You wouldn't invest without a strategy—so why live without one? Dr. Ryan Lazarus joins the podcast to connect health and wealth through the same idea: systems beat improvisation.

If you’re interested in learning more, please visit: lazarusmethod.com

Hi! I’m John.

And I’m Julie.

We’re the hosts of the Hartford Fund’s human-centric investing podcast.

Every other week we’re talking with inspiring thought leaders to hear their best ideas for how you can transform your relationships with your clients.

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Welcome to the Human Centric Investing Podcast, Dr. Ryan. We’re so happy to have you here with us today.

Hi Julie and John, I’m stoked to be here.

You know, Dr. Ryan, I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. I think it was during the, uh, the great recession of 2008, nine, 10, whatever that period was that I remember thinking myself, you know, my health is probably the greatest asset that I have right now. Might’ve been because everything else was falling. But the fact of the matter is if I weren’t able to perform my work, uh, which was very important and obviously provided everything for my family. I was gonna be in a world of hurt. And ever since then, Julie can tell you, I stress to all members of our team that we have to make sure to take care of ourselves because we are our most important asset. And I know that this is an area of focus for you, but I’m interested in hearing a little bit of your story. What was your journey that brought you kind of into this realm of health, thinking about performance, overall health, the ability to concentrate? Just how health impacts everything that we do, especially for the financial professionals who are listening.

Yes, health is the new wealth, they are synonymous. The new currency of life is the balance of our wealth and our health. And wealth expands kind of your options and gives you freedom and allows you to have certain resources and do certain things, but really health determines whether you have the capacity to use those. And I know many people that are later on in life that had regretted investing more in their health than their wealth. And ultimately what we want to do is invest energy and time and resources into both. And there’s a way to do that. And that’s what I want to share.

Dr. Ryan, will you share with us your journey as to how you arrived in this profession? I know it’s very powerful and I think our listeners would love to hear it.

Yes, yes, I’m happy to it was it was supposed to be a routine play 31 years ago in 1995. I was graduating high school two months away from graduating and was a very competitive soccer player and was playing indoor soccer and was chipped into a wall and rolled over the wall in freak accident and ended up crushing my organs and so had an emergency surgery and removed my pancreas and spleen. And from that, I became a insulin dependent type one diabetic and had digestive failures and all kinds of different complications that I was never really truly prepared for. And with the different phases of my life, but the 10 years subsequent to that where I was in college and trying to be normal was very dark. I was sick a lot, I was in the hospital, I was dealing with a life that I was unfamiliar with. And also the mindset and the depression and the anxiety and the fear and the victim, there was a lot of lessons that I learned at that time and realized that I had to figure this out myself. I was seeing almost every doctor I could see and. I realized that there is no playbook for what I had, and I needed to figure this thing out. And it dawned on me, I said, I’m gonna learn everything about health. And that’s where I did pre-med, got into school, got a master’s degree, became a functional medicine practitioner, became a nutritionist, became a personal trainer, really just obsessed with gathering information and applying it to myself. And then made that my profession and spent over 20 years in the Napa Valley in California, treating different people and applying what I learned and essentially creating and sharing this method that I’m happy to share with you.

So Dr. Ryan, you mentioned functional medicine. For those of us who may not be familiar with that term, kind of what is functional medicine?

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s not dysfunctional medicine, I’ll tell you that. Functional medicine is the new era and paradigm that doctors use to find the underlying reason about why we eventually have symptoms, syndromes, diseases and conditions. Whereas comparing and contrasting to what we’re used to in this country and maybe in Western medicine. There’s really not this pursuing or investigation of why. It’s really the name blame, cane game. You have a symptom, we’re gonna call it this. It’s caused by this and we’re going to give you this for it. And there is a time and a place. Look, I have to use Western medicine because I require insulin and I require digestive enzymes and I required diagnoses. So it’s not throwing that out. It really is. A holistic framework that can be used with emergency medicine and Western medicine. And so this paradigm shift, we’re right in the middle of it right now. They said from about 2020 to 2030, almost every single patient as they realize this new operating system is going to demand this. And we’re in the right middle of right now, so to answer your question, it’s just a practical way of identifying the imbalances in the body and then fixing them.

