Defending Against AI By Focusing On The Uniquely Human Aspects Of (Fiduciary) Life Planning: #FASuccess Ep 473 With George Kinder

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Resources Featured In This Episode:

• George Kinder: Website | LinkedIn
• Kinder Institute
• "Lighting the Torch: The Kinder Method(TM) of Life Planning" by George Kinder
• "The Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life" by George Kinder
• "Reflections on Spectacle Pond: The Weekly Edition" by George Kinder
• "A Golden Civilization and The Map of Mindfulness" by George Kinder
• "The Three Domains of Freedom: Each Moment Is Yours, Your Life Is Yours, Civilization Is Yours" by George Kinder
• Registered Life Planner (RLP) Designation
• #FASuccess Ep 015: Why Life Planning Is Simply Financial Planning Done Right With George Kinder
• Why To Use George Kinder's 3 Life Planning Questions With Financial Planning Clients
• How To Manage Strong Emotions When Asking Clients Kinder Life Planning Questions
• Asking The Toughest Kinder Question: How To Help Clients Explore Regret Productively And Take Action
• The Unbelievable Slowness of Thinking
• Fiduciary In All Things
• EVOKE Life Planning Training

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, George Kinder, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

George: Great to be here, Michael. Really looking forward to this.

Michael: I'm really excited to have you joining us, to have you back, because you have been with us in the past. For those who want to go back for the bit of history, kitces.com/15, for Episode 15, one of our very first guests, all the way back in 2017, where we had talked about this rise of life planning over the preceding 20 years.

And I think I'm excited to bring the conversation present today about this ongoing evolution of financial planning and our value to clients, and all the fascinating ways that it continues to change as technology evolves around us as well. When you were on in 2017, the conversation was, so is this financial planning, life planning thing really going to hold up in the robo era, or are all the millennials just going to use robos and advisors will be out of business?

And obviously, we're still here. That turned out okay. But now we're having the conversation all over again. No, no, no. It wasn't robo that's going to automate us out of existence. It's AI [Artificial Intelligence] that's going to automate us out of existence. And I find just there are really interesting conversations, as I guess you start to scenario-plan game theory this out. There's a version that just says the AI is overhyped. It's not actually going to be as good as we think it is. And we're just going to trudge along, mostly business as usual.

But most, I think, will make a reasonable case. The technology is going to march on. It does always get better every year in whatever it is. And so at some point, it at least starts to automate more of the technical parts of planning, which maybe relegates us to be even more focused on relationships, conversations, the behavioral elements of advice, for which I envision you, George, as father of the Life Planning Movement, have some perspective on that that I'm going to ask you about in a moment.

But at the same time, there's also this question of, well, okay, but will the AI tools eventually learn more of our conversation? They can learn your three questions. They can speak with empathetic words to "show empathy," especially when someday, presumably, we're not going to be typing into a chat interface and hearing a disembodied voice. It's going to be a 3D rendered digital avatar that looks human and talks to me through a Zoom window the way my current advisor talks to me through a Zoom window, showing me empathy because we taught it those words, but it's all AI-generated.

Which just takes me back to this fundamental issue that I'm really excited to talk to you about today of how you think about where the lines get drawn between what does it mean to be a financial planner? What does it mean to be a life planner? What does technology do to support that process? What does technology do to replace that process? What, if anything, remains uniquely human as we continue forth as financial planners?

George: Great. Wow. Well, we could pull apart that question for the next hour and a half, couldn't we? That's...

Michael: Yeah.

George: That's quite a question to begin with. And I think, Michael, I've heard some amazing things about AI with empathic listening in the field of counseling, just incredible, of people who feel that they are getting healthy, getting better, being supported. Wonderful. Fabulous. And how can any of us really know where that is going?

And yeah, of course, we know the strength of the three questions. You had a series of reflections on each of the questions, many, many words on each of the questions, reflecting on them. And AI can pick that up and run with it. I think that there are several things that I think is really different about life planning as we do it and about what people will want. Of course, the financial advice. I think financial advice hugely can be wrapped up with this work, with AI, but I think that people really want another person to be there who says, "Yes, this works," to hear it from another person.

But there's something much more than that, much more than just simply saying, "Yes, this will work for you," in terms of building the future that you have. The use of the three questions, the three questions are designed and they're just part of a number of goal exercises that we use in our program, the Registered Life Planner program. And those three questions are used, along with these others, to design what we call a torch. It's really a dream of freedom, and it's something that is so exciting and so profound for the client that they can't say no to it. I've never seen a client say no to it.

And moreover, very often it's something that they've dreamed of doing or felt guilty for not having done for decades, not having realized, or that they're thinking, "Ah, when I retire 15 years from now, 30 years from now, that's what I'll do." Or they've always thought it'll be a few years away, and they've never done it.

So we managed to capture that dream in such a way that the client's life is suddenly on fire with excitement. They're feeling a sense of flourishing, of being thrilled with what they're doing, of being thrilled with what their life is. And that's, I think, the real secret of life planning. It comes through great listening. Yeah, empathy is part of that great listening.

But ultimately, it's like a pivot or a trigger point where...and we call it Lighting the Torch, is where the client really comes alive. And there's an engagement, a relationship with the financial planner at that point that is extraordinary because the client is both really excited about it and terrified, right? "How on earth can I do this? I've put this off for all these years, or I thought it would take me another 15 or 20 years to get there, and you're saying I can really go for it." And we say, "Yeah."

Now, can you take that kind of confidence from a system that is a computerized system? Maybe some people...and I think one of the wonderful things about AI is maybe we can tap into greater delivery of financial planning for the underserved, which they certainly deserve, and use some of the goal exercises in a way to help facilitate that.

But I think there's something, A, wildly creative about that moment of Lighting the Torch, and then something profoundly, instantaneously humane about that relationship at that time that is going to be very hard for a machine to do.

How Human Advisors Can Continue To Thrive In A World Of Improving AI Technology [10:04]

Michael: Can you share a little bit more in that vein? I'm just trying to visually...what is it...maybe I'm not framing this the right way, but what is it that makes the questions more impactful when they're asked by a human?

George: I think it's the human connection, that there's a way in which we've all... With this dream of freedom that all of us have, I've never seen somebody come in and not have something that they have not put forth into their life that they really want to, that they've really wanted to for a long time, or that they imagine doing in the future.

So there's something that has held us back from doing that. And I think one of the triggering things, one of the things that works, and of course, this comes out of therapy as well, is permission, that the client looks you in the eye and they see that when you say, "You're meant to do this. This is what you were born to do, this is who you are," they know that you're saying that as one human being to another. And how can you beat that? I just don't think you can.

Certainly, you can rely on mathematical systems and machines to deliver subtle degrees of financial planning, but the wild creativity in planning and the human connection are things that I think will not be replaced by AI.

Let me share another way of saying this. So we know how subtle AI is, we know how rapid it is, but I don't know if you've kept up with scientific studies on listening. And I've certainly shared them online myself, but do you know how fast listening is in relation to thinking?

Michael: No.

