IAM944- Best-selling Author Believes in Financial Literacy Training

Jonathan DeYoe is the best-selling author of Mindful Money: Simple Practices for reaching your Financial Goals and increasing your Happiness Dividend. He writes and speaks about the intersection between love and money. He has been investing for 40 years and been a financial advisor for 25. He started his firm in 2001 and he is a big believer in financial literacy training and a big advocate for the fiduciary standard.

• CEO Hack: My morning routine that includes a high-intensity training
• CEO Nugget: Hire ahead and do less so you grow faster
• CEO Defined: A visionary, setting expectations and becoming a servant

Website: http://mindful.money/

Mindful Money Promo Page: https://courses.mindful.money/a/46201/P5zhJqDw

Discount Code (25%): CBNATIONFINLIT (Expires 4/15/21)

Learn more about Mindful Money Courses Here: https://mindful.money/services/financial-education

Twitter: @MindfulMoney_Ed
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmoneyplan/
Facebook: https://facebook.com/MindfulMoneyPlan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathandeyoe/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/mindfulmoney

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[00:00:22.10] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

[00:00:48.79] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jonathan Dio of Mindful Money. Jonathan, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:56.89] – Jonathan DeYoe

It's great to be here, Gresh. Looking forward to chatting.

[00:00:59.10] – Gresham Harkless

Looking forward to having you on as well too. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Jonathan so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jonathan is the best-selling author of Mindful Money, Simple Practices for Reaching Your Financial Goals and Increasing Your Happiness Dividend. He writes and speaks about the intersection between love and money, and he has been investing for forty years and has been a financial advisor for twenty-five years. He started his firm in two thousand one, and he is a big believer in financial literacy training and a big advocate for the fiduciary standard. Jonathan, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:29.09] – Jonathan DeYoe

I am ready. Let's do it. Awesome.

[00:01:30.59] – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? What lets you get started with the business?

[00:01:39.50] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yes. This is probably way too long a story to fit into a single podcast, but, just in quick nutshells in series. So first a nutshell, I was raised in a poor environment. I don't know if you're familiar with this happening, but what that does is it stimulates the desire for money. So I always wanted stability. I always wanted financial success. It's been something that I've wanted since I was a little kid. And so I purchased my first stock with my summer earnings when I was nine years old.

[00:02:06.00] – Gresham Harkless

That's nice.

[00:02:06.29] – Jonathan DeYoe

And I've studied investing my entire life. I love it. I love how the economies work. I love entrepreneurship. I love people who start businesses. I love people who run things. I think it's just so much fun to get involved in that. So I did all this study, and then I went to college to study finance. And I was just bored out of my mind. So I switched to philosophy. So I became a Lutheran seminarian.

[00:02:29.30] – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

[00:02:29.69] – Jonathan DeYoe

I switched from that to becoming a Buddhist academic, and then I finally switched from that back to this concept of being a financial adviser. But I sorta had that whole, deep mindfulness training for many, many years of psychology, religions, and philosophy that fed into how we did it. And this all culminates in culminates in the book in twenty seventeen. I started writing the book in two thousand eight. You might remember that was a rough time for the US economy. The Great Recession was going on, and people were resonating with the story. And so I was like, okay. Let's talk about how mindfulness works in finance. And then wrote the book, and it's been sort of, an interesting three years on podcasts and interviews and all things happening.

[00:03:09.40] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And I  say so often that so many times we forget about the human aspect of the business of life too. And I love that you talked about all those things and also how all those things add up to where you are in your philosophy and how you look at things. Because I think so many times we're used to things being in a silo and this does have nothing to do with that. When in reality, all of it aligns and makes us who we are and what we choose to create.

[00:03:32.69] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. Absolutely. I  love it. It's, who is it, Seth Godin talks about your tribe. So by me out there talking about mindfulness, I think I've attracted the people I'd like to work with. You know, that kinda makes sense. And I love the fact that that's the way it is.

[00:03:46.90] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. The more you tell your story and talk about who you are, it get that magnet out and you start to connect with those people that are just like you. And I love that you talked about it. I say a lot of times, I'm a big believer in, like, binaries. As you talked about, like, in the beginning, of your story and your experience, I think so many times we get put in certain situations because just like that magnet, it'll propel us into wanting to get things and appreciating certain things. So it's almost like, again, it's all in alignment with who we are and who we end up becoming.

[00:04:12.19] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. True. Love it.

[00:04:14.19] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper. I know you touched on it and I did as well too when I read your bio. Could you take us through a little bit more about your book how you work with the clients and all the awesome work that you're doing?

[00:04:23.60] – Jonathan DeYoe

So I guess a good way to summarize the book, there are three parts to the book. In the first part of the book, it's all about, illusions. The stuff that we're told about money that's just not true or the stuff that we instinctively feel about money that's just not true. And, I had so many of these going in. I pretty much, cut and slice and splice them down to there's eight big illusions. And so I sort of debunk those illusions. The middle part of the book is and this is where all that history with, philosophy and religion comes from or comes into play. The middle part of the book is about really figuring out what matters in life.

