Stuck in financial paralysis?

Dennis and Katie are back! Kicking off 2025, they’re diving into the mindset shifts that can make all the difference in your financial life. In this episode of Simply Why, Dennis Morton and Katie Brown explore the challenges of financial decision-making, especially when feelings of uncertainty or analysis paralysis take over. They discuss why successful investing isn’t just about skill—it’s about discipline, awareness, and adaptability. By shifting your focus to long-term goals and embracing the natural flow of financial planning, you can navigate change with confidence and clarity.

Dennis and Katie also highlight the deeper connections between financial well-being and other aspects of life. They share personal stories and insights on how financial planning is not just about numbers—it’s about aligning money with purpose to create a fulfilling future. Whether you’re preparing for retirement or simply looking for more confidence in your financial decisions, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on what it means to truly find flow in your financial life.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Finding your own personal flow is key. - Dennis Morton

Links & Resources:

• Looking for guidance in your financial journey? Schedule a free consultation today: https://calendly.com/d/5gf-ryf-vq5
• Listen on your favorite podcast app: https://simply-why.captivate.fm/listen
• Book Mentioned: How to Retire by Christine Benz – A practical guide to retirement planning, including the non-financial aspects of transitioning into this stage of life.

Connect with Katie & Dennis:

• Connect with Katie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-m-brown/
• Connect with Dennis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-morton-jr/
• Subscribe for more: https://www.mortonbrownfw.com/subscribe/
• Give feedback: info@mortonbrownfw.com

Important Disclosures: https://www.mortonbrownfw.com/important-disclosures/

Welcome to Simply why, a podcast about money and purpose, where we pull back the curtain on running a financial advisory business focused on providing intentional advice to couples and families. I'm Dennis Morton. And I'm Katie Brown. Welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.

Katie, we decided to press record this morning on a conversation that you and I were having yesterday afternoon. I think one of the things that's fun about doing this podcast is these are the things that we talk about all the time. They're just stories that we share. I wish we could have pressed record yesterday afternoon when we were riffing on this idea. Yes.

Yeah. And you know what, Dennis? It's worries that we share, but it always stems from something. So it stems from conversations that we're having. It stems from things that we're reading.

It stems from outside sentiment of things that we're hearing and seeing. We're talking to you from beginning of February in 2025. One of the things that's always striking about January is we have a lot of client meetings after a period of time where we don't talk to a ton of people in the month of December and the holiday season and everything else. And you just get to take the pulse of things, and I think that's what really got the juices flowing. Yesterday is like reading the room a little bit on talking to clients and prospects and just investors in general and figuring out maybe how they're feeling and trying to put a little bit of perspective around it.

So today we're going to talk about flow. Well, we're going to get to talking about flow, but maybe start where people might be feeling a little bit paralyzed by how things are rolling out in the news. Flow and investing markets and everything else. Yeah. You know, January is an interesting time because I feel like oftentimes people show up with a renewed energy to get things completed and to move forward, or they show up with a thud.

Yes. So true. Now tell me about the thud I get. I get the energy. What does a thud sound like in financial planning?

No, but almost that, like, overwhelm of, oh, my gosh, I have things I need to do, I should do. But I don't know that I trust this environment. Is this the time to do things? Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should.

And it's the lot of, like you said, almost. Almost feeling paralyzed, knowing there are probably good activities to do, but not having clarity maybe on what they are, or feeling like you're in a safe place to take that step forward to do those things. I've heard it said many, many times that the most expensive thing out there right now is your attention. And so many things are competing for your attention. As we lean into a new year and inauguration and political developments, policy developments, everything else, there's so much competing for your attention.

I understand the paralysis of somebody saying, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, or at least not change horses midstream, if that's what it feels like, because I don't have the time to dedicate to that focus or even know where to focus. Yeah, but you know what I think slips by a lot of people too, is that inaction is actually an action. By deciding not to do something or not to make a change, then you are actively deciding to stay where you're you're at, actively or passively, however you want to look at it. But point being, that's an action in itself. I think we've quoted Rush on the podcast before.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. I think it's an oldie but a goodie if we have mentioned that before, but you're right. Especially now, where people might be like a year or two closer to retirement, a year or two closer to selling their business, and it just, it feels like paralysis turns into a drift towards something. Are you drifting toward excellence? Are you drifting toward who knows where?

