What is holistic planning, and how does it differ for each of us? I can tell you what it means to me. It means an agreement with my clients to help them navigate through life’s challenges. In other words, I want to be there when their first child shows up. I want to be there when they buy their first home. I want to be there for them when they make all these decisions from marriage through to retirement. It is my goal to help serve my clients in that capacity.

But before we talk about serving clients, let’s talk about whose client is it anyway? I encourage my clients to form wisdom teams with their other advisors. And we can either work with those advisors, or we can suggest new advisors for those clients who want to move forward. But who would be on your wisdom team? We need an attorney. We need an accountant. We need an advisor. We need a holistic practitioner, a doctor. We need someone who is going to be there to give you that energy, that charge when you need it. Bankers are very important because as your clients grow their businesses, as they grow their incomes, they are going to need to buy houses and all different things.

But whose client is that client? When they are with a banker, are they the bank’s client? Yes, but the bank needs information that you probably have as a financial advisor. When they are with the attorney to do an estate plan, are they the attorney’s client? Yes, at that moment. But the attorney needs critical information that you hold to make critical decisions. So, just know every professional, all the way down to a tax professional, still needs to cost basis at the end of the tax year. So, you are very needed as a financial advisor to your clients. In spite of the answer at the time they are with the client, that’s whose client they are, but you are right there alongside them to make sure they get the best service possible.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s your client. That’s what holistic planning is all about. You are there to make sure that you make favorable introductions to these various professionals, attorneys, accountants, holistic planners and bankers. You are there as the advisor to make the wisdom team special: accountant, attorney, advisor, banker, holistic practitioner.

So, whose client is it anyway? It’s your client first, their client second.

We want to look out for all of our clients’ best interests. What type of advisor are you going to choose to be? Are you going to be an educator? Are you going to be a salesperson? Educators tell clients all the benefits of doing certain things and allow them to make an informed decision. I call that empowering clients to be all that they need to be. Sellers: “Oh, you need this, and you need that. And here’s why you need this. And here’s why you need that.” We call them “product pushers.” They are pushing a product but not necessarily caring about the client.

I want more of us to be educators because that’s holistic planning, educating your client to make an informed decision. The internet, Google and other things like that are powerful tools to hold in your hands. But those powerful tools have to be interpreted. We call the internet the information highway because there is so much out there. You can read about how to do surgery on yourself. I don’t recommend it, but you can read about it. As advisors, our job is simple. It’s to ask questions to make our clients think, to make them pause. Yes, that powerful, purposeful pause. Most often advisors think it’s your job to do one thing. It’s your job to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Well, we were very fortunate. We were given one mouth and two ears. One mouth and two ears. Why? So that we can listen twice as much as we talk.

If we ask questions of our clients to make them think and we listen to their answers, we can help them. Because I was told a long time ago that the answer is in the question. So, as educators versus sellers, listeners versus talkers, it is our job to assist our clients in making an informed decision. You must decide for yourself which one you want to be. How do you get to that decision process? You do it through visualization. You visualize success, not only for yourself but for your client family. Just like we are MDRT family, we have client families, and there’s nothing like celebrating family success, their success, our success, everybody’s success. But how do you visualize that success? As an athlete training for the Olympic team, we would go to camps, and a psychologist would come in the room and would tell us to focus on the situation. It’s not always going to be perfect. There are times when the starter will shoot the gun too quickly and release everyone out of the blocks. There are times when someone jumps the blocks, anticipating that starter shooting the gun off, and the starter is supposed to shoot the gun and bring everybody back. But sometimes they didn’t see that person jump. That’s human error.

So, the psychologist would tell us to sit still in a chair, close our eyes and imagine ourselves in a dark tunnel. The psychologist would then tell us to just be quiet and think about light at the end of the tunnel. And what does that light look like? And if we can see light at the end of the tunnel, that means we can see success at the end of the tunnel. What does success look like to your clients? Wealthy thoughts, wealthy ideas, wealthy decisions. It is very important that they make the right decision at the right time. Visualization techniques, not just for yourself, not just for your own benefit, but for your clients as well, are the things that we need to do as individuals to make sure that we appreciate success when we see it and we do something about that success.

Again, holistic planning is making a commitment to walk your client through life. Not one and done, but to commit to be there for them as the challenges come up and they meet the various challenges. Let’s make our clients winners. In words attributed to Charles Darwin, “It’s not the strongest or the smartest of the species that survives. It’s the most adaptable ones that survive.” Our job is to adapt to changes. We are in the midst of a pandemic as I give this speech, but we have to adapt. Do our clients still need our services whether there is a pandemic or not? Absolutely. Our job is to be strong and to be there for our clients, to be that wisdom team member, to help them out.

When it’s time to call that attorney, we call the attorney in and work with the attorney to achieve that estate plan. When it’s tax time, we get together with the accountant and get everything needed to make sure the taxes are filed on time and properly. We make sure that clients are going to the doctor. In other words, sometimes you have to ask, especially men, “When was the last time you had your heart checked? When was the last time you had this checked and that checked?” Because we are going through life together. Our job is to make our clients the biggest winners.

A great basketball player, Michael Jordan, simply said it this way: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” Let’s make our clients all winners. How do we achieve this goal? How do we achieve this task? We achieve this by making sure that we love and care about what we do as professionals, as planners, as holistic planners, that we approach life in a way that every time we have an opportunity to be with a client, our mere presence is a gift. And if clients call us on the phone, the fact that we are there makes them feel better.

Ellis N. Liddell is a five-year MDRT member with five Top of the Table qualifications and the chairman and CEO of ELE Wealth Management, Inc., an asset management company with its corporate office in Southfield, Michigan. With more than 40 years of experience in the financial arena, Liddell is a wealth manager, insurance expert, and retirement planning specialist. He is author of the book “Wealth Management: Merging Faith with Finance.”