One thing that has kind of hit me between the eyes as well when I've worked with consultants and mentors over the years, I've had it sent to me two or three times, maybe more. We talk a lot about values, what's important to us, I think it should permeate everything that we do and think and how we talk with our families and what we choose to do for work and how we communicate with friends and who we choose to hang out with peer groups, so many things are wrapped up in our personal values. And a lot of folks maybe haven't sat down and thought about what personal values are actually important to them. Welcome to Keenan Retirement, a show dedicated to helping you thrive before and during your retirement years.
If you are looking to grow and protect your wealth and want to make the second half of your life the best half, then listen in as well as advisor Bill Keenan and his host sort through the key issues that you need to know in a lively and candid way. Hello everybody and welcome back to Keenan Retirement. I'm your co-host Steve Sandeskin joining me as always is Bill Keenan and Matt Wilson. Gentlemen, how are you in this first week of the new year?
We're feeling pretty strong for 2022 Steve. We've had a couple of interesting years that we've got behind us and now we're ready for a new beginning as they say. I hear you. How about you Matt?
Good. A new year. Always exciting. Get it off to a good start and go from there.
I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention that Matt turned 40 last month. 40? 40? I've been teasing him about being closer to 40 than he would like for about 10 years and it finally came.
Yes it did. I think that's how it worked. That's a good thing. Go Matt, if I do my math correctly, I am as close to 100 as you are close to zero.
Oh man. So what age does that mean I am? Oh well, I think it makes your 60s. Oh there you go.
Your sharpest attack. Yes. You wear it well, buddy. He does.
Thank you. Thank you. It's the camera. Okay.
Well hey, we have another great topic here since it's the first of the year. We decided that we are going to talk about goal setting, behavior change and New Year's resolutions. I'll tease you with that. But before we jump into that, I think we've got maybe one or two this day in history that we want to talk about.
Got a couple of fun things to share on this day in history. Matt, what have you got there? Interestingly enough, 250 years ago, the first Traveler's checks were issued in London. And I saw that and I'm like, well, that's a pretty long time for the financial system to be around to have a check.
And think about that too. I mean, I think we've talked about this before, the younger generation, a checkbook. Traveler's checks. I kind of remember commercials when I was younger.
I have an idea of the word. I bet you if we ask someone in their 20s, they have no idea what a Traveler's check is. For sure. If you were 60 like me, you'd know what Traveler's checks are.
And at 53, I remember traveling out of the country and taking Traveler's checks. I remember. Okay. And I remember signing.
I think you signed for them. And the reason that we carried Traveler's checks was it was, I guess, slightly safer if you lost them. So I had to look this up because I'm like, well, why doesn't the advantage to it? Now, of course, I guess being around since 1772, there was no credit card system.
So I had to have some sort of system to kind of guarantee payment. And they were used by people in foreign countries and businesses accepted them because they were guaranteed payment. So when they were issued, the person who took out the Traveler's check, the bearer of them, whoever had the money that converted their cash into Traveler's check had to sign it. And then when they made a purchase, they had to sign it again.
And as long as those signatures matched, it was a no questions asked, you got your payment. So that's why merchants were able to accept them in foreign countries or at least willing to accept them in foreign countries. So what is my thinking that this had something to do with American Express? I guess that was just maybe they just had the best commercials.
You not think they were in existence back then, 250 years ago? Here's some more information. American Express developed a large-scale international Traveler's check system in 1891. Okay.
So that is probably why it took a while, but they started to scale it. So I guess they were the name brand for Traveler's checks put it another way. So what's our version of Traveler's checks? I would say the credit card.
Exactly. The credit card. Steve, did you ever use the Traveler's checks, sir? I think a couple of times I did, but definitely not much at all.
Okay. Even for an old guy like me, I think they were pretty passéed and credit cards, I think, were pretty popular by the time I was traveling. Essentially, it's what it said, the alternatives of credit debit cards and then just ATMs became more accessible, especially when you're traveling. You can just go convert cash or go get it out and be in the local currency and you didn't need these Traveler's checks anymore to do that.
