Todd Ballenger: Founder of the National Institute of Financial Education

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Uh, welcome to another episode of Nurturing Success where we chat with financial planners, advisors, other related financial professionals, talk about life and business and things we hope will improve the world out there. Today I'm very excited to have as my guest Todd Ballinger. Um, Todd is a longtime friend, mentor, uh, has had a profound influence on my life, um, both professionally and personally. Um, and I'm looking forward to a wide ranging conversation today. We'll see where it all goes. Todd, so thank you for being here.

Speaker A: Hey, thanks for having me, man.

Speaker B: You are very welcome. Um, so I love to start always with nice sentiments. So, Todd, what are you grateful for today,

Speaker A: man? Let's see. I am grateful, uh, for a good night's sleep. You know, it's just, it's a simple thing, but it's amazing how when you have a good night's sleep, what, what the day feels like compared to, uh, a not so good night's sleep. So, woke up today and said, you know, I feel rested, ready to go.

Speaker B: I mean, we could finish right now. That's profound, right? That's literally will make the world a better place if everyone got a better night's sleep. Right. So thank you. Um, and I also got a pretty good night's sleep last night, remarkably. Um, so thanks. So Todd has a really unique background, which I just wanted to have him kind of go through briefly just to kind of set the table for how I think this might help other folks that might listen here at some point. So, Todd, maybe if you run me through a quick professional background would be helpful.

Speaker A: All right, I'll give you the speed date version. Uh, started out to be a realtor, got a real estate license in college and didn't realize until I started working with realtors that I had to work on the weekend. Work on the weekend. So, uh, kept that license and became a licensed insurance agent. Started selling insurance and then decided I wanted to be a full service financial advisor. Got my securities license, I had real estate securities, insurance license. I opened, uh, my own financial services company underneath, uh, Washington Square securities and Rely Star Money Financial. There were a couple different companies we worked with back then. And for the first couple years of my career I was a financial advisor. Traditional. Sit down. What's your problem? Where does it hurt? Let's see what products are going to, you know, fix whatever ails you. And then of course you mature and start to realize that they're just, they just have problems, you're trying to help solve them. But I noticed that a lot of the problems people had, uh, were Being overlooked specifically on what I'll call the liability side of the balance sheet. They weren't thinking about how they were going to repay their debt, their credit cards. They were often making these mistakes, simple mistakes like not refinancing when the rates were lower, uh, paying off, uh, their mortgage without paying off their credit card debt, you know, at different rates. And so I decided to become a lender, um, but I didn't want to call myself a lender or loan officer. I said I was a financial advisor. So I'm going to become a liability advisor and help clients think about borrowing from the sort of financial perspective, kind of holistic. And that decision had a huge impact, uh, because it allowed me to build a mortgage company around these concepts of liability management. We grew very quickly. Uh, we grew so fast that we became one of the largest, if not the largest independent mortgage broker in the state of North Carolina. We grew to seven states. We took that public as something called mortgage.com, uh, back in 1990, um, eight, I think it was September of 98. And then from there I've stayed in the industry. I've done just about everything you can do in the mortgage industry, uh, from consulting to developing technology and software, to building out marketing programs and consumer direct related stuff. And you know, just have always loved sort of the liability side of the balance sheet, but also believe we should be looking holistically at all three sides of the balance sheet.

Speaker B: Uh, thank you, that was great. And so that arrives at the intersection of how I know Todd because uh, uh, I'm on the liability side, so full time lending. Um, but I knew something was missing in the planning I was doing for clients. And so when I found Todd, um, we realized we had very similar ways of approaching planning and thinking. And so that's kind of led to this long relationship. Todd also happens to be the founder of the Certified Liability Advisor designation amongst a couple others. That's the one that's sort of forefront these days where he helps financial planners and advisors and lenders kind of come together, cross the balance sheet and do work to help our clients and so forth. And there's several hundred people with that designation and further widely connected, thousands of people that read his material. So well versed in all things on both sides of the balance sheet really. Todd, um, what led you to create that CLA designation? Why did you do that? It's a lot of work.