George: Okay. So we're in a very fast-paced thinking environment, and I know you are, in particular. You're a thought leader in a way that is serious. And many people in the profession think thinking is faster than listening. But the truth is that listening is not only faster than thinking, it's enormously faster, almost infinitely faster than thinking. The scientific study out of "Scientific American" in December of last year, exactly a year ago, 2024, I think that one of the titles they used online was "Thinking is Ploddingly Slow Compared to Listening." And listening is 100 million times as fast as thinking, 100 million times as fast as thinking. It's almost hard to comprehend. And at first you go, "How on earth can that be?"

And so what's happening in a... This is why the relationship aspect of financial planning is so important, and even more so, the building of this torch, this dream of freedom. So you're there with a client, and they're saying these things. And let's say you're AI and you're processing and you know how to spit out empathy in a particular way. You've seen this frame to a sentence or a paragraph or a dilemma before, and you provide the empathy. There's limited number of ways that empathy are provided and you're pretty good at it.

Michael: You've learned the words.

George: Yeah, you got the words. Right. So you're listening from that standpoint. When I'm listening to a client, those 100 million mind moments, it's like 100 million mind moments between thoughts. That's happening for me. And I think it's happening for all of us. And the more that we fine-tune our ability to be present, and this is one of the reasons that we include mindfulness in our trainings, and for our ability to be emotionally intelligent, another reason that we include the mindfulness practice as well.

What mindfulness is about is about the mastery of the present moment. And if the present moment for listening is operating 100 million times as fast as for thinking, we're talking about all of our senses, and we're picking up cues and clues. We're picking up the emotions. We're picking up all kinds of things in terms of temperature and chemistry and all that stuff that's happening around us. And all of them are involved in our humanity and in our human relationship with this person sitting across from us.

AI is a long, long way from being able to do that. And my hunch is they will never be able to do that, just simply because of the human relationship of mother to child. And what it is that we're doing here is birthing our clients into their dream of freedom, into their autonomous relationship in the world, in a way that is thrilling and vitalizing for them and invigorating for them, 100 million mind moments per thought. AI can do a lot more, but it's all in the realm of thought. It's not with these six sense bases going on.

Michael: It reminds me, in some ways, of the remarkable persistence of other relationship-based professions and services, right? Even things down to... It's fascinating to me that personal trainers still exist. I can find a YouTube video for any possible workout regime structure out there in an AI era. I can tell it my particular health circumstances, places I want to focus, things I want to work on, old injuries or constraints that I have, and it will comb all the kinesthesia body of knowledge, the kinesthetic body of knowledge to craft an appropriate workout. Yet a lot of us still work with trainers because basically, I need someone to yell at me when I'm not finishing my reps.

George: Right, yeah.

Michael: There's a weirdly unique human thing there.

George: Right on, yeah. Personal trainers is a great example. And I don't know, I am sure that my friend over here in the UK would not mind my talking about him and even mentioning his name. And he's been a top figure in the financial planning world in the UK, certainly for the last decade.

And I don't know if you know him, his name is David Jones, and he was head of financial advisors for Dimensional over in London in the UK, and at one point for all of Europe. And he's retiring from that. And he's retiring to become a personal trainer.

And I had lunch with him the other day, and I do my stuff, and I'm very concerned about longevity at my age. And I'm doing lots of good things. But it was absolutely compelling to be with him and to see and to hear his story about what he's gone through and then how he is applying that incredible creativity and intelligence that he brought to financial planning and to financial planners to the field of personal training. And it was absolutely compelling to me. And I thought numerous times since that lunch I should call David up and talk to him. So there is something about that connection again that AI on a machine never going to give us. We're never going to get that from them.

Michael: I guess at its core, just human beings are social animals. We're wired to interact with other human beings and have relationships with other human beings to do the things that we do in our lives. For basically all of humanity, the greatest punishment that can be inflicted on someone is isolation from the group.

George: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael: And so there is, to me, also this fascinating element of this financial planning stuff takes so much time. It's so consuming, and these darn capacity limitations that keep cropping up because we can only handle so many clients at a time. So in comes the technology to expedite and automate, and in comes the startups that just want to remove the pesky human advisors from the equation because technology scales infinitely, and humans are frustratingly limited in the number of relationships they can have.

But then I struggle with that. It's like, so what's the end game? Congratulations, we've been so good at automating everything finance and otherwise in our lives that we never actually have to interact with another human being, and I'll just be in the four walls of my house forever while Amazon drones bring me all of my needs and sustenance? That doesn't actually sound good.

George: No, no, no.

Michael: It's weirdly badly dystopian. And so if you start with... I always find it interesting they come from the other end. If you start with...isolationism is actually one of the worst curses on humans and humanity because we crave connection to others. And you start with that and then say, "Okay, how does that apply to businesses and professional service models of various sorts?" I guess it takes you back in the direction, okay, maybe some more of the technical stuff gets increasingly expedited with AI things. I don't think any financial planner actually relishes, well, you know what I love? Data entry into financial planning software. That's the gym.

To be fair, I actually do know one or two people where that literally is their gym. But most of us, that's not why we got into the business. We got into the business to help people and engage with clients. And so in that vein, I know it reminds me the old... I was at least taught it was Jeff Bezos, where they had asked him, "How did you have this amazing vision of what Amazon could become and all the ways that Amazon would change the world?" And his response was something in the effect of, "I didn't actually think about all the ways that Amazon would change the world. I tried to think about the few things that wouldn't change, and I put all my bets there because I knew they would be constant."

And there's some aspect of that, to me, that when I think about where does financial planning go in an AI era? If there's one thing I'm willing to bet on, it's that our clients won't be happier in digital isolation. And so if that's the outcome, it starts with, this is really still a very human relationship.

Now, what cool things can technology do to make that relationship better and more enriched? I don't want to be taken away from the relationship to enter data. I don't want to be taken away from the relationship to run analysis, but it's cool to have an analysis on the screen because sometimes it creates a very rich conversation with the client when they see a possibility they didn't know they could do before.

George: Absolutely, absolutely. But I keep coming back. You're talking from the advisor standpoint in a lot of ways. And I keep coming back to what does the client want? And I think the client, it isn't even the numbers. The client wants to live a dream of freedom. They want to live as powerfully, as profoundly, as richly as they possibly can.

And we've failed, I think, a lot because largely the media, in focusing on finance, largely picks up numbers and is supported hugely by the big industry, which are selling products. But in fact, people want to live extraordinary lives. And that's the gem of life planning, is that we can deliver that using the financial planning tools that we have. And AI will only help us do that, but we can deliver it in a way where the client sees that we're as excited and we're as moved by who it is they want to be. And we're totally dedicated to making sure that happens.

The Life Planning Process And Its Benefits For Advisors And Their Clients [22:50]

Michael: So now take me back to the life planning conversations themselves. And I'm realizing, as we're having this conversation, you joined us a number of years ago on Episode 15. There are many folks who have either patiently listened with us all the way through or binged their way up to present. Bless their souls, because that's a lot of hours of podcasts now. But not everyone has necessarily gone back.

So if you can, George, just take a few moments and just reframe for us. I'm going to ask you the easy softball question. What is life planning, George Kinder, father of.... What is life planning? How do you think about life planning?

