My name is Abby Hasling, and it's my pleasure to introduce Deborah Fox. So, Deborah is the CEO and founder of Advisor Touch, a company that enables advisors to increase work more efficiently, to increase profitability, and deliver exceptional services to clients. Deborah will talk today about how to create your personal paradise. Please join me in welcoming Deborah. Good morning, everyone. It's a lovely rise for me today here in California, but I am really pleased to be here. And this is a really important topic to me. And you'll understand why as I go through my presentation, but a personal paradise is something that we should all strive to find in our lives. And so, I'm going to devote this session to explaining what exactly the personal paradise is and how you can use it for your own life and also for your clients. So, let's... There we go. So, just a little bit about me. I've been a long-time financial advisor. I do have Advisor Touch as a consulting company, but I have been an advisor and still am a practicing advisor for about 30 years. And just recently, I merged my firm, my RA firm, with another. And the firm I merged with is Financial Alternatives. And many of you probably know Jim Freeman and Chris Jacquard, who are NAPFA members. Jim and I started in the business together 30 years ago. We met and hit it off together, and the two of us used to actually train new advisors to get started in the business. So, it's really fun to have circled back around and to have merged our firms together. So, we're literally in the process of getting all up and running as a merged firm. And so, you can see we have five advisors and five support staff now because of the merge. And then I have also had a specialty planning company that I've provided services to college-bound parents with college-bound students that are looking to reduce their college expenses. So, Fox College Funding has been around for a long time too. And AdvisorTouch really was put together to help firms adopt and implement different tools and technology that can help them work way more efficiently. And so, I've really enjoyed working on that side too, and it's helped me run my own firm to make sure that I'm eating my own food too. So, what exactly is a personal paradise? Well, my definition of that is a person's deliberate effort to proactively design an exceptional life that will bring him or her happiness. And think about that. How many people really deliberately form their life and design their lives? Not too many. And so, this exercise that we have clients go through and do ourselves can make a huge difference in the pathway to happiness. So, let's look at a few things that apply here. Human nature is always fascinating, and I've always been a student of understanding why humans act the way that we do and make decisions the way that we do. And what I learned years ago is that we, as humans, automatically seek out certain things. And these are the things that are most important to humans. We need to have our basic needs met. The human, by design, is wanting to find happiness, which I think is awesome. Our brains are wired to seek out happiness. And we also want to be fulfilled, both internally and externally. We want to find love, and that can be with humans or other animals. And think of how many people are so devoted to pets that they have, and they enhance our lives tremendously. And also to live out our passions, and that is experiences and learning and hobbies. Things that really matter to us and do bring that happiness. So, how can we help our clients and ourselves focus on that? Well, it's a matter of just putting it front and center. And remembering that these things are the things that really help us live a personal paradise. So, we strive to be happy as much as possible. And here are the things that typically make people happy. We want to have great family relationships. And the tightness of a family really provides that substrate for happiness. When we have people in our lives that we really care about and love and get nurtured from, it makes all the difference in the world for everything else that we're experiencing. Good health also is extremely important. In fact, maybe that should have been number one. Because if we don't have good health, nothing else matters. We're not going to have very good relationships if we can't be present to enjoy them. And meaningful work is important. Most people do end up working in their lives and for many years. And if we don't enjoy our work, it really does affect our psyche. And we wake up every morning without purpose. And so, having meaningful work and also having work where, I call it this, being able to do something that you're naturally good at and what you enjoy. And when you marry those two things, there aren't very many days that you'll work in your life. And the reason I can say that is because I found this. I found that in becoming a financial advisor. I wake up every morning excited to go to work, excited to help other people change their lives. And to allow those people that I'm helping to change my life too. And I'm sure most of you feel the same way about that. There's nothing better than helping other people get on their right life path. And for them to be stewards of their money. And for them to raise their families in the ways that they want. And to just feel that passion for waking up and for experiencing whatever comes our way. So, we are so fortunate to have that opportunity to do this for ourselves