Speaker A: Well, when I got my insurance license and I went to the first MDRT Million Dollar roundtable, uh, conference, um, I realized that financial advisors, insurance Agents, they had designations. They had done additional work to educate themselves, and they were awarded with these letters. You know, a, uh, CPA is obviously different than someone who's not a cpa. It's just accounting professional or enrolled agent. And so I looked out there and there was nothing in the mortgage industry. There was no designation that signified that someone was willing to go the extra mile to learn, study, and better themselves. So I created a designation for our company so that I could designate within our company who was really willing to learn and go the extra mile. And even within my own company, company, I had loan officers that wanted to do that and wanted to keep growing. Others that said, I don't care. It said, I'm just, I'm just going to go do my thing, take orders. I don't care about all this other stuff. So that taught me a lot right there that even within a company that I owned and worked for and was mentoring and nurturing these people, some people wanted to learn and grow and develop themselves and some, some didn't. And after we sold that company, uh, you know, I had that designation and the education and my book and other things. And I thought, you know, maybe other people want to learn, uh, this stuff. And so I started marketing and sharing the designation out there in the industry. A few years later, the national association of Mortgage Professionals came out with a designation which we ended up actually being one of the collaborators on that because we had our designation out there and we started working with them some on that. And then over time, you've seen a few more pop up in the mortgage industry. But, uh, we still like to think we had not only the first designation, but the most comprehensive designation for professionals.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, and just from personal experience, has made all the difference in my professional career over time. M. Within our work we do together, we talk about skill set and mindset. And a lot of the conversations I have in this format have been about skill set. So I want to spend our time today talking about mindset. So this is something that you've personally helped me with quite a bit. Um, and I want to apply it to practicing advisors that they have all the skill set. They understand the products, they understand how they might fit into someone's plan, but maybe they struggle with the mindset part of it. And how do we, uh. I think the word balancing life is kind of cliche, but I mean, the idea that there's more to life than just, you know, you're helping someone, you're doing product and so forth, what else is there out there? So, and we'll talk more about that. How did you start to develop that mindset for yourself and sort of become such an important part of who you are?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think of mindset as, like, your operating system, right? Like, if you use a Mac and I use a PC, um, we can sit here and still talk and communicate because we're using an operating system that's called English, and we kind of know what the other person's saying. But if you gave me your Mac and I gave you my PC, we would both struggle because those operating systems are different. How they work, how they engage, how they, uh, approach things. I would be a lot less efficient with a Mac because I'm used to PC. Um, so this operating system that we have is really a mindset. The skill sets, the skills that you learn over time are largely, uh, based on repetition, like muscle memories. You know, Think of a sport when you first, you know, you want to play guitar, you want to learn to play golf or tennis. I mean, you don't even know what you don't know. You have no clue until you get out there and you got, okay, this is a ball, these are clubs. You, you start learning the skills that you need to play golf. But at a certain point of development, you realize the skill set. Like, when I started playing guitar, I was like, man, you know, within my first lesson, I learned a song, and I thought, this is easy. Two chords, and I'm kicking ass playing a song, right? But you realize that that learning curve starts off very quickly, you know, and then you realize, oh, my gosh, there's so much to learn about chords and frets and notes and blah, blah, blah. And so. And then you realize, okay, that the skill set will only take you so far. Because then there's this whole thing around mindset. I mean, I played tennis since I was 7 years old. I played at the college level. Um, once you get to a certain point, it's not about skill set anymore. It really becomes all about your mindset. And I would lose to players who were bet who I might have more skill, but they had a better mindset, right? Maybe they were less temperamental, they were more relaxed in certain situations. But I started to notice, wow, it's like, I'm developing skills, but I need to develop a mindset. And when I started at a particular time in my life reading, um, you know, success to a positive mental attitude, psycho cybernetics, thinking grace, these are things that I got exposed to when I was in my late teens, um, and early 20s, uh, fortunately, someone shared some things with me and I was like, it changed my whole, like, world. And I realized, wait a minute, the skill sets are really valuable, but the mindset, I mean, that's informing everything. Not just how you develop the skills, but how you feel about what you just did. I mean, someone can hit a bad golf shot and feel great about it. M. Someone can hit a perfect golf shot and feel bad about it. Well, that's not skill set, that's mindset. Right. So this mindset started for me to be like the thing that I really saw as a differentiator in terms of not just, you know, success, but more importantly, how do you feel about success? Yeah, right. And, and that's really because again, I could. You can become a multi millionaire and feel like you're poor because, you know, someone that has more than you do. It's all the relative nature is so important to start examining. And I do think for most people, they'll spend a lot of time on skill set. They'll invest a lot of money in skill set. Uh, they don't tend to always want to focus on the mindset. It's almost like, ah, uh, it's not important. I just got to get good at, you know, this. But you can be great at skill set and still be lousy at what you do if you don't have the right mindset.

