#30 Mary Martin – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Financial Planners, South Africa. This year, we kick off the show with a guest all the way from Jupiter, Florida, Mary, Martha and, Mary, it’s wonderful to have you here. And I’ve been looking forward to this conversation this whole weekend, delving into your book, and finally having to have this chat with you.

Mary Martin
Well, thanks so much for having me, I’ve been looking forward to it as well,

Louis van der Merwe
Mary, you do some interesting work in the financial planning space. And often in our conversations and from the work that you put out, you challenge the existing assumptions. But before we get to that, I’d like to rewind a little bit of a way your love for learning has started, you know, it’s very clear from everything that you put out, that you go down a lot of rabbit holes, and you tend to look at the true sources of information, give our listeners a little bit of a background of where Mary started this love for learning.

Mary Martin
You know, as a young person in school, I it’s it’s so boring. I am such an advocate for school. And I was I was really involved in school, I remember all of my teachers, I had these really powerful people in my life, powerful advocates and mentors, always I and I always say to people, these things could have gone sideways in so many ways, when you think of ways that kids are abused these days, or the trust is misused. And, you know, this is the 70s and 80s. And, and I just had the most wonderful mentors, men and women who just took me under their wing and allowed me to do things that nobody else was allowed to do in the class or in the school or in the job. And they just saw something in me. And I think they wanted to nurture it. And so I was just allowed to kind of do my thing. And, and it never stopped. You know, when I got to my doctoral program, my I had this amazing doctoral fellowship that nobody else had. And that was the Head of the School of Education said, you know, you don’t want to do that stuff that everybody else does. Why don’t you do this, this, this and this, and he let me do just the most spectacular things and just started this, this amazing career of getting paid to learn about things, you know, who does who does that? I got paid these these at the time enormous amounts of money to really learn about something and write a book about it. And it was just a dream. So it never stopped. It continues, as you know, because you read the book.

Louis van der Merwe
That’s a wonderful journey. And you know, what I can see is how you absorb this information, rework it, and then you know, put your own version of that out to your readers.

Mary Martin
Yes, but always, you know, always acknowledge I have such a respect for the history of ideas. You know, I read widely and that was always something that was that was advocated for was forget about what your major is, you know, if you’re in college or forget about what your primary interest is. Read everything you can get your hands on, you know, read a book a week, read a book a day read, just read as much as you can, and so on. really have a respect for for just that, that history of somebody comes up with an idea. And then somebody else puts a spin on it and another spin and another spin. And, you know, I really don’t know if there are any new ideas, and it’s just a matter of taking what has already been said and done and applying it to something in the present in your own way. But I never want to forget that, you know, the lineage of anything that I’m thinking about because, you know, none of it came from me.

Louis van der Merwe
And then how did you stumble on the financial services industry?

Mary Martin
Oh, yeah, stumble talk about some, well, a, a, I was living at Palm Beach at the time, and my neighbor turned into my husband, and he was a CFP. So and I started writing books for the financial services industry, right after I left my doctoral program. And they also got a job writing study guides, and curriculum for study courses for the CFP exam, in addition to writing items and full cases, so and then for all of the series, 65 series seven. So for all of those exams, that was just sort of this fun, I thought it was this fun thing I did on the side, in addition to writing books, so it just kind of snowballed. And I majored in assessment and evaluation a curriculum for my doctorate. So I really knew assessment and rubrics and learning and how you determine, you know, what the heck learning is, how to, you know, do it, and how to establish whether or not it’s actually happened, you know, whether or not anybody’s learned anything, and to what degree? So that’s always been interesting to me that we assume, because somebody has taken a course that they’ve, you know, learned like some what does that mean, to learn something? What does it mean to teach the course, you know, what is material anyway? And what is considered curriculum? What would it what is sort of important enough to be something that you teach, which leads me to this book, and something that the average person by no means would think is important enough to teach or something that you even could learn?

Louis van der Merwe
That is so true, I’m curious of what it is that intrigued you about financial advisors specifically?