George: So I think that life planning is what it means to be a fiduciary in financial advice, because what life planning does is it puts the client first, rather than the money. So what that means is that what we are passionate about, what I'm passionate about in life planning, is who is it that the client wants to be?

So what life planning is, is a structured process, at least the way we train it. We call that structured process EVOKE, where we listen in such a way to the client that trust forms very quickly. So that's a major piece of great listening. And then from that place of trust, the client moves toward who it is they really want to be. What would be the most purposeful, the most meaningful, the richest life? What have they been holding themselves back from? Just basically, who do they want to be? And we use the three questions for that as one of the exercises.

And then once you have that, we build a dream of freedom that is really powerful. A lot of studies talk about happiness, and I'm a big fan of all those studies. I read them and look at them. But if you look at happiness, like in the workplace, happiness in the workplace increases productivity in businesses by 13%. That's pretty good.

Think about making your profit that much better by having a happy workforce. But an inspired workforce is 125%. You're 125% more productive. What happens in life planning is the client comes alive with productivity and delivers quite quickly into the world who it is that they are meant to be.

So we design a dream of freedom that is usually anywhere from a few months to three years looking out in the future, and we layer into that dream of freedom not just this vision of happiness, but a vision of happiness upon happiness upon happiness. So what happens is that the client gets more and more excited about the world that we see quite clearly they can move into.

So the process is E-V-O-K-E. E is for exploration. That's where we're really just listening. Often, that first meeting can be as much as 90% listening. V is the vision meeting, where we inspire people and light the torch, the dream of freedom. And O then is the obstacles meeting. So the next meeting, the client comes in, and we take that dream of freedom, and we keep reminding the client of it. And the client very, very quickly solves all of the problems that they had seen for many years that were in the way of actually living that dream of freedom.

So we often ask the client, "What is the obstacle to your having this incredibly rich dream?" And sometimes they come up with money. That was probably what they thought all along, but now the most common response is, "Well, there's only me. It's only myself." And then we tackle what are all of the obstacles that might come in the way of doing any particular element of this dream of freedom. And we do that pretty much in a meeting, and the meeting can be relatively brief because the client is so on fire that a lot of those obstacles they've already eliminated.

And once you've done that, then you have something that you can plan with. Before that obstacles meeting, I will have done a preliminary spreadsheet, but after that meeting, you know exactly where the client's going. You know how much time it's going to take. You know what they're going to be dedicating their life to.

And so the knowledge piece, the piece that is the financial plan itself, is really simple. And frankly, I don't know how advisors do financial planning without arriving at that powerful a place for the client, that inspiring a place for the client. The final E is execution, E-V-O-K-E.

Michael: So take me back now to, I guess, the first phase or two of this. Ultimately, you've culminated in the K is the knowledge phase, where I get to deliver a plan. The E is the execute. I get that. I do that in financial planner world. Nominally, we all have some goals discovery process. Right. Gather data and goals, analyze them, deliver plan, implement. I've got a financial planning process. CFP board gives me a financial planning process for that.

Help us understand more what the difference is between the way we all go out there and try to do goals and discovery with clients and what you're talking about in, I think, mostly the E and the V part of this process.

George: So the goals discovery. One of the things I think that the board has wrong in a way is they say you got to go to the numbers first. And so we do that in our program, just to be compliant, but we look at the numbers very briefly. It doesn't take long to look at a net worth statement or a profit and loss statement, a cash flow to see pretty much where the client is financially. You can do that. If you're good at it, you can probably do that in a matter of seconds. It's really very quick.

But our purpose is to be fiduciary, number one, and fiduciary certainly has something to do with how we charge. We know that, going back to the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. It certainly has something to do with a holistic approach to money and to finance for the client.

But I think the number one thing, if you're going to really put the client first, is knowing who they are and what they want more than anything in their life, and having the passion and the understanding that you can deliver that with all the financial knowledge you have.

So you start with that frame of I'm here to listen to a client in such a way that I can actually help them get to where they really want to go. And if you do that in a goals discovery, even if you have the client weigh elements and everything. You might as well give that to AI because that's a process that is written down. It's something that can be learned artificially with artificial intelligence.

What we do in those first two meetings...and you can do all five of the meetings in one meeting. I used to really love giving... I wasn't quite pro bono, but I would give my work to anyone who came in, and if they were of really very, very limited means, I do all five phases in one meeting. We'd have one meeting a year, it would be inspiring for them, and they'd move on with their life and come back a year later to revisit the whole question.

But the two real life planning meetings, the E is a meeting where the client races to the meeting. Of course, now it might be on Zoom, but they've been thinking a lot about why they want to meet with you. And we miss that a lot. And also, they've been primed by maybe it's "The Wall Street Journal," "The New York Times," "USA Today," little personal finance columns on all the money pieces. And so they think that they're supposed to be asking you money questions. And what they're doing by asking you money questions is, I think, the real planner then becomes them, not you, because they're making the larger decisions of where it is that they want to go.

Using The First Meeting With A New Prospect For Deep Listening [32:08]

George: So in that first meeting, in the E for exploration meeting, rather than giving them...you'll still have a goals discovery. You'll still send out discovery pages for them to fill out. But the first meeting is just listening. It's asking them, "So why are you here? Why have you come?" And then just being quiet and listening. And listening in such a way that if they just start off saying, "Hey, I want to know why I just inherited this stock, and I don't know whether I should sell it, I don't know anything about it, what should I do?"

And you go, "Well, we can figure that out. And I'm glad you've come. That's one of my specialties. Let's park that to the end of the meeting. First thing I want to know is, why are you here? Why have you come to a financial planner? What would you like to come out of our relationship over time? Why are you here?" And then you just listen. And you listen in such a way that you show that you are engaged, you're interested.

So again, we go back to this empathy question. Empathy goes in two directions. It goes both to the challenges, the worries, the anxieties the client has, but also to their excitements, their thrills. And so you listen in such a way that you're really there for them. You're living, in a way, their life vicariously.

And so when they share something that they're excited about, they just love to garden, and you go, "Wow, that's so cool." Park it. You just be quiet after that. You share emotional responses to keep them in the flow. You don't go, "Oh, what flowers or what does your garden look like?" or something like that, because now you're in your agenda. You're not in their agenda.

So what we want in that first meeting is for the client to go everywhere they feel called naturally to go. And it's a wildly creative process. Again, it's something that AI could not possibly imagine because we do these quantum leaps when we're talking. We might be talking about the weather, and suddenly we leap to the passing away of our dad. And what we're doing in the initial conversation, what the client's doing in that initial piece is they're testing you out as an advisor. Can you listen? Can you listen to what I care about most? Can you listen to what I'm most excited about?

And so they'll leap to those places, just out of the blue, as a consequence of trusting you in that first meeting, because of the quality of the listening that you're doing. That level of trust, gosh, you can't beat it. For one thing, you've got a client for life if you deepen that and work with that and strengthen that. But it also means that they are going to...when they have a crisis in their life, you're going to be top of mind for them, both because of the financial element to that crisis, but also because they know you can listen. You can be there for them. So the first meeting is just listening in a very deep way.

