Daniel Crosby So you you have stumbled.
Daniel Crosby You have stumbled onto one of my many soap boxes, but you know one of.
Daniel Crosby If you if you think about the interactions we have everyday, so many of us work remotely we we move around, we move through the day and almost everyone we interact with professionally, whether it's at the gas station or the grocery store or whatever.
Daniel Crosby It is this dance.
Daniel Crosby It is this dance of predictability and conform.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby Committee and the lowest stakes, most superficial nonsense. Communication. How are you doing?
Daniel Crosby You. Yep. Good.
Daniel Crosby This.
Daniel Crosby Nice looking.
Daniel Crosby Well, you know, just, yeah, the weather sports.
Sam Sivarajan Or the weather.
Daniel Crosby No depth, no connection, no veracity to any of it.
Daniel Crosby And to be sat in a room with someone who says how are your relationships?
Daniel Crosby Is your health.
Daniel Crosby How is your personal growth?
Daniel Crosby What can I help you to do?
Daniel Crosby To be a better human, leave a more lasting legacy. You know, this is something where we are so lucky as an industry.
Daniel Crosby Some more.
Daniel Crosby To people's hopes and dreams for us to ignore them and talk about Sharpe ratios or something is so silly.
Daniel Crosby In such a misapplication of trust and resources.
Sam Sivarajan This is the future ready advisor.
Sam Sivarajan A show about transforming your financial advisory practice.
Sam Sivarajan I'm your host, Sam Sivarajan, a wealth management consultant, behavioral scientist, and keynote speaker in this podcast.
Sam Sivarajan I dive deep into the real challenges advisors face and bring you insightful conversations with top industry experts.
I.
Sam Sivarajan Together, we'll explore practical strategies grounded in behavioral science to help you better serve your clients.
Sam Sivarajan Optimize your time and build a future ready practice.
No.
Sam Sivarajan Hi everyone.
Sam Sivarajan I'm Sam Severajan and welcome to the Future Ready advisor.
Sam Sivarajan I'm delighted to welcome Doctor Daniel Crosby, a psychologist, behavioral finance expert and best selling author whose work bridges the gap between money and meaning.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel's insights into why we make the financial choices we do and how we can do better have reshaped the way advisors approach wealth management.
Sam Sivarajan With best selling books like the behavioral investor, the laws of wealth and his latest soul of wealth, he's a leading voice in helping us understand not just the numbers, but the emotions and values behind them.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Crosby That may be the best intro I've ever received.
Daniel Crosby At.
Daniel Crosby This is incredible.
Daniel Crosby You.
Sam Sivarajan Wow, you're very kind and I'm very, very excited to have you on the show.
Sam Sivarajan You explored the intersection of psychology and finance with books like the ones that we've mentioned, including your latest the soul of wealth.
Sam Sivarajan Can you share for the audience a bit about your own?
Sam Sivarajan What drew you to this field, and perhaps how your work has evolved over time?
Daniel Crosby Yeah, it's a. It's a great.
Daniel Crosby So I am a clinical psychologist by education and I went to school initially to be a psychotherapist.
Daniel Crosby My dream and my ambition was to be a clinical counselor.
Daniel Crosby Lay down on the couch and tell me about your mom.
Daniel Crosby Kind of.
Daniel Crosby Kind of shrink and I was 23 years old when I started that Sam and I think that if you can think back to when you were 23, maybe you were more mature than me.
Mm.
Daniel Crosby But it isn't a prime time in life to be giving people life advice about how to live that life.
Daniel Crosby And so very quickly, very quickly, I I candidly burned out.
Daniel Crosby I just.
Daniel Crosby I was taking my work home with me.
Daniel Crosby It was enormously.
Daniel Crosby It's it's very important work.
Daniel Crosby So grateful.
Daniel Crosby 4 psychologists out in the world, but it's heavy work, and I was young and.
Daniel Crosby Had bad boundaries, and so I was burning out pretty badly and I went to my dad, who is what was and is a financial advisor. And I said to him, Dad like, I love studying human behavior.
Daniel Crosby Absolutely adore.
Daniel Crosby I was meant to do this.
Daniel Crosby But I don't know that I was meant to do this in a clinical context.
Sam Sivarajan Mm.
Daniel Crosby And I said are there.
Daniel Crosby There.
Daniel Crosby Are there non medical applications of psychology?
Daniel Crosby And he said, well, there's a ton of psychology in my work, which.
Daniel Crosby Shocked me at the time because in in my mind my dad was 1/2 sales guy and 1/2.
Mm.
Daniel Crosby Stock picker like in my imagination that is sort.
Daniel Crosby What he did?
Daniel Crosby Pick good stocks and gather assets, and his comment pointed me down a.
Daniel Crosby Now this is whatever 17 years ago, my dad did not know what behavioral economics was.
Daniel Crosby Dad had never uttered the word behavioral finance as.
Daniel Crosby Wirehouse advisor in Alabama.
Daniel Crosby But he he knew that there was a lot of psychology in the work. And so that comment from him pointed me down this path to discover the condominium bright lights.
Daniel Crosby And to realize.
Daniel Crosby That there weren't a lot of people translating between the ivory towers of academia and folks like my dad who were working, you know, in in in everyday capacity with with real men and women boots on the ground, people with real lives. And and I thought there was an.
Daniel Crosby There to be sort of a translator.
Daniel Crosby Between.
Daniel Crosby Much smarter than.
Daniel Crosby And then the people doing.
Daniel Crosby Work.
Sam Sivarajan And so you've not looked back since. So I think that was great advice by your father. And it is funny, right? How the the the industry and the field has evolved in that time period.
Sam Sivarajan You said, I don't know.
Sam Sivarajan Too many people 152025 years ago would have understood the concept of investor psychology.
Sam Sivarajan Behavioral economics and now it's.
Sam Sivarajan I think it's become part of the tool kit of every you know, top advisor is at least to kind of give thought as to, you know, what might be going on behind the scenes for their, for their clients and how they might be better able to help them.
Sam Sivarajan Their motions in their day.
