‘I’m Not Good At Maths’

After last week’s heavy mental health series I offer something a little lighter this week… The famously frivolous subject of maths! More of a little thought really and it came from my reading into insurance for a client, though it doesn’t relate to insurance at all really.

A Real Life Example

The book I’m reading is really quite dry, necessarily so I would argue, but they try and lighten the load at the beginning of each section with a little ‘real life’ example and the example they chose for Key Person Insurance in business was a football club insuring a star player. It makes sense, if a star player died or suffered a prolonged illness then of course the club would suffer the financial consequences - the loss of their contribution but also how to replace them, if it were even possible. 

I get it, it’s the right example to use, we all understand that and it puts the point across but it made me think about my maths teachers’ attempts to make maths relatable - which often started (and ended) with working out the area of a football pitch. Sometimes a netball pitch if they were feeling fancy. 

I knew at the time I couldn’t be bothered with that. I knew that they were trying to ‘reach’ us and it felt silly. I knew that even if I was a football fan I would have no interest in working out the square footage of a football field.

Actually Interesting Maths

I suppose I might have been interested in the angles of a shot though, if I were into football. That could be maths. I remember learning about different types of intelligence, somewhere around A levels, and having my mind blown that David Beckham (shorthand at the time for a bloke who was pretty, thick and could kick a ball around) might have a form of intelligence. But of course he had to have had an intuitive understanding of angles, force, spatial awareness and a whole load of other concepts that I have no idea about. 

I met one of my old maths teachers about 10 years ago, so 10-ish years after I’d left school, at a friend’s wedding. He wasn't an area-of-a-football-field type teacher but he was a ‘please draw cartoons in your maths book because it will personalise it and then make you remember it’ kind of teacher which I found endearing but also didn’t work for me… Anyway, I remember feeling sort of proud that I had a career which involved maths twice in quite a serious way - being in business and also being in knitting.

Maths in Real Life

The business connection is obvious I think - spreadsheets, accounting, stock control, profits, payroll, tax etc but the knitting connection might be less so. Knitting - as with a lot of fibre craft - is really just maths made physical with a bit of whimsy.

If you’re not a crafter you might not know how it works so let me explain. Firstly, you can just make whatever you want with no plan, but most people find a pattern that they like the look of, find a yarn that matches, follow the instructions on the pattern whilst hoping for the best and it often works out pretty well. Knitting and crochet get exciting for me though, when we start thinking about how to make it fit us and our wonderful bodies. Can you see the connection with how I do finance?!

It is entirely possible to frankenstein different patterns together, or sizes or sections of the same pattern, you can add in extra elements, add in extra fabric or take it away to make space for your body. These alterations and adjustments can be simple or complex and they can make the difference between something which truly fits you - physically and spiritually - and something which simply put, doesn’t. They all hang on maths, whether you sit down and do the workings out or take a more David Beckham bodily understanding of it.

I remember spending a fair bit of time in the shop explaining that I’m ‘not good at maths’ but that this makes sense to me. First because it’s about visualising what my body actually needs and second because I am deeply interested and invested in it. I can take my time, make notes, use a calculator, colour stuff in with felt tip pens if it makes it easier to visualise - nobody’s marking me on this - so I get to use my brain how my brain likes to work. 

Trigonometry Saves the Day

I wish I had thought to tell my teacher about how maths saved the day for people being able to access my shop, but I do try not to be too weird at weddings…

The story goes, when I moved into the new, bigger shop, it was an absolute priority to get a disabled ramp so that people in wheelchairs could get into my shop. In the previous shop there wasn’t enough space to swing a cat and so whilst we’d had people in wheelchairs in there before nobody was really comfortable and it’s something that weighed on my mind. Now there was space for everybody, it was my duty to make sure everybody had the ability. 

Having a permanent ramp made wasn’t possible with the way that the street was laid out and the other businesses around so I knew we’d have to have a removable one. The problem was that the shop had been made level on the foundations but the street was on quite an angle. So if the ramp came straight out from the shop entrance, it would hit the highest part of the street, not the lowest part of the street and nobody is safe from that wobble. 

Naively perhaps, I assumed that having a shop on a street with a hill wouldn’t be that strange of a problem but nobody could actually sort it. Having no real head for maths, or even knowing that this was something which maths could sort out, I was at the mercy of the people selling the ramps, or the council’s disability access team, and none of them had a clue. 

It took weeks of googling, ringing, wringing my hands and stressing - the shop was already open in the new location and the idea that people couldn’t access it because of this stupid reason which should have been so easy to fix was doing my nut in! In my frustration one day I rang Dr Chris, as I often do when I find myself panicking and building myself up, and he, as a maths genius, just knew what to do. It was a simple case of using trigonometry - you know like sin, cos and tan - to work out the size and shape of a triangular chunk which needed to be taken off the end of the ramp to make it lay snug on the walkway. 

My flabbers were ghasted. 

I had learned trigonometry, enough to pass GCSEs (and I remember actually quite liking how neat it all was) and then promptly forgotten it. Who knew that maths like this could have actual real world consequences that meant something to me!? I’m not sure if the teachers had tried to use this example instead of football fields that it would have gone down any better at 15 or 16 but here we are. 

Being Good at Maths and Personal Finance

I think about this quite a lot in finance. Especially now I’m delving back into the more practical stuff like the specifics of insurance. I have to remind myself that whilst I might not be ‘good at maths’ whatever that actually means, I am interested in this and it does mean something to me so I am absolutely going to find a way of working it out.

This is really what financial coaching is about, for me. Not being 'good at money' in some abstract, universal way, but finding the way that your brain likes to work, and applying it to the thing that means something to you. If you've been telling yourself you're not a money person, I'd gently suggest that you might just not have found your ramp analogy yet. I'd love to help you find it.

Book a free call here.

Love Eleanor. xxx