LIFEonomics

LIFEonomics™
Living Free of Worry and Regret
By Rob Holdford
Foreword by Brad Isroff
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Brad Isroff
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: WHAT CONTROLS YOUR LIFE?
Chapter One: Don’t Worry, Take Action
Chapter Two: Forget Regret
Chapter Three: What You Can Control
PART TWO: THE FOUR Ls
Chapter Four: Let It Be
Chapter Five: Learn From It
Chapter Six: Let It Go
Chapter Seven: Live Now
PART THREE: PLANNING FOR TOMORROW
Chapter Eight: Create your Life Team
Chapter Nine: Develop a Life and Legacy Plan
AFTERWORD
Foreword
By Brad Isroff, WMS
My friend Rob Holdford has been in the financial services industry for more than 21 years, He’s
seen the second-worst bear market in U.S. history, Black Monday of 1987 and more than a few
other tough times. If you’re in this business long enough, you’re going to talk more than a few
clients out of utter, blind panic. But Rob told me once that with each crisis, he noticed that more
and more of the anxiety and fear came not from the actual financial damage, but from the
relationship people had with their money. I’ve seen the same thing: many folks have a
relationship with finance that can only be called dysfunctional.
I’ve known Rob for more than 20 years. My wife went into labor during a cookout at his
home. After graduating from Miami of Ohio and spending about 15 years in broadcasting and
telecommunications, I was lucky enough that my path led me to financial services and Rob’s
practice in 2003. I know the values that drive his work, because they’ve shaped my values as
well. Our vision is this: We spend our waking hours dealing with finances, but, in reality, we’re
dealing with people and their lives, trying to improve their relationships with their money. We
want to help them understand what they can and can’t control, because in this business you learn
quickly that there’s no greater fool than the individual who thinks he can predict what the market
is going to do.
After years of observing, we can tell just minutes into the initial consultation if a client is
obsessing over something in his past or future. Some people wind themselves up like watch
springs over normal market fluctuations and drive themselves into depression over investment
decisions they made 30 years before. Rob watched the effect of this cumulative anxiety and
regret and finally said, “Enough is enough.” We talked it over many times and thought we were
going to write a financial book, something about how not to drive yourself into an early grave
over your retirement planning. But LIFEonomics™ has taken a life of its own and become
something greater than we had planned.
The ironic thing is that this book about freeing yourself from worry and regret has come
from a man who has endured more than his share of both in just 43 years of life. He’s seen
relatives die terribly, a ruinous divorce and had a family member be the victim of a brutal crime.
He has reason to be bitter, angry, worried and regretful, but he’s not. I don’t know anyone who
has less regret and worry, who does a better job of living in the now and getting the most joy
possible from the moment. I don’t know how he does it, but Rob’s wisdom and vision are at the
heart of this book.
LIFEonomics™ is about finance, but finance in a way that, perhaps, you’ve never
thought of it before. Wealth is much greater and more personal than we’ve been taught—it’s not
just the power to buy things. Wealth means freedom and passion and dreams. Rob and I can tell
when someone has the proper balance between all three types of wealth—intrinsic, relationship
and financial—in their lives, because those people are truly happy, no matter how much money
is in their accounts. More dollars and cents don’t mean you have more true wealth or happiness.
More money doesn’t mean you’re doing what truly matters to you with the people who truly
matter to you. That’s the goal we have in mind for you. We want you to spend as much of your
life as you can doing what you love with who you love. Nothing is more important.
Do we want this book to help us build our financial practice? Of course we do! That’s
no secret. We hope that our vision will resonate with you and that you will consider honoring us
with your trust and your future. But even if you never think about calling us, that’s fine. This
book alone can make a difference in your life by helping you see the ways that you can live more
in the present and let go of our modern age’s penchant for worry and regret. There are so many
aspects of our lives competing for our attention that we live very little in the present. We
confuse busy for fulfilled, solvent for wealthy. Whether it’s your family, business, church or
civic organization, the teachings in the book are designed to help you be more in the present and
enjoy life without regret or worry. If we could all be a little bit more present, and appreciate the
moments of our lives, we would change the world.
Yes, our aspirations are pretty big. But Rob’s vision is big. As he and I have worked to
develop it, we have realized that the goal we’re aiming for is nothing less than transforming how
people see money. In retirement, some people begin to develop an unhealthy fixation on their
money, especially if they are soon to go from being the main income-earner to earning nothing.
It can be terribly jarring to one’s sense of identity…unless one’s identity was never based on
money or income in the first place. That’s where we hope LIFEonomics™ will take people, to a
place where they can define themselves based on the people who love them, the passions they
pursue and the difference they make in the lives of others. We would both like to see this book
become a model for a new kind of financial services industry, a more holistic, humanistic one.
Time will tell if we’ve done our jobs well enough.
In the meantime, take the lessons of this book to heart. Enjoy the ride. You’re going to
run across some truths you might find disturbing and others you find empowering. That’s good.
If nothing else, we hope this book will pry open your mind, make you question your own
attitudes toward finance and your own habits of worry and regret, and make some positive
changes. If we can cast our stone into the waters and send out ripples of good, we will have done
well.
Most of all, listen to Rob. He has wisdom beyond his years and a deeply human capacity
for caring, insight and truth telling. Later in the book, he talks about honor. I am honored to
have been part of this project and his vision. Now, I hand it over to you. Read on and make
something marvelous happen.
Brad Isroff
Executive Vice President, Wealth Management, Inc.
Introduction
The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives.
—Billy Graham
It was supposed to be just another client review appointment. I wondered why Rick and Jo Anne
were coming in so soon since we had just met only a few weeks before. They were about to
celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, and I was hoping they were coming in to ask for funds
out of one of their accounts for a dream vacation or some other romantic experience. I was
proud of the financial planning work we had done as I went through their file in preparation for
the appointment. They were very happily married, both 52 years old, and well on their way to an
early retirement. Since their son was now out of college, finances, as well as life in general,
were about to get even better. Rick was very clear about what was truly important to him. His
faith in God and protecting and providing for his family topped the list.
Then Rick showed up wearing a baseball cap, something I had never seen him in before.
He shook my hand, and I knew something was wrong. The life and enthusiasm I had become
accustomed to seeing in him was gone, replaced by something uncertain. In my time as a
financial advisor, I have developed excellent instincts for when something isn’t right, and those
instincts were buzzing now. The three of us sat down in my office and suffered through one of
those awkward moments where no one quite knows what to say. It was like one of those
moments from a courtroom drama where the jury is about to read the verdict and everything
hangs in the balance.
Rick broke the tension. With incredible grace he reached up and pulled the ball hat off of
his head and leaned forward. What was left of his light red hair fell forward in a long, untrained
comb-over, revealing a nine-inch gash held snuggly together by several metal staples. Speaking
slowly and calmly, he told me the whole terrible story in a few words. A malignant tumor had
been removed from his brain, but the cancer had already spread into his lungs. His doctors told
him that he had about six months to live. He leaned back, throwing his comb-over in place just
before the cap came down. “There was not even a single symptom,” he said. “They found it
during a routine physical.”
In a moment of clarity, I realized exactly why they had come to see me. They had come
to hear me tell them that no matter what happened, everything was going to be all right
financially. The implied question was, “Are we going to be able to drop everything so we can
focus on keeping Rick alive?” What was most important to Rick, however, was the question, “Is
the plan we put together really going to take care of my wife and child if I don’t make it through
this?”
Feeling…Lucky?
I bowed my head and spent a couple of minutes reviewing Rick and Jo Anne’s entire financial
portfolio, double-checking to make sure that my emotions were not affecting my evaluation. The
room was completely silent; I could hear the clock ticking and maybe my watch as well. But as
the shock of Rick’s illness wore off, I began to realize that we had planned for this possibility.
His disability insurance was in force and up to date. Only a few short years ago we had
increased his life insurance. We had recently rolled most of his life savings out of a retirement
plan that was over 40% invested in a single tech stock and into a well-balanced, highly
diversified portfolio with a death benefit guarantee built in. Other than a couple of minor, yet
important legal documents that they had yet to have drawn up, it was clear:
They were going to be able to put all of their energy
into defeating the cancer, free of financial worry.
Relief relaxed my body and eased the way I sat in my chair. First, I told them that no
matter what happened, they were in secure financial shape. They had nothing to worry about
from that area of their lives. I saw them both breathe easier as one possible fear was removed.
Then I began discussing other less material issues. I shared with them the story about my cousin
who discovered that she had a terminal illness and went on a cross-country quest to make all of
her wrongs right and restore her integrity in a last-minute effort (a successful one) to bring peace
and meaning to her life. Rick’s reply changed my life forever.
He said, “Well, I guess that’s the best part about the way we have lived our lives. We
don’t have to travel anywhere or do anything. All my wrongs have been made right a long time
ago. All of the people that I love already know how I feel. I have spent thirty years with the
woman of my dreams. The only debt that I have is to my God, and a dear friend of mine paid it
for me a couple thousand years ago on a cross. To be completely honest, right now, we are
feeling pretty doggone lucky.”
I was staggered. I thought, “How could he not be worried? How could he have no
regrets?” Here was a man in his prime, about to move toward retirement with the woman he
loves, who has built a proud and successful life, only to have it all cruelly stolen away by a freak
diagnosis that left him just months to live. How could he be so at peace? I was so shaken that I
almost asked the question out loud. I’m still not sure how I managed to hold back tears. But my
perspective had already begun to make an irreversible shift.
Free From Worry and Regret
Rick was far from giving up the battle against his cancer, but I knew that if he was ultimately
facing an opponent he could not defeat, he had lived a life that many people can only imagine, a
life of faith, love, meaning and purpose. Imagine standing at the beginning of the end of your
life and looking back without a single worry or regret. This man knew what was truly important