Daniel Crosby Financial decisions I I feel so lucky to have been around during this formative time.
Daniel Crosby You're.
Daniel Crosby I mean, I I remember pitching my first client. They they did end up becoming a client.
Daniel Crosby But you know, I came to them with this whole deck about behavioral economics and how I could help them, you know, revolutionize their business.
Daniel Crosby They were just like this is not a thing we have never, you know, we have never heard of this.
Hmm.
Daniel Crosby And then I think you'd be very hard pressed to find an advisor who wasn't at least considering and implementing these things.
Daniel Crosby Hallway. And then if you think about the future, I mean, you know, people, auspicious groups like Mackenzie and their wealth management 20-30 survey, they say effectively this is where the whole industry is headed like that, you know, financial advisors are effectively going to be life coaches that.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby To know how to run a financial plan.
Daniel Crosby The future, and that the human part will come first, and that the financial part will be deeply secondary.
Sam Sivarajan Well, I think you and I for vested interest probably that that viewpoint of McKinsey resonates. But your latest work.
Sam Sivarajan In my view, takes this to the next logical step, and I think it's interesting, right?
Sam Sivarajan Not going from just what emotions and the human side of it, we're going to.
Sam Sivarajan I would almost argue the deeply aspirational side of the human element right where you're talking about the profound connection between.
Sam Sivarajan Money and meaning. And it's it's it's a topic that resonates deeply with me.
Sam Sivarajan I'm curious as to what inspired you.
Sam Sivarajan To explore this particular subject at this particular time, and perhaps how you hope that in writing that book you hope to reshape the conversation around wealth and financial planning.
Daniel Crosby Yeah. So if you look at the growth of behavioral finance, it has by and large.
Daniel Crosby Mimicked the growth of psychology more broadly. If you think about the early days of psychology, you have the Freud.
Daniel Crosby World telling you why you're sad or broken or depressed, and in the early days of behavioral finance, you have this cataloging of all the ways we deviate from perfect rationality, which is necessary.
Daniel Crosby Which was necessary to achieve a break with traditional economics. And so we had all these things like, oh, you're so silly or so stupid. You're so bad with money and for for years that was the message. That's what behavioral finance was, was longer and longer lists of how.
Daniel Crosby Get it wrong.
Daniel Crosby But if you look at, you know, starting in the mid 90s, it was not until the mid 90s.
Daniel Crosby That psychology broadly started to see the work of folks like Martin Seligman, who said let's study positive psychology instead of just studying what makes people sad or depressed. Let's study what makes a great leader.
Daniel Crosby Makes a great.
Daniel Crosby What makes a happy human?
Daniel Crosby And you see his work and others work around positive psychology.
Daniel Crosby That's where I think behavioral finance is.
Daniel Crosby Yes, we need to keep people out of their own way.
Daniel Crosby Part of it.
Daniel Crosby That's part of the work of an advisor is to keep people from tripping over their feet and getting in their own way and making these big behavioral blunders.
Daniel Crosby But once we've secured that once, we've figured that out, how do we help them put together lives of purpose and meaning?
Daniel Crosby Is much harder and much more aspirational in terms of in terms of why now.
Daniel Crosby Umm there were.
Daniel Crosby There were two.
Daniel Crosby There was a micro happening and a macro happening a micro.
Sam Sivarajan Mm.
Daniel Crosby We can talk about at length if you'd like, but Long story short, I thought I was dying.
Daniel Crosby I was not.
Daniel Crosby So I had a moment that I write about in the book where I was very concerned about my health and it ended up being.
Daniel Crosby Nothing. But in this moment I was in a lot of pain and there was a lot of uncertainty and IA guy who loves money, loves, loves, loves money, like thinks of, thinks about it, writes about it, dreams about it, saves it, invests it.
Daniel Crosby I would have given you every single dollar I had for.
Daniel Crosby Answers to my questions and an assurance that I was going to be OK. So it was the first time in my life where money felt very, very small to me and.
Daniel Crosby It made me want to write about about life and and not money.
Daniel Crosby The second thing is a macro thing.
Daniel Crosby Which is when the US was founded.
Daniel Crosby Sorry for my US centrism here. When the US was founded, 85% of the world lived in poverty, 85% of the world was living on what is today $2.00 or less per day.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby Shot. Everyone was poor. Effectively. Today that number is 9% and it is continuing to fall because capitalism has created a global middle class.
Daniel Crosby World has never been richer, and yet you look in the richest places in the world.
Daniel Crosby America, right, for instance.
Daniel Crosby Most people my age and younger say that they're lonely.
Daniel Crosby Yep, the modal number of friends that an American male has is 0.
Daniel Crosby Yep, we are richer than we've ever been and we are.
Daniel Crosby We are richer than we've ever been, and it is not making us happy. And so at the macro level, I said.
Daniel Crosby The world needs some ideas about how to bridge this gap between material abundance and the psychological poverty that we're now experiencing.
Sam Sivarajan Look, I couldn't agree with you more.
Sam Sivarajan Dive into that a.
Sam Sivarajan I think the the point that you made about health, it's, I'm glad to hear that it's was nothing serious, but I think it's a journey that many of us can probably relate to. And I think as I get older, it's only now that I it's the wisdom of.
Sam Sivarajan Saying kind.
Sam Sivarajan Of makes sense to.
Sam Sivarajan It's that in your 20s, we sacrifice our our time and our health to chase money.
Sam Sivarajan And perhaps it's only in the 50s that you would want to sacrifice your money for health and time.
Sam Sivarajan Unfortunately, that equation only works One Direction, right? And we we don't really understand that until later time so.
Sam Sivarajan I think to your point, the enough data and enough research shows exactly what you've.
Sam Sivarajan You know, things like Hans Rosling's Factualness I think amplifies the the the view that the world has never been better in terms of material wealth and the law.
Sam Sivarajan Positive data points that we look at, but you can't blame.
Sam Sivarajan That rates of anxiety rates of depression rates of unhappiness are at all time highs as.
Sam Sivarajan So it sort of answers the question that I think has always been lurking behind most people's minds.
