The Realization: Your Financial and Business Literacy can affect your Mental Health
When did I think that I will have to turn pages to the days when I dreaded math in school?
After completing my higher secondary education, I was thrilled because I wouldn’t have to study math, accounts, business studies, and economics anymore. I transitioned from a commerce student to an arts student when I opted to study for a graduate degree in B.A. (honors) Psychology. It was a big relief coupled with a huge amount of enthusiasm. The relief, for being able to successfully get math off my back. The enthusiasm, for being able to get admission in a Delhi University college. Yes, even I admired the university life like many others! Thoughts about the days to come were full of excitement, hope, and dedication to learn about human behavior or psychology. The studies began, and so did my journey away from commerce! I started learning about new concepts, which made sense, got inside my head quickly, got immersed with my understanding very easily, and added to my motivation each day. I would enjoy studying more and more about human behavior, conducting experiments to understand the behavior better, creating innovative write ups for my assignments, and most important, socializing with like-minded people. Tuitions, calculations, graphs, business concepts, etc. were not a part of my daily life anymore and that would give me a huge sigh of relief. I would easily read through the articles, chapters, or notes and sit through the exam. Exams were no more a dreadful and laborious task for me. Numbers were nowhere to be seen and I was quite happy with that. Until one day, when I got introduced to research methodology and statistics. The numbers had risen from the dead. Experiment and research are incomplete without the mention of statistics, as the latter only expresses the findings of the former. Thus, I could sense that statistics was here to stay! But, with time and learning, I managed to happily accept it as a part of my academic life and later, work life too. The additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions, were anyways not hard to deal with. I could still successfully keep the devils of integration and differentiation at bay. So, it would be safe to say that I had made friends with the basic math in my life as a psychology student.
Years passed by as I completed my studies to finally become a certified mental health professional, who was ready to enter the industry. I would not shy away from saying that the theory was nothing short of a challenge as compared to the numbers. Rather, it did not let me feel the absence of the challenges that numbers had made me experience during school days. Anyhow, I was finally eligible to help people deal with their mental health concerns.
But then happened the real life! The work life! A phase of life where it is essential to have knowledge about finance, business, market trends, advertising, investments, etc.
None of these are taught as basic life skills in our education system. Or, to put it the other way, we are supposed to gain knowledge about these things by ourselves while working in the field. Unless we have or develop a natural interest towards these topics, or we are compelled by our life situation to learn about it, most of us would never lay our hands on gaining knowledge about it. I evidently fell into the latter category.
I would like to, willfully, quote an embarrassing narrative from my first job experience:
It was my first day at work as I entered the HR department of the organization with all the excitement. I had to complete my onboarding formalities that day. As soon as I filled up all the forms and submitted some other documents, I handed over a cancelled cheque to the HR person, who was helping me with the formalities. She returned in about half a minute and stated, “This won’t work! We need the cheque of an account for which you are an individual holder.” I replied with a meek ‘okay’ and left the premises. To be honest, I was really embarrassed, baffled, angry, nervous, and overly judgmental towards myself. The only thought that blurred my mind for that entire day was, “How could I not know this?” I had handed a cheque, which was of an account that I jointly held with my mother and an employee must individually hold their salary account. I began throwing the worst labels at myself. I would just not stop calling myself stupid, inexperienced, fool, dumb, etc. The happiest day of life had suddenly turned into one of the worst experiences. I felt like hiding behind a wall where no one could see me and laugh upon the lack of my knowledge. I was not aware of such a basic requirement in the onboarding process or in the life of an employee, let alone the reason behind it.
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Yes! Even after being a mental health professional, I was constantly judgmental towards myself for not having the knowledge about something that I never knew I should have.
I was not a fool, but definitely unaware. I was not stupid, but certainly inexperienced. That was the realization of my life. That day the value of accounting, finance and business education dawned upon me.
For a matter of fact, knowledge about business & finance is important in every individual’s life. We earn to live. In a specific way, we earn life in terms of money. Thus, business education i.e., knowledge of setting, running and growing a business, and financial education, i.e., gaining knowledge about money, its flow, its trend in the industry, and how to increase its in-flow in life, are as important as learning to read and write. Today, when I have just begun to establish my own business of providing mental health services to people, this realization strikes even harder. I further realize how important it is to know how to market your services, when in business, and your skills, when at job. It is essential to know where your earnings come from and where can they be safely put. How would your audience know of your existence unless you spread a word about it? How would you know what and how to make the best out of your hard-earned money unless you know about finances and investment?
Not being equipped enough with financial literacy, marketing & business techniques, and related themes, may seriously affect your financial health and consequentially, your mental health. Some of the many possible effects may be:
My realization helped me understand the value of financial and business education.
What have been your realizations? What were your learnings from the same? Share in the comments below.