Moving From Level One to Level Two

 

I believe that both professional advisors and their clients and donors are ill-served when the only option available is the traditional Flatland model of planning focused on transactions, money, analytics, and quick fixes. I call that model of planning Level One.

At SunBridge we have developed an alternative story-based approach that is more suitable for many clients and donors (and their advisors) because it addresses their deeper human concerns, it acknowledges that their real wealth is not limited to those things that can be tallied on a balance sheet, and it recognizes that many of the most important questions in planning cannot be answered with a number. In short, Level-Two planning produces better bottom-line results as well as better human results.

So how can a financial advisor, an estate planner, or a philanthropic professional move confidently from the Flatland world of Level One to the multidimensional world of Level Two? Even though this shift employs story, the natural medium we all live in and our common native language, it’s not always easy for us to make this change.

In many cases, vaulting permanently into the rewarding world of Level-Two advising demands work, commitment, and persistence. Getting to Level Two often requires us to hack our way through the underbrush of years and perhaps decades of Level-One indoctrination and training. It sometimes necessitates replacing lots of deeply imbedded old habits by gently cultivating new habits and then strengthening them over time. Such a transformation is not an instantaneous event but is an ongoing process. It requires four essential ingredients that must be persistently applied and re-applied in generous quantities. They are: 1) a new mind-set; 2) a new skill-set; 3) a new tool-set; and 4) a new support-set. These four steps are illustrated in a teaching tool we use at SunBridge called “Taking Charge.”

A New Mind-Set. To successfully effect the transformation from Level One to Level Two, we must first develop a new mind-set. We must think differently about who we are, about who our clients or donors are, about what wealth is, about the purpose and meaning of our work, and about the value we are trying to create in the world. Until this mental shift happens, the conversion cannot really start to develop. Until we can truly see ourselves as operating comfortably and authentically in this new multidimensional realm, our transformation will not make much progress.

Without a soul-deep shift in our thinking, everything else we may attempt toward moving to Level Two will turn out to be shallow and artificial. Being a Level-Two advisor is not a garb we put on for certain occasions, nor is it a set of techniques we employ for effect. It is a way of thinking, a way of feeling, indeed, a way of being. It all begins with a new mind-set.

A New Skill-Set. Once our thinking has shifted, the next step in the transformation process is to develop a new skill-set. Operating successfully at Level Two requires that we employ additional capabilities beyond those we used in Flatland. Level-One skills are not jettisoned as we are converted into a Level-Two advisor; we still need them just as much. But we must add further strengths and talents to our repertoire.

Developing these new Level-Two skills is an on-going process that can last a lifetime, but fortunately we don’t have to be perfect at all of them to get started. What we do need from the start is an attitude of openness and teachability, a willingness to learn, experiment, and practice. It also helps to have patience with ourselves while in the learning curve, and the courage to dare to be ugly as our new skill-set is maturing.

A New Tool-Set. Working effectively and efficiently in the rarified air of Level Two will require us to employ a new tool-set. Tools — whether simple tools like the wheel, the lever, or the inclined plane, or complex tools like the computer, the automobile, or the airplane — are devices that allow us to accomplish bigger results with less exertion, in less time, with less resistance, and/or at a lower cost than we could achieve working with our bare hands.

Given the huge expenditure of energy and attention required for most of us to transform ourselves and our practices from Level One to Level Two, we probably couldn’t pull it off without a smart set of new tools, custom-designed for the task. We would simply wear out before we arrived or would get lost along the way.

A New Support-Set. Finally, given our human tendencies to slip back into old patterns, fall back into old habits, or run out of resolve, we will need a new support-set in order to complete this transformation. We need scaffolding to prop us up and an outside push to keep us moving forward as we embrace this new approach to life and work. We need goals and deadlines and accountability. We need pioneers who have blazed the trail ahead and guides and outfitters for the journey. We need coaches and teammates and cheerleaders and more-experienced players as role-models.

Hopefully, we can develop a community of like-minded colleagues who are on the same journey, a circle of friends who share our vision and who are willing to help us as we help them. In this case, it really does take a village.

