#FA Success Ep 366: Avoiding The ‘Big Swap’ Of Wealth And Health As Your Advisory Firm Grows, With Stevyn Guinnip

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Stevyn Guinnip
• Grow Wellthy
• Health Credit Score Quiz
• Kitces Report: What Actually Contributes To Advisor Wellbeing
• Standing Desks, Walk-And-Talks, And Getting Healthier As A Financial Planner
• Live To 100: Secrets Of The Blue Zones
• The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer: Lessons From the Healthiest Places on Earth By Dan Buettner
• Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar By Jessie Inchauspe
• Choosing to Cheat: Who Wins When Family and Work Collide? By Andy Stanley
• Renpho
• Peloton
• Orangetheory
• Fitbit
• Peter Attia
• Health 401(k)
• Merrill Lynch Age Wave
• Edward Jones Age Wave
• Wellness Wheel
• Sally Struthers
• HALT

Looking for sample client service calendars, marketing plans, and more? Check out our FAS resource page!

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Stevyn Guinnip, to the "Financial Advisor Success Podcast."

Stevyn: Thank you so much for having me, Michael.

Michael: I really appreciate you joining us and coming out for a conversation today that I think will maybe a little bit different than some of the themes that we cover in other episodes of this podcast. One of the questions that we've long asked at the end of every episode of the podcast is around how advisors define success for themselves. And I'm always fascinated that we're in the money business as it were, and basically no one defines their success and goals by money. We have it. Most of us are reasonably good at accumulating it over time. but at best, it's like the means to some end. Usually it's something to the effect of money buys us autonomy with our time to then do the things we actually want to do with our time. And for most of advisors, I find, it falls into a couple of buckets. Some of us, that's really about time for relationships. That might be family relationships. That might be client relationships. That might be team relationships. There's something in that human-to-human relationship connection. Often something crops around impact legacy, what I leave behind, how I impact the world even if I'm not here anymore. And then, there's often something that comes up around health and just being able to do those things we want to do around relationships and impact and be able to do them as long as we possibly can.

And we talk about that, but I find in practice for a lot of advisors, we talk about growing relationships and often we do invest in our relationships as kind of the business of advice with clients. We talk about legacy impact and a lot of us really do build towards legacy and impact. Then a lot of us talk about health and our time and energy and resources are not always actually lined up on that one. I find it's the one that we say the most and I don't want to say do the least, but have the biggest gap between how often we talk about it and what we actually do about that. And I know that this is a directly, the domain in which you have built a business working with advisors around our own health and wellness. And so, I'm excited to have the conversation today about what that work looks like and how we improve it, and I guess even just a more fundamental level, why are we so good about talking about relationships and improving relationships, and talking about legacy impact, improving legacy impact and talking about our health, and then not really taking the steps to improve our health.

Why Stevyn Thinks There Is Such A Gap Between Talking About Health And What Actually Gets Done About It [06:28]

Michael: Well, you've seen so many advisors now doing this. Where do you think the gap comes from? Why is this such an issue in the first place?

Stevyn: That's so 30,000-foot view-ish and I absolutely love the concept here of why. Why does this frustration exist? Because that's really what it is. Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to have great relationships. They want to have great businesses, legacy, all of that.

Michael: We're wired for survival. It's a human thing. We really, really, really don't like dying.

Stevyn: Right.

Michael: So why is this so hard?

Stevyn: Well, I've interviewed 507 advisors and asked them this question. And what is your health? What do you wish it would be and why do you feel like you're not there?

And for each person, I'm going to say that it's probably a different tweak on the same answer, which is experience. From the day that they're born, their health has been pretty good – most people, right? They're not born with no health. You're born with no money. You build your relationships. You don't build your health. Your health comes in with you and then it slowly declines over time. So you think, just logically, "What I've always had will always be." And it's not true. And so, they never had to work for it. They never had to build it. They never had to do what they had to do with these other pieces of their lives. So that's my guess is that they just kind of like, "I've always had my health. I'm sure it'll be here tomorrow too. So I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and don't realize what's sneaking up on them."

Michael: That's an interesting framing. That does resonate to me, that just when I hear, some of us say this. "I want to get better about my health, but I don't quite have the time or the desire or the motivation. I just can't quite get there" – and I hear that and the word that comes to mind is complacency. I know I should do something about this, but I'm just kind of complacent about where I am in practice and whether I really, really need to do something now about it. And you have such a good point. The most basic level, most of us at least were born with pretty good health and no money. So we spend most of our time trying to build up the money part, but we take the health part for granted, until at some point you reach a certain age and age of life and/or career where suddenly the money part isn't the problem and the health part is not as strong as it used to be. And maybe we are realizing that we can't quite take it for granted the way that we did in the past and the priorities change.

Stevyn: Absolutely.

Stevyn: They change for 2 reasons. Mid-career, when the hustle years are kind of done, maybe scaling is a little bit done. You're still in business. You still want to be in business but you've got more room to be like, okay, now I can look around and say, "Okay, there's some stuff I've been slacking on." That's 1 reason I see people. The other is a health event, and that's more common. It's like, "Oh, my A1C is high and my doctor wants to put me on medication or a low dose of blood pressure medication. What happened? When did this happen?" And it's a wakeup to go, ooh, I've accumulated more health debt here than I realized I had accumulated. And then, they start to realize they've got limited time now to pay that off and get into a healthier space.

Michael: I like the financial advisor tone here. We've accumulated a health debt that's going to be expensive to pay off. I love it. Love it.

Stevyn: Oh, Michael, I've got analogies galore. If we talk long enough you might hear all of them.

Michael: That's fantastic. But again, I think from an advisor end, that resonates with me. I've got this small debt that's accumulating on the side that I haven't really been paying attention to that kind of compounds at a not so favorable interest rate. And if you ignore it too long and let it compound too long, that's going to be a really, really painful debt to pay off at some point.

Stevyn: I liken it to saving for retirement. If you start in your 30s, it's pretty easy. But if you don't start until you're 60, it's hard, and you have to do a lot of drastic changes. It's exactly the same for your health. If you wait too long, it becomes really difficult and not super fun. So that's what we're trying to do is get ahead of that and help people make small deposits. I just did a talk recently on it called the Health 401k. How can you automate these small deposits so that your health is not bankrupt by the time you get to retirement? Doesn't matter how much money you have. And you can even go further and say, "It's risk tolerance. When you're young in your 30s, you can eat the pizza and stay up all night long and you can be stressed out of your mind and work 16-hour days for weeks on end, because you have a lot of margin and your body recovers well. But when you get to be 50 or 60, your risk tolerance is much lower, and you don't have that margin and you have to just tune it in a little bit more.

Michael: So tell us a little bit more about this interviewing and surveying you were doing around, you said you're asking advisors, what is your health? What do you wish it to be? Why is it not there? Maybe just state of the union, I'm sort of envisioning, state of the advisor health. What did you find? I'm going to assume there are a decent... as advisors, we are really goal-oriented people. In fact, one of our well-being research studies that we do on the Kitces platform profiles advisors on a lot of different dimensions of just sort of motivations and personality styles. And one of the things that we found, we weren't looking for but kind of showed up, was advisors, as a group, are just off the charts goal-oriented people. The average advisor is 3 standard deviations off from the general public in orientation towards goal accomplishment.

Stevyn: Wow.

Michael: And we're 2 standard deviations off in self-efficacy, which means we're super goal-oriented and really confident in being able to achieve them, which just makes you even more goal-oriented because you're goal-oriented and you're good at checking your goals off, which means you try to make more goals. So a lot of us, I think, we are pretty good about health, either because we're mindful of it in the first place or we have one of the events you talked about, we set a new goal, and darn it, we're goal-achieving machines. So we figure out how to get there. But what do you find overall? How many of us are in a good place? How many of us are in not such a good place? Where do you find the gaps as you've been doing all this interviewing and research directly to advisors?

