What is True Wealth? A Financial Planner's New Approach to Personal Finance | Tom Shepard

Once you see what your pattern is with money, you actually can then apply it right back to looking at how you manage your time, how you manage your relationships, and how you manage your health and your energy. Because in and of itself, money is just a form of energy.

Foreign. What if money wasn't the goal, but just one of the many currencies we trade to live a meaningful life? In today's episode, I sit down with Tom Shepard, financial planner and author of Money Isn't Everything, Everything Is Money. Tom invites us to rethink wealth and money by exploring expanding our view of currency to include time, energy and relationships. We explore the seven financial natures from taker to giver, and how understanding your unique money pattern can unlock not just wealth, but a life well lived. We also unpack why so many of us feel stuck in cycles of earnings and learn how to break free by truly aligning finances with what truly matters. Friends, this wasn't just a talk about budgets and hustling and investing. It was a conversation about becoming. So if you've ever wondered when enough is enough, this one's for you. Let's dive right in. Tom, it is so lovely to have you with us. This is the first time we're talking live. We've exchanged lots of emails on LinkedIn and et cetera, but our first time, and it's such, such a joy to be with you.

I'm so looking forward to this. It's been on my calendar for over a month and just, just happy to be here right now and looking forward to this conversation. We just seem to have so much in common.

Yeah. Well, Tom, I want to start with this question. You know, you've, you've written this book. I have a copy of it here with me for the. Those who are going to be watching on YouTube. For listeners, it's called Money Isn't Everything. Everything is Money. And, you know, I love it. It was a book on happiness and it was a book on financial planning. And I'm just curious, you know, what inspired you to integrate, you know, these two elements together. I've read the book. I think it's fantastic. So tell me a little bit about that intersection for you.

When I was, when I was young, I had an interest in money. I kind of grew up during the 1980s. There was a show on TV called Family Ties. There was this kid on the show, Michael J. Fox played Alex P. Keaton. And there was so much about money in the 1980s. The stock market had come back alive after being pretty rough in the 70s. So I kind of grew up in this era, but my dad was an engineer. And so I thought I would go off and become an engineer and get into managing manufacturing processes and things. But my mom had a different idea. She thought I'd be an international mediator. And so when I got to school, I struggled with engineering because I just didn't, I didn't like it. So I took a couple business classes and I took some economics classes, and I even took a class on literary journalism. Almost failed out of school, but transferred to a different school. And one was public, one was private. So the relationship that I had about going to school, there's a story there that was so informative later in life as I looked back and reflected on why did I make the decisions about going to one school, being unhappy, transferring to another one. What made me happy and what got in my way of happiness? Because I was very unhappy at the first school I went to, and I was much more happy at the second school I went to. So this intersection of happiness and money, it's been with me for a long time. And it was, it was having two little girls, my first two kids. Little girls. Nothing, nothing makes a dad happier than playing with his two little girls. But they were different. And so, you know, obviously I was trying to figure out what makes each of them happy.

Yeah.

And so this, this personal experience and this observation of these new creatures coming into the world, what makes them happy.

You know, I love it. And you know, one of the things that I look through and it shines through, right? That self exploration and kind of really a very different perspective. You know, I went to Booth, I got my MBA in finance and strategy, and at that time, accidentally in organizational behavior. I didn't really think I would be doing this work back then. But, you know, it is so interesting to me. We spend so much of our lives pursuing financial wealth because we believe that is going to make us happy, right? You know, whether it is wealth, whether it's worth, whether it is whatever titles. But really we are on this journey that we find ourselves, but we know from research, the other is true, right. That those who are happier are actually more successful, have more money, et cetera, et cetera. And in fact, if you're just accumulating, there is never enough. You don't actually quite know. So you're just in this accumulation piece. And really we think about currency as a way to buy our life and everything else. I love what you highlight when you talk about currencies. And it's not just about how many dollars and euros and rupees and yens do you have. But you talk about four currencies. So talk to us a little bit about how as you work with your clients, you invite them as they think about financial planning and then they really think they come to you for a financial plan. But you have a different conversation, helping them expand beyond the traditional wealth, currency view. Yeah, so what are those four?