Interesting. 250 years. We've got that. I would have never expected that.
I sure thought that it was American Express that invented the Traveler's checks, but now we know. There is another thing that happened over 100 years ago. So this is again, January of 1922. I'm going to slip this in.
I didn't warn you guys ahead of time. It was the death of Sir Ernest Shackleton, Irish-born British Antarctic Explorer. I've read the book. I don't know if you've read the book Endurance.
I have not read it, but definitely have heard of it. Yes. Very good book. This is the ad this guy put out.
This is what caught my attention because I read the book and this ad is just phenomenal. He wrote the ad back when this ship was sailing, I think in the early 1900s. Men wanted for hazardous journey, low ages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe returned doubtful, honor and recognition in event of success. Sign me up.
That was the ad. What was the mission? You got to tell us what his mission was. They were exploring Antarctica.
I don't remember exactly what the purpose besides just the exploration. Did you say honor and valor if successful? Honor and recognition. Recognition.
He didn't say anything about payment. I guess it says low wages. This is a paraphrase, but Napoleon made a comment, something to the effect of, you would be amazed at what people will do to get a medal. I think that applies to what Shackleton described there is that men, women will do amazing things to get recognition, to get glory, to do things for country.
Those higher aspirations, those higher purposes that people will run through fire, they'll take a bullet. They'll do all these things for those highest aspirations and those highest values. I think Shackleton knew that. I think Napoleon knew that.
There'll be a lot of things for that. I think that's even a good segue into our topic today about goal setting in retirement. As I mentioned here at the beginning, as we are here at the beginning of the year, a lot of people set New Year's resolutions. I think it's almost become a joke or maybe cliche to say, oh, I set some New Year's resolutions, and two weeks later, I had already broken them.
What we want to do today is just spend a few minutes talking about some ways that you can effectively set goals or effectively change behavior. These are the things that I use with my clients. I'm sure these are the types of things that you guys use as well with your clients when you're talking about setting goals and how can we actually do that in a way that gets the kind of results that we're looking for. I'll just open it up with that as a segue and see if either one of you want to take the ball there and add some additional comments.
We talk a lot in our firm, of course, with clients and on our show about financial goals and working hard to identify what the outcome and what the objective is for this saving and investing and working toward an inspiring future and coming up with things like the magic of the 401k, the way money gets put away automatically. It goes from our paycheck into the 401k without a scene at first. It's just the idea of that happening automatically being a powerful process that's in place, something we don't even have to think about. There were studies down that showed if you had to sign up for your 401k, most people, a good portion of the people did not sign up because it took an action.
Is this in play yet, Matt? It's not a requirement, but it is a feature that is often discussed with retirement plans and when employers are setting them up. You want to have what they call an auto enrollment. Exactly.
Someone starts a new job and they automatically get signed up for the 401k. And to not do it, they have to take an action to unenroll, if you will. And then most people don't do that. So they stay enrolled, which is actually a very powerful thing.
So we think about these things that we want to do, these behaviors we want to change. My experience is if we make that as easy as possible on ourselves to set those habits or those processes in place, they're way more likely to happen. So Bill, if I want to lose 10 pounds, can I automatically be enrolled in a program that automatically loses 10 pounds on me without me having to do anything? Yes.
Well, as we may have chatted earlier, and some folks know I went through a transformation year during COVID in 2020, and then the big key to that transformation that I went through, physical transformation has been how to now find a balance to maintain the results. So even if you do affect change, positive change, how do you then make it something that sticks? And I believe that comes with not only changing the behavior, but turning it into a habit and then not only making it a habit, but making that new person, if you will, your new identity. Who are you?
I have exercises that I do when I coach other financial advisors, and I ask folks the very first exercise that I do is I ask them, who are you? And they look at me kind of funny, like, what do you mean, who am I? I said, no, no, who are you? And a way to know who are you and what you believe is to do a belief journal.