The SunBridge Legacy Builder Retreat, The Advanced Legacy Builder Retreat, The Legacy Builder Network, and The Legacy Chat Workshop provide the new mind-set, skill-set, tool-set, and support-set that thoughtful advisors need to effect this transition. I invite financial advisors and estate planners to learn more at www.SunBridgeLegacy.com, and I invite philanthropic professionals to learn more at www.TheLegacyChat.com.

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I believe that any significant and lasting change in human behavior must progress through the four steps outlined in the “Taking Charge” graphic image shown above. It is one thing to use this process to change ourselves. It is quite another to use it to help our clients and donors make significant and lasting changes within themselves.

In their seminal book, The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore identify the ultimate economic offering to be, contrary to the title of their book, not “staging experiences,” but rather “guiding transformations” — helping customers change their lives. They predict that “[o]nce the Experience Economy has run its course, the Transformation Economy will take over. Then the basis of success will be in understanding the aspirations of individual consumers and businesses and guiding them to fully realize these aspirations.”

When our Level-Two clients and donors start coming to us seeking help to change some aspect of themselves, their family dynamics, their businesses, or their legacies, we begin to move into the realm of the Level-Three Advisor. That’s when this “Taking Charge” four-step model really starts to get valuable and exciting. And that’s a subject for a future article. Please stay tuned.

Level One -- Clinging Tightly to a Sinking Ship

 

Osceola McCarty, a black washerwoman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, singleHere at SunBridge we teach that there are three potential levels of service and relationship between financial advisors, estate planners, and philanthropic professionals and their clients and donors. The deficiency of Level One planning is that it reduces client and donor service to a transaction-based activity centered around money.

Such activity, while undeniably part of the “elephant,” is just one part. Money actually is not the most important form of a client’s wealth, but we professionals have trained clients and donors to believe it is, to the point that they don’t think of their wealth as something beyond money and property, and don’t even realize that they can and should be asking us questions of value and meaning that go well beyond this.

I think the traditional, linear form of client and donor service is like the Titanic headed straight for the iceberg. Financial advisors, estate planners, and philanthropic professionals who cling to this ship now find themselves dealing with a generation of consumers who have come of age, have more material wealth than ever before, and bring higher expectations than any preceding generation that the key advisors in their life will be men and women with insight, awareness, and compatible values.

As a result, advisors who still practice at Level One are coming to realize that they have to, as Lewis Carroll put it, “run twice as fast as they can just to stay in the same place” when it comes to marketing. They have to continually bring in new business, but as long as this new business focuses on quick-fixes and transactions, every sale or every donation essentially means they will have to start over tomorrow.

At Level One, it’s difficult even to imagine ways to add value, but without added value, the relationship with the client remains little more than an isolated, hit-and-run encounter. Further, the clients of Level-One financial advisors often put off long-term, whole-life planning, which leaves the advisor in the unenviable position of having to persuade the client to make a commitment to financial services he or she needs. And when the market declines sharply, as it has done several times in the last few years, there’s a lot of blame and finger-pointing, and eventually shuffling of accounts. With no reservoir of good will based on deep relationships, that’s not surprising.

For estate planners, it’s even worse, because the Level-One service they provide usually centers on death and disability — issues that people routinely put off until, for whatever reason, they can’t postpone them any longer. As a result, the Level-One estate planner is constantly working uphill. He or she has no context for answering the question, “What do you talk about with clients after you’ve covered taxes, death, and disability?” And what do you talk about in the first place when there are few tax issues to consider, as is the case for most clients today? Not surprisingly, a substantial number of estate plans are never signed, even by clients who have already paid for them.

In the case of philanthropic professionals, working at Level One is a shallow game of hide and seek, a frustrating chase that has become increasingly difficult in a world when every prospective donor can screen his or her calls, emails, and texts, and who ignores every direct-mail piece the nonprofit sends. There is a constantly growing need for more giving, and sharply increased pressure from the organization to raise more money, but a diminishing pool of contact-able donors to respond to the fund-raisers’ pleas.

Over time, even those few who do listen will tune out or die off. It can be a dreary prospect, pushing the philanthropic professional to move on to yet another nonprofit in search of greener pastures. Unfortunately, there is usually no more grass in the new place than there was in the old.

