Hello, everyone, and welcome to the rollout of our newest behavioral tool, Pulse Check. This is the latest addition to our behavioral suite, which is now getting quite robust. We're glad that you have decided to check it out. Today, we're going to have a bit of a three parter today. The first section will be me talking on a brief tour of human history. Next, I'll be joined by my colleague Dr. Nguyen and and she and I will go back and forth and talk to you about 6 pillars of human flourishing and what they mean for your clients. And then finally, we'll be joined by Cade, who will take us through a practical demonstration of the Pulse check tool itself. So let's jump right in. So I want to talk about a well known quote. This is a quote by Thomas Hobbes that I'm sure you've probably heard before. Thomas Hobbes is sort of famous for, for saying that life was poor, nasty, brutish and short. Now, most people think that this was a comment that he made about life at the time when it was made, right? And a lot of people will. We use this to talk about how how life used to be hundreds of years ago, but he was actually talking about life in the absence of a competent government. But I feel like we're all really well acquainted with what life is like in the absence of a competent government. It seems like that's been my entire adult experience. So we're not going to belabor that any further. Instead, we're going to misunderstand Mr. Hobbs on purpose and take a look at has human life historically been all of these things poor, nasty, brutish and short? Well, let's start with poor. As recently as the founding of this country, which is of course a very a very young country, 85% of people in the world were living on an inflation adjusted amount of $2.00 per day. So think about that, 200 years ago 85% of the people in the world were living on what is today just $2.00 per day. That is absolutely pervasive and back breaking poverty that was incredibly, incredibly widespread. Almost everyone, everywhere in the world was very, very poor. Fast forward to today and we have got that number down now to 9%. And as you can see, it's fallen precipitously even in just the last 70 or 80 years, an incredible achievement for humankind to have gone from 85% to to just 9%. Now, I don't want to make light of that 9%, that 9% that's living on $2.00 a day. That's still a tragedy that we need to address. That's still hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. But we can also pause and celebrate how far we've come. So yes, for most of human history life was very poor. But there's some evidence to suggest that we are making material progress on that front and and certainly most of the clients that we serve are are well north of this and have a have a degree of material comfort that is really unprecedented in the history, history of the world. Well, now let's look at whether or not life was brutish. Well, life was brutish. We see that homicide rates in Europe are down about 35 X in the last few, 100 years. Life used to be very, very violent. And Steven Pinker and others have written really lovely treatises on how this is the the safest time in human history. Now, there are, of course, still episodes of violence. There's still violence in this country and every country, and one act of violence is one act too many. We need to be vigilant against rooting out violence. We're we're, you know, sitting here at a time when there's when there's multiple wars going on abroad that is all tragic, that is all painful. But we have to look at the bigger picture and say, yes, things are much better than they have been historically. Was life poor? Yes. Was it brutish? Yes. Was it short? Though? Again going back to the founding of the US, as recently as the found the the days of the Founding Fathers, the average lifespan in America was about 35 years and there humans had about a 5050 chance of living. Past adolescence and even people who made it past adolescence didn't tend to live very long lives on average. Now we have more than doubled that throughout most of the world and and even places where longevity has been low historically have seen a dramatic dramatic increases in the length of human life. So we are making huge progress on on all of these fronts. Capital is better deployed, people are wealthier on average than they've ever been, they're safer than they've ever been, and they're healthier than they have ever been. Now I want you to harken back to your Psych 100 class just for a minute and think about learning about Maslow's hierarchy. Kind of a kind of a flashback for you for when you were probably 18 or 19 years old, but you learned about Maslow's hierarchy of Needs, and we'll just do a brief overview of it here. We know at the base of that pyramid where things like safety and physiological needs, right the need to be safe, comfortable, well fed, and the need, the need to be secure, Have shelter, food, water, safety. These are our most primal and our most basic human needs for a large swaths of the world, and certainly for most of the developed world. These needs are really, really well met now in the bulk of the population. There are very, very few people in the US who die of starvation, for instance. There is still food insecurity, which again is a real problem that that lots of great organizations are are seeking to root out. But the sort of this, the the worst instances of what we've seen