And I typically have folks do a belief journal where they write one thing down that they believe about themselves personally, about the world, or if we're talking about the careers of financial advisor about the industry, about the career. And there's a lot of things that come to light when someone gets in touch with what they believe and who they believe their identity is. Is it a healthy person that's fit and in shape, or have they got something in their mind that says, it's always been a struggle, they've always been struggling with weight, or sleep, or other habits. And that's how they identify themselves.
And so when we change that identity, all of a sudden every ounce of us in my experience has been, I want to live and act the way I think that I identify. But back to your point about losing weight, that's very difficult when it comes down to the biggest part about losing weight, Steve, and you know this, Matt knows this probably most part, listeners know it, and it's one thing to know something, it's another thing to be able to have a process. It's not a thing to be able to have a process that's been executed on it, but it's probably 80 to 90% what we put in our mouths, 10 to 20% our exercise regimen. So when it comes down to it, we are the one responsible for what we put in our mouths, and that ends up being a huge piece to that long term, finding that balance.
And for me, when it comes to weight loss, it wasn't about getting down to a point where I did get down to a point where I was very lean, like I lost a lot of fat, and it was interesting to be there, but it was more about what's a rational place to live. And instead of having these big weight swings where I had two different wardrobes that I would have a summer wardrobe and a winter wardrobe, it's like, we know we're human, we know we're not perfect, we know we're going to have some range in our weight. Let's work on reducing that range. Instead of having to be a 40 or 50 pound swing, let's make it a 10 pound swing between seasons.
And that's something that is doable and something that can be maintained long term. And Bill, you make such a good point there when you're talking about identity, and you mentioned that you asked people to write down what their belief system is, and I have a similar exercise, and what I do is I will ask my clients, I ask them a question, and I say, here's the question. What I know to be true is, and then I ask them to answer that question 15 times. So what I know to be true is they answer that, and then I say, because.
So what I know to be true is blank, because well, why do I know that to be true? So is it been your experience? Is it just a belief that you have? So why do you know that to be true?
So we do that 15 times. And then that way it forces them to really try and dig deep about what is it that I really believe, and then we use that belief system to start shaping a philosophy of life, a philosophy of just how they go about experiencing the world, and tying that back to identity. I think that is so critical, because if someone says, well, I want to be person B is how I envision myself, but today I'm person A. Now, you might start taking some action to get you closer to what person B is, or what you envision person B to be.
But if you're still identifying as person A, what's going to happen is you're going to make progress toward person B, but then person A is going to be pulling you right back because you're still identifying with that. So you end up with this ping pong effect where I move toward person B, but then person A starts pulling me back there and I get closer to A, and then I'm like, oh, I want to be the person B, and I go back there. So you end up in this oscillating pattern of back and forth, and I think oftentimes that can relate to weight gain and weight loss as well. It's like if you haven't changed your identity to be a person who is of a lower weight, then you may just ping pong back and forth until you can make the leap to that new identity.
So I don't know if you need that resonates with you, but I found that to be true in my experience. It becomes a difficult struggle with willpower, and typically willpower eventually gives way to that person A that you mentioned. You know, one thing that has kind of hit me between the eyes as well when I've worked with consultants and mentors over the years I've had it sent to me two or three times maybe more. We talk a lot about values, what's important to us.
I think it should permeate everything that we do and think and how we talk with our families and what we choose to do for work and how we communicate with friends and who we choose to hang out with peer groups so many things are wrapped up in our personal values and a lot of folks maybe haven't sat down and thought about what personal values are actually important to them, but I had someone tell me multiple times different people, they said, what are your standards and I started thinking about my standards and they said, well, we know what your standards are. You can say what you aspire for your standards to be, but that wasn't the question. What are your current standards and your current standards are a reflection of exactly the person that you are at this moment, or you would be different. I always want to be better and one of the core values of our firm is always growing and learning.