And I think it's a worthy question to ask. And part of what we want to talk about today is how do you overcome that? How do you get there to a place where you kind of have that buy in to the actions necessary to get the financial confidence? You talked about a little bit about like a mental checklist, right? Like, just can you devise something that's a punch list that helps you to start making incremental progress?

Yeah. And when I think about a mental checklist, most of the things on that list are things that you can control. I truly believe that a lot of worries that people have, they stem from the things that you can't control. So if you can go through and check off the things in your mind, do I have my system set up? Is my family protected?

Do I have proper insurances? Am I saving at a level that helps me to reach my goals? Is my spending in check? But I'm allowing myself to live comfortably and enjoy life, like all of those things. I think when you hear the noise in the markets around you or the noise and you know, just what's happening in the world around you, it's very easy to kind of slip into, oh my gosh, there's so many things that are happening and I need to take action.

But if you can kind of go through your own mental checklist to say, all right, I have taken action. I have done the things. I know that I can weather this uncertainty because I'm controlling the things that I need to be controlling. Yeah. The more I think about this, successful investors, and we're talking about the person who's saving for retirement or the person who's building wealth around their business, or somebody who just has individual, personal financial goals, sometimes they get caught into the trap of thinking that successful investing for them is a skill.

It's something that they need to learn how to pick the right stock, how to time the market, how to make the heroic decision at the heroic time. What you're talking about is discipline. It's setting those conditions for success, knowing that things are going to change in the future. But I think one of the reasons people fail to act sometimes is because they think I don't have that skill, or I need to find somebody who has that skill or develop that skill. But it's not true.

The most successful people we've seen from a financial planning perspective are people who embrace the discipline and the flow of working through their plan. Yes, you are exactly right. I like that you brought into that, that commentary, even just the idea about timing, because can we just throw out the window? Nobody's ever going to get timing perfect. Like, it's just not going to happen.

My predictions for 2025 aren't going to come true. I apologize. That was actually gonna be the second half of this podcast. But we can, we can scrap that.

But honestly, in most cases, you don't need to worry about timing. If you have that, that discipline where you're consistently doing the things and kind of chipping away consistently, then. Then timing doesn't even necessarily have to come into the equation. It's when you make the big bets that timing can really burn you or can, you know, launch you, which great. But, you know, it's like gambling.

Like, once you get it right or you get it wrong, like, you want to go back in for that next one. And. And that's a slippery, slippery slope. Whereas if you can put that discipline and find your flow and all the things related to your financial life, then you can work in when changes need to happen. As opposed to bumper carring your boat through bumper carring your boat.

Just. We're good at mixing metaphors here. That's. That's a. I was thinking of like a bumper car ride, but then I threw him boat on water.

Okay, I got this. You and I go to completely. You and I go to completely different fairgrounds.

Katie's bumper boat sank. That was a gamble.

No, but I was thinking along the lines of, you know, bumper cars kind of like smashing from one activity to the next, but really finding the flow is better. Yeah. So, okay, I've gone totally off the rails here. No, no, not really. Actually, you've brought it right back.

In the driving analogy, we were looking, we were trying to think of other analogies. Like one of our inside, not inside jokes, but something we share all the time, is people treat planning and investing in ways that they would never treat other, other aspects of their lives. So people are constantly saying, these markets are so volatile. Well, I've had a bad day before. Like, I've had stuff go up and down as a parent, as a spouse in business.

Like, there's never any straight lines in anything we do yet. Too often we expect there to be straight lines going up and to the right in our investments and our plan and everything. It just doesn't work that way. And I think the more we can embrace that change, and I think one of the analogies that was really helpful is this idea of driving. I mean, we all do it right?

And in fact, it is snowy and icy where we are today. Kids had two hour delays. Nobody should have been on the road too early this morning. We know that when we get on the highway, there are certain things that we have to do in order to stack the deck in favor of safety on our part. You know, might buy a safe car, drive the right speed.

You make decisions to set the conditions knowing that some idiot could cut you off at any point. You don't know when it's going to happen, but you know that it's possible every time you set foot on the highway. I think the driving analogy makes a lot of sense for here. Just like embracing the flow of what it is you have to do. And there's always going to be some variables.

Yeah, I like that. I like that analogy a lot. And I think of it also from the standpoint, like you said, there are multiple things that you have to do and a lot of awareness that you have to have. My son is he's going to be 16 in a couple of months here and we'll be starting to drive soon. And so I'm trying to make a habit as I'm driving with him to share just some thoughts about kind of the driving process.

