2) How do I prioritise what's most important? (First Things First)

 

First Things First

By Sindy Wakeham

 

1^st Things 1^st!

If you want to make changes in your self-reliance, what’s more important than thinking ‘job’?

Would it be getting qualifications? How about a CV? Nope, none of those.

What does ‘1^st things 1^st’ mean?

To me, it means the most important things come first. It also means returning to the most basic foundations and then moving forward. Of course, that looks different for everyone, but for me, I go back to myself.

It’s that zone thing in Permaculture. Zone one in me would be my mind, heart, spirit, and mindset, followed by my physical health. Then my choices and actions and how they affect my home and family (zone 2), then my wider community (zone 3), and so on.

Self-reliance encompasses personal health and well-being, managing the home and family, managing finances, and work and recreation.  It means doing all I can to provide my family and myself with the necessities of life and more.

It also means building the ability to do that with freedom from enslavement, either to debt or to society by way of Social Welfare.

Please don’t get me wrong, if you follow my YouTube channels and have read my book, you know that for many years hubby and I have, out of necessity, been reliant on social welfare in between jobs, even if in work as a top-up for wages that fall beneath that which we could live off.

I am so very grateful for such a system that has supported us in our need, but that is exactly what it is supposed to be, in times of need and when there is no other choice.

We are supposed to use it only until we make a way or regain our ability to provide for ourselves financially. Many people are unfortunately in a position like those with degenerative conditions or those whose physical health or disability will never change, and the family needing to care for them, who may need to rely on the system for the rest of their lives.

That’s a different situation. I fully intend to pay my taxes in order to help look after those people as part of my duty to God and my community, being the country in which I live, to care for those in need. I know I can do that in other ways, but for me, paying taxes is about more than that.

It is also about contributing to the society in which I live, and its vital services. Now don’t think me naive...I know that no politician, national government, or local council uses our taxes in the right way, nor for the benefit of the people. But that is not my responsibility except when it comes to voting...don’t get me started on that!

My idea of responsibility comes from zone 1.

Back to 1^st things 1^st; which for me starts with my conscience and beliefs? It boils down to mindset and also faith. In the last decade, Mindset and particularly Abundance Mindset have become popular and fashionable. It looks like it’ll be around for a long time, and so it should be.

It’s not new. It’s been around since the beginning of thought. Mindset is connected to a universal law, The Law of the Harvest, which is also called the law of attraction, the law of abundance, and Karma. “What you give is what you get”. Does anyone else remember hearing that as a child? How about, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, what you say is what you are”?

I’m not going into all the details of Abundant Mindset, but will summarise it by saying that there are two sides, negative and positive, or scarcity (poverty) and abundance. The law of the harvest dictates that if you foster negative or poverty mindset attitudes and actions, that’s exactly what you get. The same goes for a positive and abundant mindset and actions. Not only do you get what you give...you get it back in abundance.

Think about it this way, you plant a seed and get back many seeds from that one seed grown into a plant that gives you back more than you sowed. You plant a fruit tree, and it gives you fruit for many years if tended and cared for in the right way. That’s the law of the harvest, and it applies to everything we do and think.

There’s an order in which to do these things, a best way of doing it, because there are many ways to do anything, and that best way could be different for everyone.

With that in mind, 1^st things 1^st means to get my mind in the right place. What’s my WHY? What are my family’s and my needs? What do I have and need? What are my skill sets, and what do I love doing?

Sometimes external factors affect how or when you can move forward, and sometimes you need to work on more than one aspect at a time. It helps if those aspects are connected.

Like for me, financial self-reliance is vital and urgent, but I didn’t seem to get it right for years, until I determined to set my home in order and my health and wellbeing first.

Now I’m taking those things into hand. I’m starting my day with spiritual matters, gratitude, reading my scriptures, meditating, prayer, and then my physical health by moving with Pilates, and then I get stuck into my business that cannot be done during the day when looking after family takes priority (yes, I wake between 4 and 5am). After all that, I tackle housework, homesteading, and family needs.

Since doing that, things are finally moving forward. That’s my ‘1^st things 1^st’.  What does yours look like? How do you prioritize your most important things to make your self-reliance work?

I’d love to hear from you.