Michael: Help me understand further the...these are my judgment words, not yours, what the good follow-up questions are, and the bad follow-up questions are. Because I was totally on board with what you're saying. I'm like, "I get it, I get it." And they're talking about their flower garden. And then you said, "And don't ask them what flowers because that's your agenda." And I'm sitting here thinking, "That's exactly what I was going to ask." And that's fine, I'll get my personal therapy later.

But you made the follow-up comment because now you're potentially taking this conversation on your agenda, not theirs. So I get it, but now I don't know. So I need a little bit of my live in the moment training. So what follow-up questions should I be asking that's keeping it in their camp and not taking it to my agenda if they're saying they're into gardening and what flowers do you garden is not the right direction for that conversation.

George: Right. It's really interesting because they could be talking about gardening, and it could be a really superficial thing for them, and you've leaped in and taken them in that direction. And the only way you're going to know that... In a way, Michael, you're asking the wrong question, okay, because you're asking, what are the good follow-up questions? And I think the right question is, how should I be listening?

And so naturally...and we're trained by this. In financial advice, we're trained this a lot, to know what the right questions are. And I think we should be being trained in how should we be listening? And so if you're listening in a way that captures in that moment the delight that the client has with their gardening, so they see that you're right there with them, they're going to go where they naturally want to go. And if that is toward what the quality of that garden is, the colors, the nature of the earth, the engagement that they have with it, the hours of the day, if that's where they really want to go, they'll go there.

If you simply show that you're, "Oh, wow, that's so cool," that's it. If you ask them, then you're taking them intellectually someplace. And even better than "Oh, well, so cool" is to share a gesture, share a movement that shows that you are really connected with what they're saying, you're excited by it, and you're completely there to wherever they want to go next.

Because what you want out of this first meeting, you want them to feel so much trust, so safe with you that they take you to their most extraordinary highs. What is it that they most aspire to? And they also take you to their greatest concerns, the things that they fear the most, they worry the most, the self-doubts, whatever are there.

And if in that meeting, they feel comfortable...they're not going to feel comfortable taking you to those places by you asking them questions. They're going to feel comfortable going to those places because you respond to what they've shared in a way that shows you are emotionally intelligent and connected with them as they wander in their conversation.

So that's great listening. And that listening will actually lead them to trust in the second meeting, the next meeting, when you go to these questions, the three questions, or we do things called the Heart's Core or the Ideal Year, Week, and Month. And they'll go to them naturally, and they'll share honestly what they care about and not share things that they think you want to know or that you are a specialist in. And that's what we want. We want them to go where they really want to go.

So when you ask about the question, the right question is one that you would ask after you've done a lot of these, showing emotional intelligence without particularly asking a question, showing it through gutturals or movements, or just a brief phrase.

The best follow-up question is, after they've gone a long way, it's just simply "anything else?". And the best question after that is, "anything else?" And it's just giving them an open space to go and framing those responses, those questions in such a way that it shows that you are really interested in who they are and where they've gone so far. And you could even frame that question. This is really incredible. Is there anything else?

Michael: So if I'm trying to take it back to your gardening example, because I'm just trying to keep this concrete.

George: You bet. Yep.

Michael: So if I'm hearing you well, if I've got this prospect and suddenly we're into, they've got this gardening hobby, I'm listening for things like, okay, if they're talking excitedly and happily about their gardening hobby, then my follow-up might be, "Wow, it sounds like you really get a lot of joy and delight from your gardening. Anything else?"

And I'm trying to keep that thread open. If I'm hearing, "Well, I do a lot of the gardening because it's a wonderful distraction from all my stress at work," then I'm going down a different thread of, "Well, it sounds like you have a lot of stress at work," and see if that's a thread that they want to pursue and go down, if I'm just acknowledging or reflecting back what I'm hearing, because those are very different ways that they could bring up what nominally is about gardening.

George: Right. So beautiful. Well done and well said. So one of the things you're doing there that is really a great expertise is that rather than asking a further question, you're making a comment and allowing them to go further with that. And that's very skillful. And I use that toward the end of the E meeting. I'll use it in a particular way.

But in the early phase, they've got to this excitement around gardening, but I don't know whether what is really going on with them is that they have a child who is really in trouble, and they have real difficulty talking about it, and I want them to be able to get there. And if I use this, "So it sounds like you have a lot of joy and that you really enjoy gardening," that's a lot of words to put together. So they have to go up to their brain. They're wondering as you're carrying those words out, where are you going with the sentence?

And so, again, think about this thing, 100 million mind moments, 100 million times as fast listening is as thinking. If instead you were just to go, "Wow," or "Cool," and show, open your eyes, show that you're alert and you're there, and then settle back so that you're not demanding from them that they tell you more about that, you're just showing that you really get it, then they might go to that child. That might be the next thing that they're going to. You just don't know.

And if you put a bunch of words out there and you direct them in a particular way, they're going to start to follow your lead. If you do it twice, you've lost them. If you ask a couple of questions of them, they go, "Oh, I guess this is Michael's meeting. It's not mine." And they're going to give up on the things that are most extraordinary for them. And we don't know what they are.

They may want to change the world in a really profound way and feel embarrassed about it. They may... I think I love your question about have a lot of stress at work. Again, that's something that people might not necessarily share the first time, or they might not share that there are things about the trust that their dad has set up.

So at the end of that first meeting, before I do... I do a little bit of what I call bells and whistles at the end, where I show them what we do, why we're so good at financial planning, why we're so good at investment management, portfolio construction, and all of those things. And I'll have typically a half-hour of a two-hour meeting designed to share with them at the end of that meeting and to address that first question that they asked about the stocks that they'd inherited.

But as we're coming to the end of the place where they are willing to go with who they are and who they want to be, why they're here, and when they really come to that end, I'll go back to those two things. Let's say they are the two things you mentioned about stress at work and about loving gardening. I brought up the gardening, of course, but let's say there are those two things.

And then I will consciously go to the thing they were most excited about, and I'll make a simple statement like you made it, and let them roll with that. So now they see, "Oh, they're really here for what I'm most excited about." And then I'll go to the place where they were most concerned, and I'll do a simple sentence there as well about what they were most concerned about, just, "It seems like you were really stressed at that."

And I will do that depending on where their mood was at the end of the meeting. If they're on a real high note, I will take them down to the sorrowful place first, just to balance. If they're on a low note, I'll take them up first to the thing that inspired them most. I hope that's helpful or clear.

Michael: It's helpful. I think maybe, I don't know, the struggle I'm trying to process through as... I'm envisioning lots of prospect meetings over the years. I get there's a certain subset of clients, of prospects where, yeah, I really just need to give literally a supportive word or two every now and then when they pause in their conversation, and they're going to keep chugging right along and they're just free association thought flowing and we're going to go where we go and I'm going to learn what I learned and it's great.

Others are not so sharing or communicative, or open, right? Some clients are just naturally a little less talkative. Sometimes people come to us in situations or circumstances where there's already challenges or shame or other things going on. So they're just paranoid. It feels like we got to do some work just to get them to start opening up and say much of anything.

