How we feel about risk and how we respond to risky situations is not applicable solely to the financial investments we make. Our feelings toward risk influence what jobs we pursue, the relationships we engage in, the products we buy, and the recreational activities we take part in. Your personal relationship with risk touches and helps shape nearly every aspect of your life.

As humans, we tend to not put enough thought into the worth or value we assign to the products and services we purchase. We’ll make better decisions on what we purchase with our hard earned $$ if we take a bit more time to consider how we place value on the things we buy. The interesting thing about finance and financial literacy is that it is equal parts objective evaluation of our financial position and our behavioral perspectives about our personal economy. How we feel about money, investing, and consumption is as important as the numerical and analytical side of working with our finances.

As we continue our journey to build financial literacy skills, you may be wondering where all the formulas and numbers are? Well, this is a big misconception of financial literacy—that it is more about numbers than it is about behaviors. How we feel about money & investing and how we behave with the resources we have via the decisions we make are as, or more, important than our ability to work with numbers. Hence, this is where we’re going to place most of our initial emphasis.

As a global society, let’s use the Holiday Season to reflect on how we approach interactions with our fellow cosmic travelers. When alignment is a challenge and viewpoints don’t seamlessly calibrate, seek first to understand—not immediately jump to tearing others down who don’t share our opinions or worldview.

If more of us seek to understand, we will continue to make progress toward a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive future state.

The fact is that emotions do play a role in business and to ignore them is a sure-fire way to ensure a “car wreck” between individuals and teams. Communication, empathy, situational awareness, and self-awareness are just a few of the skills that must continually be nurtured to create high-functioning teams. An understanding of various forms of cognitive bias is also important.

The first step on the journey to strengthen the fidelity of our inner eye is to recognize our obligation to learn and continuously improve. Without a strong inner eye, we become rigid, fixed and unyielding. Without a strong inner eye, it is difficult to see ourselves as part of the solution to challenges. We easily fall into the trap of a blame mindset and are easily swayed by strong voices that are not our own.