Speaker B: So let's say we're talking to, maybe it's not younger advisors, but maybe it's people that are earlier in their career, whether they're in, you know, mortgage, they're in, you know, financial planning, whatever, financial services in general. So they're early in the careers, they're still learning their skill set and so forth. How would you encourage them to start to incorporate mindset training, thinking into their practices, into their work so that it becomes foundational to allow them to maybe expand in a different way?

Speaker A: Great question. So if you imagine a seesaw, right, because we talked about skill set and mindset, I kind of think of that left brain and right brain. Right. You know, the left brain can, you know, is sort of your creative. Well, that's like mindset. And the right side is more of that technical, um, you know, part of your or your thing, but, but they're still, they're both really important. You know, if you lose one side thing and a seesaw is not very fun, uh, if there's only one person on it. So if you can consider or just entertain the idea that every single moment that you're engaged, like right now, there's a skill that we have of communication or talking or language and stuff like that. But the mindset's there too. It's informing maybe what we choose to talk about. The questions you choose to ask, uh, that's not a skill set. That might be a mindset because of something that you're curious about or someone listening to this, you know, says, okay, I got to get better at this. I'm like, okay, if the better at this is a skill set, what's the mindset you need to develop as well? Right? It could be a, you know, some. My, my son used to joke he's the grind set he would call it, which is like a mindset of working hard. Well, yeah, that's a mindset. And if you have a uh, a grind set of working hard, you're going to get and develop skills very quickly because you're willing to work hard at it. If your mindset is, I don't want to work hard at it, I want to just sort of lay around until that cook goose flies into my mouth. As, as, as they used to say, you know, you're going to be waiting quite a while because uh, a cook goose, campfly and so, but that, you know, if you'll just at least entertain the idea that everything contains its own sort of opposite. And that means you may have the mindset and think you're great, but without the skill set, sorry, you know, there's no proof that you're great. You've got to have the skill set, but you've got to co develop the mindset along the way. And so what I often do is like, you know, you know, AI is a new thing that wasn't really around just three or four months ago. So I had to say, I don't have a skill set. I don't understand AI but I think it's going to be a big deal. So I said to myself, what skills do I think I need to learn right now to start becoming better at using it as a tool? And to start I needed to ask myself, well, what is the mindset that I need to have? Hmm. Right. Am I open and flexible or is it fearful? Is, am I doing this because I'm afraid it's going to take my job and destroy, you know, uh, the things that I thought were really important? Or am I just going to play with it and be open minded and explore? Um, am I going to approach this in a very rigid like, okay, I'm going to do this step by step by step and take a course kind of A thing to get started or am I just going to watch videos and explore and see where it takes me? That's what I mean. Like the mindset is as important, if not more important as the skill set. Because it informs how you're going to build and develop that skill set over time. Yeah, no, I love that.

Speaker B: And uh, you know, I've seen that in my own work and my interactions with you kind of over time, kind of, kind of understand that. Um, okay, so now let's bounce the other side. So we're talking to advisors. They've been in the, in the. It might be 30 years in. They have a great practice, they got 150 million AUM, their cash flow is good, they travel, they have a family, all those kind of things. Um, and maybe they're grinding. Right, right. So, so skill us. Ah, mindset might be. Well, it's important to all people, but so how might they approach mindset differently if it's not really part of what they're doing today? How would you talk to them?