So I guess I'm just trying to visualize, if I'm trying to be really careful not to turn this meeting into my agenda and leave it their agenda, but some clients are not so forthcoming with their agenda and talking through it. How should I be keeping this conversation going and keeping them open?

George: Right, right, right. So what I heard, and let me know if there's more than this, what I heard were two, in particular, clients that would come in, where maybe it seems like maybe a different approach or understanding what other follow-up questions might be useful. And those were a client that's not so open or forthcoming or communicative. And then another one, where there are already concerns and challenges, and difficulties.

And if I take those individually, just looking at each of them. So if you have the client that comes in that they're not so open, forthcoming, or communicative, usually...always, they've come to the meeting for a purpose. Clearly, they've set up the meeting, right? So they've got a reason for coming there.

And so they're going to start off with that reason. And you've already got them talking, which is a great thing. And so if you can keep them going from that space, then that's wonderful because they're already energized by what it is that they've just shared with you.

So the why are you here, and the anything else? And particularly, as I say, this learning to just really be with them in a way where they really get that you're emotionally there for them. So they see that you're excited, interested, engaged, empathic.

And if they are, again, not so open and not so forthcoming, and they stop pretty quickly after sharing one or two things, what we do, that client, usually they're coming in, and what they mention is again, coming from "The Wall Street Journal" or "USA Today," they mentioned the financial thing. And they think of you as a financial person, like all those other financial people in the world. So that's what they're sharing. And you go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And you've come to the right place." You can reassure them of that.

And I'm excited about this. And I want to get to that area. And I love to get as much to that area as we can toward the end of this meeting. But it also may take a few meetings of really getting to know each other to really know how to address that. So you do that in the way you would do, I think, with probably any client.

But then I'd back up, and I'd say, "What will really help me and really help our work together so that I'm really on target with the financial planning work that I'm going to do for you is if I really know what you would like to have as an outcome of our meeting together. Let's say you take me on as your advisor for a number of years, what would you like to happen? Where would you like to go? How would you like to be living?" But really open-ended, "What would you like to have accomplished or experienced as a consequence of having these meetings?"

So you might have a question like that, something that opens it up quite a bit, but it's not so limiting. You want to keep it pretty broad because you want to make sure that they can share with you from that invitation, both their highs and their lows, and their practicalities. And then you go back to anything else.

And honestly, I had many clients over my career, and I would certainly have clients occasionally that would come in where that exploration meeting would last ten minutes. But more often than not, it lasted somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half.

Michael: So then what comes in the next meeting?

George: Before we go there, the already concerned client?

Michael: Yes.

George: So they've already got their concerns and all. And these are clients where they're going to really respond to your empathic presence. So I think you could also ask them that follow-up question, but I think just really showing that you are empathically connected with them is going to open them up to what it is they really need to talk about. So yeah, that's for those two. And yeah, should I go to the next meeting?

Moving From Exploration To Vision And The "Three Questions" [51:02]

Michael: Yeah, I'm getting an understanding now of, right, the E of the exploration. Well, I guess, so now I'm trying to vision, no pun intended. So now I'm trying to vision the vision meeting, and what I'm reading by inference, this is where a fresh set of questions start coming in, right? That the exploration meeting was a lot more of them flowing the conversation where they wanted to go or where they feel compelled to take it. But in the vision meeting, I've got some more questions I'm going to be asking or exercising to take them through because now I'm trying to take them through a particular visioning process.

George: Right. And just on that edge of moving from exploration to vision, at the end of that first meeting, very typically, the trust level is so high. And you share, as I say, in that last bit of that meeting, why they've come to the right place from a financial planning standpoint. So they know that you're in the game of financial planning. That is your profession. That is what your specialty is, and you really know your business.

And when you show them that you can really listen to their human concerns, who it is that they really want to be, and then that you are really on top of what it is to be a great financial planner. My experience was that they bring up the contract, and they want to sign with you right away. That happens in the first meeting. And it would be rare, in my engagements with clients, that it would take to the second meeting. And if it did, they'd come in with a contract in hand and ready to go at the beginning of that meeting. So it's a very, very powerful and effective meeting just simply from a business standpoint as well, because you've connected with them, and then you've shown them the financial planning strengths that you have.

And then that last half hour or so, not only will you have your set piece of who you are and how you do your work, but you will have heard them for an hour or an hour and a half and what their concerns are, and you will be able to tap into those concerns that they have with the financial planning knowledge that you have about how you will address those particular questions that they've brought up. So there's a huge amount of confidence and trust that is delivered in that first meeting, extraordinary amount.

So then in the second meeting...and we train our advisors to do it slightly different ways. There are different approaches by different trainers, different teachers that we have in the EVOKE program. But the way that I would do it is I would hand them, and I think most of the time, I would give them the three questions as homework, along with a number of other goal exercises, so that they would come into the vision meeting with all of those goal exercises done.

And then that meeting is much less listening and much more about the elements that they've added. It's like you've got the goals discovery work that you've done. And here, in each of these goal exercises, there's a prioritization that we have them do. And I'm sure you have something like that in the goal discovery work that you do. And in that prioritization, depending on the amount of time we have, we clearly want to get at the things that are most important. But if we're doing the three questions, and that's the main thing, often we will read the responses to question number one and pause with each one, and then read the responses to question number two and pause with each one, and read the responses to question number three and pause with each one.

And again, it's like your piece with "So I can see that you love to garden," or "It sounds like you have a lot of stress at work." It's just reading it and pausing and being open, showing through your body language. It might be a gesture, "Love to hear more," but without saying that, and seeing where they want to go.

And it's question number three usually that has...it's the most intense life and death question. It's a question of profound meaning for people. And question number one is, "If you had all the money you need for the rest of your life, what would you do?" Question number two is, "If you suddenly discovered you only had five to ten years left to live, what would you do?" So there it gets more meaningful, and often relationships come up.

But question number three is reflecting on suddenly discovering that you only have 24 hours left to live, and you're totally shocked by it. And the question isn't "What would you do?" The question is, "What'd you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do?"

And I would say that 90% of what we call the torch of the meaningful stuff that we're aiming at in a financial plan is going to be contained in that question. Certainly, 90% of the strength of it, of the emotional impact of it will be there. We'll layer in things from question one and question two and from the other goal exercises, but we absolutely want to make sure that everything that's in question three is addressed because that's where their serious concern is.

Michael: So number one is "If you had all the money you need for the rest of your life, what would you do?" So that's an exploring freedom question, right?

George: Yeah.

Michael: Now you start to get at "What would you like to be doing that you're holding yourself back from because of money?" And start getting the real hopes and dreams and goals and wishes and values.

George: Right.

Michael: So number two, you find out you have five to ten years left, like I said, and stole all the money from number one. So what would you do now? This is the narrowing down to what really matters?

George: Usually, we don't give them all the money they had [in the first question].

Michael: Okay. So we don't carry over the money.

George: No.

Michael: We reset back to current circumstances, but we're constraining the time window.

George: Exactly, exactly. So it gets much more poignant for them, yeah.