So the four currencies are time, energy or health, relationship, you know, communication in words. And then there's stuff, the material world. And money falls into the fourth category. So you know, the life that you're living, the time you are here on this planet, you're trading with energy to get money so you can come back and maybe buy the things that help you have a good relationship with life. So those are the four currencies. And the way you trade them, the very approach that you use is one of seven paradigms, or we call them financial natures. So when we think about trading time and energy to get money to come back and create a life the way we do it is unconscious until we become aware of it. And I was 40 something years old by the time I had become aware of it and I'd taken all kinds of other assessments. Myers, Briggs, Enneagram, Disc, Colby, you know, I was in management and management wanted to know what kind of person I was. And I took all these other assessments, but I'd never taken an assessment to tell me what kind of relationship did I have with these currencies, with money.

So I want to explore them a bit. A question I have is the following. I love time. In particular, if you go back to the stoics, the stoics would say it's not money that defines who's rich or wealthy, it's those who have their own say on what they do with their time. Right? And so many people in pursuing wealth actually become slaves. They feel they have no control, right? This is the life. And, and then we add in, you know, and what's interesting, I was having a conversation about this yesterday. The other thing we do is when we fill our life with stuff, we again trade our time. And since we are so busy running, I was talking to a mother yesterday that we lose relationships. We think we are relationship, right? We're kind of, I'm taking my kids here, there, everywhere, because I've got all these experiences I want them to have. And your experience of that time is just busy and frantic and frustrated of like, come on, we're going to be late. Or like, you know, or drained Especially if you're working. And so the relationship again. Right. I think it's really, really interesting. The one that I. I didn't feel in your current season. I would love to talk about. There's one that I talk about. We have a very similar assessment. More on the. You know, I talk about wealth, which is your stuff. Health, which is the same as health. Then we talk about love, relationships. And then the fourth I always have people think about is meaning. You know, meaning, what is the meaning you find in your life? What are you doing that fills you with joy? Because you are pursuing something bigger than yourself, maybe even your personal legend that you think you're used, born for. So I'm curious about your take on meaning also as a source of another source of currency. What do you think? Where does meaning fit into your wheel here?

One of your posts talked about an acronym called sharpe.

Yep.

And the S and the H and the R and the P map very well on the time, health and energy, relationships and stuff. And the A in the middle is almost like a. It's a triangle. And it's the motivation. Are you motivated to protect? Are you motivated to manage? Are you motivated to pursue? We talk about discipline is one thing that people write about, how to be successful, you gotta be disciplined. And the Stoics were like, you gotta be disciplined. And that's kind of the. Almost like the Roman notion of deny the self, but the Greek notion of know thyself is what motivates me, what drives me. And then the third one is that management piece is what motivates me to be disciplined. So when I was writing about this stuff, I would write when I was motivated to actually produce the book, I had to hire a ghostwriter who had discipline. And since I was paying her and I wanted to get the book done, I was motivated to be disciplined. And she helped me to be disciplined. She helped motivate me to be disciplined. So this. This notion of desire, or what's my direction, what's my purpose? I'm trading those four things to bring purpose and meaning and focus to this life that I am creating.

Yeah. You know, because it's such an important conversation, I think, to be had. And I'm so glad we've not had another financial, you know, any person in financial planning or others on the. On our podcast. It is so interesting because, you know, I am 50. I turned 50 last year. I came to this country with $5,000. My first trip at 23, I came here with none. Right. That 5,000 was a loan. Right. It was A loan. And I'd found myself, you know, at 25 years later, right, From a place even though I'd never actually thought about investments, but, you know, I had found myself 25 years later where I think, as you, you know, I looked at, we'll get into those kind of different places where you can find yourself. Where I was like, you know, I think we have enough not to live a luxurious life, but I think if we just want to go beyond, like, we're not surviving, right? Like, it's, it's that notion. And so it was this invitation as I was turning 50, to just say, maybe I dedicate the second half of my life to actually fill my meaning bucket. Because that whole notion of the wealth, I mean, there is no limit. We come with nothing, we go with nothing. And so you can decide how much you want to accumulate and leave behind. That's it. But the meaning, the significance, the impact lives on way beyond you, right? And in certain effects actually keeps multiplying over and over and over, similar to whatever you put in the bank. And so I decided that I was going to make a pivot and really pursue meaning and basically accumulate wealth through meaning rather than wealth without meaning, and become the, you know, 25 years. And, and that's what I often find curious. Right. I'm. What I'm curious about is do you have people who come in your late 40s and 50s who, first of all don't even know how much money they have, and the fact that they can break free from this cycle that they find themselves, they feel, oh, my God, I have to keep running because how am I going to do whatever that they actually have enough income, they have enough passive income, enough disposable income, that I think making a pivot towards looking at the other dimensions, maybe your relationships, maybe there is new love or deepening love because you haven't spent enough time, or maybe your health is not where you need to be and you need to really spend more time on that, or maybe with your time that is all going into work right now towards something else. Maybe you redirect that time to pursue meaning of what you think you want. Like, I'm. I'm curious how those conversations come up and how do you handle them?

