LIFTing the Burden ft. Travis Parry

Once you hit the age of 50, would you look at your life and say “wow I have lived this life I’ve always dreamed about” or would you have regret, wishing you had done things differently?

When Travis Parry’s dad passed away unexpectedly at the age of 49, it forced him to look at his life and his years ahead.

Was he on track to live the life he always wanted? So he started some heavy research on parenting, finances, and psychology, and created a model for others to live without the burden of working too much or worrying about finances.

He, his wife, and his 7 kids take 16 weeks off throughout the year to vacation. His own life is proof that his model works!


Key Takeaways

• When parenting is in-sync and you both are on the same page financially, that stressor goes away.
• Once you boil everything down to your needs and wants, then you can prioritize where your money is going and know exactly how much you are going to spend.
• The LIFT model helps families or couples create a happy and balanced life.

Key Moments

{1:57} “It all just kind of hit me at that moment. Dad was able to become the person that he wanted to become. And I had this come to Jesus moment where I realized I wasn't where I needed to be.”

{9:21} “I felt stuck and I got back into that mode where it was like, wow here I am again, nothing's going to change if I don't change literally everything. So, the first thing that we ended up changing was our financial situation.”

{16:41} “When you have that freedom and you don't have the stress, it allows me to say, ‘yeah, I take Fridays off.’ I take 16 weeks off and we go travel the world with our kids and with my wife and do trainings or public speak, whatever it is that we're doing as we're traveling around. And we homeschool our kids.”



More about Travis
Dr. Travis G. Parry the author of the #1 Bestselling Book “Achieving Balance”, Host of the Balanced Advisor Podcast, and Founder of the Make Time Institute. He’s earned a doctorate in family and human development to better understand stress and goal achievement. Dr. Parry founded the Make Time Institute to help financial advisors achieve balance. More importantly he is a homeschooling father of 7 incredible children and the husband to 1 amazing and talented wife of 20 years.


Get in touch with Travis
https://www.balancedgrowthbook.com/


Share your Story
Send it to us at podcast@jennylynneerickson.com


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Transcript

Jenny Lynne: Travis Parry, I'm so glad to have you here. How are you doing today? 

Travis Parry: Doing excellent. Thank you, Jenny, for having me on. This is awesome. 

Jenny Lynne: I am really excited to dig in with Balance Man, right? 

Travis Parry: That's right. Don't forget it. 

Jenny Lynne: All right. I love it. I love it. Okay. So , as you know, this season is all about the messy middle.

So tell me about the inciting event in your story, the moment where everything changed and you started to get into this loop with figuring out how do I change my relationship with work? 

Travis Parry: So, My father and I had a fantastic relationship. He was 49 years old. We did a lot together.

I was his oldest son and he passed away very suddenly, a heart attack on a mountain bike ride. 

Reality [00:01:00] was none of us were expecting this. We were actually planning a 50th birthday party just two weeks later. And so instead of getting everybody together, family, friends, communityWe all gathered for his funeral and I, I was a financial advisor.

I was ripe old age of 26. I was tasked with doing all the financial stuff helping my mom, figuring out the life insurance, the death benefit, how to pay off her home, her cars, move her to different locations, like all of it was on my shoulders. And that was rough for a 26 year old. You know, kid who, who, yeah, I was studying this.

I was learning on the beginnings of how to help people longterm in retirement and things, but I didn't expect that to happen to my own father right then. And so dealing with the emotions, dealing with everything. I wrote my dad's obituary and in that process. You know, I wasn't expecting to do this.

 It all just kind of hit me at that [00:02:00] moment. Dad. Was able to become the person that he wanted to become. And I had this come to Jesus moment where I realized I wasn't where I needed to be.

And part of that was I wanted to be like my dad. I wanted to have great balance and be there for my kids and coach their games and do all the things that a great family man would do. I got caught up in the providing for that family. I got caught up in, well, I may just need to be more productive or tips and tricks and hacks.