It is my view that continuing to perpetuate a Level One model of professional practice in today’s world is a recipe for personal and professional disaster. Beyond the consequences for the client or donor imposed by Level One service, there are serious side effects for the advisor­ — side effects that fairly compel us to ask new questions and, eventually, to move into a reality with options for greater depth. Some of the more serious effects for the advisor are:

1. The products and services that the advisor offers are largely indistinguishable from those offered by competitors (except perhaps on the basis of price), making positioning all but impossible. As a result, these products and services — and by association, the advisor himself — become commoditized. This drives down value and price, making it necessary for the advisor to offset shrinking profit margins by constantly increasing the number of sales just to maintain the same level of income, which creates a marketing reality of diminishing returns;

2. Because there really is no deep and engaging relationship with the client or donor, eventually, the advisor becomes bored with the repetitive, “cookie cutter” quality of the services he or she provides. No client or donor is going to be more enthusiastic about working with you than you are about working with them. This is why so many professionals experience burnout after even a relatively few number of years in practice;

3. The stability of the advisor’s practice remains highly susceptible to shifting economic, legislative, and market conditions. Because the practice is predicated on numbers alone, any changes in laws, regulations, national or world economic conditions, or other factors that affect the numbers, will directly — and often adversely — affect the practice. The unpredictability of such an arrangement fosters a sense of anxiety in the advisor about the future that aggravates the already unsettling marketing reality;

4. A schism develops b etween th Sharing and Saving a Lifetime of Stories e advisor’s work and personal life that greatly reduces his or her ability to be useful to clients and donors. While many things may have great relevance and meaning to the advisor personally, there exists no conduit for incorporating these into the professional practice. The sense of work as something fundamentally separate from life increases, with corresponding increases in tedium, indifference, and suspicions of irrelevance apart from dollar values alone. And ultimately, dollar values alone cannot provide any deep or lasting job satisfaction or feeling of usefulness and purpose.

Even financially successful advisors are starting to question the stress, tenuousness, and dearth of personal fulfillment inherent in perpetuating a practice limited to Level One client service. For example, Mark is an estate planner in a large southwestern city who has a steady stream of clients and a lucrative business, but he’s grown bored with the repetitive nature of his practice and alarmed about the effects of Congressional tampering with the estate tax laws and the threat that they’ll be eliminated altogether.

“Work just isn’t fun anymore,” he confided in me. “I didn’t get into this profession to become a mechanic, but that’s what it feels like a lot of the time.” Staying at Level One is a formula for boredom and burnout, one that leads to the advisor getting stuck on what we in SunBridge call “the marketing merry-go-round,” because the advisor has to keep pushing people into the pipeline as clients and donors move quickly in and out of the professional relationship.

I firmly believe that professional advisors who do not rise to the challenge of meeting the needs of their clients and donors as human beings, who do not shift beyond the old transaction-based approach to client and donor service, will have increasing difficulty succeeding and even surviving professionally in the years just ahead. They will be clinging tightly to a sinking ship.

At SunBridge, we are charting a new course to a truly client- or donor-centered model of practice, where the advisor meets the client or donor at whatever level the client or donor may be, and then invites the client or donor to move — at the client or donor’s pace — to increasingly more profound levels of advisor/client relationship.

Ultimately, at Level Three, the professional advisor serves clients or donors as an architect of sorts, helping them define and design a future of greater abundance, purpose, and significance, and then as a general contractor in turning their blueprint into reality. Those who are able to envision a future for themselves of working with their clients or donors in this way are enjoying greater abundance, purpose, and significance in their own lives, as they produce the same result for those they serve. We invite you to explore this brave new world with us.

Selling the Invisible

 

Most of us make a living selling something that can’t be seen, can’t be touched, can’t be tasted, smelled, or heard. We sell services.

Unlike ice cream or perfume or a brand new car, which purchasers can experience with their senses, what we offer is invisible, intangible, and has no taste. Whatever “it” is that we sell, “it” happens largely inside the customers’ brains.

So how do we persuade our customers to buy from us something that has little or no sensory input?

Surprisingly, in the same way marketers sell Haagen-Dazs, Obsession, or a shiny new Lexus. Those products are sold when their sellers succeed in creating inside the minds of their customers a future story of pleasure experienced or pain avoided.

Take for example, every perfume commercial you’ve ever seen. What are they selling? Romance, adventure, seduction. Or at least the imagined hope of it. Buy this perfume, dab it on, and that’s what will happen to you. Can’t you just picture it?

