Hello, I'm Doctor Wen. Thank you for joining me today for Profitable purpose through pro bono practice. We're going to answer the question today of what pro bono can do for you as a professional and in your personal life. We'll get into how this work for the public good applies in our industry, the spectrum of benefits from engaging in it, and how you might go about getting started. We're going to start with a story that comes from the Roman poet Ovid. It's a story I'm sure you've heard 1000 times before, about a king called Midas. King Midas was walking in his garden when he encountered a Sater and recognized the sater as a companion of the God Dionysus. Midas was really hospitable to him, sort of hoping that Dionysus would gift him something, a token of gratitude for the respect shown. And sure enough, Dionysus did offered Midas A wish. Midas requested that everything he touched returned to gold, and he was granted the gift. Sure enough, everything he touched turned to gold. His banister, up the stairs to his room, his curtains, even the flowers in the garden. Midas revelled in his new power, but the enchantment sinister side was soon revealed. As he picked up grapes from his plate, they turned to gold. His bread, his wine, everything he attempted to consume turned to metal. He realized what he'd done and felt despair. And as his daughter came to comfort him, their embrace simply turned her into a golden statue. Midas prayed to Dionysus, begging for release from the curse, and he was instructed to bathe in the ribbon. And as he submerged, he was freed from the curse. And from that day forward, Midas lived more humbly and treasured the riches that no amount of gold could buy. How many times have you heard this story? This moral money can't buy you happiness. Wealth is a double edged sword, and some things are more important than money. And perhaps you've heard this other framing of a smaller idea. If you were offered $50 million, no strings attached, you'd take it, right? I would. But if I was offered 50 million with the condition that for the rest of my life I can have no one to share it with, no one to care for, no one who cares for me, suddenly it's an entirely different question. The underlying point here is that there are things worth more than money because money cannot buy happiness, and yet poverty can't buy anything. And Americans know this. It's causing significant stress. Last year in April 2023, the CFP Board Consumer Sentiment Survey around cost of living found that 63% of Americans are concerned with purchasing necessities such as food and clothing and worrying they don't have enough. 55% were concerned about being able to pay their rent or mortgage. 9 in 10 Americans are concerned here about the cost of living in the US, and it wasn't much better in 2024. This report indicated 84% of Americans were feeling financial stress, with predominant drivers of that stress being food and housing. Again, the basics of life. More than half of Americans expressed fear around inflation, the prices of basics rising, with only 9% indicating that they felt they had outcomes that would outpace that fear. 63% of Americans didn't see their financial situation as something that would improve during this year, and 80% were not able to add to emergency savings. In 2020, 352% of Americans attributed this financial situation as a contributing factor to a decline in their mental health. I'm throwing a lot of numbers that you hear, but as you can see, these numbers are all in the majority. So it's no surprise then that 92%, an overwhelming majority, 92% of Americans cite financial security as their top goal, with 88% citing financial security as their main life stress. The upshot here? Financial insecurity destabilizes relationships. It leaves dreams unrealized. It drives a deep fear around food and housing, the basics of having a life that's just contributed to living. Money alone can't buy happiness, and poverty can't buy anything. So what's to be done? So let's talk a little bit about this duality of money and meaning, how we account for it in theory, and then how we act to balance the tensions with operationable steps. An image that comes to mind when I think about this topic dates back to nineteen O 9. It's from a card game. It's an image used to represent the concept of collaboration in work. You can see there's a stone Mason, an architect and a priest standing in a cathedral. The priest can speak to what the purpose of the cathedral is, what's it for, What religious rites and rituals need to be accounted for in the design so the form suits the function and the architect shows his plans, his ideas of lofty material vision. And the stone Mason on the left here keeps his balance on that bench as he crafts the physical reality where spirituality gets housed in a purpose made building. How does this relate to money and meaning? Well, we might think about our own inner architect. What does your architect dream of having a making in this world? What does that look like? How high does your Spire go? Thinking about your inner priest, What brings you meaning? What does your life need to embody spiritually in terms of truth, purpose, or meaning? And to the stone Mason, what form can this take? Where is there a balance of material dreams and meaningful purpose that can be actualized? If we focus entirely on our material flourishing, we risk detaching from the reasons for living that materiality initially sought to protect. If we focus entirely on purpose, we can undermine our ability to provide enough resources to do that with any health. I believe there's a single tool that counterbalances material myopia, keeps your sense of purpose and