Stevyn: That's a great question and I'll just give you a few of the big takeaways. One of them is I always assess stress and it's perceived stress, how stressed they particularly feel. We didn't measure it on any kind of data input. But this was their take on their own stress and it was a scale of 1 to 10. And of all the people I interviewed, the average advisor stress is a 7 out of 10, which is a chronic, moderate stress all the time. Sometimes it goes higher, but it rarely goes lower, but they kind of see themselves at a 7 when things aren't going crazy. And where we see good health, repair, restorativeness, feeling good about what you're doing and the ability to stay long-term in the industry is when your stress is a 5 or less on that same scale.

And so, as a group, having them be at a 7 just shows that there's constant adrenaline and cortisol coursing through their blood, which is helping them to change their body composition in a negative way. It's helping them put on fat. It's helping them get lesions inside of their arteries, blood pressure. All kinds of negative effects are happening simply because of that stress level. And when I did the research on it, Michael, I found out that there were some surveys done in this industry, and they said that the stress in 2008 when the housing bubble happened, right now the stress in this industry is 30% higher than it was then. And I think what it is, is a case of people thinking it's okay, it's normal, it's standard to be that stressed and they're not realizing the damage that it's doing. So that was an ah-ha moment is that this group is very stressed, right?

Michael: Well, and I will say we see a parallel to it. We just finished running our advisor well-being research study so we do it on the Kitces platform every other year. So the last one was in 2021. And we just wrapped up and published the 2023 study. And what we found was a really notable decline in average advisor well-being over the past 2 years across basically every single age group and demographic we measured, except advisors over age 55 to 65. Older advisors, by and large, were similar or slightly happier, tends to be in a good place for their business overall and were still pretty happy with where their businesses were.

Stevyn: Right. That makes total sense.

Michael: And every other group was worse. And we were really surprised. We were like, we feel this in 2021 right between the spikes of the COVID variant waves, which by most people's measures, a really stressful time. You're back in the office. You're not back in the office. You're meeting with clients again. Nope, we're back on Zoom again. So much stuff was in flux all over the place. And so, we were expecting just to see this post-COVID bounce in advisor well-being and instead every category was lower, except advisors age 55 to 65, who apparently are feeling pretty good where they are in this stage.

Stevyn Noticed A Toxic Cocktail For Chronic Disease [17:12]

Stevyn: Right. Well, that's what I found too. I found that everyone is dealing with a chronic stress and just from a physiological standpoint, when you combine chronic stress with chronic sedentariness, that means periods of long bouts of not moving out of your chair, many advisors are chained to their chair for many hours at a time, it's what I call a toxic cocktail for chronic disease. 1 plus 1 equals 50, so if you have both of those present, you're exacerbating the issue as far as chronic disease goes. And so, that's a health crisis in the industry is what we're seeing. So that was number 1.

Number 2 is that when I looked at the healthiest people that I spoke to who gave themselves, their stress was directly related to their health. So if they scored themselves high on health, they scored themselves low on stress. There was a converse relationship or an inverse relationship. And that was really interesting. So are their stressors actually different? Or are they just better able to cope is the question. And I think that there's an interesting thing there. So if you take better care of your health, then your ability to bounce back and not feel as stressed might not be as big of a deal. And so, that was another interesting piece.

I also found that people who are most healthy were spending or allocating 10% of their day to their health. So what does 10% of the day mean? Okay, if we got 24 hours, 8 hours, we're going to just knock them off the top for sleep. That's what we should be doing. So we're left with 16 hours of week time. The average middle-aged American sits still for 12.3 hours per day. You're like, okay, that's leading us to high levels of chronic disease. So the research says if you change that by an hour or 2, just kind of intermix different modalities of movement, whether it's walking to the water cooler or walking and talking or going for a walk outside, doesn't matter, you can actually reduce all-cause mortality and chronic disease incident. So what I found, similarly, in the group of people, that I interviewed is that if they spent 10% of their wake hours on themselves, they were healthier. So that's like an hour-and-a-half roughly. And...

Michael: An hour-and-a-half every day.

Stevyn: Every day. And it didn't matter if it was preparing their food for lunch or if it was taking a walk or if it was getting a massage. I didn't really see any commonality...

Michael: Okay. Not necessarily like an hour and a half a day of exercising necessarily,

Stevyn: No, no. It might even be a rest. It could be something very simple or something engaging, like CrossFit. It didn't matter. I didn't see it had to be a specific thing. But it's just that they were intentional and depositing back into themselves in some format.

And I would actually not recommend that much exercise. And I can say that wholeheartedly because I have a master's degree in exercise physiology and I spent 20 years trying to get people to exercise. So I come by this recommendation fully well aware of the benefits of exercise. And I teach something called the hierarchy of wealth, and it's a pyramid with 4 levels. And on the bottom level is how you think, mind. On the next level – and you start at the bottom and you work your way up – and the next level is mending. How do you recover yourself? The next level from that is meals. How do you feed and nourish your body? And the very tip, the last thing is exercise. And if you start with exercise, you're going to burn out, get injured or quit. It's just not going to work. If you start with diet and exercise, it's not going to work. I know this, for many decades and hundreds of clients that if you start there, you will not succeed long-term.

So what does it mean? It means you take something from each category. So what are you doing to improving your thinking? How are you orchestrating your day? How are you preparing your food or going to the grocery store and making room for you to take a 5-minute siesta at 3:00 or going for a walk after lunch or I don't know, playing with the dog on the floor. Because getting down on the floor and back off the floor is a big deal. I know it doesn't seem like it, but it's a big deal.

Michael: Until you get older and it's a lot harder to get off that floor than it used to be.

Stevyn:Yeah, that's true. But if anybody who's listening has watched "Live to 100," it's the docuseries on "The Blue Zones" on Netflix. He went to Okinawa, Japan, the guy, Dan Buettner, who wrote that book, Blue Zones. And he looked at these 90, 100-year-old people. They're getting down and up off the floor an average of 30 times a day. And so, you're like, okay, there's so many things we can do besides just go to the gym or exercise. And I would say that sometimes less is more when it comes to people who have a lot of stress and who are dealing with a lot of business or raising kids or caring for loved ones or whatever that might include. Michael, financial advisors are some of the most caring people I have ever met. And I can say this wholeheartedly because my dad was 1 for 32 years. He took...

Michael: Was a financial advisor?

Stevyn: He was a financial advisor for 32 years, yes, and he took care of people. He served them. He gave of himself to these people, was a part of his community, was engaged at all these different levels. And that takes a lot and if you take... or excuse me, if you continue to mostly give and give and give to everyone around you, sometimes you don't need to go run 3 miles or lift heavy weights. Sometimes you need to go take a bath, get a massage, put your feet up the wall, go for a walk with the sunset, breathing out of your nose. Sometimes you need to just do the monotony of chopping onions because it's therapeutic and it's preparing for your next meal. All of these things that I'm talking about, this hour-and-a-half, this 10% of your waking days, is the stuff that just feeds you on those 4 levels that I just mentioned.

Michael: So my 4 levels again, mind, mending, meals, exercise.

Stevyn: And movement. Yep.

Michael: And movement. Oh, because they're all Ms.

Stevyn: They're all Ms. Of course.

Michael: So you talked about mind. I think we get movement. Can you share a little bit more around meals? I think I know what that means, but meals and what is 'mending' in this framework.

Stevyn: Yeah. We'll start at the bottom. We'll start with the mend one, which is where everybody that I work with ignores because they're like, "Yeah, I should get more sleep." But there's almost this badge of, "I only got 4 hours of sleep and I'm still able to be here doing this, or I'm so busy." And it's something to look out for. So we start there and we're like, we look at metrics and we say, "Okay, how long are you sleeping? What time are you going to bed?" Because it does matter. You have to have deep sleep and REM sleep. Deep sleep happens in the first half of the night. REM sleep happens in the second half of the night – for the most part. I know there's cycles and there's lots of detail there. But for the most part, if you're going to bed too late, you're not getting deep sleep, you're not repairing your cells. And you're not repairing your brain so you're at risk for dementias and slowing down in older age. Nobody wants that.

So sleep is, we hear it all the time and it's something where we are trying to understand how do we protect that space? How do we get the different levels of sleep? But then, how do we also get to bed before midnight so that we can get the deep sleep that we need? You would not believe how many advisors have a second work day. Maybe you would. You probably do know that. They have a second work day and they work all day. They do dinner or whatever, and then they go back to their computers at night, destroying their circadian rhythm with the blue light, destroying their deep sleep and reparative, so they're actually going into further debt and waking up not recovered. They haven't paid their debts for the night. So they're in a sleep debt the next day. So that's 1 pillar.