Or consider all those Lexus commercials last December. You know, the ones with the devilishly beautiful couple still in their pajamas on Christmas morning, one leading the other out to magically unveil the shiny new car with the big red bow on top. What are they selling? An over-the-top surprise gift, leading to overwhelming gratitude on the part of the [wife, husband, girl friend, boy friend], leading to ... Well, you get the idea.

The key to the sale is the future story brought to life inside the mind of the prospective customer.

This is just as true for you as for your local Lexus dealer: To sell a professional relationship with you, you must bring to life inside your prospect’s mind a narrative of a shared future, one in which they are finding happiness or avoiding danger because you are a part of their life.“Great,” you say, “but how do I do that without the benefit of sensuous smells, new leather seats, and a million dollar TV advertising budget?”

My answer: learn to master the art of story.

There’s something different about the way a story touches us and inspires us and moves us to take action, compared to other ways of communicating. Steve Sabo captured the essence of this difference when he stated:

Tell me a fact and I’ll learn.

Tell me a truth and I’ll believe.

Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.

It is not altogether clear why stories have such impact, but I believe it has to do with the way the two sides of our brains operate. It is thought that the left hemisphere is the critical, analytical side. Its function is to process numbers, evaluate data, and keep things neat and tidy. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is the intuitive, creative side. Its function is to think imaginatively, handle abstractions, and form and decipher stories. Storytelling and story listening are definitely right-brain activities.

The mental picture I have is that when story-based information is directed toward our brains, it gets routed to the right side, whereas numbers, statistics, and logical arguments are directed to the left side of the brain. Upon arrival, bundles of information sent to the left side (numbers, statistics, and logical arguments) are scrutinized and critiqued careful and skeptically, because that’s what the left brain does.

Story-based information, on the other hand, is subject to less cynical review because that’s the way the right brain operates. It’s as if stories bypass the harsher scrub-down and go straight into the system. And since most of our important decisions are made intuitively and then later justified analytically, stories can be very potent in moving us to action. When it comes to touching hearts and affecting behavior, a well-placed story is almost always more effective than numbers, statistics, and logical arguments.

Stories Connect Us on a Human Level

I have learned that stories are the real ties that bind, regardless of the type of relationship. Sharing stories is an honoring, intimate experience that results in feelings of closeness and affection.

Sharing stories is the best way in the world to connect with people, to understand them, and for them to feel understood. We create genuine human connection by sharing the stories of our lives. As we share experiences back and forth, we start connecting on a personal level. It’s very natural and comfortable.

I believe that we human beings are hardwired to connect with each other through story and to share important information, both factual and emotional, by sharing stories. For thousands of years, we sat around the community fire sharing the events of the day. We sat on the porch and rocked and talked about life. We shared happenings at the family table. We told our children stories at bedtime. We hung around the fishing hole weaving tales waiting for the fish to bite.

Today, however, with Twitter and iPods, text messaging and life’s busy pace, we don’t seem to have nearly as much time for story sharing. Nevertheless, I think it is still a basic human need to tell stories and to hear them.

Because this deep need to share stories is still strong within us but is so seldom honored in today’s world, when you offer to listen and share stories with prospects and customers, they appreciate it and they connect with you. As a result, they start to feel comfortable with you and trust you. One of the most important things you can do in an initial meeting is to use stories to nurture a relationship of sufficient trust so that when you ultimately offer your advice, prospective customers will accept your recommendations and implement them.

Stories Create Empathy and Understanding

By sharing stories, we are briefly able to see the world—or at least a part of it—from another’s vantage point. We take in their words, their tone, and their body language through our senses and send them on to our minds, where they become the catalyst for our own internal reconstruction of the life experiences they are sharing with us. Their stories remake the neuron structure of our brains, and thus they literally become a part of us. True empathy and connection occur.

Just as story sharing builds human to human connections, conversely, whenever people reduce or terminate story sharing between themselves, their relationships are weakened. If you look closely at any relationship that is fading or already dead, you will find the parties to the relationship—whether friends, a married couple, family members, management and labor, or even nations—no longer share stories.