to him. He had really lived his life; life had not lived him. I knew then that I was privileged to
have known and worked with him.
Most importantly, I knew at that moment that if Rick could live a life of honor, free of
worry and regret even faced with a deadly disease, so could I. And maybe I could help others do
the same. That moment of harsh truth and nearly divine wisdom has culminated in this book.
Rick lost his battle with cancer some seven months later, but before that happened he
shocked his doctors (but no one else who knew him) on more than one occasion by smiling,
getting up and walking out of a hospital room that they were sure would be his last address.
Countless friends, relatives and co-workers were touched and inspired by his grace and dignity
during his last few months on this earth. Because of his planning, his wife and son will be able
to dedicate the rest of their lives to honoring and teaching the lesson that Rick lived in his final
months: It is possible to live a life without worry and regret.
Living in the Now
The aftermath of Rick’s stunning news was not the first time I had thought about writing a book
like this. I’ve spent more than 20 years as a financial advisor coaching people in preparing for
their lives and six years thinking about writing a book like this. Why? It’s simple really. Over
the years I have seen hundreds of clients and thousands of others at seminars who were
consuming their precious lives with worry, regret or both. It’s an epidemic, especially in the
United States, where we seemingly worry about everything. We are the most anxiety plagued
country on earth, and it defies logic: As we get greater material wealth, we have more fear. Of
course, at this writing our economy seems to be in recession, so perhaps there is reason for some
realistic concern. However, even when times are great and we’re flush, we seem to find reasons
to fret over things or to look back and beat ourselves up. Forget baseball; it’s the national
pastime.
I think that worry and regret are crazy and destructive. They are habits, choices that rob
us of our lives more than anything else we do. Studies show that 50-90% of a person’s
conscious time is spent daydreaming or projecting their thoughts into the future or living in the
past. There’s nothing wrong with a little of either one, but when you’re living in the past or the
future, you are most certainly not living in the present. Worry is the habit of projecting irrational
fears into the future, while regret is the habit of punishing yourself for the mistakes of the past.
Both take you out of the process and joy of living your life, which is happening moment by
moment.
Worry and regret are the twin demons that warp and corrode our lives by making us
spend much of our time either fearing what might happen tomorrow or feeling bad about what
happened yesterday. Now, that’s suffering. The vast majority of the unhappiness and suffering
in life occurs not in the present moment but in anticipation or memory. Worry and regret are like
diseases that infect people with enough time on their hands to dwell on what might happen or
what has already happened.
Worry and regret are habitual obsessive patterns of thought. According to Eckhart Tolle,
emotions are the body's response to thoughts. The emotional response to worry is fear. The
emotional response to regret is guilt. Since our bodies can't tell the difference between a real
experience and the thought of one, we not only generate unnecessary and uncomfortable
emotions via worry and regret, we also put our bodies through unnecessary stress as they react to
the fear generated by the obsessive thought. Our "fight or flight" programming kicks into high
gear. Our endorphins race, adrenaline increases, and our muscles tense, getting ready to spring
into action. All of these physical responses seem to validate the worry, fooling us into believing
that “something is really wrong” or “my intuition is telling me I am justified in my worry.” This
is a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog. We think we are following our feelings, but our
feelings are really following our thoughts, which we have habitually allowed to run amok like a
spoiled child in a nice restaurant. Our feelings feed more obsessive thinking and we create a
vicious cycle that’s very hard to break.
An Exponential Change
But what might happen if we could learn not to worry and regret so much? I think it would hand
people back a major percentage of their lives. It would be an exponential change in happiness,
peace and the reduction of stress. If we lived more in the present moment, we would be more
able to enjoy the things that can really only have meaning in the present: a baby’s cooing, art, the
feeling of being alone in nature, exhilarating acts like skiing moguls or paddling down rapids,
making love. There is very little fear or suffering in the present moment. Worrying about the
test results, the unpaid bills, the leaky roof, the fight you had with your boss, or regretting that
episode of infidelity, the job you didn’t take, the awful thing you said to your mother five years
earlier—that’s where the pain lies.
In thinking about all of this in the wake of Rick’s courageous approach to his illness, I
realized that the time had come to write the book I had been thinking about for so long. The
lessons I had learned from working with clients who previously had spent much of their time
engaged in worry or regret could help others lead lives more centered on the joys of now—on
planning for the future rather than worrying about it and forgiving themselves for the past, rather
than beating themselves bloody for things they couldn’t change. I hope in creating
LIFEonomics™ I can help some people free themselves from the suffering of living constantly
in the past and the future. My hope is that in reading this book, you will develop some tools to
pull yourself out of worry or obsessing over the past and turn your attention to life as it is today,
the only time we have any control over.
In creating LIFEonomics™, I’ve also come up with what I call the Nine Foundations of
a Worry- and Regret-Free Life. They are:
1. Worry is useless obsessing over a future we cannot control.
2. Regret is useless obsessing over a past that we cannot change.
3. Obsessing about that over which we have no control is futile.
4. The only things we can control are our thoughts, words and actions.
5. We only have control in the present moment.
6. We take control of our thoughts, words and actions first by controlling our attention.
7. You must assemble a “life team” of people you trust.
8. You must create a “life and legacy plan” that you believe in.
9. We learn from the past and plan for the future so that we can live powerfully in the
present, free of worry and regret.
Mike’s Lesson
Mike was an executive in the accounting department of a large company in our area. He was
tall, slim, and completely sure about most everything. He was his wife Nancy’s one true love
and they had raised two wonderful children together. At 55 he attended a University of Arkansas
continuing education course on retirement that I was teaching. He came in to see me at my
office completely sure that he was going to have to work for another five years, until he was 60,
before he could retire. But through some advanced tax and retirement planning, we were able to
shock him and help him retire within a few weeks. Mike proceeded to have what he called the
best five years of his life. Sadly, within a couple of months of his 60th birthday he was diagnosed
with a terminal illness and died a few months later. How valuable do you think those five years
were to him and to the people who loved him?
The lesson I took from Mike’s story is that time is the most precious asset any of us will
ever possess. Time is more important than money, because you can always find a way to get
more money, but when you’re out of time, you’re out. If you waste two years in a life you hate
for no other reason than a feeling of obligation, nothing will give you those two years to live
over again. They’re gone. So from this perspective, wasting time should be a hanging offense.
There are three ways to define life, and the simplest is the time between our birth and our
death. All we really have when we enter this life is the time until we leave it. We are constantly
balanced between the cradle and the grave, and being aware of this truth (but not fearing it) is
one of the greatest gifts anyone can ever receive. You see, I think most of us confuse “life” with
“living,” when they are really not the same. Living is primarily the mundane, routine things we
do to get through the day: getting up, brushing our teeth, going to work, making dinner, doing
the laundry and so on. When your sole focus is on those chores and on worry and regret, you can
become complacent about how precious every moment is. It shouldn’t be necessary to have a
brain tumor or heart attack to realize that we are only here for a finite time and each day is
miraculous.
The second definition of life is the opposite of the mundane: the quality of what we do
with our time on earth. Life is about the meaning and purpose of what we do with our time, and
that doesn’t mean we have to cure malaria or build hospitals in Ghana. Quality of life means:
The percentage of a person’s time left on this earth spent doing what is
truly important to them with people who are truly important to them.
Meaning and purpose don’t need to have high-flown religious or philosophical aspects to
them, and anyway, I’m not a theologian or a philosopher. But I have spent most of my career
interviewing people about their lives. I have met people who had great financial wealth but a
quality of life that was obviously terrible. I have also met people with very little financial wealth
whose lives were nevertheless rich and joyful and filled with meaning. Guess which people I
envy? It’s not the rich ones, because no one lies on his deathbed and says, “I wish I’d made
more money.”
What is LIFEonomics™?
Unfortunately, many people still focus on money as the measure of their happiness. I’ve seen it
time and time again: A client tells the story of her once-upon-a-time passion for golf or art or
jazz or travel, and how she did the “mature thing” and gave up on that passion for the career that
would allow her to make the most money. Then, once she retires, what does she do? Right, she
dives headfirst into the original pursuit that she loved dearly. When I see people like that, I want
to shout, “Why didn’t you just make a career out of what you loved in the first place?” But I
don’t, because you can’t go back. No matter what you believe about an afterlife, each of us gets
one shot at this life. My goal is to help everyone I can live it with more meaning, purpose, love
and joy. That means dumping worry and regret.
I want to replace economics, where everything is about money, with LIFEonomics™,
where it’s all about shedding our fears of the past and future and creating a life we can love in
every moment. This is something of a revolution. With the Information Age, we thought we
were developing the most educated, sophisticated generation of investors in American history.
What we have actually created is the most debilitated, traumatized, deluded generation ever.
Now even the professional advisors have begun to lose faith and abandon their sacred mission: to
help our clients plan to create the richest, most secure, most rewarding lives possible. Note that
there’s nothing in there about making a bundle of money.
LIFEonomics™ is a system for living a fully engaged life. It’s a holistic approach to
financial planning that takes the money out of it, for the most part. Strange as that sounds, it’s
really valid. Financial planning is 10% money and 90% human nature and living life. Most
brokers want to talk about money and the stock market, but what we should be doing is asking a
very simple question:
If you were not afraid of failing, what kind of life would you like to have?
I’m talking about a kind of “spiritual economics.” When you think about it, a financial
planner knows more about what’s important to people and what they fear than their doctor, their
lawyer or even their pastor. We have a responsibility to teach people that their lives are about so
much more than money. In fact, money is merely the third level of a “hierarchy of wealth” that
each of us must master in order to build a truly wonderful life:

Intrinsic Wealth: Time, talent, wisdom, education, health, your potential as a human
being. This also includes such things as your capacity for love, compassion, patience
and understanding, as well as one of my favorites: a sense of humor. Intrinsic Wealth
is the sum of all that makes you…uniquely you.

Relationship Wealth: The only way we can manifest and experience our Intrinsic
Wealth is by experiencing it with other people. The relationship can be with your
significant other, family members, friends, your creator or whomever you choose, but
it must be central. Also, it has been said that it is not what you know, but who you
know. Relationship Wealth also includes your list of business associates,
acquaintances, and networks you belong to. Having the number of a great plumber
who you know and trust can be priceless.

Financial Wealth. The sole purpose of money is to support and enhance the other
two types of wealth. It has no other meaning.
The trouble is that in the minds of many people, these types of wealth are exactly
reversed, and that’s because of worry and regret. We worry about paying the bills and not
having enough to live on after we retire. We regret past financial decisions and determine that
we’re going to take as much as we can while the opportunity is there. So money comes to
dominate our lives, yet there’s never enough of it. We still worry and fear and suffer, and that’s
because money doesn’t address what we really need: The knowledge that we’re living a life that,
at the end, we can look back on with pride and joy.
Money is the blood that carries the oxygen through a healthy life. Money is freedom.
Money is just potential energy. It’s there to be used as you see fit. And when you find the way
to give up worry and regret and to spend your time doing what you care about with people you
care about—and when you have the help of a professional team the understands what truly
matters—you’ll find that somehow the money part falls into place.
You’re going to find a lot of information about getting rid of worry and regret in this
book, some of it in the form of exercise worksheets. When you’re ready to tackle them, go
ahead and write in the book. Really. That’s what it’s for. I hope your copy will be dog-eared
and filled with post-its and paperclips before too long because you’ve found so much you can
use. But if you don’t feel like defacing your copy, go to www.lifeonomics.com and you can
download the worksheets. You’ll also find all kinds of other information there.
Oh, and that third definition of life? It’s as a series of connected, precious moments that
you’re fully present to savor. That’s what you can experience when you fully understand
LIFEonomics™. Ready for a new way of being? Let’s get started.
Rob Holdford
November 2008
PART I: WHAT CONTROLS YOUR LIFE?
Chapter One
Don’t Worry, Take Action
Worry is like a rocking chair—it gives you something to do but it doesn't get you
anywhere.
—Author unknown
As a financial planner, I’m always looking into the future. But it’s a healthy concern with what’s
to come; being concerned about tomorrow is perfectly rational when you are looking at events
that are statistically probable. For example, you have about a 40% chance sometime in your
working life of being disabled and unable to work for some length of time, so the need for
disability insurance is apparent. You also have the certainty of death sometime down the line, so
the need for life insurance is apparent. When something is probable, we create a strategy for it
and base our actions on that strategy.
When something isn’t probable but we obsess over it, that’s worry, one of the two mental
habits that blight our lives. This is the LIFEonomics™ definition of worry:
Useless obsessing over a future we cannot control.
We have very little control in this life over what will happen to us. In fact, there are really
only two aspects of life that we can control: how we prepare for what might happen and how we
respond to what does happen. How we prepare and respond determines a great deal of how our
lives progress. For example, if you work in a high-risk job and take out disability insurance,
you’re preparing for a reasonable possibility. If you find out you have dangerously high
cholesterol and start losing weight and changing your diet, you’re responding to something in a
healthy, positive way. Or you could choose not to buy disability insurance and hope for the best,
and keep right on eating pizza and prime rib. That’s called denial.
Exercise: Worry Inventory
What are you worried about? List your worries here along with your take on whether they’re
something you can prepare for or control. Rank them from 1 to 8, with 1 being most worried and
8 being least worried. You can also download this worksheet at www.lifeonomics.com.
Worry Inventory
Worry
Rank 1-8
Legitimate
concern? Y/N
In my control?
Y/N
Can I prepare?
Y/N
Learned Helplessness
People who practice chronic worry of the debilitating type tend to feel helpless in their lives,
powerless to change anything or change themselves. This mindset naturally leads to worry
because it robs these people of the mental strength to deal with the normal ups and downs of life.
But this is also a big lie, because people who have a helpless attitude are also abdicating
responsibility for their lives. They’re throwing up their hands and saying, “There’s nothing I can
do. It’s beyond my control.” That approach means you don’t have to try to improve your
situation or deal with your problems, so you don’t have to worry about failure and regret. You
simply float with the current, apparently unconcerned that inevitably, unless you paddle like hell,
the current is going to sweep you over a waterfall.
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes
hardest to bear are those which will never happen.
—James Russel Lowell
But helplessness is not something that comes naturally to any adult. Sure, as babies, we
experience it out of necessity. So, when we’re born, we immediately begin to develop a sense of
entitlement. Suddenly every need is met with nothing more than a scream or a pointed finger.
As babies we are taught that we are entitled to all the food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, love and
attention that we need. Later, many children have parents who, meaning well, do incredible
harm by giving their children “everything they didn’t have growing up,” which is what we used
to call “spoiling kids rotten.” Later, schools keep us ignorant of how money works and “bolster
our self-esteem” by moving us up a grade even when we fail a class.
Well, self-esteem doesn’t come from having your ego soothed; it comes from overcoming
obstacles to achieve a goal. So, is it any wonder that by the time we are adults we have a
delusional paradigm in place permanently disabling us, dooming us to a life of dissatisfaction
and financial failure? We leave school and enter the job market believing that we are somehow
entitled to a good job, great pay and sound benefits. We believe these things are ours by divine
right, and when we find we lack the ability to get them for ourselves, we find ourselves feeling
helpless to navigate life’s mazes. We learn to see ourselves as helpless, and each failure
reinforces that belief.
Psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman developed a brilliant theory behind the concept of “learned
helplessness” that identifies the three most common habitual attitudes behind both the image of
oneself as helpless and the image of oneself as empowered. It’s useful to look at this, because if
you recognize any of these qualities in yourself, you know which mindset you tend towards. In
his research, Seligman identified three main qualities that defined learned helplessness and
“learned optimism” when people confronted some sort of failure:
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
1. Personal -- The person who failed decides that he or she is responsible for what
happened, no matter what caused the failure. “It’s all my fault.”
2. Pervasive -- The person sees the same weakness or shortcoming that caused this
failure throughout his or her life. “This sort of thing always happens to me.”
3. Permanent -- The person is resigned to the idea that whatever shortcoming was
responsible for the failure cannot be improved upon. “I’m never going to be able
to change.”
LEARNED OPTIMISM
1. Impersonal -- The person sees the cause of the failure as something at least partially
outside their control. “You know, stuff happens.”
2. Isolated -- The person does not spread the poison to other areas of life. “Just
because I fell short in that venture doesn’t mean I can’t succeed in others.”
3. Impermanent -- The person sees his or her weaknesses as being able to be
overcome. “I’ll learn from my mistakes and do better next time.”
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see that an attitude of learned helplessness is a recipe for worry.
If you don’t believe you have the ability to achieve success or to change the qualities that bring
on failure, all you’re going to do is worry. On the other hand, taking responsibility for your
mistakes but not making them into the entire story empowers you to take control of the parts of
your life that you can control: your thoughts, words and actions. You learn to trust yourself and
your decisions and to let go of the rest. The best thing about learned optimism is that it can be
learned. You can train yourself to adopt these positive habits. In fact, I think it’s a must for
anyone who wants to live free of worry.
According to the Anxiety Disorder Association of America, anxiety disorders are
the most common mental illness in the U.S., with 19.1 million (13.3%) of the adult
U.S. population (ages 18-54) affected at a cost of more than $42 billion a year,
almost one third of the $148 billion total mental health bill for the U.S.
Cancer Of The Probability
As a financial advisor, it’s not only my job to help people be prepared financially for the likely
events in their futures, but to help them get some perspective on what is likely – and very
unlikely -- to happen in the coming years. To put it another way, I teach people the difference
between projecting into the future and planning for the future. When people project events into
the future, they turn the unknowable possible events of tomorrow into today’s drama and ask that
unhealthiest of all questions: “What if?” The unknown nature of the future, which many people
find exciting, becomes a source of fear that spirals into the vicious cycle of endless worry.
I call this diseased thinking “cancer of the probability,” because it turns into obsessive
worry over things that in all likelihood will never happen. People caught in a death spiral of
worry lose all sense perspective on the probabilities of life. The fact is, life is a game of
probability. The odds at any one time are very much in your favor. But worry blurs the line
between possibility and probability. Is it possible that your headache is caused by a malignant
brain tumor? Yes. Is it probable? No, in fact it’s very improbable. Is it possible that the airline
flight you’re on will be brought down by terrorists? Yes, but it’s extremely unlikely.
People with cancer of the probability see only the possibility of something, not the
probability. The fact is, when I’m working with a client, it’s irresponsible and probably
unethical for me to create a plan for them to deal with something that’s extremely unlikely to
occur. All I would be doing is feeding their worry. Instead, I explain that while life can throw
some curves at us through the years, the best way that we’re able to respond with confidence is
to prepare and have a secure financial foundation beneath us. Long-term care insurance can ease
the pain of having to send a spouse to an assisted living facility. Life insurance can ease slightly
the grief of losing a loved one. And having a diversified investment portfolio can help protect us
if world markets suddenly come crashing down. Honest assessment of probability and an action
plan to deal with it are the mature ways to approach the future.
Twenty years ago in my early years of practice most companies only sent out quarterly
statements on investment accounts. Clients would spend time reviewing their accounts once
every three months. When online access to investment accounts was first rolled out several years
ago, my colleagues and I thought that it would be a huge benefit to our clients. It didn’t take us
long to realize the truth. I had clients who were actually getting up every morning and checking
their portfolios on line. How their investments were doing determined their mood! Since
normal, healthy investment portfolios tend to move up and down on a daily basis, I knew this
was a form of insanity.
Unless you’re a trained financial professional, you don’t have the knowledge to put the
complexity of today’s markets in the proper context, and it’s only that context that keeps the pros
from making foolish decisions. More importantly, for most people the tendency is to obsess
and worry over their money instead of letting it serve their life goals.
Exercise: How Do You View Failure?
How you respond to life’s failures and setbacks has a lot to do with your success in life. How do
you think you view failure now? What will that knowledge compel you to change about your
attitude toward failure? Check the boxes that apply to your attitude. If you like, download this
exercise from www.lifeonomics.com.
How Do You View Failure?
I tend to see my failures as: Personal Impersonal Pervasive Isolated Permanent Impermanent
What does this say about me?
Actively Doing Nothing
Unfortunately, in our society we have been sold a bill of goods that says “responsible and caring
people are supposed to worry.” NOTHING could be more wrong. It is not the epitome of
maturity to be filled with worry. Worry is a self-delusion that makes us feel like we’re actively
addressing a possible future problem when, in fact, we’re doing nothing at all. Actually, we’re
doing worse than nothing. We’re stressing ourselves out, probably driving the people around us
crazy, and hampering our ability to enjoy life. Here’s another definition of worry for you to
chew on:
Worry is a loss of faith.
When you dwell obsessively on the possible bad things that might happen in the future,
you’re declaring that you don’t have faith. If the worry is that something will happen to you,
you’re saying that you lack faith in your ability to cope, to keep yourself healthy, to manage your
money wisely, and so on. If the worry is about someone else, you’re telling that person you
think they’re weak, foolish or incapable. If you’re religious, you’re basically telling God, “I
don’t believe you’ll give me what it takes to cope with what comes.”
My mother is wonderful woman who has always been a terrible worrier, probably because
my older brother died when I was a child, and she spent the rest of her life worrying about
something happening to one of her other two sons. But, I wondered, how could she have such
deep religious faith and still worry so much? That’s a contradiction many people live with these
days, and it’s a source of deep anxiety for them.
Of course, bad things happen sometimes, but so do good things. However, our culture has
taught us that thinking positive is childish! We’re told that if we focus on the worst things that
can happen in a situation, we’re wise and realistic. If you talk to anyone who has visited the
Dalai Lama or eastern mystics, they all tell you that worry-free people are child-like in their joy
and positive energy. A child is living in the moment. Worry is something we teach our kids to
do by example. It’s a habit that pulls our attention to the tiny probability that something bad will
happen instead of the overwhelming probability that it won’t. There is nothing of value in
worry. Not a single thing. Worry is a useless emotion.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
—Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"
Planning Is Everything
In contrast, responsible adults substitute planning for worry. They separate legitimate concerns
from worries. They learn from the past, plan for their legitimate concerns, and put mechanisms
in place that give them the best chance of responding well to those concerns should they come to
pass. Those mechanisms are usually financial and legal in nature: insurance, investments, wills,
power of attorney documents. Maybe they plan to maintain their health with a program of diet
and exercise. Then, with their plans in place and a professional team monitoring them to make
sure they adjust as life changes, these responsible adults get about living their lives, enjoying
today without worrying about tomorrow.
That’s what I want to see you do. That’s what I want to see everyone do. Control the
things you can control (your words, thoughts and actions), take steps to reduce the probability of
misfortune as much as you can (by losing weight and exercising if you have a family history of
heart disease, for instance), and then get on with the business of living. Bad things may still
happen, but if you have done everything you can to prepare for them and to minimize their
likelihood, why worry about them? You’ve controlled what you can, so let the rest go.
Raised by a worrier mother, I had to teach myself to overcome my habit of worry. My
response was to deliberately confront my fears. This included doing things that took me out of
my comfort zone. I skydived, bungee jumped and skied black diamond runs that gave me
vertigo. To help overcome my shyness, I took up acting in high school and became a public
speaker early in my financial career. I found that facing my fears with action is much more
powerful than living with worry.
You might expect that as a financial advisor, I see planning as the key to living a truly
fulfilled life. You would be right. Sure, it sounds romantic to throw all your possessions in a
Volkswagen microbus and take off to see the world with no job, no insurance and no means of
dealing with the uncertain future, but that romance quickly fades when someone gets sick, the
bus breaks down or you simply hit age 55 with no desire to live on the road anymore, no savings
and no job skills. My duty as a financial professional is to enable people to live their lives more
fully, and I do that by creating plans that allow my clients to be spontaneous and creative with
their lives while knowing that beneath them, like a safety net below a trapeze act, is their
investment/insurance/legal structure, ready to catch them if something goes wrong.
From the New York Times, a list of things not to worry about included hot dogs,
cancer-causing cell phones (whew!), shark attacks (there was one fatal attack in
2007), and the universe’s missing mass. Thank goodness, I can stop looking for
that under my couch.
Exercise: How Will You Plan For Disaster?
Planning is your only defense against the unpleasant surprises of life. In this exercise, describe
how you would plan for the major possible disasters of life. Download this worksheet at
www.lifeonomics.com.
How Will You Plan For Disaster?
Type of disaster,
i.e., Medical
Financial
preparation
Legal
preparation
Safety
preparation
Physical (property)
preparation
Mental
preparation
Denial And Delusion, Together Again
One of my first life coaches told me that a lot of people confuse work and worry. That’s smart.
If you’re working and worrying about doing your job (or perhaps losing your job), then your
worry habit is satisfied. You’re like a three-pack-a-day smoker. But let’s say you retire, and
now work is no longer around to satisfy your worry fix. What do you do? From my experience,
you begin obsessing about money, especially the idea that you will outlive your savings. You
can’t get your Marlboros®, so you take up smokeless tobacco. What matters is, now you have
something else to obsess over.
I tell my clients, “If you’re going to worry, you may as well go back to work.” The ironic
thing is, if you have a plan that you have faith in and advisors you believe in, you can have a
worry-free retirement. The same goes for any stage of life: plan, trust, quit worrying. But some
folks would rather spend their time dancing with the Dysfunctional Twins, Denial and Delusion.
For example, I know people who have pensions and rollovers that add up to a lot of potential
retirement income. But they aren’t doing anything about them, so they will likely end up
working a lot longer than they have to at a job that’s highly stressful, because they worry that if
they don’t, they will run out of money in retirement. These people are trapped in Denial and
Delusion.
Denial and Delusion have power because there are two kinds of worry:

Active worry: the fretting we do over something that’s actually happening, such as a
medical test result or rising flood waters

Passive worry: the irrational worry over what might happen or what we might learn if we
seek more information
Worriers will do anything to avoid active worry, so they take incredible steps to keep passive
worry intact as a sort of shield. These are the people who won’t go to the doctor for fear of what
they’ll find out, even if it might prevent a serious health problem down the line. They don’t want
to know how much is in their retirement portfolio because they’re afraid that no matter what
they’ve done, it won’t be enough. Such people are living dysfunctional, unhealthy lives. They
harbor the delusion that any new information will always be negative and once they face the
facts, they will have active worry. So, instead, they deny that the facts are even important. If
they don’t have to deal with the facts, they can remain in passive worry forever.
The trouble with Denial and Delusion as a strategy is that you can’t prepare for or prevent
something from happening if you’re ignorant of it, and if it does happen you have no safety net.
It’s like that precancerous polyp the doctor would have removed from your colon if you had
gone in for a screening when you were 55 like you were supposed to. If avoiding worry is more
important than facing facts, maybe that polyp becomes cancer by age 70. If your company gives
you a choice between early retirement and being laid off, and you’ve ignored your retirement
planning for 20 years because you were afraid of facing some hard choices, what do you do
when you find out you can’t afford to retire? How does job-hunting at age 60 sound to you?
Part of the process of living without worry and regret is ridding yourself of Denial and
Delusion. This means coming to grips with the following:

The facts are very rarely as bad as your fears make them seem to be.

Knowledge, even when it’s scary, is always better than ignorance because knowledge
empowers you to plan.

Planning and knowledge eradicate a great deal of worry, because when you “know
the worst” and can create a strategy to deal with it, suddenly it’s not so bad.
Stop Worrying, Start Planning
But before you can do all this, you’ve got to let go of the habit of worry. Worry is an addiction
like alcoholism, and it has triggers. For some, when the market goes down, they wallow.
Reinforcement from the past makes them overreact, just like stress can make an ex-smoker start
smoking again. People react with worry when they don’t have a strategy, when they have not
anticipated the future and planned for legitimately possible negative events. It’s crucial to see
worry as what it is: self-indulgence that makes you feel as though you’re addressing the potential
troubles of life head-on when what you’re really doing is robbing yourself of the power to deal
with what comes. Ironically, what I’ve found is that most of the time, the things that knock us
down aren’t the things we worry about, but the stuff that comes out of nowhere, like Rick’s brain
tumor.
One of the best ways to begin breaking a worry addiction is to get the help of someone
who can see your distorted thinking for what it is. I had a client whose mother was in a nursing
home. She was selling art off the walls of her house to pay for her mother’s care, and she told
me she was borderline suicidal. She had what is known as “caregiver’s stress syndrome.” Well,
it turned out that her mom had a bunch of telecom stock that she had won at bingo 20 years
earlier and was now worth about $350,000. I asked the daughter about it, and she told me that
her mom didn’t want to pay the capital gains on the stock sale. The daughter was a scientist, but
even educated people have a blind spot about money. In the end, I brought in some tax attorneys
who showed her how she could sell the stock without paying a lot of the taxes on it, and she was
able to use the proceeds to pay for her mother’s care. A few months later, I got a two-page letter
from her saying that I had saved her life.
Another client and his wife had an $800,000 investment portfolio in 2001 at another firm.
He retired before 9/11. After that disaster, the market went way down and their portfolio lost
about $300,000 in value. The man became obsessed with their portfolio and would check it
daily. If their portfolio was up, he felt good; if it was down, he was depressed and miserable. It
became an addiction facilitating his worry. Well, the market is up on a day-by-day basis only
about 50% of the time, so half the time he felt bad. Professionals know that we get most of our
real returns in the market on only a few trading days a year; the rest of the time we gain some,
lose some. Basing your emotional equilibrium on your portfolio’s performance is like basing
your self-image as a sailor on the direction of the wind. For this couple, when they became our
clients, we looked at their entire range of financial needs and created a plan that ensured that no
matter what happened, they would be able to get by. They wouldn’t be staying at the Ritz, but
they would survive. The husband was able to put that worry burden down.
Are you a planner or a worrier? Here’s a quick test to help you find out:
Planner
Worrier
You’d rather get all the facts so
you can deal with whatever
needs to be dealt with.
You’d rather not know the facts
because you fear the unknown.
When you receive an unexpected
communication, you don’t think
twice about it.
When you receive an
unexpected communication, you
assume it’s bad news.
Problems motivate you to plan for
a solution.
Problems confirm that there’s
something to worry about.
You’re able to step back and
keep life’s challenges in
perspective.
You’re easily overwhelmed by
what life’s challenges mean (that
you’re unlucky, doomed, etc.)
You trust the professionals who
are part of your team.
You don’t trust anyone who tells
you what you don’t want to hear.
You’re willing to change your
plans to create a better outcome.
You cling to your worryempowering habits like a
drowning swimmer clings to a
floatation device.
You have peace of mind.
You have little peace of mind.
LIFEonomics™ is your key to living free from the worry that debilitates so many people.
When you set the habit of worry aside, you’ll find new worlds opening. In my practice, one of
my great pleasures is helping people retire early. Well, what do you get when you take someone
in their fifties who’s coming from a high-stress job and turn them loose at the peak of their
experience and wisdom and knowledge? I’ve had people write novels, become lobbyists, go on
missions around the world and more. Letting go of worry allows people to realign themselves
with who they really are. When we realign, life becomes a series of joyful moments. You no
longer feel you have to sacrifice to survive. How might you realign your life?
Summary

Worry is useless obsessing over a future we cannot control.

We can learn to feel helpless or empowered.

It’s important to know the difference between what’s possible and what’s
probable.

Worrying creates the illusion of doing something and being responsible.

Worry is a useless emotion.

Emotionally mature people plan instead of worrying.
To-Do List

Ask yourself how often you worry about things that are unlikely.

Look back to see how your own pattern of worrying developed.

Review any life planning you have done so far.

Keep a journal and write in it your responses to each failure.
Chapter Two
Forget Regret
We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The
difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.
—Jim Rohn
I have a client, Jeanie, who is in her early fifties and has been a friend for 10 years.
Growing up, she and her dad were not close because he was something of a workaholic and was
gone a lot. As an adult, she realized there was so much she didn’t know about her father, and
since he was, of course, getting quite old, she wanted to get to know him. She turned her
attention to him and said, “I want to get to know you.” They spent a lot of time together, and she
heard all his stories and found out about things he had done in his life that she had never known
about before. It was a very meaningful time for her.
Shortly after this reconnection, her father died. The funeral was on a Monday, and by
Wednesday Jeanne was getting worried. She called a friend and she said, “I should be more
upset. Why am I not grieving more?” The friend said, “You spent time with him, and you don’t
have regret about it.” Some people might say, “How tragic, she had just gotten close to her dad.”
But she had no regrets, because she had caught up. She was complete with her father. There
was no unfinished business.
Living In Reverse
Just as worry is obsessive attention paid to what could happen in the future, regret is obsessive
dwelling on a past that you cannot change. By definition, the past is beyond changing. What is
done is done. Yet, I see many people sitting in my office punishing themselves over the
mistakes of the past: the relationships they didn’t pursue, the financial decisions they wish they
could take back and so on. Regret is a time machine that propels us backward in time and forces
us to relive our errors of commission or omission again and again. Why? Why spend time
wallowing in what’s done and gone while denying the lives we’re leading now? Regret is just as
unhealthy as worry, which is why it’s the other of my twin demons.
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the
closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
—Alexander Graham Bell
Imagine that you work in an office. You decide that in order to solve a problem, you
need to go back into the file storage room and pull an old file. The file storage room has no air
conditioning and it’s August in Arkansas (an ugly, humid month). Imagine going into the
horrible heat, pulling the file out, and getting the information you need to solve the problem, but
becoming so obsessed with the rest of the information in the file you never come back out of the
file storage room. You stay in the store room, obsess and suffer. That is how regret robs us of
our lives. We develop a terrible, almost masochistic fascination with the sad facts in the file of
our lives, beating ourselves with them endlessly.
But why do we continue to punish ourselves like this? In our justice system, a criminal
cannot be tried and punished for the same crime more than once. The Constitution forbids what’s
called “double jeopardy.” But we do this to ourselves all the time. Now, it’s understandable to
feel bad about something we’ve done in the past, especially when it has hurt someone we care
about. But it’s clear to me that the kind of corrosive regret that lasts for years, or even decades,
is something else: punishment by guilt. One of the best things I ever heard about guilt came from
Sarano Kelley, coach and author of The Game, who has been a marvelous mentor to me. I was
wallowing in a deep pool of guilt and regret over a painful divorce, and Sarano said, “Guilt is
just an excuse to do nothing and feel self-righteous about it.” In that moment, my perspective
shifted, and my life was never the same again.
I realized that I was swimming in guilt as a means of punishing myself for my sins, real
or otherwise. I have spent a great deal of my life feeling guilty as a way to make myself do
better, but I realized in that moment that guilt is a trap. Regret and guilt are only valuable in two
ways:
1.
You learn from them. The only good reason to look back into the past is to learn
from it! What else can you do? You cannot change what’s done. All you can do
is try to see the patterns and decision points and make better choices in the future.
2.
Guilt can wake you up when you’re about to do something that violates your
value system and prevent you from doing it.
Regret leads to guilt as certainly as spring leads to summer. But there’s no payoff, no
redemption, because there’s no way to alter what’s in the past. Guilt does not make you a better
person! Christ taught that you should turn away from guilt, just set it down and walk away. He
knew it was a trap for the spirit. But we hold onto it and its twin, regret, as a way of paying for
bad calls and foolish actions. What we need to learn is self-forgiveness, but that’s not the
territory of this book. That’s ground more suited for a therapist or a pastor.
Exercise: Regret Inventory
What do you regret today? Use this exercise to clarify your regrets from relationships, lost
opportunities or other life events and how important each is, 1 being most important, 8 being
least important. If you’d rather not write in the book, download the worksheet from
www.lifeonomics.com.
Regret Inventory
Regret
Rank 1-8
My
responsibility?
Y/N
What can I learn
from it?
Can I let it go?
Y/N
Deciding is Suffering
My goal is to help people live without worry and regret in the context of planning for and
enjoying their futures to the utmost. I have found that’s almost impossible to do when you are
preoccupied with living in a regretful past. Sadly, regret and worry are linked by fear. One of
the most dysfunctional attitudes I have run across in my work as a financial advisor is something
called regret aversion. In the clients who suffer from it, the thought process goes something like
this: “If I make a decision that doesn’t work out, I worry that I might suffer from regret and guilt
because of it, so I won’t make a decision at all.”
That’s about as dysfunctional as it comes. The result is complete paralysis of the
decision-making faculties. Not only does this keep people from making decisions that are
important to their futures, but it ends up producing in them a deep distrust of their ability to make
sound decisions at all. Get enough of that and we’re right back at Learned Helplessness. Regret
aversion is a very real phenomenon. It’s powerful, because the desire to avoid pain or a financial
loss is a motivator that’s five times stronger than greed. Basically, you don’t trust yourself to
choose, and you worry that if you choose you will later be faced with regret that leads to guilt, so
you’re going to avoid choosing at all. Regret becomes a life sentence, because you’ll also regret
not being able to make important decisions in the first place. It’s a terrible Catch-22.
For such people, deciding is suffering. Their fear of regret is overpowering. If they
could make a decision, regret it for an hour, then let it go, that would be OK. But they can’t.
Guilt becomes the shirt they wear to remind themselves of their poor choice. For clients like
this, I actually give them an option: not to decide. I give them the pertinent information, keep
them informed about their choices, and then tell them that we are going to decide not to decide
for a while. In my practice my team and I use the LIFEonomics™ Wealth Management System
that we have developed over the past 21 years. It’s based on the time-honored financial planning
process of:

Discovery

Analysis

Implementation

Review
Because of this system, clients are kept from the need to make decisions until we have all the
information about their financial situation, their goals, what they care about, the markets, and so
on. However, eventually, we reach a point where a decision is unavoidable. After all, we are
just a wealth management team.. We can’t make your financial decisions for you any more than
your doctor can “make you” take a prescription drug. What we can do is make it OK not to
decide until it’s time. Clients can defer deciding when to retire or how to allocate their assets
until they’re more comfortable with the act. They can avoid the pain, or at least stop associating
the act of choosing with coercion.
Exercise: What Is Truly Important To Me?
This is one of the two most important questions you can ask, and if you don’t know what is
important to you, now is the time to figure it out. Download this exercise from
www.lifeonomics.com.
What Is Truly Important To Me?
1. What’s truly important to me?
Why is it important?
2. What’s truly important to me?
Why is it important?
Note: You may repeat asking and answering these questions several times. When you feel
complete in your work, place your answers in priority order from most important to least
important.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost’s most famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” perfectly captures the feeling
of regret avoided. The final stanza:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The road not taken is such a powerful image because deep inside we all know the truth
about the nature of regret. We usually regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do.
Risking and daring are part of our human nature. When we aim for a goal but fail, we somehow
give ourselves credit for the attempt. But when we choose to back away due to fear or the
delusion that we will get back to it “one of these days,” we always feel as though we have denied
ourselves something. It’s as if we robbed ourselves of the chance to live fully. The actor Oliver
Reed, a renowned hard drinker and lover of taverns and brawls in his native England (and who
was rumored to have drunk 106 pints of beer in a 24-hour period), once said, “My only regret is
that I didn't drink every pub dry and sleep with every woman on the planet!” Of course, he died
of a heart attack in a pub after three bottles of rum and five arm wrestling victories over sailors,
so, perhaps, he’s not the best example. Then again, maybe he is!
We always wonder about what we leave undone. That’s the impulse that drove Jeanie to
get back in touch with her father, even though it could have gone badly and reopened wounds.
But we can’t resist the lure of “what might have been.” To put it a different way, there are no
sadder words to say at the end of a life than, “If only…” In his 1993 book Your Erroneous
Zones, Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote, “You'll seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It
is what you haven't done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop
an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your
present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you've lost them forever.”
Of course, sometimes those words don’t involve choices passed up but choices that led to
sacrifices. For example, Robert Plant, lead singer of the famous band Led Zeppelin, has said that
he now regrets all the time he spent on tour chasing rock superstardom, because it meant being
away from his children, one of whom mistook him for a burglar when he returned from a long
tour. Another example is the Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, who retired from
baseball after the 1966 season at the height of his greatness because of the unbearable pain from
an arthritic left elbow. He said at the time, in his retirement press conference, “I don't regret one
minute of the last twelve years, but I think I would regret one year that was too many.” He
wanted to leave the game with full use of his body—and before injury could tarnish his legacy.
For the rest of us, it’s what we don’t do that keeps us up at night, wondering if we’ve sold
out, if we’re cowardly, or if we can ever really be happy knowing what might have been. The
damaging nature of regretting things undone is backed up by psychological studies. In a
January 1, 2008 New York Times article by Benedict Carey called “The New Year’s Cocktail:
Regret With a Dash of Bitters,” researchers insist that the emotional damage inflicted by regret
over what we don’t do is much greater than any other kind:
Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate
versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who
made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a
career of it.
Lost “possible selves”, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the
person you could have been.
Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large
and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown,
convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an
emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the
most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the
long run.
However, what therapists and psychology researchers also found is that some people, as
they got older, developed the ability to a) put regrets and past decisions in perspective, often
becoming more realistic about why they happened, and b) also reflected on what they had gained
by making a certain decision, not just what they had lost. For example, a woman who went
through a difficult divorce regretted it but also said that it had taught her humility and insight,
qualities that had served her well in rebuilding her life. And that ability shows us a path out of
the endless cycle of regret and guilt.
Do Your Best And Let It Go
Living with full self-awareness of what we want and what matters to us is the key to
living without crippling regret. I’ll talk a great deal more about this later on, but this
reemphasizes the point I made earlier about my job being to help people live more fully, with
money being the energy source for that life. My measure for a quality life bears repeating:
spending as much time doing what is truly important to you with people who are truly important
to you. That’s it. There’s nothing magical about that statement. It simply depends on what
speaks to your passion.
If you are fully aware of what in life fires your passion for living, and you live fully
engaged with that passion, then you will always make decisions that serve that passion. If your
passion is your family, and you turn down a job that would have paid more money but taken you
away from your kids, you will never regret turning down the job. If you have a passion for
archaeology, and you take an opportunity to travel for six months to participate in a dig in Egypt
but spend the time away from your spouse, you won’t regret it, because you’ll come back so
engaged and joyful and full of life that your relationship will be better than ever. Passion drives
out regret.
But to live this way, you must be aware of what and who matters to you most. We’re not
used to thinking in this way. Instead, it’s because we focus so much on money as an end, not the
means to an end, that we forget that we’re supposed to be living, not just earning. Once again, let
me remind you that the most important questions you can ask are: “What is truly most important
to me?” and “Who is truly most important to me?”
Once you know those answers, you will always do your best to make your life what you
want it to be. And that is the key to living free of regret—to making the conscious decision to
free yourself from the prison of regret by doing your best at all times. If you do your best with
what you have, there is nothing to regret, because if things didn’t work out, it wasn’t your fault.
What happened was beyond your control, and we don’t worry about what we can’t control,
right? If you didn’t do your best, do you beat yourself to a pulp emotionally for the next 30
years? No. Instead, you learn from your mistake, figure out how not to make the same mistake
next time, and then let it go. You parole yourself out of that life sentence. You forgive yourself.
Forgiveness is the shortest path to peace. True forgiveness is when the crime is never brought up
again.
Psychologists using gambling as a test have determined that most of us are more
motivated by regret than by rejoicing—in other words, we feel the pain or
possibility of a loss (and are more motivated by it) than the hope or possibility of
gain or victory. This is one of the reasons that even though visitors to Las Vegas
know they can win more at blackjack if they bet more, they do not.
My mother, Christine, is loved by every person who has ever met her. When I was a
child, she made sure that we never missed Sunday school. But on one particular Sunday, Dad
had gotten in late from work, so she decided to let us sleep in. My older brother, Nathan, got up
before the rest of us and asked if he could go next door and to play with his best friend like he
had done a hundred times before. Nathan was killed that morning by his best friend in a gun
accident. It took years for Mom to let go of the belief that if she had only taken us to church that
morning, her eight-year-old son wouldn’t have been taken from her. She was able to forgive
God, but forgiving herself took longer. She still worries about my brother and me, but she lives
remarkably free of regret. Her strength and faith are humbling to me.
There are two days in the week about which and upon
which I never worry...yesterday and tomorrow.
—Robert Jones Burdette
Exercise: Who Is Truly Important To Me?
The second essential question you can ask is about who you want to spend your time with, doing
those things that are so important to you. Now is the time to think about such things. If you like,
download this worksheet at www.lifeonomics.com.
Who Is Truly Important To Me?
1. Who is truly important to me?
Why is this person important?
2. Who is truly important to me?
Why is this person important?
The Regret Continuum
There’s a process to memory, regret and guilt—a continuum if you like. The process
starts the same for everyone, but then at some point it diverges like Frost’s road in that wood and
turns toxic for some people. For others, regret isn’t really a factor. Some people trust their past
decisions for better or worse and see mistakes as a source of growth and wisdom. Others torture
themselves. Where does memory turn into poisonous regret and guilt?
Take a look at my two versions of what I call the Regret Continuum and see if you
recognize your own process of remembering the past in either one. The first version is what I
consider to be a healthy process:
Memory  Regret  Reason  Insight  Release
In this version, regret is temporary, much like the feeling of failure back when we talked
about Learned Helplessness. It’s OK to have regrets about something that happened in the recent
past. What’s dangerous is chronic, cyclical regret that just punishes without accomplishing
anything. In this model, the person passes through regret to find a reason why he or she did or
said something, possibly lending some justification or perspective to the bigger picture. This
leads to insight and learning where the person becomes wiser for having learned from the
regretted event. And in the end, the person lets it all go, content to know that whatever happened
before, he or she has made the best of it.
That’s the place where I hope to take more of my financial clients. But too often, I see a
thought process that falls into the unhealthy range of the Regret Continuum:
Memory  Regret  Guilt  Repetition  Distrust
The person who undergoes this kind of regret journey is truly on what they call a “guilt
trip.” It’s a trip that leads to misery. Here, the person has the same memory and sense of regret
about the past, but then can’t let it go. Regret turns to guilt, which like worry is a useless
emotion. Guilt is self-punishment, and what are we punishing ourselves for? I think it’s for not
being wiser and knowing what we wanted out of life back when it came time to make a big
decision. Call it not being in balance, not having our priorities straight or what have you, but I
believe that guilt is all about beating ourselves up for not being smart enough to know what was
important to us. We didn’t know our passion or didn’t listen to it, and we made a choice that we
regret. Now, we’re going to make ourselves pay for it.
But what good does this do? All it achieves is a habit of guilt that we repeat over and
over until we internalize the idea that we can’t trust our choices. After all, to choose might mean
more regret and guilt. We’re paralyzed and unable to live. The world is filled with bitter, angry
people in later life who regret everything:

Their past, because of their decisions

Their present, because of how their regret has warped their lives

Their fear of the future, because they see nothing but more of the same
That’s imprisonment, and it doesn’t have to be that way. Regret is a choice in itself, just as
worry is. It is possible to free yourself from it and to start taking full control of those aspects of
your life that you can control? We’ll explore the answer to this question in the next chapter.
Summary

Regret is obsession over a past you cannot change.

