Happy Sunday Everyone:
I was on a coaching call this past Thursday with some great folks and monster producers. One of the guys on the call has been in the program for a long time, he’s kind of done it all as it relates to production, “doing loans”. He’s super organized, process driven, structured, and smart. Being successful, organized, smart, structured, and process driven doesn’t make him a good person, but this guy is, he’s awesome. He asked me on the call if he should redo his will/trust as he hadn’t looked at it since 2015? I was honestly a little surprised with his attention to detail and following a process so incredibly well, that he wouldn’t have it in his calendar to re-review such an important set of documents. We agreed that he’d put in in his calendar to review high level points annually and move on.
Wills/Trusts aren’t the primary point of this email today but I think it’s worth noting:
* if you don’t have a will set up at a minimum, and probably a trust too, you need to.
* I want to be respectful of anyone that has lost someone who didn’t have it set up but I think our mindsets need to be that we’re helping a great deal with the people we leave behind with giving directives i.e. who gets the kids, where is the money going, do I want to be resuscitated or allow me pass peacefully…those are big questions that would be great not to put on people already grieving your loss.
* Doing the exercise once doesn’t mean it’s done. Things change, the people we thought would take care of Jack/Thomas if we died, moved, we lost touch more than when we would have liked, we needed to make changes. People you’re putting all your trust in encounter their own life’s challenges, you need a review of “are they still in the position to handle this the way I want for my loved ones”. If you don’t review its actually scary what could happen.
If anyone is still reading this (thank you very much), where the call became more fun for all of us was when we put the correlation to updating wills/trusts with that of our team members. Now that my bad ass student is contemplating “what’s next”, part of his “why” is investing back in his team members lives. He’s always done this to a degree but it’s more important to him today than any time in the past. We agreed that although we do reviews, the reviews are more about job performance and less about life performance. My hope is for anyone that has a single person report to them, that you understand that you have a legit responsibility to understand work/life goals of your team members. The big key is once you think you understand them, do you review them consistently enough to understand if they’re both tracking, or needing tweaks? Big difference between job performance & life performance.
There was a point in time where I didn’t think any of this stuff mattered, I didn’t think it was appropriate or my place to help change someone’s life for the better, it’s just a job, right? That attitude will allow you to affect absolutely nothing and no one for the better. When I mustered the confidence for just a moment in time and asked my team during a team meeting if anyone wanted help with anything, and the answer was “yes”, when I was expecting a “thanks but no thanks”, my life changed categorically. Doesn’t mean I have all the answers or that I don’t need help from others, it just means people know I care about them on a personal level and when that happens anything is possible.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. I’ll be smoking chicken wings and cooking steaks for high schoolers watching football at our house all day!! WINNING.