throughout time just really aren't present on the physical standpoint now in the way that they have been for most of the history of our species. And So what we've seen is whereas human life was one sort of scratching and clawing for a short existence to get your basic needs met, people have been able to move up the hierarchy of needs. You know, Gandhi famously said, paraphrasing, you know, to a poor person, bread is God. If you don't have enough to eat, you're not real worried about love and friendship and the meaning of life. But we see that as we in the developed world have begun to meet some of these most basic needs. Not only have our not only have our our our good parts of our lives moved upstream, but our worries have also moved upstream as well. We're now starting to see people with plenty of money having more psychological needs that are not being met right. One of the most dramatic of these is that an increasingly large number of people report being socially isolated, and it's actually the youngest generations who report the greatest degree of social isolation. Now loneliness may not sound like all that pressing a problem, it may sound like a very sort of first world or or high quality problem to have, but the impacts of loneliness are really dramatic. Social isolation and loneliness have been shown to have equivalent effects as smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day and are more fatal than obesity. They have a loneliness is a better predictor of premature death than even something like being overweight, which is well established to be to have negative health consequences. So people have those basic needs met. They have enough food to eat, they have somewhere warm to stay. But they're lacking that connectedness. They're lacking that human connection. And what we're seeing across all of these dimensions is a new sort of struggle. You know, for most of human existence, the biggest problem with food was was hunger, people dying of malnutrition or starvation. Now, a great deal more people die every year from having too much food than from having too little food. You know, a Gallup study for most of human history. Again, 200 years ago, 85% of people were living in just absolutely horrifying poverty. And now, what we're seeing in this country a a Gallup study from a few years ago found that at every income level, SO50 a hundred, 152-5500. No matter what people made, they thought what they needed to make to be happy was just one bracket north of where they were. And a study out this year found that millennials say they need to make half, $1,000,000 a year to be happy, which of course represents about less than 1% of of incomes in the US. So whereas for much of human history the problem was just this absolute lack of capital, this absolute lack of money in in real and absolute terms, now we have problems of of greed and dissatisfaction and not having enough. For much of human history, violence has been a huge problem. The 20th century was the the bloodiest century in human history, with millions and millions of people losing their life to violence. There are still wars. Of course, that will likely always be with us. But in recent years, four times as many American war fighters have lost their lives to to self harm as have died on the battlefield. So we see again and again we live in an age of material prosperity but psychological want. People are lonely, people are disconnected, and they don't know what to do with this new class of problems. So into this, into this void, we need to start thinking in new terms. So our good friend Tim Mauer at Signature FD had this to say, which I think is just very poignant and perfect for our conversation today. Tim says personal finance is more personal than it is finance. So Tim believes and I believe that it would be a mistake for us to try and intervene or to help only at the financial level when we know that so many of the people that we serve are struggling on a deeper level. The other thing to say here is that this is just where the puck is is going. We're trying here with this new tool to skate to where the puck is going. Mackenzie a couple years back issued a a study white paper rather on what they thought the wealth management industry would look like in 20-30. And you see that their their belief here is that financial advisors, the role of a financial advisor is going to expand that financial advisors are going to look less like simple wealth managers and more like life quarterbacks that are concerned with Wellness Broadly. The sort of tactical offerings are going to expand. They're going to folks are going to expect estate planning and tax in additional to investment management in addition to investment management, but they're also going to want more out of life and McKenzie right not not known as an especially not known as an especially psychologically minded or granola organization. McKenzie is over here saying that look financial advisors are going to look like life coaches in the coming years because of the very trends that we are talking about today. And then again, another consulting giant here we have, we have Bain talking about the value stack, the type of value that we can deliver. And you see there at the bottom, we're delivering sort of functional things and that's where our industry has been for a very, very long time, right. We're going to give people what they're asking for, the most