Sam Sivarajan Equals happiness and.
Sam Sivarajan There's lots of research out there that, yes, you need wealth to cover some basic living and shelter and food, but it doesn't automatically equate to beyond a certain point that more money is necessarily equal to more wealth.
Sam Sivarajan And I think one of the things that you've said in the book that really resonates with me is that money doesn't create values but amplifies them.
Sam Sivarajan Mean. I personally like that and it reminded me of the Stoic practice of contemplating death.
Sam Sivarajan Known as memanto Mori.
Sam Sivarajan The idea that you know, you remember that you will die.
Sam Sivarajan Now I know this sounds morbid, but it isn't meant to.
Sam Sivarajan And it's actually meant to be to sharpen your focus on what truly matters to you so that you're living your life for that.
Sam Sivarajan In that vein, how do you think financial advisors might be able to help clients identify and align their financial decisions with their most deeply held values?
Daniel Crosby Yeah, I'm laughing because I'm I'm holding up my memento Mori bracelet that I have on that my daughter made for me.
Daniel Crosby Umm, that's one of my favorite.
Daniel Crosby One of my favorite.
Daniel Crosby I'm sort of an existentialist guy, but same. Same idea.
Daniel Crosby So how do advisors get at and align their clients deeply held?
Daniel Crosby Well, the first thing is I think we have to recognize the impediments to that.
Daniel Crosby When we when we as an advisory community, ask people about their financial goals, it must be plainly said that the responses that we get are usually pretty lame.
Daniel Crosby Pretty tepid.
Sam Sivarajan Pretty trite, right?
Daniel Crosby Yeah, they're they're pretty trite and and there's a reason why.
Daniel Crosby The case.
Daniel Crosby Most people just don't really know what they want and and desire tends to be highly mimetic, meaning that we're subject to a lot of copycat behaviour.
Daniel Crosby And people don't know what it takes to fund a good.
Right.
Daniel Crosby So when you ask if you ask someone whose neighbor just got a lake house what their financial goals are, you're likely to hear a lake house. If you ask someone whose brother-in-law just sold a business for $5,000,000, what their financial goal is, it's to.
Daniel Crosby You.
Daniel Crosby Business for $6 million a lot.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby You know, a lot of times it's it's compensatory compared.
Daniel Crosby And it's sort of rooted in nothing.
Daniel Crosby And so it's this basic thing, but I think many of us have heard of this 5.
Daniel Crosby S exercise.
Daniel Crosby But you say you know, hey.
Daniel Crosby What do you want to?
Daniel Crosby Like, well, I want to solve my business for $6 million.
Daniel Crosby Why do you want to sell a business for $6 million?
Daniel Crosby My brother-in-law sold.
Daniel Crosby Well, but why is it important to you that it'd be more than?
Daniel Crosby Well, I've always felt, you know, I've always felt like I didn't matter much in the family and no one paid attention. And you, you know, you ask you, ask these five why's you go. Oh, OK.
Daniel Crosby What you're looking for is to leave an intellectual legacy and to be respected.
Daniel Crosby You.
Daniel Crosby You don't.
Daniel Crosby $6 million you you want respect. Now let's talk about what we're actually talking about.
Daniel Crosby People get.
Daniel Crosby Sucked into these memetic desires and just doing what everyone else is doing, but a lot of times they haven't examined the assumptions that sit beneath these things that they profess to want.
Daniel Crosby So the first thing we have to do as an advisory community is to stop taking things at face value.
Daniel Crosby And recognize not because clients are sneaky or bad.
Daniel Crosby Just because.
Daniel Crosby Living unexamined lives and and not take those things at face value.
Daniel Crosby Value if there's. If the voice isn't cracking a little bit when they tell you.
Daniel Crosby If there's not some heft and some emotion behind that statement of purpose, you're not there yet and you've you've got to keep going and you got to keep digging.
Daniel Crosby So that's the first thing is understand how to get to purpose in the first place.
Daniel Crosby And then once we're there.
Daniel Crosby You know, there's a chapter in the book called your Money needs a Why? And I I talk about some of the research around.
Daniel Crosby Blending money and meaning and and things like visualizing the future and naming your dollars.
Mm.
Daniel Crosby And Sam, it's almost like science fiction. How powerful it is. People who name their dollars, people who visualize this robust future.
Daniel Crosby They're dramatically more likely to.
Daniel Crosby They're dramatically less likely to panic sell.
Daniel Crosby Tend to have higher account balances.
Daniel Crosby Like so many of us have divorced money from life to the point that our our brokerage account just kind of seems like a video game.
Daniel Crosby And then when we reconnect those things, something magical happens.
Daniel Crosby And so that's I think the power is doing the hard work to get.
Daniel Crosby There, knowing that whatever they told you first is probably wrong. And then once you get there marrying it up with very practical elements of the financial plan and and watching that magic happen.
Sam Sivarajan I like.
Sam Sivarajan I think that's so.
Sam Sivarajan I think your point about the superficial answer, in my experience, it's.
Sam Sivarajan Not that they're trying to deceive.
Sam Sivarajan As you say, the client, but these are questions that no one's ever asked them, let alone they've asked themselves.
Sam Sivarajan And so I think the danger is to gloss over the answer.
Sam Sivarajan The.
Sam Sivarajan Ask the question.
Sam Sivarajan Get the answer right it down.
Sam Sivarajan And I think you're making a very powerful point, Daniel, that you have to dig deeper. You have to attack.
Sam Sivarajan You have to explore what is it that it means. The five YS is a great example, but in some ways the understanding that the advisor has to go into that conversation is.
Sam Sivarajan That the client is trying this on for size, it's almost like going into a dressing room to try on new clothes.
Sam Sivarajan Trying this answer on pre size and almost looking to you to say does that fit?
Sam Sivarajan That.
Sam Sivarajan Does that make sense?
Sam Sivarajan And I think what you're saying is that the advisor has to kind of in a very collaborative way almost challenge that thinking that the client is putting forward to say, OK, is this what you mean and why is that important to you?
Sam Sivarajan Why is intellectual valued validation important for you to use your?