perspective, and on top of that, augments your ability to do both of those things in such a way that it also increases our ability to thrive and excel, not just personally, but professionally. But before we get to what that tool is, let's just zoom out a little from personal relationship with money to a more universal human framing. For this, we're going to ask a question that anthropologists, sociologists, artists, scientists, psychologists that have all debated What is the indicator that society is civilized? Is it the judicial system? Is it a collectively agreed upon set of symbols that we uphold as values? Is it legal code? Is it enough time to make art an economy? Infrastructure for education? What do you think? There was an anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who was ground breaking in a number of ways in her field. She was prominent as a researcher of cultural differences, comparing tribes, norms, values, studying this them, societal functions and what they considered important. Legend has it that she said the sign of a civilized society in ancient cultures is a femur, a thigh bone that's broken and healed. The reason being is that females take a really long time to heal. So an individual with a broken thigh is not running, hunting, protecting. They're not doing much of anything actually, and they must have been served and tended to, protected by the community and society, if they've healed their femur. The thing is, of all the recordings of Mead speaking at her zenith in the 60s and 70s, there is no evidence she actually said this. Yet it continues to circle on the Internet 50 years later. Why? I think that it's because we wish it was true. As humans, we wish that if we were to fall, somebody would catch us because on some level we recognize this is what makes us most human. Something Margaret Mead did say that is well recorded is as follows. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. We might ask, why is the CFP recommending 20 hours a year of pro bono service in a field that already demands a lot of your time, energy and expertise? And the answer is this pro bono service is a hallmark of rich professional traditions. Whether it's medicine, psychology, any service that's been determined to be essential to our societal improvement and thriving has a responsibility to consider the role and collective good. It's a value in our culture, a hope perhaps, that we can improve, flourish, thrive. And financial security And growth is a foundational part of any person, any community, any society achieving that. Beyond that, it's a balance pull for us in our own lives as well, as we walk that line between purpose and profit, meaning and money. Meeting people at the point of need is a threshold met by a field that has reached a place in our society where we recognize the skill as crucial, vital, and important to our well-being. You're a key navigator for people through a landscape that's thorny and high stakes. In so many ways, your service gatekeeps success. Your work can break people's financially disordered patterns inherited from their past, which will change their present and define their future. This changes lives, changes trajectories and opportunities that butterfly effect out into the world. What you do directly impacts your client's ability to live the lives that make them happy. When you think about your job, how do you answer the question of why you do it? And has that changed as you've progressed in your career? When you think of your reason for doing this job, what comes to mind? Of course, we're all working primarily to earn money to support our reasons for living, but why financial advising? Why planning? Why wealth management? Why this and not something else? I asked. Because for all of us, it's so easy to get caught up in the demands of every minute that we can really lose sight of the big picture. So let's pause and revisit the why. Because losing touch with why we do what we do means we won't do it as well. So why this job instead of another? Well, for most advisors I speak to, it's because there's a problem solving element, a detective work element almost, and then a very real impact on people's lives as they flesh out the abstract concept of investments and manage it into material reality. And in short, there's a huge amount of opportunity to feel like they've really accomplished something. And that's not just my anecdotal understanding. The 2020 Kitsis research study on advisor well-being, and this is 2020 by the way, a bit of a roller coaster for the market here. They used a tool called the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving, which evaluates well-being across 7 facets relationships, engagement, mastery, autonomy, meaning, optimism, and subjective well-being. The research demonstrates that financial advisors outscore general population in all 18 subscales here, with accomplishment endorsed most highly. In other words, the sense of accomplishment attainable for financial advisors vastly outpaces other careers. Why? Why is this a field where there's such a high potential to experience a sense of accomplishment? To answer this question, let's first break accomplishment down as a concept. Accomplishment might be passed into a couple of different things. The first being having a sense of value, knowing what you do has value, and then being able to deliver that value to somebody else. Another facet might be that there's a sense of growth, development, participation in that advancement. Another would be that we develop skills. And then 4th, profiting so you can better your own life. This study here suggests that financial advising and wealth planning hits on all of