04/09/2026
I taught seven-year-olds fractions before I ever taught a grown woman her finances. The method never changed.
Thirty-one years ago, on 1 September 1995, I stood in front of my first classroom in Lithuania. Chalk dust in the air, thirty pairs of eyes on me, and a curriculum I'd memorised but hadn't yet learned to actually teach.
I didn't know it then, but I wasn't just learning how to explain a subject. I was learning how real behavioural change actually happens in a person, and that lesson would matter far more, decades later, on a different continent, teaching something nobody had put on a syllabus.
What do I mean? In that first classroom, I quickly discovered that the children who struggled most weren't struggling with the material. They were struggling because nobody had built the ground beneath them first.
Confidence, safety, the belief that they were capable of understanding at all. Skip that, and the facts simply don't land, however clearly you explain them.
I carried that lesson with me for thirty plus years, through classrooms, through a career as a regulated financial adviser, and now into the work I do today. Financial confidence isn't taught by opening with a spreadsheet. It's taught the same way a nine-year-old learns fractions, by building the ground first, then the strategy, then the growth. Skip the ground, and no amount of good advice holds.
This is the entire principle behind the Always ENOUGH™ Method. Mind, then heart, then money, always in that order, because the order is the method.
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I'd love to know what you make of this. What's a skill from an earlier chapter of your career, one that never quite made it onto a job title, that quietly shapes how you work today, even if no one else can see the thread?
