Psychology of Money and Better Client Conversations With Brian Portnoy

Brian Portnoy is the Founder of Shaping Wealth, a company that delivers human-first, applied behavioral-finance learning and engagement for financial advisors, corporations, and educational institutions. A CFA charterholder with a PhD from the University of Chicago, Brian has over two decades of experience in hedge-fund and mutual-fund investing. He now focuses on helping people make better money decisions and align finance with a meaningful life. Brian is also the best-selling author of The Geometry of Wealth and The Investor’s Paradox.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:05] Brian Portnoy shares an overview of Shaping Wealth as a human-first behavioral finance training platform

• [3:54] Training advisors to use emotional intelligence and deeper client conversations

• [6:02] Exploring money stories and how advisors’ own beliefs shape their guidance

• [10:10] Growth mindset versus fixed mindset among advisors and the pain required for real change

• [13:62] Brian explains why human-first guidance especially resonates with fee-only advisors

• [15:46 The four core client meetings and improving communication in each one

• [25:01] Introducing Shaping Wealth’s AI-powered, always-on coaching companion for advisors

• [28:27] What money really is, why the brain struggles with it, and how it acts as an emotional mirror
  

In this episode…

Financial advisors excel at technical guidance but struggle with the deeper human challenges their clients face. Money triggers stress, fear, and uncertainty, yet most advisors aren’t trained to navigate those emotional dynamics. How can advisors improve their conversations, build trust, and truly guide clients toward better financial decisions?

Brian Portnoy, an expert in behavioral finance and the psychology of money, explains how advisors can strengthen their emotional intelligence, clarify their own money stories, and adopt a human-first mindset. Highlighting the value of skills such as self-awareness, empathy, and better listening, Brian emphasizes practical tools for improving client conversations across prospecting, discovery, onboarding, and reviews. He also shares the importance of well-being science and how understanding happiness and purpose can meaningfully reshape financial guidance.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Brian Portnoy, Founder of Shaping Wealth, about human-centered financial advice. Brian discusses the psychology of money, improving client conversations, and the role of emotional intelligence. He also explores advisor wellbeing, communication strategies, and the impact of AI-powered coaching tools.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Brian Portnoy on LinkedIn

• Shaping Wealth

• The Geometry of Wealth: How to shape a life of money and meaning by Brian Portnoy

• The Investor's Paradox: The Power of Simplicity in a World of Overwhelming Choice by Brian Portnoy

• How I Invest My Money: Finance experts reveal how they save, spend, and invest by Brian Portnoy and Joshua Brown

• "[Emerging Tech] Simplifying Operations in Wealth Tech With Max Klein" on The Customer Wins

• "How Advisors Win at Life and Wealth With Donald Morgan" on The Customer Wins

• "Secrets to Scaling SaaS Businesses With Patrick Hannon" on The Customer Wins

Quotable Moments:

• "The brain and money don't play particularly well together because the brain evolved before money existed."

• "Most people think they have a growth mindset, but they don't because growth requires investment and pain."

• "Money is a relatively brand new thing, so our adaptations lead to very difficult decisions."

• "I always say that no one speaks the language of money fluently, and it does a number on us."

• "We hear pretty frequently that our programs change people's lives, including the financial advisors we train."

Action Steps:

1. Develop deeper emotional intelligence skills: Strengthening self-awareness, empathy, and social skills helps advisors better understand client needs and build more meaningful, productive financial conversations.

2. Clarify your personal money story: Reflecting on where your beliefs about money come from improves your ability to guide others by reducing bias and making you a better listener.

3. Adopt a human-first approach to client meetings: Prioritizing emotions, values, and personal goals elevates interactions beyond technical planning and helps clients feel seen and supported.

4. Invest consistently in personal growth: Ongoing learning and self-improvement directly influence your leadership strength, client outcomes, and long-term business success.

5. Use AI tools to enhance advisor support and wellbeing: Leveraging technology like empathetic AI agents provides real-time guidance while reducing burnout and improving overall performance.