Michael: And so that's getting at what's really meaningful, what's really important. That's like eliciting priorities question.

George: Five to ten years left. That really touches us, and we go, "Oh, boy, I'd better get done what's most important to me." And so it does. It gets... And usually, as I say, relationships are probably the strongest thing that come up there, but the various legacy things that might come up as well.

Michael: And then, "You only have 24 hours left to live. What did you miss? Who did you not get to be?" That's a regrets question.

George: Yeah, and it's funny, we don't emphasize the regret, but you're absolutely right. The regret is there, but what we're capturing there is what are the things that they are most passionate about that they missed, that they didn't get to do or be? And those are things...there's so much energy there that when we... This is why, when we craft a torch from the vision meeting, a torch that is their dream of freedom, this is why those elements are the strongest in there. And it's why, as well, that that torch is executed almost immediately by the client.

The client's productivity soars. It's not 125%, it's like 1000% of where it was before, because they'd held off from doing these things, but they clearly are the most important things in their life.

Michael: And so by the end of this meeting, now I'm getting to a version of, "Tell me about your goals, so I can plug them into my financial planning software and do financial planning for you." We're getting to some articulation of goals and where we want to be, but we're doing it from a different pathway than, "Here's a list of goals, circle the ones that are important to you." Kinds of worksheet exercises that are out there for some financial plans.

George: Right. Rather than worksheet exercises and prioritization in that way, we give them a really strong image. So this process, we call Lighting the Torch, and it's a question toward the end of this meeting, it could be halfway through the meeting. We go, "If as a consequence of our time together, I or we were to deliver to you," and then we name a moment in time, might be a year from now, might be three years from now, a year and a half is fairly typical, "where you are doing this."

And then we layer in one really extraordinary development in their life after another, that they have identified in the three questions and in their ideals and in the Heart's Core grid. So we put those all in there in such a way, this is where we're layering happiness upon happiness upon happiness, and in such a way that the client is absolutely thrilled, stunned, excited, profoundly moved, and inspired to make it happen. And so we say, "If, as a consequence of our work together, we were to deliver this to you, how would that be?" And they're stunned, and they go, "Wow, incredible," and they want to move on it right away.

Using A Third Meeting To Identify Obstacles To The Client's Vision [1:00:27]

Michael: So now tell us more about the obstacles meeting. Because again, gather data and goals, do plan, present plan, implement plan. We've got that in our financial planning process. And so you've got a different way that you get to the goals conversation. I feel like in the E and the V part of EVOKE, you've got the plan delivery and implementation in the K and the E part of EVOKE. But you've got this whole extra meeting that we don't usually have, so think of it as in traditional financial planning process. So tell us more about where this came from.

George: Well, first of all, what we've got from the vision meeting, from the two meetings together, we've got an extraordinary understanding of who the client is and what they want to do with their life. And we're also aware that they haven't done this, that this is something that we've unraveled for them by really listening, by great empathic listening, and then by following them through the three questions and the other exercises.

So we know perhaps there are three things that are really quite extraordinary for them. One has to do with their career and their work. One of them has to do with their family. And the third one has to do with something, say, profoundly creative or spiritual, let's say.

And so we take those three elements, and each of those things has an aspiration. So the aspiration in the career might be just real success. They've written books, they're on YouTube, they've got a real following on TikTok or Instagram, or they've just moved up the ladder in the organization that they're in. But there's something that's happening there that they're excited about, and we're going to move with them on that.

In the family, there'll be something where they haven't been as close to their partner, their spouse, or their kids as they would have liked, or their parents. And we're going to take them right there and make that happen. So we're going to make the career happen, we're going to make the family thing happen.

And then in terms of the creative piece or the spiritual piece, that also may be a place where the environment comes in, where they live in the city, but they'd like to live in the country. And we facilitate something like that. So we're going to make that happen as well. So suddenly, these three things that we've discovered through this process of working together are the three major things in their life that would really bring them alive.

In the obstacles meeting, we're delivering them. It's like, okay, so what is it that you would like? That's the why. And then how can you act on this? How can you deliver this to yourself? We facilitate them. Obviously, we've got to have our financial skills, and that's going to come in enormously in the next meeting. But we also have that awareness in the back of our mind as to what the financial consequences of each of these actions will be. And we'll ask them, "How are you going to do this and when?" And we will go toe-to-toe on them.

So they'll say, "Well, next month." "No, no, when? When next month?" We'll get them down to absolute details. Is there someone...we'll ask for an accountability partner. Is there someone who actually could be there and help make sure that this happens?

So we'll layer tasks that are actually delivering them into their dream of freedom. And now we're even more confident of who they are and where they're going and what they're going to do, and now their financial plan has really powerful meaning for them and for us. We know that it's not just delivering numbers. This is delivering a person into the person they want to be.

Michael: So can you help us, I guess, set up this meeting? Right? How am I explaining to the clients this next meeting after the vision meeting? How am I setting up the conversation when they come into the obstacles meeting?

George: Great, yeah. And Michael, after each of these meetings, the client is typically so moved or inspired that, in between the two meetings, they're doing a lot of work already. So a lot of the stuff they've held back for many years or they'd anticipated doing in retirement, they're going for.

But the particular setup between the vision meeting and the obstacles meeting is, at the end of the vision meeting, you've lit the torch, and you've asked them at the end of that meeting, once that torch is lit, you ask them, "Is there anything that could possibly get in the way of this?"

And so you're already beginning obstacles there. "Is there anything that could possibly get in the way of this?" And they may share one or two things, and you go, "Okay, we're going to address that. We're going to address each of those things next week or in two weeks." Typically, it's a two-week break between. "But what I'd like you to do between now and then is to park all of those obstacles. Just trust that we'll take care of them when you come in. And what I want you to do between this meeting and the next meeting is really live into the dream. This is such a stunning dream of freedom. In our jargon, we call it the torch. And it's such a stunning dream of freedom for you. It's moved you so much. I want you to live into it, to paint the picture more specifically, the details of it, as if you were living in it. What would it really look like over the next two weeks?"

So if you have that specificity and you have that inner life where you've visioned it and you're living there, then the obstacles are going to be much clearer for us when we go at it in the next meeting. And we're going to be working on your financial, we're going to actually do a mock-up of the financial plan that we'll have available in that next meeting, but it will clarify the financial issues tremendously for us. So live into the dream. Come in, and we'll see you in two weeks.

Michael: And then when they come in?

George: Well, first, you ask them if anything's changed. Sometimes, you'll be astonished. Everything's changed.

Michael: Now that we've been thinking about all these things, we've realized all these other things that we were holding back on that we hadn't really talked about, and now we want a new, new, different plan.

George: Yeah, because you've given them permission. They didn't realize they had permission to actually live with that much freedom in their life. And so sometimes things have really changed a lot and dramatically different visions. Sometimes it's just a tweak or two that you're doing. Sometimes they say, "Well, I've already done that piece, and now there are these things."