Speaker A: So you're asking if they're. So if they're a financial advisor and things are going well. Right, sure. Um, is that kind of what you're asking? And then kind of, yeah, sure, yeah. So. So things are going well. I mean, you know, it's easier to sell aspirin than vitamins. Right. Because, you know, vitamins tend to support overall well being. But I know where it hurts, when it hurts. Right. And so oftentimes, let's just say what would be a good way to say this? Um, you know where it hurts and if you know where it hurts, that can be a skill set or a mindset. If it's a mindset, it's often harder to get at because mindset is formed over a very long time through a lot of repetitive patternings. And you could say, like, okay, I play a lot of tennis, so I hurt my elbow. It's called tennis elbow. That's a repetitive injury. And if that's hurting, there's certain things I can do. I can wear a brace, I can use ice afterwards, but I know where it hurts. And there's a certain skill that, uh, maybe I'm just holding the racket wrong and there's a skill that I need to learn there. Right. But mindset is kind of weird because for some of us it's like the air we breathe. Like when I first started working with a coach, the coach pointed out to me, um, as a teacher, you're running your car at 7,000 RPM. Mhm right. And that's okay until you have to pass another car. And life is going to present you with opportunities where you need to do that. What are you going to do then? Because if you try to pass in, you're going to blow the damn engine up. Uh, it's not going to work. So you really. And not to mention, over time, your car is going to burn out pretty quickly. And at that time in my life, I was pretty young, but I was exhausted and burned out, and I'd never even started to really think about things in this way. And so you have to kind of look at the long game. You have to also, uh, accept the fact that sometimes the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, it's just, it's hard to know that we're in pain because we're so used to it. It's like our pain tolerance gets so high that we're not sort of clear that, wait a minute, you're in pain, you're just used to the pain. So sometimes it's different. You know, pain is really great teacher. It tells you where to, you know, where it hurts, you know what to do and what to maybe start thinking. But, uh, sometimes people don't know they're in pain. And that is a whole different conversation. That's a mindset where. And it's a skill set to start to identify in your own life, where am I in pain? And I'm not willing to acknowledge that I'm in pain. And that can be stupid stuff like, I'm making a ton of money right now, but I'm still not happy. Right. Okay. That's a mindset problem. You've got the skill set of making money, but if you're not happy making that money, you're not enjoying your life, then maybe there's a mindset that needs to get a little bit of attention. So hopefully that kind of.

Speaker B: No, that's, that's perfect. Um, and that's obviously a subject that we could spend hours, days, weeks, months and years exploring as we have.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: All I will say to that is the word awareness is a word that I use often, uh, to help bring me back to sort of these ideas that if I'm just aware of something, it's the first step to acknowledging there might be a problem because I think I agree with you. Most people don't maybe don't even understand they're in pain or something's going on. They just. Something's not quite right and they don't know how to get there. Becoming aware of something is the first step. So I'll kind of leave it at that. Um, so I'm going to read uh, you something that you wrote, um, and then you can tell me how you got to that and kind of what it means because it's related to this topic. So the mantra retire from the notion of retirement. Q is work is a four letter word, but so is love.

Speaker A: Dang. Wow. Uh, you dropped the mother lode there.

Speaker B: Right, so that's a big, that's a lot of stuff there. But I think that is where there's a lot of pain for people, especially in the financial services where you do have to grind for most people, right? And you got to get through. And the successful career is not built in a day. It's built over years and years potentially. And is retirement important? Is it not? I don't know. So it's something I struggle with. So I figure other people having the same thing.

