301. Newlywed Bonding #9 — Plan Ahead

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Finances—or more accurately, squabbles about indebtedness and spending—stimulate break up more than almost anything else.  

$$$  Plan ahead. Marriage vows express devotion to each other. Unplanned, unnecessary, and surprise spending and indebtedness can easily kill such devotion.

$$$  Plan ahead. The continual practice of spending less than your income reinforces devotion to each other. Teamwork bonds.

$$$  Plan ahead. Long before the wedding date, commitment to marital spending, decision-making, and success ranks as highly as commitment to each other.

$$$  Plan ahead. Budgeting generates good self-discipline to overcome and minimize the effects of bad habits. New habits can put mind over money instead of plastic over mind.

$$$  Plan ahead. If you can’t budget, you can’t plan effectively. There is no special way to do it except YOUR WAY—whatever works to keep spending below income, to make savings a lifetime process.

$$$  Plan ahead. Commit to stop, slow, or compensate for impulse buying, compulsive shopping, and immediate gratification.

$$$  Plan ahead. Reward yourself cheaply for avoiding big or unplanned big spending.

$$$  Plan ahead. Rewards create and reinforce new habits. Reward yourselves frequently for:

·        Staying within budget

·        Not having to pay credit card interest

·        Meeting your saving goals

·        Devoting to each other by not overspending in your domain of responsibility.

[More about newlyweds appears at posts 297, 261, 257, 254, 247, 242, 230 and 224. Scroll down or search by number with dot and space following it.]

 

 

 

256. Newlywed Bonding #6 — Blessings

Just the term ‘budgeting’ scares some people. Like other processes, however, it can be learned by experimenting and mastered through practice. Newlyweds have four strengths to guide them:

1.     Some income. (It’s usually not enough, so spending control can be critical to avoid great indebtedness just getting settled into marriage.)

2.     Mutual interest to have enough money for a good life together.

3.     Two different and talented minds operating with joint purpose to succeed in marriage. When those minds operate as one in financial matters, wealth grows.

4.     Mental flexibility. A spouse can suppress the urges for impulse buying, compulsive shopping, and instant gratification when they have something bigger to live up to—for example, rewards that flow out of budgeting rules designed to overwhelm such bad habits.

So, as newlywed couple, wherever you’re at, do the best you can with what you’ve got. Think control before spending instead of the reverse.

More follows in future posts.

[More about newlyweds appears at posts 256, 247, 242, 230 and 224. Scroll down or search by number with dot and space following it.]

224. Newlywed Bonding #1 —Intro

Marriages deteriorate more easily and become temporary, than they solidify and become permanent. Deterioration requires little else than inattention, sloppiness, carelessness.  

Solidifying a marriage requires a lot of shared goals and planning to sustain mutual respect. Making the process habitual in the early years produces desired results later. (Grace and I didn’t get the shortcomings of our early marriage straightened out until our third decade together.)

First impressions last, and early marriage sets the stage for whatever follows. Jointly built successes bond a couple. Failures, weaknesses, and even good intentions do not bond and can smother love to death.

Consequently, newlywed success depends on preventing relationship harm. That’s where forming good habits comes in. It requires mutual devotion—not just commitment—to build new habits that stamp out premarital bad habits that lead to deterioration.

This Newlywed Bonding series covers four beneficial habits that chase bad habits away:

1.     Virtue as relationship glue

2.     Money as relationship slave

3.     Separate but equal as teamwork

4.     Custom as dispute avoidance

The first good habit will appear in a few days. The Table of Contents at the top lists many subjects pertaining to living successfully with someone of the opposite sex.

NOTE: A nice and classy young lady, Tricia, inspired this series of posts. I pray her pending marriage matches her public pleasantness, charm, and sense of responsibility.

 

219. Female challenges

A nice lady asked if my blog applies to large women. Yes, plus those not perfectly shaped. (I ignore genetic causes.) A few reminders follow for women unproductively worried about such things.

☺ Oversized and imperfect shapes have many culprits: low sense of self-worth, unflattering image of physical self, lack of self-respect and self-confidence, bad habits, stinking thinking, and on and on. Mostly, however, it’s food intake inspired by frustration, loneliness, or discomfort tied in with some or all of the above.

☺ Her size and shape too easily mislead her thinking. For example, the nagging voice about weight is her enemy. Nagging herself, just as nagging a man, produces unintended consequences.

☺ Her size, shape, and presentation of body is her choice—past, present, and future. Self-interest and common sense say she should forever make her body and its appearance follow what she decides is best for her future.

☺ Guilt about the past is counterproductive. Self-promises loaded with great intentions about a brighter future can be productive—even when her ‘great intentions’ later dim to ‘almost got there’.

☺ Loneliness can’t be escaped, only deferred. It must be overridden by a comfort with herself different from what shopping, pizza, snacks, and munchies bring. Living up to something bigger than herself helps. (Turn her heart over to the Lord, and loneliness will not trouble her. Avoiding calories also becomes simpler and much easier.)

☺ Her outside appearance attracts a man, her inside virtues hold him.

☺ Virtue has its own rewards. It makes tough decisions easier, and adds to her importance and self-respect.

☺ Faith in the Lord uplifts her spirit. Belief in man—Humanism—discourages it.

