The Flourish Feed Podcast

Eighty five percent of Canadians have no estate plan. The consequence does not land on them. It lands on the people they leave behind.

Greg Barnsdale spent a career in funeral service and wrote Do Not Ignore Your Mortality. He makes the case that mortality planning is a financial discipline, not a morbid one, and that the cost of skipping it compounds in every direction at once.

The tax argument is the cleanest. Planning opportunities basically disappear the moment someone dies, so the window is entirely in advance and most families spend it avoiding the subject. Then the human cost. Settling an estate, in his phrase, is a bureaucratic ultra marathon, and an estate that was not structured properly produces complicated grief on top of ordinary grief.

The fix he keeps returning to is not a document. It is a conversation, held early, that tells the people who will have to act what you actually wanted. End of life planning should not be done at the end of life. Handling it well is one of the more loving things a person can do for their family.

For anyone who has a will and has not opened it since it was signed, and for anyone who has named an executor without asking whether they know what that involves.

Chapters:
00:00 Why mortality planning is a financial discipline
03:01 The reluctance to discuss it at all
06:01 Estate planning and financial security
08:49 Goals and objectives in legacy planning
11:42 The economic ripple of poor planning
14:59 Online wills, where they work and where they do not
18:02 The multiplier effect
21:08 What bad planning does to grief
24:10 Cultural perspectives on death planning
26:50 Rituals that make the conversation possible
30:00 Executor education and estate literacy
32:53 The gift of love in mortality planning

Greg's book and tools are at Do Not Ignore Your Mortality. Online estate platforms named in the conversation: Willful Canada, Legal Wills Canada, Epilogue Wills, Ontario.ca, and LegalZoom in the United States.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Leaders using AI are reporting a drop in productivity. Not a rise. That is the finding this episode is built around.

Dr. Jennifer Churchill calls the mechanism cognitive debt. Outsource enough thinking to a machine and the capacity that did that thinking degrades, quietly, the way an unused muscle does. The tool delivers the output and takes something back that does not show up on the invoice.

Her response is not abstinence. It is protecting cognitive reserve deliberately, keeping the human skills in use rather than in storage, and building enough psychological safety in a team that people can say what the tools are actually doing to their work. Rituals matter here more than policies, because a ritual is what survives a busy week.

She also takes on the part nobody covers, which is that brain health is gendered and the research and the advice mostly are not. And then the economics: brain capital as a category, and what it means when a country's cognitive capacity becomes a measurable asset.

For leaders who adopted these tools quickly and have not asked what it cost.

Chapters:
00:00 What AI is doing to leadership
08:45 Cognitive debt
17:56 Brain health is gendered
26:52 Identity in the age of AI
27:56 Meaning and purpose
30:42 Human connection in a tech driven world
34:32 Rituals that hold the balance
40:09 Brain capital
43:28 The private podcast series
49:20 Moments of bliss

Dr. Churchill's private podcast, AI Without Anxiety, is open to subscribers, and Flourish Feed listeners can use the code FLOURISH for a reduced entry fee. The McKinsey Health Institute paper discussed is The human advantage: Stronger brains in the age of AI.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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The future is not something to wait for. It is already forming, in signals you can observe today if you know which ones count.

Nick Griffin founded Munro Partners and is its Chief Investment Officer, with more than two decades spent on thematic investing. His method ignores the traditional economic indicators in favour of long term structural trends, on the argument that the trend is what actually decides which companies exist in ten years.

The S-curve of adoption is the tool. Amazon and Facebook did not win on execution alone. They sat on a structural shift in how people behaved and rode the steep part of the curve. Finding the next one is a question of reading where a behaviour is changing, not where a price is.

He names three themes: artificial intelligence, decarbonisation and security. And he does not dodge the part most fund managers do, which is that technologies capable of enormous good are capable of the opposite, and that owning them is a moral position as well as a financial one.

The last third turns human. What work is for, what purpose looks like when machines do more of it, and why human interaction becomes more valuable rather than less.

Chapters:
00:00 Thematic investing
01:53 What it actually means
04:21 Reading the signals
06:18 The moral side of owning it
09:50 Why the shift happened
12:17 AI, decarbonisation and security
15:11 Where AI goes
20:20 Physical AI
24:27 The human element
27:54 Work and purpose
30:50 Human interaction in a tech world
35:35 Moments of bliss

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement, and the difference decides whether it buys you time or costs you your voice.

Kristin Parise is a pelvic health physiotherapist who rebuilt how her business runs around AI tools. She is not a technologist and that is why the conversation is useful. She wanted her time and her energy back, and she went and got them.

The counterintuitive result is more human contact rather than less. Repetitive work moved to automation, which left room for the client interactions that actually needed a person in them. She used the same approach to produce an entire conference, and she is specific that the output is only as good as the prompt and the instructions behind it.