The other pillar is what we already talked about, which is stress. They don't know they're stressed. So we have to look at things like heart rate variability and resting heart rate and breathing rate while they're sleeping and things like that so that we can be like, "I know you don't feel stressed, but your body is stressed. How can we fix that?" You said that advisors are goal-oriented. They absolutely are. I have a 1-page scorecard. I call it the Longevity Metrics. We fill it out together. These are all the things that I have discovered that lead to longevity, being able to do what they want, when they want, with the people they want for as long as they want. Because it's not fun to get kicked out of your business because your health doesn't hold up or you have to sell it or bring somebody in or whatever before you're ready. So that's what "Mend" is all about is those 2 pillars of stress and sleep.

Michael: And just the measuring that you're talking about. I'm assuming this is our modern age of Fitbits and the like that you can just strap on the equipment and it actually tracks all this stuff for you.

Stevyn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it does. Yeah. It's amazing. We use Fitbits or Apple Watches or our Rings or WHOOPs or whatever. It doesn't matter. We can get the data from everything. But it's like pulling the curtain back and getting to look inside of your physiology. Is it perfect? No. But it's good enough for us to see trends on things. And when people understand that their heart rate variability tanks when they don't get enough sleep, and then their heart rate variability goes up, it means that their nervous system is balanced and working properly. And they understand how that relates to brain fog and making better decisions and not having a fight with your wife or husband or whatever. It's eye-opening and you're like, oh, I'm doing these little things that are making life harder for me. Why don't I not do that, and then life will get easier? I call it the fertilizer of life. Everything grows better when you're taking care of your "mend" level.

Michael: And just for nerding out a moment for those who aren't familiar, what is HRV?

Stevyn: Sorry. Yes. I just did a huge blunder that people in the industry do all the time, talking about RIAs and things. But yes. HRV...

Michael: No, you're good.

Stevyn: ...is heart rate variability and I'll nerd here for a minute so people understand. You want your HRV, your heart rate variability, to be very high. And what it's measuring is every beat of your heart and it's measuring the time in milliseconds between each beat of your heart. Logically you'd think, well, we want those beats to be really consistent, right? Well, we don't actually because 1 nervous system, 1 side of your nervous system is your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system is saying, "Beat, beat, beat, beat." And it's wanting your heart to beat faster and faster because you've got so much to do. But you've got this other side, which is the off switch and that's your parasympathetic nervous system. It's saying, "You're fine. Calm down. It's okay. Breathe. Slow down." And when they're both talking to your system, then your heart has variability between its beats, because one's saying speed up and one's saying you're fine. And everybody's engaged. And that's a good sign. So there's a lot of variability. You're doing well.

If you have a very low heart rate variability, it means that you are in fight or flight all the time and you don't know how to turn it off or to repair and recover your system.

And I have clients all the time that they have no variability at all and we start working on a few tweaks. And we don't overhaul things. I'm all about high ROI. High return on investment. A little bit of effort and resource for a big outcome. And so, we find the piece, the gap that's going to move the needle the most and for everybody that's different, but that's what we look for. We find the gap. We get the tool. We fix it and the domino pieces fall into place. And that's the beauty of tech and then also the beauty of being able to see what the tech means and say, "There's the gap. Let's fix that. And let's fix it in a way that feels good to you so it doesn't feel like you're punishing yourself or guilty if you don't do it." And someone loses 25 pounds, they're like, "I feel like I haven't done anything. It's been too easy." I'm like, "Exactly. That's how it should feel. It should feel natural and part of who you are." We just have to find that thing for you.

Stevyn's New Take On The CFP Designation Of The Meals Layer [30:19]

Michael: And then, talk to us about the "meals" layer of the pillar.

Stevyn: So for meals, I have a new take on the CFP designation. And it's called carbs, fats and proteins. So carbs, fats and proteins, CFP, you have to have this designation. You have to know the stuff that it takes to get those balanced and I'm going to share a little bit of my philosophy with you. It's what's called diet-agnostic. So I don't subscribe to any particular type of diet. The one that I tell people who don't have a particular bend in a certain way is just be balanced. And inside my portal – I've got this app portal that my clients all use – when they enter their food in, we do an audit of their food, and we watch it and we just change a few things based on what we see – they don't have to do that forever, but there's this beautiful little wheel in there, and it's balanced. So you've got this CFPs, carbs, fats and proteins, and if they're equal, you're probably doing okay. We don't eliminate anything. So we just look at, "Can we put a few metrics around this And people can self-assess and then they can make a decision that's going to help them balance their macros over time.

I don't care about calories, Michael. I care about nutrients, and if you get the nutrients right, the calories work themselves out

So what we do is we take all of these things that we want to do and put them on a clock. And it's called circa diem, around the clock. It's where the word, circadian rhythm comes from. And we do these things in the first hour they're awake that are going to set their clock. And then, we do things at their meal, during their work, and their last hour that they're awake that are going to support their physiology in very, very small ways. And it gets this cadence going where the body can predict – it's all the clocks inside the system are all on track with each other, they're synced. And this beautiful symphony of health begins to form, and it's so much easier than people think. However...

Framing Your Day In The First Hour And Last Hour [32:28]

Michael: So I haven't heard lot of discussion around things like first hour, last hour activities. I feel like there's a lot out there about diet and the meals and what we do in between, but talk to us a little bit more about what you're framing up here around first hour, last hour.

Stevyn: So first hour and last hour are your most important hours. And it's not because you're going to go to the gym or anything like that. But that's setting the tone for what comes next. So your first hour you're awake, you need to do things to wind up your physiology, to turn all the switches on. Glucose uptake. Oxygen uptake. You've got this optic nerve that runs to a central clock in the middle of your brain, and if you don't see light within the first hour, sunlight would be best and daylight is second best, then you don't set your clock. And then, you're up until 2:00 in the morning, can't sleep or can't get into deep sleep.

So what you do in the morning, I call it "echo," because an echo reverberates all day long. So I tell my clients, in the morning, you first E, you eliminate: go to the bathroom. Then you C, you calculate what metrics are important to you. Do you need to step on the scale or check your blood sugar or whatever. Whatever those measures are, blood pressure. Calculate that stuff right then. And then, H is hydrate. Get 16 ounces of water because you've probably lost two pounds of water while you were sleeping. That turns all your systems on. And then, O is most important and that's orchestrate. So orchestrate your day. What do I have going on today? When am I going to eat and when am I going to move? If I'm not going to move now, when is it going to be? And do something to just set the intention for the day. So that first hour is critical for how the rest of the day goes. That make sense?

Michael: It makes sense.

Stevyn: To the last hour, you're like, the wind-down, right? You have to just ramp back down so your body knows it's time to produce melatonin, it's time to get ready for turning off all the systems of hunger and digestion and all of that. It's time to start repairing and using fat as a fuel source so that you're not accumulating but you're actually managing your weight and that last hour is turning down the lights, Turning off the blue lights, making sure that you're not working too late and keeping the neurotransmitters on in your brain that are causing you not be able to get into deep sleep. And so, there's lots of things that you can do in that space. But that last hour is just important because it dictates what your morning is going to be like as well.

Keeping A Scorecard For Health Goals And Metrics [35:24]

Michael: So you'd mentioned earlier a 1-page scorecard around this as well. Because we love our goals and metrics tracking. So what do you score and track or what should we be collectively scoring and tracking for ourselves?

Stevyn: There are 5 areas on this scorecard. One of them is called biometrics. It's height, weight, body fat. If you don't have a Renpho scale or some body composition scale, I would recommend getting that just so you can see, because people lose muscle as they age naturally, 6% to 14% a year after age 40. And we don't...

Michael: What was the tool you recommend, you said the what scale?