these dimensions. Finally, this breakdown of accomplishment parallels a well established area of psychology that postulates the following model to breakdown what healthy well-being encompasses. It's abbreviated to the permer theory and something that the Orion Pulse Check tool metabolises into an application for any of those who are using the Orion BFI tools. A question in the field of psychology has sought to frame the answer for Over and over is how do we be happy? And there are a lot of different approaches to this question, one of which was codified by a doctor, Martin Seligman. Seligman's research suggests that our flourishing depends on our ability to foster growth in the following areas of our lives. Positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment, which is where the PERMA comes from. Positive emotion refers to spending time with people we care about. For example, the feeling you get when you practice gratitude, listening to music that inspires you for example, or exercising. Kind of engendering that positive, positive experience for engagement. This would be described as sort of being immersed fully in an activity. Could be Tetris, being in nature, painting in that sense of flow. Essentially positive relationships. This is a facet where you engage with other people and feel valued. You feel heard. You might join a group or part of a community that has a common interest. You're learning more about the people that you love. Things like that for meaning. This facet speaks to purpose, so you're being guided by values that extend beyond yourself. Interest. You're connecting with greater truth. A truth of being. You're asking how you can use your passion to help others, thinking about things beyond just yourself, how you establish meaning in the world. And then accomplishment speaks to the advancement in growth because those gains lend to well-being more so than riches or fame. So financial advisement has this high potential for you to feel like accomplishment. And then psychological research tells us that when we contextualize our life with the attempt to foster meaning, positive emotion, positive relationships, and engagement, we are well on track for improved well-being. Guess what researchers found out that pro bono does for people? Exactly those things. The Foundation for Financial Planning has research that serves as an incredible resource on this topic, though. Research explores the metrics of pro bono practice in terms of the impact on financial professionals in a range of ways. They completed a survey of almost 1200 CFPS. It's the most comprehensive piece of research done on professionals and pro bono work in our industry. And in this research, they found that of those engaging in pro bono work, 99% of them found that the satisfaction they got from helping others motivated their service in a range of other ways. They found that advisers reported an increased sense of happiness, this active participation in bettering others lives that led to deeper relationships with self and community, the sense of meaning and purpose, this enhancement of professional skill set and a competitive edge in the market. And they put numbers to these things. 77% felt motivated because it let them give back and play an active role in advancing their profession. 71% felt motivation by the improvement of skills that it lent to their practice. 57% saw positive business impact as a motivating factor in their engagement and pro bono. So this field has a high potential for accomplishment and it has an arm of the field coming into purview now more formally recognized as beneficial to not just the professional discipline, not just the community or social infrastructure, but to advise as well-being. So we're going to break down how you can serve others and how that process changes you for the better in terms of these things. So we're essentially going to speak to how you profit from enacting pro bono service. And this lies along a couple different dimensions. The first being held in happiness, the second meaning and purpose, next advanced skills and accomplishment and then positive business impact. And I also want to speak to the psychological research around service today, because it's not just some kind of warm fuzzy saccharine talking point. Research has demonstrated that service quantitatively changes people for the better in terms of health, happiness, meaning and purpose. Service isn't so much just about being a do gooder or taking cookies to your neighbours, although it can be, of course. It's really about excelling in your expertise, recognizing that you have something of high value, and your ability to engage that particular skill set for those who need it most and are often most barred from it. That sharing of your value will benefit you and other people in ways that nothing else can. This service really sharpens your current skills, teaches you new ones, and then research demonstrates that very intentional support of this kind of practice will give your practice the edge to recruit and engage the sharpest talent that will grow your phone. Let me just switch gears for a moment here with another story. You might be familiar with it. It's the story of Achilles. His mother dipped him in the river sticks while he was still an infant to make him invulnerable. He becomes an incredible warrior and a hero. Except the part of his body that his mother held him by to dip him in his river. His heel was not invulnerable and it led to his downfall. This part of him that was not immersed in the thing that gave him strength ended up becoming a weakness. The upshot to this is recognizing that the part of us that isn't immersed in practice will