The thing she guards is authenticity. Used carelessly these tools flatten how a person sounds, and she treats that as the line rather than a risk to manage. Custom tools for team training and collaboration, yes. Her own voice on the page, always.

For women running a practice or a small business who keep being told to adopt AI and never told what it is actually for.

Chapters:
00:00 AI and human connection in business
02:37 How Kristin got here
05:44 The first attempts
11:52 AI as a thought partner
17:26 Getting organised
20:13 Automation
25:21 Producing a conference with it
30:10 Reclaiming time and energy
35:25 Attention and client experience
39:08 Moments of bliss

Kristin is on LinkedIn, Blueberry Pelvic Health is on Instagram, and The Pleasure Principle Women's Health Conference takes place on 8 May 2026.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Solve for the right things. Most investors are solving hard problems that do not matter, carefully.

Marc-Andre Lewis is President and Chief Investment Officer of CI Global Asset Management, and he came to markets from theoretical physics. That shows in how he works: build a model, break the complex thing into parts, then find the few drivers that actually move the outcome and ignore the rest.

Applied to a portfolio it produces an uncomfortable conclusion. The headlines about inflation, AI disruption and volatility are mostly noise, and the discipline is in telling that from signal rather than in reacting faster than everyone else. He is direct about where that goes wrong, particularly for younger investors, where a fast information flow turns investing into gambling.

What he says to solve for instead is narrow. Know your objective. Watch growth and productivity. Rebalance. Diversify, properly rather than decoratively. Then be patient, which is the part that cannot be optimised and is the part that works.

The conclusion is worth sitting with. Macroeconomic forces matter, and a sound process matters more.

Chapters:
00:00 Clarity
02:18 Where science meets markets
04:51 Decision frameworks
06:47 The danger of trading on emotion
09:56 Signal against noise
12:43 What professional management is for
16:02 Planning for uncertainty
19:20 The metrics a long term investor watches
22:23 Designing a resilient portfolio
29:51 Diversification
32:29 Principles for the next decade

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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You choose your own hard. Both roads are difficult, and the only decision is which difficulty you are signing up for.

Michael D'Angelo coaches athletes and spends this conversation on what separates movement from momentum, and talent from mastery. His answer is not effort. It is the willingness to sit inside discomfort instead of routing around it, which is where the transformation actually happens.

Closer is better. That is his standing correction to perfectionism, and it is why his people keep going after a session that did not work. You do not need the perfect execution. You need to get closer than last time, and to still be there next week.

He is good on the machinery underneath it. Neurochemistry and emotional arousal decide performance more than willpower does, attention is the skill that produces flow, and the emotional weight of winning and losing is data rather than verdict. If you cannot get past not getting the outcome you wanted, there is no opportunity to learn from it.

And the line he keeps returning to, which is really about the second half of life rather than sport: what a shame to quit learning.

Chapters:
00:00 A blueprint for flourishing
01:59 From athlete to coach
07:22 Accidental purpose
13:35 The five buckets
15:48 Mindset and mental shifts
24:48 Neurochemistry and high performance
33:40 Winning, losing and what it does to you
36:55 Growth
40:51 Attention as the skill
45:51 Emotional arousal and performance
50:49 How mindset changes with age
55:27 The paradox of fitness across life stages
01:00:03 Fitness, community and what comes next

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Fix gender equity in entrepreneurship and global GDP rises by 20 percent. That is more than AI is promising, and nobody is building a fund around it.

Eleanor Beaton founded SAFI Media and coaches women running seven and eight figure businesses. She spends this conversation on one pattern, over functioning, and what it actually costs.

Her framing is the sharpest thing in it. When women over function, they reduce their ambition to match their energy levels, and nobody has unlimited energy. So the ceiling is not confidence or capital. It is the amount of other people's work being absorbed for free. She calls pushing yourself hard enough to damage your relationships and your health what it is, pollution, and says women leaders are done absorbing the cost of it.

Then the practical half. Not being a fast responder, trained deliberately, as a way of protecting attention. Delegation as a leadership skill rather than an admission. Boundaries around time held with humour rather than confrontation. And her mother in a car, furious, telling her money is power and to always make her own.

For women building something with their own capital in it, and for the people advising them.

Chapters:
00:00 Business models that support the person running them
03:09 Agency and autonomy
06:01 Over functioning, and what it costs
08:58 Women and wealth dynamics
11:51 Working inside male dominated structures
15:03 Building a team that does not need you
24:44 The power of a supportive question
25:43 Time management for people with none
29:36 Raising resilient young men
32:57 Attention in a noisy world
37:23 Where women in business go next
39:11 Moments of bliss

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Your most vibrant decades can still be ahead of you. That is a claim about tissue, not attitude.