And one of the conversations we had recently was, I Probably pay more attention to my peripherals than I do, like, laser focus in front of me. Like, you have to have awareness across all things that could impact the driving. So you kind of have to know, okay, where is that massive puddle? Or is there. Once again, we live in Pennsylvania, and there are a lot of deer around here.

Pay attention for any animals that might be running on the side of the road. And like that, that constant scanning. But being careful not to get so laser focused on one thing. Like, you can't just stare at the car in front of you and expect to be safe the entire time. There are a lot of things that can come from other areas, but to have kind of a soft awareness and go with the flow of things I think is really, really important and kind of apply that to our investing life, too.

We can't put all of our energy into one particular area to make a plan successful. It has to be the awareness of all the things, but also the discipline to not immediately veer one way or another. Yeah. And what's the most dangerous thing you could do if you're driving? Staring in the rearview mirror, constantly looking backward at what just happened.

Yeah. And too often, this is coming back to, like, all right, how do we measure if we're doing okay? How do we check in? If you're sitting here at the beginning of the year saying, how am I doing? One of the worst things you can do is focus exclusively on, am I up or am I down in my portfolio?

Did I have a good year or a bad year? Because that's entirely looking in the rear view mirror without surveying the landscape of what's out in front of you. We see too often, and this is the. We talked about the kind of the two sides of paralysis. One is people will.

They'll not. Not invest. Let's say they'll be too conservative or they'll stick with what they have. That might be too aggressive or risky because they don't have a sense of what's to come. And that's.

That's where that kind of the plan comes back into place. We talked about this idea of soft focus. I think when you talk about scanning the horizon, there's this idea of soft focus. It's applicable to a lot of different activities. I remember it from baseball.

Learned it recently in skeet shooting. You talked about it in tennis. Talk about soft focus and how it might help somebody who might be bouncing from one news story to the next, from one market update to the next, having, like, a laser like focus and hopping around versus maintaining a Soft focus that helps you navigate the flow of your financial plan. Yeah, that does tie into paying attention to those peripherals. We often talk about planning as we don't know what the final number is going to be.

We can't set, we can't be fixated on landing at a particular spot because life happens from every direction. And so that idea of I know the direction that things are going, I have a good framework for kind of where those guardrails are at and where my flex points are at, but I also know that I can flex if I need to. So be focused on your goals. But I think that that soft focused idea allows you to be flexible and allows you to stay in the flow. To say, things might not be going exactly as I might have planned in a hard focus, but that's okay because I think when, when you have the understanding of where those, once again, where those guardrails are at, then you, you can still stay with the flow and not feel as if you have to make a jerk reaction.

Yes. The parallel that I remember from baseball is imagine a batter facing a pitcher who's going to throw a fastball 95 miles an hour or a curveball at 75 miles an hour. And if you try and focus when that pitch is coming, if you focus on the pitcher's logo on the hat or the shoulder or the arm slot, you think it's going to come out of if it shows up anywhere else, you're going to have to move your focus and jump from one thing to the next, which takes your attention away and increases the odds that you're going to miss it. But if you have a soft focus where you're just kind of like seeing the whole picture and not having a laser like focus on any one aspect, the ball is going to pop out of that in sharp relief. It's going to be that thing that emerges.

You'll see the stitches, you'll know where the spin is. Great hitters have that soft focus and see it coming out there. And there's other, again, like tennis and shooting, you know, shooting skeet, you know, you just see the clay come out of this soft focus and you're not jerking the shotgun from one place to the next. I think there's a similar methodology for people to say, I don't need to be following every single metric. I need to have a soft focus on my plan.

And this is something that also came up recently. As you know, I've been working through the book by Christine Benz from Morningstar called how to Retire. And in the intro to that book. One of her key themes for the entire book about retirement is whether when and how to retire is less than 50% about money. You also need a network of people who care about you to practice healthy habits and take care of your body, to plan your days and have activities that bring you joy.

So coming back to this idea of a soft focus and finding flow in retirement, if you're focused more than 50% of your energy on just the money side of it, to the detriment of those other aspects of your life, it's not going to feel like it's in balance. That's when you're going to feel the imbalance. I love that quote and love that you pulled it forward. And through our experience as advisors, I can attest that that's probably spot on. That's a lot of the feedback that we do get from some of the families that we work with.

