Financial DNA - Discovering Your Unique Financial Personality for a Quality Life

Did you know that icebergs connect below the surface? Well people do as well. This is where truly lasting relationships are formed. So how do you get below the surface and connect with others? I am not just meaning a one sided conversation where you find out the other persons dreams and aspirations. How do you share some of who you are with them?

What I am talking about is creating a safe environment for a Wealth Mentoring Conversation, which is by its very nature mutual. Why would a prospect or client, or for that matter any one else, start totally sharing who they are with you, if you do not reciprocate? I appreciate this is not the normal approach in a traditional advisory relationship, which by its very nature is somewhat one-sided. However, in a wealth mentoring relationship where you are building a long term relationship with the client to be their trusted guide, it is absolutely foundational. This is a key differential in building trust along with listening.

At the start of a radio interview, I was asked a fundamental question: What is the relevance of behavior to your wealth creation?

In my view, your behavioral style is foundational to your wealth creation. When I use the term "wealth creation" I do not just mean money or financial wealth, it also includes your whole of life wealth.

I adopt the approach that the correct place to start building true wealth in your life is from the inside. In essence, I have an "inside-out" approach to wealth creation.

What do you do when you have multiple passions?

This is a great position to be in, particularly as many people do not lay claim to having one passion. If you do have multiple passions then in my view you are very wealthy in terms of having a quality life. Some may be surprised to know that Financial DNA is not my only passion. I add in the development of youths as another, then watching cricket (sorry not baseball!!) and other sporting activities, and wine tasting.

The key is to work out how all of your passions can get squeezed into your busy life.....

In my last topic on engaging the client, I concluded with the comment that facilitating the Financial DNA profiles with your clients is easier than you may perceive, and does not have to take you away from being an advisor to a counsellor. There is no doubt this is a concern for some advisors particularly for those who have been more focused on the investment side of the business.

In my training sessions, I often use the golf analogy, if you already have a good golf swing meaning you are a good client facilitator, then Financial DNA is putting a much better golf club in your hands. So we are not here to change your swing, just make the ball contact better and straighter, meaning have a more powerful conversation. I wish to be clear that the goal is not to convert advisors to being counsellors or defacto psychologists. Rather, our goal is to take a lot of the guesswork and assumptions about client behavior out of the client discovery process.

Interestingly, the most common question that we have been asked by financial advisors is: How do I get my clients to take the profiles? Will they do the profiles?

I have been in the shoes of the advisor introducing the Financial DNA Profiles and fully appreciate the questions. Being honest, when I started down the track of introducing the Financial DNA profiles to my clients in 2001 and, before then asking more probing life orientated discovery questions, I did not necessarily expect such a process would be for everyone. Particularly in Australia where there is less personal openness than in the United States. There is no doubt that I was expecting resistance.....

Communication is a significant theme in Financial DNA and one that I am often asked to talk about. Certainly, it is a foundational starting point in all of our work with advisors and clients.

How advisors and clients communicate is not only important to the quality of the relationship but also to the quality of the financial decisions that get made. What happens when the communication is poor is that people start making decisions around each other because the trust has been diminished. Also, poor decisions get made because the information has not been heard as intended. The same is true when couples, families, business partners and teams communicate.

January is traditionally a time to decide on a New Year resolution and then for most people, within a few weeks, to break it! Some manage to stay the course and succeed but most would agree that successful New Year resolutions are few and far between. Why do most people fail in achieving their resolutions? The reason is very often because they do not have a process for converting the resolutions to goals and then writing them down with an accountability framework.

to find out more, please listen to this podcast, or visit our website - www.financialdna.com

In order to understand where you are going (in life and financially), you first need to understand who you are. And in order to understand who you are, you need to understand where you came from. Your values, education and environment all interplay in a complicated way to determine your financial personality, and understanding the impact of these influences is key to the self-discovery process.

Whether you are aware of it or not, your values are a very important part of what drives your day-to-day decision-making. However, many people go through life purporting to have certain values yet these values do not correlate with the way they live their lives. How many people say they value family but spend little quality time with their children? How many claim independence as a high priority and then work in a job that is more like a prison sentence? In cases like these, it may be that they are not acknowledging or recognizing their true values. Or it may be that they are not really living their lives in accordance with their values.

No one can deny the power of someone being passionate about something. We have all witnessed the all-consuming, potentially irrational attitude that is associated with a person pursuing their passion, whether it is their business, a religion, a sporting activity or the latest addition to the family.

Uncovering your passion and then finding ways to incorporate that passion into your everyday life can be a difficult process. It can also be invigorating. Living with passion covers every aspect of your life so that even the most mundane acts become flushed with purpose.

This is why understanding your passion is a fundamental part of the process of developing your financial plan. If you don’t know what drives and motivates you, how can you manage your financial resources appropriately?

Where is your life going well now? Are your business and family relationships aligned? What is the purpose for your life? Are you making committed decisions? How do you want to be remembered?

Building a Quality Life is a continual journey. There is always a way to make your life better no matter where you have got to: whether it is having extreme financial wealth, being the President of your company, a sporting star or community leader.

Ultimately, how well you synchronize all aspects of your life is the key. In particular, what we have seen is that you cannot separate your life and financial decisions. They are integrated. So how does one continually balance these choices?