What are you willing to give up to get what you want?

Welcome to Scared Confident. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. So this episode should maybe come with a rant warning. We'll see how it all comes out. It's been rolling around in my head for the last few days, and I feel like I need to try to speak on it, and we'll see how it comes out. So I gave a talk a couple days ago, and, you know, a lot of times afterwards, people will come up and ask me questions or kind of share some of their more personal stories and moments with what I talked about, maybe want some application in their own lives, and I want to try to protect the innocent here. But someone came up and said, you know, we're in a space where it feels like we're in our mid thirties. There's a lot of big decisions to make ahead of us.

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:42]:Like, how do we make sure that we have the financial security that we want for our future? How do we, you know, decide what we want in our family? How do we decide how we want to, like, use our time? Just, like, kind of this moment where, like, there's a lot of the decisions and choices that have been made. We need to decide if we're going to make some, create some change in our world. And I said, what are you willing to give up to get what you want? Like, what are you willing to give up to get what you want? And my encouragement to her was that, hey, you and your spouse, you need to get really clear about what you want the next 510 20 years to look like, because once that's aligned, you can start making choices today that lead you to that end. And I saw this moment where she started to see there are things that I want to do right now. For instance, travel to amazing places. If I decide I want some of these things in my future, I may not have the ability to do both of those things. So let's say. Let's use an example.

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:42]:Let's say saving for a house was one of their goals. I'm projecting this part of it, but let's imagine saving for a house is one of their goals. Well, if you're going to save for a house and that becomes a goal in the future, that means that you have to likely not spend money on something today so that you can give yourself that later goal instead of spending the money on what you're doing today. And I saw this moment where she was like, I kind of want both. And you know what? Whenever you kind of want both, what ends up happening is that you spend your money on your short term goals, satisfaction, happiness, impulses, desires, and everything that you want in the future becomes a crapshoot. It becomes full on luck, and probably not even luck. You start to create a very unlucky future for yourself, would be my guess. And this discipline of being able to understand wanting something tomorrow means I have to give up something today.

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:38]:And if you are not willing to do that, you are not going to get your tomorrow. I am like, here to tell you even things is like when I would close my eyes at night when before J.R. and I had all four girls, and I would just see this big household, this big, crazy, active, busy, loud household. That was like something I wanted in my future. There was never a year, ever, ever, zero of them where I thought, you know what? This is such a good year to have a baby. This is such a good year for me to wrestle with Breastfeeding. This is such a good year for me to not have any sleep. This is such a good year for J.R. and I to create even more complexity in our relationship as we create change, of adding one more kid. There are exactly zero Years where that happened.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:23]:Zero of them. But I can't want the picture of a big family. I can't want this future and this vision and not be willing to give up some sleep, some peace, some financial resources, some. All these things that it took to, like, decide to have a baby. So that's like a really big one. But financially, the places you put your time, the friends you want in your future, the places you want to go. And I said to this young woman, I said, I go on some pretty rad trips. We take some great vacations.

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:55]:We stay in really nice places. And there's usually valet. And I love it so much. I get to do that today in my mid forties, when J.R. and I were in our twenties, that is not what vacations look like. We were like, literally coupon codes of like four days, three nights at the Sheridan in Orlando. And we would, like, make sure there was a mini fridge so that we could go get groceries. And we were not buying drinks at the pool, and we were driving, literally not getting flights. We were going out to eat at, like, Applebee's.

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:29]:Like, it was places where there is not ballet. I'm not making fun of those things. I'm just saying there was a season of a lot of scarcity and leanness and a choice to say, I am going to give up some bougie experiences and satisfaction in my twenties so that my thirties can look different. And if my thirties look different, then my forties can look different and I am loving my forties. And we are still making some choices and things that we don't have in our lives because we want our fifties to look different and our sixties look different. So I'm not telling you to make my choices, but I am saying you have got to be honest with yourself about what you want in the future is going to require you to give up something today. It just is. Life is not a zero sum game.

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:13]:It's just how it works. And I think falling in love with your future, getting a vivid picture of that future, putting yourself in that mentally and like, what is it going to feel like and what am I going to be able to do? And what will I be able to say yes to? And what freedom do I want in that stage in my life that kept me going when I was in seasons of no, I can't, not right now. We didn't have the space for it. We had chosen not to create the financial investment in things that were not going to serve our future financially. So again, you get to make your own call. But this is a reminder that a vivid picture of the future for me helps me more clearly be clear and comfortable with the things I have to say no to today to get what I want to the future. Okay, this is your reminder. Life is not a zero sum game.

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:05]:And what are you calling to give up today to get what you want? Thanks for listening. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared, confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will.

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