Absolutely. I'm going to change names when I refer to people, but just. Just for the sake of calling this, calling this one woman, Jane. Jane has been approaching retirement for the last five years, and she actually has enough money to retire. She even has a reason this year, with a change that was implemented at Work to get mad and want to retire. But she's so attached to working to this certain point in the last meeting, she's like, next year I will retire. And I looked at her husband and he rolled his eyes and he said, Next year's 25 years. But you said that at 20. At 22, 23, 24. This is like the fifth time you've said, I'm going to retire.

Right.

So there's a certain type of person that finds it very difficult to go from 40 years of working and earning and defining themselves as a earner. It's hard for them to know what to retire to, too, because for that person, happiness might be the satisfaction of working at something. Maybe it's even hard, maybe it's even difficult. But the earner manager type of person finds it very difficult to retire, period.

Yeah. Even the definition of retired for me, I always talk about retire as change your tires. Right. Rather than stop working, because that's scary. But, like, what do you want to actually. What's the second race? We don't oftentimes choose our first race. We don't choose the first mountain. Right. Maybe some of us do, but most of us, at least, you know, in our generation, we. I mean, I became an engineer because I. Not because I thought I was going to be good at engineering. I didn't know anything about chemical engineering, but, you know, that was my ticket out. I got into the entrance exam, I pursued it. But I think as people approach around 20, 25 years, they come into their late 40s or 50s, if not earlier, if they've made the right choices. I think there is a choice that we can all make, which is what is the second race that I choose to run? I didn't choose the first one, but what is that second or even potentially a third race? Right. People are living longer and longer. There is no reason why we can't have a 40 to 60 and a 60 to 80. Right. Or 80 to 100. I don't know how long people live. Right, Right. It's so important to choose that race. But to do that, you need to know your financial nature. You need to know yourself. You need to. Because that race is very unique to you.

Right.

And how you make meaning is unique. So talk to us a little bit about. I love this. Right. I'm a huge fan of assessments because they give you a mirror back. I took the one on currencycamp.com you outlined seven natures, and I would love for you to kind of get into them a little bit and take us through each one of them and so that the listeners can themselves start to figure out, hey, which of these am I? And of course, we'll put the link where people can go take the assessment on your website.

So there's seven financial natures. I was a math teacher for a little while and I went to the blackboard and I said, how many relationships with money are there? And I drew a graph and I, I, well, there's the nature, the relationship you have when there's not enough. Right. The money coming in is less than the money going out. Yep. That's a state of insufficiency. It comes with a certain energy. And we decided that if you had that relationship with money and you enjoyed it, you liked it, you know, you thrived in that environment, we would call that the taker. Who do you want taking the shot at the end of the game? You want the taker, Right. The person who's, who's up for the excitement. The next nature is what if there's sometimes enough, but sometimes not enough? So there's enough over time, but it goes up and down. And we call that the spender, and we associate that with people who want to use money to have fun. Then the third nature is the earner. It's a state of efficiency. There's enough all the time, but there's not more than enough. So you can figure out how to align it by making it align or going with it as it goes up and down. That's the earner. The saver is the person who's happy to have some money in a savings account. I was talking to a woman who, she viewed her savings account as sacrosanct. And when I told her that 401k loan is not a loan and it's not savings, all of a sudden she was like, well, I should have used that to buy a house. And you know, she, she, she couldn't think outside of her own box as a saver about. But as soon as she identified a different pot of money as something other than savings, she would relate to it different. So that's the saver. Then you have the investor. The investor tends to be a creative type. They're, they're looking to produce other value, maybe income off of their savings. And then the levers are the ones who use that extra money to try and make life simpler, make it easier, turn it into a system. They're looking at leverage, not debt leverage. And then the last one. And again, it's the last one because I just started at a certain point, but there's no hierarchy, but there's an order. So it's more like a circle, but the last one is the giver, and the giver is the person and a state of being where you now have enough to meet your needs, so you have some extra that you can give away. And I was talking to a lever who was trying to understand giving. And I said, do you give? He said, yeah, I give. It doesn't work. I said, that's. That's investing. That's funny. So, you know, one of the things. It took me 20 years to write the book because I had to get very, very specific about terminology and words. In the four agreements, we are introduced to this notion of, you know, be impeccable with your word, but it's also be impeccable with words like, yes, they mean something. And. And so some people attach to the notion of a giver, and they say, oh, I wish I was that. But I had one woman who got taker, and I could see she was agitated. And I said, what's the matter? She's like, it sounds so bad. I don't like what I got. I said, well, what do you do for a living? She says, I. I'm a photographer. I'm like, okay, great. You take pictures for a living. Do you do it instinctively? And she's like, yes, it's like a gift. I'm like, well, then you should accept it. Because it's not a. The word's not bad. It's just a symbol of the energy that you bring to this career that you love. You are a taker. Love it, get into it.

