Wealth Beyond Riches: Building Prosperity With Purpose, Values, and Impact

How Your Personality Shapes Your Money Habits with Douglas Lynam (Ep. 39)

• Abbey Henderson, CFP® • Season 1 • Episode 39

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What if the reason certain money habits feel so hard to change has less to do with strategy and more to do with how you’re wired?

In this episode, Abbey Henderson, CFP®, CEO, Wealth Advisor & Coach, sits down with Douglas Lynam, author, TEDx speaker, and investment advisor, to explore how personality patterns and early-life experiences shape how we earn, spend, save, and give.

Abbey and Doug discuss:

  • Doug’s unconventional journey from Marine to Benedictine monk to financial advisor, and how it shaped his perspective on money
  • Why many financial struggles are actually behavioral struggles in disguise
  • An introduction to the Enneagram and how it helps uncover underlying money patterns
  • How childhood experiences and conditioning influence financial decision-making
  • And more!

Resources:

Connect with Abbey Henderson: 

Connect with Douglas Lynam: 

About our Guest:

Douglas Lynam is an investment advisor, author, and speaker known for his work at the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and financial planning.

Before entering the financial world, Doug spent 20 years as a Benedictine monk, where he helped lead his community through financial challenges and discovered how closely money struggles are tied to deeper emotional and behavioral patterns.

Today, he helps individuals better understand their relationship with money through frameworks like the Enneagram, offering a more human and self-aware approach to building wealth. He is the author of Taming Your Money Monsters and From Monk to Money Manager, and his work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times and CNBC.

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Wealth Beyond Riches with Abby Henderson, CEO, wealth advisor, and coach at Aberis Financial Group. In this podcast, we help generous, fun, and passionate professionals overcome their biggest financial concerns while leveling up their lifestyles based on their values. We do this by exploring the five levers, which represent the diverse resources each person possesses throughout their lifetime.

These levers encompass finances, health, mindset, relationships, and time, offering a holistic approach to personal development and growth. Join us on this transformative journey as Abby and her guests draw from years of experience to guide you in achieving your life goals while staying true to your values.

But that's not all. This podcast will equip you not just to build personal wealth, but also to understand how your prosperity can contribute to the betterment of the world around you. By exploring strategies for giving back and making a positive impact, [00:01:00] we'll empower you to create a life of significance and leave a lasting legacy of positive change.

[00:01:08] Wendy McConnell: Hello, and welcome to The Wealth Beyond Riches Podcast with your host, Abby Henderson, where we talk about enriching your life in every way. I'm Wendy McConnell. Hello there, Abby. How are you?

[00:01:21] Abbey Henderson: I am fabulous, Wendy. How are you?

[00:01:23] Wendy McConnell: Oh, you're, you're such a liar because you said it was rainy and dreary, but look at you being a good little let's be springy and happy and all that stuff.

And it is

[00:01:31] Abbey Henderson: spraying.

[00:01:31] Wendy McConnell: It is. It's very springy. Glad to see your face, as always.

[00:01:35] Abbey Henderson: Glad to see you too.

[00:01:37] Wendy McConnell: So we do have a guest today.

[00:01:39] Abbey Henderson: We do. And I'm super excited because we are going to talk about something that traditional financial planning often doesn't address. And it's how your personality and behavior patterns influence how you actually implement a financial plan.

So my guest, Doug, has the most fascinating journey, [00:02:00] how he has arrived here, which I'm gonna let him talk about. But since I'm guessing he may not share all of his accolades, I would just want listeners to know that he has an amazing TED Talk, which we will link to. He's written two books, which we'll talk about.

And he's been just featured in too many things to mention, but I'll just throw out two, The New York Times and CNBC. So Doug, I'm so excited to have you.

[00:02:27] Douglas Lynam: Thank you, Abby. It's been a long time coming to do this show with you, and I'm so thrilled to be on, beyond it, and just to be honored to know you, by the way.

I just really admire what you've been doing with your practice, and I think you've got an a- an a great, an amazing business model, by the way. I think it's spectacular.

[00:02:41] Abbey Henderson: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. And our listeners will learn a little bit more about this as we go along, but I think your story can't be beat.

So why don't we kick it off with that? How did you, what was your long winding path to becoming a financial advisor?

[00:02:56] Douglas Lynam: We could spend the whole show on that, but- We could. But I'll give you the, I'll give you the [00:03:00] quick highlight reel. I, as we talked about before, Abby, I, I grew up in a fairly affluent family, but where money was weaponized, when my parents divorced, the cash was a tool for kind of control of the battlefield when total war broke out between my parents and they always, one would always make the other one pay for everything, trying to make the other pay for everything.