Mary Martin
Well, it was sort of the the water I was swimming in, you know, I have been surrounded by financial advisors for as long as my husband and even a little longer, and financial planners, mostly, and mostly in the US, and they’ve just been my friends and my neighbors, and it was purely an accident, you know, it’s an accident of geography, and just how it all turned out. But what I noticed was a, they they were in, remember, I came from, I came from writing the exam, and writing the curriculum guides. And this is before the recent most recent changes, at least here in the United States. So I knew better than they did, just how much training they had on human beings. And it rhymes with like, as my husband says, It rhymes with hero. And so there were these parts of the exam, I think was 8% of the time, that were considered sort of professional development. They were considerably, you know, communication, maybe, but still, like nothing even close to this. So I knew what they were doing. I had them all in my life, I worked for eight years for an organization that worked with them. So I knew what was happening. And, and I and I saw that there was this concentration on the doing. And if you think about charging somebody for service, though, I mean, frankly, you know, they want to know, what do you you know, doing? What are you doing for that money? And they so the concentration in most careers, it makes perfect sense, you’re providing a service, what the heck is the service, right? And they’re paying you for this service. And, you know, you’re not going to say, you’re paying me to like be this, you know, grounded, regulated nervous system. That means nothing to anybody, however, and I know I’m getting a little ahead of myself, no matter what your way of being is, as a person, it’s affecting people anyway. So it’s not like you either have already you don’t, everybody has a way of being when they’re with their clients, when they’re with their partners when they with their children. And maybe that’s different, I don’t know. But you have it already. And the question is, is that way of being that you are embodying because it is like your actual body that’s doing this is your way of being helpful? You know, is it is it you in a state of care and compassion with yourself and with other? Are you defensive? Are you on the offense? Is everything a power play? Is everything a zero sum game? You know, what, what does your way of being say to somebody who’s in the room with you are you competing with them? Are you an expert? Are you the person who has all the wisdom that you’re gonna like, drop on them? So my query is, what is your way of being? Do you? Do you even know? And can you feel it? A? Can you experience it when you drop into your own body? And this may make no sense to a lot of people. But when you drop into your own experience, what do you find? Because whatever you find is affecting who you are, and how you’re interacting with other people, whether you know it or not. So this isn’t like, Oh, get this thing, that you should have it you already have this thing, but what is yours doing? You already have a way of being everybody does, and has working for you? You know, how is it? How is it working for you? And how is it? How do you feel it? intrapersonal Lee? And and what do you feel from others as a result of your way of thinking? What do you bring out in people? Do you even know? Is that something that you pay attention to? Or or are interested in listening for? Is that how Wow,

Louis van der Merwe
this is so much in in that response. Now, I want to focus a little bit on the piece around this fixation that we have as an industry around the value that we’re adding. And what you’re saying is it’s yes, it is important about what we’re doing. But it’s equally important how you show up and your way of being what led you to that conclusion.

Mary Martin
Um, well, I’ve been practicing mindfulness for longer than, but well, actually not, I was meditating in a different a different style of meditation for years TM. And then about 15 years ago, I discovered, and you know, the story of that, how mindfulness came into my life, because I really wasn’t living in my body, which is a weird sentence. But but it was so true for me, I was this like, brain, you know, with legs, and really great brain. And that was the thing that I prided myself on, you know, I, I’m so smart. And I’ve got this giant IQ, and I’ve got this PhD, and I’ve done all the things done all these things. But what so what, and it was a really humbling experience, because my values that I got from, I don’t know where I got them from, I don’t know, maybe my parents with their Ivy League educated PhDs. But, you know, I got this, I got this message, that the most important thing was my brain, and my accomplishments and my achievements in this, and I’m not blaming anybody, I got that message. And, and I ran with it, for sure. And then I came up against this moment where it became clear that I was I missed the boat. And I had, that was a message. And that is a message for sure. But it wasn’t the message of a human life. It was the message of a human brain. And there’s this whole body that’s, you know, attached to that human brain that I was neglecting for years. But while being obsessed with fitness, while being obsessed with thinness, so you’d think, Oh, Mary was paying attention to her body, but in all the wrong ways. You know, I wasn’t paying attention to how it felt to be me. And in fact, I was doing all the things I was doing, to not feel how it felt to be me. So from the outside, you saw one thing, you know, wow, look at that. And the inside was completely disconnected. And so it took me a long time took me years to get close to, to who I really, you know, to what was really happening and what I was avoiding all of those years. And once I did that, as painful as it was, and I had been in therapy, by the way for years before that didn’t touch any of this. So this practice, which by the way, is not about like reliving all your childhood stories. It’s not about that. It’s not about all of your stories at all. It’s about recognizing that you have stories that are attached to the sensations in your body, and you’re allowing this to dictate how your life goes. And that might sound really weird. But that’s what I found in the practice. I found that the closer I got to how I was actually feeling you’ll hear people say things like mindfulness is liberating and I was always like, what is what the liberating I don’t understand it. And now I get it because it’s liberating. Once you have done your work, of touching your own pain and your own suffering and realizing that you’re going to die You know, you touch it, it’s horrible. It’s upsetting whatever you learn how to be with what is in your life rather than running away from it. That’s what they’re talking about when they say liberation. And so that’s what I feel. And when I saw these financial advisors with the doing doing doing, and the achieving, achieving, achieving, and the Forbes 104 100, and under 40, and all of this and all of the concentration on, I won’t say the wrong things, definitely something that’s very important in the business, but this lack of concentration on the human being behind it all. And then when I look at, I’m a bit of a futurist, and when I when I look at the way the industry could be going the way the world is going. And I think well, let’s just say that a lot of the technologies that are underway now, in 20 years have been perfected, you know, what is there left for a human financial advisor to do, and it’s certainly nothing technical. And so what’s left is for people who still I mean, there are people now who who are happy to not deal with the person. But that for people who want to deal with people, if you think about what they’re doing, they’re voting for humans, like they’re casting their vote for people, that people are important. And so how our people are important. And the way you connect with them, the way you relate with them is important. And that comes from one place that comes from the human, the mammalian nervous system. And it comes from this well regulated, grounded clear presence, that people feel like they can open up around that people trust with their secrets and with their money and with their lives and with their dreams. So the most important thing, to me, I think, in any job, but for financial advisors is who you are and how you are as a human being. Because that’s going to be ultimately where your value comes from. Does that make sense?

