Finding Abundance: Reframing Your Relationship with Money and Success for Inspired Purpose with Seth

[Music] today I want to talk about money and kind of our money scripts and our success scripts around money and how that can impact our paths to purpose I’ve been a wealth manager for 30 years I started my own company 22 years ago and I’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of families uh with regard to their you know Financial choices they make but even the more importantly the psychological uh unconscious and conscious uh guiding factors into those choices so I look forward to sharing a little bit with you all today and there’s so much I could unpack I’m going to have to try to just narrow it down and maybe we’ll do some subsequent programs so when it comes to success it’s hard to untangle the financial aspect to it so many of us have been raised with you know Financial Security being a top priority and often times our programming around money as I mentioned could be unconscious maybe we didn’t have much Financial Security growing up as a child and so we really crave that security or maybe we just want to have the uh freedom and the flexibility that we can have with having

more financial resources so there’s a lot of programming behind our success scripts and the financial component to it and so what I hope to do today is help us think about wealth more holistically and to allow us to LEAP into our purpose path uh with just a more balanced approach versus just maybe a myop approach of I have to make money and that’s the primary driver uh so my story is I grew up uh in a farming family both sets of my grandparents were farmers from South Dakota I grew up with my mom and dad and brother in Colorado and while my parents had uh professional jobs and you know went on to get their Advanced college degrees uh we also had a 10 Acre Farm because my parents wanted us to have the work ethic uh of what you get when you farm so we had pigs that we fed and horse dolls to clean and fences to mend and lots of weeds to pull and so that was a big part of my childhood was realizing the Merit of work ethic and for whatever reason I took that to the next level where I started to associate my sense of self-worth and my sense of lovability even with my performative abilities to be productive whether that

was uh getting all A’s in school doing well in my Sports Endeavors being in student government working through jobs throughout high school and Beyond to help pay for my personal expenses as well as part of my college I was a Taskmaster and I was a doer and a work machine and I had a lot of pride in that can any of you relate to work ethic being one of the primary of values instill in you as as a young person so with this mindset of my productivity being kind of my IQ card my identity card uh I wanted to find a way to to uh amplify it right so I just kept going so in college I was a double major with honors I was in student government I helped start a fraternity I worked the whole time I was in college then I graduated and started my career a week after uh graduation and wanted to get ahead and compete against my class of other young financial advisers and this path you know worked for me in the traditional sense right I had success I made some money I got Advanced degrees and earned Awards but it was kind of at such a fast pace that I wasn’t in touch with who I was I was just a Performance Machine trying to

achieve more more more and not celebrating really my wins along the way I remember with my uh girlfriend who later became my wife at the time she said one morning you don’t have a balance Seth you just work all the time and I was reading the LA times and I saw that there was an ad for the LA Marathon so I said oh yeah I have a balance I’m going to run the LA Marathon in 5 weeks and did I run the marathon yes yes did it hurt me and have some repercussions to my joints for not having trained properly yes but I checked that box I used to drink a cold soup from the trunk of my car because I didn’t want to stop for lunch I would buy cans of insure or drink cold cans of soup just so I could keep going keep working because you know what I had to get ahead and that uh kind of frantic pace of trying to achieve achieve achieve worked until it didn’t work so I had my blessing in disguise I guess we like to think uh some of these dark times of life where my health really fell apart uh my marriage fell apart I went through a tough divorce and my company that I had started six years before went through a tough time with a

financial crisis so in a two-year period of time I had pretty much all these uh foundational pieces of success or so I thought just get flipped on their head and that really forced me to wake up and these life events or these life Quakes can can have that effect on us so looking back we can often times celebrate the toughest times in life because that’s where we’ve had huge pivots that really opened us up to where we really wanted to be or meant to be and I just was speaking to my son’s class recently and I passed out all the students a little piece of red thread and I went through and was telling my life story of how I thought I was going to get into this school but I went to that school I thought I’d be this major but I got into that major I thought I was be in this relationship but I got into that relationship and at the time all those classes I didn’t get into felt like doors that were slammed in my face but later I I came to realize that they were opening new doors and you have to trust that red thread because when we look back with time we realize that it all happened for a reason and I like to