So we want to be a firm where all the team members have a core value of we're always growing and learning. We don't believe we've arrived. We think that we're humbly competent about what we do, but we know that we can always learn more. And I hope that we never think we figured it all out like we never think we have all the answers.
We always want to be growing and learning. I always want to be raising my standards. And you can do that by peer groups, study, education, experience, so forth. I am a current reflection this person today of my current standards period.
So if I want to raise my standards, then I need to take some action to do something different become a reflection of what my current standards are. Yeah, and I think values are another key piece here. Like you mentioned there, Bill, and I like to think of a values hierarchy. So we all might say I've got five values or I've got seven values and that's great.
And I always encourage people to really be thoughtful and reflective on what your values are. But then there's probably a hierarchy within those values as well where you could rank them one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And so as you think about setting goals or things that you want to accomplish over time, we need to make sure that whatever it is that you set your mind to that they are in alignment with those values and ideally toward those highest values because you don't want to end up setting a goal for something that's going to have a conflict with your values. If that happens, obviously it's very unlikely that you're going to achieve that goal.
So making sure that your goals are in alignment with the values definitely going to be super critical here as well. And it can be confusing at times. A core value can be security, but then also that very same person could have a value of variety. We might want to have things that are different.
We might want to have maybe two cars that we drive back and forth between something as simple as that or maybe have one home where someone lives for primary residence and another vacation home somewhere so they can experience the variety between the two places. But security might be number one and variety might be down the list, but it's interesting to know that the same person would like things that are consistent, but then also we each have a desire, some desire for variety. The order to which those come into play could make a big difference as to decisions we make. And by the way, while we're talking about this, it might be really good.
If you're married or you have a partner to understand what their values are as well, it could eliminate or maybe help reduce some conflict in the future when you understand what folks close to you hold as dear as well. And when I think about values as well, values are not a noun. Values are a verb. And we can say that we have values and we can write them down and we can put them up on the wall and we can look at them every single day.
But if we're not putting those values into action, if we're not living those values, if we're not, you mentioned Bill standards, if we're not holding ourselves to the high standards of our values and exhibiting those and living those, then they really don't mean anything. So values really only get put to test when it's required that we actually take some action that would indicate whether or not we're actually living up to those values that we say we are. So oftentimes it's not until they're put to test that we really understand what our two values are when the pressure's on. So I always want to remind people that it's about values in action and not just values as words or values as nouns.
Wouldn't you say that what I said about standards, you're demonstrating your standards by who and what you are today. Wouldn't you say that very same thing exists with values? Absolutely. Yeah.
And who you are today, the standards by which you live today are essentially the height of your values, the depth of your values that you're living today. Yes. You know, another thing that I think that I've heard and people have told me and folks have advised me is show me your calendar and show me your checkbook and I'll quickly understand your values. Where you spend your time and what you spend your money on is a pretty exacting demonstration of what your values are.
Kind of something between the eyes. You know what I mean? Right. We have what we aspire to be and then we have actually what we're doing.
What we're talking about today is how do we make a change that we aspire to make that sticks? How do we do that? How do we get clear about what's most important in our lives because we don't want that. We don't want that thing where 15 days later after the first year we've already reverted back.
We truly desire change, but we've got to come up with some tools, some shortcuts, maybe. It's a hack. A hack that gives us some leverage to make these things stick. I mean, I can think of one.
I mean, I saw my picture. I shared this in my transformation, which is out there on Facebook, my personal page, and also we did a blog on it. We had my trainers on one of our shows. I saw a picture of myself down in Cabo from a vacation.
And when I saw the picture, I wasn't wasn't happy about it. I didn't like the way it looked. And I thought, well, there's some leverage right there to make a change. I'm in a group with the trainers still and a lot of it through social media, but I don't want to be the person that got into a really good shape at one point.
I don't need to be over the top and try to be a bodybuilder or something like that, but I don't want to be the person that made this change and it was great. And then folks look up a year and a half later and say, well, he's back to where he was before he started. So yeah, yeah, another one of those things. It didn't stick.
