How To Reset Your Financial Plan and Know When it’s Time For A Change

Are you feeling stuck in your financial journey—like no matter what you do, you’re spinning your wheels without making real progress or you’re unsure that your plan is the right plan?

If your financial situation isn’t where you want it to be, it’s not because of bad luck—it’s because the system you’ve built around your money is delivering exactly what it’s designed to. In this episode, we dive into Dan Heath’s insights from Reset to help you recognize the hidden patterns shaping your wealth and, more importantly, how to break free from them. Whether it's your spending habits, investment strategy, or mindset around money, small shifts in the right places can create massive results.

By understanding the core idea that your current financial plan is perfectly designed for your current results, you'll learn how to find leverage points that truly move the needle. Instead of making random changes, you'll discover how to focus on the interventions that matter—whether that’s eliminating waste, doubling down on what’s working, or rethinking your approach to financial growth. This episode will give you a clear framework to reset your financial trajectory and start seeing real, lasting progress.

What you’ll learn: 

1. Identify the hidden financial habits and systems that are keeping you stuck—and how to fix them.
2. Discover leverage points that create outsized impact so you can stop wasting time on changes that don’t move the needle.
3. Learn how to restack your resources for compounding growth, eliminating financial waste and accelerating your wealth-building journey.

Hit play now and take the first step in redesigning your financial system—because small, smart shifts today can lead to exponential results in your wealth journey!

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Book a Discovery Call with Kyle to review your corporate (or personal) wealth strategy to help you overcome your current struggle and take the next step in your Canadian Wealth Building Journey! https://canadianwealthsecrets.com/discovery 

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Canadian Wealth Secrets Show Notes Page:

Consider reaching out to Kyle if you’ve been…

• …taking a salary with a goal of stuffing RRSPs;
• …investing inside your corporation without a passive income tax minimization strategy;
• …letting a large sum of liquid assets sit in low interest earning savings accounts;
• …investing corporate dollars into GICs, dividend stocks/funds, or oth

Canadian Wealth Secrets is an informative podcast that digs into the intricacies of building a robust portfolio, maximizing dividend returns, the nuances of real estate investment, and the complexities of business finance, while offering expert advice on wealth management, navigating capital gains tax, and understanding the role of financial institutions in personal finance.

Transcript

Are you feeling stuck in your financial journey? Like no matter what you do, you’re spinning your wheels without making real progress, or maybe you’re just unsure if the plan you’re on is the right plan.

If your financial situation isn’t where you want it to be, it’s not because of say bad luck or say just a lack of understanding. Sometimes it’s the system you built around your money and it’s delivering exactly what it’s designed to do. In this episode, we’re going to dive into Dan Heath’s new book, Reset. It’s not a financial book. It’s a book about how to get unstuck in many different facets of life.

or business or any sort of things you’re trying to feel like you’re unstuck on. He provides practical advice and steps on how to think about, you know, reshaping your strategies. We’re gonna unpack that and apply it to your financial journey. We’ve been reading that here and we’ve found a lot of parallels. And we really wanna kind of dive into a quote that really, from the book, that really stuck out to us as,

as impactful and made us do a double think, and think about what are we doing with our money and what are we doing with our financial planning? And in the quote that Dan begins the book with is around your systems. And we talked a few episodes ago, and the episode was titled, it was episode 140, and it was your financial goals are lying to you. And we talked about a system designing, your system for your financial plan.

And we based that episode off the quote from the Atomic Habits book about, we don’t rise to our goals, we fall to our systems. And we want to make this episode specifically as a spinoff to that episode because we talked about, you your system for designing, you know, your financial plan. We talked about, you know, the financial flywheel effect and how to create a flywheel and what are the components of our flywheels, our financial flywheels in business, but also our financial flywheels in

our financial journey and how we kind of compound our wealth. So we shared that in episode one, for to go back and listen to that episode, but sometimes we don’t know how to create that flywheel or how we, or whether our flywheel is stuck. And that’s what this episode is about. And this is why Dan Heath’s book, Reset, fit perfectly in line with that episode because his quote at the beginning of Reset is the system you have,

So think about your financial system right now. It’s like the system you have is perfectly designed to get you the results you’re currently getting. And that kind of hurts. It stings when you hear it like that, especially when you think about, now it doesn’t hurt and sting if you feel like your system is working well. And because you’re like, yeah, perfectly. I’ve perfectly designed this system. I got this great flywheel effect and it’s designed perfectly to get me these results and I’m getting great results. Awesome. Pat me myself on the back.