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. Marry, a lot of people in the industry talk about, you know, showing up with empathy. And we have Brene Brown talking about how empathy is important. And over the last 10 years, we’ve been hearing empathy, empathy, empathy, and you have a slightly different take on it and bring in compassion. I’d love to hear you tell us more about that.

Mary Martin
And this is just me, this is you know, so and you know, this, everybody knows this, this is this is this is really easy. Okay. Ready? You know that empathy hurts, everybody. So A, why would you do that? Okay, and be the FM, our eyes. So the research shows that empathy really does activate the power of the pain centers in the brain. And but you don’t need to even hear that because you know, that empathy hurts. But as it turns out, compassion opens up the reward circuitry. So compassion is actually healing. And if you had a choice to do something that hurt you, or healed you and others, during your day and in your in your job, what would you rather do? Now, this is not to say that empathy is not important, because it’s the, it’s where it all starts. It’s it’s and, and mindfulness and empathy is a little different from what a lot of other people are talking about. And all we say is, once you have touched your own suffering, I mean, it’s whatever it is, whatever your suffering is, it’s, it’s painful. And, and you come out on the other side, and you now know something about every single human being you come in contact with, because they’re human too, and they suffer too. But if you’re spending your time avoiding your, your, we call it the unwanted. If you’re spending your life avoiding your unwanted, you’re not in the position for actual empathy. All you can do is like, try to understand how somebody might be feeling acts. And when you read, Nick Eppley, you find out that guess what we can’t do? Perspective take. So when we, you know, role play, that actually doesn’t work. So when you’re role playing, and if you think about it intellectually, this makes perfect sense. When you’re role playing, you’re yourself, you know, obviously, because you can’t be somebody. So you’re yourself. And you’re imagining what it could be like to be somebody else, but you’re yourself doing that you can’t get away from being yourself. So you’re still you imagining not being you, but that you’re you and you so you can’t get away from yourself. And if you touch your own unwanted, and you have this sort of, you know, it’s you acquire a vulnerability once you’ve done that, that you might not have had before. I mean, it’s all upside, it really is all upside except for the moment you truth be told, you know, when you’re really exploring your unwanted and we have ways to do it. So you’re, it’s not you’re not like fire hosing yourself with pain, you know, you you go in a little bit you come back out, so you’re not drowning in your own pain, and we give you skills to just sort of titrate your own pain, and to have a little of it and just build your capacity for it. But once you have done that, you the thing you know is you know, of pain, and that tool letter, super powerful word, you know, of internal pain. And every single other human being walking around on the planet has that they have a pain, and you now know of pain, as that’s enough. That’s enough. And what it what it does, is it has this amazing byproduct of, of just like, your heart just burst open with compassion, because you just see everybody else differently. Now, everybody, you know, it’s, and it’s not like you see them as the walking wounded, but you you just see this poignant, you know, profound heart that everybody has, that’s, that’s a little you know, broken. Because you know, yours is and, and you know that you that they’re capable of healing and you know, that you can help them with, with your own heart, by being in a state of care and compassion for them. And it feels so wonderful, it feels a lot better than feeling miserable for people, which I have done a lot. So I know that mindfulness based stress reduction classes are filled with people who quite frankly, are dying, like for real dying, and who are in chronic pain and suffering chronically in other ways. And it’s as an MBSR teacher, the most difficult thing to learn is to not get hooked on their pain at it. So it was really hard for me to not do that. But then once you let that go, and you instead replaced that with compassion, because there’s it, it leads to nowhere to just drowned and other people’s pain. I mean, it can’t there’s like, I don’t, there’s no good that comes of that. But there’s good that comes of compassion. So that’s what we do in mindfulness, we, we don’t avoid our pain, we don’t avoid the pain of others. But we also don’t steep ourselves in it, because that’s not that’s not healing, and it’s not positive,