In fact, if you work back upstream to the point in time when the relationship turned from good to bad, you will discover it was at that moment that the parties stopped listening to each other’s stories and stopped trying to tell them to each other. I’m not sure which is cause and which is effect, but I’m certain that, left unchecked, the cessation of story sharing is an unmistakable harbinger of the death of the relationship. Strong and lasting human relationships require the sharing of stories.

A Secret about Stories

We connect with those who listen to our stories, and we cherish those whose stories we have truly heard. Through stories, we understand their world and they understand ours.

The fact that this can happen quickly, almost immediately, is one of the keys to honest and authentic professional selling. When two people meet at the story level, they don’t need decades of memories to create a meaningful friendship. They become friends by creating a positive story of their future together. Friendships turn prospects into customers.

My third book, Double Your Sales: An Honest and Authentic Approach to Professional Selling, is based on these principles. It teaches how to use story to connect, to humanize, to warn, to encourage, to clarify, and to share information, both personal and professional.

Most importantly, it shows how to use stories to create between you and prospective customers a shared narrative of your future together. It allows both you and them to visualize a tomorrow in which you are working together for your mutual benefit. Without that, few if any sales are likely to happen.

Fortunately, you don’t have to become a professional storyteller to be a successful salesperson. You don’t have to understand all the details about stories and how they work, any more than you must be able to service a modern computerized, fuel-injected automobile to successfully drive it. It doesn’t hurt to know those things, but it’s definitely not required. Your innate skills as a storyteller and a story listener, with a little practice and a little polish and with an engagement process based on a sequence of storytelling and story listening will be enough.

But the key is to remember that the most important story of all is the one being created in the mind of your prospect – a future story of pleasure experienced or pain avoided, resulting from their relationship with you and their implementation of your client process. That is the way to sell the invisible.

The Life Circle: Roadmap to Better Planning

   

Financial and estate planners traditionally have focused on money and property as the defining elements of a client’s wealth. But consider this: If your house were on fire, and you had time to save only one possession, which do you think it would be: the cash in the top drawer of the dresser or your family albums with the only photos of your children as babies?

Money has value, but only quantitative value. We inherently understand that many things hold far greater value than money, and we readily would part company with all our money rather than lose something that holds tremendous emotional value for us. As the MasterCard commercials rightly recognize, we can buy many things of value with money, but some things are “priceless.”

Now, here’s a fascinating question for you as a professional: If you asked your clients the “burning house” question, what would you expect their answers to be? Wouldn’t you be surprised if even one of your clients said that they would forfeit the irreplaceable photo albums in order to save the cash?

If so, this means that you already recognize that real wealth is not limited to money and property. It’s just that, until now, in the traditional world of financial and estate planning, the wealth of a client’s life—the admittedly greater wealth that belongs not to money but to meaning, history, relationships, purpose—this wealth has been “none of your business.” It’s personal, and traditional financial and estate planning are largely impersonal. And this is exactly what changes when we enter the world of Level-Two client service. It becomes personal indeed, to the point that the client’s most meaningful wealth informs the decisions that determine how the client’s money and property are managed.

It is crucial to understand that these areas of wealth, which Level-One client service largely ignores or, at best, regards as incidental, move to center stage in Level-Two client service. The ancillary questions that you may or may not have asked a client earlier will now become the crucial, defining ones— questions about the things they value most. such as their heritage, personal history, and values.

Before we discuss how you can do this, let’s look at a map of what a client’s comprehensive wealth typically includes. We call this map the Life Circle. It’s actually a tremendously useful tool to have on the desk when talking to a client, as it illuminates, in a highly visual way, the Level-Two axiom that a client’s wealth is far more than his or her material assets.

You can readily see that Level-One client service deals only with the upper left quadrant, the “Financial” area, essentially ignoring the other three areas as well as the areas in the center. This way of thinking has led us to ignore more than 75% of our potential usefulness as financial professionals whose purpose is to advise clients in the management of their wealth.

Of course, we didn’t realize this. We may have thought of the categories contained in the center and upper right and lower quadrants as the province of genealogists, therapists, clergy—but certainly not the hard and impersonal lines of financial advising. We simply haven’t had the vision, concepts, methods, and tools needed to acknowledge and work with them. The simple truth is, whatever a client values is part of his or her wealth. As such, it may directly or indirectly affect decisions involving any area of wealth, including finances.