Dr. Ryan, when I think about financial professionals, there’s oftentimes travel involved, odd schedules, early mornings, late nights, meetings with clients, meetings with our companies and our team members. You’re not necessarily sleeping well, you’re not eating well, and then let’s layer in the complexities of the market and unexpected developments there. And then if clients have needs and all of a sudden. It feels like our day, our schedule, our life isn’t really ours. And I know that you work with many athletes, many very high-performing athletes that obviously have similar demands and their body in so many ways is their tool. How do you think about helping people, whether they’re a professional athlete or a professional financial professional, put all of these pieces together and really start thinking about their health? First, rather than their outlet calendar, which oftentimes is sort of driving our day and our life.

Yes, I work with professional athletes, world record holders, high level CEOs, biohackers, everyone in between. The financial professional is a corporate athlete. And pressure that they have to perform is very similar to these professional endurance athletes. And the system should be the same for my athletes and my corporate athletes. And so my answer is I apply the same principles. It’s very hard to balance our professional obligations with our family and our health. And that is... That’s the twist, that’s the tug of war that most of my health professionals that are my patients are dealing with. There’s meetings, there’s dinners, there’s entertainment, and they struggle with what health habits can I keep at the same time as prioritizing my family and my profession. And so I say it’s really no different. And that’s why You would not, like for my health professionals listening, you would not invest without a strategy and or a system or you know there’s some protocol or formula that we generally use in finance or in our jobs and so that’s really my argument is our health should have a system. It should have a formula or a framework that we use and that’s what I teach my health professional and my endurance athletes. So my answer is they’re one and the same.

So Dr. Ryan, what is this system? How can you describe that for us at a high level that we can begin to think about it?

Yeah, well I took that 30 years of experience and I also took the 20 years of being in the trenches in private practice with thousands of patients and learn what works and what doesn’t work. And I will tell you what doesn’ work is chasing fads and following the shiny things that are all over social media. You know, you don’t rise to the level of your goal, you fall to the levels of your system. And so, you know, that’s from James Clare, the Atomic Habits, one of the most important books that I highly recommend to everybody. And so that system should be one that is flexible. You can balance everything, like I said, and you can stay consistent. And so in my book and when I work with all of my patients, there’s these seven essential health elements and I can touch on each one and you know, there can be follow-up questions if you’d like, but I’ll just say it’s, make it very simple. The bottom three of this framework are the classic health elements that everybody knows and recognizes. They’re the foundations and anchors of health and I call them Nourish, Rest and Move. So it’s how we move, it’s the quality of our rest in our sleep and it’s what we’re putting in our body. So those are obvious. That. That isn’t going to blow the mind of your listeners. But what happens is there’s often neglecting the growth and the mindset portion, which is the top three of the system. And that’s called connect, learn and challenge. And so just to touch on those and we’ll have follow up questions, but learning is the ability to receive information and learning things that interest and inspire you, not just work. Because sometimes we get in the loop of just going doing our work responsibilities, being with our family, if you have a family and not really pursuing these other things. And this is where flow states come in and neuroplasticity, which is how our brain expands. And ultimately that provides us with perspective. And so sometimes it helps to kind of zoom out. So when some people are feeling stale or in the loop, it’s a very important aspect that I teach. Connect is just connection to nature and connection to self. So You know, we have this roommate in our head speaking to us all the time. All the time, never shuts up. And you know, I teach people mental fitness to learn how to be a witness and observer of, you know this chirping and not believe it all the time. And this is where, you know the act of mindfulness comes in. And, and the connection to your support group, very, very important when it comes to having sustainable health habits is, you know, having a support group or people in your life that. That can support you through this. There’s a lot of really important science that shows if you’re isolated, that it can be hard to make this a consistent lifestyle. And then challenge is having something that you’re moving towards that inspires you and motivates you. And it could be in your job, but it could in any aspect of health. And then in the center is what I call spark, and that’s your passion, your purpose, and your potential. So ultimately, what I do is I evaluate each person’s kind of effectiveness and bandwidth and energy in each one, and I find where they are lacking or where they’re vulnerable. And then we work to correct those that are weak and kind of develop this holistic kind of growth of all of them. And so this system, it’s holistic, it is comprehensive, but it can be completely personalized when I gather the data from them. So I’m happy to answer. All kinds of questions if you want to dive into each one.