Stevyn: A Renpho. Yeah, it's an inexpensive, affordable body composition scale you can get on Amazon for $25. And it has these electrodes. You stand on it, and it reads your body fat, your muscle mass, visceral fat, which is around your organs, and it gives you some baseline numbers. And then, you can watch over time how those change so that you are not losing muscle mass and so that you're not accumulating what I consider to be a "credit card debt," which is visceral or belly fat, because it has a very high interest rate. It's very costly to you to have that. And so, you can use a simple tool like that to just keep an eye on those things.

Michael: Okay. So biometrics.

Stevyn: Biometrics is first. The next one is blood work. and I have a list of 13 things I think everybody should get.

And then, the last 2 are your move metrics and your meal metrics. And those are things like how much protein should you be betting a day? How much are you getting a day? Are you meeting your goals as far as fiber intake? Everyone's too low on fiber. We watch something in movement called zone minutes. How much time are you getting in a specific heart rate zone? And recommendation is 150 to 300 minutes in a particular zone. Most people are at like 20 for the whole week and we want it to be 150 to 300.

Understanding "The Big Swap" [40:30]

Michael: So for advisors who are listening, where do we get started? We're talking a lot of stuff now. Now this all sounds awesome, which means now it's so much to do I can't do anything, because I'm overwhelmed because it's so any awesome things. So where do we get started? As you noted earlier, you like to aim for the bigger ROI activities. So what tends to be the big ROI activities that we could be pursuing?

Stevyn: Well, if you don't mind, I'd like to take a step back to frame it a little bit, if you're good with that.

Michael: Sure.

Stevyn: The first place to start is understanding "the big swap." That's what I'm going to all it. And this is what an advisor said to me. He said, "Stevyn, I came into this industry with no money and as an athlete. And now 40 years later, I have a ton of money and I have no health. I'm bankrupt in my health." And so, it's "the big swap." I hear it all the time. And what I want the listeners to understand is that you don't have to exchange 1 for the other. You can do both. So that's the first place to start is realize that you can make deposits in 2 fronts at the same time. And I kind of think of it as a railroad track. If you're laying 1 rail, you're great and you probably have laid it all the way, miles and miles down the road from a monetary standpoint. But this other rail is just built 1 rail at a time, kind of keeping track with your other 1, your money. So that's your health and wealth railroad.

And so, when you look at that, if I look back to my own history, I'm the daughter of a financial advisor, I entered this industry as a third-party, I guess, as an 11-year-old, right? I'm turning 50 this year. So I watched while my dad built his business through those hustle years, did very well for himself, and his health declined. He was the heaviest he'd ever been during those years. He was the most absent from our family. And it was a time that I saw it for what it was. And a lot of people need to understand that if they just take small steps now, then you can start to accumulate compounding effects over time. So that's my main thing is look at your life and realize that this is a value of yours. This is something that's worth protecting and it's worth saying no to things for. It's worth putting a deep root in the ground and making things work around you.

And I'll give you an example of this. If someone has kids and pets and parents that they're taking care of, those always come first and their health comes last. So I would just encourage everyone listening to say, "Let your health pull up a seat at the table too. Let it have a voice of you need to do these things and let some things work around you and you work around some things," all based on priorities, obviously and what's needed. But don't let it keep getting put in the back burner. Okay, so that's the first thing.

The second thing is just start cutting your day in half. Take your 24 hours. You can draw a circle on your paper. Cut your day in half and say, "Half of my day is for recovery. Half of my day is to eat." Okay? So let's say you're going to eat breakfast at 9:00. That means you're not going to eat anymore after 9:00 that night. That's a really simple way to start. And it just gives...your body's not good at multi-tasking. It doesn't digest food and repair cells well together at the same time. It needs to do one or the other. So let's give it the opportunity it needs. So feed on half of the day and then fast on the other half of the day. That's a good place to start.

And the second place is map out your day. When are you going to eat your breakfast, lunch and dinner, generally speaking. Is it 10:00, 2:00 and 6:00? Great. Doesn't matter. Pick your times because your stomach has to release acids and it needs to know when you're going to eat. Otherwise, it sends the acids and there's no food and then you're grumbly and complainy and you have a mental breakdown. So just generally speaking, set your intention around meals.

And then, the last piece is set your bedtime. I know it's silly. We do this for our kids but we don't do it for ourselves. When do you intend to get to bed? If it's 11:00, set an alarm for 10:00 and start your wind-down at 10:00 and wake up without an alarm clock, as often as you possibly can. That's where I would start. Once you have those core frameworks built, then you can start working on your exercise or dialing in your nutrition and some of that stuff. But the framework has to exist first, because you can always insert new tasks, to-dos, tips, tricks, hacks, whatever. But the framework exists whether you're 40 or you're 60 or you have to care for children or your job changes or whatever. You can just rebuild your framework until it works for you.

How Stevyn Found Herself On The Path To Being A Health Coach To Financial Advisors [42:51]

Michael: So help us understand how you came to this path to be doing this kind of work.

Stevyn: Well, I alluded to it just a minute ago. It's my history. It's my DNA, my people. The financial services industry is something I grew up in. I worked in my dad's front office when I was in college. He had a robust business. He did very well. And I got to go on lots of trips. I got to go on lots of conferences. I got to see his colleagues. And I was shocked, Michael. I was absolutely shocked as a teenager when I could articulate what I was feeling, which was there were a lot of sick people. And there were a lot of people who were having 1 good year of retirement or dying at the desk. And I was like, "Wait, aren't you guys planning for retirement?" As a kid, I was like, "But then you're not getting to do what you want to do? I thought you wanted to travel. I thought you wanted to take up whatever sport." But then, they can't.

And so, then when I worked in the front office, I saw the same things from the clients. We would celebrate their retirements. We would celebrate their weddings. You become a part of the family when you're a small community as an advisor. And to see these people suffer so and not get what they had worked for decades to be able to enjoy really hit me hard. And so, after I graduated, my dad's like, "I think you'd be good in this business." And it's one of those things where... should I have done it? Maybe. Would I have been very well off and had a great gravy career? Maybe. But I couldn't do it. I was like, it's not the system that I can feel good about.

So I chose not to go into the industry because of what I saw, and the health of my dad and how hard he had to work and then struggle and the stress. And then, the result of these retirements. And I was like, I'm going to go fix this. And so, I became an exercise physiologist. I went and did what I now see as being the other asset. This other piece that we have to have for retirement. And the research is out there, Michael. I don't know if you've seen the Age Wave research, Merrill Lynch did some in 2014. Edward Jones did some in 2021. And the research is where they talk to retirees and say, "What is a good retirement?" And across all these metrics, stress, financial worry, early retirements that were unplanned, all of these, it's health. Healthcare. Health crisis. It's always in the top of the reasons that people either enjoy or don't enjoy what's going on in retirement.

And so, it's a very integral part here. It took me 20 years to figure it out though. Honestly, I was doing the whole exercise more, get in your cardio zone. You need to do 3 times a week. I was that person. And it was when I almost died in Australia, and we're going on probably 10 years now. I almost died there. I had to have an emergency surgery. I was septic. I had to have a blood transfusion. It was horrible. I almost didn't get to see my family again. We were living across the other side of the world, and, fortunately, I did make it. But overnight, the 5 days I was in the hospital, my body aged a decade. I lost so much muscle mass. I lost all my gut biome, all the flora, fauna from the antibiotics I was on. I had a completely different body when I woke up out of that surgery. And it was that event that said, "Whoa. What is actual health? It's not exercise." Is exercise a part of it? Of course. But it's not exercise. It's how you think. It's how you orchestrate your day. It's stress. It's sleep. It's repair. It's all of these things and when I started to look at it, I thought this lightbulb moment. I was like, finance and health are identical. The parallels that you subscribe to, to be successful financially, are the same ones for health. It's small deposits, long-term mindset and it's the other wealth. It's W-E-L-L. It's abundance of this asset. And so, that's when Grow Wellthy was born was from the 2 worlds that I lived in collided on that day.

Michael: And so, what is your actual business? What do you do at this point with this?