   
   

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Max Klein of LEA, Donald Morgan of Independent Wealth Connections, and Patrick Hannon of Fidelity Labs. Today, I'm speaking with Brian Portnoy of Shaping Wealth, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using Quik!.

You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right. I'm excited to talk to our guests today.

 Brian Portnoy is an entrepreneur, writer, and expert in the psychology of money. He's the founder of Shaping Wealth, the global wealth industry's premier learning and engagement platform for human-first financial guidance. Brian's three behavioral finance books have been published in 15 languages, and one of them, The Geometry of Wealth, How to Shape Life and Money, and Meaning. Sorry I'm Getting This All wrong. Inspired by his current venture, Brian previously worked for 20 years in the hedge fund and mutual fund industries as an investor, researcher, and educator.

 Brian, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Brian Portnoy: 01:42 

Hi Rich. Great to be here.

Richard Walker: 01:44 

Sorry I butchered the name of your book. You can mention it again later.

Brian Portnoy: 01:47 

It's all good.

Richard Walker: 01:49 

So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I'd love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Brian, let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?

Brian Portnoy: 02:05 

So we are experts in the psychology of money and the psychology of financial planning. And the core problem that we address is that individuals, all of us human beings, struggle with money for deep evolutionary reasons. The brain and money don't play particularly well together. The brain evolved to solve a bunch of survive and thrive problems well before money was invented. Lo and behold, this new thing shows up and we're like, well, what do we do with this?

So, you know, we're supposed to buy low and sell high. We're supposed to invest for the long run. We're supposed to save more and spend less. Guess what? We don't do a lot of that a lot of the time.

 And so as experts in that field, we have some sense of how people can do better. But in particular, rich, the business that I've built is B2B. We work with financial advisors, so we train financial advisors to have better conversations with their end clients, our friends, neighbors, you name it. On making better financial decisions. So Shaping Wealth is a learning and development platform with courses and workshops and coaching and things like that, all geared toward making the financial advice industry that much better at engaging their clients.

Richard Walker: 03:26 

So I was just having this conversation yesterday with somebody that when I was an advisor, I came to the conclusion that 90% of my job was psychology. And it was listening and understanding and empathizing and seeing what people are going through and helping them talk them off the cliff, etc.. But the person I was talking to said, that's not the norm, Rich. That's not the norm of what financial advisors do or act like. So I'm curious, from your perspective, what is the norm for a financial advisor and their attitudes towards the psychology of money, etc.?

Brian Portnoy: 03:54 

Yeah. So it's so there's a historical dynamic here. I call it the 50-year arc from Gordon Gekko to Brene Brown. That financial advice way back when was brokerage? You know, Blue Horseshoe loves Anacortes Steel.

You're putting your best, best, best client into your best idea. They're still brokerage people are still selling. That's fine. Having the right product for the right client is a good thing. However, the arc of progress is more toward those coaching or therapeutic conversations.

 We're not therapists, not trained to be. But because money is such an emotional topic, it does raise all of these issues around fear, greed, envy, hope, joy, regret. When I give talks to groups of advisors all over the world, I often ask the question, who here has ever felt like their client's therapist? I think it's been 100% of the hands in every room goes up. The challenge is that we are trained very well in our industry, in the wealth management industry.

 On the mechanical elements of advice. Technical expertise in building portfolios, purchasing, insurance, estate planning, taxes, things like that, but not so much on the guidance piece. And so the mission of Shaping Wealth is to train the guides on the journey toward financial well-being. And that's a different thing, because that means this is humans helping other humans navigate uncertainty, complexity and change. Uncertainty.

 Complexity and change is the human condition. It's the soup that we're in. It's really hard. And it's one thing to build a portfolio. It's another to really know how to listen and empathize and understand where somebody is coming from.

 That's the training and engagement that we've put into the world. That's the platform we've built.

Richard Walker: 05:47 

So what does that really look like to the end consumer who's going through this course or this training? I mean, is it all about communication skills? Is it building more empathy, like the Brené Brown approach? I love her, by the way.

Brian Portnoy: 05:59 

Yeah. She's great.