tactical, the most analytical basics. You want your you want your assets allocated. Got it right. You want your taxes managed? Got it. But what we see from Bane is that we're actually able to add more value and to create a stickier relationship with our clients when we start to wade into things that are emotional, right, the behavioral finance piece, Right when things that are life change, life changing and impact them at a self transcendental level. When we're able to move beyond the basics, which candidly AI does very well, which robo advisors do very well. And when we're able to become partners with our clients in their lives more holistically, right at an emotional level, at a personal and a relational level, the kind of value we deliver changes and the stickiness of that relationship changes. Now, this is heavy stuff. I apologize, but I think it's important. This is heavy stuff to consider. And when we're talking about things like human flourishing and happiness and meaning and purpose and well-being, it can be hard for us to get our arms around these ideas. And it can feel like they're too out there, too ethereal for us to sort of intervene with or talk about in a meaningful way. But that's where the Pulse check tool comes in, because we've relied on some insights from positive psychology to talk about the six pillars of human flourishing. These are the six things that are reliably indicative of a happy, fulfilled, meaningful life. And we believe that you can monitor those elements of Wellness, personal Wellness and human flourishing right alongside of the elements of financial Wellness and financial security that we're already looking at. So Doctor Wen and I are going to go through these. 6IN turn, we're going to tell you a little bit about them and then Cade is going to show you how in very simple practical dollars and cents terms you can be. Bring this into your planning process. So Naomi and I will go back and forth on these six. Naomi, welcome. Tell us about happiness. So happiness according to this is going to be an an index where we gauge positive emotions. So we're looking at joy, gratitude, serenity, the ones that are listed here. And this is going to be just a scale to kind of gauge where you fall in regard to those experiences? Yeah, so the first this is, I should have mentioned this earlier, quite adorably. Our six facets of Wellness here for Pulse check spell out hearts. So the ancient hearts is happiness. This is, as Naomi said, just having fun, right? This is leisure. Having fun. Making sure you have that in your life. The EI think is probably the least understood and most overlooked of the six. This is engagement. When most people think about human thriving, they think about the H that Naomi talked about, that happiness, having fun, sitting by a beach, eating an ice cream cone. And that's part of it. But the E is around deep, immersive work, a hobby, a project, or a job that is so immersive, so engaging for you, that you enter that flow state and you lose track of time. So yes, work is a piece of a happy, fulfilled life and a very particular type of work. Deep, meaningful, engaging work. Naomi, What about a? It is for advancement, which I think is highly related to engagement in that once we kind of find a task that is engaging, we have that flow state. Human beings are naturally inclined to want to produce something or be productive and part of that requires challenge. If we want to grow, we have to have challenge and embrace that change. So advancement is an index that's going to gauge how much we're engaging with the task that is meaningful to us, that provides adequate challenge that scales our growth and scaffolds that growth. How do we find a sense of mastery or competence essentially how do we, what are we doing that helps us have a sense that we're doing a little bit better today than yesterday. And it's again, it's related to engagement and happiness and sort of the next sequential step though. I love it. Am I better today than I was yesterday? Humans are wired for growth. OK, so I'm excited. I get the the 4th, 1:00 because this is the the grand, the granddaddy of them all. This is the most powerful of the six. You don't have to pick just one, but if you did, this is the one you would pick. This is relationships. This is how are the meaningful bonds in your life doing? You know, however you define that, whether that be with a partner or spouse, children, loved ones in your circle, friends. How strong are those relationships? And how's your pursuit of greater wealth? Put those relationships on the back burner, which is often the case. And then it leaves us with T, which is the final one here, the searching for meaning. And again, like he was talking about Daniel, so much of this is how do we pull things out of the ether of the human experience and condition to to make them actionable and operationalize them with our goals. And so with truth, we're kind of back in that esoteric territory of what do we do that helps us gather a sense of meaning and purpose and a life that may inherently not grant that to us, which is again quite, you know, that question that's out there a little bit existential. But Pulse Check brings that into something that's quite practical and pragmatic and by being able to put actions, those words. So when we think about the truth, we have humans that we want to find something that gives us meanings as purpose. Pulse