A lot of our conversations, obviously there's a money component and we need to make sure that especially as things are transitioning, you know, where do the new income streams come from? How do their financial needs get met? But much of the conversation is, it's really kind of working on those other aspects and talking through how is it different, how is life different and how. How are you evolving and what are. What are the new activities that you're doing?

And I love that. I love that part of the conversation. I love the personal connection. Yes, we've been very fortunate to work with people who are kind of successful, have built a successful mindset around retirement and their financial life and have that robust view and confined that flow. Some people never figure it out.

Unfortunately, we've seen that happen. I specifically remember somewhere in, I think it was 2020, maybe like early pandemic, something like that. Or, you know, it was probably the markets had started to recover, but we were still kind of depths of the pandemic and had a conversation with a client on an October day. And I was looking out the window as I'm talking to him. It's brilliant blue sky, like perfect weather, eastern Pennsylvania in October.

And he was despondent over the volatility in the markets and just said, I'm still feeling like I'm below where I need to be. The markets are down. We'd gone through the financial planning process. He was going to be okay. And he said to me, when is the sun ever going to come out again?

He was in town, so he was looking at the same sky I was. Had he chosen to. But that level of focus is what we're trying to avoid, because the sun was out, there were a lot of things that were very positive even then, even at the depths of a pandemic and a bear market and all the things that were happening then. So when I think about outcomes that we should be seeking as planners, as investors, as anybody who's kind of trying to accomplish something, a meaningful life supported by their finances, it's trying to avoid that slippery slope to focusing on the wrong things, which, as you said, it's less than 50% about money and so much more about experiencing the joys of life. I think that's a good example because I do think that it can be a slippery slope.

And oftentimes it's triggered by hearing some things that are happening in the outside world. And oftentimes they are shared in a very dramatic way. And I think if you allow yourself to self identify too much with that and don't give yourself the opportunity to ask the question, is that me? Does that impact me? Then it can become a very scary environment, and it can really shift a mindset.

I think giving yourself that space, that opportunity to just pause and say, am I okay? Is that my challenge to fix? Is that directly impacting the things I'm trying to do? And sometimes just that, that little pause in there can make all the difference in whether or not you see the sunshine that day. Yeah.

I mean, let's face it, it's a cliche for a reason. Comparison is the thief of joy. And comparison takes a lot of different forms. Whether it's benchmarking to your neighbor or the markets or anything else. That's what we're trying to get at here, is finding your own personal flow.

I think a couple of key takeaways from today. One, have a plan that you believe in. It's one thing to have a plan and stick it in a drawer, but to really have buy in and know what you should be checking in on and being able to avoid the noise. The other one, that change is constant. Right.

And then at least 50% of the conversations we have around people's financial lives are not about money. It's about how money goes to support the other things. The health, the wellness, the relationships, all of those. All of those aspects, because that's where meaning is derived. And we can see that when our attention is shifted, all these different directions, as it might have been recently.

And I think for many of us, if we're honest with ourselves, if we are feeling frustrated, feeling like things are not going well, it's sometimes easy to point to the money thing or point to something else. Whereas oftentimes it does go back to, okay, is there a relationship that's impacting how I'm feeling or thinking right now? Am I feeling a lack of productivity and purpose right now? Oftentimes it's those items that are influencing the way we're thinking about things. But it's easy to point to some of these other things that are happening in the world around us and say, it must be that.

Yeah. Because there's no ticker symbol or news crawl for a lot of the other things that we talk about. So it's really up to us to help figure that out. And hopefully in the types of conversations we have, we can empower clients to feel that way. So, Katie, I know we were going to entitle this episode Go with the Flow, but I think Bumper Car Boats is really going to be a much better title.

I think we need to take that analogy and start running with it. And if you're. If that's not the title of your first book, it's got to be the second. Finally, I get to title something there. That's right.

Well, we were waiting for that stroke of genius to come through. So if you don't want your bumper car boat to sink, check in with your plan. All right. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Simply why, a podcast about money and purpose.

We hope you enjoy getting to know us, how we approach leading a financial advisory practice, and the work we do every day to help families and couples make important financial decisions. Morton Brown Family wealth is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. This podcast is designed for educational and informational purposes and not intended as investment advice. More information can be found at Morton Brown Family Wealth.