My mind is swirling. I love that. I think it really helps compartmentalize, but yet pull all the pieces together because I think oftentimes we maybe focus on just one piece, like, oh, I’ll pack my workout shoes or, oh maybe I’ll just drink sparkling water tonight instead of having a beverage. So I think the bringing all those pieces together is so interesting. As financial professionals think about the next conference they’re enrolled to attend. And the busy schedule and you know breakfast might start at 7 a.m. And then the dinner might start at 7 p.m and then ultimately the the social time when maybe they want to talk to colleagues or peers is after dinner right so it starts to get late into the evening how and i know there’s no one size fits all, but just. Even if you could help us think about foundationally some best practices, sort of how would you guide someone to flow through this day? What are some things maybe that in your mind are kind of non-negotiables or maybe those one or two small adjustments that someone could start to make as they think about, okay, the next time I’m at one of these events, here’s how I’m going to change my behavior so that I learn better, I connect better, I feel better, all of those things.

Yeah, that’s the juice, right? That is the challenge in the whole thing is, I just shared a two minute framework and it’s holistic and it is great, but the reality is I think it’s almost impossible to allocate energy to all of those. And so ultimately what I will share and what I teach with my patients is get rid of the pressure. There’s gonna be a lot of pressure to do this. And so in my book called the Essential Health Playbook. I talk about our life as offense and defense. We all know generally sports that there’s two aspects in sports. Offense is you’re leaning forward, you’re proactive. There’s a goal you’re trying to score, okay? And in defense, it’s different. You’re reactive. There’s chaos. You’re on your heels. You need to be able to make decisions quickly and pivot quickly. They’re two different strategies. And so When you have structure and routine and time, that’s where we can be an offense and that’s why we can maybe start to put energy into all of those things. But your question, Julie, is what happens when you’re on defense? You’re waking up and you barely have time to do anything. There’s meetings, there’s meetings. There’s social entertainment. And so there should be a defensive game plan. You realize, A, there’s awareness, I’m on defense. This is not what time where I’m gonna have 45 minutes to 60 minutes in the gym. And I’m not gonna have my 30 minutes in the morning journaling and writing down things or my intentions or meditating or whatever you may wanna do. I pair offense and defense with ceiling goals and floor goals. When a health professional is busy and there’s a lot of obligations, they’re on defense. And so that’s the time to hit floor goals, that is the minimal amount of effort to just sometimes check the box. And it could be just walking. I mean, it could walking. It could be using the stairs in a hotel. It could taking calls outside and walking around. It could doing. You know, air squats in your hotel or in your office. It doesn’t have to be this long investment. With nutrition, I use this framework or this formula called the EAT plan and it makes eating optimally so easy. It’s just, it’s basically you select one of the three. So EAT, it the essentials, it is the amount and it’s the timing. And so sometimes you feel like you need to eat perfectly or if you’re having some momentum and you’re in a work meeting and the nutrition is not where it needs to be or you’re provided food that maybe is in alignment with what you’re trying to do, then you have some other leverage points. You could change the timing, you could change to the amount that you’re eating. And so kind of knowing, okay, I’m outside of my normal routine, I wanna eat the right way. Which one of these could I do? Could I eat exactly what I should be eating? Could I modify the amount or the timing, which is basically when you’re eating. And then for the sleep, sometimes it’s very hard. I have a lot of health professionals I meet with that will have meetings that turn into bar sessions, happy hour, and they’re going to bed. Around 11 or 12 and then we’ll have a meeting at 6 a.m. And so this is where there’s a little strategy about the alcohol consumption at night and having a game plan on how they can get the proper sleep because sleep is non-negotiable. And so there I kind of identify where each person struggles with when they’re very, very busy and then I create a strategy and a game-plan. Based on those anchors.

So Dr. Ryan, you, you talked about systems kind of trumping hacks and, and the latest thing we find on social media. Can you give us an example, maybe of a client that you work with recently, where you developed a system, if you will, um, that, that kind of addressed one particular aspect, obviously changing the names to protect the innocent, but just to give people an idea of what you mean by systems, Trump kind of hacks.

