During a recent live session with Kinder Institute trainers Mary Zimmerman and Scott Frank, and COO Lora Woodward, attendees asked the questions we hear most often about The Seven Stages of Money Maturity® Training, EVOKE® Life Planning Training, and the Registered Life Planner® (RLP®) designation. Here’s a recap.
Q) What’s the difference between the Seven Stages, EVOKE, and the Mentorship?
A) The three courses build on each other, but each stands on its own too:
- The Seven Stages of Money Maturity teaches the framework — the psychological and behavioral structure George Kinder built for understanding how people relate to money, from childhood innocence through pain, knowledge, understanding, and vigor, on the way to what Kinder calls vision and aloha. It’s also where you get your first real practice in listening with empathy.
- EVOKE Life Planning Training teaches you to use that framework with real clients, through three structured meetings: Exploration, Vision, and Obstacles, that build on your current work with clients which we refer to as Knowledge and Execution. As Scott Frank put it, Seven Stages gives you the “why,” and EVOKE gives you the “how.”
- The Life Planning Mentorship is an online six-month program that follows EVOKE. It’s where the work gets cemented into your actual practice — you present a real client case study, get feedback from trainers and peers, and revisit both the EVOKE and Seven Stages material in half-day “comeback” sessions.
Scott Frank summed up the distinction this way: “If you want to test-drive what it’s like to listen with empathy, Seven Stages is awesome. If you want the full monty, just go straight to EVOKE.”
Q) Do I have to take the designation courses in a specific order?
A) No. This came up more than once, and the honest answer from both trainers was: it depends on you.
Mary Zimmerman took Seven Stages first, back when it was the only course offered, and for years assumed that was the “right” sequence. But she’s since seen people jump straight into EVOKE with no Seven Stages background and move through it just as effectively. Her current take: “It can go any way. In this busy world, wherever it fits for you is the important thing.”
Lora Woodward noted that Kinder Institute sees a genuine mix — some people start with Seven Stages and get hooked into pursuing the full designation; others start with EVOKE and circle back to Seven Stages later, sometimes even after the mentorship, as a capstone. The one fixed rule: EVOKE is a prerequisite for the mentorship.
What actually earns the RLP (Registered Life Planner) designation?
All three components: The Seven Stages of Money Maturity Training, EVOKE Life Planning Training, and the six-month Life Planning Mentorship. Completing all three earns the designation.
How long does the whole designation process take?
Typically 7 to 18 months, depending on your own schedule and course availability — most people land somewhere in the 7–12 month range.
What’s the core skill the Seven Stages training is actually teaching?
Underneath the frameworks, both trainers pointed to the same thing: listening with empathy. Scott Frank described conventional financial planning training as producing “technical tacticians” — people trained to solve problems, which paradoxically gets in the way of actually listening to a client. He called the Seven Stages training “the great untraining for advisors” — the process of learning to sit with a client without immediately jumping to solve, fix, or advise.
Is this only for financial advisors?
No. While most attendees are CFPs, RIAs, or business consultants, the trainers were clear that people with no financial planning background at all also go through the training — some purely for their own self-knowledge, others because they’re looking for a life planner themselves and want to understand what to look for. As Mary Zimmerman put it: “I’ve always been a believer everybody in the world should go through the Seven Stages for their own self-knowledge.”
Who is this for — is there a “right” life stage to take it?
Trainers were emphatic that there isn’t one. The work has been described as meaningful for people just starting out in their careers and for people decades into them — one story shared involved an 80-year-old participant who said the training changed how he thought and felt about money after a lifetime of doing things one way.
What makes Kinder Institute’s approach different from other financial planning education?
The experiential format. Participants don’t just learn the material — they take turns being both the “planner” and the “client” in live practice sessions, working through their own real financial lives and aspirations in the process. As Lora Woodward described it, that’s what lets people feel the power of the work before they ever try it with a client.
Have a question we didn’t cover here?
Book a 20-minute discovery call with Kinder Institute’s COO, Lora Woodward, sign up for our next free monthly Information Session, or email us at info@kinderinstitute.com.