So I've specifically put myself around that framework of people. They stay in shape. It's important to them. Health and fitness is important to them.
And there's a little bit of accountability for quite a bit, actually, because they post things on social media. Again, I don't want to be the guy that did it and then didn't do it. So that accountability, I think, is really important to produce that leverage that we're talking about to maintain this positive change. The health and fitness and weight, that's an easy one, isn't it?
That's just an obvious one to talk about when we're talking about New Year's resolutions. When you think about the accountability, I mean, that's probably a core reason why businesses are successful is there's accountability that inherently built into a business, which raises people to, okay, we either did it or we didn't. It's very clear. You have shareholders and you also have customers.
That's right. Yes, stakeholders and all kinds of interested parties that are going to be asking questions and you may not like the question. So if you don't want to have to address certain things, you better do what you say you're going to do. It's much easier on your personal side to probably get a little lax with that because you have to answer to yourself, which, again, as you said, is easier to just put off to another day.
As I think about accountability, it's clearly very important, both in business as well as in personal. Ultimately, those I think about say this hierarchy of values, I think it's important that as humans, if we want to change behavior, if we want to achieve something that ultimately it's going to have to come about because of it's important to us intrinsically, meaning it's inside of us. It's something that is important to us. I want to do it as opposed to I'm doing it because somebody else is making me do it or somebody else wants me to do it.
So it's got to be this intrinsic motivation. And I think it also ties in with discipline. And as I think about discipline, oftentimes we think discipline is a bad word. It's a harsh word.
It's like, oh, I just don't have enough discipline to do this or to do that. When I think about discipline, if discipline for me is hard, it's because I'm doing something that I'm not intrinsically motivated to do or it's not something that is high enough on my hierarchy of values that I want to do it. It's hard because I'm probably feeling like other people want me to do this or society is pressuring me to do this or I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses. So I want to do this.
But it's not until I direct my discipline towards something that is super high on my values system. When I do that, discipline becomes effortless. And so I think about discipline as it becomes effortless when I'm directing that discipline toward something that I want. Discipline becomes very, very difficult if I'm trying to apply that discipline to get away from something.
So to me, it's about moving toward as opposed to moving away. That's a way that I frame it. That seems to work well for me and for folks that I work with. I love that.
And we talk about a lot of folks thinking that it's a lack of clarity about what we would like to go toward. Maybe it's not necessarily a lack of discipline. Obviously, discipline, we talk about this. Do you think that it's true that you have to have some willpower and some discipline to change a behavior and hopefully it's motivated by inspiration, something you're moving toward, like you just said, but that it takes, what is it now?
30 days, 45 days, what does it say it takes to install a habit? Steve, I know you probably have no days. Well, I, you know, some people will say it takes 21 days, but I think that's kind of, you know, woo-woo science. I don't think there's like a fixed number of days.
And I mean, you mentioned willpower. I mean, I'm not a big fan of willpower because willpower is exhaustable. Willpower is exhausting. Willpower to me is I'm forcing myself to do something that I don't really want to do.
I just got to have the willpower to do this. If that's the case, then you don't want to do that. You shouldn't do that. You need to figure out what is it that I want to do?
What is it that I aspire to? What is it that gets me going to bed at night not wanting to wait until I get up in the morning? It's like, I'm so excited about the next day that I go to bed at night. So excited about getting up in the morning because I just love what's happening.
So that's, that's, I think the ideal. Now, you know, we're not all going to get to that ideal, but I think that's what we can strive towards. So I don't like to think about willpower. And I like to view discipline in a positive manner because when I have discipline in my life to your point bill about clarity, it means I've got clarity about what's important to me.
And when I have clarity about what's important to me, discipline is a positive thing because I look forward to doing that thing. A lot of people say, I hate to work out. I hate to exercise. I'm just the opposite.