I think that is actually quite powerful. So, friends. So one reaction to what just said, Thomas, these are. You tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but the nature isn't something that. This is who you are. Right. And you will always do this. I think I'm taking away from even this conversation of what you've just said is which archetype you might fall into. Your tendency would be, you know, instinctiveness is a strength. Impulsiveness, as you highlight, is a weakness. We will be moved in a particular way if we are unconscious, but we can consciously choose to take that energy and act on it or not act on it. Right, Right. It's not just, oh, you are a taker. I mean, and it's interesting to me because when I first read taker, I was like, you know, wow. So, you know, give and take. Adam Grant. Right. That's not the taker you're talking about.

There's, you Know when, when somebody gets giver or taker. I, I mentioned Adam Grant's book. I'm like, this is a great book for you to go read, because to give with the right notion and in the right way, you'll be successful. Otherwise, you'll be a doormat. So every single one of the natures has a strength, has, has like everything else that you can, you know, but it also, each nature has, has a shadow side or a, you know, so the saver. You ever watch the show Hoarders?

Oh, my God, yes.

You know, and, and I think about the investor, you know, investing and taking too much risk, concentrated risk. That's too much of something. But you know what else is too much of something? Over diversification. So there's, there's ways to over or under do every single one of these relationships with money. To be successful in life, you got to master them all, and you get to master them through different stages of life, different levels within that stage, and even with different states as you move through a level. So this, for me, I'm a lever. I built this system, but it's not even a system I built. It's more like I discovered patterns in all kinds of places and then said, this applies to money too, because money is an energy. And if energy works this way at a cosmic or a quantum level, then maybe it works at this level that we're dealing with each and every day as we handle money or energy and do so over a period of time.

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So would you. So in this assessment, right, I came across as a giver, right? Right. But do you go through a cycle through all of these in different stages of your life, or do you always start one place? Like, how do you think about this?

You did a post where you talked about, you know, be more, be more human. So what does it mean to be more human? If 5% of your brain is what you're accessing, because you are wired that way like you were born a certain way. So you've got like this 5% of how you can be that is driving everything else. And so that's what we talk about as being your nature is this is the 5%, this 5%. You can use that 5% to become aware of the other 95%. And guess what? Life is trying to teach you by introducing you to other people who are not like you to become more like other people. And that's where we need each other. We need each other to self actualize. We need each other as a mirror to reflect the blind spots in our being because they can see them better than we can see them.

Yep.

You know, I hurt my. I hurt my neck a while ago. And now to like try and turn, you know, it's an effort, but even peripheral vision is black and white. So you're aware, but it's only what you put your attention on that becomes color. So the goal in life is to become all of these things. There's an order to it. And if you learn to play your scales in music or in art class, mix colors, then what we're doing with these relationships with money is we're doing our scales and we're mixing colors. And if we do it well, we will move from one state to another state and eventually up a level and we will learn to be more fully human and more useful as a human being who has more skills and more resources to pool in order to, in our word, evolve with your money. You know, you were. Yeah, you are born to evolve and become a better version of yourself.