Stevyn: Yeah. So I run Grow Wellthy and Grow Wellthy is helping people to have better health. So we take that scoresheet. We assess. We make tweaks and I coach financial advisors to be as healthy as they are wealthy and to have the retirement that they're looking for with their health as a partner in that process. So we essentially, we work together for 6 weeks and we say, "Okay, here's the concepts that we're going to apply. Here's the frameworks we're going to use. Where are your biggest gaps?" We find the tools for those and we watch magic happen and we turn their health around. That's what we do. After 6 weeks, they have the blueprint. They have what's called a c that they can take and run with or they can stay in our community and they can execute together on it together with us where we've got several dozen advisors who are colleagues, peers. They help each other in this process. So it's a behavioral change, coaching around health and wellness from a financial perspective.

Michael: So can you go a little deeper with us of just what's the 6-week process? What's happening over this 6-week time period? What am I doing as an advisor?

Stevyn: Yeah. For sure. So advisors come in and first thing we do is goals, tools, and metrics. So we assess that. We gather all the data. We get all the tech in place, and we look for the data. We analyze it. Once we have the data, we start to create some goals and those goals are based on what the client wants, what the blood results say, whatever. We pick a couple things. And then, the next few weeks are going through that pyramid that I told you, understanding how we can implement different things from those 4 levels, the mind, the mend, the meals and the movement. And we learn about those concepts and execute on the things that feel right for them and that move the needle for them based on the goals.

So for one client, he might need to do these 3 things, and somebody else might need to do a different 3 things that we figure out that are kind of their core things that they're doing. But it's all based around the same concepts and framework. So that we work together once a week in small group setting or private setting, depending on what they choose. And then, at the end of the 6 weeks, they have a plan in hand that they know what to do. It's going to serve them for the next several decades, if they choose.

And they know what to do with it and it all makes sense for them. So that's what we're doing is we're learning. We're educating. We're applying and creating their path forward. As you well know, if someone doesn't set a goal financially, whether it's for their business or for their retirement or whatever, chances of hitting success are pretty rare, right? You talk about success all the time. You ask all of your guests, what does success mean to you. That's what I'm asking my clients. What does health success mean for you? And it's different for everybody. It's being able to hike 14,000-foot mountains for some. It's being able to get on the floor and play with their dog for others. It's lots of different things. But we have to understand it and work backwards from those goals with a plan in mind. And that's where financial planning and health planning are very similar. Nobody does it though. Nobody does it. Everybody goes to the gym. They maybe lift weights or try to get a little heavier weight, but they don't have a comprehensive approach to all of these metrics to keep their wellness wheel very round.

Michael: I guess that gets back to some of your comments earlier that when we were talking about what are the big ROI activities. You weren't necessarily talking about... I feel like traditional in the "get healthier" frame, which is essentially eat less fats and exercise more. You were talking about just cut your day in half of the eating half of the day and the recovery half of the day, which essentially is, don't snack after dark. Being more intentional around your bedtime and when you go to sleep. Just I'm struck. You're talking about somewhat different kinds of things, I feel like what we traditionally hear around health and wellness.

Stevyn: It's true. I am. And in fact, one of my clients I was talking to today, he said, "Stevyn, the first time that I met with you, I expected you to tell me to put down the pizza and stop eating the junk and not snack after dinner and exercise more." And he said, "I do all of that and I keep gaining weight and I was waiting for you to tell me that and you didn't." He said, "You came at it from a completely opposite direction that I've never even thought about, and all I had to do was these 3 things that were not even diet and exercise-related." For him it was drink his water earlier in the day and try to be mostly done by 2:00 for him, because he was getting up in the night to go to the bathroom too much and it was disrupting his sleep. Something as simple as that. And then, it was turn off the blue lights an hour before bed and I can't remember what the other one was. But that's him. That's his unique things.

But the process helps us find the things for you, for each individual person, because you are unique. And so, when he employed these 3 things, he's lost 40 pounds. And it's been 3 months or something. I don't know exactly what it's been. And it was so easy because he was already doing the eat well, exercise more. He's already doing more. He's like, "What else have you got for me?" I'm like, "We're not even starting there. We're starting down here on the bottom of this pyramid." And poof, it all started to work immediately. So that's the piece. It's like the missing piece of the puzzle gets you, that 20% gets you 80% of the results.

Michael: So can you just give us more examples? What are the other things?

Stevyn: Sure. Well, there are 5 pathways to health. I'll see if I can remember them off the cuff here. But one of them is to control your glucose, your blood sugar. So there are lots of ways that you can control your blood sugar. But if it's spiking and valleying throughout the day, you're on a roller coaster and you're going to crave sugar and eating, and overeat, you're going to feel like, oh, I can't stop eating or I want this all the time or I only think about food. So we have to control the blood sugar. And really, honestly, the reason we want to control blood sugar is because insulin has to show up and insulin is a storing hormone. It stores fat. It's the signaler that says, "Take any extra and throw into storage." We don't want that around, right? So that's a key pathway to health is controlling that. One of the ways, it's really simple...Yeah, you had a question?

Michael: So I say, so what do I do?

Stevyn: Yeah, yeah. One of the ways to control your blood sugar is go get the book, Glucose Revolution by Jesse, and I'm going to butcher her last name, Inchauspe or something like that. Glucose Revolution. And she gives you 10 hacks that will help you stabilize your blood sugar. Do you have to do all 10? No. Pick a couple of them and employ those and see how it works for you. But one of them is to move after you eat. So if you have lunch, go for a 15-minute walk after lunch and you will cut your blood sugar spike in half. That's huge. And you only have to walk at 1.2-miles per hour which is basically saying you just have to stroll. Doesn't have to be anything big deal. You just need to burn off that sugar before it goes into storage essentially. So that's one example.

Another example is to eat your fibers and your green stuff first. So have a salad before you have your steak. And just doing that one thing, or eat broccoli before you eat your pasta, is going to stabilize your blood sugar just because of the way that your stomach empties and what it has to do for second and third. Very simple hack you can do.

Michael: That's literally just a sequencing thing for order into the stomach and order of processing.

Stevyn: Absolutely.

Michael: So I eat my fibers and my greens before I eat my proteins and my carbs.

Stevyn: Yeah. And you would actually eat it fibers and greens first, then you would eat your proteins and fats and finish up with any carbs, like piece of fruit or your bread. So imagine going to a restaurant, Michael, and they bring out the bread bowl first, right? That's the opposite...

Michael: I was just thinking, so basically stop eating the bread bowl first.

Stevyn: First. You can have it. Just eat it last. So when you sit down, one of the things you can do is just set the mood. Tell the waitress or waiter, "Please don't bring the bread bowl first. Bring it at the end. And can you bring us some salads to get started." And boom, you've just corrected your blood sugar with a very little small tweak. You can still have the bread. You don't have to not have it. If you want it at the end, chances are you might not want it still, but that's okay. Give yourself permission if you do still want it. So yeah. The order that you eat it in is very, very important for blood sugar. So those are just a couple.

The second pathway to health is metabolic flexibility. And for those not familiar with metabolic flexibility, it's what fuel source does your body use to think, move, be alive. And I'm going to bet unless you're on keto, a keto diet, I'm going to bet that most people are burning sugars as their primary source of fuel. That's carbohydrates and sugars and things like that. If you are on a keto diet, you probably have a primary source of fat burning. So if we think about this, as a car, it would be your electric car is going to be your sugar burners, your carbohydrate users; and then your gas cars are going to be your keto people, like a long burn, slow burn. But what we want is we don't want either one of those. We want a hybrid car. That's what metabolic flexibility is. It's can your body, does it know how and have the enzyme capability to burn fats when it needs to and sugars when it needs to without going into a coma or gaining a bunch of weight or being hangry or whatever. And cutting your day in half, like I mentioned earlier, is one way to start training your body how to do that.

So let's say, for example, you take a test and you're like, am I a sugar burner or a fat burner? I don't know. Try skipping dinner 1 day and just see how your mood changes. If you're mostly okay, and you're a little hungry but it's not that big of a deal, you're probably okay and your body knows how to tap into fat as a fuel source. The opposite is that you can eat 2 Pop-Tarts and if you have to crawl under the table and go into a coma, your body probably doesn't know how to burn carbohydrates very well. So you can just do a quick test and just be like, which one am I and which one do I need to work on? And timing your day. Remember I said set your meals, cut your day in half, get your circadian rhythm. All of that is for this very reason. It's for blood sugar and metabolic flexibility. Is this too much nerdy stuff?

