As 2024 comes to a close, you might be reflecting on your financial goals and the progress you’ve made. Many people view progress as a linear checklist of milestones to hit, but regaining control over your finances is far from straightforward. Focusing only on the end goal is discouraging, and that creates a mindset that is unsustainable for lasting change, especially when it comes to how you think and feel about money.
In this episode, I encourage you to reframe how you view your financial journey and the progress you’ve achieved this year. I’ll discuss why the linear approach to progress can be limiting and introduce you to my lily-pad progress method, which leads to more sustainable success. Often, it’s easy to overlook the small steps and skills you’ve gained, but those incremental behavioral shifts are fundamental to generating lasting change.
Take a moment to consider what you can do now that you couldn’t do just a week, month, or quarter ago. Celebrate your wins and recognize how far you’ve come on your financial journey.
Listen in to learn more about the lily pad progress approach and hear about these key topics…
- [01:36] Pitfalls of using a linear approach to tracking progress
- [06:52] Benefits of using the lily-padding progress method
- [12:30] The importance of celebrating wins and acknowledging growth
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to reframe how you think about the progress you’ve made toward reaching your financial goals.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved this conversation about The Lily Pad Progress Method: Reframing Your Financial Progress, check out my episode on Sustainable Change: Take the Next Best Step to Change How You Think and Feel About Money!
Transcript for “The Lily Pad Progress Method: Reframing Your Financial Progress ”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So as we prepare for the New Year, I realize that some of you have probably made a lot of progress with your finances and maybe some of you haven’t made progress with your finances or some of you have made a little bit of progress with your finances. No matter where you are, I want to give you an opportunity to reframe how you are thinking about your progress. I also am sharing this episode with you because if you’ve ever wondered like, do I want to work with a coach, is working with Keina, like what does it look like? I think it can just give you a little bit of an insight as well to how I talk to my clients about their progress.
One of my favorite things to do as a coach is to be a mirror for my clients. And if you have a financial app, your financial app can’t be a mirror. Your financial app isn’t going to recall for you how you’ve had conversations with your kids about money. They’re not going to recall for you about how you made sure you made it to the post office to return a package because you ordered clothes and now you realize like, I actually don’t need the clothes. Those are some of the things that in client sessions, I’m reflecting for clients to really help them see how they’re experiencing behavioral shifts with what they’re doing. I think one of the challenges in deciding like, Hey, I am going to take on getting my finances together, is that sometimes we really want quick change.
I think that in the world and the society that we live in, we want things to happen quickly. We are looking for very linear progress. So if you are a visual person, imagine you have a timeline and you are looking for, I made it to step one, I made it to step two, I made it to checkpoint one, checkpoint two, checkpoint three and that’s the type of progress you’re looking for. I think that a lot of you, that’s the type of progress you want when you think about your finances, like if you had to think about the check-boxes, you’re like, I never overspend, like that’s check 0.1. Check 0.2 is, I have all my debt paid off. Check 0.3 is like, I know every single bill. There’s just a lot of things that you want to happen linearly and you have an order in which things are supposed to happen.
I think the downfall to thinking about your progress in this very linear approach is that you are focused on the finish line. So when you’re focused on the finish line, all you’re ever doing is talking to yourself about how you’re not meeting the expectation. The reason I know this is true is because I hear clients say like, but I have so much further to go, I have this, that, I’m still trying to work on. I’m still trying to work on this. They’re like belittling themselves, for lack of a better word, because they’re focused on being finished and they don’t want the process to take a long time and they’re missing out on the opportunity to really think about who they can become as they go through the process. And maybe that’s disheartening to you in some way where you’re like, oh my goodness, I just want this to be really quick, I want to pay off all my debt. But here’s the thing, when you are thinking about financial progress in a very linear focused way, you’re actually missing out on the opportunity for you to have sustainability in the financial process.
Sustainability, like financial sustainability. When I say financial sustainability, I’m talking about your ability to maintain your financial results. That right there should be the thing that you actually want the most because when you have that, you don’t have to be afraid of what happens if you get off plan. And really, I would say what happens when you get off plan, because your finances aren’t always going to just be a walk in the park. There are going to be things that happen. You could have underestimated a tax bill, you could have underestimated how much it takes to take your dog to the vet. There are things that can happen, but when you’re realizing like, I actually am very financially stable and I’ve made sure that I’m not just focused on the finish line, then you getting off track or something throwing you off isn’t going to derail all of your progress.