But if our system, if we’re feeling stuck, then our system is perfectly designed currently to get those results, which means like, keep doing what you’re doing and you will get those same results because your system is perfectly designed to do that. And so when we think about our systems for financial journeys, our systems for the structures we’re using and the inputs we’re putting into our system to create the outputs,

That system is perfectly designed to get you those results. So if you want different results, you’ve got to change the system. And that’s what the book reset is all about. And in this episode, I don’t want to go into all the components of how to say, get unstuck the way Dan does in the book. Go read the book. I encourage you to. It’s a great read. It’s a quick read as well. We’re going to point out two components because I want to apply this to the flywheel effect in designing your flywheel for financial.

your financial wealth journey. And the component that I want to kind of focus in on is because we’re thinking about designing our system and designing that flywheel to create your compounding wealth. What we need to do is we need to think about what are the components of that flywheel. And that’s how we want to think about getting unstuck. And we want to think about the components to get unstuck.

is because what Dan says is one of the main first components of figuring out how to get unstuck is to find leverage points. Like what are the leverage points that you can double down on? What are the leverage points that can actually move the needle? And identifying those leverage points is a really, is a strong component of getting unstuck and designing the right system. So if I do want a flywheel effect, I need to figure out what are those leverage points that I should really lean in on?

And he’s got two tips about how to find those leverage points. And that’s what we wanna talk about here in this episode is how do you find the leverage points in your system to make sure that your system is producing the results you want to get so that when you think about, you know, your current system is getting the results it’s perfectly designed to get. We wanna be able to like hear that statement and not cringe or hear that statement and go, okay, I’m on the right path. It feels good when I hear that, yes.

Otherwise, if you’re hearing that statement and you’re going like, it just stings a little bit, then that’s the part where you’re like, let’s find the leverage points. So let’s unpack the two strategies Dan in his book, Reset, unpacks on how to find your leverage points. I’m gonna outline them first, then we’ll dive into each one. So the two that were kind of hit home for us was, he says the first part is called go to Gemba. I’ll explain that in a sec. But the second is,

focus and find your bright spots. So let’s unpack going to Gemba. So going to Gemba means, basically it’s a Japanese term, Toyota, when they were building their exceptional, well-built cars, they were designed to last, people were flocking to Toyota to go, what are you doing well to design your cars? And the CEO of Toyota was saying,

hinged all of this kind of like exceptional learning that he’d done to design the right system for building his cars. He called go to Gamba, which basically says go and see the real work, which they were saying, you know, in his in that in the Toyota example, they were going to the line, they were looking and expecting what was happening when they were building the cars and this piece and this piece. And because when you go to Gamba, which means you go and you you go to the work and you see what’s happening, then you uncover

the components that may be misused or not working. So when we think about that in terms of our financial plan, if we are going to go to Gemba, we have to actually go and look at the components of your existing flywheel. And if you don’t have a flywheel, you have to go and look at the existing components of your financial structures and your financial plans. So you have to think about like, okay, if I’m trying to…

build and compound my wealth, where are the inputs coming from? Where do those inputs go? What are they going into? Like, go and dive deep. Sometimes for some of you, this means you have to track daily expenses because all of a sudden it’s like, well, I better actually go and look at where my money is going and where my money is coming from because we hear a lot of times is that when people hop on a call with us, they’re at stage one of their financial building journey or phase one.

which is kind of like they’re still awakening to buying assets and having an asset approached philosophy in terms of their financial journey. But also it also means usually in stage one or phase one, we’re thinking about like, how do we gather more capital to put in places? And sometimes we have to think about like, okay, does that mean I get an extra job because I need more capital? Like you have to reverse engineer where your goals are.

