September 2018 Update

Now that summer is officially over (boo! hisss!) it’s time for one of our all-time favourite activities at Spring: using what we’ve learned about ourselves to make life better — for ourselves, our families, our team, and our clients. (We swear we’re fun at parties.)

In the short time since JYC Financial and Spring Personal Finance merged, this habit of reflection has already become ingrained, mostly because of Julia’s continued insistence on starting every week reflecting on the successes of the past one (you’ll notice mention of this practice in both Julia’s and Sandi’s Week in the Life posts).

An interesting development in the field of intelligence is the concept of reflective intelligence, sometimes referred to as “mindware” by its champion David Perkins. Reflective intelligence is our ability to self-manage, self-monitor, and self-modify, and is different from neural intelligence (which determines the speed and efficiency of our brains) and experiential intelligence (which is context-specific, accumulated knowledge).

Here’s an example: over the summer, Sandi took Wednesdays off to spend with her family and generally laze about in the sun. Her previous schedule (Mondays and Tuesdays for meetings, Wednesdays and Thursdays for focused planning work, and Fridays for overflow work, writing, and internal projects) had to shift to accommodate the change, and Tuesday became a focus day with meetings shifting to Fridays instead.

Without fail, her weekly success sheet included at least one (raving) comment about how easy it was to focus on her planning days. The lesson: a “free” day to work on internal projects in the middle of the week instead of the end is the right pace for her to maintain her focus and creativity (and sanity, if we’re being honest).

As of September 30th, the Spring team will have worked with 85 families on financial, estate, and cash flow planning year to date, plus all of the annual check-ins or email exchanges with clients from previous years who didn’t need to update their plan in 2018.

“Success on your own terms” has been the driving theme of every one of these engagements, and reflective intelligence — the ability to step outside of yourself, pay close attention to what’s working (or not), and modify your behaviour accordingly — is what powers it.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in September: Sandi shares her thoughts on Daring Greatly by Brené Brown in this book review and Julia explains how CPP and Social Security integrate for our readers working on both sides of the border.

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Originally published at springplans.ca on September 25, 2018.