become a weakness. I started playing the violin when I was five. I would practice for hours and hours a day all the way through my teens. And I became so proficient in playing that by my early 20s, if you handed me a piece of classical music, there's a there was a fair chance I could sight read it, I was so immersed in violin. But over time, life got busy. I played less and less and less, to the point where I basically stopped practicing entirely. And today, I can still read music. I can still correct my children as they practice their piano and play their instruments, much to their chagrin. And I still remember how much of my favorite music goes when I think about playing the violin. But if I pick up my violin now and try to play the pieces that used to play perfectly, I'm really, really rusty. I can remember how in my head, but it does not translate to my fingers at all. It's awful. And so it is with all skills, though, the areas that we're not immersed in practice and they become our Achilles heel. And pro bono is an excellent chance in this regard to really pit our skills against reality and then see where we can sharpen up. And again, the research done by the Foundation for Financial Planning backs this up, that if we want something that really immerses us in practice and a range of skills, pro bono is it. 87% of CFPS found pro bono developed their knowledge and financial strategies and debt management, and that figure goes up to 92%. If we just focus on CFPS under the age of 35, we have 85% indicating a boost in skills around cash flow management, 74% indicating it builds the ability in the sources of money conflict topic, 73%. I find the increase in skills related to retirement savings and income planning, the hard skills of our profession, are all demonstrably improved by pro bono, and each of these skills sharpened through pro bono conveys value for our practice. Continuing to add like this is is great. It's required by our job to keep our knowledge fresh in the industry, but then pro bono is where we see that we can actually apply that knowledge. Rubber meets Rd., so to speak. And all of those skills are vital. But as we know from research coming out of the likes of Merrill Lynch or Schwab's RA benchmark study last year, the single biggest value add that advisors and planners can have here kind of comes from behavioural coaching. You know, to have clients stick with the plan that was best informed by those hard skills. So our soft skills, so to speak, this behavioural coaching relies on our ability to effectively communicate and listen. Because it just won't matter how good your planning or hard skills are, if your client doesn't feel heard or understood in their financial goals, you won't be able to communicate the past of them in a way that they can understand and adhere to. The Foundation for Financial Planning found that 71% of advisors indicated they saw pro bono skills improving their client listening and communication skills. So if you wanted to grow your practice or pivot to alternate roles in your firm, pro bono operates to diversify your client base and improve your leadership skills and improving all these things that translate to use within the scope of your career trajectory broadly and specifically. So if you're long in the tooth in this career, pro Bono's going to keep you sharp. And if you're newer to it in the under 35 year old demographic, pro Bono's going to really get you up to speed. From this study, again, 81% of CSPS under 35 saw improvement in communication skills necessary to strong client interactions due to pro bono. So if you have employees under the age of 35 and you encourage them to support them to engage in this, you're going to advance their communication skills and their work in their field and the value that they bring to your practice. Younger financial planners are really recognizing the benefit of pro bono service quite widely. The Journal for Financial Planning just recently published an article on this exact topic. It's July 2024 if you want to have a look at that. There's such a drive to improve the social infrastructure of a society with people in this age demographic and so that our society can sustain life. And young people are often very acutely aware of this, and they want to apply their skills so that their personal rising tide can be part of lifting all boats. The research demonstrates that younger planners especially value the acquisition of new skills, and they see a positive impact on their practice through the pro bono work. So if you're asking the question of how you can bring a very competitive edge to your recruitment, how you would track the best, the brightest in the field, the answer is that you promote pro bono and endorse it. Better yet, incorporate it into your practice expectations and then support the effort. Firms that encourage pro bono have this competitive edge. And if you're looking to expand your practice or retire, if you're looking to essentially engage younger entrance to the field, which is really important for succession and important for retaining your clients, pro Bono's part of this. It will really support this effort. And if you encourage pro bono work, it not only enhances your firm's reputation for embracing this hallmark tradition of a noble profession, but it really attracts the talent worth retaining. The reason being, pro bono pairs that advancement of skills and accomplishment with positive business impact, with increased health and happiness, meaning and purpose for you, your employees, and those that it helps. You might think of those two things as two horses almost pulling you forward and giving you locomotion like a chariot with