Richard Walker: 06:00 

What does it look like?

Brian Portnoy: 06:02 

Yeah. So our consumer is the financial advisor. Yes. I give talks to, you know, large audiences of individual investors. But the vast bulk of what we do, what we've built is oriented toward engaging financial advisors, the wealth management industry globally.

And we've got clients on six continents still haven't found an advisor in Antarctica. I'm looking but, you know, we're seeing this global trend toward so-called human-first or behavioral advice. And what it looks like is, you know, and you started going there with a whole set of skills and mindsets that are customers the financial advisor can use in their day-to-day engagement with clients. So first and foremost is emotional intelligence. A lot of what we do is train financial advisors in the four dimensions of emotional intelligence, which are self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills.

 One of the most fascinating and less understood elements of emotional intelligence is that the source of being truly empathetic is self-awareness. And so, for better or for worse, the advisors who we work with, thousands of advisors all over the world, we ask them to go down their own exploratory path. Who are they? What does money mean to them? We work with financial advisors on their money stories, which is a really powerful and important exercise.

 Hundreds and hundreds of advisors have gone through our money story exercises, programs, I should say. What we've found is that upwards of 90% of financial advisors, experts in money, have never once written down why money is important to them. And then when we help them work through these money story exercises. Where did you learn about money? From whom?

 What are your values and beliefs in this space? It ends up that they recognize that they become better listeners once they've figured out their own story. They're more finely tuned to hear what others are saying. So one big skill bucket, if you will, that we train financial advisors in is emotional intelligence. Another one.

 And I'm not going to go through all of them because we have so many workshops and modules and seminars and such. But another one is well-being. The science of happiness is a robust field. It's known as positive psychology, and in some ways the future of behavioral finance. The future psychology of money is understanding what makes us deeply content and happy in life, and where money fits into that.

 The challenge is that it's really awkward, sometimes weird, in a financial advice context to talk to people about what their meaning of life is like. What's your purpose? Like, you go to your broker, your advisor, and they're like, hey, what's the meaning of life? Like, wait, what kind of conversation? I thought we were talking about the stock market, right?

 Not so much. So we educate our clients to have not awkward, very productive, authentic conversations about what's truly important to their clients. And once they can have that understanding, they can then attach the money pieces. So it's a pretty wide ranging set of human skills that's why we call it human first or human centric, related to wellbeing, emotional intelligence, decision making, how we navigate change in life, and many other topics.

Richard Walker: 09:35 

Okay, so I love this because I love self-improvement and I've written two books. One is the actual methodology for How to Change called It's My Life. I can change if I want to, and I've I've always been fascinated with how we can get better internally first to advance the rest of our lives. And honestly, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have that mindset of I have to improve myself to improve my business. How receptive are financial advisors to that?

How many of them are in the mindset of self-improvement and constant reinvigoration of who they are? Or is that a battle to overcome and try to get them to see the value of doing this?

Brian Portnoy: 10:10 

It's a battle. Honestly, it's a battle. I'd say it's a pretty mixed landscape out there. I think many people we know, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners understand, recognize the distinction between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. I think most people, most people think they have a sense of humor, but they're not particularly funny.

Most people think they have a growth mindset, but they don't. And the reason we know that they don't is that growth requires investment. It requires pain. You can't build muscle without breaking muscle. And in an industry where you know you can make a pretty good living not having to sort of change much, invest much in your business to then say, okay, we're going to break things apart.

 We're going to sort of reinvest here in our human capital, and that's going to involve learning. It's going to involve paying attention, engagement and ultimately change. So we've got lots of customers there into what we do. But when I look around the industry generally, I see a pretty mixed array of folks who range from a very much a fixed mindset, like they might find what we do kind of interesting because it's about the brain, it's about who we are. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we see people rolling up their sleeves and doing one thing after another with us to continuously improve.

Richard Walker: 11:40 

So if you were invited by a firm to come speak at their national sales conference and they had 1000 thousand people in the audience. How many would raise their hand to come work with you just off of the bat? Like, what percentage do you think you attract? Naturally.

