Find A Financial Life Planner
A Fast Sleigh Ride
By Roger Wellington
I made a New Year’s resolution at the beginning of 2008: find work that expresses who you are. For the last 10 years I had made a series of career decisions motivated by financial expediency (college tuition has a way of doing that) and at the age of 52 found myself with the nagging feeling of being disconnected from the activities that filled my days. But finding work that satisfied my longing for something that combined a sound business with an element of personal transformation—not so easy.
So I did what any sane job seeker would do….I, umm, went to a meditation retreat. Actually, I did the usual: sent out resumes and networked with friends but wasn’t having much success. Then I found myself at a meditation program where I met George Kinder’s wife at a lunch break. After a scintillating conversation (Kathy is an amazing human being) she suggested I meet George and within a week I was the Institute’s new Executive Director.
That was 8 weeks ago as I write this and it’s been one fast sleigh ride since then. Within a week I was attending the 2-day Seven Stages of Money Maturity®workshop. Then it was on to the national Financial Planning Association conference immediately followed by our own Kinder Institute conference during the first week of October. Later in the month I did the 5-day Advanced Training in the EVOKE® methodology.
I am by nature a practical idealist and was therefore respectfully open to the idea that KI’s Life Planning work was powerful. But, hey, I’ve done many many workshops and retreats, both personal and professional, over the years, so I suffer from old-timer’s disease—a natural skepticism that there’s something worthwhile out there I haven’t seen before. So there was a lot riding on my experience in the 5-day EVOKE training—would this new job prove to be the answer to my longing for meaningful work once I myself had been “life-planned”? Would the power of the life-planning work live up to its advance billing? Was this something I could really get behind? And how do you feel about figuring all this out publicly in front of your new boss?
Well, I guess you can tell from the fact that I am writing this column how it all came out. Wow! The 5-day experience was WAY beyond my expectations. It was, of course, personally transformative in a unique and powerful way. This will not be news to those of you who have done the training. Here are a few notes that I took at the time to give you a flavor: “Amazing, transforming work”… “Inspired vision of what financial planning can be and what LIFE can be”… “Breaks the false distinction between ‘spiritual life’ and ‘real’ life”… “Leads us to consider the very root of what makes life worth living”. In short, it was an absorbing, surprising, gratifying, encouraging, stimulating, and life-changing event, all while learning highly useful professional skills. The design of this training, combining as it does both personal and professional learning, is radically powerful. One of my fellow participants wrote at the end of the week, “Without question this is the most profound experience an advisor can provide their client or can experience themselves…”
Over the last month, I’ve had many conversations with life planners and reflected more on my own experience. At least four realizations have emerged that speak to the enormous potential of Life Planning work:
It grabs us where it counts. Money. It’s part of nearly every decision we make and colors every turn we take in life. It’s how we define what’s possible to undertake in life, how we express who we are through work. It’s so much a part of our lives, like water to a fish, that it’s easy to forget our dreams, so lost are we in making the flow of money continue. Life Planning meets us at this most basic level and gives us back the energy we invest in our workaday lives. When this energy comes alive, it’s almost like waking from a dream—old habits can be overthrown in a blink as we set ourselves on a new course. Some of my fellow 5-day participants have already made remarkable changes in lives they had long considered irreparably “stuck. It’s brilliant that Life Planning can reach right down to the level where fear, greed and materialism often hold sway and call us to a bigger life.
Life Planning has broad applicability beyond the Financial Planning profession. The Institute’s trainings are naturally focused on financial planners today but I can imagine that different aspects or versions of this work could be useful for estate planning attorneys, therapists, career counselors, students, even the general public. Only time and resources are keeping this from being re-tooled for different audiences.
Life Planning is bigger than one man. George Kinder has created a powerful body of work, but my experience to date makes it clear that he has successfully passed his insights on to a larger group of people—the other Kinder trainers and a host of terrific financial planners. This is significant as it means this work can spread exponentially.
It’s cross-cultural. It is often suggested by residents of other countries that Americans have a tendency toward self-absorption—that we are an overly emotional, “therapy” culture that enshrines personal confession. Although life planning work certainly digs deep, it does so with a purpose—to foster the best financial planning possible. It is therefore an approach that even more hard-boiled cultures find useful. The burgeoning use of this work in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK is a testament to the wide acceptance that Life Planning is enjoying. We even have some signs of interest as far afield as India.
All of this indicates a promising future for Life Planning here and around the world. I see my job as providing a firm foundation strategically, organizationally and administratively so that together we can see this work transform lives and bear the greatest fruit possible.