check helps us look at how do we contribute to something that is greater than our self. That might be through work, that might be through altruism, it may be through religious engagement or philanthropy. And that's kind of gauge we're using for T, how we're engaging with that meaning beyond our self. Yeah. How are you working for something bigger than you? And then finally is S So this is strength. This is your health and your Wellness. So I've heard many advisors say that that health is wealth. And it's true. A couple years ago, if you'll permit a small digression, I had something wrong with me and I could not tell what it was. I went to five or six different specialists. I was miserable for months. I actually wrote about it. I wrote about it in my new book. And during these couple of months when I could not stand to be around light, when I was in such intense pain, I would have given you every dollar I had to feel better and it was just a dumb cracked tooth that it took me forever to discover. And now I'm doing fine. But in that moment when I was in the thick of a health scare, money was Money was useless to me except insofar as it helped me to get answers about my health. So we know that health is wealth and so we want to make sure that people are not putting their health and their physical Wellness at risk in the pursuit of those financial gains. So again, hopefully this is a useful framework. This hearts framework is useful for you and I think for those of you who work with retirees, you can also see where some of the the disconnect comes in. So my personal hero Viktor Frankel talked about you know evermore people have the means to live but no meaning to live for. And I think a lot of financial professionals have had the experience of working with someone in retirement who has hit their number. You know, someone who has hit their number and and maybe exceeded it greatly, but still finds themselves floundering a little bit in retirement. And there's some sort of disconnect on those 6 dimensions, right? Maybe it's the engagement that they're missing. Advancement. You know, work scratches a lot of psychological itches, right? It it gets us engaged, it gets us advancing, being better than we were yesterday. It builds relationships around us and makes us work for something bigger than our self. So there's a lot that work does right? But the Hearts framework gives us some conversational tools for talking to our clients about how they're doing and how they could be doing better. So we're working from the deep and existential and philosophical. We're getting increasingly granular and practical. And I'm now going to flip it over to Cade, who's going to talk to us practically about how we built these six components into our planning process so you can help your clients make better decisions about living a fully fulfilled life. Cade. Thank you, Doctor Daniel. Thank you, Doctor Naomi, I'll just say as a quick blurb, this project has been so cool to work on and every time I hear both of you speak, I just absolutely love everything you have to say. So thank you for your insights and perspectives there. So my job here in this part of the presentation will be to bring some of the abstract ideas and show you how they've been instantiated in our technology in Orbion Planning. So without further ado, well, let's jump into the demo. So First things first, let's just talk about a couple of settings. So this hamburger menu at the top right is a good place to start. I'm going to go into settings, and at the firm settings level, I just want to make sure that this pulse check toggle is configured to equal true. So this is the togle that will enable pulse check for the entire firm. So I'll go ahead and save that. Next I'll move over to my settings and you may only have this my settings. This is the equivalent of the advisor settings. You just you just want to make sure that this is either set to true or if it's set to false, then you have to go to the individual client level and make sure that it's enabled at the client level. So I've got Doctor Wynn pulled up and I'm going to go into her client settings and just make sure that Pulse check here equals yes. From there I'm going to go into the goals results and I can see this post check tile here. It says incomplete. That means we haven't started the workflow. But before I do, one other thing to point out is that if I come here to the client again, this is the advisor view. So this is, you know, pretend that I'm the advisor and and Doctor Wing is my client. She's the investor. I can send this workflow out just on a dedicated basis. So if I want to invite Doctor Wynn to Orion Planning under this data workflow drop down, I can just go ahead and grab Pulse check. And even if that's the only workflow that I want Doctor Wynn to encounter, I can. I can single this workflow out and only use that one, and I can either send via e-mail if I just punch in an e-mail here, or I can generate a URL and I can send that URL in a personal e-mail that I'm generating. So a couple of options there. So I'm going to go ahead and add goal and you can see our four behavioral finance tools here. So if you haven't given these a look yet, the risk profile is fantastic. The our our Protect Live Dream, this is a customized version is available our BeFi20 which we released about a year ago and again Pulse Check is the 4th edition. We have webinars on each of these other