So you have to do the relighting of the torch so that it's convincing and compelling. And then you ask the question again, "What could possibly get in the way?" And you begin to outline that for each of the major elements within the torch. But first, you ask it in a general way, "What could possibly get in the way?" And usually, people, as I say, in the old days, they'd say money. Now they're more likely to say myself. And the third most likely thing they are to say is, "Well, nothing. Nothing's going to get in the way."

And that is a powerful statement when they say that, because you know that you've really landed this. Nonetheless, you go into the obstacles, and you go and say, "That's really exciting, but let's go at each of these elements and let's just move forward on them, because that's what this meeting is about." And then you take them into each of the elements, the career, the family, the creative or spiritual piece, and you go, "Okay, what are the obstacles here? And what could you do about them? And how could you do that? And when could you do that? And do you need some help doing that?"

And so you get early numbers, but these are numbers about time and accomplishments, but they're informing the financial plan. You'll know much more about the financial plan, particularly if that third piece has something like, "I want to live in the country, and I'm living in the city," and you're moving them on that in some way. Well, that's incredibly valuable there. The career stuff's going to be really helpful.

The Life Planning Training Process For Advisors [1:08:33]

Michael: So I'm curious whether or how this has evolved for you, this process has evolved over the years. I think we're almost 20 years out from when you published "Lighting the Torch" originally. And you were many years into teaching and doing life planning at that point. So is it still the same process it was then, because it's worked so well and continues to? Have you made changes or adjustments, or have other learnings on the process now, from where it was originally?

George: Yeah, I think the most exciting thing is really in the teaching of it. How do you convey this in such a way that the advisor themselves, going through the program, is both experiencing their life plan come alive and also experiencing their ability to bring their partner? They come in, and you partner with someone you didn't know before. And so the person that they've partnered up with in the training, so they're bringing them alive into their life plan.

So I think it's mostly the changes that have occurred in the training. The EVOKE process is very much the same as it was. I think one of the...probably the most significant difference that I don't think was in "Lighting the Torch" is that we now do the torch often, almost like a video clip of placing them a few months forward from now or a couple of years forward from now and then layering these things into a scenario that is one thing after another about each of the things that they have longed for most to accomplish or to be or to have.

And so it's got almost some cinematography to it that is very alive, very dynamic, as opposed to in the old days, we would just list that these things would have happened. Now we give them the feel, the touch of it, sensations of it. So I think that's probably the most significant thing. There are certainly small things that have happened for years whenever...and still, when I do a... Mostly, the EVOKE trainings are given by trainers that I've trained, but I do a few a year. And when I do those trainings, there's usually something that I'm tweaking a bit, that I'm making it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit more alive, a little bit more toned in the training itself.

Michael: And for those unfamiliar, just what is the training process? How does it work? What do I do? What does it cost? Where do I go?

George: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So first, it used to be in the old days, I'd recommend taking the two-day training first. That was the first book I wrote, "The Seven Stages of Money Maturity." And what we realized after doing that for many years, people loved it, we had great response, but there was a tendency to think they got it all. And then when we came back and checked with them a few years later, they were not implementing the EVOKE process.

And so what we did...and the two-day is more of a psychology or a philosophy of money. So a lot of the people, for instance, in the financial therapy movement have done the two-day, and many of the leaders came through the two-day in the early, early days of that movement.

And so we've now realized that we want implementation so that people are actually delivering their clients into their dream of freedom, and the clients are coming out and living their life plan. And moreover, also that advisors are living their life plan at the end of the five-day training. So we designed a four to five-day training, and now we recommend that people take that training first and take the two-day afterwards as a follow-up.

And then also there's a six-month mentorship after that, so that you're really embedding it in your practice with... Usually, it's the team of people that you've come through the five-day with. So five-day is occasionally a four-day now that we've had COVID and have a Zoom program. So you can do it in four days, and it's less expensive that way. It is one of the more expensive programs that you'll pay for because we typically have two to five trainers for anywhere from seven or eight to 16 participants.

So we really have a high trainer-to-student ratio, and they're residential courses. And what happens is you go into the course, and you pair up with someone there, after meeting them, spending a few hours getting to know people on the course, and you pair up with someone, and then that person becomes your life planning client, and they also become your life planner for the next four or five days, right? It's quite something.

So at the end of that time, you have delivered that person into their life plan. And you can ask anybody that has come through the program. I don't know of anyone who hasn't come into their life plan as a consequence of doing this program. So there's that much... Not only does your planner do it for you, but you also have the trainers pitching in. So you do demos in front of the group, practicing these skills of emotional listening, emotional intelligence, of what we call the pause, just really being quiet, but being engaged of how do you ask the three questions? How do you deliver the obstacles meeting?

So we practice those three meetings, in particular, really in great depth, so that you're learning from practicing, you're learning from experiencing inside. This is experience-based as opposed to evidence-based. This is an experience-based program, which I think is more powerful. And then on top of that, you have great trainers who have been practicing this for years, that are also coaching you on your skills as well as on your life plan.

Michael: And just to help set expectations for folks, what is typical cost?

George: The cost is around five grand for the EVOKE training. And it can be a bit more, it can be a bit less. If you get in early, there's an early discount that will keep it under that, that kind of thing.

George's Recent Writing And Promotion Of Fiduciary Principles Beyond Financial Planning [1:15:04]

Michael: So what are you working on now? What are you, George, working on now? Where's your focus?

George: Well, it's interesting. I was reflecting. I did not go back and listen to the tape that we did eight years ago, Michael, but I did reflect on what have I done in the last seven, eight years? And what's amazing to me is that I've been more prolific during these eight years than I ever have in the past. And they were years when I caught...at the end of 2019, just before it was beginning, I was one of the first cases of COVID, and I caught long COVID.

So I got a pretty bad case of it. And the fatigue lasted for a long time. In spite of that, and perhaps because of that, visiting these three questions reminded me of what my legacy was, what I really wanted to do. So I produced during that time, let's see, five, six, seven, seven books and an album on Spotify during that time period. So I've been extremely busy. And then just in this last year...

Michael: Wait. What's the subject of the books, and what is the album on Spotify?

George: So the subject of the books. So my third question forever was, it wasn't career, and it wasn't life planning. It was I want to live in the weather, number one. And number two, I want to create illuminated manuscripts. So those were...and perhaps the third thing might have been living a deeply spiritual life in some way.

So I had been collecting for 30 years. I'd been collecting... I'd been spending my mornings out in a cabin on this pond that we live on. It's an 80-acre lake. And the mornings would be filled with...my passion was to understand what the nature of the present moment is. Back to this question of listening being so much faster than thinking. What is that all about? What is that nature?

So I would be practicing mindfulness, and I wrote poetry for every day of the year and captured photographs for every day of the year on this pond. So I put together a series of five books, including poems for every day, poems for every week, photographs for every day, photographs for every week. So I've got a season, spring, summer, fall, and winter. I've got a weekly version. So five of the books are that living in nature. What is the experience?

I think the greatest teacher of mindfulness is probably Mother Nature because we step out of our house, and she's alive. We feel her on our skin. We smell everything. We're just alive. So I wanted to capture that and inspire people to live with more of that in their life, partly as an environmentalist wanting that, but really just loving that from childhood, just knowing that that was something extraordinary. And so it was a thrill to finish that work.