two horses on one side you have these things that you know you gain and improve and it leads to positive feedback loop of professional success. And then the other horse, more existentially almost it has this bonus which positive feedbacks into your success. In terms of meaning, at the moment, research is indicating that more than half of Americans are unable to pull together even $1000 for an emergency expense from their savings. It's a situation with almost no margin for error. And there's a professional sharpening for you here, a highly qualified individual, as you provide critical services to those most in need of competent, ethical and objective financial guidance. And there's the obvious element of service. When we give our time and our skills to boost those in needs, we're really capitalizing on compassion in a way that simultaneously and most importantly boosts others, but it also brings benefit for ourselves. Compassionate service has been demonstrated over and over in psychological research to give purpose, improve physical health, strengthen your mental health. In fact, there was a group of Stanford psychologists who completed a bunch of research and to the point where they had such a body of evidence, they founded the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, abbreviated to see care. From this, they developed this secular compassion training program known as Compassion cultivation training. It's based on their research. Why? Why all this? Well, because they found that the active practice of compassion steps you out of yourself. Focus. You can access a sense of meaning beyond yourself. This broader perspective is highly correlated with the greater quality of life. This is something we need with increasing importance. Let me personal story. When I was a child growing up in England, we had four TV channels, BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, Surprise and ITV. And when I would go to school, if there was anything worth watching on TV, there was a fair chance that we all saw the same TV show at the same time. And then we'd all talk about it. And of course as I got older, cable and satellite TV came in. That became more of a thing. We'd had some wealthier friends who had a cable box with DVR, so now they could record a show for later, watch it at their leisure. Fast forward to now, we all have our own algorithms that streaming services recommend, so we have these personalized streams of media just froze. Personally, there's a fair chance that the media I consume has 0 overlap with my next door neighbour. Point being that in a world of increasing choice, there's decreasing communal space, which is strange, especially when we think of this in terms of social media. Technically, when we're connected, I could quite literally look up what somebody I knew in 7th grade had for lunch last week. There's a photo right there on their social media. And yet, research repeatedly demonstrates that heavier social media use is linked to increased depression, anxiety, alienation, and isolation. So while we're in a time flooded with the appearance of increased connection and shared space, it's divested entirely of the interpersonal benefits of communal space. So our ancient brains, which are wired towards social engagement, house as very social beings, and to stave off the illnesses engendered by alienation and isolation, we often have to practice against those things very intentionally. Compassion and service is the fastest way to do this. If we think of our Internet profiles, every time we Google a question, our profile feeds back to us what it thinks we will like. We can leave our thinking kind of inflexible because we're not really engaging with the reality in the broader context. We're simply engaging what we kind of already want to hear and it's just not very active of reality. But if we engage in compassionate service, we are now forced to leave this fictitious bubble that Internet algorithms craft for us. We have to see other people's lives for what they really are. This can push us to re evaluate our perspective, our sense of self focus and access. An actual form of self-care, IE meaning beyond self. The psychologists at the Stanford Research Center on Compassion that I mentioned found that sometimes we fear compassion. We have a worry that we'll be taken advantage of if we're too kind or that will overextend ourselves. They even found that some of us struggle to cultivate compassion for ourselves because we worry that it will make us lazy. But research demonstrates that compassion will help you live longer with greater quality of life. It increases our ability to find motivation in changing our own unhealthy behaviours and helps us move away from environments or relationships that can harm us. And you can even reduce social anxiety. Compassion gives us a purpose. You find a sense of usefulness to yourself in the context of others, and in that sense it catalyzes emotions that work to paralyze those ordinarily and it catalyzes them into momentum. So instead of feeling self criticism for your weaknesses or shortcomings, you feel motivation to change those due to care for your well-being and then its usefulness in the broader social context. In a study of over 2000 people that was undertaken by the University of Chicago, it was found that extreme loneliness was twice as likely to cause death as obesity or high blood pressure. Guess what can reduce loneliness? Compassionate service. Compassionate service quite literally elongates your life and improves the quality of it with both your physical and mental health. Even on a neurological level, it's been shown that when we feel and tend to others burdens, it