and for others. Positive thinking is incredibly important because our brain, as I'll show in just a moment, it only can hold one thought at a time. And so, we cannot be anything but positive if that's what we allow. If that's the feeling, the emotion that we allow to come into our brain. And I think that's such an awesome component of being human is that you have to decide. What is that brain thought going to be? Is it going to be positive or negative at any given time? Number five, having gratitude. It is so important to have gratitude because we all have great things that happen to us on any given day or week or month or year or decades. And we also have negative things that happen. But if we can focus on being positive and having gratitude for having the opportunity to live this life as a human, it will make a difference in how we view anything that comes our way. Forgiveness is so important also. There are things that happen to us that other people do to us and that we do to ourselves. So, we have to be great at forgiving both others and ourselves and realize and recognize that as humans, we are not perfect. We are going to mess up. We are going to say the wrong things to someone. We are going to make the decision to go down a path that really we shouldn't have gone down. It wasn't the right path. It might have been detrimental to what we're actually trying to do. But we have to be able to forgive and move forward. And giving to others, that is something that just nurtures the human soul. And whether it is just giving a smile to someone that's not having a good day or listening to them, being there, being present to listen to what is ailing them or helping people in need or just being there for others just to make them laugh, to make them have another perspective. I'm hoping that this presentation is some sort of gift that I can give to you to give you some of these perspectives. Religion helps keep us grounded. And, boy, there are all sorts of ways, all sorts of religions out there. Well, it's just important to believe in something, I guess, is what it comes down to. And having personal freedom. We are so fortunate to live in the United States of America where we have personal freedom for the most part. Not in everything, of course not. We can't exist as a society being able to do everything that we want. We have to stop at the red light. We have to file our taxes. There's a lot of things that we have to do that maybe isn't personal freedom, but the vast majority of things that we have definitely is under that category. Watching TV or a movie. Isn't that interesting how the human brain can get so absorbed in a great story or a movie and it helps us be happy. Of course, it can help us not be happy, too, depending on what we're watching. But in this case, it's usually happy. So, another component of the personal paradise is caring for ourselves. And our health really does need to come first, as I mentioned earlier. And every day we need to wake up understanding and being excited about taking care of our top priorities. And what I do every day, and I'm sure many of you do something similar, before I hang up for the day, before I leave work, which is at home now, before I leave my home office, I make sure that I list the top priorities that I need to get done for the next day. And what that does is it actually launches your brain, your unconscious brain, to start solving those problems or those tasks that we all need to do for the following day. And it goes on in the background of your brain. And by the time the next day comes, you many times will have a much easier time getting through your to-do list because your non-conscious brain has actually assisted you while you were sleeping to figure out how to do the things that you need to get done. And one of the things that always just is a marvel to me is we can generate these feelings of euphoria when our to-do list items get done. Think about that. When you finish a to-do list, how does it make you feel? It depends on the level of complexity, I guess, of the to-do list. But I know when I get over the hump, I mean, I just feel so good and I feel like I can give myself a reward and go do something fun. That is a great part of the human brain and being part of our personal paradise. And wellness should also be part of our personal paradise. That happiness, the good feelings, that should be a focus for all of us because it's so important for the human brain to most of the time feel those emotions, not the negative emotions. We want the positive emotions. And eating healthy, taking care of our bodies, taking care of our brain and exercising regularly can make a huge difference in how we feel. And with this whole pandemic, I mean, a lot of us have been knocked off our regular exercise schedules, going to workout classes with other people and things of that nature. And so we have to still focus on making sure we're doing the things that really nurture our soul and our bodies. And so exercising might be different now than what we were doing before COVID hit us. And then nature is something that really makes us feel better emotionally. And it has physical effects. You can see it reduces blood pressure and heart rate and muscle tension and the production of stress hormones. And that last one is so important, as I mentioned earlier, because it just can create havoc on our health. So just viewing nature, even looking at a poster or a photo of that or movies, that can reduce all these