And I just thought I was something more special than the average person and I would just figure it out. So I ended up becoming this do it all. That really isn't a traditional, you know, workaholic, but was, I just kind of got caught in what I call the workaholic trap. And that's when I realized that, oh my goodness, what if I only make it to 49?

I'm halfway. I'm more than halfway there. What [00:03:00] if I don't make it to 50? Am I on track? To doing the things that I need to be doing to becoming the person that I want to become. And that honestly changed the course of the rest of my life to start making change and, and becoming balanced man to help others make the, you know, changes into their balance and moving forward out of that workaholic trap.

Jenny Lynne: So first of all honoring how difficult it can be to lose someone , that young, but it's amazing to me that in that moment, what you saw is a man who lived a full life in his 50 years of life. That's what I'm hearing and really starting to question, am I living? As full of a life that no matter when I die, I know it's exactly what it needs to look like.

Travis Parry: I was probably denying the fact that my dad was even dead for, for several weeks.

was just such a absolute surprise. Yeah. [00:04:00] Someone that deals with somebody going through cancer, for example, you know, they may have a few months to a few years and they go through these processes much slower over time, but when it happens that fast and you get a phone call that dad died, you just like what totally floors you.

Jenny Lynne: That's tough. That's tough. So you were in this moment, you were in denial a little bit, which is totally natural. There's so much logistics. It's hard right after, cause there's all this things that have to be done when you're not in a space where you want to do those things.

But in through those things, you kind of got a mirror into your own life. How did you move from seeing that mirror to turning it into something that you could do differently? Totally. 

Travis Parry: So I, you know, the stages of change, we're not going to get deep into this, but psychologists have found when people want to change from an addiction the first step is just realizing that you have the addiction, that you're in an addictive state or habit.

And I think that was the wake up [00:05:00] call. That was like. Dude, you're here, even though you didn't want to be here. And the irony is I chose a profession. I want to be a business owner. So I'd avoid that completely, but I was naive and didn't have the systems, the processes in place that I do now. And so I realized I needed to get some help.

And I started with consulting help. I started with getting some coaches, going to trainings. Then I started reading books. You know, I did all the things that kind of the self helpy things to do. And it got to a point where I needed to involve my wife. I even involved my my church leaders who were there to help support me because I realized that this addiction for so long had then made me not able to cope with stress very well.

And that stress coping mechanism, a lot of people self medicate. I won't go into all that, but we're human, take your pick. There's vices out there that we choose to self medicate with. [00:06:00] And that became my stress outlet and I realized, Oh my goodness, I need to better deal with my stress and cope with that.

It came from the fact that I wasn't living the balanced lifestyle and I was stuck in this trap. And so with a lot of help, was I able to finally make it through several phases? I call it, do it all. You're doing everything all at the same time. Multitasking throughout your day, being a productive workaholic like, Oh, okay.

I need to be more productive. And I started getting training on that to eventually becoming a personal developer where I was so focused on myself and learning and growing. But if you want to really get out of an addiction, you have to climb all the way out with supportive friends, family, mentors, coaches, you know, church leadership, et cetera, that are all going to surround you and a society.

That's okay with not being a workaholic, which we're, we're so struggling with that. Oh yeah. [00:07:00] Absolutely. A badge of honor. You and I both working on that, right. But yes. So I'd say all of those pieces started to align and it took several years. This was not a overnight success. This is a several year process.

And I was finally able to write a book about it and you know, called achieving balance in that. Really resonates with business owners about, wow, you know, balance is possible. And I actually have a system for it. Nice. 

Jenny Lynne: And we'll talk about that system shortly, but I want to dig first into that first couple of years.

So you said it was a couple of year journey. We all know that hindsight's 2020 journeys look very linear and beautiful. Let's talk about how not beautiful and not linear it was. So you really talked about two things. One is realizing that Stress was one of your triggers that was kind of spiraling down.