Brian Portnoy: 11:54 

Well, I mean, so what's what's what, what's the firm like? I mean, what's the nature of the firm?

Richard Walker: 11:58 

Oh, I don't know. I mean, just pick a broker dealer or something, you know, a wealth management firm.

Brian Portnoy: 12:03 

I would say 200, 250. It really depends on the incentives of everyone sitting in the room. If your incentive is to sell a product to a customer and not to get into these deeper conversations that we think drive better, not only better life outcomes, but better long term commercial outcomes. You might look at what we do and say, okay, where's the quick hit? Where's the dopamine rush?

That's not what we're really selling. However, the industry is changing a lot and some of the core features of wealth management have been commoditized. It's pretty hard to say, hey, I can pick better mutual funds than the next guy, or I can build a better portfolio than the person down the street. That's just simply not true anymore. Maybe the end customer believes it because you say it in a compelling way.

 It's simply not true. I think what's understood now in this arc, from Gordon Gekko to Brene Brown, is that the real edge in advice is on the human side. It's making those connections and the people in that room who I would be speaking to who think, okay, I need not only do I need to dig in deeper with the families that I take care of, but I need to build a team who gets it also. Those are the firms that are going to sort of latch on to our suite of programming, and we're going to have a great long-term relationship with them.

Richard Walker: 13:31 

So I heard a great quote from a coach saying, the growth of your company is directly correlated to your own personal growth. And I'm wondering if you have metrics or studies or things like that that correlate what you're teaching to outcomes that these advisors and firms are seeing as a result of becoming more human-centric. Do you have that kind of knowledge or.

Brian Portnoy: 13:52 

Yeah, and I'd probably label it as anecdata, meaning we have lots of customers, we do surveys, we do NPS scores. We try to track progress over time. Tracking that progress can only go as well as the firm allows it to. And most firms don't do a particularly good job at tracking the progress on their human capital to the extent that they do, and to the extent that we have hundreds of testimonials. We've run big programs with big firms.

We hear pretty frequently that our programs change people's lives. And I don't mean just the end client. I'm actually talking about the financial advisors who we train. And I think one of the reasons, The core reason why we find that is that we speak to our customers as humans first, before we speak to them as financial advisors. The modern financial advisor is often sort of sitting at this big intersection of transactions, and all they're doing is taking a story or a product from over here and trying to move it over here, and they're just sort of a conduit.

 They're very well paid conduits. We say stop. We say human first advice starts first with the advisor. What's motivating you? So the comments I made earlier about money stories really come to terms with who you are, what you're trying to achieve here, what's important and that lens.

 And so we have so many testimonials from advisors saying this was the most transformative learning experience of my career, and you've changed the trajectory of my firm. I can't ground that in a massive Excel spreadsheet. I could just point to a lot of people whose lives we've changed.

Richard Walker: 15:37 

I have to imagine this is really attractive and applicable to the fee only advisors out there.

Brian Portnoy: 15:43 

Yes.

Richard Walker: 15:45 

Yes.

Brian Portnoy: 15:46 

Yeah. And I think we have more success in the fee only space where there's not an incentive to sell a product. The incentive is to provide great long term advice. And so, I mean, we are one way of thinking of ourselves as a human capital solution. We make people better at what they do and who they are.

And if your incentive is to build a financial plan and have a long term view on what's going to drive success for your client, however they choose to define that however you can, you know, participate in that dialogue about what counts as success, then the types of skills that we train you on make a big difference. You made a brief allusion to it earlier. I'll amplify it now. Communication skills. So for example, we have a coaching program called Navigating Behavioral Advice, our navigator series.

 And it is a super practical tactical set of workshops on better client conversations. The psychology of client conversations. In the four meetings that every advisor on the planet has. 100% of all advisors have the same four meetings: discovery, I'm sorry, prospecting, discovery, onboarding, and then ongoing reviews. And there's an underlying psychology, and there's a real conversational acumen in terms of how to ask a better question, how to listen a little bit better, how to connect the dots, how to tease out what's really important.