think about that analogy as being the red thread in our lives so that big shakeup for me uh that 2-year period shakeup really opened me up on my personal growth path my spiritual path and so I dove in and went to eart to Retreats and Byron Katie and Pim odron and I learned how to meditate and I went to India and I just like dove in right I needed to learn what is fulfillment what is true success because I clearly had the wrong operating system and from that journey I really thankfully woke up and found a whole new paradigm from which to operate personally and to help support clients and that Paradigm was really around uh kind of this eye-opening awareness that I gained that you know I had plenty of of affluent families that had $10 million homes and they were not fulfilled at all and then I had taken my kids on service trips during this period where I went down to Guatemala uh Honduras Mexico and we volunteered in orphanages and and we met people that literally had almost nothing from a material standpoint and yet they seem fulfilled they were generous they were had a sparkle in their eyes and I

thought how is this the case that these people with you know $10 million homes are grumpy and controlling and unhappy and people who literally have almost nothing from a material standpoint seem to be happy and so that’s when I started to create a holistic definition of wealth I look at wealth across 11 dimensions and money is one of those Dimensions right our income streams and and our net worth uh that of course is an important factor in a life of abundance but it’s not the only Factor so the other 10 Dimensions would be your impact the level of satisfaction you f with the difference that you’re making maybe in the community maybe with one child you Mentor or maybe in the World At Large your physical assets are how your body looks feels and functions are you happy with how your body looks feels and functions that’s your physical dimension of wealth how much F you have when was the last time you had a deep belly laugh that’s the fun Dimension and your intellectual capital is your mind stimulated is it growing are you expanding yourself are you doing the same old same old the environment in

which you live also is a dimension are you happy with where you live as far as the the country the state the city the neighborhood the home do you need to declutter your home would you like to have a a Bic coastal living or simplify your life or or live on a beach in Mexico so thinking about the environmental Dimension is important and then the social capital right the caliber of your friendships in the community your family so the level of connection you have and the quality time spent with those closest to you uh your emotional wealth has to do with kind of your general attitude and your stress levels and then your uh career if you’re still working is do you feel appreciated for what you do do you feel aligned with the work that you do and with the company you’re doing it with that’s part of having true abundance and then finally your spiritual Dimension has to do with your framework connection to a framework Beyond yourself something that’s beyond yourself so these 11 Dimensions is kind of what I what helped open me up and it made me look at a broader framework of what actually wealth can be and should be and so I

started to work with clients in this way and I kind of already had uh not knowing I was doing it but started to be really intentional and I talk about a story in my TED Talk where there was a corporate attorney who was super miserable in his career he had back pain he was traveling all the time and through our work together he ended up following his passion which was to be a high school history teacher and by doing that he was happy to work many more years he was able to have Summers off and travel with his wife which was her passion and it really was an amazing change for him to uh have that permission to make a big p pivot away from this higher paying job which one would think would be more successful to actually a far greater holistic definition of success in their life and in his health so when we look at covid recently I found that to be a huge accelerator for people to tap into this holistic definition so while it was definitely tough for many people financially and I don’t want to Discount that uh a lot of people had to Furlow employees if they were business owners people had you know to struggle just

trying to make ends meet however we all had to go through a big change and that change was we were no longer just commuting like we commuted working inside the professional office that maybe we worked within uh flying around the country going to meetings we were home right we all were kind of at home trying to get through this time and in doing so we made Big Life Changes a lot of us started to spend more time with family we may be picked up new hobbies learned to play guitar we took an art class we started to listen to more podcasts so we started to learn maybe we took walks outside or we had a chance to Garden more do more puzzles so a lot of people when they looked at their life through the pandemic financially felt like it was a setback however if you look at it through the other 10 Dimensions they actually had more abundance as a result of the pandemic so thinking about money money is simply currency money is kind of an energy if you will it’s not who someone is but it amplifies the person that they are it amplifies their values and their character so if someone is fearful they