Yeah, you know, I alluded to it. There’s a lot of shiny things right now. There is a lot trends. And we now live in an era where it is information overloaded. Used to be 30 years ago, you’d have to go to your doctor because you didn’t know this health information. And then we had the internet where you could kind of research. Now anyone could literally put their labs in to GPT and say, tell me exactly what to do. And there’s this endless amount of noise, if you will, on social media or podcasts. Of course, not yours, but just there’s so much information. People are they’re overwhelmed with health advice and they’ll chase something because, you know, someone will make a great argument about doing it and they don’t sustain it. And so ultimately, the system is sustaining. Something that is aligned with your goals, your values, your priorities, and your lifestyle. And so having awareness of that is the first and most important, like literally auditing your health is an important start because you need to know where you’re at and where you need put your energy in. So to answer your question, John, there’s one I actually wrote about him in the book. His name was Trevor, even though his name is not Trevor, but I think a lot of your listeners Mike, find this. May be very relevant. So I practice in California, about 45 minutes away from Silicon Valley, we have a lot of tech execs and A lot of high demands with these startups and a lot of moving parts, working 18, 20 hours. And this gentleman was from Silicon Valley and I won’t name the corporation, but very busy and had about 300 people reporting to him. And he enrolled in my program and it was the classic, just tell me what to eat, give me the supplement. I just wanna get leaner and I want my energy better. And I do that and I gave it to him, but as I started to understand his lifestyle, there were some key deficiencies that needed to be addressed before. And one of those was connect. He was not present. He was literally connected to this thing all the time. So we would be in meetings and he wouldn’t even be listening. And I’m making it very clear. You need to do these things. And he was, is not present and so I explained to him. The difference between being present and not being present, which is that when you’re on autopilot and you’re just moving from one thing to the next, it is very hard to be intentional with what your health goals are. And so I just, I met him where he was at and I said, I just want you to try, you know, a couple of things and I wanted him to, I call meditation mental fitness, but I wanted to share with him the benefit of this, but there’s a, it conjures up a lot of misconceptions and even torture if you will. You got to sit in this position. You can’t think. It has to be 25 minutes or longer. And I just shared with him that you can practice being solely focused on one thing all throughout the day. And so I would just have him every time he’s brushing his teeth in the morning. His mind would be wandering, just like many of us. We’re not really present. We brush our teeth and we move on. Or when we’re doing dishes, we’re like, let’s move from this chore, cause I have things to do and we’re never really present and so I just made him like truly be aware of, you know, the pressure of his hand on the toothbrush and what the bristles feel like and what toothpaste feels like and what I was just doing was instantly bringing immense awareness to what he was doing. And that’s the power of mental fitness and meditation. And he started to get a little better at it. He would come in and I said, okay, let’s start to expand this a little bit more, taking it from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. What eventually we did is I opened up this understanding that our mind is on autopilot all the time, thinking about things in the past and thinking about things we need to do in the future. And he had a little bit of confidence and clarity. And he realized that he could start to insert intentions with his goals in there. And so he started to develop momentum. There was a light bulb that went off. So I would give him every three or five minutes the opportunity to just sit and focus on one single thing. And it was like a lightbulb went off for this gentleman and he realized the difference between where he was and where he wanted to go, because he was more present with his family. As calls were coming in, he was realizing how he was neglecting certain things. So the story about Trevor was the libel went off. He realized what simple things that you can do and how it translates into his personal and his professional life, his relationship with his kids got better and his wife and his employees and his colleagues. So then he started this regular practice. And so he put it into his system. He eventually developed a habit in which he prioritized non-negotiable, five to 15 minutes of just simply focusing on one thing. Immense change in this man’s personality, translated into eating correctly, exercising, communicating better, and people would say to him all the time, what is going on? You are different. And that recognition that he was a different person was just compounding this emotional investment he was putting in. And he started to meditate every single day for 30 minutes, and his life completely changed. So it’s a long answer, but I just wanted to bring in that the connect portion and the responsibilities that we have with these texts and these texts, and these emails, and these meetings can sometimes take over our psyche and our consciousness. And when you can learn to prioritize it and then make it a habit that you can learn to become a witness and observer, then it translates into everything else in your life and so that’s that’s one there’s many with people that changed their diet and started an exercise routine and had terrible sleep and started to prioritize but that one really stuck in my head and I think it hopefully it resonates with some of your listeners about why you would prioritize that type of that health change.

That is such a great example. As you were saying, the brushing your teeth example, I know I did it this morning. I can assure you of that. But I can’t tell you anything more about it, right? It was literally autopilot. I was thinking about this. I was think about meetings later today. So that’s just such a powerful reminder. For our financial professionals listening, if they’re intrigued, right, and even that small example of brushing your teeth really caught their attention. How do you typically guide people to begin this journey? Obviously, there’s a lot of steps involved, but what is that first step that you would guide our listeners to do if they’re thinking, you know what, this is my curiosity, I want to really invest in myself.

Yes, in regards to prioritizing a meditative practice.

Or just any part of the process, how might they think about, whether it’s meditation, whether it is more of eating better or exercising, how would one get started? What is the first thing? And maybe it does start with meditation, right, really looking inwards.