things, anger, fear, stress, and it increases good feelings. So something that is a really easy thing for us to do as part of our personal paradise. Another important thing is to build your bucket list. We've all heard of a bucket list. And the actual definition of a bucket list is a number of experiences or achievements that a person hopes to have or accomplish during their lifetime. And think about that. If we don't have a plan in place, if we don't have things that we're striving for, that we've fought through and that we have identified are important to us, how the heck are we going to live a personal paradise? We can't. We have to have it designed. And so if we have this list, a bucket list of the things that will energize us, that will make us feel great, will help us be a contributor to the world, it will change everything. It changes our focus on making sure that the positives are enveloping us on a daily basis. And through the months and the years and through our entire lifetime, it really does give us something to look forward to and to focus on implementing. And when you've thought through these things that are important, and you know what? The side note is there are going to be things on the bucket list that you really want to do, but you don't ever get a chance to do them. That's okay. We don't get to do everything that we want. But if we can focus on the things that are doable and that we have passion about and that we get excited about and that will fill our brain with those endorphins, then that's good enough. We don't have to do every single thing. But we can at least put it on the list and see if we are going to accomplish it. And so the last point here is a reminder about what's important to us and when we're feeling like we need some direction or to focus on something positive. Now, we can't think that we're always going to be positive. Sometimes it's very hard to keep our personal paradise front and center. I mean, there are things that hit us that will throw us off track. And of course, COVID is one of those things. It really hit all of us so deeply in figuring out how to live life without being able to go and be in a social position, in a social group and being with the people that we love and the people that we want to meet and to travel to the places where we want to go. We were completely disrupted and we are still being disrupted, right? There's still lots of COVID restrictions that we have now. And so we can either get really depressed about it, we can complain about it or we could take another approach, a more neutral approach and just be reminded that we should never ever take our lives for granted. We can't take it for granted for a day because we don't know which days and how many we are going to have going forward. And so COVID could easily knock us off our track to finding our personal paradise. But we mustn't allow something like this to do it. We have to prevail. We have to just keep on keeping on. And life does present these challenges to us. This was a big one. This was really difficult for us to completely have our social lives disrupted. But you know what? We'll look back when we're over the hump on this and we'll recognize that we became stronger because of it. It gives us that opportunity to be so much more grateful for when we do have the things that are normal in our lives back. And the human brain can really help. As I mentioned earlier, the brain can only hold one thought at a time. And so that means we get to make the choices to what that thought is. At any given time, we choose to have either a positive or a negative thought. And we literally can train ourselves to form positive thoughts most of the time. And then when a negative thought comes into our brains, we can learn how to just delete it. We can change it back to a positive thought. and how do you do that? You give a negative thought context. If a negative thought comes into your brain, you think about why am I even getting this negative thought? First of all, do I even deserve to have this negative thought? And in some cases, it is true. No, if you had a argument with your spouse or your child or something happened at work, it's okay to have a negative thought, but only for a short period of time. We've got to get back on track with the positive thoughts. So we can deconstruct that negative thought and understand why it came into our brains. We can learn from it and we can just knock it out by replacing it with a more positive thought, which will be to, you know, if something happened, okay, how do we move forward from that? What's the strategy to move forward so that that negative thought isn't going to come up anymore? And so having our consciousness be there, having human consciousness gives us that opportunity to turn a negative thought into a positive one. And this ability is a key component of designing and living a personal paradise. You focus on what's most important to you. You focus on all the positive things and those negative things just are there for a little context that are there just briefly to make you recognize that having those positive thoughts fill your brain is what it really is. It meant to be there to be human. So here's an easy solution to stay in paradise mode. Fresh air is one of the most important things that we as humans need to fill our lungs with. It significantly boosts our mood. And I live downtown San Diego in a high rise. And when the pandemic hit, staying in a condo and not going out, it gets to