As professional advisors, we’re trained to focus on the financial, legal, investment, and tax issues that affect our clients’ wealth. This is all good, solid, Level-One thinking. But we shortchange our clients if the services we provide fail to take into account and appreciate their wealth as extending far beyond money and property alone, because the most significant wealth we possess as human beings is not material. Material wealth, considered in isolation, is devoid of any real or enduring meaning. If our services deal only with the client’s money and property, and ignore the client as a human being, then those services are similarly devoid of any real or enduring value.

The Life Circle reminds us that clients come to us with a heritage that connects them to a past, to people and places, cultures and traditions out of which they emerged into their present life. Each client is part of a family that has shaped his or her identity, beliefs, and values. All belong to a larger human community through friends, work, the organizations to which they belong, and the causes they hold dear.

Through the stories of their past and their vision of the future, they naturally seek to learn and grow humanly, to live whatever spiritual life speaks to them, to be responsible and skillful stewards of their life’s riches, to shape their destiny, and to move into ever deeper fulfillment of their life’s meaning and purpose. Properly addressed, understood, and applied, these non-material assets inform the client’s material wealth with meaning and purpose, and establish real and lasting value in the professional relationship.

The Life Circle is a visual reminder that we humans are so much more than our bank accounts. It helps us to remember what’s most important, and to make sure that we acknowledge, appreciate, and honor this in the way we provide service.

We sometimes use The Life Circle as a roadmap to help us visit the stories that shed light on the key components of a good plan. Those stories will lead us to answers to questions like “What do you see as your life’s purpose, and how did you come to understand what it was?” and “Who do you consider ‘family’ and what do each of them mean to you?” and “Besides your family, who else is important in your life and why?” and “What causes and organizations do you stand behind and what led you to feel that way?”

As those stories are shared, they lead the clients and us to consider, for each dimension of their lives, another important set of questions: “How do you personally define success in each of these areas of your life?” Once again, the answers reside in the client’s stories. Once again, by listening attentively and lovingly to their stories, we can glean the true answers. We can then ask the next questions, the questions at the heart of the matter: “What is still missing for you to feel successful in each dimension of your life and how can we help you achieve it? What are the stories you want to be able to tell about your life’s purpose, your family, your community, and your financial well-being, and how can we help you be able to tell them?”

The Life Circle reminds us that all the pieces of life are interrelated; similarly, all the stories are interrelated. A meaning of money story can tell us just as much about the meaning of family or the meaning of community as about the meaning of money. And the same principle applies to financial plans and estate plans: it’s never just about the money, because everything we do with the money affects the other pieces. It affects family relationships, it affects our footprint in the communities we care about, it affects our ability to live our life with purpose.

The Life Circle, in the hands of a caring SunBridge advisor, helps us understand and then piece together the most important parts of our life in a plan that reflects our deepest values. The Life Circle is the roadmap that leads to deeper, richer, more meaningful planning

Give the Gift of Self

 

“Silver and gold are not gifts, but only excuses for gifts. The only true gifts are gifts of self.”Anon.

In this season of gift-giving, it’s easy to get sucked into a frenzy of gift-buying. The urgency of checking off our list can seduce us into focusing on gifts that come from a store and can be tied up with a bow. 

Surely they’ll be appreciated when opened, but just as surely they’ll soon lose their luster and be forgotten. The truth is, most of what we purchase in our gift-giving frenzies are things the recipients don’t really need. A comment by Dallin Oakes, my university president in my undergraduate days, explains why these gifts ultimately leave both giver and receiver feeling empty: “You can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need won’t satisfy you.”

What they do need—and what we all need—more of is a little more old-fashioned human kindness.

I’d like to suggest that in lieu of (or perhaps in addition to) those store-bought gifts, we consider giving gifts that are a little piece of ourselves. But what to give? I believe if we pause and take time to ask ourselves one simple question, we’ll know what to give.

What can I do to demonstrate my love, esteem, respect, or appreciation for this person?

Note that the question invites us to “do” and to “demonstrate.” Loving, esteeming, respecting, and appreciating all call for expression and action.

Here is a short list to get you started. I’m sure your list will be much longer and more specific than this one.

Listen. 

Listen generously.

Listen generously to their stories.

Ask how they’re feeling.

Ask how they’re really feeling, and pay close attention to their answer.

Share.