can really regulate our own distress. One of the biggest barriers to feeling a sense of purpose in life is isolation. This is where we feel so alone in the road that we travel that we stop being able to see the point of walking it at all. Related to this is an allegory of long spoons, and you've probably heard it before because it's a parable that's told in so many different cultures, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu. In medieval Europe, the food in the story is a Stew. In China, the food in the story is a bowl of rice. But the moral is the same. Essentially, they're a group of people and they are hungry and they find these utensils to eat this food with. But their chopsticks are really, really long, or their spoon has a handle that is incredibly long. They can't feed themselves. It's just simply impossible. The utensils are just so unwieldy. But they start to realize that they can feed their neighbour and their neighbour can feed them. So when we engage in compassionate service, it kind of works like that. So we embark on this path that others have paved and continue to travel on. And then we find a community of people who know this secret to finding self by supporting others. Now culture profits from the idea that we really find a sense of purpose due to our own special gifts. The things that set you apart from the people. And those things can be really great about you. It can be integrated into how you see yourself giving yourself purpose. But without the sharing of those gifts with others, they begin to lose meaning because they lose context. Recognizing our gifts is part of the truth, and the growth of those gifts put to use in the service of others is actually how they grow. For those of us who are at a table where no one's really in need, pro bono will push us to look beyond our immediate sphere to serve those who need it more, who aren't naturally part of our ecosystem. And this plays into our ability to sharpen skills through new challenges. But it also changes our personal narrative and our personal ARC. It gives us a richer understanding of the world around us and not just our highly custom ecology that we run risk of insulating ourselves with. Another benefit of this engagement with altruism is gratitude. As you find your part of something bigger, that others need your skill, and you are part of positive impact in changing this big thing you're a small part of, there's a natural engendering of gratitude. There's gratitude for your skills, the effort you put into crafting those skills, the effort you're extending to other people, and for where you've got in yourself in life. This cultivation of gratitude can really foster a sense of purpose. Research out of Harvard even found that this particular practice can reduce your blood pressure. There's a doctor I'm Susan Albert of the Cleveland Clinic, and she summed this up to explain that altruism activates reward centers in your brain that releases serotonin, dopamine and all those endorphins. So when we think of service and compassion, we sometimes think of it as this saccharine sentiment for Hallmark greetings cards. But it's actually a practice that changes our neurology as well as our personal narrative about who we are and how we make sense of life. Service is an efficient way to bring meaning and find personal purpose in connective ways that will service our community. So if you think of the arc of your own life, do you have a special connection to widows? Veterans, single parents, families struggling with healthcare concerns, you can find a niche in your own personal life that will speak to you in such a way that you might want to serve it now. Paul Gilbert, who is a professor with expertise and Compassion Focused Therapy, recommends that you activate compassion in your life in three different ways. If we want to really reap all those benefits that we're talking about here, and we can adapt these to our professional work through pro bono service. The first one he speaks to is about fostering inner compassion, so giving compassion to yourself when you're struggling with a personal weakness. The second here that he talks about is to receive compassion. So when somebody shows you kindness, you take note of it. You record that gratitude for it. And the third area here is to give compassion, so to offer support and your particular skill set and the service of someone who's less fortunate than you. So to recap, the first is fostering that inner compassion, being able to receive compassion from others with gratitude, and then giving compassion, offering that support for others. So while the idea of giving until it hurts is bandied about as if it equates to good service, it's not realistically healthy. If you, I mean, of course, if all you did was pro bono service, you wouldn't have the balance you need in keeping a roof over your own head, which would really get in the way of a lot of things, including your ability to serve other people. So this selfless giving in absence of self preservation is really inefficient. Adam Grant, who's the author of the book Give and Take, terms this as the importance of being otherish. So he defines this as being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests safe and protected. And herein lies the keystone of today's discussion. If you are engaging in pro bono work, you are keeping your own interests because you are sharpening skills, you're competitive edge and recruiting. You're enlarging your soft skills and hard skills, and you are fostering this sense of otherishness here. You are giving to others, you're lifting others up, you're engaging with compassion, and you're finding meaning beyond yourself on