A Banker’s Guide to Healthy Wealth Series – Make Friends
This resolution we all learned at circle time in preschool--making friends. I will be the first to say that at that age it was as easy as trading a cracker for a cheese stick… But as you get older, it’s more important now to have a solid support system around you. With a strong group of friends your mental health will increase immensely as you will have another outlet to vent about your day at work with or anything going on in your personal life.
We all need someone, whether we like to admit that or not. If we transition this into the work life setting, having a group around you is called a network. This network of individuals will help you achieve your current goals within your company and can help you find opportunities if you are looking for a change. Your mental health is often not talked about due to the stigma that surrounds it, however opening yourself up to the conversation allows change to commence. This allows your brains chemistry to spark with excitement upon meeting a new friend at work, or even calling a friend on your way out of the office to grab dinner; all of these components are key to a healthy lifestyle.
Make new friends
A recent Harvard study concluded that having solid friendships in our life even helps promote brain health. Friends help us deal with stress, make better lifestyle choices, and help us rebound from health issues and disease more quickly. The people we bring into our lives as friends will show us how to forgive, laugh and make conversations. The basic components of any relationship, from our marriage to our coworkers, are all found in friendship.
In business settings, we call making new friends networking.
These individuals can be the catalyst to finding new solutions, lower costs, increased knowledge or even new personnel. Regardless of what your needs are, networking has the ability to assist you in attaining your goals. My father always told me if you were going to be successful in business you needed to have a good banker, a good accountant and a good attorney. From a banker’s perspective, I believe I put them in the correct order.
As a business owner you already have enough burdens, and willingly use these professionals as advisors to help you navigate the ever-changing landscape in your industry. Networking in turn, allows you to find even more experts that you can lean on to help give you a better picture of what your next plan of action needs to be.
As you prepare for the coming year tweaking your business plan, creating your projections, analyzing your expenses, calculating margins and everything else that successful entrepreneurs have to do, be sure to include time to write down your business’ goals for the coming year. It has been proven if you vividly write down your goals, you are more 1.2 – 1.4 times more likely of achieving them.
In doing so you can increase your business’ overall health, use facts to make best decisions, implement a retirement plan, educate yourself and find experts to help take your business to the next level. Just remember, before you allow an individual into your network, you need to ask them what kind of diet they are on, how often they exercise, how many books they have read and how much they have saved up for retirement.
We hope you have enjoyed our Banker’s Guide to Healthy Wealth Series. Over these five articles, we’ve shared insights on how the popular resolutions most people make at the beginning of a year can actually be beneficial to not only your personal life, but to your business one as well. If you’re starting with this article, be sure to go back and check out the others on eating better, exercising more, saving money, and how to feed your brain by reading more.
Of course, if one of your resolutions is to find a better bank that’s in your corner (and looking out for your future) we’d love to be that bank. If you’re already a customer, thanks! Either way, we’d love to hear from you and learn if there’s anything more we can do to help you put these tips in place, or help with any other aspect of your financial life. Contact us today or stop by any of our Southwest Kansas offices to say hi!