Sam Sivarajan And why is getting selling your business for $1,000,000 more than what your brother-in-law sold?
Sam Sivarajan Your vision of how to achieve that validation.
Sam Sivarajan So I think that's a powerful point that you made. And the second point, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more about.
Sam Sivarajan It sounds a little woo woo for the financial world, but when people like Olympia and Michael Phelps or Tiger Woods or Novak Djokovic use visualization and use every.
Sam Sivarajan Replay.
Sam Sivarajan One of their senses visualize their goals and objective to make it real.
Sam Sivarajan I think it's a lesson that we can all draw even into our day-to-day financial goals.
Sam Sivarajan Now, sticking with that stoic philosophy, if I may.
Sam Sivarajan I'd like your point that to view wealth as a means rather than an end.
Sam Sivarajan How do you think the financial advisors can help?
Sam Sivarajan Clients retain that view, especially in a world where, as you say, it's so much of it is mimetic. So much of it is what you see on social media or influencers, etcetera.
Sam Sivarajan Can you?
Sam Sivarajan How can financial advisors help their clients?
Sam Sivarajan It isn't a.
Sam Sivarajan It isn't a game card that you're looking to see. You know how many points can you rack up? The whole point of the money is what?
Sam Sivarajan Do you want it to do for you?
Daniel Crosby So first we have to understand where people are starting from and we start from treating money as an indon to itself.
Daniel Crosby In my previous book, the Behavioral Investor.
Daniel Crosby I cited some of the neuro Economic Research that shows that people value money independent of what it can do for them, which is totally irrational, right? We should.
Daniel Crosby We should value money in so far as it is able to purchase the goods and services that we need to live the life that we want to live, and yet people.
Daniel Crosby Treat it like liquid happiness, right?
Daniel Crosby Treat it like the scorecard like you said, and they too tightly couple their self worth and their net worth. And I think we have to begin.
Good point.
Daniel Crosby We have to begin, first of all.
Daniel Crosby A recognition of an uncoupling of that net worth from that self worth, and then secondarily I think we have to give them, we have to substitute something.
Daniel Crosby In in the 1st Chapter I talk about Martin Seligman's PERMA Framework which is this sort of five part model. For thinking about a good life and.
Daniel Crosby That's a better proxy for joy than the dollars in your bank account, so you know, I think, you know, one of the things that we've done at Orion where I work as we've we've built these 6 dimensions of Wellness and it's things like, you know, how are your.
Daniel Crosby How is your health?
Daniel Crosby How is your personal growth and we have our advisors measure these things and report on them and set goals that are built into the financial plan.
Hmm.
Daniel Crosby Plan so you know, nature abhors a vacuum, and so we're not going to be able to replace this idea of money as the end all be all thermometer for our happiness and our self worth until we substitute it for something else. So.
Daniel Crosby It it may not be the perma model for you, it may be something else, but we have to give them something else to measure.
Daniel Crosby Because we are measuring creatures, and if it's not money, it's going to be something. So we have to think about what is a good life look like.
Daniel Crosby Are we?
Daniel Crosby And then try and go get more.
Daniel Crosby That.
Sam Sivarajan I really like that.
Sam Sivarajan I think the point that we we are a Society of.
Sam Sivarajan We evaluate ourselves on different measures and in, as you say, if you don't give them a better metric and they're going to rely on what's available.
Sam Sivarajan It's interesting that Orion does that.
Sam Sivarajan How are you finding advisors kind of evolving, if you will, to move to those different types of metrics from what they might perhaps might have been used to and their clients in terms?
Daniel Crosby So it must be said candidly that there is always some trepidation among advisers when we, when we roll out something like this.
Daniel Crosby And so just to get into the nitty gritty of it a little bit, what we do is we have these 6 dimensions, right.
Daniel Crosby Mentioned a few of them before.
Daniel Crosby But we give them in a very tech enabled, beautiful.
Daniel Crosby We give them to the client and we say, hey, we want you to rank these six things.
Daniel Crosby Are the six things that tend to predict like a happy, meaningful life?
Daniel Crosby We want.
Daniel Crosby We want you to rank them in the order that they're important to you.
Daniel Crosby And then we want you to drag them one to 10 to tell us how, how fulfilled you are in this area.
Daniel Crosby How are you?
Daniel Crosby Right. So let's say your relationships are #1 and your health is number 2.
Daniel Crosby My relationships are innate. My health is 5. Whatever.
Daniel Crosby So it gives us a sense there's an ability to sort of mass customize.
Daniel Crosby And what we're able to do is to calculate the biggest delta between importance and execution.
Daniel Crosby We're looking for places where a value is deeply valued but but poorly executed, right?
In front.
Daniel Crosby And so in my example we go.
Daniel Crosby Daniel, your health is a 5 out of 10.
Daniel Crosby What are we going to do in the new year to get your health, you know, north of five?
Daniel Crosby And does it?
Daniel Crosby Is there a financial element to?
Daniel Crosby Do you need to hire a personal?
Daniel Crosby Do you need to buy more fruits and?
Daniel Crosby You know, whatever we can, we can work that into a financial plan.
Daniel Crosby And what I find is that the advisors are almost universally fearful of this because it's messy.
Daniel Crosby You know, life life is messy and they're like, oh, God, what?
Daniel Crosby Know what happens if?
Daniel Crosby You know, they start talking about stuff that I don't know about or it gets too touchy feely and that almost never happens.
Daniel Crosby What you find is that the clients feel so hurt. They feel so listened to. They love that advice.
Daniel Crosby They are so deeply grateful to have married their finance.
Daniel Crosby Lives with their personal lives and it's not it's not woo woo.
Daniel Crosby Not.
Mm.
Daniel Crosby It's not inappropriate or woo to say hey, let's help you get in shape and give you some money to do it. That's.
Daniel Crosby Mm hmm.
Daniel Crosby An sensible thing to do.
Daniel Crosby And so I think once you can get advisors to take that first step into the dark, they're sold because their clients love it so much and the feedback is so fantastic.