Louis van der Merwe
just so that empathy doesn’t necessarily reduce the suffering. It just transfers some of it

Mary Martin
Yeah, that doesn’t. Your empathy for somebody is you feeling pain, you feeling, you know, their pain is what people will say, even though you’re really feeling their pain, but but let’s say you are, how is that helping, versus being in a state of care and compassion, and moving that into, into help into into wanting to help and wanting to elevate, and wanting to heal? And that’s your compassion.

Louis van der Merwe
And that is so true. I think when you speak to financial advisors, the things that stand out is that they think they tend to be people that want to help in this industry to want to help people. Yeah, but yet we get caught up in the technical piece, and, you know, might even say, behavioral finance, and it ends up being less helpful sometimes, yes, and

Mary Martin
that behavioral finance piece is like, you know, it’s learning about it. So we here in the US, at least for I don’t know, maybe a decade have been concentrating on investor behavior and investor psychology, but also on that relationship, on that relationship for making decisions on that relationship for moving forward with plans or not on that, you know, my favorite thing with advisors is their agenda, you know, their attachment to their agendas. And, and when you say, like, you don’t have you can have an agenda should always have an agenda. But just like we do for mindfulness class, we have an agenda. And then the guidance is to hold it lightly, and allow for whatever arises to dictate what happens next. And the only way you can do that is if you know how to do that, you know, is if you are trained yourself, to be checking in on your own way of being and how you’re showing up. And so that you can have the sort of strength and groundedness to allow that to really listen for and allow what is most important for the other person to lead the meeting. So your agenda isn’t necessarily what happens. Your agenda is something that would be great if it occurred that way. Um, but it’s sometimes even better if none of that happens. And instead, you listen. And at the end, the client says something like, I never said that to anybody before, or I wasn’t planning on talking about that. And your only response really is thank you. And sometimes that’s the meeting. And you have to be ready for that insight, I

Louis van der Merwe
think the wording that you use in your book is that the agenda helps you to prepare. But then it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is the structure of the meeting. And that’s something that really resonated with me, because a lot of the examples that people that have attended your mindfulness based courses are giving us these surprises, these pleasant surprises around client experiences, can you share with us what some of the experiences that have stood out for you over the years,

Mary Martin
they’re largely around that they’re what I just said, they’re largely around, they’re surprises there. When an advisor becomes comfortable, with silence, and with the awkwardness, of a person who’s like, just struggling with their meaning, and with what they’re saying, and I know y’all have been taught to prompt, and to, to help to kind of, you know, tease the thing out of the person with their there are moments and I’m not saying there all the time. But after you’ve been practicing for a while, you sense there’s like, you sense that somebody is struggling and needs to do the thing on their own. And they, the advisor sort of sits back, and the person just talks and stops, sometimes for a while, and sometimes cries, sometimes ugly rise, and, and then talks again. And the advisor is just, I had this one advisor, and it’s in the book, and which was really remarkable, said, I was using the clients story, and how they stopped and started as my anchor, like, as I was, it was the practice, my practice became this person, and how they were stopping and starting. And I was just allowing for it. And the more upset that person got, the more kind of open and open hearted I got, and the more compassionate I got. And I could feel it. And so this person just told the story. And I said before said that, that she had never said that said it to anybody ever, never told a story. And so it’s things like that. It’s things like an advisor, she says, Okay, um, after practicing for a while, realizes the second before, they’re about to get on camera, because this was during COVID thing the second before. And they realize, you know what, like, I’m tired. I’m really tired, I rushed to get here, I was just really annoyed because I had to do something with my kids that my partner said that they would do and they didn’t do and it’s like still in my head. And my body was really dysregulated from all of those moments put together. And that was that was what Daniel Kahneman calls noise. So all these things are noise in the nervous system and, and for your listeners. He’s the guy who, you know, writes about Thinking Fast and Slow and system one and system two thinking and writes about biases. But he also wrote this fantastic book about noise. And noise is just as responsible for the inferiority of human judgment as biases, but we don’t notice it. And in mindfulness, we learn to notice it like we go out there looking for it. We call it a soundcheck, we do we do a check on our own nervous systems and say, what is present here that could possibly get in my way, in the way I’m interacting with my client, what might close me, you know, and it could be pain, it could be being annoyed. It could be like this advisor, I was in a rush, I got up late, you know, just this whole kind of perfect storm of things, where they were going into the room, just not at all grounded. But fortunately, as this person said, All it took was like, what’s going to happen in one minute, if you don’t show up in one minute in that Zoom Room? Or if you show up and say, uh, Can you excuse me for a minute, I just need one minute, I’ll be right back. And you get yourself off camera and Off mic and you ground yourself. You can do that in one minute. If you know how. And if you have a practice of doing that, and you if you’ve learned what your unique nervous system can most benefit from. And then this person goes back on camera, and it’s like a whole new day and was able to really be open to the fact that guess what their agenda wasn’t going to be what was happening and actually said, I don’t know, because I had my agenda. And I know I was annoyed. And I think if I just turned the camera on, and I just went, I would have just been like, okay, and gone down my agenda. But that’s not what happened. And that’s not what happened with the meeting. So it’s these little surprises, little surprises, like, after we do mindful movement, which is weird, right? You experience tell me about mindful movement for you.