Dr. Edythe Heus built Rev6, a brain and body training system, and her argument starts with fascia, the connective tissue most training ignores. Keep it healthy and strength, balance and mobility hold. Let it stiffen and the decline everyone calls aging arrives on schedule.

The counterintuitive part is instability. Most training chases stability, and she trains the opposite deliberately, because a nervous system that has to respond to uncertain ground is a nervous system that stays sharp. The same logic runs through her work on the feet, where movement actually begins, and the pelvic floor, which she treats as central to aging well and which almost nobody discusses.

What makes it land is that the cognitive and the physical are not two tracks. Movement changes how the brain works, which is why her seniors programme is about clarity as much as balance, and why she keeps coming back to purpose and community as part of the training rather than a nice extra.

For people who have decided which decade they get old in and have not checked whether that is true.

Chapters:
00:00 A different view of longevity
03:02 Fascia and aging
05:58 Movement and the nervous system
08:56 Why instability is the training
11:56 Flow and peak performance
14:56 Mind and body as one system
18:04 What this looks like for seniors
20:56 Reframing core training
24:00 What modern life does to movement
26:57 Injury and what it really costs
30:12 It starts at the feet
32:56 Abs, posture and the essentials
35:53 How Rev6 came about
38:47 The pelvic floor in aging
48:44 Movement and purpose
55:29 Small actions, big changes

Dr. Heus wrote ProBodX in 2003 and created Rev6 Vitality, a seated programme for seniors, in 2016. Rev6 became an NASM and AFAA continuing education provider in 2023 and has been covered in Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Sporting News, the Los Angeles Times and Time Out New York. Rev6 have offered Flourish Feed listeners a limited time 50 percent off the first three months of the Rev6 On-Demand subscription at Rev6.fit with the code FLOURISH.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Fear is learned. That is the part people miss, and it is the reason the fix is not courage, it is dosage.

Robin Esrock has been to more than a hundred countries and wrote The Great Canadian Bucket List, now in its third edition. His TEDxVancouver talk has passed 1.1 million views. He came on to argue that travel is a wellness practice rather than a holiday, and he is specific about the mechanism.

Anybody travelling for a long time, he says, is usually running away from something or searching for something. Both work. What does not work is waiting for the right age, because there isn't one, only a triggering moment you either take or do not. And the antidote to a media diet that leaves you frightened of the world is not less news, it is a small dose of the actual world, taken often.

The thread that runs underneath it is community. He has watched happiness turn up in places with almost no money in them, reliably, in the company of other people. That is the same finding the research keeps producing and it is why this sits on a wealth show at all.

For families with the means to go anywhere and no clear idea what they are going for.

Chapters:
00:00 Courage and curiosity, not distance
02:12 What travel does to who you think you are
05:02 There is no right age, only a triggering moment
10:13 Dosing adventure against a media diet
13:03 Travelling as a family when nobody wants the same thing
16:11 Budget to luxury, and why preferences move
19:47 Bucket lists that are actually yours
21:46 Where happiness turns up, and where it does not
30:04 Community and purpose
39:43 Moments of bliss

The Great Canadian Bucket List is in its third edition. Flourish Family Wealth is partnering with Robin later this winter on building a bucket list for your own reasons rather than somebody else's. Subscribe at www.flourishfamilywealth.com for how to apply.

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

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Sleep is not something you fall into at the end of a day. It is something you design.

Aimee Griffiths founded Rise Lifestyle Co and works on sleep and recovery. Her reframe is that sleep is the most powerful performance tool available and the one nobody treats as an investment, because it looks like an absence of activity when it is the opposite.

The body rebuilds in it. Deep sleep is when growth hormone does physical repair, and the brain spends the night cleaning and processing rather than resting. Skip it and the cost shows up everywhere at once: focus, emotional resilience, athletic recovery, and the quality of every relationship you have the next day.

She is even handed on the technology. Some of it genuinely helps and some of it produces anxiety about a number, and knowing which is which matters more than owning the device. The changes that move the needle are smaller and less interesting than the gadgets: the environment, the nervous system going into the night regulated, and a ritual that means the same thing every evening.

For anyone treating sleep as the thing that gets sacrificed when something matters.

Chapters:
00:00 Sleep is not passive
02:40 Health, happiness and performance
03:40 Sleep, exercise and recovery
07:30 Deep sleep, growth hormone and repair
12:45 Nervous system regulation and emotional resilience
18:30 Designing the sleep environment
23:50 Sleep technology, help against confusion
30:10 Sleep as a longevity investment
39:20 What it does for relationships
40:30 Moments of bliss

Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.

Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.

Connect with Gillian:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers
https://x.com/GillianStovelR
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself

Send TFFP your thoughts!