Michael: No. This is fantastic. Keep going. Anything else on metabolic flexibility or are we going to pathway number 3 now?

Stevyn: We can move onto pathway number 3. So pathway number 3 is cardiovascular or oxygen utilization. We'll call it that. How your body uses oxygen. And that is related to how strong and efficient your heart and lungs are. And so, let's say somebody goes for a walk uphill and they start breathing heavy right away. They probably don't use oxygen very well. Their cells are not adapted to that. If someone can run a marathon and still talk, they're very well-adapted and have strong heart and lungs. So we want to have a strong heart and lungs, because if you don't, your heart beats really fast, it doesn't move very much oxygen around your body or blood around your body very well and it is not efficient over time. You're not capable of doing the things that you want to do. Running up a flight of stairs, catching the bus, climbing the mountain, playing with the grandkids in the back with soccer, whatever. You're just not going to be capable to do that stuff. So that is a pathway to health as well. And more so than any of that is we're finding the link between all of these and brain health, dementia, Alzheimer's to be incredibly linked together. So what was interesting when I interviewed these 507 advisors is a lot of them are afraid of losing their mental capacities. It's a real fear for them that they're going to slow down or not be as quick or good with numbers or whatever.

Michael: We're in the thinking and talking quick on our feet business. It's really scary to not have brain capacity...

Stevyn: It is.

Michael: ...when you're in the knowledge business.

Stevyn: Absolutely. So you want to keep your brain sharp. And dementia is being called now the Type 3 diabetes. Why? Because it's directly linked with blood sugar and your body's ability use fuels for your brain that are good for it and insulin resistance in the brain. So being able to utilize oxygen, to not have too much sugar or not too much insulin, all of that directly effects your cognitive abilities over time as well.

So anyway, that's the next one. And to do that, those are things like making sure that you're getting out of breath sometimes throughout the day. It can be a long walk, a Peloton ride. Oh, my gosh, Michael. I cannot believe how many advisors have Peloton bikes. It's like a thing. You told me about the standard deviation of your advisors and goal-setting and that thing.

Michael: We're high Peloton users?

Stevyn: Yes.

Michael: So now I'm hearing this. How many people are listening to this podcast on their Peloton?

Stevyn: Yes. It is unreal. If I asked 100 people on the street if they had a Peloton, maybe 1 would. You ask 100 advisors, probably like 70% would. Seriously, it's crazy high number. And second to that, this is a total sidenote I'm going down, second to that is Orangetheory. So if they're not Peloton users, they probably belong to Orangetheory and it's because it's goals. Orangetheory and Peloton are all about output and goals and relationships and connection with people. It makes complete sense but that's the 2 that they go to.

Anyway, getting a lot of side notes here. Okay. With that number 3, now we're on number 4 for our pathways to health. Okay. So our fourth pathway...actually I'm going to skip to our fifth pathway and I'll come back. Our fifth pathway is traps and taxes. So it's us getting in our own way and doing things that are sabotaging our health or leaking health out of our health bucket. It's the things that we are either unconsciously or consciously doing that are this is not really helping us. And so, I have a whole area where we work on this of being able to change the traps, which are your thoughts.

Here, I'll give you some examples. "I don't have time." "When things slow down, I'll work on X." "I have to finish my plate because if I don't finish my plate of food, it's eating money." Doesn't matter. There's so many thought traps out there that are keeping people stuck...

Michael: Having grown up in the Sally Struthers, eat all the food on your plate because children are starving in Ethiopia.

Stevyn: Absolutely.

Michael: I remember that conversation growing up.

Stevyn: Oh, my gosh. Yes. Please, advisors, if you are listening, do not force you children to finish the food on their plate. Please don't. Because I have to undo that work in 30 years. Help them make good choices. Try new things. But not finish their plate because they're wasting money. That doesn't help.

Michael: Because the problem is you overeat, you stop, you don't stop eating when you're done eating because you're feeling your obligation of clear your plate?

Stevyn: Yeah, you're using a different measure or metric for what is enough for you. And nobody knows. Nobody knows how to gauge their own hunger in fullness cues anymore because they lost that ability many, many years ago in childhood. So we have to reestablish that. We have to say, "What does hunger feel like? And am I actually hungry?" There's this acronym that I would encourage everyone to write down. It's called HALT. H-A-L-T. So if you feel like you want to eat food, then just self-assess and say, "Am I hungry?" That's H. A, am I anxious, angry or annoyed and I just need to soothe myself? L, am I lonely? Or T, am I tired? All of those can show up as hunger. And once you start to recognize the difference, you can then give yourself the thing that it really needs rather than just more chips or whatever. Yeah. So those thought traps are really important to identify and once you identify them, you're either like, "Oh, I see you. You've been talking to me for a long time and I'm going to call BS on this. I know that that's not true, and I reject that thought. Now I can move forward and make the choice I really want to make."

Michael: So are there other common traps... when someone gives you the external perspective, it's a trap, when you just do it, it's like, that's how life works... that's what I do. That's what I know. That's how it's supposed to work. There are probably a lot of people listening where you just messed with their heads around 10, 20, 30, 40 years of living their life as you're supposed to clean your plate. So okay, I get it, but you also just rocked my world and understanding. So what else is in that category of I'm doing it wrong and I didn't even know if I was doing it wrong until you come in and rock my work and reset me?

Stevyn: Oh, thought traps. A lot of people's thought trap is, "I'll do it Monday" or next meal, "I'll do better." It's always some point in the future and it's very convincing because you truly believe that you will, but you don't. You just never do. You never catch up to it. So if you hear yourself saying that in your head as a justification, and one of my advisors actually today said this to me, he said, "I am a great salesperson and I can sell myself on anything." So recognizing when you're selling yourself on a false truth or something that you really know is not going to happen, no matter how justified it sounds to you, call it what it is. So if you see yourself kicking the can down the road for some future time when you're going to do it, guys, if you're not ready to do it right now, you're not going to be ready to do it then either. It's just...

Michael: So if you're not ready to do it now, just freaking do it now.

Stevyn: Just do it.

Michael: And if you're not ready to do it now, figure out what it takes to actually be ready to do it now. Don't commit future you who can then easily blow it off when future you arrives because future you don't feel like doing it...

Stevyn: Either.

Michael: ...in the future.

Stevyn: Exactly. Just know that about yourself. It's the same when you commit yourself to events. Oh yeah, I'll show up for that event that I'm sure I'll want to go when it comes. If you don't want to go right now and can't wait, you're not going to want to go in 3 weeks when that event happens. People overcommit themselves because they think they're going to be different in the future, and they're not. They're the same person as right now. So that's another thing. Just call it for what it is. If 'I'm not going to do it right now" or "I'm going to kick it to tomorrow," write it on the calendar or be specific so you can at least hold yourself accountable. But recognizing it is kind of the main thing.

And then, something I hear often is I don't need much sleep. I operate on no sleep. I've always been that way. That's just how I'm made. No, I'm sorry, it's not. It is absolutely... you've been able to get by because you're super smart. You're super capable. You're driven, responsible. You've got lots of great attributes. But being able to get by on little bit of sleep is not one off those attributes. Your body is just, you're just going into deeper and deeper debt. So if you hear yourself say that, call BS on it and say, "Nope, that's not true, physiologically." And as you age, you actually need more sleep and it's even harder to get deep and REM sleep. So you really need to incorporate and protect that now while you can.

So those are a few of the thought traps. Yeah.

Michael: Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, the sleep dynamic strikes me in particular, because I went through a round of this as well, that on the one hand, I lived a long, long time of not being terribly well slept, but figuring out how to manage to it and felt like I was fine. And it was actually getting a Fitbit and starting to track my habits on a Fitbit to actually be able to see what was going on. And I would go back and look at the Fitbit output of my average hour stuff for the month, because you can get these big roll-up numbers of averages for the month. In any particular month, I have a fairly stable sleep pattern. A good sleeping month was like a 30-minute per month average than a bad sleeping month. Something like 7 hours in deep sleep cycles versus 6-and-a-half hours in deep sleep cycles. And every month that was below average, I'd put on at least 2 pounds and every month I was above average, I dropped weight.