Louis van der Merwe
Yeah, it’s finally slowing down to notice things that’s always on autopilot. And even in your book, you mentioned how you work with children, and how they, you know, get up in 10 second increments, and then in 20, and then in 30, and I even imagined me doing that. And just the awareness that we brings, before we jumped on the call I told you about my one year old daughter, and how she is experiencing grace and, you know, wanting to taste everything. And it’s just that curiosity, and, you know, awareness of things that are normally on autopilot. Hmm,

Mary Martin
yeah. And so some people tap, you know, tap their, their hands, tap their feet. And it is remarkable how, once you, once you kind of have that on your radar, how distracting that is. And for people who do it, they’re shocked by how distracted they now are with other people tapping, because they realize that it is impossible to truly listen to somebody and be present for somebody, if you’re tapping, they could just care. And as M Scott Peck, peck says, if you’re doing anything else, you’re not really listening. So taking notes like no. And there’s a time, you know, there’s obviously a time for doing that. But when it comes to this deep listening that we do, which I also call deep witnessing, you know, you’re really the type of listening that that we do that is called for not all the time, but sometimes is really what somebody needs, the other person needs to a, say their stuff, and to get it out. And they can probably get it out with anybody. But they’re not going to feel feel seen and heard with anybody. And that takes a specific kind of presence. And a specific kind of listening that we do that involves not doing a lot of stuff with your body, you know, if you’re an animated person. So for some people, it can be very difficult to learn how to listen deeply. But it’s a it’s a really, it’s a wonderful discipline, to just be like, Where the heck is my body right now? Like, what am I what am I doing? What am I doing? And why? And is it something that’s useful or skillful, or, you know, has an outcome? Or why is this current? So it, it brings even them, or maybe especially the movement, I have a somebody who’s in the class, who’s a swimmer. He’s a competitive swimmer, and coach, and he said, this is like, teaching somebody how to swim. And I said, I do tell no idea how that’s true. And he said, you don’t get better at swimming by just swimming. You don’t get in, I thought, oh, that’s, that’s what I’ve been doing wrong, you know, he said, you don’t just get in the water and swim, you do specific drills, that, you know, are geared to do one thing to the point of automaticity, you know, have that unconscious competence. And then, you know, you add something, you do something different next time. And that first thing you did, has become automatic. But if I were to tell you everything you had to do to swim, you would be paralyzed by thinking about all the things you had to do. And so in mindfulness class, you do you know, this one thing, you do the body scan for a week, and people are like, Why do I have to do this thing for a week? And, and it’s not just a week, I have news for you, it’s sort of the rest of your life. But the more you get in the habit of doing of checking in on your body, guess what, the more you check in on your body, not because you think of doing it, but because it occurs to you, because we become what we practice. So you’re creating this brain, this, you know, our brains are predictive, they, they predict what’s going to happen next, believe it or not, and then they do do the things accordingly. They allocate resources accordingly. And if you intentionally do whatever it is body scan, swim a certain way over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You’re creating a brain that predicts that you’re going to do that. So you’re not doing it consciously. And then guess what? You notice you’re getting a sore throat before you ordinarily would, or you realize you’re tapping. And these things begin to occur, as many people in the class say it’s like magic, which, which is, you know, which I’m always very quick to say, it’s not like magic, it’s neuroscience, it’s you are practicing. So you’re creating a brain that does these things. You’re creating a brain where it’s an option to ground yourself in a moment that is appearing tense, it’s an option to suddenly sit back in your sort of deep listening, presence, and allow somebody to tell their story. It’s not something you’re thinking about. It’s something you sense and it happens. And that’s what the practice, I mean, that’s what any practice does, is it creates a brain that does whatever the thing is, as a matter, of course. And so this is changing your way of being to something that is more skillful for your clients and for your other relationships.