three tools that I absolutely recommend you look at and if you can find a way to incorporate into your financial planning process as the evidence is very strong that they are beneficial and additive. So I'm going to go ahead and click the Pulse check workflow. The assessment takes about two minutes, so we'll go ahead and start. There's three short parts to this. The 1st is a rank ordering from most to least importance of these six Wellness categories or these six categories of human flourishing or human Wellness. And as Doctor Daniel pointed out, these spell out hearts, HEARTS. So I'll go ahead and order these. And there is no right or wrong answer here. This is just what's most important to me. And of course, in this case, the advisor probably wouldn't be taking this. In this case, Doctor Wynn would be would be taking this assessment. This is, this is probably her job to do, but obviously just for the purposes of showing you how it works. So once I've got these in the order that makes the most sense, I'll go ahead and Click to Step 2. Step 2 is just rating my current fulfillment within each of these areas. So we have these Spectra here, and the Spectra exist from unfulfilled all the way to fulfilled. So I'll go ahead and rate the fulfillment in each of these categories and then I'm going to click get my result. And what we are going to do is calculate these responses and then we are going to surface the Wellness category that has the lowest ratio of fulfilment to importance. And said another way, we're going to find the area that is the most important that simultaneously has the lowest relative level of fulfilment. So these are the results. No surprises here. Relationships is the most important thing. It's number one in the stack, but my fulfilment in this area is relatively low. So. So these are the results. But really the the next part of this is now we've identified what's most important. We've identified current fulfillment and now we know if we set a goal in one of these areas, these are the candidates 1-2 and three that are going to make the most sense and really they're going to have the biggest impact in an investor's overall fulfillment. So I'm going to go ahead and set a goal here. This is priority #1. Now we've got this template here. If you're struggling to come up with ideas about which goals to set, you can just pull from our little menu here. But in this case, relationships. So why don't we just budget to travel to see friends and family two times per year starting next year? Generally a SMART goal would work well here. And then the next question is, will I need to do any spending or saving to achieve this goal? And sometimes the answer is no. You can set a non financial goal. You know, if you just need to pick up the phone and talk to some family members and that, you know, sort of scratches the itch here, then then that's great. That doesn't require any money other than keeping your phone phone bill paid. But in this case, you know, I do need to budget for this to happen. So I'm going to say yes, this is a financial goal. Then I have two options. I can either add this as kind of a an additional annual or monthly budget or I can set aside funds that I'm going to invest or save for a future purchase. So in this case, I will do this and I'm going to choose an amount, let's say I'm going to budget $25,000 a year. I'm going to choose an inflation rate of 5%. And this is a recurring goal. It's not a one time goal. So we will start this, I think I said next year and we're going to do this every year and let's just say for the next 15 years in terms of the frequency from here, I now need to choose which account is going to fund this goal. So I've already got this taxable brokerage account queued up. However, I can just add an account here. I could either log in and link an account that's at another institution or I could add a manual account. But in this case, I've got this taxable brokerage. So I'm just going to earmark this account to to fund this goal. Then I get a nice summary menu just to make sure that all the data makes sense and is what I would expect to see. And now I've set my goal and what's nice here is that we're just, we're we're normalizing the the style, the look and feel of these pulse check goals, these Wellness goals, these flourishing goals right alongside the other goals like retirement and education funding. And that's important because we're trying to normalize these conversations. So from here, this is kind of my my hub. I can manage these goals, I can remove it or even I can edit the goal. From here, I'm going to go ahead and click into the goal and I can see, great, I'm on track. I'll click over to the assumptions and again, just make sure that the general assumptions and the specific ones also make sense. And then from here I can also make changes like just by using our what ifs, hey, what if the price changes from 25 to 30,000 and I can apply that change, Looks like I'm still funded. I can change the goal year, let's say if I need to defer a year, I can do that. We've got a nice plan impact summary here. So you can watch these changes on the fly. We can also change, you know, monthly savings. I could, I could allocate all of my excess cash flow to this goal or I could just use this slider to save a little bit more if I were unfunded. So I can go ahead and apply that change as well. So it's nice to be able to have these