Daniel Crosby And it differentiates you.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby I don't know the numbers for Canada, but in the US there's like 350,000 financial advisors.
Daniel Crosby And guess what?
Daniel Crosby As good as you think they are, they can all run a financial plan and they can all balance a portfolio.
Daniel Crosby And that is never going to be the thing that differentiates you and saying you're your family CFO or whatever.
Daniel Crosby Tired and lame and everyone does it.
Daniel Crosby And so I think we have to think about things that are truly differentiating and really knit us closely to our clients and stuff like this is what fits that bill.
Sam Sivarajan Oh, I love.
Sam Sivarajan And I think you're so right. And I think it's everything that you talked about, those technical table stakes, I think don't.
Sam Sivarajan Haven't mattered for a while, and certainly in the industry of the future where we're going towards with AI and everything else are going to matter less.
Sam Sivarajan So this idea of bringing out that human element that you talked about at the beginning is one way of doing that, and it strikes me, as you say, that's a very powerful way of doing it, to say where is that delta between your priority for this dimension and?
Sam Sivarajan Where you're at right now.
Sam Sivarajan I think.
Sam Sivarajan Clients are almost looking for permission to talk about this in in this context of a rational wealth plan and an advisor that can engage with them in a behavioral coach type of way where you're encouraging them to to give them permission to think about this.
Sam Sivarajan Important element of their plan and concrete ways to move forward to your point, I think you're going to create a trusted client that is going to value your relationship even more.
Daniel Crosby So you you have stumbled.
Daniel Crosby You have stumbled onto one of my many soap boxes, but you know one of.
Daniel Crosby If you if you think about the interactions we have every day, so many of us work remotely we we move around, we move through the day and almost everyone we interact with professionally, whether it's at the gas station or the grocery store or whatever.
Daniel Crosby It is this dance.
Daniel Crosby It is this dance of predictability and conformity and.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby The lowest stakes, most superficial. Nonsense communication.
Daniel Crosby Are you?
Daniel Crosby Good you. Yep. Good. How's this weekend?
Daniel Crosby Looking good.
Daniel Crosby Well, you know just.
Daniel Crosby Or the weather. Yeah, the weather.
Daniel Crosby No.
Daniel Crosby Depth.
Daniel Crosby Connection. No veracity to any of it, right? And to be sat in a room with someone who says how are your relationships?
Daniel Crosby Is your health.
Daniel Crosby How is your personal growth?
Daniel Crosby What can I help you to do?
Daniel Crosby To be better, a better human leave a more lasting legacy six months hence. When we talk next, what can I help you do to get there?
Daniel Crosby That is like a breath of fresh air the likes of which you nobody asks you about, that your dentist not talking to you about, that your accountant's not going to talk to you about that.
Daniel Crosby This is something where we are so lucky as an industry.
Daniel Crosby To be proximal to people's hopes and dreams, and for us to ignore them and talk about Sharpe ratios or something is so silly and such a misapplication of of trust and resources.
Sam Sivarajan Look what you were saying reminded me of the saying by Maya Angelou that long after, people forget what you've said is how you made them feel right.
Sam Sivarajan I think that's exactly what you're talking.
Sam Sivarajan You don't even have to get the words right.
Sam Sivarajan Doesn't have to be solilique or anything else.
Sam Sivarajan Is just a genuine authentic.
Sam Sivarajan Care for your client and wanting to help them get to that next stage of their purpose and.
Sam Sivarajan Happiness, I think if you can do that and engage in that conversation. I've always said it's it's asking the question, not necessarily with the objective of finding an answer because there might not be an.
Sam Sivarajan But the very fact that you've asked a question and genuinely want to.
Sam Sivarajan The.
Sam Sivarajan I think can make all the difference in how that client receives you.
Daniel Crosby I wanna say Amen to something.
Daniel Crosby Just said there because.
Daniel Crosby I think one of the concerns that I get from advisors sometimes is, well, what do I say here and almost like is there a script for this and how do I introduce this and?
Sam Sivarajan Introducing.
Daniel Crosby People have a sixth sense for authenticity.
Daniel Crosby If you are stumbling and fumbling your way through a true desire to help them, and a true desire to help them grow, it honestly does not matter what you say, it will shine through. And if you don't give a RIP about how they are, there's nothing you can.
Sam Sivarajan Also trying to.
Daniel Crosby There's nothing you can say, like if that that will be transparent as well.
Daniel Crosby So it's it's much more about getting you know the motivation right then it is getting the words right.
Sam Sivarajan No, Daniel, I think you'll agree with this statement.
Sam Sivarajan But I won't put words in your mouth.
Sam Sivarajan Our our perspective on money, I think often involves with our life experiences as we get older.
Sam Sivarajan Know for sure mine has.
Sam Sivarajan How has your own view of money changed over time, and what insights do you think that younger listeners, younger advisors, might be able to take from your journey?
Daniel Crosby So it's interesting my.
Daniel Crosby I I at least.
Daniel Crosby Partially agree with it. So my my.
Daniel Crosby Take on money has evolved over time, but I don't know that there's anything anyone should take from it.
Daniel Crosby What do I mean by that?
Daniel Crosby Money has become less important to me with age.
Daniel Crosby But that's also because I have a lot more money.
Daniel Crosby And I think this is, I think this is something we run into.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby There's a survivorship bias, and there's sort of a a a rich folks bias to, you know, we're taking advice from billionaires who are telling us to follow our dreams and and live our passions.
Daniel Crosby It's like well.
Daniel Crosby Yeah, yeah. Easy for you to say. If I if I had $200 billion, I would also follow my dreams. But but I don't.
Sam Sivarajan Easy for you.
Sam Sivarajan Say right?
Sam Sivarajan All right.
Daniel Crosby I'm gonna go pay my mortgage so.
Daniel Crosby Yeah, I mean, definitely, definitely my own journey with money has been.
Daniel Crosby To value it less and to value relationships.
Daniel Crosby To value intellectual contribution more and legacy more and all of that is good.
Daniel Crosby It sounds lofty, but I also think that we as.