Share what’s in your heart.

Share the stories in your heart.

Express appreciation.

Express appreciation that is specific, sincere, and succinct.

Express appreciation that is specific, sincere, and succinct in a written note.

Seek to understand.

Seek to understand, then to be understood.

Forgive.

Ask for their forgiveness.

Call.

Call just to say hello.

Call just to say hello and forget about the time.

Bake their favorite cookies.

Bake their favorite cookies and then eat them together.

Share some photographs together.

Hug. Hug long and hard.

Hug long and hard, look them in the eyes, and say “I love you.”

Hug long and hard, look them in the eyes, say “I love you, and here’s why . . .”

By now, you get the picture. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

What do you do at work, Daddy?

 

When they were smaller, my children used to ask what I did at work. When you’re not a fireman or a police officer but an estate planner and financial advisor, it’s a bit challenging to describe what you do to a five-year-old. As they grew, though, they figured out what estate planners and financial advisors generally do.

But in 1998 we moved to Orlando and shortly thereafter I started SunBridge. That renewed their uncertainty. Today, even though they’re smart and mature, they still have a hard time following the evolutions of this company.

They’re not alone. Professional colleagues frequently ask: “What all do you do at SunBridge? You seem to have such a wide array of offerings that it’s hard to understand them all.”

So, anticipating my family’s questions as we gather this Thanksgiving at my daughter’s new home in Wilson, North Carolina, and hoping to craft an answer that will also satisfy those professional queries, I wrote out the following description.

To my dear and precious Elisabeth, Nathaniel, Sara, Kate, Evan, and Paul (and all of my wonderful professional colleagues)—here’s what I do at work:

Our mission at SunBridge is to touch hearts and change lives. We do this by providing practical, affordable, and innovative training, tools, and support to professional advisors and to select client families in our area. Here’s a summary of our programs.

Services for Professional Advisors:

The Legacy Builder Network is a community of caring professionals who tap into the power of family heritage and legacy stories to develop deep, meaningful relationships with their clients and design financial, estate, and philanthropic plans that are based on their clients' most significant vision, values, and purposes. See www.SunBridgeLegacy.com.

The KEY Advisor Network is an alliance of attorneys and financial advisors who provide middle-class and upper-middle-class families the training, tools, and support they need to navigate the financial and legal issues of these turbulent times and to de-clutter their financial and legal lives, put their houses in order, get their ducks in a row---and keep them there. See www.SunBridgeKeyAdvisors.com.

Double Your Sales Professional Training is a client engagement system based on a sequence of simple stories that helps honest and authentic professionals connect with people more quickly and effectively and allows them to turn more prospects into customers—customers who buy, who buy more, and who buy more often. See www.DoubleYourSalesNow.com.

Time to Think Teaching and Coaching is an approach to leadership and professional services based on the observation that the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first, and the recognition that the environment we create will determine whether those around us can think for themselves with rigor, imagination, courage and grace. See www.TimetoThink.comand http://www.sunbridgenetwork.com/TTT.html.

Services for Client Families:

SunBridge KEY Advisor Planning is a common-sense, down-to-earth program for giving middle-class and upper-middle-class families in the Orlando area the training, tools, and support they need to navigate the financial and legal issues of these turbulent times, and to de-clutter their financial and legal lives, put their houses in order, get their ducks in a row---and keep them there. See www.SunBridgeKeyAdvisors.com.

Legacy Planning Associates is a comprehensive process for high-end Florida families in which hard-core legal, tax and estate planning is integrated with family vision, virtues, and values for a lasting legacy, assuring that a family’s heritage, faith and life’s purpose are the foundation on which to shape future generations of healthy, productive, and responsible children and grandchildren. See www.LegacyPlans.com.

The Money & Success Client Connection System is my process for engaging new clients. I use a Double Your Sales-based “Get Acquainted Conversation” to set up a deeply-connective Meaning of Money Priceless Conversation, which leads to customized estate or financial plan based on their money stories. Later, I use the Meaning of Success Priceless Conversation to begin a long-term advisory relationship by discovering what elements of success are still missing for them. See http://www.sunbridgenetwork.com/Money_and_SuccessHOME.html.

That’s it. Seven programs. All based on the power of connection, the power of story, and the power of thoughtful, integrated, people-centered processes.

