Leveraging Your Financial Intelligence

At the Intersection of Money, Health, and Happiness

Douglas Lennick, Roy Geer, Ryan Goulart

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119430780
• eBook ISBN: 9781119430841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Smart financial decisions boost more than your bottom line—they'll make you healthier and happier too!

Are you one of the 90% of people who are stressed about money? If so, you know it can take its toll on every part of your life. Financial health, physical health and happiness are profoundly interconnected. It's almost impossible to enjoy any one of these without the help of the other two. The authors describe this phenomenon as the intersection of money, health, and happiness.

Leveraging Your Financial Intelligence will teach you a powerful values-based approach to achieving your most important life goals. As you take steps to improve your financial well-being, you'll discover that leveraging your financial intelligence will also fuel your physical and emotional well-being.

Backed by the latest research findings in neuroscience, psychology, health, and cultural anthropology, the authors' invaluable advice focuses on the practical actions you can take to improve not just your finances, but your overall life satisfaction.

You'll be inspired by meeting people from all walks of life who have leveraged their financial intelligence to build financial security, promote fitness and health, and increase their daily sense of happiness.

Proven recommendations from the authors' work with countless clients, along with worksheets, self-assessments, and other tools will help you apply the book's concepts to enhance your own financial, physical and emotional health.

Use the strategies presented in this book to leverage your financial intelligence in a way that's tailored to your individual circumstances and allows you to create your own extraordinary intersection of money, health, and happiness.

Chapter One
Money, Health, and Happiness: How They're Connected

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

—President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Just after 9:00 AM on September 11, 2001, life changed forever for Mary Ann Malone, though she couldn't have realized it at the time. She and her fellow Merrill Lynch traders had a disturbingly clear view of a massive fire at the World Trade Center just across the Hudson River from their Jersey City office, caused by a plane that had plowed into the WTC north tower. At 9:03 AM a second plane struck, this time crashing into the south tower. An hour later, the Merrill Lynch high-rise building was evacuated, and Mary Ann began a tortuous five-hour trip home to Westchester, just north of New York City. Major roads and bridges along her normal commute were closed, and cellular service was down, so she had no idea then that the WTC attack had taken the lives of countless friends and colleagues in the Wall Street trading community. All Mary Ann knew for certain was that she desperately needed to get home to her four-year-old daughter, and that she never again wanted to work where a body of water separated her from her child. For a year afterward, Mary Ann says, “I was a mess, and my daughter had issues because I had issues.”

Mary Ann had grown up in working-class Queens, New York, and dropped out of college in the fall of 1978 after only a month, because she quickly realized that the academic life was not for her. Mary Ann initially got a clerical job on a stock-trading desk. By her early twenties, Mary Ann was making a six-figure income as a NASDAQ market maker, no small feat for a woman back in the 1970s, and by the early 1990s she was undeniably wealthy. Mary Ann was financially secure, but after 9/11, she was also emotionally devastated. When Merrill Lynch offered a generous separation package in the wake of the post 9/11 financial downturn, Mary Ann jumped at the opportunity. She took her daughter to Ireland, her ancestral home, for the summer of 2002. While there, Mary Ann learned about the EDUCO seminar,¹ a powerful personal development experience. On the one-year anniversary of 9/11, Mary Ann flew to the Bahamas to attend the EDUCO seminar, and it changed her life. There, Mary Ann learned to use her mind to control her thoughts so she could live the life she wanted to live. Mary Ann discovered that she had a choice about how to live her life: She could look at life through the lens of the fear of terrorism, or she could live life through the lens of joy, positivity, and meaningful personal connections.

When Mary Ann returned from the seminar in September 2002, her friends immediately noticed a positive difference in her. She no longer focused obsessively on the past. Previously, Mary Ann had trouble talking to her friends about anything other than the awful losses of 9/11. Today, it's rare for her to think about the terror of 9/11, not because 9/11 isn't important, but because Mary Ann learned to use her mind to focus on what she can control—not the past but the future—which includes creating positive experiences for herself, her family, and her community.

Mary Ann has enjoyed taking on some exciting career challenges since then. She became a registered yoga instructor. Mary Ann also launched and operated a fitness center in Denver for four years. It was an extremely rewarding venture for Mary Ann. She loved being able to help people see the benefits they would derive from the training, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually as well. The fitness center created another priceless benefit: That was where Mary Ann met her loving partner, Tom Perkins, now 55, who had coincidentally taken the same EDUCO personal development seminar several years before Mary Ann had, and who also coincidentally became a regular client at Mary Ann's fitness center in Denver.

Sitting in Tom and Mary Ann's comfortable living room in Saint Augustine, Florida, surrounded by their two affectionate dogs, it's tempting to imagine yourself around a campfire, listening to the story of how these two very different people miraculously came together. Tom, who grew up on a Wyoming cattle ranch, got his pilot's license at age 16 and leveraged a lifelong passion for aviation into a series of lucrative aviation-support businesses; and Mary Ann, a scrappy girl from a New York outer borough, leveraged her smarts when still a teenager to become one of the earliest female stock traders on Wall Street.

Tom and Mary Ann are each strong-willed and independent. But they know how to manage occasional differences, because what joins them as a couple is a shared belief that their life is in their hands, and that they are the ultimate creators of their lives. As Mary Ann says, “The way we think is our creative tool—our gift from God, our co-creation with God.” Whether you think of your source of spiritual energy as God, or Universal Energy, or Buddha, the result is the same. According to Mary Ann:

It's not just about making money and being profitable. It's about employees. It's about customers. You want not just you, but them, to flourish, thrive, and be happy. When you understand how your mind operates, you can create a positive or negative story about your life. Why not make it positive?

Mary Ann and Tom consistently focus on managing their thoughts to create alignment with their day-to-day behaviors. In addition, they also recognize the connection between their thoughts and emotions and their physical well-being. When each independently decided at some point to build a blueprint for personal happiness, both Tom and Mary Ann included physical fitness as a key ingredient. In fact, that was why Mary Ann had opened the fitness center in Denver—to help people translate their positive thoughts about vitality and fitness into their daily lives. Mary Ann, now 57, talks about how her mental state fuels her physical state. A few years ago, Mary Ann found she was able to leg press 10 repetitions at a 550-pound weight. Tom's mind-over-matter moment came when he leg pressed 1,000 pounds. Both attribute these accomplishments not just to regular workouts, but to their mental focus, a perspective they believe allows them to overperform ordinary physical expectations. But for both Tom and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Money, Health, and Happiness: How They're Connected
• Chapter Two: Living in Alignment
• Chapter Three: Setting and Achieving Goals
• Chapter Four: Money
• Chapter Five: Health
• Chapter Six: Happiness
• Afterword
• Appendix A: Exercise: What Are Your Top Values?
• Appendix B: Exercise: Values and Behavior Alignment
• Appendix C: Exercise: What Is Your Life's Purpose?
• Appendix D: Exercise: Visualize Yourself Living Your Purpose
• Appendix E: Goal Achievement Planning
• Appendix F: Exercise: Play the Freeze Game
• Index
• End User License Agreement