How did you go through the process of looking at, I would like something to change. What were the steps you went [00:08:00] through to then say, Oh, this I I've, I'm being triggered by all the stress in my life and it's keeping me from getting to where I want to go. 

Travis Parry: I think once I was able to feel my body again, like literally, I kid you not.

It was two weeks where my wife just felt like. You haven't given me a hug in two weeks. Like I just was numb. I didn't have feeling and it sounds crazy to, you know, most people out there that haven't been through this experience, but I was there at my home for two weeks, helping my mom just get everything in place.

 My coping mechanism at first was helping mom, like feeling a sense of purpose helping her. And then when I got back into my normal state, we got back home and I was back in my job.

I realized that this was not. My purpose, financial planning. I love financial planners. I helped them. They're one of my best clients. They're my ideal clients. I love [00:09:00] them because they need what I have. And I was stuck because of that industry. There are lots of other industries we helped to. But I felt stuck and I got back into that mode where it was like, wow here I am again, nothing's going to change if I don't change literally.

Everything. So, the first thing that we ended up changing was our financial situation. Financial stress is ginormous on people. And I think for business owners, the financial stress is real. You don't do well enough, there's financial stress for sales. You do too well, there's financial stress for taxes and planning and estates and it's just stressful.

And there I was helping client after client every day. Seeing their financial stress going, I want to help them so they don't end up like my dad, who I know dealt with a lot of financial stress. So he's a balanced guy who really made time for his family. Don't get me wrong, [00:10:00] but I think internally. He didn't cope with the stress very well of his financial situations of being a business owner.

And they were successful and there are times when they weren't successful. There were times where my dad actually was, he had a broken neck and was disabled for a while. He wasn't able to work. He just, it was really stressful on him and the family. So that's when I started to realize, well, all this financial stress stuff.

So my wife and I, we wanted to be the poster children of the debt free, you know, millionaire next door type of people. And I also had this poll to help my clients figure out their financial stress. So I went deeper as a financial planner and I got a master's in psychology to understand where is the stress coming from and how to cope with it.

And then I started teaching psychology at a junior college at a local college and really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much. [00:11:00] That I wanted to become more of a speaker on stage and really share that message with other audiences. And you know, I was told, well, you need a PhD and you need to write a book.

And so I began that journey and that led me to basically more and more education to try to figure out these components. The PhD was focused on couples and financial stress. Yeah. And we delve deep into that. And I honestly believe. that workaholism is a financial derived addiction. A lot of business owners, at least ones I've studied and worked with, we've interviewed over almost a thousand now for my book, Achieving Balance and Balanced Growth.

And when we're rolling out, they have told us that yes, they love their job, but there's also this financial component of they're paid really well. And it keeps them kind of. Being, you know, unable to detach going on vacations, [00:12:00] even if they're doing fantastic. It's just this pull that the financial component brings.

Jenny Lynne: Yeah. Yeah. And that financial component bleeds throughout both, not only business owners, but also individual workers, like the number of people that are scared to quit their job because they're at a certain level of income generation and they're afraid to lose that. So there's a stability component that keeps them working in unhappy jobs.

For sure. So yeah, that makes complete sense. And that is like, it's the two things I've found as I've talked to business owners, financial and then performance. So some level of, I want to achieve so that I feel included, loved, like I matter all of those like deeper kind of needs. So let's go back to the basics.

What I love about what you did is you started at the bottom of the, you know, this, the physiological, the actual, like we need money and we need health. Like it starts at the bottom with our bodies and with. With our money. So , how did you find balance with that particular stressor?

So like you said, it's too much income. You've got taxes and [00:13:00] other kinds of stressors to little income. You're worried about sales. And I see people in this. Kind of feast famine all the time of they're reacting to one stressor or another. And then also you have the added component of now that I actually have a lot of business.