all of those 3 facets that we just talked about. Your skill set is really valuable, and so is your time. The best use of your energy isn't to spend weeks scouting out connections to see who needs that help that you can give. Rather, it's to actually spend it engaging in the help itself. And so This is why I like this pro bono planning match through the Foundation for Financial Planning, who's partnered with Orion in a number of different ways. If you scan this card here, you'll be able to see in real time what I'm talking about. You can immediately connect with needs that have made themselves known by making an account. You just simply browse opportunities and you offer help and you get connected with a non profit host so you can just get straight to work. If you connect with a pro bono opportunity through this platform or volunteer with any of FFP's grantees, you can also get automatic coverage by pro bono Eno liability insurance that's provided free by the FFP. We think about the statistics we mentioned earlier. For example, more than half of Americans being unable to pull together even $1000 for emergency expenses. You'll realise that you become even more of an indispensable guide for those that need support. In quite a complex financial world, these people can't ordinarily afford it. Your profession is not just one of value, but it's one of critical service for those that are chronically underserved. You're a provider of competent, ethical, and objective financial guidance for those most at risk for being sunk by financial stress. And as you make a living, the participation in 20 hours of pro bono a year is a chance to really make meaning as well. Sharpen your skills, add to your sense of purpose, and keep your work in perspective. With regard to perspective, let's put this in context by zooming out a little bit. Life is stressful. As we've gone through these statistics earlier in this presentation, the majority of Americans are worried about their financial situation. The research shows that the vast majority of Americans have concerns about meeting even their basic needs, food, shelter, things like that. Beyond that, Americans are experiencing high levels of stress generally. There's a survey that the American Psychological Association does every year gauging stress in America, and a majority of Americans exhibit quite a lot of stress around the financial situation and then also about the market at large, things they can't control, inflation, interest rates, and even beyond that, geopolitical turmoil, election, things that they can't control that will impact them. Psychological research indicates that in these situations where a lot of things are beyond your control and causing stress, one of the best things you can do is to focus on what you can control might be your budget, steps to reaching financial goals, that kind of security. So yes, we may not be able to control the market, but we could control something like our budget. But what happens when you don't know how to control those things? You simply don't have the education, the opportunity, or the direction? What happens if you need somebody to point the way, a community to support you in that direction from a professional, and that's you. This is where you come in. And so at the risk of sounding like a fifth grade math word problem, I want you to picture a train going from New York to Miami. It's going right down the coast. If the train gets to North Carolina and the track is switched and the track is switched just one centimetre, just an inch, it's just changing course by that tiny little inch. That same train that was bound from Miami could just as well end up in Kansas. One small switch can completely change the trajectory. I tend to think of pro bono work in a similar way. Your crucial skill set with just 20 hours out of a year may be enough to give that one inch switch in the tracks. The switch in habits, plans, financial literacy, and so on. It being completely changed someone's financial trajectory though, and permit them to get on the right track to achieve their goals and the financial security that eludes so many Americans. You have a skill to directly influence and reduce at risk family stress and the ability to actually give them a life that has less fear through your pro bono work. On the other side of that, pro bono work also helps you manage your own stress. It's going to reduce anxiety and it's going to engender more compassion. As we come to a close in this course, I want to review this quote here from Winston Churchill that we make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give. And with that framing, I want to issue a little challenge to you. We want to go back to those 3 facets of Compassion by Paul Gilbert, and I want you to think about three things as we go throughout this next month. In which areas are you showing compassion for yourself in ways that will motivate you to do better and take care of yourself and those around you? And then I want you to think about compassion as you receive it. Times where you feel gratitude and take note of those and be mindful of them. And then lastly, the areas in which you're able to extend that compassion. I'd like you to issue the challenge of finding something if you're not already engaged in something. And perhaps you'll find that one of the ways in which you extend compassion is through pro bono service. And you'll find here again, the QR code here for the Pro bono Financial planning link through the Foundation for Financial Planning to quickly get you set up in the most efficacious path to, to engaging in this work, which profits not just you, but those around you. Thank you. _1733157208570