you. However, getting out into the fresh air has been my savior. I live by San Diego Bay and just getting out to take a walk, at least one walk every day, getting into that fresh air, feeling the breeze coming off the bay, it literally transforms me every single time. And so when I had a full day of work or something was bothering me, if I can get out into that fresh air, it makes all the difference in the world. And so being refreshed and relaxed is something that fresh air just does for you automatically. And it creates serotonin, a burst of serotonin in the brain. And that makes you feel happy and gives you that sense of well-being. And that last point, a few minutes of controlled breathing can have also a very positive effect. If you've had something aggravating come up or somebody is angry with you or things aren't going the way that you want, just controlling breath, taking some deep breaths and then going outside and taking a walk can be the absolute best medicine. And did you know that helping others is part of a personal paradise? When we help someone get something that they want or help make them feel better, make them laugh, help them figure out an answer that they're looking for, you get warm and fuzzy feelings when we're able to make someone else happy or help them out. And it works both from a mental and physical standpoint. And so our profession is just conducive for that. We help others. That's the definition of what it is to be a financial advisor, helping others to live the life they want, have the funds they need to live that life and help them find their personal paradise. Think about all the conversations you've had with your clients about if they're still working and wanting to plan to stop working in the near future, think about those conversations. It's all about building a personal paradise. Many of you have probably heard of the author Harold Kushner. He has a wonderful book, by the way, Living a Life That Matters, but it's not the book that I'm focusing on for this particular slide because there is a forward that's in that book that says, we crave significance. The need to know our lives and choices means something. We sometimes confuse power, wealth and fame with true achievement. So living a life of significance is also part of a personal paradise. And another book, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, Richard Carlson. This is a forward in the book by Dr. Wayne Dyer. And I just love what this says. And many of you have probably heard of Wayne Dyer. Many people mistakenly believe that circumstances make the person. They don't. Instead, they reveal him or her. Our circumstances don't define us. Our success does not lie in our collections of possessions or accomplishments. It does not lie in the details of our predicament, but in how we deal with what we have and how we face our challenges, how we transform our unique curriculum into growth and into a life filled with love. We have the capacity to make this human experience all it can be. I love that quote. The never ending quest for happiness should be part of our personal paradise. It's never ending. Maya Angelou, her mission in life. I love this. My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. Isn't that awesome? What a great mission. And you know, I always, when you hear people say, well, you need to have a mission in life. You need to have it written down. This is one sentence. And how incredible of a sentence is that? I really respect her, but I thought this is a great mission for a personal paradise. Life is so precious. We don't know how long we're going to be on this earth. It's so important that we stay in the moment, that we live an exceptional life now. Don't wait too long to fulfill some of your dreams. You might not have the opportunity to fulfill them if you wait too long, whether it's physical health, whether it's just the opportunity goes away, whether things change. Embrace things now and choose to focus on the absolute best things that life can offer. Why would we focus on anything else? If we're here to live a personal paradise and to fully experience our life as a human, why would we not focus on the positive and the things that are just waiting for us to embrace? So what road will you follow? There's unlimited number of roads. The sky's the limit. So why am I so passionate about doing things now? Because I have a personal story and I'm just, oh shoot, I told myself I'm not going to get emotional. Sorry, I can't help it. In 2018, my personal paradise was disrupted. Everything changed for me. My husband had to have open heart surgery and had a number of bypasses. And immediately, as soon as he was transported to the hospital, everything changed. Everything changed as to how I was thinking about life. I didn't know if he was going to make it. I didn't know if I was going to be a widow. I didn't know if I would be able to keep on with my personal paradise. This photo that I took, this was the photo where he was taking his first steps after his surgery. And the gentleman that is cut off on the left, that is his personal nurse that he had in the ICU unit. And this reminds us that life is precious. This reminds us that we can't take any day for granted. We need to embrace every day as if it's our last. Now, thankfully he's fine. He's still here. He's back to, you know, he's not normal. He does have some things in his chest, but we're back to living our personal paradise. But this will forever be a life-changing memory for