I don't want to slow the gas because they still have the feeling of scarcity from when they weren't making as much. And like you said, it's a push pull that a lot of people never find the balance. What did it take for you to define balance in finance for you and with your wife and for your family?

Travis Parry: . So what do we value most priorities? Once we come to this conclusion of like, okay, shared values, what do we value together? 

 After my wife and I started figuring out what are our priorities, where our number one, two, three, and really prioritizing our shared values on money. 

And so I put all of these things together. It wasn't just one thing you're right. It wasn't like this linear, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom all over the place.

So then we created a [00:14:00] structure that looked at what are our financial priorities and where's our, you know, where's our line, like how far do we go down and say, okay, that's it. Cause what a lot of people do is they'll buy on emotion and they'll say they have a financial plan or they have a budget or, but they don't stick to it because of their emotions, because of the stress in the moment, because their kids really beg for something, or they want that vacation that they can't afford, like all of those things.

But if you boil it down to basically needs and wants, and you say, this is how much money we have, or we, we have smoothed because we're business owners. This is how much we're going to pay ourselves. Well, then, you know what you're going to buy and you know, you're going to start at the top and you're going to fund from the top to the bottom.

It's just logic, but most of us don't think logically. It sounds so insane. We're emotional creatures. And so we tend to just. What we have been taught, what we've been trained and what our [00:15:00] instincts tell us to do, because we don't have a plan for that. And, and so after my wife and I became really good at this, like we paid off literally tens of thousands of dollars of debt, we became debt free.

And we have done, you know. Up and down, you know, we're, we're not perfect at this but we've done so much better of staying true to what our shared value priorities are in money, it's not a stressor anymore. Like it used to be. It is a strength of ours. And now we have a good, probably 10 to 12 years of solid track record.

I call it our financial history that we can look back and go, remember when it was this tight? Remember when we were here and we can look back and see the record that we've, we've tracked through budgeting softwares and Excel spreadsheets and go, wow, we really have. Been able to take care of our money situation so much better, 

Jenny Lynne: which then frees [00:16:00] up the capacity to do the things that are important to you because you're looking at if most important to you Is there is your kids and having these experiences where you get to travel together and see the world which I happen to know you So I happen to know You know how to build a business that lets you get away for what 16 weeks I think is 

Travis Parry: is That's the goal every year is try to get away Close to four months and you know, not all at the same time, but yeah, you're exactly right.

When you have that freedom and you don't have the stress, it allows me to say, yeah, I take Fridays off. I take 16 weeks off and we go travel the world to our kids and with my wife, you know, and you know, do trainings or public speak, whatever it is that we're doing as we're traveling around. And we homeschool our kids.

We have a little more flexibility. Now it becomes a time thing. That's where time started to become a huge component is now that when money, when money is not the problem or the obsession or the [00:17:00] compulsion now you can say, well, I've got control over that. Let's control the time that we're spending at work.

Let's look for where the money is coming from and what are the most important things at work to make a super productive so I can spend less time. doing work. I love it. I love my job. I love helping other people. I love that when I come home, my kids are excited that I'm there. Yeah. 

Jenny Lynne: Yeah. And that's, that's what counts the most.

So lightning round. Are you ready for the lightning round? I'm ready. I'm ready. So you have you've kind of gotten to the heart of, so in order to create some of this, you have to scale your business to a degree. And how do you do that without getting stuck in this trap? But if I do more, I'll just accelerate it and then eventually the money will come back to me.

But at some point you kind of lose sight of that. So you've created this lift model. Give us just a super quick elevator version of what that model is. 

Travis Parry: Yeah. So if you want to follow the zigzag [00:18:00] squirrely path, the best kind, by the way, it's all over the place. It's like, how did I package this? I just created the lift model, L live your values.

So as an individual, before you share this with your spouse and family, what are your values? And this came from my father's experience of me writing his obituary. If you had to write yours. This is the model. This is how the practice goes. How would you write that about you and not focus on, you know, what it is you did or the legacy, but who you become through that process?