Stevyn: Wow.

Michael: For a whole bunch of other habits that I'd been trying to go through for years around eating healthier and exercising, and I went back and looked, the amount of time I spent exercising in the month had no actual relationship to whether I was up or down that month. It was whether my sleep hours were above or below average. And it wasn't the month that I had 5 hours of sleep – because I was traveling a lot back then and would have terrible sleep cycles when I was traveling. Just a 30-minute swing in average sleep averaged out over a month was enough to materially shift the direction of weight more than how much food I ate, how many calories I tracked or how much exercise I got because I was Fitbit tracking all of that.

Stevyn: Oh, my gosh. That just gives me goosebumps because you have data to prove exactly what we're talking about here is that that level of mend comes before the nutrition and the exercise. It has to because that's when your body burns through fat. That's when it decides to store it or use it. And if you're not getting enough, it adds up. So wow, that's amazing.

Michael: Yeah, it was quite striking. That was not the result I was expecting to see but it was extremely unambiguous, looking at the data.

Stevyn: Yeah. And that's why I love the data. It tells a story. It really does. And we can, I call it the 3 authorities. You've got 3 of them. 1 is what science says you should do. The other is what you like and feels good to you. And the third is what is your data say. And if all 3 are saying the same thing, you got a winner right there. But let's say that science says you should do it but you hate it, it's not a winner. Or you love it and science, all the research in the world says it's great for you, but you keep gaining weight and the results don't speak for themselves, it's not a winner. We have to have congruency between those 3 authorities for it to work.

And then, I wanted to touch on your piece about exercise and weight loss. There are a gazillion reasons to exercise. Weight loss is not one of them. And people don't understand that.

Michael: Okay, now you're messing with all of us again and all the things we learned. So deprogram us.

Stevyn: Yeah. It's so engrained in us that we need to exercise more and eat less to lose weight and it is absolutely incorrect information. The amount of calories that you burn exercising really hard are minuscule compared to the other things that we're talking about. And in fact, when you exercise –sometimes too hard when you exercise – it actually increases your appetite and so you overeat because of that. And you can gain weight exercising very easily because of that. And so, that's why we always work on these other pieces first before we add the exercise in because if you listen to Dr. Attia, he says exercise is the most important thing for you to do. And I agree with him. I do not agree though that it's the first thing that you do. And there's a difference. 1 is behavioral. 1 is physiology. And so, if you start with exercise, you're going to rev up your hunger response. You're going to get sore. You're going to have a lot more repair to do, because your muscles need to reattach and get the inflammation out and all this other stuff. And if you don't have the routine of sleep and stress control to go with it, you're going to be in a continuous tear-down cycle. So if you're exercising to lose weight, I would ask you to reassess your goal and your mode of reaching that goal, because they're probably not aligned.

Michael: Because I have to start with the mending sleep side first because that's lower on the pyramid.

Stevyn: Yeah. You do. And if that's not in the place, the exercise is not going to get you there. And if we think about how fat is burned, you have to unlock it in a sequence. Okay? So I'm going to give you a little bit of a insight into a hierarchy of, what do they call it? Order of operations. We'll call it order of operations. Okay. So let's say you want to burn some body fat. And you're like, I've got too much around my stomach. I need to get rid of some fat. It's time to do something. Okay, great. So you start to exercise and your body's like, "Oh, we're exercising. Let's use the sugar that's in our bloodstream for that fuel source. Great." You're like, well, I don't really want to...I want to use the fat around my stomach. Well, the order of operations is that your body will pull from all the sugar in your blood first and when that is depleted, when there's no more sugar left in your blood, it's going to pull from the next level. And it won't go to the next level until the first level is completely empty. So it unlocks the level. Think, I don't know, Mario Brothers. You unlock a new level of success or whatever.

So you burn through the sugar in your blood, unlocks the next level, which is stored sugar. And that stored sugar is called glycogen. It lives in your muscles and your liver. It's stored for the emergency when you have to run away from the bear or whatever. Then it will use any glycogen stores that you have. And then, and only then, will it be like, "Oh, man. She's still exercising or hasn't eaten yet. We need more energy. Where are we going to get it from?" Your body will throw out a craving to go get more food, because it's so much easier to burn the sugar than it is to go tap into something else. Fat is hard for your body to burn. It takes a lot for it to do it.

So I like to think of it in money terms. Sugar is the cash in your pocket. Easy to spend, right? And then, the glycogen, the stored sugar is like money in the bank. You can go get it out pretty easy. And then, you have to go to this next level, which is the fat in your blood stream. So if you had a meal in the last few hours, there's some fat in the blood stream and your body's like, "Oh, we'll use that. We can break that down and turn that into what we need." Okay, great. So that's the next level, maybe your savings account or something. It's a little harder to get to but your body's willing to do it. Well, only when that is gone, you've emptied that account, your body's like, "Really? We have to go get that certificate of deposit out? I don't even know who to call to do that or what to do." And it's just not super accessible until your body knows the pathway and has all the tools in place to do that. So you have to go through those stages to get to the fat and unlock that to use that as your fuel source. Most people never get there. They just go eat another meal, have a snack, grab some grapes, eat a cookie on their way passing through the break room, and they're always burning off that sugar and they never have a chance to tap into fat. So that's again, back to that cut your day in half. Give your body 12 hours to tap into those fat sources and to establish the ability to do that.

The other piece of that, we'll just go a little further in this fat fuel thing is that your body burns the most of its fat storages while you sleep. And so, if you're not getting the deep, restorative sleep – you never even access, you're not even in the realm of being able to unlock the door. You're not even in the room of where the fat storages are. It's not possible. So that's why teaching your body metabolic flexibility, eating the right foods, getting the good sleep, it unlocks the doors. Otherwise, they stay slammed shut. And you probably have people listening who are like, like one of my clients, I'm exercising harder than I've ever exercised before and eating less than I ever did. I can't lose a pound. Because the doors are locked. If your body needs more calories, it's going to go pull from your muscle and kind of consume itself. It'll pull muscle before it'll pull fat. That's why we have to do it in a place of peace, a place of comfort where your body is willing to let go of that fat and it's the right circumstances are established. So anyway, that was a big rabbit trail when we're thinking about thoughts and traps and taxes.

The other piece of it, which I alluded to...

Michael: Yeah, what was number 4 since we jumped to traps and taxes. Then what was the last one?

Stevyn: Well, real quick with the traps, because we only talked about thought traps. When it comes to taxes, you've got alcohol, sugar, industrial seed oils, sitting too long, staying up too late at night past midnight, eating out too much, those are all taxes that are, if you do have good health, they're leeching health from you. So I call it a high tax bracket. You've got the money but you're getting taxed like crazy for it. So that's something that...

Michael: What are the things in there again? So alcohol?

Stevyn: Sugar.

Michael: That trombone sound. Sugar. Staying up too late.

Stevyn: Eating out.

Michael: Eating out too much. What else was in there?

Stevyn: And sitting still for long hours.

Michael: Because we don't do that. Emails and financial plans and analyses and...

Stevyn: Exactly.

Michael: ...2, 3, 4 client meetings in a day. Yeah.

Stevyn: Yeah. Exactly. And it takes...you can turn all these switches back on with 1 minute of movement, guys. It's not a big deal. All you have to do, it's almost like touching the screen of your cell phone when it goes dark. Just touch the screen. Get up. Move around a little bit. Do a walk and talk. Do something for at least a minute and then go sit back down again. You'll keep all your systems operating that way. So okay.

So we need to go back to the other one, which was the other pathway to health, which is around your muscle and joint function. So it's maintaining muscle and joint function. And that's just your ability to move your body in space and time. And so, I told you earlier that every year after age 40, you lose muscle mass at a rate of 6% to 14%, depending on what your activities are. So if you are doing nothing, you're going to lose more muscle mass quicker, closer to the 14%. If you're doing something, you're going to lose your muscle mass slower. So we want to slow that down. I call it inflation. It's basically your money's getting taken. Things are more expensive. So this process is how can we slow that and have a plan in place for it. And how can we maintain our function?