Speaker A: Okay, let's try to see if I could take those in order. I'm going to actually start where you left off with, with awareness. Because it's such a powerful, um, concept. It's often misunderstood, but if you, if you really understand awareness itself is a solvent. Um, most problems are simply patterns that are unobserved. Right. That you. And when I say unobserved, they've just become like we were saying, they become what you think is. And without examining what is, you accept it. Even if you're in pain, it just becomes the pain you tolerate. Awareness is a solvent and that just bringing awareness to things creates sort uh, of a magic, a resolution that starts to happen if you think you're bringing awareness to something which I'm going to call actually attention. The difference is when I start to bring awareness to something, it's non judgmental. I'm simply becoming aware. Uh, and I'll use a, uh, budgeting versus dieting kind of a mindset, you know, to talk about that in a second. But if I bring attention to something, the problem is if I bring attention to it, I tend to also bring a judgment to it. And if I bring a judgment to it, such as I shouldn't be doing this or I should be able to do this at this stage of my life, or why isn't this happening? That's attention with judgment, which actually just tends to sort of do nothing but continue to sort of bind the Gorian knot, right? Just you don't, there's no relief from it. It actually feels more painful when you bring awareness. And so people, you know, say, you know, I Want to learn to budget. I'm like, that's horrible idea, right? Because while budgeting is a skill set, it's like dieting. It's almost guaranteed to fail because dieting is based on deprivation, a reduction in calories. But to the, to the human, that's deprivation. Budgeting is deprivation. So if you actually just bring awareness to your spending, right? And we're going to get to your other question around work and love and even retiring from the idea of something. But if I just bring awareness to what I'm spending, that awareness informs. I start to pay attention to that. Starbucks was $7. It's no better than the $2 Nespresso I had or the $1 cup of coffee that I could buy, you know, or, uh, get at work for free. It wasn't that much better. So you start in bringing awareness. The behavior shifts simply because you're aware. If you're judging, I should be able to get a $7 cup of coffee because I deserve it, because I work hard to. All you're doing is just, you're just binding things up. So I like to say, look, if you want something to change, don't do anything about it. Just become aware of it. And keep staying aware of this makes me angry or this frustrates me. Just keep the fact that I'm aware of this and in that stuff starts to happen, don't do anything about it. Become aware of your spending, become aware of your eating. And when you become aware of your eating, you suddenly you're sitting there going, why am I just sitting here taking these chips out of a bag and eating them? It's just a habit. It's just a pattern. It's just. It's like I'm really not enjoying them and suddenly the behavior can shift. So the idea of retirement is just an idea, right? The problem is if you have an idea of like retirement, then you have to set up all the conditions that go with retirement, which could be age, money, time. And all of these things are assumptions. I don't know when I'm going to die. I don't know how much money I actually need. It depends a lot on what, what I want to. I mean, If I have $3 million and I want to retire, I can retire on that. It depends if I. My goal is to go to Monte Carlo. I can't even buy a house, maybe for that. So, you know, so I can't. So there's so many variables. And again, it comes back to the awareness, the fulfillment. So I like to say I want to retire from the idea of retirement. Because once I do that, I'm just living. And if I'm enjoying the work I'm doing, why would I want to retire from working? So then the question becomes more for me, what would I never want to retire from doing? Mhm. Because if I can retire from the idea of retirement, I'll just do the things that I enjoy. And if I'm doing the things I enjoy, I'll keep doing them. And most likely I'll keep getting paid for them. So I'll have the money I need. And if I have more money than I need, I can give it to my kids, I can spend it, I can adjust my lifestyle accordingly. But a lot of these things, the notions themselves become the bondage. Like so the idea of retirement becomes a bondage. We live in our entire lives to try to get to some amount of money so we can stop working. And then we're terrified the market's going to crash. Then we're terrified that bitcoin, uh, is going to replace the dollar standard or I don't have enough gold. And it's like all you're doing is continuing to push this idea of retirement around. So I'm like, gosh, you know, the only thing I care about retiring from is, is from the idea of retirement. And then if I don't have that, I don't need any particular amount of money or anything else. I'm just going to work and enjoy the time that I have doing the things I enjoy doing. So now to your last point. What is work and what is love? Well, if you love what you do, then aren't they the same? Like isn't the work itself just, you know, your expression of love? Because you're talking to people that you enjoy and yeah, I mean, uh, everybody has stuff that they hate to do on a day to day basis. I hate sending stuff to my accountant and doing taxes right now for my business, which is due, you know, by March 15th. I mean, that's not something I enjoy. But I still have to say I enjoy the conversations with her. We're figuring stuff out. So it's like, okay, these notions of work, notions of love, they still, they're the same thing. They're just ideas and notions that we kind of live into. And for me, I want the two to collapse as much as possible because if I'm going to retire from the idea of retirement, then there can't be a shadow between work and love. Right? Because that if you really, if someone says to you, what do you Love. You know, one of my favorite definitions is you just ask them, well, where do you spend your time? Because that will tell you what you love. If you spend all of your time playing golf, you probably love golf. You spend all your time with your family, you probably love your family. If you say, I love my family, but you spend all your time at work, then I'm going to say, well, there's maybe a little bit of a gap there, right, between what you think you love and how you're actually living. And that's where that work and love kind of need to sort of dance together.