What is it that you really could say about yourself or what others would say about you as your characteristics? Are you loyal? Are you successful? Like. Focus on those characteristics. Once you have those, then two is the eyes is the ideal calendar in lift ideal calendar. Now this is the time. This is where you can say, okay, now I have time flexibility.

So where [00:19:00] do I put my time? And I don't, it doesn't matter if you're working at a W2 job position where you're, you know you, you have salary or, or 40 hours of work, whatever it is that you're, you're doing, or you're the business owner, you still have control over your time because we have 168 hours a week.

We get to decide that's equality. We all have that, how we use it and what station we come from. That's, that's a whole other topic, but we can say in our. situation. How do we use these 168 hours? And I have 10 areas of life that I say, Hey, you decide what are your priorities? Where would you prioritize your time and how much time?

So track it and then schedule an ideal calendar. The third one is family support. And this is crucial because those personal developers out there are trying to read every book like I did and work through it on my own. So my family wouldn't have to suffer. The reality is once I open up to my family, like, Hey, this is my ideal calendar.

I want to [00:20:00] live this. I want to be with you. And I want to go on daddy dates and vacations and take my wife on dates and take her on vacations and you guys, we all have to be in on this together and they have their own ideal calendars that we actually set down once a week and we go through our ideal calendars.

There's, I, we have seven children. There's no way in the world we'd be able to operate if we didn't actually say, Hey, this is what we're doing every day. This is how we're operating. We've been doing this for over a decade and it's saved our lives, literally has saved our lives. We'd go crazy. And it doesn't matter how many children you have.

You don't, you know, have to have a quiver full, but regardless, it's important to have this family support for you to be like, well, dad. You're, you're going to come home at three o'clock today because we're going to go, you know, mountain biking or we're going to go to get ice cream or whatever it is, man, I don't want to break that.

I don't want to break that promise to my child who I've, I've [00:21:00] committed to be there with them. It gives boundaries. To our ideal calendar so that I don't become a productive workaholic and just work all day and make lots of money. It's easy to do. It's easy to do. That's where you get sucked into the trap.

So the family support is absolutely crucial. And quite honestly, if we don't look at this as an addiction, we don't. Why do we need family support? Because look at any addict. If they go away to a treatment facility. And they come back right back to where they were and nothing has changed in the home or their friends or their community or their lifestyle.

They'll go right back to where they were. It doesn't matter if we don't treat it like an addiction that needs a support system that we'll miss it.

We'll get started. We'll make progress and then we'll fall right back. The last piece. Really is as if you have a partner or a spouse, you need to work as a team, you need to work as a team together. This comes back to the financial piece. It comes back to the [00:22:00] time piece, but it also comes down to, are you going to help your children?

To not be workaholics. Who's talking about that? Who's talking about, well, I'm going to give my children an ideal calendar and teach them how to be balanced young children so they don't grow up thinking they have to be a workaholic in order to make it. Because I think that's where a lot of, you know, the ideology in society is.

But if you want to change society, you change the family. Change the family by being great teammates with each other as, as parents, and then you can teach the children. So that's the Lyft model, L I F T. It works. It's been helping myself for a long time and our clients literally for, for years and years.

Jenny Lynne: I just want to be a fly on the wall with your seven kids and the two of you comparing calendars. I mean, I swear guys, right? 

Travis Parry: I'll throw my GoPro in the corner next time. You know, it's crazy. Got it down to about, you know, 45 minutes to an hour. Not bad. Going through not bad 

Jenny Lynne: for the seven kids. 

Travis Parry: We, we focus on [00:23:00] goals too. It's not just time, like, Hey, how can I help support you in, you know, your goal and our family goal and very, very goal oriented, which is balanced, right? How do we help each other? Yeah, that's 

Jenny Lynne: amazing. All right. So You've already kind of summarized your methodology so well, but I want to talk about your journey and the journey you went on.