It is. Your daily choices without judgment, without judgment. The awareness is the most important part. Every single health coach, executive coach, integrative functional doctor that is ultimately trying to improve your daily habits will agree if you’re unaware of the choices you’re making every single day and you are just on autopilot, it’s very, very hard to integrate a new, better decision for your health. And so that’s part of what I do is they take an intake form and it asks them 50 questions and they get a grade. They literally get a scorecard, report card on these health elements. But that’s my formula and system. It could be any intake form on what you’re eating, your exercise, your sleep. And so, that’s the first thing. I would also say be... Be very clear with what your goals are. I mean, this is, you know, very obvious, but sometimes like I alluded to, you wanna eat right, you wanna sleep right, you wanna exercise, you want to get lean, you wanna meditate, it can be very, very overwhelming. And so what I would do is say what is your goal and can we create some momentum in that first because what we know is that this momentum carries over to other aspects of our life. And being overwhelmed with trying to change everything at once for most people, Julie, does not it does not work. It might it might work in the short term. But ultimately, what we’re what I’m trying to do is have it be consistent. And so it’s just they’re simple changes. What are your goals? And then another thing I would say is understand your priorities. A lot of people think that they... Want to get healthy for this reason, and it’s not in alignment with what their priorities are. And if there’s a misalignment of why you’re trying to do something with what is actually important to you, it’s very hard to sustain it. And so, you know, auditing your habits, being aware, having a clear goal, making it simple so you can achieve success there and add layers and stack it from there. And then just practice this as much as you can. Change is hard. We all resist it. But once you develop this momentum, it carries off into every aspect of your life. It also, it takes weeks. And so often people can get frustrated and then go back to what they would call their normal routine.

Ryan, I’m laughing because the process you just described is the same process that financial professionals use with their clients all the time. We have to develop an asset statement and an income statement. Just understand where the client’s at. We need to have a thorough discussion of goals. And then we have to talk about the process by which we’re gonna get there. And so I think your process is something that financial professional can really identify with. So thanks for that example.

Yes, of course. As you know, too, it’s also the practical application of that. It’s a great start, but then it’s the implementation of that and financial discipline, just like our habit discipline. But you’re exactly right. They are one and the same.

Well, the devil’s always in the details. And if it’s okay with you, we’d like to begin the process of finding out a few more details about Dr. Ryan Lazarus. We heard your story earlier, but if you’re game, Julie and I would like to. Kind of do a session with you that we invite all of our guests to do, which we call the lightning round. And the simple purpose of this is to help our audience get a little better idea of who Dr. Ryan Lazarus is as a person. So if you’re game, we’re going to ask you a bunch of questions, just one top of mind answers in terms of what comes to mind and maybe a little bit sentence or two as to why. So if you’re okay, I’ll ask Julie to start.

Yeah. I’m game. Ask away.

What’s your superpower in one word?

My superpower is taking complex information and making it simple for somebody to understand and to be able to implement into their life immediately.

Dr. Ryan, what’s the first concert you ever went to?

It was the Beach Boys. It was in Mountain View, California. And I think it was six. So it was 1983. And I was with my parents and all of their friends dancing, really silly, just had to bring that up because I haven’t thought about that in a while.

That’s great, I can picture it now. What’s your favorite app on your phone?

My favorite app is called FitMind. It is mental fitness training that you can click and get 30 seconds to 30 minutes of lifting, heavy lifting for your brain. So that is probably my favorite app.

All right, what is your go-to karaoke song?

Wow. Uh, you can never go wrong with living on a prayer. Uh, but some of those notes are really hard and embarrassing. Um, yeah, I’ll say that probably any of those eighties rock, you know, I’ve had my guns and roses nights as well. Um, so.

Dr. Ryan, thanks for being with us today. I really enjoyed the time we spent together today.

Thank you, John. Thank you Julie. It’s great talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Thank you so much. And for our listeners, if you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Lazarus, you can visit www.LazarusMethod.com or check out his book that he mentioned. It’s called the Essential Health Playbook and it’s available for purchase at Amazon. Dr. Ryan, thank you again for being here with us today. You’ve given us so much to think about.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to the Hartford Funds human-centric investing podcast. If you’d like to tune in for more episodes, don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube.

And if you’d like to be a guest and share your best ideas for transforming client relationships, email us at guestbooking at HartfordFunds.com. We’d love to hear from you.

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The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the guest who is not affiliated with Hartford Funds.