Daniel Crosby We, as an industry of largely well to do folks, I mean this is finances and industry that pays its people well by and large.
Sam Sivarajan Mm.
Daniel Crosby And so I do think that there's a danger that we can become sort of divorced from the people that we are trying to serve.
Daniel Crosby I think a lot of people fall through the cracks because we're giving advice, you know, not where you and I are not billionaires.
Daniel Crosby I don't see your checkbook, Sam, but I'm not a billionaire.
Sam Sivarajan Trust me, I'm.
Daniel Crosby You know, you and I are not billionaires then and but still we've been blessed and we have.
Daniel Crosby And I think that, you know, we have to be careful to not be philosophizing from this perch where we're letting the realities of everyday folks.
Daniel Crosby Through the cracks.
Sam Sivarajan No. Look I.
Sam Sivarajan I think that's a valid point and we live in a time where, yes, there's abundance, but we live in a time where I think, you know, there are many, many people that are struggling to get by. And I think that that is the reality of it and this.
Sam Sivarajan Not an attempt to gloss over.
Sam Sivarajan The idea of trying to make the point that money is not important. I mean that's just not going.
Sam Sivarajan Obviously we need money to buy food to get.
Sam Sivarajan I think perhaps I can speak for myself and I'm certainly not a billionaire, but I think my.
Sam Sivarajan Relationship with money is evolved in much the same way as yours has, and for the same reasons okay it's.
Sam Sivarajan I have more of it than I did when I was.
Sam Sivarajan My.
Sam Sivarajan Perhaps it's it's it's easy to say this in a, you know, in the rearview mirror, but I think my relationship with money has changed as well.
Sam Sivarajan I don't value it in the same way or put a priority on it in the same way that perhaps I might have done in the 20s or.
Sam Sivarajan That using it as a scorecard, as I might have done in the 20s.
Sam Sivarajan And I fully admit that it's sort of easier to say that when you're not worried about having a roof over your head.
Sam Sivarajan But I do think that part of.
Sam Sivarajan We are in today's world is I think that there is this tendency to focus on materialism because of what social media and others kind of influence us through this mimetic behavior.
Sam Sivarajan I I think that's where.
Sam Sivarajan I dare say where an advisor can play a role to help a client understand.
Sam Sivarajan And what is their true motivations for wanting more or doing whatever that they want to do, as you say, are you really looking to maximize the value of the business that you sell because you think it's worth that much or you have plans for that money or is?
Sam Sivarajan Simply to be able to brag at the next cocktail party.
Sam Sivarajan I I think having that kind of a conversation and trying to.
Sam Sivarajan Get that?
Sam Sivarajan Of a motivation from from a client is a real value that an advisor can provide.
Sam Sivarajan Bye.
Daniel Crosby I think you're absolutely.
Daniel Crosby I think not enough advisors have embraced that value and it gets so easy in North America, where being wealthy, working hard.
Daniel Crosby Are entirely consistent with. You know, everything that's just in the water culturally.
Daniel Crosby Nobody's ever going to give you a hard time, and I think that.
Daniel Crosby I think that a lot of people, if you even said, well, why do you work so?
Daniel Crosby Why do you care so much about making money? You would go. Oh, well, I want my kids to have the things that I never had.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Daniel Crosby And that's sort of lofty sounding BS sometimes and and really, you know, really what your kids want is you, your your time they want.
Daniel Crosby You know they want.
Daniel Crosby They want you or your presence, but it sounds so compelling and right in and it sounds so, yeah.
Sam Sivarajan And altruistic right that you're doing it for their, you know, for the right reasons.
Daniel Crosby Yeah, it sounds self sacrificial.
Daniel Crosby Sounds altruistic.
Daniel Crosby But you go look your kid maybe doesn't need a fifth trip to.
Daniel Crosby They may need, you know, they may need more time with you and maybe you're a little more ego driven than you'd like to say.
Daniel Crosby And what this really is is.
Daniel Crosby You avoiding the rigors of home life.
Daniel Crosby You avoiding XYZ things.
Daniel Crosby Right. Or or you wanting to be a big deal in the corporate world and getting your back?
Daniel Crosby That way, and and framing it in altruistic.
Daniel Crosby So, because our culture adores money at the level that it does, and because it rewards hard work the way that it does.
Daniel Crosby And consumerism.
Daniel Crosby You're never gonna get a hard time effectively for saying I want to work harder. I want to make.
Daniel Crosby That is deeply resonant with everything that the West values, and so somebody's got to call you on that nonsense at some point.
Daniel Crosby And that's a tough gig for an advisor, but I think it it.
Daniel Crosby Improves clients lives.
Sam Sivarajan Yeah, because the danger is the clients are fooling.
Sam Sivarajan And it's only on their deathbed that they sort of realized that they have that aha moment where they say, can be honest with themselves to say, well, that isn't really what I wanted.
Sam Sivarajan Wasn't doing it for those reasons, but unfortunately now it's too late, right?
Daniel Crosby Well, you know we we talked about Memento Mori earlier.
Daniel Crosby Know I cite.
Daniel Crosby From Brawney, where this palliative care nurse in in Australia and she interviewed hundreds of people who were dying and working, money only comes up in one capacity and it's I wish I had not cared so much and worked so hard.
Daniel Crosby I wish.
Daniel Crosby When death brings.
Daniel Crosby Life into the you know what matters in life into sharpest relief.
Daniel Crosby The only thing we think about work is I wish I had done less of it and we would be wise to learn from those people who gone before us there.
Sam Sivarajan Yeah.
Sam Sivarajan And it's a great book.
Sam Sivarajan It's lessons for us to learn before it's too late, right?
Sam Sivarajan We talked about the idea of values and emotions around money, and obviously that's touchy, sensitive type of topics and I can totally empathize with an advisor that would feel a little leery about broaching that subject.
Sam Sivarajan Do you have any strategies that you might recommend for advisors to kind of help foster that kind of open and non judgmental conversations with their?
Daniel Crosby So I think you know, let's, let's talk with with respect to money and values.
Daniel Crosby Talk about what's our job and what's not our job.