me because we didn't know whether we would continue to be able to live our personal paradise. And because of that experience, I have been redesigning my own personal paradise. And I tell you this because I realized that, yes, it took a health issue for me to come to this conclusion, but it's very important that we don't put off the things in life that are important to us, whether it's being with family, whether it's traveling, whether it's knowledge that we want to acquire. There's a million things that we can do, but we need to focus on it now. And the personal paradise isn't static. It morphs over time, and that's as our lives ebb and flow. And that's a good thing because it's never finished. You can always add to your personal paradise. So for me, I'm more focused on the present than I've ever been before. Instead of planning for decades ahead, I'm now planning for only half of one because I know that my husband and I, we need to do things now and not wait for 10 years because we don't know if we'll have those 10 years. And so what I'm doing now is just focusing on just the best life has to offer. I try to live each day in a state of ecstasy. Is it all day long? Of course not, because there's things that I don't like to do every day, but I get through them and then I get back to ecstasy. I go take my walk. I call friends. I do social distancing meals with friends. I am just gonna focus on that positive. And I'm going to make sure that I am prioritizing my bucket list and that I'm focusing on doing those bucket list items that are at the top to know that I can do them when I can, as I can. And so I'm choosing to completely embrace my own personal paradise. And I wake up every day feeling grateful and just looking at the world in a state of awe. I mean, you look at how this earth has been put together and what that higher power has done for us to be able to live this experience and to create our own personal paradise with our human brains and where the sky's the limit. I mean, how lucky are we? How lucky are our clients to have us to help them figure this out too? How much joy does that bring us to not only become better people for ourselves, but for others? Incredible, it really is incredible. And here are some quotes that really resonate with me that I had saved for my own personal paradise. Thoreau says, you must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. And then Eckhart said, most humans are never fully present in the now because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. And then the Dalai Lama, there are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow. So today is the right day to love, believe and do mostly live. I love that one. And here are a handful of items from my own personal paradise. To live a life that matters and makes a difference. To focus on the positive things in life and be happy. And leveraging the fact that the brain can only hold one emotion at a time. To never take life for granted. To live each day in a state of awe. To surround myself with interesting, positive people. To be committed to lifelong learning and never ending improvement. To pay it forward and to not wait too long to do the things that I want to do. Because if I wait too long, I won't be able to do them. So we all need to experience things that take our breath away. And in this case, I'm showing you photos right after my husband had his surgery or soon after. We went to Aspen, Colorado, which has a very special place in my heart. After college, I actually lived there for the winter and it was one of the most special times of my life. And this, of course, the beauty there is just absolutely amazing. I'm a big nature person, so I love that. But there on the bottom right is a photo of this macho salad that there's a restaurant there called the White House Tavern. And it was the absolute best salad I have ever had. The combination of ingredients was just incredible. I can't wait to go back there. But just seeing that photo just brings me back there immediately. And I get so happy just seeing these trees and seeing the good food. So I'm telling you, you want to have these types of triggers around, whether you have paintings or photos in your workspace or at home, and that you have these special experiences that you bring out regularly so that you can relive them in your brain because it makes you happy. And so plan things that take your breath away. Plan outings and vacations and meetings with people, meeting some of your idols. There are so many different things that can take your breath away. If any of you have, if you are a watcher of America's Got Talent, I love that show because it's so positive. If you have watched the show, you will recognize Nightbird. She goes by Nightbird. Her name is Jane, but that's the name she goes by. And she is just this shining light. And so she was introduced and asked how she's doing. And she said, I'm awesome. I'm so happy to be here. Well, her view of life is completely different than what most of us could handle. She has cancer in her lungs, in her spine, and her liver. And this is the quote that she said when I was watching this show that I wanna share with you. It's important that everyone knows I'm so much more than the bad things that happened to me. You can't wait until life isn't hardening anymore before you decide to be happy. I have a 2% chance of survival, but 2% is not 0%. 