So if you are someone who definitely has checkpoints or check boxes that you’re thinking like, nope, it needs to be 1, 2, 3, 4. I need you to get away from that. What I was explaining to my client the other day and I was drawing this picture, one that I actually borrowed from my time as a math teacher. I probably have talked about this on other podcast episodes, but I’m just going to tell you about math for a little bit and maybe this will help you translate it a little bit more to your financial situation as a math teacher. So I taught middle school math and as a math teacher, and if you’re a parent, you might be like, yes, I get this, but in math you teach things in a very linear order, like you have to do this and you have to do that, you have to do that.
Well, what you miss out on if you’re not paying attention as a teacher, especially one that’s progressive, is that you are not monitoring for where your kids are experiencing the changes in their thinking. You’re not looking for the fact that a kid that struggled last week with being able to find a common denominator can now talk about why you actually need to have a common denominator. I won’t actually go down this whole rabbit hole with you, but as a teacher, I thought about every single kid and I’ve thought about them very discreetly and I’m looking for what are the things that they’re doing this week that they couldn’t do last week? What are the things they’re doing today that they couldn’t do yesterday? And so that’s what I’m looking for. I’m not just looking for can they add one plus three, can they multiply three times five?
Because if I’m only looking for them to be able to get the answer, I’m missing out on how they’ve changed as a student. And the same is true for your financial progress. I’m going to call it lily padding progress because that is literally the graphic that was explained to me for math. But if I take it to finances and I’m thinking about a lily padding progress, which my client was like, oh my goodness, that looks like so much more work. Why would I want to do that? It looks like so much more work. And it’s not that it’s more work, it’s just like I told you as a teacher, if I’m not actually looking for what can my client do or what can my student do today that they couldn’t do yesterday, I’m going to miss the opportunity to celebrate them and I’m going to miss the opportunity for them to make that next step in growth and the same is true for you.
If you are not looking at like, how do I think, how do I feel about my finances today that I didn’t feel last week, a month ago, even a year ago? You are going to miss the opportunity to celebrate your progress. And the reason that I’m giving you the analogy of the lily pad is because when I’m thinking about like if you’ve ever seen a pond with lily pads on it, you can hop from one pad to the other. So on each one of those pads that you’re hopping to, you are collecting habits, you’re collecting skills, you’re collecting points of reflection. And so, if you had a bag that you were putting all of these skills, habits, and reflections in, you are going to have a really heavy sack with you of all of the things that you’ve changed and all of the things that you’ve learned.
And that collective progress over time is going to help you still get to your finish line but you’re going to do that in a sustainable way because you’re not just looking for, have I paid off my debt? Am I out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle? Do I have money saved or not having money to save, it won’t be as discreet as that. When you’re paying attention to the lily pad process, you’ll make sure that on your journey you’re asking yourself like, what can I do this week that I couldn’t have done last week? What can I do this month that I couldn’t have done last month? What can I do this quarter that I couldn’t have done last quarter? What can I do this year that I couldn’t have done last year? I was actually talking to a client who I would say like, she’s had a tough time celebrating her wins since we’ve been working together.
And today I ask her on our coaching call, I said, can you just tell me about the November, so I’m recording this podcast in November, but the November 2023 You, what would she say to the November 2024 You? And her face lit up and it created a shift in our entire conversation because she is someone completely different than she was a year ago. We were even talking about, one of the things we were talking about in her budget was that, Hey, one of the things we want to look out for is your mortgages, the escrow is probably going to increase because they’ll readjust your property taxes. Home insurance will probably go up. So we want to just be mindful that your mortgage payment might increase. And so she’s like, oh my goodness, Keina, it already did. She’s like, yes, it already did and they made me do a double payment, but I actually had money in the bank so I could do the double payment and I wouldn’t have been able to do that a year ago. That totally would’ve wrecked me.
I said, see, like that right there is the progress you need to be celebrating because that is a significant change for you. So that would be an example of lily pad progress. You can actually pay a bill that you didn’t expect. We couldn’t have predicted for her that she needed to pay two mortgage payments. That wouldn’t have been a prediction but because of the fact that she’s starting to manage her finances really, really well, she separated her bills from her spending. Because of those shifts that she’s made while working with me, she was able to take care of this unexpected expense with ease. Can it still be true that she wants to save more money and that she wants to have better money conversations with her husband? Of course. Those things can still be true, but we’ll bulldoze across the progress that she’s made if we’re only focused on her progress being very, very linear.
