As advisors, we spend a lot of time and effort helping clients set goals. That’s because goals are foundational to financial decisions around investments, asset allocation, and income planning. On one of our recent weekly radio shows on WCCO in Minneapolis (AM 830), we invited our long-standing friend Doug Lennick to discuss the connection between achieving purposeful goals in your life, and how they need to be tied to values. Doug is the founding CEO of think2perform, a high-performance leadership development firm, and is widely recognized as an expert in the art and science of human behavior. Following is an abstract of our discussion, edited for length and clarity.
Doug, your latest book, “Don’t Wait for Someone Else to Fix It: 8 Essentials to enhance your leadership impact at work, home, and anywhere else that needs you,” draws a strong connection between self-awareness and goal achievement. Why is that?
Self-awareness is about the ways we go about pursuing our goals. The book breaks down the process of achieving purposeful goals into four steps that my co-author, Chuck Wachendorfer and I call the 4Rs: Recognize, Reflect, Reframe, and Respond. Recognizing is most closely tied to self-awareness. It’s tied to our experiential triangle of thoughts, feelings, and actions. In the financial world, many of our money decisions are not only heavily influenced by our thoughts, feelings, and actions but also by those close to us. It’s the reason why I believe we must invest with our personal values front and center, and not some abstract notion of maximizing returns simply for the sake of returns.
It's also why the ability to have a goal and visualize it is so important. For example, you want to know where you want to take your life now or during the next chapter and visualize what getting there will look and feel like.
Once someone has settled on a goal — whether it’s to retire at 63, travel, or buy a second home, what are the next steps?
Step 2 is having a plan. In my many years working as a financial advisor and financial planner, I discovered that people who have a plan do better than those who don’t. Before you can plan, however, you need to assess your current behavior and how you’d prefer to act. A plan helps to close the gap between these two points by setting mission-critical activities you can take to advance toward your goal. Then, the next step is to implement the plan, which is when the hard work really begins. Remember, a perfect plan is meaningless unless you can execute it. An implementation may require setting micro goals and nudges to get you to change the way you have been doing (or not doing) things in the past — including turning bad financial habits into healthier ones. The point is to get started, and not to expect 100% change overnight.
That’s an interesting insight. What we tell our clients is that a well-crafted financial plan shouldn’t change that much, but it must be resilient enough to anticipate and adjust to potential dangers and changing life events.
Exactly. Step 4 in our process of achieving purposeful goals is to control direction. That doesn’t mean changing direction with every shift in wind direction. It means tracking your progress toward your goal and redirecting as needed. The goal is not perfection: It’s about charting a course so that as events unfold, you can make needed adjustments while staying clear about the overall direction of the goal. Let’s say you and your spouse are four years out from your intended retirement date, and one of you is laid off in an industry with diminishing prospects. Ideally, a thoughtful financial plan would allow you to have the financial breathing room to either find a new career path or shift to a part-time job to keep you on track to reach your retirement goal.
How do you advise people to keep working intentionally toward their goals when life throws such big curve balls?
Make no mistake: Pursuing new goals in the face of adversity or changing life circumstances is difficult – they often entail doing things you’ve never done before. It’s quite likely for mistakes to happen that lead to unintended consequences and discouragement. Throwing off discouragement means tapping into your resilience and getting support from others you trust and respect. I also think it’s the big reason that people chose to work with experienced, qualified financial advisors. A good advisor can do a great job at helping you set purposeful goals and aligning them with what matters most to you. And that, I think, is one of the keys to having a long, meaningful, and happy life.
The original article was published by the Pioneer Press .
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Wealth Enhancement Group and Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services are separate entities from LPL Financial.