2% is something, and I wish people knew how amazing it is. Can you imagine being in her situation and having that attitude? She is my hero. I cannot imagine what the pain that she's going through and how she's able to keep that outlook, but she does. And so what you see there is Simon Cowell on the right was pushing the golden buzzer and put her through to the semifinals. If you have a chance to look her up online, do so because she's a singer and it's incredible. So what should you do? I hope that you can begin designing your own personal paradise if you haven't. And here are the things that you want to include, your health, family, financial, travel, and then other items that are on your bucket list. And this photo is another one that was from our trip to Aspen. And this was a coffee shop that had the most beautiful, and it just had the best feeling. And this is where I did some writing. I worked on my personal paradise to update it a bit. And so it's a special photo for me. So how do you begin designing your own personal paradise? I pulled out three things to start with, gratitude, awe-inspiring, and motivational. And so when you embark on this journey, what you're doing is pulling out the things that are important to you. And I think gratitude is incredibly important. And so I ask you now if you do have the ability to write something down, to write down some of the things that fall into each of these categories as a way of ending this session so that you have something to start building on. These are three words that are very important to me. And so just take a moment to write down some things that give you gratitude. You don't have something to write with, and at least think about them. Something, things that are awe-inspiring and some things that are motivational. Give you a minute to think and write a few things down. 30 more seconds. Just write whatever comes to mind and you can go back and amend it. All right, so I hope you had got a few things written down and I hope you devote some more time when you have some free time during the conference here. I want to tell you about a gentleman that lives here in San Diego that is so awe-inspiring to me. My husband and I see him often on the boardwalk here by the bay. He's in a wheelchair. He has no arms and no legs. He has a motorized wheelchair and he zooms down the boardwalk so fast. It's crazy. He always has this incredible welcoming smile on his face. We always are in awe of him because he's able to navigate everything without his arms and legs. One time he happened to be stopped and we went and talked to him. We just asked him about how he stays positive. He just said he doesn't know life any other way, that life is great for him. It was completely his attitude. He was completely full of gratitude and just loving life. He even coaches football for kids. He's been coaching for, he said, like 15 years. He's been coaching football. How do you do that? He's just super positive. I tell you about that because I have no reason to ever be unhappy with my life or some of the things that come my way. Yes, I'm going to feel sadness or anger at some time, but you know what? Just thinking about this quadriplegic and his attitude and how we have never seen him other than with a big smile on his face. I have nothing to worry about. I have no right to complain about anything in my life. What do you have in your life? Who have you seen in your life that completely inspires you for who they are and how they live their life? You'll have multiple people. Think about those people. Write it down. When you're feeling down or when you're feeling frustrated or you're feeling angry, think back on those people. How would they approach changing the mood? Remember, it just takes one thought to change how you're thinking. Now, I'll open it up for any questions. Not just questions, thoughts. If there's something that you could share to enhance this conversation, I encourage you to share with everyone. What are some of the things that you're doing to live your personal paradise? Or what do you hope to be doing? Did this session inspire you to think about something that you want to start doing? I hope so. I can't wait to hear. So Kristen or Claire, can you open it up for questions? Yes. Does anyone have any questions for Debra? I should say thoughts too, not just questions. Share your thoughts and any questions. Any questions or thoughts? We're getting the last day vibes here with the questions and thoughts, but that was a great session. Thank you so much. I know I feel a lot more at peace on this Saturday morning after listening to your session. So thank you again and thank you everyone for attending. You're welcome. And I'm so happy that I was able to still present the session. You now know why I'm not there physically. I could not risk getting on a plane and being exposed to COVID because my husband is such a high risk patient, cardiac patient. So I appreciate that you gave me the opportunity to do it virtually. I give you all virtual hugs and thank you so much for attending. And I hope you'll reach out to me and just give me your thoughts. Yes. We appreciate you joining us in the very early morning hours there in California and giving us a nice, beautiful morning sunrise backdrop too. Oh, we do have one question slash thought. The slides, I think I just added. Debra wanted them shared after the presentation. So the slides are in the app now for you to view. Thanks again, Debra. Have a great day.

personal paradise

happiness

basic needs

fulfillment

love

positive thinking

gratitude

bucket list