can put big walls and fences and security systems around them and they can try to use money as a control device if someone is very generous well then they can use money to create a positive impact in people’s lives and maybe it’s as simple as buying buing groceries for them the person behind them in line or maybe it’s working with a nonprofit or starting an NGO or doing impact investing there’s a lot of different ways that money can be an amplifier to who we are and even to who we want to be so when we think about money being an extension of ourselves yes there are Financial Basics that we need to follow right so it’s are you living on less than you earn are you leveraging the power of compounding interest are you maximizing your 401K plans are you being smart with taxes and your asset allocation all of that yes is important but I would say even beyond that is our personal relation and framework with money because many of us have uh self-limiting beliefs when it comes to finances and again as I mentioned it could be due to uh experiences we had when we were quite young I wanted to share something I

started my TED talk with was uh about elephants and I was always fascinated with elephants and when you see uh an elephant often times at a circus not that I’ve been to one in forever but they have a a tiny steak in the ground with a small rope Tethered to one of their feet and that’s how the elephant is kept in place well these are 3 to 7,000 ton animals right they could easily lift their foot and pull that steak out of the ground but they don’t and why is that well uh when you look at how elephants are trained I would say broken which you know is really breaks my heart but they are trained when they’re really young by being Tethered to very big metal stakes in the ground and chains that they cannot pull out and they essentially learn that that stake is an insurmountable limit to them so they never try to pull it out again even though they could later so the question that I have for everyone is in what ways do you have self-limiting beliefs tethers to Stakes that you’re not realizing you could easily pull out of your life and you know when I think about wealth I think about how in some ways we get

trapped into certain routines and certain mindsets and our thoughts lead to words lead to actions which keep those mindsets uh those belief sets continuing on so we have an opportunity to rewrite that narrative around our relationship with money and in rewriting that narrative there is tremendous tremendous opportunity so when we think about wealth wealth uh is really about internal it’s not external so as I’ve been talking it’s not the accumulation of things it’s more about our internal gratitude it’s about our internal connection to a framework Beyond ourself and then money is just a byproduct of that it’s about knowing our priorities and it’s truly living them and it’s about being of service to others right it’s about impacting others wealth is in the joy of giving to others and that gives us meaning and so if we appreciate what we have and if we can find a way to live on less than we have then by definition we’re already rich so thinking about wealth and these new definitions really helped me to uh feel a lot more gratitude in my life and and I hope that as we do some exercises later uh in this

mea program it’s going to help all of you to maybe expand your perspective of wealth as well so let me just get back to purpose uh when I think about uh people going through their normal life phases is I came up with a three-phase framework uh that seems to have landed well with people and that is number one the 1.0 phase of life is when we get our sense of identity so when we’re younger typically and these phases don’t always have to be linear but when we’re younger typically we figure out who we are are we the funny person in class are we the athlete are we the academic are we the introvert are we the musician and these identities kind of start to shape us well we get into the 2.0 phase of life that’s when we start our field of study we start our career uh we start to make money maybe we get married we have children we buy a home we get a mortgage maybe we start a company that’s the phase of responsibility right our heads are down and we’re just like getting kids to school getting homework done paying the bills doing our job you know just kind of getting through the motions and so 2.0 is a phase of

responsibility well there does come a time where our kids become more independent where we’ve achieved a lot of what we wanted to professionally and where we start to think about 3.0 and 3.0 is a phase of Freedom so in this phase of Freedom that’s when we start to think about that bucket list trip to Bali we’ve always wanted to take or that dream of wanting to learn to play guitar or maybe we think about rekindling our relationship with our spouse or with our sibling or we we think about that book we’ve always wanteded to write so the freedom phase life 3.0 is when we really get to expand our creative selves and as I’ve heard in this program move those 13 inches from our head to our heart and operate less from a place of ego and more from a place of Soul the challenge is it’s hard to move from 2.0 to 3.0 because we have a certain default mindset an operating system that has served us in that 2.0 phase that may not serve Us in the 3.0 phase so a default mindset is really kind of the Learned habits and behaviors that uh have you know allowed us to get ahead so for me it was like no pain no gain right that’s