Daniel Crosby No, I.
Daniel Crosby There's two chapters in the book where I talk about values and money.
Daniel Crosby And you know, one of the things that I don't think people realize is that your money is your vote in a very real sense.
Daniel Crosby You know, we the way we spend our money.
Daniel Crosby Materially creates the world around us and if you want more of a thing, spend money on it. And if you want less of a thing, stop spending money on it.
Daniel Crosby So that's one.
Daniel Crosby Is what kind of world do you want to live?
Daniel Crosby I had this really interesting and sweet interaction with a kid of mine.
Daniel Crosby A few months ago, we were at a farmers market and we almost every Saturday we we go down to this local farmers market and our little suburban downtown here.
Daniel Crosby And my kids go shopping with me at the regular store too, so they kind of sort of know what stuff costs. And and we were buying spaghetti sauce from, you know, a local entrepreneur. And it was expensive.
Daniel Crosby I mean, it was, you know, double double what it costs in the store. And my kid, after we had left and bought this marinara sauce.
Yeah.
Daniel Crosby My kid is like that is way more than it is in the store and I was like, yeah, absolutely. Well, why?
Daniel Crosby Did you do that?
Daniel Crosby And I said because I wanna live in a world.
Daniel Crosby Where I can take you out for a walk on a Saturday morning?
Daniel Crosby And I can support an entrepreneur who's doing their best.
Daniel Crosby It's not because it tastes better.
Daniel Crosby It's not because it's a great value.
Daniel Crosby It's because I value.
Sam Sivarajan What it means?
Daniel Crosby Yeah, I I value what it.
Daniel Crosby I value the existence of this farmers market and that entrepreneurs livelihood and so like, yeah, I can take a hit on some $15 spaghetti sauce and like, I guess I'm going to you know so because I want to create that world.
Daniel Crosby I think we need to educate our clients about that.
Daniel Crosby I think we can also educate our clients on.
Daniel Crosby The fact that the way we spend our money.
Daniel Crosby Is the ultimate BS detector when it comes to what we say we value. You know, if you say you value spirituality, how much money did you give?
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Call.
Daniel Crosby You know, did you spend on self improvement?
Daniel Crosby Much did you?
Daniel Crosby How much did you spend on personal growth?
Daniel Crosby You know, if we say we value fitness, how do you have a gym membership?
Daniel Crosby You pay a.
Daniel Crosby Did you buy healthy food?
Daniel Crosby A lot of times we there's this disconnect between what we say we value and how we actually move.
Daniel Crosby The world.
Daniel Crosby And money has the ability. Our budget has the ability to cut through that smoke and that self deception and tell us what we value.
Daniel Crosby I don't think it's ever an advisor's job to instruct their clients on what they should or shouldn't value.
Daniel Crosby But whatever it is that they value.
Daniel Crosby Money can be a bit of a North star and a bit of a compass there to show them.
Daniel Crosby Whatever disconnect may exist between what they profess to value and how they're actually moving through the world.
Sam Sivarajan I love that Daniel and I couldn't agree with you.
Sam Sivarajan I think you're right it this is not about being judgmental, but it's about being a mirror to some extent, to your client to say, OK, this is what you say, that you value, but this is what you're doing. Is that consistent?
Sam Sivarajan And again, because all of us are human and we get caught up in our own kind of perspective or the.
Sam Sivarajan Tell ourselves, and we need a trusted advisor, family member, friend to be able to tell us that.
Sam Sivarajan You may not be aware of this, but this is your intention and this is your action.
Sam Sivarajan You intend for there to be this gap between the two, or not.
Sam Sivarajan Right.
Sam Sivarajan And I love the story of you. You teaching your your son. Not only are teaching him the value of money, but also.
Sam Sivarajan Values per SE so that they grow up with with both so that when they get into the world that they're able to marry the two in a in a hopefully in a in a more coherent way.
Daniel Crosby You've.
Sam Sivarajan Highlighted some of the psychological barriers to happiness that wealth can create.
Can.
Sam Sivarajan You talk about some of this in your.
Sam Sivarajan What are some of the most common traps? I mean, maybe you can list one or two and how do you think that advisors might be able to help clients avoid them?
Daniel Crosby So when it when it comes to happiness and money, the research is really interesting.
Daniel Crosby I think a lot of advisors will have heard the khanom and indeed in study from from few years ago that talked about it $75,000 US.
Daniel Crosby You know, happiness, kind of.
Daniel Crosby Well, there's, that's that's kind of true because there's no, there's no blood test for happiness, of course. So you've got to operationalize it some some way. You've got to sort of decide how you're going.
Yeah.
Daniel Crosby It and the way that Kahneman and Deaton chose to measure it, was had a lot of physical aspects to.
Daniel Crosby It ended up loading onto things like pain and so yeah, like money can buy you an absence of pain because at a certain level you can afford healthy food.
Daniel Crosby Can go to the doctor.
Daniel Crosby Can you know whatever.
Daniel Crosby Get, you know, get surgery can live in a warm house.
Daniel Crosby Money does a good job of getting us out of misery.
Daniel Crosby But then we also know that for another group of people that for a lot of people, money accelerated all the way up to half $1,000,000 in income a year. And for about 1/3 of people that started accelerating after about $100,000 per year.
Daniel Crosby So it matters how we measure happiness.
Daniel Crosby Then we also see that about 15% of people money has no effect on their happiness.
Daniel Crosby What?
Daniel Crosby And that's because they have a different problem, and that is because wherever you go there you are and there is not enough money in the world. Like if you're if your depression is organic, right.
Daniel Crosby That's a different, that's a different.
Daniel Crosby That's a different ball of.
Daniel Crosby If your depression is because of situational things, maybe you need therapy and not a bigger paycheck.
Daniel Crosby So for about 15% of people, money has no effect. But then we see that beyond that, it matters how you spend.
Daniel Crosby And the best ways to spend money for happiness.
Daniel Crosby To give it away, to buy yourself experiences over things, to spend it on deepening relationships. You know, one of the things that I thought was fascinating that I talked about in the book is people who buy a new car.
