What determines your income and happiness

According to financial-services veteran Max Bolka, “Your income can only grow to the extent that you do.” Bolka believes most of a financial advisor’s success depends primarily upon who they are as a person, before talent or skill even come in to play. “In fact, success depends first on the purity of one’s heart,” he said during his MDRT 2018 Annual Meeting presentation. 

No matter what you tell yourself, you’re right, said Bolka, who specializes in partnering with advisors to provide clients with comprehensive legacy planning and succession planning for business owners. “The inner precedes the outer,” he said.

We limit ourselves by what we believe. Bolka identifies the three categories of beliefs that typically hold people back. Those are:

• Fear
• Lack
• Struggle

Fear
To overcome it, you first need to figure out what you’re really afraid of so you can heal. We often mask our fears, so it’s not always obvious. At least not to us.

For example, Bolka said, we may claim we have the more “acceptable” fear of failure, but what you really might fear is success. “Most people have a far greater fear of success,” he said. “And while fear of failure can motivate you to a minimum level of safety and security, usually associated with the comfort of mediocrity, fear of success is bound to keep you there.”

Lack
You can identify this one by the “if only” statement. As in, “If only I had more time, money, clients” and so forth. This indicates the false perception of lack is at play.

To help change your perception, look at your beliefs to see if they’re actually true. For example, take the concept of time. Time is man-made, Bolka said, and we’re all given 24 hours in a day. “All time management is self-management. Studies show your perception of time and how you experience time influences how your body metabolizes time,” he said.

Wound-up type-A personalities, who live as if they could win their race against time, tend to age quicker and die prematurely. Instead of running a losing race, Bolka recommends a few daily mantras instead, which also work for other areas where people commonly perceived lack. These mantras are:

“I have all the ________(time/health/energy/money) I need to accomplish what’s important to me.”

“My ________(time/health/energy/money) is constantly expanding in both expected and unexpected ways.”

“I am grateful for the________(time/health/energy/money) I have.”

Struggle
“Most people need to prove how important they are,” Bolka said. “Sometimes this entails showing how hard they work and how they’ve overcome obstacles so they deserve the good life. They even create the obstacles to overcome! We love to ‘sacrifice,’ using struggle as an excuse to show what a good person we are.”

The concept of struggling to overcome is a founding belief of many of our myths and our movies, but what if that’s not true? “What if we were born happy, lived blissfully and died happy?” Bolka asked.

To overcome these limiting beliefs, Bolka recommends focusing your attention and creating good habits to override your existing unhealthy habits. In his Annual Meeting presentation, he outlines this in what he calls his “six steps to designing your destiny.”

Read more in Bolka’s presentation, “Success is a state of mind.” 

For more about the value of good habits

• Read the Annual Meeting Presentation “5 habits of highly effective salespeople.”
• Listen to what gets in the way of developing good habits with clients in the video “What separates good from great advisors.” 
• Read more in the MDRT Blog post, “Two good habits of a successful advisor.”