Sometimes going to Gemba means go and look at your budget. Go and look at your daily expenses. Can you clarify? Can you clean up this to actually unlock and get you unstuck on some of the things that you are stuck on? sometimes it looks like, go look at your financial statements and see where there’s pieces that are missing or you can clear up. Sometimes it means go look at your annual reports.

to see like what structure are you currently in? I sometimes we take for granted that we’re just in structures or we’re in different accounts or we’re in different containers. And we think, hey, this is what we do, but we need to go to Gemba and look because you might find those friction points and you want to fix those friction points. And what you’re really doing is you’re narrowing down

where those bottlenecks are when you go to Gemba. And that’s what Toyota was doing. So, you know, I’m often reminded of, we’ve quoted Alex Hermosy here on this podcast many times. And I recently heard Alex say that, you know, his philosophy for just business growth was, he uses three words, is more better new. And he’s saying like, you do more before you do better and then before you do new. So too many times entrepreneurs are saying like, let’s go find something new.

And I think we do that in our financial journey as well. think, let’s go find the new stock or the new structure or the new learning that I need to apply. But a lot of times what Alex said is in terms of business growth is like, you need to just do more. You just need to do more instead of the new. And if you can’t do more, you do better. And if you do that better, and you can’t do anything better, and you can’t do anything more, then you look at something new.

So when you think about our financial plan and you think about going to Gemba, going to Gemba helps you identify the bottlenecks that are existing in your financial system or your financial planning or where your growth is stalling. And go and look and it’s oftentimes we just need to do more. And when you ask yourself this question, what is preventing you from just doing more? And when you answer that question, that is your constraint because you can fix that

then you usually have the exponential growth you’re looking for. So that’s like a constraint versus a non-constraint. It’s like sometimes when you think about your financial planning and you think, okay, wait a bit, is the structure my bottleneck is like this, you know, this ETF or this collection of ETFs or is my risk management strategy here the bottleneck? It might not be the bottleneck. Maybe the bottleneck is just doing more, which means you need more capital.

And that’s a constraint versus a non-constraint. There’s no constraint if the returns you’re getting in your current structure are doing what you want to do to hit your goals. But maybe you just need to add more to the pipeline, which means if you’re not hitting your financial goals, it’s not the structure that’s the problem, it’s the more part. Let’s just do more of that. And then all of sudden, that is your constraint. How do I do more to reach my goal? Do I need to get another source of income?

Do I need to all of a sudden make more in my business? Can I reallocate more to the pipeline or to the flywheel? Maybe I do need to restructure my budget and my financial side so that I can add more to that and then hit my goals faster. So sometimes we think that the structure is the problem and we need to change the structure when the more part may be the problem. So don’t go new, go more first and go, what is the bottleneck that is actually constraining my

my exponential growth or hitting my goals. So that’s an important part about going to GEMBA is like when you go to GEMBA, you will discover some of these bottlenecks. And that’s a part about finding leverage because once you find the bottlenecks and then you work on fixing those constraints, you’ve got a point, you’ve got this leverage point that you now can, you now can you adjust. So if you think about the flywheel from episode one forward and you think about, you know, our flywheel was once

We were taking all of our income and we were putting our income into our pass-through structure. So this was on the business side, but also the personal side. So when our business income would come in, it goes into our pass-through structure, which is a high cash value whole life policy, which provided a safety, growth, liquidity, and flexibility. We couldn’t find another structure that did all of those things and compounded our growth and gave us two uses for the same dollar. So the dollar went into the pass-through structure and then it came out and now we have

it growing in one place and then we bought income producing assets, which is the second or the third component of our flywheel. We think about going to Gemba and trying to narrow this down. It’s like, well, well, we are convinced that the pass-through structure isn’t a constraint. Buying income producing assets, we now know is one of the important pieces that we want to have. And we’ve identified that there’s no constraint really there. We can look for certain deals.