The only value in guilt is learning or being awakened to the need to act.

Deciding is suffering because we worry that our decisions will lead to regret.

We regret what we have not done more than what we have done.

A quality life is spending your time doing what is truly important to you with the
people who are truly important to you.
To-Do List

Pick one regret and forgive yourself for it.

Pick something you feel guilty about and figure out what you can learn from it.

Take a looming decision that’s causing you worry and set it aside for a while.

Do something in the next 30 days that you have been regretting not doing earlier.
Chapter Three
What You Can Control
“You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what
happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to
master you.”
—Brian Tracy,
Motivational Speaker and Author
In his book, The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz puts forth the profound insight that
everything we are and do is determined by the agreements that we create with the world and the
people around us. Here are the 5 Agreements that Ruiz believes we all make:
1. Who we are.
2. What everyone else is.
3. How to act.
4. What is possible.
5. What is impossible.
That’s real wisdom, because it makes clear that everything in our lives is a result of choices
we make. We reach a compact, a treaty, with the rest of humanity about what we will do and
how we’ll do it, and that compact decides our identity. If you and the world agree that you’re a
weakling who can’t stand up for himself, then your behavior and everyone’s response to your
behavior will only confirm that. On the other hand, if the agreement is that you’re strong and
indomitable, guess what? That agreement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this context, it’s clear that the only way we can live the lives we were meant to live is to
make choices that evoke our greatest strengths and define not only how the rest of the world
perceives us, but how we perceive ourselves. The only possible choice is a simple one: control
the things we can control, and quit worrying about the things we cannot control.
Exercise: Controlling My Thoughts
Thoughts are one of the three aspects of life that we can control. What are your most common
thoughts, the thoughts that qualify as habits? Do they produce positive attributes for your life or
bring you harm? What can you do about it? If you want to write more, download this self-test
from www.lifeonomics.com.
Controlling My Thoughts
My habitual thought
Positive or negative?
Can I change it? Y/N
How will I change it?
The Foundation Of Living
We think we have some sort of control over all aspects of our lives, but a great deal of that belief
is self-delusion. We convince ourselves that by making sound investment decisions we can
control the rate of return on our investments, but the performance of the financial markets and
the larger economy is completely out of our control. We believe that if we work hard and
maximize our value to our employers, we won’t have to worry about being downsized, when
employee value has little effect on whether a person will be let go when the time comes to cut
costs. Face it, there are many areas of life where we have zero control, and that’s terrifying to
the majority of people who live steeped in worry and regret.
A delusion of control is a false belief that another person, group of people, or
external force controls one's thoughts, feelings, impulses, or behavior. A person
may describe, for instance, the experience that aliens actually make him or her
move in certain ways and that the person affected has no control over the bodily
movements. Thought broadcasting (the false belief that the affected person's
thoughts are heard aloud), thought insertion, and thought withdrawal (the belief
that an outside force, person, or group of people is removing or extracting a
person's thoughts) are also examples of delusions of control.
Awareness of their lack of control creates in some people a truly irrational state of
constant anxiety. For example, there are about 40,000 deaths each year from auto accidents in
the U.S., compared to about 200 deaths from aviation-related accidents. So, despite the fact that
there are about 10,000 civilian aircraft flights per day from U.S. airports, flying is about 200
times safer than driving. Yet, many more people are afraid of flying than of driving. Why?
Because when you’re driving, you have a sense of control. You’re at the wheel and can see
what’s going on around you. If you hit rough turbulence in a plane, all you can do is hold on and
watch the flight attendants to see if there is panic on their faces. You have no control.
This kind of worry is not only a waste of time and energy, it is deeply irrational and it’s
the driving force behind all kinds of nonsensical decisions that people make about their money,
travel, health and relationships. Which makes more sense to fear:

Traveling in a car on a highway filled with amateur drivers of varying levels of
competence and/or impairment, with little or no oversight to ensure that everyone obeys
the rules?

Or traveling in 747 controlled by exhaustively trained aviators, staffed by rigorously
trained professionals and controlled at every step by a ground system dedicated to safety?
Still, we worry about flying and drive like it’s no big deal. Worry about airfares in the face
of skyrocketing fuel prices if you want to, but fretting about safety is a waste of your time and
energy. Why not spend time focusing on the things we can control? Everything else should be
background noise. Knowing what you can control and directing your energies and intellect
toward making the most of those things is really the foundation of living free of worry and
regret. I’ve already mentioned the three things we can control:
1. Our thoughts
2. Our words
3. Our actions
Everything else is illusion. But in this chapter I’m going to take this a step further, because
taking control over these three aspects of the self opens up new possibilities for selftransformation.
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be
sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.
—Calvin Coolidge. 30th President of the United States
Attitude and Perspective
Thoughts, words and actions occur in the moment. Each is one part of a larger tapestry that
becomes the pattern of our lives. Over time, for each of us, this pattern emerges as certain types
of thoughts, words and actions that become more common in our behavior: positive, negative,
loving, hurtful, you name it. Eventually, these become habits, and, whether we want to admit it
or not, our habits—our patterned, unconscious ways of thinking, speaking and acting—drive
much of what our lives turn out to be. LIFEonomics™, perhaps more than anything else, is
about changing your habits, regaining control over those unconscious patterns and consciously
changing them for the better.
The habitual patterns of thought, word and action that form as we get older and become
set in our ways lead to perspective, which is what I call the “frame” through which we see the
world. Everyone has a perspective on the world, a sort of “big picture” idea of how reality works
and how it affects them personally. Some people’s perspective is that life is unfair and nobody
wins. Others may feel that money is the only thing that matters, or that everything functions
according to a divine plan. There are as many perspectives of the world as there are people. The
thing is, perspective is a notoriously difficult thing to change once you get past a certain age.
How many people do you know who have, for example, gone from being conservatives to
liberals past age 40? Not many, I’m sure. That perspective on the world hardens like concrete
after a few years, and it usually takes something dramatic—a near-death experience, a divorce, a
mental breakdown—to bring on the epiphany that makes us reexamine our perspective and ask,
“Is this really how I want to live?”
With the help of my friend and mentor Sarano Kelley, I had an epiphany about my health
and life path after my marriage broke up which changed my future completely. In her book A
Course in Miracles, Marianne Williamson defines a miracle as “a shift in perspective.” It’s that
powerful. Why? Very simply, our perspective on the world shapes our attitudes. While
perspective is the 30,000-foot view of all of life, attitudes are our habitual beliefs about specific
parts of life—how we see relationships, what we think of elected officials, whether we’re selfstarters about our health or would rather just say to the doctor, “Give me a pill and fix it,” and so
on. These are the self-fulfilling prophecies I was talking about. Your experience in a certain
area of life tends to mirror your attitude toward it. So if you have the attitude that monogamy is
for suckers, you’re probably going to cheat on every partner you have and wind up alone with
multiple divorces by the time you’re 50. Attitude becomes destiny.
In case this is getting too complicated, let me illustrate more simply:
1. What you can control: thoughts, words and actions.
2. Over time, words, thoughts and actions become habitual, leading to a large-scale
perspective on the world.
3. Perspective breeds attitudes, how you view the many parts of your world.
4. Attitudes influence thoughts, words and actions in a kind of feedback loop.
Exercise: Controlling My Words
Your words stem from your thoughts and go a long way toward programming your mind for
better or worse. What are your habitual phrases or word choices and how do they affect your
life? What can you do to change harmful verbal habits? Grab this test at
www.lifeonomics.com.
Controlling My Words
My habitual word or
phrase
Positive or negative?
Can I change it? Y/N
How will I change it?
Everything Flows Downstream
Wait a second. Go back to #4.. Yes, that’s a big one, isn’t it? While your thoughts,
words and actions drive your attitudes, the energy flows the other way as well. Your attitudes
determine what you think, say and do. This is why it is so difficult to change without some kind
of traumatic event. Everything we do reinforces the attitudes we’ve embraced. But if yours are
built around worry and regret, does that mean you’re stuck being that way unless you die on an
emergency room table and are lucky enough to be brought back or if you hit bottom because of a
drug addiction? Of course not!
The way to shift your attitudes and escape worry and regret is to change your perspective,
your big-picture philosophy about life. A change in perspective is the most powerful thing that
can happen to someone, like an atheist becoming a born-again Christian. If that sounds like a tall
order, it is. You don’t just say, “I’m going to start being positive about all people!” and do it.
You’re fighting an uphill battle against the weight of your habitual attitudes and patterns of
thinking. They’re programmed into your brain like computer code, so to change your
perspective, you must reprogram the computer. You do that by—and here’s where we come full
circle—controlling your thoughts, words and actions. Everything flows downstream from there.
But to begin the reprogramming process, you’ve got to have something known as
metacognition, a term first used by psychologist J. H. Flavell in 1976. It means having the
awareness to step back and watch yourself think, then see the patterns behind your behavior. In
layman’s terms, it means three things:
1. Seeing what your perspective on life is.
2. Seeing the negative patterns in your thoughts words and actions (self-defeating, moneyfocused, envious, etc.).
3. Understanding how those patterns affect your perspective and your life in general.
Sure, that’s a tall order. But you can do it! In fact, you’re already doing it. Reading this
book, especially this chapter, is the first step to unlocking and transforming your thoughts, words
and actions—to really taking control of what you can control. So, let’s dig more deeply into
those three vital components to a life well-lived.
Attention!
Our thoughts seem hard to control because, unless we’re meditating or sleeping, the
stream of consciousness is going on inside our heads 24/7. But I’m not talking about controlling
every stray thought that pops out of your subconscious mind like a soap bubble. I’m talking
about controlling your attention. So, what exactly is attention? It is thought in action directed
toward something or someone. Controlling your thoughts is really a matter of commanding your
attention, making attention a conscious act, not something that’s reflexive and reactive.
According to Sarano Kelley, attention comes in three varieties:
1. Moving Attention: Your attention is ricocheting off things and people, bouncing around
like a pinball, lighting on things but not captured by them. This is the hummingbird of
mental activity, zipping from place to place, never slowing down or stopping. Moving
attention is something you allow when you are too busy to govern your thoughts, like
when you’re multi-tasking and worrying about 100 different things at once. It robs you
of your ability to think proactively or assess your responses to things because there’s no
mental bandwidth left.
2. Captured/Emotional Attention: Emotional content stops your ricocheting attention and
grabs it. I do this when I give a keynote speech by using real life stories that affect their
emotions. This is also how people exerting no real control over their attention can sit for
hours and focus completely on a movie in a dark room full of strangers. Emotion is the
key to attention, because we all have triggers that capture our thoughts: guilt, sexuality,
tragedy, and so on. Imagine that your attention is a flashlight with a narrow beam. When
your attention is drawn to something, you have a thought about it, and emotion is your
body’s reaction to the thought. But this is largely reflexive attention; we have little
control over what sets off our emotions. It’s mostly pure reflex. So if your emotions are
mostly captured, then you have to ask, what or who is controlling your thoughts?
3. Directed/Proactive Attention: This is the state I want you to achieve. Here, you will
yourself to hold your attention on something that has not necessarily captured your
emotions. To live free of worry and regret is literally to notice where your attention is
and to deliberately realize that what you give your attention to becomes your truth. You
buy it, you own it. This is the meaning of the term “to pay attention.” Directed Attention
gives you the power to catch your attention being manipulated and redirect it toward
something productive and positive.
We’re talking about what we can control, and nothing is more fundamental than controlling
attention. When people realize that their attention has been focused on something that isn’t in
their control, they can gently move themselves back to the center of their power by refocusing on
what is in their control. When I was working on this book, the financial markets took a major hit
into bear territory due to the perfect storm of the mortgage disaster, bank failures and oil prices.
A few of our clients were beginning to panic, but when I spoke with them, I told them that the
best thing to do was to focus on the things they could control, namely, their decisions. In
finance, rash decisions usually lead to disaster. I reminded them that we had already planned for
this and had a strategy to deal with it, so there was no need to worry.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is one of the most common diagnoses in
children who have trouble paying attention. But experts say that very often, kids
tagged with ADHD can be gifted kids who are just bored in class, who are
dealing with instability at home, or who have trouble getting enough sleep.
Ask yourself, where is your attention right now? Is it on this book, or is it scattered and
broken among a dozen other targets? When someone or something captures your attention,
that’s like grabbing your flashlight. Ask, “Who’s got my flashlight?” My favorite place to focus
my attention when this happens is to pull my attention back to gratitude and think about what
I’m grateful for. Clichés flow out of truth, and gratitude meditation is a powerful tradition.
When I start to have worry or regret, I turn my attention back to things I’m grateful for. That
centers me and reminds me where my attention belongs. My attention to creating this book was
one of the highest measurements of the power I’ve developed to focus.
For yourself, can you find something you can turn your attention to when it wanders? Where
can you bring your mind to recall what’s important?
When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around.
I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something.
Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go.
I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.
—J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Affirmative, Sir
The words we speak have incredible power. They’re like fallout from the nuclear reactor of the
mind. Even though words are easier to control than thoughts, some of us just choose not to
control what comes out of our mouths. Why? We usually believe that the words we say are of no
consequence to us personally. However, the words we speak affect how the minds of other
people perceive you. You know this. If you speak positively about life for long enough, you
will program others to think of you as a positive person. We, too, hear our own words. Why
should our own minds be any different? They’re not.
The fact is, what we say has the power to shape our thoughts. Thought becomes word and
word becomes action, but word also feeds back into the mind to reinforce subconscious
perception. If we continually tell ourselves how unattractive we are, we begin to believe it.
Others hear it and do the same, and their response to us reinforces our own subconscious belief.
The world is a great echo chamber for the words we say. So you can see why it’s just as vital to
control your words as your thoughts!
In fact, it should be easier, because words come with the safety net of having to travel
from your brain to your lips. How often have you thought something but not said it? That’s an
important habit to develop. There are certain types of speech that have no positive value
whatsoever and that you should teach yourself to abandon as soon as possible:

Complaining -- In other words, whining. I’m not talking about voicing a legitimate
concern about something. Rather, it is fruitless to be negative about things you can’t
control. Complaining serves no purpose other than to let other people know you’re
unhappy in the hope they will do something to fix the problem.

Doom Saying -- There’s a certain type of person who, when presented with a
scenario, will immediately tell you all of the terrible things that can happen. The wife
of a good friend, for example, decided to give birth to their second child at home
with the help of midwives. Immediately, one of their friends launched into all the
horror stories she had heard about home birthing. I suspect people do this because
they think it makes them sound wise and in touch with the harsh reality of things. It
actually makes them sound depressing.

Gossip -- Gossip is one of the most destructive kinds of speech there is. It not only
poisons the reputations of the subjects, it also brands you as a gossip in the eyes of
others. There is nothing positive about it. If you must talk about others, find
something positive to say about them. If not, follow your mother’s advice: if you
can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.

Self-defeating talk -- When people ask me how I’m doing, I always say, “I’m great
& getting better.” People are often expecting to hear a platitude, but every time those
words come out of my mouth, they have an effect on me. Affirmations get a bum rap
as part of some sort of New Age self-help regimen, but from a mental health and
behavioral perspective, they make a ton of sense. When you talk about how bad
things are or how hard a week you’re having, you’re convincing your subconscious
of the truth of what you’re saying. Remember, you’re programming yourself for
good or bad., positive or negative.
Affirmations in particular are very powerful verbal habits. They mean positive thinking, not
childish optimism. Remember, part of living without worry and regret means facing the facts
and letting them go. You have to be honest with yourself, but that doesn’t meant you can’t be as
positive and life-affirming as possible! The words that come out of your mouth shape your
thoughts and your progress through each day. They are the first step to manifesting results in
your life. That’s why when people ask me how work is going, I always say, “Work is going
great, every day I’m blessed with the chance to do what I do.” This costs me nothing, and I
don’t care if the listener thinks I sound like a rah-rah cheerleader. It helps set me on a strong
course and gives my mind an infinitesimal little nudge toward the positive.
I also make a habit of saying things like “I feel great,” and “I am at peace.” You want to be
careful about saying these things at the top of your voice in a crowded elevator, but otherwise, go
for it! You see, this sort of positive mental programming quite often in religion, as in
Christianity’s profession of faith. Controlling your words actually reshapes your environment
and creates evidence for the thought in your world, making it easier for your mind to believe
what you’re saying. If you convince others that you’re a positive person, their behavior will
reflect that, and your subconscious will more readily believe what you’re saying.
Exercise: Controlling My Actions
Thoughts and words lead to actions, and actions change our lives for better or for worse. What
habitual actions are controlling some aspect of your life? Smoking? Working out every morning?
Drinking or eating too much? Starting your day with prayer? Is it positive or negative? What can
you do about the negatives? This exercise is also available for download at
www.lifeonomics.com.
Controlling My Actions
My habitual action
Positive or negative?
Can I change it? Y/N
How will I change it?
Actions And Environment
Actions are the third area that you can control. In fact, doing so is even easier than
controlling your thoughts and words. Thoughts and words lead directly to actions, and actions
have the power to influence your environment, such as the people with whom you live or work.
The actions you choose to take will reflect back upon you within your environment, and your
environment serves to reinforce the thoughts and words you’ve been sending into the world.
Your environment should reflect who you choose to become. Do you want prosperity?
Then do whatever you can to create an environment that reflects prosperity. This means a
lifestyle and surroundings that reflect your most cherished values. If you value the peace of mind
that comes with not having debt, then paying off debts and not running up new ones should be
part of your environment. If health is your highest priority, then buying organic produce and
taking a daily walk may need to be part of your environment. Your physical world should take
on the form of the ideal world you have inside your mind.
Beyond this, your environment is also includes with whom you associate. Actually, your
associations might be the most revealing aspect of who you are becoming. The people around
you reflect conscious choices. If you want to become more positive, fill your environment with
positive people. If you realize that too many of the people in your life are negative, then
remember that you can change this. It’s not difficult to do. You don’t need to make the change
hurtful. Instead, gradually spend less and less time with those who bring energy into your life
that doesn’t serve you well.
Always keep in mind that your subconscious assumes that if a person is in your life, they
must be reinforcing truths about you. Negative people reinforce the idea that your own outcomes
will be negative. People who are forever having problems and are asking you to bail them out
reinforce the idea that you are somehow either everyone’s white knight or just as messed up as
they are. So pay careful attention to your associations and be sure to control your thoughts and
words. They will determine who come into – and stays or leaves -- your sphere of influence.
Always keep in mind that everything begins with thoughts. Exert control over them and
you will influence your words, which reach into the world and attract certain types of people to
you. Those people will help you transform your environment which, in turn, guides your actions
in a positive, confident, prosperous direction. When all those forces are in place and working in
concert, worry and regret become obsolete. Whatever happens that is beyond your control, you
can handle it.
Summary

All you can control is your thoughts, words and actions.

Quit worrying about the things you cannot control.

Planning and preparation—the things you can control—provide peace of mind.

Habits become perspectives, and perspectives shape your attitude to the world.

Attitudes influence thoughts, words and actions.

You must control your attention and what it falls on.

Be careful of the words you speak, for they will shape your thoughts.
To-Do List

Make a list of the things you cannot control in your life.

Make a list of the planning steps you have not yet taken to give yourself peace of
mind, then begin taking them.

