive from this. And feel free to go to dawnmcgruer.com, download the activity sheet, and give me feedback in the group. And also you are free to comment on each of the posts. So, if there’s a question you want to ask to me, there’s something you want to get out of this podcast, or you’re just going through something and you just need a little bit of help, a little bit of support, I’m here. Yeah. So come and join me, dawnmcgruer.com. Make sure you connect on social media. I connect with everybody, and the more diverse my network is, the better that we can all support and give.

So I will see you on next week’s podcast. And thank you so much and just have a happy super day. And if you’re feeling a little bit low, remember, find your happiness plan and find something that just perks you up and gets you through the next hour. Take care.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode and don’t forget I’m going to be with you each and every week. So download and listen on dawnmcgruer.com or on iTunes and come and join us in our Facebook community too. All the details are on the website, and I’ll see you next week.