And as kids, we got stuck in the middle. So I developed really negative m- mindsets around money. I had basically projected my daddy issues onto all the world of corporate finance. And so I really rebelled against it. I wanted nothing to do with money or in the world of materialism. And, and so I first went off trying to find just a different path and I, my brothers and I, we all rebelled in really wild and crazy ways.

My former rebellion was to run off and join the Marine Corps first. And I went to Officer Cannon at school with the Marines. I graduated top of my class, and then I realized that unresolved anger issues and some high explosives really aren't a great combination, so maybe I should go find something maybe better to do with my life.

And I was looking for a higher calling and looking for some meaning. And then [00:04:00] I did the radical thing. I went and joined a Benedictine monastery. I became a Benedictine monk for 20 years and took a vile poverty and thought, great, this whole finance thing is behind me. I'm never gonna have to deal with money ever again.

Wonderful. Great. And as a bonus, my parents were completely flabbergasted.

[00:04:17] Abbey Henderson: Yeah, I bet. You couldn't get much more different

[00:04:19] Douglas Lynam: between those two options. Yeah, you might not know it, but spite's a reason why some young men joined monastic communities. But, and it had a great adventure. There were so many parts about monastic life that I really were wonderful.

Wealthy was a spiritual adventure in the truest sense. But ironically, I found myself in a community where everybody hated dealing with money, including me. And if you're, if that's your family dynamic, whether that's your work dynamic or your monastic dynamic, it doesn't usually go very well. And so shortly after I arrived, maybe about two, two or three years after I got there, our community found itself in bankruptcy because we just took the vile poverty a little too [00:05:00] seriously.

We kind of, that prover- proverb- or that aphorism of let God and let go. And we kind of took that a little too, uh, too casually and thought we're, prayer alone was gonna solve our problems and we would've been billionaires, but, uh, realized that actually a budget actually works pretty well too. You can do both.

So I ended up being the person who had to dig the community out of that financial hole, even though I was financially illiterate at the time. In my home, it was, of course, like many folks, it was easier to talk about sex than money, so we just didn't have those conversations. I didn't know any about taxes.

I didn't know about budgeting. I didn't know how to balance a checkbook. But as I say, necessity is the mother of invention, so I found myself needing to learn this stuff, so I did. That kind of started my path down to the world of money. Took me a couple years, and finally the community put it on solid ground, realized that I was pretty good with this stuff, and then I started helping monastery guests with their often catastrophic financial struggles.

And I realized that a lot of people's spiritual [00:06:00] struggles are actually money struggles in disguise. If you can solve their financial problems, their stress level goes down dramatically, and that became my form of service for many years. There's a huge part of the story I'm gonna leave out, but I wanna get to a deeper conversation.

But essentially, after 20 years, I decided it was time to leave. Our monastery was dying, as many communities these days are, unfortunately, and I made a big pivot into the world of finance. And so I became an investment advisor and decided to take the skills I learned in the monastery out into the world, and really as a form of service, as a form of love, as a form of give, a way of helping people build not just wealth and build a better material life, but also to build a better spiritual life.

They had the resources to put their love into action. They had the resources to go out there and fix the crack in the world that they are uniquely designed to fix. And it's very hard to do that without some cash in your pocket. And so that's what I really try to help my clients do. And now, of course, I'm an investment advisor.

I [00:07:00] got these two books, I've got the TED Talks, all the things, and that kind of brings you today in a very round, in a very tertiary way.

[00:07:08] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. Fascinating. And we could do, like you said, we could do a whole podcast episode just on that journey. But I actually came across you because I am starting a journey in the union and you are now helping people tame their money monsters using the Enneagram as a framework.

And that was your second book, right?

[00:07:28] Douglas Lynam: Correct. T-

[00:07:29] Abbey Henderson: Tame Your Money Monsters. Um-

[00:07:30] Douglas Lynam: Taming the Money Monsters, Nine Paths to Money Mastery with the Enneagram.

[00:07:34] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. So that's actually the winding way you and I met, because I was like, "Oh my gosh, someone is, has, is already paving the way in this area." Why don't we just start, because I bet a lot of people listening to this episode, why don't we just start with what is the Enneagram and why does it matter?

[00:07:50] Douglas Lynam: Yeah, it's a, that's a deep question. The Enneagram is a personality typology system. It explains, and it's really, it's an ancient system. It goes back a long ways, [00:08:00] but in modern times, we've really been able to ground it to childhood developmental psychology and the latest research in neurobiology to show it actually works.