I love it. So what you're highlighting is this notion of there are these seven, and as you actually master these, you move to the next level. So it's a never. It's an infinite game. You can keep playing. Level one, level two, level three, and it's a journey towards higher and higher maturity. And with that, more and more freedom and choice that you are choosing to design consciously. I do like the seven colors because, you know, it's very hard to paint a beautiful picture. I'm looking at some of Gaudi's work here on our wall and I can look at all the different colors. Like you want different colors. We don't want just one color.

If you think about the album Dark side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, it's got a picture of a prism on the COVID and white light goes through the prism, it comes out other side. You got seven colors. And there was a Point in my life where I was going through something and I was seeing rainbows everywhere. And the rainbows were a symbol of hope that I could get through this time. And on the other side, life would be even more vibrant. Right now it's stark and it's white and it's bright and it's a little too much, but on the other side, it will be better. And that was. It was like hope and a promise. And on the other side it was so, you know, the way we get through life is to go through it, you know.

Yeah.

And we are trying to protect what we have, manage what we have, to get what we want. And so need and want are both in play. Neither of those words is bad either.

Yeah. And pursue something that we are being called. Right. Which is innovate the future. So I love those three. So each one of these you highlight has. Each one of the seven have these three. Protect, manage and pursue. Right. That can lead to different behaviors.

Right.

And how they would manifest. I love this idea, you were touching on it before, Tom, of how we evolve with money. Right. So evolve with money and through that start to flourish. So talk a little bit about. When you talk about evolve with money, what do you exactly mean? How can people start that process? What does it mean and how can you start it?

So the tagline was, we were trying to bring eastern philosophy and western philosophy together with science. So evolve with your money is like taking the wisdom from the east and the west. State and flow. So evolve with your money means identify your state and the direction of your flow based on who you are. Right. Like if I said, ashish, come stand here and you could came and stood exactly where I'm standing, that would be two different places because you're bringing a completely different experience to that place. And so immediately becomes a different place. And so who are you? Where are you? Where do you want to go? Great. We start with that. We gather the information, we get the black and white data, and then we start to ask you, who do you want to go with? When do you want to start the journey? You know, we just keep working through a process that helps you begin to identify all the moving parts and pieces and how to put them together so that they are ordered enough to follow your own personal journey. And that's something you can do with money so much better than you can with time management and energy management and relationship management. Because it's so black and white and material, you can. You can get it out of your head onto a piece of paper. Once you see what your pattern is with money, you actually can then apply it right back to looking at how you manage your time, how you manage your relationships, and how you manage your health and your energy. Because in and of itself, money is just a form of energy. And so, yes, time and so is are your words that you use to describe to somebody else the relationship you're trying to have with yourself, with them and with this world.

I love this picture that you have in your book where you show one of the levers, right? One of the seven, where it's. All of them are. There are these wavy lines and they're pointing from the left to the right, but one is top to bottom. And you talk about this notion of stuckness, right? So if you're stuck, then you're not flowing. If you're flowing, you have a choice. And over time, as you shift from needs to wants, you have a chance to level up. But you can't level up if one or more of those are stuck. So how does somebody unstick them?

So in the book, the lever, that's the dial. The dial, that's the wrong way, right? So if I'm. If I'm trying to flow in a certain direction and I keep banging my head against something and I'm looking to have a breakout, a breakthrough, or avoid a breakdown, then I need to be able to define the thing that I'm experiencing. That picture comes from yoga, right? So if I'm moving my energy through seven chakras and it's cycling back around and my energy is good, but all of a sudden it gets turned sideways and shut off, then I'm going to have problems that are related to that lack of flow. It's the same thing with money. So if. If my issue is I cannot save money. And the reason that you can't save money is because you're looking backwards at your life and you're looking at your experience with money. And the language you're using is to describe the experience that you had with money. The story that you're telling is looking backward and you're not actually looking in the right direction to solve the problem. Because the problem isn't where you were or where you are, it is where you're going. And as soon as you turn and look in that direction, you've actually turned the dial. Now the question is, I can take the next step, but what is the next step? And then what's the step after that? And oftentimes what people are doing is they're taking the step that runs them into that wall. And then they retreat and they go back. So instead of living a cyclical life where patterns are similar, they end up going in a circle. So it's like a rudderless ship will go in a circle. If you wander around in the woods, you will go in a circle. Unless you are able to anchor yourself to items that show you the direction you're trying to go and accept that the next thing that you have to do is take that next step in the direction of where you want to go.