 So that sort of communication skill building is absolutely critical. You know the firms that want more sales training sometimes I do have a hard time connecting with them other than to say, well, a richer pool of emotional intelligence and much deeper communication skills should be producing more skills. But we're not doing all the tricks and flips with sales that might get you sort of a hit today versus what it's going to build culturally over time.

Richard Walker: 17:57 

Yeah. The whole industry is about the deeper relationship at the end of the day, in my view, because I've had a lot of conversations about the generational wealth transfer. How do you keep the, the, the children of the clients that you have as they transfer that wealth over time? It always comes back to the nature of the relationship. Are you having a relationship with them, which is fundamentally how you're communicating and are you communicating?

And are you listening and going through all this? So I want to kind of switch this up a little bit because you are asking an advisor to change. And in order to buy your service they also have to change. Like it's a double whammy. You're selling change, but they have to change in order to buy the service in the first place. I mean, Quik!, we have faced that problem.

 We talked to an advisor. They're like, we have a solution. We have a ten times better solution, but they don't want to change. And it's like, how do you overcome that? How do you get people to say the change is worth having.

Brian Portnoy: 18:56 

So I think it's a great point I'd break, let's think crudely, but sort of accurately break the world into two buckets. Those who are eager to change but don't know how, and those who either aren't even thinking about change, or if they are, they're quite resistant to it. There's actually and we teach this, we have a program called Navigating Change, and there's a model in psychology known as the Transtheoretical Model of Change. It's a big word, but it basically says the term it. It means change is a process.

And some people are at this Precontemplation phase or this contemplation phase. And they're like, I don't you know, I don't want to engage in this coaching program or I don't want to lose weight or I don't want to change that relationship. They're just not there yet. And there are others, however, that are poised. We do quite well with those who are poised for change, and then we're able to say, this is the path and it's such a large industry.

 There's so many people to work with, and there's no question that the imperative of the modern industry is to improve relationships. So even if it's a top down mandate, you do have plenty of firms saying, hey, we need to dig in deeper, we need to understand our clients. And oh, by the way, the whole artificial intelligence trend is going to make this even more fraught because as you engage with ChatGPT or Clod and you feel like they know you, that could be seen as a threat to the advisor or the advisory firm where it's like, oh, wait a minute, we have to understand our clients Even better. So the point is digging in with clients who are already primed for change. Those are great conversations because then we can quickly get into what we offer.

 Here's the specific things that you're going to walk away with. Even at the level of learning objectives. Continuing education credits specific skills that you'll be able to measure over time. The broader mission, which is a little bit, you know, mission. It has a missionary quality to it is to say that humanizing advice, which is sort of our tagline, humanizing advice, is virtuous but also commercially savvy.

 And so let's have that. The thing is, as the industry becomes more competitive and consolidates and private equity money comes in and the focus on shorter term profits, I think is accelerating, those conversations become harder now, not easier.

Richard Walker: 21:28 

I think you said something really, really critical in there, a lot of really good stuff. But the critical piece is in sales. Selling to people who are ready is 100 times easier than somebody who's not ready. And so I heard this from somebody else who said his job was to go into a magazine company and help sell more ads, and his sales team had 3000 contacts to go against. And he said, stop that.

Look at all the other magazines. And he found out there were 175 or 180 of the 3000 actually advertising today. And he said, those are your leads. That's it. We're not going to try to convince nearly 2800 people to advertise if they're not ready to advertise.

 Let's only focus on the ones that are going to actually advertise right now and win them. And it's one of the hardest things when you're trying to grow your business, to say, I have something super valuable for you, but you're not ready. So let me help you get ready. No. Take the ones that are ready.

Brian Portnoy: 22:24 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's been, I think, part of the way I've tried to build the business, the other dynamic that I'll flag, if we're just going to be transparent about how hard this can be, is that I think a lot of what we do, even though I think it's critical, even though I think it's essential, it tends to always fall into the nice to have bucket. So when you think about the budget, when you think about the budget lines of an advisory firm, you know, they have to hire certain people. They need to own certain pieces of technology like financial planning software or CRM. They need to have all of the business blocking and tackling done.