☺ Loneliness comes from self-centeredness. Sincere giving of herself to others drives out self-centeredness and, consequently, loneliness.

☺ What she thinks about, she gets. (Our subconscious takes us toward what we think about whether good or bad, desired or undesired, liked or hated, feared or coveted.)

☺ Everything for which she can be grateful adds to her happiness.

☺ Ungratefulness for her body compounds grief out of all proportion to her body’s importance in successful living.

The female nature begrudges every flaw. Her mushy thinking keeps focus on them all.

133. Woman as Boss — #1 — Introduction

The male and female ego go head-to-head when a woman is the boss. Many men can’t handle it, but of course the problem is each man’s. Her best practice at all times rests with dodging disrespect. Using or avoiding the following practices accumulate benefits over time.

1.      Leadership means to inspire people to do what they may not particularly care to do and do it well. Over-supervision squelches inspiration and trust, which weakens belief in the leader, which reduces respect.

2.      Management means arranging things, shaping events, and coordinating outcomes. Micromanaging squelches initiative, signals distrust, and undercuts the authority of others. Each of these results earns disrespect, and men are particularly sensitive to loss of authority.

3.      The female nature easily leads to miscalculations and misjudgments in the workplace. For example, some women pay too much attention to emotional disturbances that men expect to resolve or live with on their own. Interference can breed disrespect.

4.      Some women imitate the way they think men lead, manage, and emphatically boss. They duplicate what they see, have seen, or deduce that men do. Acting outside her female character earns disrespect, and getting bossier from frustration earns more.

5.      Some women focus more on the process of working than producing results. They seek to integrate relationships and manage emotions. By taking their eye off what workers are producing, they lose respect.  

6.      Their child-raising instincts push women into bad habits dealing with subordinates. The male nature cringes at orders from an authority figure female. Men can adjust to women telling them WHAT to do but not HOW to do it. When told HOW, men lose interest in doing it, and she loses respect. (Women can test this first hand with their Honey-do list.)

7.      Don’t complain and don’t explain. When the boss does either, she empowers others to judge her—and they will. Their respect for her declines with each judgment that they or someone else could do better.

8.      Whatever policies, practices, and rules she formulates or follows need no explanation when they have been violated. If she explains to the violator, she gives up her authority as discriminator about violations and will be judged weak. Either her or her rules will be found wanting and disrespected. 

9.      Women focus on relationships in the workplace. Men deal with principles that smooth and level out emotions. For example: Men work best under these leadership principles. Assign responsibility to each person such that everyone is aware of who does what. Delegate authority to each person sufficient to fulfill their responsibility. Hold everyone accountable for a job well done or not done satisfactorily. Bosses that do this well earn greater respect.

10.  Praise and chastise individuals ONLY in private for reasons explained next below.

11.  Praise and chastise teams as a whole and don’t cite individuals for special recognition, good or bad. Other team members will disagree when they are not included. This far too easily breeds envy, jealousy, and whining that fertilizes disrespect for the boss. Those not recognized in front of others do not have access to the boss’ agenda. So, they can’t be expected to understand how ‘heroic’ is someone else. Also, they feel they contributed at least as much and maybe more. That is, “The boss just doesn’t know what all goes on where I work.”

12.  The female nature automatically earns less respect and less enthusiasm from people in a structured organization. So, a woman boss’ strength lies with femininity. Why? Because men greatly respect women strong on feminine mystique, female modesty, religious loyalty, and moral standards that men would not choose for or by themselves, and female-defined and -friendly manners, expectations, and social standards. Any effective leader needs respect above all else.

All this is not to say a woman can’t be a good boss, but she has a much tougher assignment than men. See CONTENTS page at blog top for more about Woman as Boss.

11. Self-esteem—simple or psychobabble?

Many people suffer low self-esteem—defined here as how well one likes and appreciates oneself. The easiest route to improvement lies through one’s self-image or self-concept as some call it—defined here as one’s picture of Self. People can improve self-esteem by consciously working to improve their role in the world—the who and what of their Self—while trying their best to ignore dislike for themselves.

For women, self-laudatory accomplishments of little things help—for example, saving more money, cooking new dishes, earning praise at school or work, becoming more punctual, memorizing verse, reading a worthwhile book, dumping bad habits, learning new skills, volunteering for charity work. It’s important to remember successes, forgive and forget mistakes, and this encourages one to keep driving onward.

Better clothing and more attentive grooming helps immensely. Paying greater attention to her appearance programs her subconscious with many improvements about who and what she is. For example, it’s anachronistic, but 100 hair brush strokes daily helps even though modern researchers claim healthier hair does not result. The time spent brushing in the mirror is productive. Her female nature energizes her to make the most of what she’s got, and so she easily comes up with new ideas for better grooming and appearance.

Whether brushing hair or not, as she daily devotes more time and energy to better grooming, the small improvements she perceives improve her self-image. Each day‘s success—whether recognized by others or just her—makes her feel better about her female self. The better she looks to herself, often measured by the reaction of others, the faster she learns in iddy-biddy steps to like her female self. So, women less successful as female should look to exercising greater self-control over what they can change—their self-image. Improved sense of greater fulfillment will follow.