Louis van der Merwe
Mary, I want to delve a little bit into this idea of the advisor who’s responsible for the client wellness. And I’d love to hear your take on where those boundaries come in. You mentioned a couple of times in your book around the frequency of contact that an advisor has, what role do you see that advisor of the future play in the work that you’re specifically doing, as it pertains around wellness?

Mary Martin
Well, I’m a trauma sensitive mindfulness practitioner, and there’s a lot around trauma that advisors probably should know. But the but that’s the line. So unless you are a therapist, or a financial therapist, that’s not something you’re getting into, you’re not healing somebody is, you know, trauma in your 12 times you see somebody here. So what, when I say wellness, what I mean is, your way of being and your way of listening, is looking out for the other person’s nervous system, because that’s what you mammals do. So, so we’re social animals, and we not only communicate, but we collaborate, we cooperate. And we co regulate each other’s nervous systems. And I don’t think people think of that when they think of, oh, that’s, you know what we do. But if I say, you know, when you reach out to somebody for help, that’s your nervous system, that’s it’s called your social engagement system. That’s your nervous system, saying, I don’t know if I can really do this on my own right now. But I am acknowledging so and so as a helper for my nervous system, so I’m going to reach out for them to them. So if a client is reaching out to you physically or calling you up, it could be you know, something about their account, obviously, but it could also be that their nervous system has recognized your nervous system as something that is regulating for them, which is a wonderful compliment. And even more of a reason to make sure that your nervous system is, is regulated, and you know how to get it there in a moment’s notice. So I do think that those who have the knowledge, you know, with knowledge comes responsibility. And once you are aware of how much you can affect people, I think, you know, you’re you’re obligated to do your level best to be positively affecting, and nurturing other people’s nervous systems and regulating them when you can. Now as far as their overall wellness, and what financial advisors are responsible for the fiduciary part, I totally get, I think it depends on the designation that you have and what they say. However, even the CFP Board in the United States is now having investor psychology as of March 2022, as a sliver of what they’re testing with, still, that’s not wellness, that’s not well being. But the decisions that you help people make, you know, this is like the fiduciary of the heart, you know, this, the decisions that you’re helping people make should be for their ultimate well being. And that’s not a small thing. And well being depending on who you talk to has very many and varied different aspects of it. And I know financial well being to some people is a thing in itself. And I’m not quite sure what it means. I guess it means what you think it means. I’ve seen a couple of definitions. But what I’m saying is their overall well being you have a part to play in that because you’re talking to them, and presumably about their lives, like the whole the totality of their lives and the direction of their lives and their decisions. And an important distinction. I think these three make here made here Because what you find when you research decision making, which and genetics and all the things that I researched, which is fascinating, it’s that decisions might a decision that some people may somebody makes might dictate the direction of their lives, but it does not dictate their happiness or their their subjective well being. So that’s really important. So decisions that have resulted in tremendous financial loss in a direction somebody would have thought that they didn’t want to go in. When you ask them 20 years later, they will frequently say, that’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Or I’m so glad that that happened. So I wonder, I think the best you can do for finding for somebody’s well being is to help them with their decision making. And as Shane Parrish has this wonderful class called decision by design, which I think everybody should take. And he, he recommends making decisions as late as possible, as late as possible, because he says, every decision that turned out being a bad decision was bad, because the person says what they say, If I knew then what I know now, right?

Louis van der Merwe
Is that the Farnam street?