What Surprised Stevyn The Most About Building A Consulting Business? [1:21:23]

Michael: So you've gone on this journey in bringing this to the advisor community, I'm curious from your own path, what surprised you the most about trying to build a consulting business around actually doing this and helping advisors with it?

Stevyn: Well, first of all, I had to get over myself and I had to realize that I didn't know anything. And I had to learn a lot of new skills. That was a big thing. It's not easy, as everyone listening knows who's running their business or growing a practice. It's not easy to be the jack of all trades and to learn the marketing piece and the tech stack and all of that stuff. But even further to that, what I thought I used to know really wasn't true. What I learned in my master's degree, all my certifications, everything, wasn't what really what was happening. So I had to trust myself to go find the new research and apply that stuff that I knew was working and not stick with the old. Like you said to me, you're telling me stuff I haven't really heard here. This is not stuff everybody's talking about in the nutrition world or the exercise world. There's a reason for that because I had to go find the new information and trust myself that this is the new path forward. So those are some big hurdles I came to.

The third one I would say is how do you tell numbers people that their health is important? And how do you educate and tell people… there's not a burning fire here until you have a heart attack, of course, or something like that. But how do you teach people to prevent what's coming? And it's the same conundrum that advisors find themselves in. How do you teach a 30-year-old that they need to start saving for retirement? There's not a problem yet, right? It's hard.

Michael: Given our planning orientation, I'll admit that the piece of this that stuck with me is you were talking about is this whole if I want to make deposits to be in good health and retirement, that just as we tell clients you have to start saving early and it's so much easier when you save early, and we've, all in advisor world, seemed some version of the charts or made some versions of the charts where, "Here's how much you have to save if you start at 55, and then here's how much less if you start at 45, and then here's how much less if you start at 35. And look at how little it takes to accumulate retirement if you just start at 25."… That mental image is pretty well engrained for me in financial advisor world. So I'm just thinking that, but the end point is your health in retirement and it's the same start earlier, longer and if you haven't started, that's not good. But the only better time to start than yesterday is to at least start today...

Stevyn: Exactly.

Michael: ...because it only takes more if you wait from here.

Stevyn: Yes. And it's funny because when I'm coaching my advisor clients and we're talking about their "spending" or how they're allocating their, whether it's their food or their movement or their time or whatever to create the goals that they're looking for, one of my best tactics, if anybody here ever works with me, you'll recognize this in the future. I'm giving away my secret here. But one of my best tactics is, "What advice would you give to your clients if they were overspending to the goals that they had told you that they wanted?" And this lightbulb goes off. They're like, "Oh, my gosh. These 2 worlds are...I always wonder why my clients are making this choice or this decision or why they're not seeing the big picture or the long-term goal." And as soon as they see that in their health and connect those dots, it's this lightbulb. And they can then begin to coach themselves through this process. Because it's the same. I am the financial advisor. I just have a different asset I work with. It's just health instead of dollars, but it's for the same goal, the same reason that advisors are working with their clients right now.

[1:30:58]

Michael: So what was the low point for you on this journey?

Stevyn: Probably my low point was when I realized that, and maybe it's high point too, as I think about it, was that I can't do it by myself. I can't be good at everything.

Michael: What happened that you hit that wall?

Stevyn: It was me violating my own principles. So when I saw myself starting... my own heart rate variability start to go down, or my own metrics starting to change in a way that I didn't appreciate, I was like, this is not a sustainable situation that I'm in. And I'm not able to do this by myself. And so, part of that is ego saying, "I should be able to do this all by myself and take care of my clients and run the business and take care of me and my kids and all this other stuff." And then, so that was a low point. I'm broken. I can't do it. Something's wrong with me. Why is everybody else able to run their business and I can't run mine? And have this balance per se, or whatever you want to call it, this equilibrium of life in general? But then at the same time, that was the pain point that got me to say, "I don't have to do it all. I can pull an expert in for this marketing piece or this digital whatever whatever and get the support that I need. I can align myself with other people who are doing what I'm doing and learn from them and become part of a community." And then, you realize that they're struggling too and they're looking for help, maybe not in the areas that you are, but you can't do everything perfectly. And something's going to give.

I was speaking at this event, it was an FPA event Atlanta, a year or two ago. And someone recommended this book to me, Choose your Cheat have you heard of it?

Michael: I don't know this one.

Stevyn: Yes.

Michael: What is Choose Your Cheat?

Stevyn: Premise of the book is you can't do everything to the level that you want to do it at. It's not possible. So you might as well choose the thing you're going to cheat on or AKA not do as well on...

Michael: Okay. Yeah.

Stevyn: ...or it's going to choose you and you're going to be regretting some things. So whether it's relationship, kids, money, career, health, you have to have a certain level of choosing your own destiny of what things you're going to let slide on purpose and which things you're going to really focus on and which things you're going to be okay with mediocre on. And that was one thing I did talk to those advisors at that call, at that event was, I was like, if you don't take anything from what I'm saying here, the one thing I would love for you to at least do is examine your life.

And I think that in the advisor world, it's very easy to keep shooting for the next AUM, the next level, the next partner, the next scalability of whatever. And sometimes we don't recognize the cost to keep going, like when is enough enough. And then, ask yourself do you have enough in all of your categories or is there something that's a little bit lopsided?

What Other Advice Would Stevyn Give Advisors Who Feel Stuck In Complacency [1:28:25]

Michael: So what other advice would you give advisors who maybe are reaching that moment of, "I've been complacent too long." I know some things aren't in a good place anymore. I need to do something and I'm not even sure where to start because there's so much that I probably have been neglecting and need to get back to now.

Stevyn: Advisors, they're data people. They're assessors. They like to have a problem and a solution and do that. So that's one of the reasons I created the health credit score quiz. Just go to my website, growwellthy.com. Right there on the front page, it's assess yourself. How are you doing? Because the bedrock of what I teach is awareness first, curiosity second. And it's a healthy dose of vitamins A and C, awareness and curiosity. So if you know where you are, face the facts, it's like the person who doesn't want to come into your office and have a financial advisor because they're too embarrassed. Come on in. Face the facts. And then, get curious. Don't create guilt or say how horrible you are, feel whatever. Just assess and then: "I wonder what would happen if…" And start to ask some questions. And one of them is pick where...I call it the dopamine detective. You want to follow where it feels good and is good for you. So you think about, okay, think about those four items that we talked about. Exercise, meals, mending and your mindset. Those four. Do any of them pique your interest? Because if they do, they're going to give you a dopamine hit in your brain, and we got to follow the dopamine because that's where health is found is in the feel good. And so, if you can find something that piques your interest, anything I've said that you're like, ooh, that's interesting, that's your particular next step. I can't tell you what it is because I might say, "Go for a walk after dinner every night" and you're like, "I hate walking. It's freezing cold outside. I'm not doing it." Even if it is...

Michael: "Well, then don't."

Stevyn: Yeah. So follow the dopamine. Let your own curiosity guide you to the next best step for you. Maybe you need some help with that because maybe you don't know all the options available to you.

Stevyn's Definition Of Success At This Point [1:30:52]

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success. And we talked about the whole theme, success means different things to different people. Sometimes it changes for us as we to through our own lives. And so, you're building this successful business around helping advisors with their own health and wellness and provide that as a service to the advisor community. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Stevyn: So success has… 2 words come to mind. And I toggle back and forth because I do think about this often. I toggle back and forth so I'll give you both of the words and you guys can decide if one fits better than the other. But success to me is choices and it's choices, which also equals freedom. And that is success. Nobody wants to be forced to sit on their couch because they have to go to dialysis and can't do the things they want to do. Nobody wants to be forced out of their business because they had a heart attack and they can't get to the office anymore. Nobody wants to be forced to do anything. I talk to advisors all the time who say, "I love what I do and I don't ever want to stop." What they don't know is that they may not have a choice in that if they don't take care of their partner in health. And that will force the issue to them. So to me, success is the ability to have a choice, do I want to do this or want to do this? Can I turn the page or not? And not locking yourself into being forced into decisions. It's the freedom to move your body. It's the freedom to run your business. It's the freedom to move around the world and live in Portugal if you want to. It's the freedom to make choices.

Michael: Amen. Amen. Thank you so much, Stevyn, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success Podcast."