It's a valid system used by the American psychiatric- American ... Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get my source wrong, but Journal of American Psychiatry says, "Hey, this is a real tool. You can use this in patients and encourage a psy- psychotherapist to, to know it and use it. " But it, what it tells you is that there's only so many ways you can design an ego.

There are patterns of ego development. And in, in a nutshell, you, you personalize many components to it. And so you've got a, a nature part, which is your DNA, and you've got a nurture part, which is your childhood environment. And so the anneagram help, helps explain the nurture portion of your personality.

It's not gonna tell you everything, but it explains what were the key coping mechanisms, defense strategies you developed as a child to navigate the biggest stressors that you had in that childhood environment. And since the, in human [00:09:00] beings, there's the reaction patterns are, there's only so many reaction patterns you can have, and they're fairly predictable, and it goes back to the neurobiology, but essentially, there's, comes up with nine core coping mechanisms that we have to defend ourselves and protect ourselves, and then that gets us through the biggest struggles of our childhood, but then sometimes we keep, but we keep using those same defense mechanisms throughout our lives, and oftentimes they, they always create a lens through which we see reality.

So we're not all seeing reality through the same sort of lens of our egos are different, but this pattern tells you what's that core fear that your ego is trying to protect you from, and what is that coping mechanism that you're using, and then how could that ... And then the book goes a little deep, deeper than that, and says, "All right, if you've got these nine patterns, you've got one, how does that influence your relationship to money?"

And the way, and then that takes us into a deeper level.

[00:09:56] Abbey Henderson: Hmm. So we could, again, we could spend a whole podcast or [00:10:00] then we're going to talking about all nine types.

[00:10:03] Douglas Lynam: Right.

[00:10:03] Abbey Henderson: But coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, you and I are actually the same type. Just as an example, maybe to pique listeners' interests that they go off and explore some of this on their own- Yeah.

why don't we ... And we're actually the same type and subtype.

[00:10:19] Douglas Lynam: Yes.

[00:10:19] Abbey Henderson: Uh, so why don't we spend a little time talking about self-preservation threes through- Self- specifically through your framework, if possible.

[00:10:27] Douglas Lynam: Sorry, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cheat and pull up my notes here really quickly. Yeah, no. I apologize.

[00:10:31] Abbey Henderson: I know how to type when you start dividing them by type- I'm

[00:10:34] Douglas Lynam: ready to roll.

[00:10:35] Abbey Henderson: subtype.

[00:10:35] Douglas Lynam: But I think that's really helpful. Let's just diagnose ourselves. Let's poke fun at you and me for a minute. Yeah. And then we can, people can get a sense of a flavor for how this works.

[00:10:43] Abbey Henderson: Yep.

[00:10:44] Douglas Lynam: And so- And why it

[00:10:44] Abbey Henderson: matters.

[00:10:45] Douglas Lynam: And why it matters.

[00:10:46] Abbey Henderson: Yeah.

[00:10:47] Douglas Lynam: So what is a type three? It's a deep question, but essentially, for threes, what happened in our childhood environment is we tend to e- experience love that was somewhat conditional on our achievements.

Like we were [00:11:00] validated for what we did, maybe not so much for who we were intrinsically. So we found ourselves with a deep rooted kind of shame or grief about how we perceive ourselves. We have this sort of, well, I would say internalized grief. It's a grief about how we perceive ourselves, but then we also have what I call an externalized grief.

So it's a kind of a stereophonic shame, if you will. It's a grief about how we think people are perceiving us. And what it does for a type three is it creates the greatest fear of a type three of being fundamentally worthless. And we all have a deepest, unconscious fear, but for you and me, what that does is it puts us on this kind of hamster wheel of achievement.

Like we, we feel like we wanna get the gold star from the teacher. We wanna get the pat in the head. We wanna be looking for validation and connection through the things that we do. And what that, uh, it's a, it's a problem. So I, I use car metaphors a little bit. I'm not really a car guy, but the, the metaphors work.

[00:11:57] Abbey Henderson: Yeah.

[00:11:57] Douglas Lynam: And I call the type three the race [00:12:00] car of egos, meaning we're always racing towards the finish line to some goal. And it's like getting things off of our to- do list and those accomplishments that the, we're looking for the, not just any accomplishment, but what we think will win us the praise and admiration of whoever we happen to be around.

[00:12:17] Abbey Henderson: The gold star.