The constraint was like, let’s get more income. All we need to do is put more money into the funnel and then that machine can keep compounding. But there’s parts sometimes where all of a sudden a bottleneck will occur, where all of a sudden it’s like, okay, we can’t find the deals in real estate. So there’s a bottleneck. What are we gonna do to adjust that bottleneck? Going to Gemba on a regular basis is important to make sure that your flywheel is moving as it’s intended and your system

is designed perfectly to get you the results you want to get. So going to GEMBA is the first component to find and use your leverage points because it will help you clarify those leverage points of your flywheel, which makes your flywheel move seamlessly. Okay, the second component of finding your leverage points from Dan He’s book, Reset, is study the bright spots, which really means go look. So when you’re going to GEMBA,

You know, go look at what also what all is already successful, like what are your a performers? Maybe your emergency fund grew in a certain way, go look at that and go what is happening there, study it and study study that component. Maybe all of a sudden, you’re looking at that your assets in real estate, and there’s certain certain real estate assets, they’re outperforming others, what is making those real estate assets outperform others? How can we study the bright spots and use them as leverage points to supercharge?

your financial strategy. Sometimes we just set and forget. When we set and forget, that’s fine because we’re gonna set and forget strategy. But going and studying bright spots can help you fix that flywheel to move a little bit smoother, move a little bit faster, and move a little bit stronger when maybe you haven’t looked at those strategies or those ideas for a while. So you want to kind of go study those bright spots. If you think about our flywheel, like,

why we have our flywheel the way it is, is our bright spots as we know that our pass-through structure is a bright spot. It actually helps us achieve more than what we could do without it. You we put a dollar in, all of a sudden the dollar will grow contractually. It grows in value. It does not go backwards. It grows at a safe rate. And then we have access to it. We have the liquidity, we have the flexibility, the safety there.

And then we can take that dollar and we can buy our bright spots, you know, more of our bright spots, which is our real estate. You know, when we’ve, we’ve studied, we’ve gone to Gamba and looked at what was working in our real estate portfolios. And we’ve doubled down on the right strategy, the right types of real estate that actually help us, which is us going to our bright spots and studying our bright spots to do more of the what’s works and do less of what doesn’t work. And we’ve,

made a point to make sure we continually study what works and what doesn’t. We’re not say setting and forgetting in that part. We’re saying, hey, let’s do less of that type of deal and more of that type of deal. We’re getting higher value there than we are getting over here. And the other part is when we were doing that, we were also making shifts in terms of the portfolio of saying, there’s more bright spots also in risk managing our ETF strategy inside of our, say, our registered accounts or in the business.

our business funds, when we’re investing on the equity side, the learning and the bright spots of doubling down on around risk management in that area has actually paid off very well for us. So helping us identify those bright spots and doubling down on them has been exceptional for the work. studying your bright spots is not only say helping you kind of clear bottlenecks when you go to Gemba, but it also,

helps you identify what are the components of your flywheel. Because what you can do is go, hey, that was working in the well, that doesn’t all of a sudden now your flywheel uses this component and not that component to keep the wheel moving to keep your compound growth happening. So what we want you to think about, right, like we talked about two components here to find leverage to help you build your flywheel for compounding growth. We talked about going to Gemba. We talked about bright spots.

And the point there was finding those bright spots, finding those pieces of your flywheel to build that compounding machine. But it was really about making sure that your system is designed perfectly to get the results you want to get. Because right now your system is designed perfectly to get the results you are getting. So if you are happy with those results, keep your current system. If you want to change those results, change the system.

Because like in that first episode in episode 140, we talked about you don’t rise to your goals, you fall to your systems. So your system is extremely important. So if your system is stuck, go to Gemba and identify bright spots. We’d love to see what your system looks like. We’d love to see what some of your bright spots are. Reach out to us on all social media platforms. We’re CanadianWellSecrets.com. Head over to our website and we’ll see you in our next episode.