And so one of the first things I heard actually is close to your L and your lift model. And that's, if you died tomorrow, are you living the life that you want to live now? That's the, that's the first step, that kind of moment. And people can have that moment without losing somebody. So I think what I really heard under the.

Under the covers of what you were saying is don't wait until you lose someone or go through this experience. You actually can pause now and ask yourself if you were to die tomorrow. And I know that seems dark, but I've done it before. Is the life that I'm living right now, the life that I would be okay with.

It helps a lot to just ground yourself around what's important. So that's what I heard first. Next thing I heard is that you really found your triggers like it's and it's stress and more [00:24:00] specifically as you dug underneath it, financial stress that no matter whether things were great or bad, there was always some sort of financial need associated to it that you were chasing.

And so the chasing never stopped because no matter whether things are going good or bad, you're still running after it. So really getting clear on that financial stress as being the core of what was driving a lot of this. Okay. Then from there, I heard underneath that is that in order to resolve the financial stress, you actually had to go deeper and figure out what was important to you so you could set priorities.

And instead of running, constantly chasing these financial things, instead, you were focusing on how can I use the financial resources available to me and the time available to me in order to enable these. Important priorities in my life. And it became a much clearer path to what success looks like. And you were able to set up boundaries and stop when, when, when you're done.

That's right. That's why you had to have both the time and money component which you have in your lift model as well. And then in there, I actually [00:25:00] skipped a step. So if we kind of backtrack to the moment where you realize you need to change, I love the step you put in there and feel your body. There's a lot that goes on in life, but a lot of times when people have these moments, there is a bit of a, let's pause and let's get back into our body and our life before we try to solve these big esoteric problems, because we actually need full capacity and access to ourselves in order to move, move that forward.

So I love that you kind of embedded that in there. So I'll maybe put that 

Travis Parry: well done, well done. And 

Jenny Lynne: then ultimately it's backing it up. It's doing the work and bringing in, you're making your whole family, a part of the process so that you have all this track record over time to be able to look back on and trust that even though you don't know what life's going to throw at you, you know, that you have the tools to navigate it.

How was that for a summary? Of course, you made it easy with your lift model, but, 

Travis Parry: You're, you're a pro like this is, this is exceptional. I love seeing it in this form because. You, you know, cause we know each other a little bit from some training we've been involved in it's [00:26:00] public speaking, but getting the message out, just getting the message out.

Like you pulling that out of me is very helpful because it's here a lot. And in my next book, I'm going to focus more on the financial piece of it. My first book, achieving balance talked more about the time aspect, which is a resource. It is our greatest resource, but the money part, or I'm going to go take a deeper look into how the financial stress really causes all of this in the first place.

So I really appreciate you bringing this up and you, you, you hit all the pieces, even the, even the slight little pieces, like feeling in your body. Cause you're right. Like I could write a book just about. The two months, the two years after dad died about grief and but I have others who have done much better job on that, but yeah, you know, feeling where you're at.

So you're not trying to make life changes in that moment. Crucial. So thank you for bringing that up. Oh, 

Jenny Lynne: thank you. Well, do you have any final words of wisdom for, for folks listening? 

Travis Parry: My only word of wisdom is exactly what you said earlier, but you don't have [00:27:00] to have a life changing event to make change.

Unfortunately, it's what typically brings us to change. Look at us. Look at us. Both of us had that. Yeah. Yeah. 

But until you really know what your values are, you won't have that internal motivation to, to make the change. 

Jenny Lynne: Yeah. Yeah. That's very powerful. And for those of you who are not writers and don't like things quite as bulleted and organized, you can also visualize your funeral. Think about who would be there, what songs would be playing, like get in your body a little bit more experience it.

But there's so many ways to get at this exercise, but it is so important. . So. Thank you so much for your wisdom, Travis. You are an amazing human being and I'm so excited to have you on. And thank you everybody.

Travis Parry: Thanks Jenny.