I love to work out. I love to exercise. Oftentimes I'm listening to podcasts. I'm listening to things that fill my mind.
I'm learning while I'm exercising. Oftentimes I'm outside. I'm out in the woods. I'm hiking up and down hills.
I'm in nature. It's snowing outside. I mean, to me, it's like, I love doing that stuff. And I love how I feel when I'm done.
I love how I feel the next day. I love how I sleep really well at night. So to me, it takes no discipline to exercise because I've structured my exercise in such a way that I look forward to it. And it's a high value of mind to try and be as good a shape as I can in the things that I can impact.
So to me, that's all the positive. Isn't it great the way it works, the natural endorphins that get released when we are moving? And that can even be a brisk walking. You don't have to hike the mountains like you do as well, Steve.
But just moving, the natural endorphins are so powerful. Thank goodness that's the case because there is our immediate reward for activities such as exercising. We talk about that inspiring future that we want to drive it to. But I think our episode wouldn't be complete if we didn't talk a little bit about some of the biggest life changes.
And this can be in relation to overcoming addiction. It can be in relation to relationship issues. It can be related to making a job that someone doesn't like. It's stressing them out to a point where it's compromising their health.
It can be related to a health issue on its own. But it's that concept of hitting a bottom where you get to a point in your life where you say, enough is enough. You've lived with something that you haven't liked, something that's going on, something that's happening and whatever it might be. And you hit a point where you say, I'm done.
It's over. No more. It's time for a change. And that decision can happen in an instant where life as you knew it before changes and the motivation switches.
So interesting to think about that, hitting a bottom thing. I mean, someone gets diagnosed with diabetes or is told, look, if you don't change your eating habits and your exercise habits, you might be cutting years off your life. You don't stop drinking alcohol. Your liver is shot.
I mean, you're going to die. I mean, not to dramatize it here, but it's real. It's real. And something's going to kill us slower than other things, right?
But when it sets in, 53 years old, I'm thinking about things that my behavior might be taking years off my life down the road and understanding and figuring out what it takes to hit a bottom and say enough's enough. We're going to go in a different direction. What about that as a motivator, Steve? And a lever?
Absolutely. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, the biggest motivator, a change is pain.
And when you hit rock bottom, just like you said, Bill, it can happen in an instant. You can just say, that's it. Never again. Am I going to let that happen?
And when the pain gets bad enough, that's when people will change. And ultimately, change happens because the person wants to. It's not because someone else has convinced them or shared enough facts and logic with them. Like, oh, you need to quit smoking because if you don't quit smoking, you're probably going to get lung cancer.
That's probably not likely going to get someone to change until they internally hit that rock bottom. Maybe they make the connection that if I keep smoking, maybe I'm going to die before I can walk my daughter down the aisle if she gets married someday. That might be the motivation to change, but it has to come from within. It's not going to be somebody else telling me, oh, you should do this.
You should do that. Yes, I totally agree. That's where the leverage and the real power comes from. Anything to add here as we get ready to wrap up another wrong like in that sense, in the context of retirement, these goals and what's the purpose of all of that?
And is it to live a longer, happier, more fulfilled life? I mean, is that really it? I mean, it's probably different for everybody, but that seems like that's probably the purpose. You talked about the values in action.
And there's actually a book. Martin Seligman wrote a book. He's considered kind of the founder of positive psychology. And he called it flourish.
And he actually created a survey with somebody else where they, and you know, it's surveys hold C values in action. And it's about using your strengths, the things that you're good at, figuring out what your values are and building upon those to flourish as an individual, which is interesting. We actually have the team go through that survey a couple years ago, just to get a sense of where everyone was at and kind of talked about that whole process. As we were kind of prepping for this, and I was looking at kind of research on people that are living long that are happier, that are more fulfilled.
I came across this article on this Japanese city island, Okinawa, that has the longest life spans and the highest rates of sanitarians. That's how you say it, folks that are over 100 years over 100. Yeah. And it was because it's like, well, what is it?