Speaker B: I mean, it's. And there's a lot there, right? It's really powerful. Um, and it applies right. When we think about business being productive, having a business, helping people, those kind of things. These lessons can be woven throughout there. So just a simple awareness of what your day looks like. Ah. And what you're doing during your day. And depending on how you define productivity could become important. So to folks that are out there trying to understand how this conversation we're having applies to your business, it's everything about your business. It's what you do during your day and what you find yourself loving, what you're doing with your day. And of course, there's things you don't love doing, um, at the end of day, but awareness, it all starts with that awareness kind of piece, right. And where you're kind of going. And there's a lot more work to be done, but that's okay. Um, all right, so let's go back to liabilities a little bit, if we could, and talk about, uh, you know, for advisors. Right. So the work that I do and that you support and you help a lot of us with is trying to. Trying to partner with successful and whatever financial planners, advisors to understand how to incorporate liability planning or management into their practices. So what would you tell advisors if they're not currently thinking about liabilities as part of that practice? Just kind of off here on the side. What do you. What would you encourage them to do to, uh, sort of get a greater understanding of it?

Speaker A: I would say start in your own home. Is the home, uh, a point of wealth that you consider to be important? In other words, is the value of that home something that at the end of the day you care about? It could be because one day you'll sell the home and. Or one day you'll give it to your kids or whatever. But is it an asset? And for most of you, I would hope you would say, yes, it is an asset. It is important to me. And ask yourself, is it a liability? And how is it a liability? It may have a mortgage, certainly has taxes and insurance and homeowners insurance and things like that. So it is a cash flow liability. Uh, it's a time liability, meaning grass. Have a roofer coming later to look at something, right? I mean, there's just things you have to do with this thing called a house, but it is an asset and it is a liability. Um, that's not true for a lot of things. I mean, a checking account is an asset, but you don't think of it as a liability for the consumer. Um, you know, four, uh, hundred 1K is an asset. Um, credit cards are a liability. There's no asset to a credit card. It's just a liability. But a house and a mortgage, they live on both sides of the balance sheet. And so if you're a financial advisor, you don't have to say, hey, it's just going to be important to my clients. I'm like, start with you. We spent years with Schwab Merit Prize, Merrill lynch advisors out on the road talking about this thing called liability management. And we would simply start with, you have a house. What's, what's it worth? What's the offsetting liability? And let's just do a little net worth, little balance sheet, right? You got a $500,000 house and $200,000 mortgage. You have 300,000 net worth just with the house. Now expand that to all the other assets and stuff. And if this is important to you or at least something that you think about, occasionally your clients are thinking about it too, right? And they think of you as their financial advisor. And if they think of you as their financial advisor, they probably have, uh, questions, whether they're asking them or not. When we started looking deeper into this and asking the questions of clients that worked with many of these advisors through surveys and other things, we found they had lots of questions and they didn't know where to ask the question. I don't call my realtor. My realtor sold me the house. But they're not going to help me manage my real estate or figure. I don't call my loan officer necessarily because they've sold me the mortgage. But I haven't heard from them since. And, you know, I don't know what they would do. So the only person they can think of, that's when we call them financial advisors. We don't call them mortgage advisors. They call mortgage lenders, you know, called realtors, not real estate advisors. They're realtors, but it's a financial advisor. That's again, why we wanted to be liability advisors. We wanted to set things up to say, if you are a financial advisor and you have clients that live indoors, then it's likely that they have questions about their house and their borrowing and other things. And if they don't, their kids do or their parents do. And you may or may not have the ability to answer that question cogently because you've never been trained, just like I, you know, or John hasn't been trained to talk about, you know, uh, investing and diversification, risk and all those kinds of things that you might be trained as a financial advisor. So by gosh, it's a two sided balance sheet at minimum. But I really think of it as three sided balance sheet. And if you're a financial advisor, whatever stage of life, if your clients care about it, you should care about it and you should, uh, have someone in your life that can talk about the liability side of the balance sheet the way you talk about the assets side of the balance sheet. And that's really the whole message. And then that's the mindset. The skill set is okay, learning to talk about products and risk and the right way to pay the mortgage back and things like that. Just like the financial advisors talking about, you know, risk management and risk tolerance and liquidity and things over time. That's the skill set side of it. But you got to have the mindset that this is, uh, important to you and your clients and you're going to have clients as liability advisors that are going to be caring about the wealth and they need to talk to financial advisors as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, that's perfect. I want to ask, you mentioned something in there. Um, I'm not sure there's a clean answer for this one, but, um, clients have questions whether they ask them or not. Is there a skill set question that you might suggest that we, all of us could use to help elicit better responses from our clients in that situation? Is there a way to get them to maybe give you the question behind the question or those kind of things? Anyway, I'm not sure if you understand what I'm asking there, but.