Sam Sivarajan Mm.
Daniel Crosby See a very short lived bump in.
Daniel Crosby Very short lived because very quickly we get habituated to that new car and it's just like a car now, like just the new car smells gone and gets dinged up a little bit.
Daniel Crosby Just a car.
Daniel Crosby People who buy a car to join a car club.
Daniel Crosby If Sam buys a new Ferrari to join the Ferrari Club of Toronto, that actually does buy lasting happiness.
Daniel Crosby Because you've bought yourself a set of friends.
Daniel Crosby Bought yourself something to do on.
Daniel Crosby You bought yourself an experiences so spending on relationships, giving it away, spending on experiences and getting out of work you hate.
Sam Sivarajan Experiences.
Daniel Crosby Are all things you can do to kind of to kind of get get to.
Sam Sivarajan Yeah, I like.
Sam Sivarajan You made a very important point in my view that we started off talking about the evolution of psychology from being this negative pain associated thing. And it was Seligman and his colleagues that brought in this idea of positive psychology that.
Sam Sivarajan Happiness is something more than the absence of pain.
Sam Sivarajan Is.
Sam Sivarajan It is something positive that we strive for in my mind. I think that's a very important thing to keep in mind for advisors that for most of our clients.
Sam Sivarajan They're past that absence of pain threshold, if you will, and that it's really they're trying to figure out how they move into that positive half of that equation, if you will.
Sam Sivarajan I think the things that you talked about.
Like.
Sam Sivarajan Experiences, relationships, or what's going to help most of them get there. And I think that's what an advisor can do to help remind their clients that that's that may be the ticket.
Sure.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel, this has been.
Sam Sivarajan A phenomenal discussion very near and dear to my heart. Umm. So I want to ask you a few final rapid fire questions that I ask all of my guests. So if you're ready.
Sam Sivarajan Professionally, what is the most important lesson you've learned over the years?
Daniel Crosby This is so depressing.
Daniel Crosby No.
Daniel Crosby No one, no one cares about your work.
Daniel Crosby Just.
Go.
Daniel Crosby Just go do it.
Daniel Crosby Go do what matters to you.
Daniel Crosby I think a lot of times we try and be impressive or.
Daniel Crosby Climb the ranks and everyone you know, everyone you meet is fighting their own hard battle. No one cares about you, so go do go. Do what matters to you.
Sam Sivarajan That's such a beautiful lesson and it's so.
Sam Sivarajan It's and it's taken me years to learn and I have to learn it every day and fortunately.
Daniel Crosby Mm.
Sam Sivarajan #2 what is 1 practical tip you would offer listeners keen on applying your insights.
Daniel Crosby So one of the simplest but most powerful things that I found when researching the book was that writing down one thing you're grateful for every day was good for a 10% boost in happiness, which is equivalent to taking psychiatric medication.
Daniel Crosby By the way.
Daniel Crosby Which is the equivalent.
Daniel Crosby You know the equivalent boost.
Daniel Crosby Not against.
Daniel Crosby That's there are different different things, but.
Daniel Crosby Umm that simple.
Daniel Crosby One thing you're grateful for at the end of every day is like just unreal bang for buck in terms of your happiness.
Sam Sivarajan So powerful I got into this habit on my wife's encouragement.
Sam Sivarajan Maybe about 10 years ago, it's.
Sam Sivarajan Interesting how profound that can.
Sam Sivarajan There's lots of things that most of us have to be grateful for, but in the day-to-day hustle and bustle, it's easy to overlook it.
Sam Sivarajan I think that's very powerful advice.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel, if listeners want to learn more about you or find your work, where should they go?
Daniel Crosby Go by the soul of wealth and read it and love it.
Daniel Crosby That's number one.
Sam Sivarajan Great book. I love it.
Daniel Crosby Thank you.
Daniel Crosby I have a podcast called Standard deviations, which I'd love for you to listen to, and then I am on Twitter Daniel Crosby and on LinkedIn. Daniel Crosby, PhD.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel, this has been a really, really fun conversation. I always enjoy talking with you. So thank you so much for joining us today on the future Ready advisor.
Daniel Crosby Sam, it's great to chat with someone so like minded.
Daniel Crosby For the work you're doing.
Sam Sivarajan In this episode of The Future Ready Advisor, I spoke with Doctor Daniel Crosby, a psychologist, behavioral finance expert, and a best selling author.
Sam Sivarajan Here are my three key takeaways from this thought provoking discussion.
Sam Sivarajan Number one, align money with meaning.
Sam Sivarajan True financial well-being isn't about accumulating wealth.
Sam Sivarajan It's about aligning financial decisions with your core values. Advisors need to dig deeper beyond surface level goals to help clients uncover their why and make money serve.
Sam Sivarajan A purpose driven life.
Sam Sivarajan #2 the power of relationships and experiences.
Sam Sivarajan Wealth maximization often misses the mark on happiness.
Sam Sivarajan Daniel highlights that spending on experiences, nurturing relationships, and giving back, creating more lasting satisfaction than simple mater.
Sam Sivarajan Ossessions.
Sam Sivarajan #3 advisors as behavioral coaches, the future of advising lies in human connection.
Sam Sivarajan Clients crave meaningful conversations about life, not just portfolios. By exploring clients, values, and motivations.
Sam Sivarajan Advisors can foster trust, differentiate themselves, and truly impact lives.
Sam Sivarajan These insights remind us that great advising blends financial expertise with an authentic understanding of what makes life meaningful.
Sam Sivarajan Thank you for tuning into the future Ready advisor.
Sam Sivarajan You've been listening to the future Ready advisor. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, or share your feedback wherever you listen.
Sam Sivarajan Be sure to follow the podcast.
Sam Sivarajan So you never miss an episode. For more insights on how to keep your practice future ready, visit www.sams.
Sam Sivarajan Calm. You can find the link on the show notes.
Sam Sivarajan There you'll find free tools and resources along with exclusive bonus content from these podcasts.
The.
Sam Sivarajan Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to sharing more strategies with you in the next episode.