When Crisis Hits:The Financial Therapy Strategy when Life Goes Off Plan
How do I manage the guilt of pausing my financial goals during a life crisis?
The pause you’re required to take isn’t failure; It’s wisdom in motion. Employ the Strategic Pause technique: intentionally setting down non-essential goals (like extra debt payments or retirement contributions) to protect immediate cash flow and mental bandwidth. This act is a strategic move to build your financial stability and safety net, ensuring you maintain resilience instead of suffering total collapse or self-condemnation.
I’ve Been Gone
If you’ve missed my posts or emails, you're correct. Our family faced a serious medical crisis, requiring a member’s diagnosis, major surgery, and a challenging recovery period. The immense emotional and logistical bandwidth consumed all my time, pushing all non-essential activities, including this blog, to the side.
Immediately following the diagnosis, I consulted a mentor about my yearly goals. His practical advice caused me to get (surprisingly) emotional. What made me tear up? The completely unemotional advice that, when managing many spinning plates, it's crucial to choose which ones to set down intentionally rather than risking a total, uncontrolled crash. Our natural tendency to try and keep everything going often leads to disaster.
And he advised stretching my goal deadlines by six months or more. This wasn't merely a delay, but a strategy to re-evaluate what was feasible to prevent burnout and ensure long-term sustainability over short-term momentum.
The tears obviously came from the immediate crisis, but also from the grief for a lost timeline—the realization that I had to put down deeply held business and personal dreams, and grapple with the immediate fear of both the personal and professional unknown future - would the health crisis pass? Would it financially devastate us? How would we move forward?
The Myth of Financial Perfection
How does strategically setting down a plate intersect with the Myth of Financial Perfection? This myth demands flawless execution of financial goals (a new house, car, paying off debt, maxing out retirement) as mandatory for success. Our perception of friends, family and what we see on social media (only the highlights of their lives) creates a myth that we’re the only ones who have real struggles, delays or bumps in the road toward success. Because of this mis-perception, when life interrupts, the failure to maintain perfection feels deeply personal and catastrophic.
The direct application was clear: client acquisition goals and income growth had to pause due to my need to care for my family. This deliberate choice meant an immediate professional and financial step back that felt like it would end in total failure.
While "care for your family" is the obvious right choice, it doesn't remove the sting. A logical, solid decision can often conflict with our emotional importance connected to our financial plans and professional identities.
Pausing goals is intensely disappointing because when external circumstances derail our carefully planned lives, we must grapple with the fear that we may never recover. This fear of a lost trajectory can be more impactful than the financial setback itself.
Past failures compound this fear: putting down a plate triggers a spiral, making us believe we will fail totally and abandon the entire savings or debt repayment journey forever. This fear is real - I’ve started a few side hustles in my life, and each has concluded because of family or other professional demands. I sometimes view those other hustles as failures, simply because it feels like a failure - regardless of the reasons or opportunities that eclipsed them.
Then that insidious voice whispers that we’ll never actually make the goal we set. We’ll never have it together. That every failure of deed is that we are a failure.
The second reason for the tears was that this health crisis reminded me that I was not in control. The illusion that doing everything right financially can insulate us from disaster shatters when a random, unpreventable event (like this diagnosis with no risk factors) occurs. The shattering of the financial control illusion is a moment to assess. What are the core beliefs about ourselves and our world that we hold? If we’re not in control, how do we respond?
The Strategic Pause: Setting Plates Down Without Self-Condemnation
So how do you choose what gets put down?
Even in pondering this question, the desire to try to keep it all going forward arises again. So let's explore that: What happens if you try to do too much, more than you can actually prioritize and accomplish in a day? Overwhelm. Anxiety. Exhaustion. Depression.
Emotional health is often connected to our thinking patterns and decision making. When we avoid decision making, we might make an impulse decision in the end, and then feel relief that the pressure is off, but wondering if we actually made the right choice.
So, let's return to the “how” to make the intentional choice and strategic sacrifice:
The Hard Work of Prioritizing
Each plate isn’t equally critical. Some things can be delegated, even if it’s uncomfortable. In this season, I delegated meal prep and planning, cleaning the house, and some investment decisions to other trusted friends and professionals.
But in the application to financial crisis, or life crisis that becomes a financial crises, the first question is: “which financial ‘plates’ are truly structural and needed to be safe and secure, and which are merely about speed and optimization?” How do we create a Tier 1 (Must keep going) vs a Tier 2 (can temporarily pause) priority list during a crisis?
It's easier sometimes to stop spending, but hard to strategically pause a commitment to a goal. Some specific, temporary 'plates' that might need to be set down might be stopping the extra debt payment, pausing the retirement fund, or taking over the vacation fund in whole to cover a financial crisis. (One small note: NEVER cash out existing retirement funds, only stop adding new contributions to it.)
The Mental Shift
Next, it's important to communicate that pause to ourselves without self-incrimination or condemnation, instead seeing it as an act of cash flow stability and safety.
In my case, the emotional liquidity protection was re-framing the way I thought about my energy and care for the ill family member, the rest of my family, and the non-negotiable things I needed to do for my contracted work. And while I struggled at the beginning to willingly give up connecting with leads and business contacts, letting my business go quiet, only doing the necessary tasks was necessary for me to serve my family and my other firm commitments.
My mindset had to change, knowing that I wasn’t in control and that God was: and if I believed that God was in control of my life, he was also in control of when and how my business will take off and progress. I only needed to stay faithful to the priorities I’d already committed to: my teaching, my family, and the responsibilities right in front of me.
Here are some practical ways we can re-frame some financial pauses:
Consistently Communicating with Key People
This intentional pause also requires strategic communication.
This is not about disappearing; it is about setting clear, compassionate expectations. I communicated proactively with my teaching job and existing clients about the temporary shift in my availability. Even though I couldn't respond to new leads immediately, I followed up within a few days to acknowledge their outreach and explain my focused availability. This proactive expectation-setting is a vital part of the pause—it protects your reputation (i.e., Credit Scores) and prevents disappointing others as best as possible.
Conclusion: Resilience Over Flawless Execution.
The goal isn't perfection; the goal is resilience. True flexibility is the practice of strategically prioritizing which 'plates' must keep spinning and which deserve to be placed safely on the counter, preventing a total collapse when crisis hits.
Focus on the return to the goal - even if your effort is imperfect - knowing that modifying in the moment is the path to long-term financial growth.
Ready to trade financial perfection for real-life resilience? Let's talk through your story and build a plan that won't shatter.
Book a free intro call here.
This post may contain affiliate links. That means if you purchase something through these links, I may earn a small commission—at no cost to you. I only recommend things I use, respect, or love.