In this effort, I am blessed with the greatest help on the planet. Sharon Greenway and Cyndi Campbell are the other members of the SunBridge team, and my partners at Legacy Planning Associates are Mike Cummins and Mary Tomlinson. Each one is brilliant, creative, hard-working, generous, and full of integrity. I’m thankful I get to work with them.

I’m also thankful for the blessing of being able to work with some of the most exceptional professional advisors and client families anywhere. Something attracts the best and the brightest and the most caring to our networks and programs—the kind of folks you’d pick to hang out with as friends if you could pick anybody. What I said about Sharon, Cyndi, Mike, and Mary— brilliant, creative, hard-working, generous, and full of integrity—is equally true about the advisors and client families we serve. Every minute spent with them is a treat.

As you can see, I have a lot to be thankful for. Life is good when you love the work you do and the people you do it with. As I’ve often said, if you want the perfect job, sometimes you just have to go out and build it yourself.

So now let’s get on with the turkey and dressing.

Knee Pads: An Eye to See, A Heart to Care, and a Will to Act

 

I heard a story this week at our SunBridge team meeting that I think must be shared. While Sharon Greenway will no doubt be embarrassed for others to know about it, her story must be told.

Sharon, our incredibly capable Chief Operations Officer, is an avid volleyball player, and she has passed on her passion for the game to her daughter, a high school freshman. Sarina is so passionate about the game that even though she is in a brand-new school this year, she is a full-time starter on the junior varsity volleyball team at Olympia High.

Last week, Olympia’s varsity and junior varsity teams played the teams at Evans High. Evans High is a struggling, traditionally black school in a low-income, high-crime section of Orlando. Athletics is one of the few positive outlets for a student body that doesn’t have many bright spots in their challenging lives. The matches were epic struggles between determined competitors, but ultimately the Olympia girls—most of whom play club volleyball on national traveling teams—were victorious.

But that’s not the story here.

As Sharon watched the two teams play, she noticed that, of the 24 girls on the Evans teams, only five had knee pads. To a serious volleyball player, knee pads are like shoulder pads to a football player or shin guards to a soccer player: you just don’t play without them. And yet, here were 19 girls who didn’t have them, scuffing and scraping their knees whenever they went to the floor.

Those bruised and bloody knees really bothered Sharon. Yes, those girls were competitors, but they were people first—people who couldn’t afford the proper equipment to compete fairly. That just wasn’t right.

But rather than shrug her shoulders, high-five her daughter and her teammates for their victories, and return home to her comfortable neighborhood, Sharon decided something had to be done.

She launched a campaign to round up knee pads for the entire Evans roster. She first contacted the parents of the Olympia players. Many had “extra” sets of knee pads they could give. Some wrote checks. Then Sharon reached out to her daughter’s club volleyball team and their parents. They too were inspired by Sharon’s leadership and an obvious need.

In short order, there were enough and to spare, for every girl on the Evans High volleyball teams to have her own pair of kneepads. The Olympia coach has invited the Evans teams to a joint clinic where each Olympia player will present kneepads to their opposite number from Evans. No more bruised and bloody knees for the Evans High volleyball team.

I’m sure there are some surly people who might point out that knee pads are not on the same plane as food, shelter, and medical care, but they would miss the larger point. I believe that any time there is a need we are able to address, we have a moral obligation to do so. The SIZE of the need is not nearly as significant as the EXISTENCE of the need.

I admire three things in this episode: First, Sharon perceived the need. How many other teams and how many other parents have played against Evans High this season and through the years, yet did not notice that only five players out of 24 had knee pads? How many were so caught up in winning the game that they failed to see the impact on the lives of those young girls?

Second, she cared. Having seen the need, she yearned to avoid a hurt, to right a wrong, to equalize an inequity. In her heart, she knew she could not turn a blind eye to what she had observed.

Then she acted. How many of our good intentions are ignored, or allowed to wither on the vine? How many acts of service are “procrastinated” into oblivion? How many of us “mean well,” but fail to DO well?

Here is the lesson I am taking away from the story of the kneepads: I will strive to have eyes to see, a heart to care, and a will to act, when I am in the presence of needs great or small. I cannot do everything, but I can—and I must—do something.

Thank you, Sharon, for teaching this lesson so eloquently.