I might not have. I might have died, and that work would not have been done if it weren't for long COVID and me realizing that I might have a sentence on my life. So those were five of the books. I wrote two books then on civilization. And that's really where my passion is right now, and bringing life planning and mindfulness, and fiduciary into businesses is where I've gone. But I wrote a book called "A Golden Civilization and the Map of Mindfulness" and another book called "The Three Domains of Freedom: Each Moment Is Yours, Your Life Is Yours, and Civilization Is Yours."

And so right now...and I did an album, and it was a protest album happening...it was the long COVID summer, and I had two teenage daughters, and I was trying to figure out what on earth am I going to do with them? They're living at home, and they both had creative spirits to them. And one of them was profoundly musical. And I said, "This is my chance. I've been wanting to do this since I was a kid. Let's make an album together." Her name is London.

And so she and I...she wrote most of the music, and I wrote most of the lyrics. We went out to the cabins, we recorded these seven songs and it was just wonderful to do that. A 16-year-old daughter, imagine, being able to spend that time with her. So that was very, very special.

Michael: Very cool.

George: Yeah. So now I'm in London, and I came to London because I wanted to carry my work further, particularly the work of fiduciary. I wanted to carry it further. And my notion has been, as I wrote these two books on civilization, that... And you and I have reflected on this at various points, Michael. How is it that we, you and I, and the great advisors that we know, that we are passionate about being fiduciaries and we are passionate about putting our clients first? And yet, pretty much every corporation that we engage with, the product providers, the mutual fund companies, the brokerage firms, pretty much none of them are really, really, truly fiduciary.

And part of my thought was, well, as I've been thinking about civilization and thinking about the dark stuff that's happening in the world and the negative externalities that have arisen very much from the great stuff of capitalism, these negative externalities seem to have gone to scale as much as the positives have. So we have earth dangers, we have democracy challenges, we have threats of AI, the threats to truth and media.

And my thought was, this has to be systemic. That this must... Because, again, what we grew up with, the notion that as entrepreneurs, we are creating something that is extraordinary. Because of our entrepreneurial competitiveness, we are creating the very best things that humanity can create.

And my thought was, why? Why on earth have we not then created over these 250 years of phenomenal growth? Why have we not created the very best of humanity, our wisdom and compassion, at the top of every hierarchy of power? And I went on a world tour, and I asked people what a golden civilization would look like. And then I put together in a single sentence, something that I call Fiduciary In All Things, which is a piece of legislation that I'm just promoting, but also I'm beginning to bring into business as a mission-driven, like a B corporation ideal, the requirement that... If we lived in a fiduciary society, what an incredible difference that would be.

I ask audiences wherever I go, I say, and I ask kids this when I talk with the younger generation, "How would you feel if every institution you encountered was trustworthy and humane in everything they did? How would your life change?" And my thought is that, given what's been happening in the world, again, this scaling of the negative externalities, this global scaling, that humanity is scaled too. This is the first time we've come together historically as a species. And so we ought to be focusing on how do we bring the best of us into the world?

And the capitalism with purely shareholder fiduciary obligation is clearly failing us, with three billionaires owning as much as 180 million people. That's not the "Of the people, by the people, and for the people" that Abraham Lincoln spoke of in terms of fiduciary responsibility. So I am bringing those notions just as a total pro bono. I've got a movement called Fiduciary In All Things, totally pro bono, and that I'm promoting to consumers everywhere and just doing whatever I can for it.

And then I won an Innovator Founder visa over to the UK to launch a startup to bring fiduciary notions into businesses as a way to boost productivity dramatically. And you might wonder how that works. But one of the things that... You realize that if you look at all the different models, we've had a fiduciary from shareholder to what we love fiduciary to our clients to be corporations to this movement I do, which is called FIAT or Fiduciary In All Things, including truth and democracy.

If we were to shift to a fiduciary model in all things, we would need far less regulations. The regulatory apparatus would diminish dramatically, because the leadership in our corporate life and our government life, and our nonprofit life, our kids would be able to look at those leaders and go, "Boy, they're heroes." And right now, our kids don't have any heroes.

So I'm excited about this. And studies have shown that the work we're doing can boost productivity enormously, because of the inspiration factor that we will bring into corporate life, into businesses. So there's a long-winded answer to your question.

George's Reflections On His Journey And Advice For Newer Planners [1:24:22]

Michael: So as you reflect on this journey, overall, I guess, what surprised you the most about growth and evolution of life planning over the decades now? Can you say that?

George: Growth and what surprised me. And I think I'm mostly touched. I think my heart has opened over the years as you move from numbers to perhaps greater wisdom. And I'm mostly profoundly touched that we're in 42 states, registered life planners. You can find them in 42 states and 15 countries, and in pretty much every continent of the world. And I think that I never really imagined a community of people that care about each other and get excited about the work. So I think that was probably what took me by the greatest surprise.

Michael: What was the low point on this journey?

George: I think the low point came at the very beginning of my career. Because in the early days, I split work and what I wanted to do with my life. My life plan, back in those days, when I first started work, I didn't want to do work. I didn't want to work for a living. I'm sorry, but I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to live a deeply spiritual life. And clearly, the world did not have a path for me to do that easily. I was not naturally gifted at those things to be able to make an economic effort at it.

So I felt this profound split, and it was hard work then to establish and learn the skills. And from all of us in some way, the things that we struggle with most, don't we end up becoming the best teachers of? And I think that's what happened, was that I came to financial planning because I wanted to deliver myself into a life of freedom. And I figured that this new skill, this was back in the early '80s, that this new profession that was just arising was a profession meant to deliver people into their dream of freedom. And I thought, "Wow, I want to learn how to do it for myself, and then I want to bring that to my tax clients."

Michael: So what advice would you give younger, newer advisors coming into the profession today in this emergent AI era that they would be coming in today?

George: I think the first thing I would do if I were coming into this today is even before I would get a certified financial planner designation, which would be really high up on my list, I would take the EVOKE course. So I knew exactly what I was doing in terms of delivering clients into their dream of freedom. I knew exactly how I could do it. And then all the stuff that I would learn in the financial planning profession would immediately be of benefit to the people I was working with.

What Success Means To George [1:27:33]

Michael: So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the themes that comes up is that word "success" means very different things to different people, right? Sometimes it changes for us throughout our own lives. I would imagine you've had clients where their responses to the three questions actually changed over the years. So you've had this wonderful path of building successful businesses, building a whole movement around life planning. And so the business boxes of success, as it were, seem well-checked. How do you define success personally for yourself at this point?

George: I think if I were to define it and still define it as an aspiration, Michael, I would say that I would love to live so...in the Three Domains of Freedom, the first domain is each moment is yours. And I would love to live so much, so present in the moment that when I met someone, whether they're an old friend or brand new, that I would be present enough to bring a kindness to them that might change their life, that might make them either on that day or in their life, a better person. That would be extraordinary to be able to be that present.

Michael: To be able to be that present. That's an interesting way to frame it. Well, thank you, George, for joining us on the "Financial Advisory Success" podcast again.

George: Thank you, Michael.