Yeah. No, I love it. It's. It's so intuitive, you know, But I don't. I've never seen it, you know, first of all, beautiful meld of east and west, but also in how you outline. Right. It's. It's so logical, but it is. Yet I always say simple, you know, common sense is not common practice. Right, Right. And if we don't really think about the full, we are too stuck playing this chapter or maybe the next chapter, but not our life. And then life doesn't evolve the way we want. Right. There is a notion of flow and consciously choosing how we live. And so I was just reflecting. Right. Like you have in this particular flow. Earning. I'll just start from there. Right? Earning. If you're not earning enough, you probably won't save enough. But if you're earning and you're saving enough, that gives you choice to invest. If you use to invest, then it allows you to not just invest your money, but think about levering up with that to be able to make more than what you can with the money. And from that place, you can think about giving. And again, if you give the right way, you know, you then almost are going back to the beginning of. Okay. From that, what becomes possible. So do you. With your clients as they have a conversation about what they want to do with money and the life they want to live, which is so interesting. Right. We come to what life we want to live after we have enough money to go see a planner versus the beginning of what life do I want to live? And hence, what should my journey through these seven look like?

Notice that spender comes before earner. So we will ask people first before we talk about what you earn, I want to know how you're spending your money. And then I actually want to do an exercise. Once we've identified how you spend your money, I want to know what you want to spend. Like dream about what you want in the future the way you did when you were like 9, 10, 11, and 12 years old. Yeah, you were young At a certain point, young enough to not have been indoctrinated into trying to fit your life into how much you make. Like, no, how much do you want to make? When I was 15, I knew I was going to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. And so when I talk to a 50 year old that wants to be a millionaire by the time they're 65, I look at them, I go, you've got a lot more experience, you know, a lot more. And so why can't you have as much optimism as the, about the next 15 years as you did when you were 15? That makes no sense to me that you are burdened by knowing more. Right. So it's our nature and our story that we look back at. In Peru, the future is referred to as being behind us because they'll admit that they walk backward through life. But the truth is.

Tell me more about that. I have not heard that. So you have to tell me a little bit more about that. I'm very curious.

So when we are trying to make a decision about what to do, we often look at our experience. Right. If time is the independent variable, then life is a series of ups and downs.

Yep.

But if time is the dependent variable, it's lefts and rights. So Einstein freed us from this notion of time being the independent variable. In the book the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, he talks about Einstein time, and he uses the good date and the bad date to talk about how time can be experienced in a relative basis. So you're on a good date, it goes by quick. You're on a bad date, it goes by slow. Why? And it's because you're paying attention to every moment in the bad date. And on the good date, you're in the flow, you're just kind of experiencing it and loving it. And by not paying attention to it, it goes by fast. In transcendental meditation, they talk about if you can get into this flow state and stay there, then life will go by really fast, but it won't matter, you know? Yeah, but the person who's experiencing drama after drama after drama, life is like, when's it gonna end?

Right.

And so by paying more attention on the good date to the moments, to be in the moment, to be there and, and paying attention, you can make it last long and to save.

Really savoring those moments.

Yeah, yeah, really savor it. For the bad day, just carry cash. And when you feel like it needs to end, then just pay your half and call it a day. I was sitting with my Daughter, my middle daughter is a saver. And we were sitting there watching a movie and we had a bowl of popcorn. We were sharing. I'm a lever. And so I went in with my crane and I just tried, you know, get it in there somehow. And she goes in, she takes one out and she looks at me, goes, you know, you could savor it. I'm like, yeah, but for me the experience is of leverage. For her, it's savor, comfort, relaxation. So on so many levels, we are very naturally a certain way in the way we go through this world. And so we build these experiences based on being that way. And then we look back at them and we think the way that we were, the experiences we have, that's how the future is going to play out. But in truth, the future can play out anyway.

Yeah, we control very little of what happens. We just control our actions. But somehow we feel, we control our destinies.

So I was, in some respects, I kind of left behind my engineering degree. But I've come back to it more recently because this, this whole notion of quantum mechanics on physics. So we have the four basic building blocks of evolve with your money. And we have four basic building blocks to DNA and we have four basic forces. So we have electromagnetism, we have gravity, we have the strong force, we have the weak force. And so I was trying to figure out what's the weak force. The weak force is love. The weak force is the one that gives us direction. The weak force on a ship is the rudder. It's not gravity which is holding the ship on the planet. You know, it's not the power that's being burned to drive the props. The weak force is the rudder. And so these four things are what we trade. We trade them to get more, we trade to manage, we trade to protect. And we do it at different levels.

