Keep Calm and Prosper: Mindfulness and Other Tips for Resilience for Advisors

The first thing I like to ask my peers is: “What do you want to be remembered for?” Do you want to be remembered for taking chances, being courageous and helping your clients live their best life by living yours? Because you can, by winning each day.

We’re often solely focused on investing in our clients and we don’t do so well with investing in ourselves. But, if you think about airplane safety measures, you’re supposed to put your oxygen mask on before helping others. Our own ability to take time for ourselves is what allows us to give back to our clients, our community.

My guiding principles to achieve that lie in the Power of Five:

  1. Yourself: You’re your number one priority, so put time on your calendar for yourself. Schedule your work out, time with family or time for reflection. If it’s on your calendar you will be more likely to hold yourself to it.
  2. Passive Learning: You can passively learn – or absorb information presented to you – while actively learning and being involved in the process. You can do this by attending impactful conferences – like those offered by MDRT – listening to podcasts and reading industry publications to hone and grow your skills.
  3. Gratitude and Community: These two elements are especially important right now, and while it’s easy to complain it’s even harder to be grateful for what you have, who you’re able to serve and being able to give back to your community by enriching what you do professionally and personally.
  4. Feed Your Business: What are you really investing in for your business – super heavy marketing or making sure the people around you are helping you? Invest in others by hiring a great team and sharing the fruits of your labors to fuel your business.
  5. Daily Rituals: Renowned academic Angela Duckworth says that part of winning your day is having consistent habits and being able to invest in yourself which allows you to be consistent and have passion – two elements which make up the grit needed to achieve long-term goals. I live and die by my daily rituals and find them to be the most meaningful way to invest in myself.

Because we’re not great at building time for us, we’re also not great at practicing gratitude. Spend five minutes a day reflecting with a Gratitude Journal: write three things you’re already grateful for, three things you’ll make happen and two things that’ll make your day the very best. This gives you the opportunity to bookend your day with what went well – something for which we don’t give ourselves enough credit.

The last component of investing in yourself is being able to ask, “Am I daring myself to live my best life by not only doing what I need to do for myself to be healthy – working out, eating well and spending time on the business – but am I also daring myself to do better the next day?” Having a vision of how to make an even better tomorrow is important for continual growth.

Capturing mindfulness and resilience as an advisor starts with you, especially in times when you need to keep calm and prosper for everyone around you and yourself. You need to show up every single day, being your best, showing your best and giving back. These small steps really will allow you to have the courage, inspiration and desire to feed your business and yourself more.

So, I ask you: what do you want to be remembered for? What will help you win your day? And how will the Power of Five help you show up, be present and dare greatly for yourself, others and your clients?

Sara Samuels, J.D., CLU®, RICP®, Wealth Management Advisor with NM-Chicago, specializes in working with small to medium sized businesses as their personal CFO type roles, as well as individuals that are new wealth creators. Her goal with all her clients is to financially inspire them, so they reduce economic vulnerability and build enough wealth to live their very best lives, now and in the future. She is an 8-year MDRT member and 2-year Court of the Table member.