Last Saturday I took a wonderful class at the Junior College entitled “Building Your Financial Portfolio on $50 a Month”. This might not seem like a daring move, but in my life it was huge. I had to get over three of my fears to accomplish this.

The smallest fear was just navigating the unfamiliar junior college campus. My second fear had to do with the timing of the class, the weekend, when I normally have my disabled son home with me. Third was my fear of dealing with investing, a subject I had always thought too complicated for me to understand.

I believe and teach that there’s always something we can do to empower ourselves in the face of fear, anxiety or discomfort. To challenge my fear of the JC campus, I went ahead of time and scoped out the parking, the machines and the classroom. I figured out how much money and time I would need so that I wasn’t stressing early on a Saturday morning.

For my son, I needed to arrange for him to stay at his group home. I don’t have much experience of weekends without my son. I wondered how this would affect his sense of well-being. Before the weekend I took things to the group home that he might need, and of course, they knew how to contact me.

And lastly, to challenge my fear of investing I told myself that taking the class is just gathering information and I didn’t put any expectations on myself to become an investor. If I felt comfortable after the class to take some action great, and if not I would know more than I did before. My intention (see blog entry March 7, 2015) was to treat it like a new adventure, have fun, and learn something about myself and investing and I did.

What about you? Is there anything you’ve thought about doing and put off or decided it was too difficult? Would it be liberating to take it off the shelf labeled “too hard to do” and try on something new? Adventure, exploring the unknown, contributes to the richness of our lives. How do you know what yours might be?   Check in with the desires of your heart, your next adventure is waiting there.

With love, Jackie