Emotional Income Streams

By now we’ve all heard the gurus touting the secret of financial success is having multiple sources of income. Having a finance background, I’m always looking for additional sources of revenue streams for my company or for me personally. Having multiple sources of income for your business or household is critical to help mitigate risk of loss or value of one of those streams and minimize the impact to your overall incoming revenue.

Now, why should you not have multiple sources of emotional income, too? Think about it, the more sources of positive emotional support coming in to you helps reduce the risk of loss of any one stream. Getting yourself involved in volunteering, reaching out more often to supportive friends, maintaining your workout schedule, getting positive reinforcement at work for a job well done are all sources of this positive vibe stream that helps fuel our emotional reserves when times get tough.

Any loss of one of these streams in your typical day or week is far less detrimental to your overall wellbeing when you still have plenty of other sources to depend on. A bad day at work or less time available with your partner that day are far less impactful to you if you get that time to walk around the neighborhood while you’re talking to your best friend to make up for some of that lost daily revenue, right?

And finding these additional streams of positive vibes is not as hard to find as you think. Try putting a hypothetical budget in place of the positive support you need per day and apply a value to each of them you receive. If you need $200 per day of positive vibes and a 30 minute walk is worth $50, talking to your friend during that walk is worth another $50, a smile from the cashier at the coffee shop is $10, and so on. Before you know it you’ve reached your income budget for the day and if you’re really good, you’ll end up with a surplus!

Part of this challenge is now recognizing the additional streams of support in your life that you have not applied the appropriate value to. Maybe you don’t see that smile at the coffee shop worth $10, but the beauty behind this exercise is training your brain and your soul to place a higher value on these streams. Just as in business, you can always improve efficiencies to get the highest return out of our revenue streams and the same can be done to train your brain to value these streams even more than you do today. Saying a list of daily gratitudes is always a great place to start your day by noting at least three things each day that you are grateful for. The more often one of these things appears in your gratitudes each day, the higher the value you place on them and you should budget accordingly!