Mary Martin
Oh, yeah, yeah. So he has this amazing course that, um, I think I want to say it’s 12 weeks long, maybe it’s not, no, it’s 12 weeks. And, and it’s and some of it, you’re gonna think, Oh, I know this, everybody thinks so I know this, but about so many things, by the way. But one of his one of my favorite sayings was you wait till the last possible minute to make the decision with the best information that you have. And so you the weight, just the way he articulates it. So there’s no such thing as a bad decision. You know, it’s there’s a bad decision making process, a decision making process that lacks decision hygiene that doesn’t take and noise and biases and other things into account that doesn’t wait to the last minute, and allows urgency to rule the day, instead of the importance of the decision, you know, Is it urgent? Or is it actually important. And if it’s not important, then and you’re letting urgency, run your decision making, that’s not a good time. So instead, you wait until the last minute, and you get all of the information that you possibly can. And what you get down is your process for helping your clients make decisions. And he doesn’t talk about not, you know, I want to say he talked, I don’t think he talks about noise. But he doesn’t talk, he might talk about bias. But you get everything you know, from all of your reading and things that have nothing to do with financial decisions and decision making. But from human being decision making. Get all that down and you get you make a decision making process that’s as good as it can be for the decision. And as late as it can be for any decision. And then it is what it is because the thing that ends up dictating the person’s ultimate satisfaction with the decision has nothing to do with the decision. It has to do with the person and how they think about the decision and the event. And you’ll see that from George Bonanno his work at Columbia, the guy who wrote the other side of sadness with potentially traumatic events, said so, you know, your husband dies in a car accident, that’s a potentially Trump, I would think that’s pretty traumatic, right? He says, No, it’s a potentially traumatic event. And it only becomes a traumatic event when you decide that it’s traumatic. And this goes for everything. And there are some things that, you know, very high probability that are going to be traumatic, you know, my sister died, you can bet that for my parents. That’s everybody. That was pretty traumatic. But young widows, he talks about, you know, because there’s some sense of like, people who are 27 years old, shouldn’t be dying. However, for most events that we consider traumatic, he just considers them potentially traumatic. And the research does bear that out where some decision that you think was horrible, in retrospect, turns out to not be horrible. Or you say, Oh, I learned so much. Like I went to law school, wholly bad decision. Terrible. And I ended up leaving law school, and I’m one of those and it cost me like $70,000, whatever. And then, but I’m one of those people who looks back and says, I learned so much from doing that, and then undoing that. And by the way, my decision making process for that was horrible. So that was a combination of things, but I learned so much. So you would think oh, $70,000.05 months when you when you add a bunch of things that happened up you would think it was terrible, but and maybe in the moment it was miserable, but in retrospect fact it wasn’t. And as it as it is, with any event, it is what you think it is. And that’s what mindfulness, that’s another thing mindfulness teaches you. And a lot of that is genetic. It’s true. There’s a giant, you know, genetic chunk to that. So those sunny side of the street people, when something you know, most people think is horrible happen, and they’re fine. That’s, you know, they were probably born that way, there are a lot of people who are born that way, I know some of them. But for the rest of us, there is something we can do, you know, there are practices that we can do. And we can change our relationship to the things that happen to us. And there is no such thing as something that has to be miserable, really. So the decisions that you help people make, I would focus on the decision making, and not the decision, necessarily.

Louis van der Merwe
Thank you, Mary, I think that gives us a much wider framework for thinking about wellness, it isn’t necessarily this, you know, defined construct, it’s much broader than that. And as you’re talking about decision making, you’ve spent, obviously many years with the financial transition as the Institute as they learn it in chief, I want to delve a little bit into that just understanding what your role was, and how the work that you’re doing now is different from kind of that human side of financial planning.