What's different about them? And they have this concept they call it icky guy. And what it means is the reason for getting up in the morning, and they actually don't have the word retirement there. That's not a word in their language, which I think is interesting too.
But it's they have a purpose and they interviewed individuals and they had 101 year old fisherman. His purpose was sketching fish for family three times a week, 102 year old woman. Her icky guy was holding her tiny, great, great, great granddaughter. And another 102 year old karate master was teaching martial arts.
And so again, it was like their purpose, their motivation for getting up every day, like you said, Steve is they're excited to get up every day because they have this objective to do this. And they found via studying the society that they live longer and they're healthier. Now they can't necessarily say because of this mental attitude, they're healthier, but they are. I mean, that's what reality tells us.
So figuring out what that is and also realizing that it can change too. I mean, as people go through life stages and we talk about this in the retirement planning process, your financial plan is going to change. I can see your goals and objectives and your purpose may change may adjust a little bit, but those values in action, those probably aren't going to change a whole lot. Those values, I think, are pretty inherent to your personality and what you have from your upbringing.
We have the go-go years, the slow go years and the no-go years. Yeah, maybe we can change those. But like you said, though, Matt, well, we could change. We could change our thinking on it.
But that's basically about how much people travel and do act. Yeah, well, I'm spending and then eventually I'd like to stay at home a little bit more. That's the choice by choice. But I would say the inherent values don't change.
That's right. Maybe some of the practical activities that go on there. Excellent. All right.
Well, good. Well, I think we will wrap there. Bill, I'll give you the last word. But before we do that, for those of you listening, if you would like to learn more about Keen Wealth Advisors, please visit us at KeenWealthAdvisors.com.
You can get the show notes from this episode as well as all of the past episodes. We've got some amazing blog posts out there. It is a huge repository of knowledge about personal finance, about retirement, and as we're talking about today, things about how to live a better life and how to achieve things in your life that you want to accomplish. So, Bill, let me stop there.
And you can go ahead and wrap up here for us. Well, I appreciate you both having this conversation today. I think it was very apropos for the time of the year. I hope we've stimulated our listeners to think about what might be important to them because I do know this.
There is an endless amount of stimulation out there vying for our attention. And a good portion of that is negative news, advertising, pop-ups on our phone, our computer. There are so many things that are vying for our valuable attention. I would say our attention is priceless.
We each own our own attention as we enter this 2022 and we think about the year, just bringing to mind that we need to get focused on what's important to us, what we value the most, and come up with a plan to work toward that. We're never going to be perfect, but we protect our attention. And as they say, and I believe this, you're either growing or you're dying. I would like to always be growing up until the day I take my last breath.
But what I do know from my experience, my personal experience, and from all of the clients I've had the privilege of serving over nearly 30 years, and also friends and family, is that typically if someone has a focus somewhere in and around, being healthy and fit, fostering strong social connections with people you choose to be around, really protecting your peer group, hanging out with folks that raise your standards and that you enjoy being around, the people that bring you energy, not suck energy from you, having a clear sense of purpose, whatever that might look like for each individual, and never stopping learning, and then training our brains to be optimistic and grateful. A big part of that is not watching too much news as well, but those things at a core, developed into each individual's objectives in life, I think, can be a starting point for where we might want to set our goals. And work toward being better, being better over time, and we can do a whole episode on smart goals right Steve, specific, measurable, achievable, and I've heard different ones for the letter R, but I'm going to call it relatable, and the T would be time bound, meaning we have a time frame that we want to achieve these goals. That's another thought experiment around setting goals and hold yourself accountable to those goals.
Well, excellent. There's a whole lot more we could be talking about goal setting here and trying to accomplish things over the course of time, but I think we will wrap it there. That was a great summary that you shared there with this bill. So again, go to keenwellthadvisors.com and we will catch all on the next episode and welcome everybody to 2022.
Let's try and make this the best year possible. Take care. Thank you Steve. Thanks Matt.
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