why I was drinking cold soup out of my trunk because I was going to get ahead well I had to change that framework in order to really get more launched into my 3.0 phase so the 2.0 phase of life is really around motivation often and motivation is external it’s about external uh reward words external acknowledgements and it is more ego fueled the 3.0 phase is really fueled by inspiration which is internal it’s more s sourced from your soul uh it’s it’s about following the breadcrumbs of curiosity as chip has said and so I would like to invite everyone to think about your life 2.0 phase that you may be in today or maybe you’re at 2.6 or 2.8 and what it might take for you to get into a meaningful 3.0 phase of life now for me I have absolutely loved creating Retreats around how to design and ignite this life 3.0 phase of life that’s been part of my 3.0 is creating these programs for others and I just absolutely love it uh one of the exercises that I put together uh is called your Inspired Life purpose so The Inspired Life purpose are four circles so picture two circles on top two circles on bottom and then a Circle in

the middle that’s overlapped by the other four and the top circle on the left is your are your natural gifts this is what’s always come easy to you your innate abilities the top circle on the right are your skills so these are talents or skills that you acquired through work education and experience the bottom of circle are your passions these are the things that you love to do if you had all the time and all the money in the world this is what you’d be doing and then the bottom right Circle are huge trends that you believe are just inevitable could be climate change could be AI could be driverless Vehicles could be anything and it’s also what the world needs most so it’s kind of Trends and what the world needs most and then where those four circles intersect that is your Inspired Life purpose and as we go through an experience later on how to go through that program I would just invite everyone to think about what purpose is worthy of your your life what purpose is worthy of your life and that intersection of your gifts your passion your skills and what the world needs most that might be a cue as to

where you could put some energy and reflection to find what that purpose is that is worthy of your life so I like to think about and and I’m saying this like I figured it out like I’ve been on this journey living in my head for so long and it’s been such a long journey from my 13 inches from my head to my heart I’m tall so maybe it’s 14 in but I really been working on tapping into what I call my inner guidance system which is really from my heart so rather than the swad analysis of always making decisions from my brain I am now when I’m thinking about a new project with my company a new potential hire a new initiative a new community building program I try to tap in and say is my inner guidance system leaning into this opportunity so being able to kind of trust your knowing versus your thinking I find has been a very helpful tool for me to kind of ideate what my purpose might be because I’m sure some of you here are like I don’t know what my purpose is I just know it’s not working another 20 years doing what I’m doing so maybe just try that tap into and cultivate your inner guidance system it’s it’s really

helped me to uh continually try to breathe into that space of knowing versus just living here which I’ve lived plenty of time in in Residence there so you know our industry the financial services industry is really evolving and I’m really grateful that there’s more kind of life-centered coaching programs and values based planning programs out there so I’d encourage you to speak to your advisers about that because that can really be also a great support network for you to bring more Consciousness with your financial decisions and that goes with you know how you spend money how you invest money how you give it away and how and why you work for it and to what degree you need to keep working for it versus finding that more aligned path so I just wanted to say thank you all I know I just tried to put a lot out there because I’m trying to keep this short but it it truly does uh excite me to imagine each of us not just chasing dollars but living more from our authentic calling and being true you know to our values and trusting that holistic wealth will follow when we are true to those values

and you know imagine each of us coming alive in this place of operating from Love from our natural expression of self versus for love trying to get that external motivation or that external extra dollar and if we do so that will allow our Inspired Life purpose to radiate more brightly into the world and to me that’s that’s true abundance so thank you all for allowing me to share and I want to close with one of my favorite quotes by Howard Thurman don’t ask yourself what the world needs ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do it because what the world needs is people who come alive thank you [Music]