conversations on the fly, adapt the goal and when I'm satisfied with that, I can just come right back here to the pulse check hub. From here I could add another goal or set a goal in a different category. A couple of things to point out what's nice about this and and again in in the spirit of of normalizing these conversations. You can see in our cash flow report, you see this pulse check relationships. So I can see the the expense line and also the distribution line. So I can see this taxable brokerage account is distributing money to fund the goal that I set. So you can tell this story with numbers, you can kind of watch this goal taking place over time and this is a good place to just make sure that everything is occurring. And again, normalizing this expense, prioritizing your Wellness in in the areas that matter the most, right alongside some of the other goals. So here you can see this Pulse checks goal. This pulse pulse check goal rather is funded right alongside this retirement goal. And we've got a nice summary card that shows these are the top 3 priorities. And from here I can just Click to get back into to the Pulse check hub. One other thing that I'll show you is action steps. So we'll we'll automatically generate some action steps. And this is a this is a nice tool because you can, once it's done, you can just mark it off as being done. Or you could delete it, or you could even, you know, just edit this and you could choose a new action step. So it's a nice accountability checklist, especially when we're talking about fulfilment. Unfortunately, the things that matter the most to us are often the things that get first neglected. So that is pulse check in a nutshell. I really like how elegant and simple it is. It really cues up a nice conversation for a financial advisor to have both financial discovery, non financial discovery and more importantly to to help the. We know that goals, goals based planning is effective. It's more effective really than any other type of of of planning. So tying money to meaning to purpose is is really, it's really important, it's really sticky. It's really effective. And so the the point here is that what what those goals are usually not informed by. So take like a retirement goal for example. I'm sorry for clicking around, but our retirement goal is not always informed by any qualitative metrics. You might ask, you know what kind of lifestyle you want to live or you know how much you'd like to spend. And those are questions that are sort of instrumental in their value. But these these Wellness categories in Pulse check, sorry, I'm going to go back to the Pulse Check Hub. In terms of relationships and truth and advancement and engagement, these are what we would consider to be intrinsically valuable. They don't require anything else for them to be valuable whereas retirement asking the question like how much do you want to spend or what you know that that is an instrument and it it suggests a certain kind of lifestyle that might lead to greater fulfillment. But these these categories are directly getting at the, you know, it's sort of the core of of the issue. So usually goals are not informed by this kind of analysis and usually that analysis is not so quick and elegant and simple. So that's something I really, really like about this. In short order, let me just kind of lay out what the road map looks looks like for Pulse check. Coming soon will be the ability to just print this out as APDF. So you could upload this to the document Vault or you could send this out directly to or like deliver it physically to your client if if you so desire. And having the ability for both, both people to sort of indicate hey this is you know this is Naomi taking this assessment or this is Naomi's partner taking this assessment and being able to differentiate the user. So that that would be that would be something in the near term future as well. Before I throw back to Doctor Daniel for for us to close out, I just would say that you know this is live and available now. So I fully encourage everybody to and go ahead and get those pulse check tiles enabled from the settings that we went through in the in the outset of of this portion of the of the webinar. And also would love to hear about your feedback and your questions and your, your your comments. This is a really great tool. I believe in it a lot and I'm excited to hear you know your experience with it. So with that said, thank you so much for your time and attention and I will throw it back to Doctor Daniel to close this out. Well, thank you again for your time today. We hope you learned a little bit about human history, about the six hallmarks of a life well lived as well as a Kade's piece about how these can practically be integrated into a planning process. If you are already an Orion planning client, we'd encourage you to jump in and begin to check out the Pulse Check workflow. It's live. It's ready for you to play with an experiment with. If you are not yet an Orion client, we would welcome welcome you to go to orion.com and learn about learn more about Pulse checking, our other behavioural tools, or go to our free Orion Advisor Academy, the CE educational arm of our enterprise that allows you to fulfil a host of your continuing Ed needs at no cost. We even have an ethics course for you. So thank you again for for checking out Pulse Check and we hope to hear from you soon. _1734786716168