And what I mean by that is how do I create more happiness and more well-being in my own life and my family's life? And there's a ton of research on this. Like, psychologists have been studying the human brain. Religious people have been meditating. Philosophers have been asking what is the good life for thousands of years.

And so this has been written about, and one can find answers to these questions. And the interesting thing is it's not a faster Internet connection. It's not a boat. It's not a big house. It's not the things we generally think of that create happiness. And so really getting down to what makes us happy before we start applying a financial planning process is so important. Then the third section of the book is really about doing that financial planning process. It's understanding where I am now, understanding where I wanna go ultimately and all the stops I wanna make on the way, and then what trade-offs am I willing to make. In other words, what am I willing to give up to have the things that I want?

So that starts with identifying what those things are really understanding yourself and then writing it all down. Once it's written down, it becomes a document that pulls you through life. No matter who you are, all the CEOs that are listening to this, get hit with things. Things come from outside your purview, smack you off track, and you gotta get back on track. Well, what was the track? Well, the plan is the track. So you sort of return to plan. If something happens, return to plan.

And that's pretty much that's that's what we do. Like, we do the planning stuff. We help people think about their lives, and what their trade-offs are gonna be, and then we help them stay on plan. When the world tells them or their brains tell them, hey. Something's going wrong. Something's going wrong. Something's going wrong. Wait. Wait. Wait. We thought about this. It's in the plan. Let's look back at that plan and what we wanted.

[00:06:43.50] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that. And I feel like, I don't know if you've had this same experience. I feel like so many times we learn about finances, and we don't necessarily do that work that you kinda talked about in the first few parts before we do that. We say that happiness is a boat. Happiness is a six-figure check or whatever it might be that we hear that we start to redirect our entire life based on that, forgetting to do that work in the beginning and then using, I guess, finances and money as a tool to get to where we want to be and what happiness truly is.

[00:07:14.80] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. I think that it's rampant. I mean, we start starting when you're in high school and you want a thing. Well, how do you get the thing? We set the goal and you go for the thing. Well, let's look at that groundwork first.  We're not very good at being introspective. That if you sit alone for more than five minutes in quiet, you're like, oh my god. I gotta check my device. Like, we're not good in just quiet spaces, which is it's a habit we should be we should be working on. Spend some time quietly with our thoughts.

[00:07:42.19] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And I feel like that's one of the things that has happened in this past year is that a lot of the noise that we did have before has been taken away from us and has forced us to be quiet, to be more introspective, to look at what matters. So that's why I love what you do because it aligns more with the person and what they're trying to achieve rather than the thing and then working backward from there.

[00:08:00.19] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. Exactly. Yep.

[00:08:01.80] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So would you consider that to be what I call your secret sauce? The thing you feel sets you apart and makes you unique. Is it your ability to kind of do that introspection for other people, understand that, and then kind of create that path from there?

[00:08:13.60] – Jonathan DeYoe
Secret sauce. So it's funny because I talk about in the book and those illusions, I talk about there is no secret sauce. It's just about having a plan and following the plan. So if that's a secret sauce, then I guess that's a big part of it.

[00:08:28.30] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And so many times we find out that, when you hear people that have reached success or happiness or whatever and how we redefine it, we sometimes can overcomplicate it and say that, okay. Well, what is equals mc squares or what's the square root of pi or whatever these questions are? That's the answer. But in reality, sometimes the answer is right in front of us. You just have to create do that work to find that answer, then create the plan and execute that plan to get there.

[00:08:53.60] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. Have a plan, and execute the plan. It's pretty simple. I think there are a lot of motivational speakers that talk about massive action. And that's true, and that's great, and that's important, but it's gotta be massive action in the right direction.

[00:09:05.50] – Gresham Harkless

Right.

[00:09:05.79] – Jonathan DeYoe

You gotta have the direction, then you take action. And so many people get stuck on one or the other of those things. It's the coordination of those two things that makes life worth living. Like, it makes you end up where you want to go.

[00:09:15.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And it sounds like you've been able to tap into that and help people understand that in so many different ways with all the work that you're doing. And that helps people get to really where success is for themselves individually. It's always a journey. Right? So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:09:40.79] – Jonathan DeYoe

It's my morning routine. Like, I spend two hours before anyone else in my house is awake. Usually, I work out, I meditate, I read, I write. So I spent and this is every day for the last ten years. I spent two, two and a half hours by myself, now, taking care of my physical body, taking care of my mind, and reading and feeding myself with the right kinds of stuff every day. I do it on Saturday. I do it on Sunday. I do it every day of the week.

And I know that when whenever I don't do it, when I miss it, like, when I have an interview that's early in the morning and it takes me off schedule or something like that, I feel it. I know there's a difference. I'm not as settled. I'm not as good. I'm not as smart. So that's important to have that morning routine that works for you. And I think high-intensity training is part of that routine. Your health is critical. So having that morning routine, I think is, I think that's the greatest hack that's, existed in my life.