Mary Martin
Sure, TJ and I wrote the book in 2000, for a long time, she needed a writer and my sister of all people knew her. So I did that with her, and then other financial books and was in touch with her. And then in I want to say, 2014, she wanted to pivot with her company do something different. And I was around and I said, Oh, I’ll help you for six months. So eight years later, so it was really supposed to be a project. And what I ended up doing was she had a bunch of tools that she and her community of practice had created over 20 years, really, it’s 20 years of work. And they were they would get together, you know, monthly, and they would get together annually. And there wasn’t a lot of structure to that, really. So just it was what I knew and what I learned what I was trained to do. So I created the program, and wrote the textbook, and created the exam and got it listed on FINRA and so just did all that nonsense. And then the LMS, there was another one before the current one, and just kind of got it all structured, I mean, that’s it, and then really started bringing my own work into it. But so I was never like a full time employee. You know, that was something I did as a consultant. And I got more and more into into my work with mindfulness. And it really, there was a lot of tension in the two of the things. And so I just went off to do my own because the work there is really about transitions. And that is like is, you know, that’s what they do. They they do the human dynamics of financial change. And that’s really not what I do, I also have a different take on transitions just in that, um, from mindfulness practice, as you know, there’s really, you really get a sense that we are constantly going in and out of things and you know, things are coming and going. So I have a kind of a different take on it. And all and and as we just as I just talked about when it comes to decision making, I don’t know if I think you can do the best you can with some of these decision making during transitions and of course, protect them, particularly if they’re in an emotional state. And, you know, and of course guard them against making bad decisions or any decisions if it’s not a good time for them to make a decision. Absolutely. But I don’t know how much responsibility you are, I don’t know. I don’t know how much of that is responsible for how much how happy somebody ends up being. I think that’s on them. And I think as an advisor though, there’s stuff you can do with that. You know, you can you can teach you have these practices that you’ve learned, and you can teach them by example, you can be a role model for gratitude for savoring, I’ve taught I do entire firms, where they make they make mindfulness like the cornerstone of how they work. They don’t really say they do, but they incorporate it into every little thing from from their the people who go outside for their meetings, because being outside in nature is so good for so many people and they don’t like lecture people about how good it is to be outside. They just made this gentle suggestion to all of their clientele. Anybody you know, bring your walking shoes, whoever wants to walk outside around the lake, and they found they found that most people took them up on it. And their meetings went better, they were happier, they felt better, they looked forward to their walks with their advisor, the advisor got in all their steps. So they bring savoring in to meetings, they bring gratitude, and they bring grounding practices into their meetings with their clients. So, so they a practice it in their own lives, and then be it’s like, They’re these little touch points in their meetings, where they incorporate it not with everybody, but with people who are receptive to it, and who are seekers for something grounding, and who, you know, who who want clarity and who want to be. They want a nervous system that is more downregulated. So you can do that. So when I talk about wellbeing, I’m, I’m really talking about, yes, the decision making, but your way of being elevating their way of being, and the things that you do, that you can teach them to do in their own lives, that will elevate their well being as well. That help.

Louis van der Merwe
Absolutely. Seth Godin, when he talks about tribes often say, people like us do things like this. And for me, it just sounds like the work that you’re doing, or for people that’s ready to pursue this, and maybe even the financial advisors, the type of clients that they are attracting, would resonate with this, you know, and find that and that almost by itself, becomes a marketing engine to drive new business. I’m on the right train here.

Mary Martin
Yes, I have an exercise, as you know, early on, where where you just look at what you’ve done during your day, and you precede it with I’m the kind of person you know, I’m the kind of person who gets up early. Or I’m the kind of person who, you know, gets up hungover. doesn’t exercise shows up late to me? Oh, yeah. So you write down what you’ve done every little thing, because you’re the kind of person who does that. And and including, including doing inner work, including caring about the well being of your clients, including realizing the responsibility of being a nervous system, who can help regulate others who can improve the well being of others, just by the way you are, you can actually improve somebody’s well being just by sitting there and being you even over zoom. Like that’s powerful. And wouldn’t you want to do that? And then also, wouldn’t you want to notice, instead of having somebody else say, Dude, chill out? Wouldn’t you want some, but like, I have to say sometimes to my kid, wouldn’t you want to notice for yourself? Wow, this is it’s really getting crazy inside me. It’s really getting activated. I’m really activated for some reason. And I need to do something about this. Before I talk to my child, before I have this meeting, you know, before I take another step, I need to get my, my own house in order here. And I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do that. Because whether you know it or not, you’re affecting yourself and everybody else with your way of being. It’s just in which direction and is it a choice or not? In that’s, you know, that’s up to each individual,

Louis van der Merwe
Mary, for our listeners way would they be able to find mindfulness for financial advisors, the book, and also your MBSR courses that you host,

Mary Martin
I’m WWW dot Mary Martin phd.com. And the reason I have the PhD I have to say this. So Mary Martin is this really famous person, she was the first Peter Pan, there are so many Mary Martin’s, I don’t know what my parents were thinking, by naming me Mary Martin, because there’s like 5 million Mary Martin’s. So it’s really hard for me to get a website domain. So that’s why it’s not because I think I’m fantastic with my doctorate, but is the only way I could get a.com. And that is you can get a free chapter of the book. The book will be there in two weeks. And everywhere books are sold. And the MBSR classes. The next one, that one starts this week. The next one starts in April, and then there’s a class for advisors, that’s like pretty much every season one starts on Thursday, and the next one starts anyway.

Louis van der Merwe
Thank you so much for being here today and the wonderful work that you do to promote this industry and to move it forward. It is very important and it is life changing. Definitely as someone that’s experienced this and worked through a lot of what you put out it’s highly recommended and just wanted to say thank you again.

Mary Martin
Well, thank you for being a pioneer. And thank you for having me.