And then you get to, okay, how are we going to improve our talent pool? How are we going to hire the right people? And that might sound essential, but the challenge is that the payoff between the spend and the outcome can be so long, in some cases, years it becomes mushy. Moshi. And so I've tried so hard and for the most part failed to move us from the nice to have bucket to the must have bucket.

 We've got a couple enterprise clients, large clients, fantastic, who have us in their must have bucket because they think if we're not investing in our people in the way that Shaping Wealth can help, then like what are we doing? Because this is a people oriented business, believe it or not, that is not the common belief. It's usually step one. Oh, what you're doing is fascinating. Step two: Let's have a deep dive conversation.

 Step three is on our priority list, but it rarely percolates to the top, even when that emphasis on training and learning and engagement seems to be important to them.

Richard Walker: 24:18 

Man, the best years of my career are the years I have personally changed the most, and the outcomes may have taken a year or two years to really fully manifest, but I know when I work on me in those years, I see the most outcome in my company's growth, my team's growth, the happiness factor, everything. So I'll give you the anecdote to say this is a must have. I mean, self-improvement, investing in yourself is a must, must have. But now, how do you compete with the darlings of AI when everybody's like, I got to get this AI assistant, an AI agent, an AI XYZ to help me run my business faster, save time, you know, do the communication with my client for me. How do you compete and what's your view of AI with your business?

Brian Portnoy: 25:01 

Well, so AI is a huge tailwind for my business tailwind. We've built an AI, an AI called Lydia. Why, Lydia? Because the very first coin ever discovered was the Lydian coin 2700 years ago. Turkey today, the empire of Lydia.

Then it's not only a pretty name, but Lydia is sort of our shout out to the human journey with money. And we have designed Lydia as an always on, empathetic coach, thought partner and support system for an advisor effectively rich. What we've done is crystallize my entire team's know-how, expertise and wisdom into an agentic AI that can have an ongoing, just in time, fully integrated, infinitely scalable conversation with as many advisors who sign up. So in a traditional LMD platform, what I call our analog platform, you find what we do interesting. You do an asynchronous workshop or you do a live coaching session with us.

 And you know, like we said, the reviews are quite good, but it's time away. It's attention away. It's not even the money, it's the time and attention. And then you have to come back and figure out how to apply it. What we've realized from a distribution point of view, but also a storytelling point of view, is that people love what we talk about, and they love the skills that we are introducing, but they struggle with how to use that in their daily existence.

 So, Lydia, you know, poetically, is that always on coach and conversation partner? Practically she is an open API platform where every agent is an API endpoint. And the thing about me and my team is that we're intimately aware of what financial planners do every day, and sometimes it's helping a client, sometimes it's training a new teammate, and sometimes to a point you've made a couple of times. Now, wisely, it's taking care of yourself. Advisor well-being is a very, very big theme for us because we see advisors on six continents struggle with anxiety, imposter syndrome, burnout, things like that.

 So your clients, your teammates and yourself, we have under construction more than 20 different agents who depending on what's going on, show up and in your tech stack integrated into your CRM or into your financial planning software or some other tool that you already have, and it does things that you find very useful. So I'm the owner and GM of the franchise. Lydia is my head coach. She's the super agent, and she is fine tuned to say, oh, I can answer this question myself or oh no, I'm going to hand this off because I need a punter or a strong safety or a left tackle to get onto the field, because this is the play that's being run.

Richard Walker: 27:57 

Yeah, I love that. I love that way of thinking. I want to ask you a really fundamental question because you said you studied money and you even referred to the time when there was no money. So it's kind of a two part question in a way. Has money always been there in some form, shape or other because we had bartering and maybe money was wheat or, you know, stones I don't even know.

And what is the core purpose of money in humanity then?

Brian Portnoy: 28:22 

Wow. Okay, I have an answer.

Richard Walker: 28:24 

Maybe I shouldn't have asked a question with only notes left.