Similarly, another client that I’m working with, she’s a realtor and we were putting money into her tax account on our coaching call and she’s like, you know what? I haven’t dipped into my tax account all year. I said, would you have dipped into it last year? She’s like, yeah, I totally would’ve dipped into it. I asked her why. She’s like, I would’ve dipped into it to be able to pay myself. She hasn’t done that at all this year. Her tax account has almost $40,000 in it. Once again, there are other things that she’s still working on, but when we consider this lily pad progress, we’re able to celebrate the fact that she has not had to dip into her tax savings, that she’s actually able to honor setting aside taxes each month and that be what the money’s for because of the fact that she is following the process and she can still have other points of growth on this trajectory but if we were just looking at like, okay, you want to pay down debt or you want to have money saved, we would miss that opportunity.
So when I am thinking about this lily pad progress, the reason that I want you to think about that is because there are fundamentally more opportunities for you to be able to celebrate your growth and your success overall. If you are just looking at your progress in a very linear fashion and you’re just looking for the finish line, you’re not going to celebrate your growth. And so when I’m thinking about the lily pad progress, you have the opportunity to jump around. You could celebrate some opportunity that maybe you haven’t had to use your credit card all month. So you can celebrate progress towards your debt. You might be able to celebrate the fact that you put all of your bills on autopay, so the budget is actually working or you might celebrate the fact that you’ve been able to auto transfer money to your savings account and you’ve transferred $200 every single paycheck.
So now you’re celebrating the saving that’s happening or maybe you’re just celebrating the fact that you’re having money conversations with your husband, and so you’re able to bop around because remember we’re on lily pads and we bring the bond. You’re able to bop around and be able to celebrate the things that are working. And when you’re able to celebrate the things that are working and collect the things that are working and think about your skills and think about your habits, that’s going to give you motivation to want to continue. When you still have things that you’re working on, it’ll give you the space to be like, it can be true that I am working on saving money, but I’m also really good at managing my money.
You can give yourself permission to be good at the fact that you’re good at managing your money, and you can also give yourself permission to say and I’m still working on saving money. Those two things can exist at the same time. So as we close out 2024 and you start to think about where you are with your finances, I really want you to lead into and go into 2025 with this lily pad approach and really thinking about your finances in a lily pad like progress type of way. Where what are you able to do that you weren’t able to do before working with me? In my five month coaching partnership, I even have a list for my clients where I’m like, Hey, what are your financial milestones? And like, that’s another way that we can think about this Lily pad progress is like, what milestones have you hit that before working with me you wouldn’t have been able to say yes to any of these things but now you can say yes to these things?
So that shows you that you were actually making progress. So thank you so much for tuning in. Some of y’all, you might need to get a lily pad out and jump on it in the living room and celebrate your financial progress. But most importantly, as we wrap up 2024, if you were someone who you’re like, oh my goodness, yet again, I am looking towards what financial goals I’m going to set in 2025, and this is another year that I’m like, you’re just hemming and hawing about your finances and there’s just always that little constant lull in the back of your brain about what you should be doing with your money and maybe you can’t sleep at night. I just want to encourage you to apply to work with me, and I want you to do it in a way that just is like, you know what? This is an investment for me and I want to be able to see this lily pad progress with my own finances. Here’s the thing, I want you to be able to come back in 2025 and I want you to be like, you know what Keina, the 2024 version of me is impress girl.
So you got 12 months to impress yourself. I can tell you that if you do this with a coach, you are going to be able to celebrate so many things along the way, and you’re going to be able to do it in a sustainable way. So you’re not going to have to worry about like, dang, can I do this? Can I not do this? What happens when I’m not working with Keina? I’m going to get you all set up. I take pride in the fact that a number of my clients, we still have relationships where they’re texting me or they may message me on Instagram or Facebook or send me an email and they’re celebrating progress with me and or they’re coming back to work with me again because they have a new financial goal, whether that’s like I’m starting a business Keina or like, we want to do a refresh because we’re thinking about having a baby. All of those things. So the process works. The only thing that you have to do is go to the link in my bio or go to my website and apply to work with me. So I look forward to chatting with you soon. Until then, I will talk to you later.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