Yeah.

And that pattern is everywhere. And it is most material when it shows up in your money. And so we used to have this, this was the first cover.

Yep.

And we were stressing the four currencies. But the reality is the, the personal assessment of knowing yourself, that's really where the journey 100%.

I mean, I couldn't agree more with you. And it's so interesting, right. So we had in rewire we talk about those wealth, health, meaning as where you are and then say, okay, what do you want more of? What do you want less of? And then, you know, we usually take people to throw those nine hardwired for happiness, practices and self awareness is at the center of it right of the sunflower for a reason. You can't access anything unless you're aware. And so I love it. I think. I think your book resonates a lot with me because of this. Really focus on starting from where you are and who you are, and from that, making choiceful actions, as you say, from what motivation states do you operate and how do you, in a structured way, continue moving forward? So, Tom, I think this was a good date because I didn't even notice that. We are 45 minutes into a conversation and we can go on and on. But, my friend, as we bring this to a close, what advice would you have from your so many rich years of experience working with clients? In the end, we all want to flourish. Not just be happy, but want to flourish, right?

Grow, do work, contribute to the world.

Take care of our health, have relationships, you know, all of these collectively, as you say, these different currencies, you know, give our life meaning. We are, if we are growing all of these dimensions rather than just one. You know, I would call it flourishing rather than just, you know, I have lots of money or I have lots of relationships, but I'm always like, you know, struggling or I don't have health. What advice would you have for people? I would love to end with that. If you want to flourish, how should you think about financial planning as an important lever to actually help you flourish?

Money is. Is just an energy. And you know, what's not in the book? Because I had to, you know, the book had to stop at some point, Right. This is a pattern that's in everything, so. But it had to stop at a certain point. But what's not in the book is this notion that we live through different life stages. And so one of the first things you can observe about yourself is what life stage am I in? Like, am I in the allowance stage where my parents allow me to do things? Or am I in this creative stage? Or am I in this stage where I'm trying to find more meaning?

Right?

So we go through these different stages, and based on how we're wired to do money, there's certain stages of life that are going to align with that in a more synchronous way. Like when I was raising little kids, there was a point in their upbringing where we were on the same page. Like, I had a mattress I was trying to get rid of, and I put them on it, attached it to a lawnmower, and we drove that thing all over the place. We were playing and we were having fun.

Yeah.

And then. And Then they got to an age where I didn't know really quite how to relate to them. That's the same thing with, with, with your money. But if you can identify it and see it, and that's what I think our whole process helps people to do is visualize something that seems invisible. Yeah. And take it from underneath the table, put it on the table. That if I have a spouse who, who manages money or has a relationship with money that's different than mine, then take the financial nature's assessment. Know your nature, know their nature and start to have a dialogue around curiosity for what it's like to be like the other person. You know, what's it like to live your life preferring a type of relationship with time and money and health? It was easier to do with my children than it was my spouse. Yeah. But it's more important to do it with your spouse. And if you don't do it, then you're going to do it when it's required. And the only time I can think of when it's required is when you're going through a divorce. Yeah.

Well, thank you for, thank you for this beautiful work with that quote of money is just energy. You know, this book, Money isn't everything. Everything is money. I invite our listeners to go check it out. Take that assessment. You know, people look at what do you want to achieve in life and where your finances are, but very rarely have I seen somebody that says, what is your financial nature? Right. Where are you? What are some of the things that are your strengths, weaknesses, and this notion of playing the up level game continuously. So I really, really enjoyed it. I think it's, it's a beautiful way for us to have a different relationship. Not one of scarcity, but one of abundance. And know that if we play the game right, we can constantly level up, not just in one aspect, which is money, but in all the other aspects. Because we can't take money with us. No. Right. It's nothing that we can take. But money is what we do with it. And what we do with it is, you know, relationships, meaning health and freedom. Time. Right. Time to be being able to get that choice of where we want to spend our time. Tom, this was incredible. I'm so excited to have met you and thank you for following our work. I love yours and hopefully together we can help a billion people flourish, my friend.

I look forward to remaining entangled.

Thank you. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning.

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