Brian Portnoy: 28:27 

No, no, I can do this pretty quickly. There's always been an exchange. There's always been transactions. But money, as we understand it, meaning this standalone thing that is physically and now digitally passed off between one person and another, it's only a few thousand years old. The brain between our ears is more because the software hasn't really been updated for more than 100,000 years.

Money is a relatively brand new thing, so a lot of our adaptations in terms of short term focus on survival and huddling with the tribe and other elements of that evolutionary journey translate into very difficult decisions because you're focused on the near term, not the long term. You're focused, you go along with the crowd. Everybody's buying crypto. Well, then I should buy crypto. It feels safe.

 All those sorts of things. Money from a boring seventh grade point of view is a means of exchange, a unit of account. And a measure. A store of value. Boring and not useful at all.

 What money really is , based on not just anecdotes, but a lot of behavioral science, is that it's an emotional lightning rod for all of the big things: fear, greed, joy, envy, envy, regret, anger, hope, you name it. It's a mirror. It is an opportunity or a challenge to look at who we really are and what our values really are. It's a weapon or a cudgel in relationships between institutions. So money is actually a social experience for which we generally all, including me, lack a perfect vocabulary.

 I always say that no one speaks the language of money fluently, and in some ways, what Shaping Wealth does is teaching the language, grammar, and syntax of money so that people can have better conversations about what really matters to them and how money fits into it. So it's a trip, man. It does a number on us. We know that it does. And we sort of stammer and grope for the right words.

 I'm really proud of what we've built in terms of the ability to share these words with financial advisors. And something I say to advisors all the time is we give you the words, but you find your voice. Yeah, we're going to talk to you about happiness and emotion and information processing and decision making. It's cool. It's fun.

 You're going to learn a lot, but at the end of the day, you're going to take the words from me and my team, and you're going to have to find your authentic voice because that's what's going to connect to the client.

Richard Walker: 31:07 

Yeah. See, I'm glad I asked the question. I knew you'd.

Brian Portnoy: 31:09 

Oh, yeah. And that was pretty the history of money and emotion in. About what? 90s. Okay.

Richard Walker: 31:15 

That was brilliant. Brilliant. Good job. I'm going to have to wrap this up. And I do have one more question.

But before I get there, what's the best way for people to find and connect with you, Brian?

Brian Portnoy: 31:23 

Sure. So Shaping Wealth is the company shapingwealth.com is the website. We have a free content platform called Compass because for our advisors, you are the guide. We are your Compass. So if you go to shapingwealth.com, you can just sign up for Compass right there.

And for me, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. I'm there all the time. So Brian Portnoy on LinkedIn and hey, my emails, bp@shapingwealth.com and I'm always up for a good conversation.

Richard Walker: 31:52 

Obviously outstanding. All right. So here's one of the favorite questions I love to ask. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?

Brian Portnoy: 32:02 

Yeah, it's such a good and important question and my mind goes in a few different ways. I want to flag somebody who's become very important to me more recently, just over the last couple to three years. And who has influenced so much of the good things happening in Shaping Wealth. And that's one of my advisory board members named Jason Pereira. Jason is a Toronto based financial advisor, runs a very successful firm called Woodgate, but well beyond that is an absolute expert in financial technology and AI and has just been sort of my brother in arms on the build out of Lydia.

And really, as I'm in the weeds and going 100 miles an hour in nine different directions, he has been a wonderful sort of source of direction and guidance as I figure things out, because demonstrating leadership to my team, demonstrating competence and leadership to our customer base is always a work in progress. So Jason's not the only guy in my network that comes to mind, but I'm going to flag him just because he's been such a wonderful friend and thought partner and has demonstrated through his action and attitude, good, the good things that can happen.

Richard Walker: 33:23 

That's awesome. I love hearing that he is a good guy. All right, I gotta wrap this up. So I want to thank Brian Portnoy, founder of Shaping Wealth, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Brian's website at Shaping Wealth, and don't forget to check out Quik! at QuickForms.com where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brian Portnoy: 33:53 

Thank you Rich. It's been great.

Outro: 33:56 

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.