[00:10:33.79] – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what would you consider to be what I call a CEO nugget? And this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. You might have already touched on this. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:10:45.70] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yeah. So when I look at my practice relative to a lot of my peers' practices, we had these study groups and things like this. What I note is a lot of these guys are smarter than I am. Like, a lot a lot a lot of guys have they're good with technology. Their tech stack is awesome. A lot of guys have been good at marketing. They're good at something. The thing I notice is I've always hired ahead of growth. And so the nugget there is I've grown fast. Like, my company in the last ten years has grown faster than most of my peers.

And in in prepping for this, I was like, what what can I think that is? And from a metrics standpoint, you gotta measure these things. And from a metrics standpoint, what I'm talking about is your revenue per full-time employee. And so my revenue per full-time employee is less than my peer group's revenue per full-time employee because I hire ahead. Because I'm doing less, and I'm having people do more stuff for me. And if more people are doing more stuff for me, I have greater capacity. They have greater capacity.

So the minute someone just starts bumping up against capacity, we hire. If someone else bumps against capacity, we hire. And so by hiring earlier, we grow faster. And I think that's a nugget that if I had known that ten years ago, I would have hired much more quickly than I have hired. And I think I've even had a bigger and better practice today had I done that.

[00:12:09.29] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. And I appreciate that. And so now I wanna ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're open to our different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So, Jonathan, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:12:22.10] – Jonathan DeYoe

So we're actually in the process of, rolling out, the entrepreneurial on the entrepreneurial operating system, eos. I don't know if you heard of this.

[00:12:30.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yes.

[00:12:31.10] – Jonathan DeYoe

And so I think the CEO is changing my view of what a CEO is. And I think the CEO is a visionary. You know, here's the path. This is where we're going. And then it's then they're setting expectations of individuals, and then they're just supporting. Then they become a servant. So visionary, setting expectations, and then becoming a servant, helping everyone do their best in the role that they have so that we can meet the vision. And people have questions about their vision setting them straight on their vision. This is our vision. This is your part in that vision. Clear? Great. Fantastic. How can I help you do these things to help us get to that vision? I think that's it. Vision and then vision and then support.

[00:13:10.60] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Appreciate that. And even that holistic view because think so many times, especially as we talked about investing in the people that are on your team and bringing on those employees, you have to make sure those employees or those team members, I should even say what success is and how to reach that, but you also have to be there and be a servant to them and support them in so many different ways to make sure that that happens. And when you start to kind of, I guess, hit on each of those, that's when you start to see the success in getting to achieve that growth.

[00:13:37.00] – Jonathan DeYoe

Yep. And you have to meet them individually. Like, you can't assume that, hey. Today is a great day for this person. You have to say, what's going on with you? what are we overcoming today? And sometimes you'll hear nuggets. You'll hear stuff that's important that you've gotta think about and help people think through. Maybe business related and maybe in their lives. And it's, there's a lot of folks to talk about making it making it personable, making love the center of the whole thing, really taking care of people. And as long as we're doing that, I think I think we're all gonna be a little more successful.

[00:14:04.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, we all definitely as a world will be, because I think when you start to make that impact and you start to talk to the person and help out the person, then it starts to affect them. It starts to affect their family, the organization, the business, and the world as a whole. So I appreciate that definition, and, appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of the book, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

[00:14:31.39] – Jonathan DeYoe

Great. So, the best place to get information about what we're doing is to go to Mindful. money. That's not there's no dot com. It's just mindful dot money. And you can find all of our social media links. And then when you're there, and this is something I'd suggest, is when you're there, go to the financial courses. Go to the financial education. So one of the things that, really struck me about a year ago was the thing that the thing that moves people towards financial freedom, there's lots of things, but there's a first thing.

And the first thing is financial education. And the thing we fail as a country at doing is providing any kind of framework for financial education. And so we've built an eighteen-module system that teaches people the difference between credit and debit, teaches people the difference between stock and bond, teaches people how to save, what a match is, what a 04:01 is, what's an IRA. And we just just educational.

And you don't have to hire us for anything, but there are courses there. And I'd recommend people start with a financial education that'll enable them to make better decisions about who they work with in terms of an adviser if they wanna do it themselves. All these things are fine but start with some education.  In the last couple of weeks, we've seen this thing with GameStop. Right? And that's been pretty crazy, and I think a lot of education would have protected a lot of people when this all fell out. When all the fallout comes down, a little bit better education would have helped a lot of people.

[00:15:51.89] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate that, Jonathan. We will have the links and information in the show notes, but you're right where I think that's something that as a, I guess, a country or even as maybe a people, as important as financials are, especially how that can make or break, sometimes your relationships, your success, your view of self. We don't necessarily have enough knowledge and information about that.

So I appreciate you for talking about that, obviously, but, of course, creating opportunities for people to be able to get more informed so that they can make more. I guess, enlightened or maybe better decisions is a better way to say it, based on what they're trying to achieve. So definitely appreciate that, and I appreciate you again, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:16:30.89] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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