Speaker A: Well, this, uh, is something that, you know, I think it was Tony Robbins a long time ago says it takes you three questions to get an honest answer. So one skill set is simply asking the same question at least two or three different ways to get to the point where you're actually getting a real answer. It's kind of like, John, how Are you? And you say, fine, yeah. And I say to you, okay, that sounds good. Um, how are you really?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. And then you say, I'm, I'm okay. You know, I didn't get as much sleep in one last. I mean, but how are you doing overall? I mean, you know, scale of one to ten, I mean, how you really do it? You're like five. Okay, that's cool. So if you're a five right now, what would it take for you to be a 10? What's, what's the gap between where you are right now and where you want to go? Um, do you have any idea? Have you thought about that? You know, and so it's like, know that you're going to probably have to ask a few times to really get an answer. And quite honestly, uh, asking someone multiple times is not only centering for them because they're probably distracted and stay distracted until they know you're serious. Um, but also communicates that you care. You know, it communicates that you're actually interested in their response. And in some ways, once they see that you're really interested, they become interesting. They start to talk in a different way and suddenly realize, okay, you know, but now that's just broadly speaking. But now when it comes to things like the house, you know, we had questions, we used to like to ask and say, you know, if there was something that you thought was true about your house that wasn't, when would you want to know? Right. Um, have you ever paid extra on your mortgage, and if so, why? And that was a question we asked with the merit prize advisors and their clients. And it helped us to acknowledge the fact that a lot of their clients were prepaying the mortgage without telling their advisor. So that was cash flow that could have been going into investing accounts, it was going towards the house. They just didn't know why they were doing it. They were just doing it because it was made as much sense as anything else. So now you ask, what are you trying to accomplish? Well, I want to pay off my debt. Why do you want to pay off the debt? Because I don't want a monthly payment anymore. So why would you not want to have a monthly payment anymore? Because I want to have more cash flow. What would more cash flow make possible for you? You know, I think I'd have a better life. Ah. Uh, now we're on to something. The person wants a better life. My question is, is that the best way to get there? And if it isn't, what might it be? Might there be Another way to get there that's even faster, more efficient, more effective. So it's like when you start just asking questions and you ask the question of the question, you start to get at, uh, what it is that they really care about. And that in of itself, once you know what they care about, actually answering the question is easy. If you've got, you know, some skill in what you do. Right. It's when the client has no idea what they want, you're kind of all over the place. It's hard to really, you know, uh, respond.

Speaker B: Uh, so if you didn't catch that, that was a masterclass in asking deep questions to get, really, to get your client to tell you how you can best help them. Because at the end, that's our job and that's our, our, our. We're blessed to help people, right? And you need to get down to what they need and what they really want in order to be able to help them in the most effective way. So thank you for that, Todd. All right, so we're going to wrap here pretty quickly. Um, Todd publishes a fantastic newsletter. How many subscribers we have to now

Speaker A: approximately about 7,000, I think.

Speaker B: Great. So we'll put the link in the notes so, uh, you can sign up for it. It's weekly, uh, it's a little bit wide ranging. Talks about assets and real estate and liabilities and AI and all sorts of cool stuff. It's ah, it's a must read every week. I love it. We're going to wrap, otherwise we'll keep talking for hours and hours. Um, but I won't leave you the last word, Todd. So if you want to put something out in the world that's positive, it could be advice, just a quote, something that's interesting. What do you want to leave us with that's going to make the world a better place today?

Speaker A: Uh, I would say if you. In the world we live in right now, there are two superpowers. One is curiosity and the other is flexibility. So be curious and stay flexible because it's easy to get broken right now. If you hold on to anything, I don't care what it is, you just got to be loose, go with the flow, be like water, as Mr. Bruce Lee used to say. And, um, you know, if you could only now, when I was younger, all I cared about was muscle strength. And you get older, all you care about is flexibility. And I do think there's an analog to that, that in the times that we're going through right now with so much, um, change, the fourth turning, you know, is a bigger, broader topic that's happening right now. But at the end of the day, just give yourself a break. Cut yourself some slack. Be flexible, go with the flow. Um, and at the same time, curiosity goes a long way to helping just, you know, find your way. You know, climbing a tree in the dark.

Speaker B: Thank you. Awesome. I appreciate your. Todd, thanks for your time today.

Speaker A: Thanks, man.