Write some daily affirmations for yourself.
Create a reminder system that helps you focus your attention on what’s important. Afterword
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
—John Lennon
When I was 12 years old, I read a book that changed my life. Actually, it contained one
of two quotes that changed my life. The book was See You At the Top, by Zig Ziglar. In this
classic book, Ziglar coined so many phrases and ideas that have become self-improvement
classics—“Checkup from the neck up,” “Hardening of the attitudes,” and so on—that it’s almost
a self-help version of the canon of William Shakespeare. But one sentence in the book set me on
the course that’s led me here, to you, on this day. It was, “You can get anything you want in this
world if you can just help enough other people get what they want.”
That was extraordinary to me, and so simple as to be genius. I think it’s a truism of life
that the most powerful gift you can give a person is a change in his perspective. Everyone has a
different perspective on the world, and it’s impossible to judge someone else’s perspective unless
you can see things from their point of view, which you can’t do unless you’ve shared the
experiences that shaped that perspective. This is the reason for my #1 rule: Let It Be.
Our perspectives tend to be set in stone early and to be based on a superficial
understanding of the world and human behavior. We tend to think, especially when we’re
younger, that things are very black and white: people always do what’s in their best interest, their
motivations are cut-and-dried, and to get what we want we have to out-compete the other guy.
It’s life as a war with the winners as survivors. But every now and then an idea comes along
that’s so profound and makes so much sense that it sparks an “Aha!” moment. That’s what
Ziglar’s quote was for me. After I read it, it was so clear to me that the way I would gain the
things and freedom that I wanted was to help others get the same for themselves.
LIFEonomics™ is a manifestation of that purpose: to inspire and empower people (including
myself) to overcome adversity, live powerfully and love unconditionally, and be free from worry
and regret.
I think I know what people want: peace and prosperity. They want personal peace, which
I define as freedom from conflict in their lives and a sense of control—that all things are in
order. For some people, peace means having a beautiful home and garden that is a physical
representation of the peaceful mental state they want to carry around; for others, it’s about being
able to travel and enjoy a series of memorable moments secure in the knowledge that they are as
prepared as they can be for whatever comes along. Peace is having all your ducks in a row.
Prosperity is simpler: having the financial resources to do what is truly important to you
with the people who are truly important to you. It’s not a number. It’s a lifestyle. That goes
back to the Zig Ziglar quote: “If I help enough people find the peace and prosperity they seek,
then they will help me achieve it for myself and the people who are truly important to me.’
PULLQUOTE
How much pain they have cost us, the
evils which have never happened.
—Thomas Jefferson
END PULLQUOTE
The Definition of Insanity
The second life-changing quote was “The definition of insanity is doing the same things
over and over and expecting a different result.” One of our team’s goals in creating
LIFEonomics™ and the LIFEonomics™ Foundation is to help people overcome the insanity
of doing the same things over and over with regard to their life planning—that is, not doing any
planning at all. But I’m not a patient man; I don’t want to wait 100 years for the slow process of
human evolution to bring millions around to the idea of the Four Ls and Life and Legacy Plans.
I’m passionate about the idea of the “tipping point,” as brilliantly laid out by Malcolm Gladwell
in his book of the same name. I think that human development doesn’t happen slowly over long
periods, but with sudden, volcanic changes in perspective. Something happens, then everything
changes.
That’s what we hope to bring about with LIFEonomics™ — a sudden shift in
perspective that empowers people to live in alignment with their purpose, whatever it might be.
What happens when people are empowered to live in alignment with their purpose? I’ve seen it,
and I’ll tell you: It’s an increase in joy and contentment, an end to regret, the loss of the fear of
death, revived relationships and a de-emphasis on material acquisition. People stop worrying
about having and start focusing their energies more on creating and helping, bringing light and
blessings to others who, hopefully, will undergo their own shifts in perspective. Multiply that by
a few hundred million and bingo! You’ve got a completely new world.
The single most important question for anyone interested in helping people make choices
that will dramatically enhance the quality of their lives—coaches, self-help authors, physicians,
therapists—is, “How can I get people to make changes that are in their own best interest?”
There’s a billion-dollar self-improvement industry based on selling a thousand different answers
to that question, and it’s mostly a waste of time. The answers are all based on conventional
wisdom, and neither I nor the rest of my team have much tolerance for that. We prefer
unconventional wisdom. Rather than talk at someone and lecture them on all the good this
choice or that choice will do them, we take a much simpler solution: show them what’s possible.
Put Me In, Coach
That’s what I do in my other profession as a life coach. I combine my work as a wealth
advisor and life coach because in the end, the values and life choices that I help people discover
as a coach are what guide us to their ideal financial solution for the present and the future.
Sound life choices and sound financial choices are inseparable, two sides of the same coin.
LIFEonomics™ is as much about a coaching and self-improvement program as it is about Life
and Legacy Plans. That should be obvious; we’ve spent most of our time talking about mental
disciplines that free us from worry and regret, not about 401(k) accounts. LIFEonomics™ is
really about training yourself to let go of worry and regret so that you can make changes that will
enhance your life on every front, from health and wealth to purpose and relationships.
So, if you don’t believe that people can change, I have one thing to say: Come to my
office and let our team of gifted, unconventionally wise people show you. We’ll paint some
before and after pictures that will blow your mind. Lives change every day if the motivation is
strong enough. I have seen people make changes so profound even they couldn’t believe what
they had done, guided by the LIFEonomics™ coaching method:
1. Figure out what is truly important to you in life, your purpose.
2. Teach your mind to let go of worry and regret so you can focus your energies on reinventing yourself around your purpose.
3. Set goals and have someone to hold you accountable.
4. Create a Life and Legacy Plan.
5. Reach your goals and set new ones.
6. Repeat.
My mentor, Sarano Kelley, does essentially the same thing with The Game, his incredible
coaching program that brings about titanic changes in people’s lives. His goal now is
characteristically modest: bringing about global transformation by the year 2020 with his GT
2020 program. If anybody can do it, it’s Sarano. My point is, he and I both have the same
advantage when it comes to helping people make major changes in perspective—we can point to
real people who have already walked the walk thanks in part to our efforts. All the lectures and
rah-rah speeches in the world pale in comparison actual results.
Every evening I turn my worries over to God.
He's going to be up all night anyway.
—Mary C. Crowley
founder of Home Interiors & Gifts, Inc.
My goal is that LIFEonomics™ as a system can be adopted and used by personal coaches on
the intrinsic wealth side and by financial advisors on the financial side and that, by adopting this
philosophy, we will have an exponential impact on the human race. I want to create an even
larger community of like-minded people who will get LIFEonomics™ out there and bring about
more of the kinds of change I see in my office every day. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt
that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever
has.”
Coach, Advise, Teach and Inspire
What I’m trying to do in my wealth management practice and my coaching is to help
people reach self-actualization, the pinnacle of Dr. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy, the peak of
personal development where the person is the best he or she can be. I don’t think a lot of people
think in terms of making themselves the best they can be; instead, they seem to spend most of
their time worrying about survival and finding excuses why they can’t change things. But what
if you could get past that? What if you could let go of worry and regret and use your energy to
be the absolute best you can be? And if you’re not thinking in those terms, why not?
I don’t need to contribute to global change to be happy with my life; I could die
tomorrow with no regrets at all. But helping others reach self-actualization, free of worry and
regret and turned loose to do what is truly important with the people they cherish, is my purpose.
I hope that this book has helped to light the way to personal transformation for you, that it’s
made you think and challenge some of your preconceptions. I hope you’ll be one of the small
percentage of readers who will be so intrigued that you go to www.lifeonomics.com to find out
about coaching and self-transformation. Speaking for my team and the LIFEonomics™
community, it would be an honor to be part of the next, most exciting stage of your story.
So, I’ll leave you with a statement of purpose, the one that guides my wealth
management practice, my team, my coaching and my life:
“To coach and advise some, to teach and inspire many,
to have love and compassion for all.”
Acknowledgements
This book is about courage. I talked about my mother in the book and how she taught me
about faith, love and forgiveness, but I learned about courage and not giving up from my father,
Joe Holdford. Every time I get knocked down in my life, I have this vision that gets me
through. It’s of my father on the ground holding my eight-year-old brother just after the gun
accident that took his life. But it’s not the shock or the grief from which I draw strength. It’s
the moment in my mind that my dad got back up. He got back up and kept mom from having to
see the blood. He got back up and went on to protect and provide for my mother, my younger
brother and me. That vision has gotten me through all of the rough times in my life, because if
Dad could get back up after that, I simply had no excuses. He used to say, “Son, you can never
truly defeat a man who never gives up.” He would know.
This book is also about honor. The standard that I use is that of my younger brother Joel
Holdford. I’ve never met a more honorable man in my life, and I am blessed to have him as my
brother.
This book was made possible by a very long list of people, starting with the people that
are closest to me: my beautiful wife and poet Carla Jean and my two youngest stepsons, Dylan
and Kevin. Every day I get to go to work at Wealth Management, Inc., with my business partner
and best friend of over 20 years, Brad Isroff. When Brad bought into my practice five years ago
it was with the agreement that he would take on the hard stuff to free me up to write this
book…and it finally worked. I also get to go to work every day with my “day wife” Janet
Bredenberg, who has been running my practice for over 14 years. Together with Dana Benfield,
our newest member of the team, those three make sure every day that all the real work gets done
while I get to have all the fun talking to clients, teaching workshops, keeping on top of economic
and market research and writing books.
I would also like to acknowledge the rest of the LIFEonomics Project team, without
which this book would never have come to fruition: Rosemary Hauschild, project co-coordinator,
intellectual property coach and long time believer in me; Tim Vandehey, the gifted professional
writer that worked with me on every sentence in this book; Hobie and Kathi Dunn, who
provided exemplary book cover design, logo design and coaching; Deborah Kemp, future
Director of the LIFEonomics Foundation; Anton Ross, website designer; and Sara Green,
compliance analyst with LPL Financial. Thank you all.
I would also like to acknowledge the rest of my family: my oldest son, Daniel and his
wonderful wife Jennifer, my twin daughters Amanda and Amber, their mother, Kim Davis and
my three grandchildren, Jewel, Timothy and Victor. I’ve mentioned my brother Joel but can’t
forget my sister-in-law Amber and all five of my awesome nieces and nephews. I also consider
Brad’s parents, Richard and Suzanne Isroff, to be both family as well as rich sources of
knowledge and wisdom.
Another incredibly important relationship is with personal and business coach Sarano
Kelly. His guidance empowered me to discover and live my purpose, of which this book is the
ultimate manifestation. Some more members of my extended brotherhood of contributors
include my close friends and advocates Steve Biermann, Barry Knight and my spiritual mentors
Richard Eastburn and Sam Laird. I must acknowledge my Inner Leadership Game Team
including my daily accountability partners during the writing of this book, Kelly Campbell and
J.T. Mccormick. An amazing life coach and friend Mari Jo Hayes and my friend and former
business partner Chris Fess also made their own contributions.
I also would like to thank all of our clients for their trust over the years, especially those
people whose stories in which I was not only blessed to play a part, but that I was allowed to
share in this book. You were my inspiration. I would also like to thank my tenth grade creative
writing teacher, still a close friend and client, Dell Gorman. She taught me everything that has
ever really mattered about writing, and awful lot about life.
I would like to acknowledge all of the wise teachers and writers from the hundreds of
books that I have studied over the years. I am very clear that I am absolutely not an author of
wisdom, but a collector and re-distributor of it. Finally, I would like to thank God for giving me
this book and the opportunity to share it with the world. It is my greatest hope that it will truly
empower all that we can reach to truly live a life of peace, prosperity and purpose, free of worry
and regret.
About The Authors
Robert J. Holdford
President and CEO
Wealth Management, Inc.
Securities offered through LPL Financial
Member FINRA/SIPC
Rob Holdford is an author, wealth advisor, life coach and public speaker. In the financial
services industry Rob has practiced within the discipline of comprehensive financial planning,
concentrating on retirement planning, estate planning, and tax reduction strategies for over 21
years. More than two decades ago Rob decided the best way to grow his financial planning
practice was through public speaking, which started his long career of teaching workshops and
seminars to educate, help, and inform the public. Rob has also been an instructor for the
University Of Arkansas Adult Division Of Continuing Education, Pulaski Technical College,
and has taught financial courses all over central Arkansas. Rob holds securities licenses
including Series 7, 63, and 65. Rob has been developing and applying his LIFEonomicsTM
Wealth Management System to help change lives over most of his career.
Outside of the financial services industry, Rob is an advisor to the board of directors of the
Learning Disabilities Association of Arkansas and is in the process of establishing his own
charitable organization called The LIFEonomics Foundation that will be partially funded from
revenue for this book. In 2002 The Sarano Kelly Coaching Organization honored Rob’s
personal development work by making him only the second person ever to win their most
coveted award, Player of the Year. After training under Kelly he went on to “life coach”
hundreds of individuals for Sarano Kelly’s “The Game – Win Your Life In 90 Days” not only in
the United States, but eight other countries helping people to make huge breakthroughs in their
business and personal lives. He enjoys playing in a local rock band, whitewater paddling, travel,
and snow skiing.
Brad Isroff, WMS
Executive Vice President
Wealth Management, Inc.
LPL Registered Principal
Securities offered through LPL Financial
Member FINRA/SIPC
Brad is a 1985 Graduate of Miami University of Ohio with 15 years of experience working for
Fortune 500 companies as well as five years in the financial services sector. Brad has obtained
his Wealth Management Specialist designation from Kaplan University of Iowa, and has been an
instructor for Pulaski Technical College. He is the registered principal at Wealth Management,
Inc. of Little Rock, Brad holds security licenses Series 7, 66, and 24.
Outside of the financial services industry Brad is an ambassador with the Greater Little Rock
Regional Chamber of Commerce. He enjoys playing in a local rock band, travel, snow skiing
and is an avid Arkansas Razorback sports fan.
About Wealth Management, Inc.
As independent financial advisors, we are committed to offering our clients fair, objective and
customized financial solutions. We work for our clients—not for a large investment firm. Our
mission is to help our clients create, enjoy, and protect multi-generational wealth free of worry
and regret.
Securities Offered Through LPL Financial Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through CWM, LLC, a
Registered Investment Advisor. LPL Financial is under separate ownership from any other entity. Rob Holdford’s
Arkansas Insurance Licensee is LIC #25003. Brad Isroff’s Arkansas Insurance is LIC #265961, Ronald Lee’s
Arkansas Insurance License is LIC #00000