[00:12:17] Douglas Lynam: The gold star, right? Yeah. And then, but we tend to leave our authentic selves in the dust. And so three, we say we're expert mask changers, meaning we'll, we're like chameleons. We can walk into a room and we'll just, just subtly shift our persona to try to be what we think the people in fr- around us want us to be in order to win that admiration from the world.

And so it's a bit of a trap, it's a spiritual trap, and it can get us in all kinds of trouble because we, and that runs us into a whole bunch of hosted difficulties. That's a really quick one, but maybe you could expound and say how you perceive what a type three is like.

[00:12:58] Abbey Henderson: Yeah, I think I agree. And I [00:13:00] would also, as people are listening to this, I would just emphasize that there's, of the nine types, there's strengths and weaknesses of them, and there's not one that's better than the other.

They show up in, in really wonderful ways. And then as we're pointing to, there's some, some patterns that don't always help us so much. When I think about where my s- type three-ness really doesn't serve me is I cannot slow down.

[00:13:25] Douglas Lynam: Yeah.

[00:13:25] Abbey Henderson: It is really hard for me to go on vacation and really unplug.

[00:13:29] Douglas Lynam: Yeah.

[00:13:30] Abbey Henderson: And I think, I think that's

And it's very unconscious.

[00:13:35] Douglas Lynam: Yeah.

[00:13:35] Abbey Henderson: I think I'm fine doing it, and then I go to actually do it, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, not so good." And then I think the other thing is can't say no.

[00:13:46] Douglas Lynam: Yeah. '

[00:13:46] Abbey Henderson: Cause I can always fit one more thing on the to- do list. "Oh, you need me to do that? Of course. "

[00:13:51] Douglas Lynam: So we often say that type threes, we're not human beings, we're human doings.

[00:13:56] Abbey Henderson: Doings, yeah. Let's

[00:13:57] Douglas Lynam: go.

[00:13:58] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. [00:14:00] For sure. So that's a little bit of a type three. Did you wanna say anything about the subtypes or do you wanna move on to where this can become a challenge on the financial planning money front?

[00:14:12] Douglas Lynam: Yeah, let's move on to the ... We can ... The subtypes are gonna get really technical.

I think we're gonna get lost, but- Yeah. ... this is ... So just for your audience to understand, within the nine type types, then there's three subtypes of each one, and then there's lots of variety in those with wings and things like that. So it isn't a one size fits all. So even though Abby and I are the same type, we're still very different in how we express it.

[00:14:35] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. So where do we get in trouble on the, in the finance

[00:14:38] Douglas Lynam: side? Well, okay. So then what I'm doing is I'm layering on top of the Enneagram my own theory, what I call the attachment theory of money, which is based, just plagiarizing the attachment theory of relationships if anyone listening is familiar with that and applying it to money.

But the basic idea is that we can have a healthy relationship to money, which is great, and many, some people do, but if you're like [00:15:00] me, obviously grew up with a really negative mindset around money, but there's two what I call money monsters for the, for each type. One that's anxiously attached to money, meaning we're too hyper fixated on it, maybe too many greedy or inquisitive or neurotic about it, or on the other hand, we can be avoidant around money where we unconsciously push it away and we procrastinate on dealing with it or paying our bills.

And that's certainly what I have struggled with. So these two unhealthy patterns of anxiety or avoidance, and most people tend to be a, maybe a jumbled style, we tend to be anxious at one circumstance and avoidant in another. So there is in what I, there's what I call the four pillars of finance. And the four pillars are gonna be earning, saving, investing, and giving.

So earning, saving, investing, giving. These are the kind of the four big pillars that your financial life rests on. And a lot of us are maybe anxious in one [00:16:00] area, like we might be anxious earners making it to good income, but then we're avoiding savers because everything's getting spent on stuff. Or we might be compulsive savers, but we're terrified of investing.

We never really ... We can't, as you've pointed out, I mean, you can't save your way to retirement, you can only invest your way there. And then some people, they invest really well, they make a big pile, but then they're avoidant around the giving. It becomes just a narcissistic ego itself and grandizement project and they're never really putting their wealth into action to do something useful for the world.

So those are the four ways that ... Those are the four pillars, and those are the two, two unhealthy types. For a type three, there's a playful with these names. So the two money monsters for a type three, I call them the barrier and the blinger. So the barrier is the money avoidant type two, where we bury our head in the sand and don't wanna look at it because we have this deep internalized shame or grief that we're always dealing with, we often equate our net worth with our self worth.

And if our net [00:17:00] worth is low, then our self worth is low, and then we're just like the ostrich who wants to bury its head in the sand, but up in the air and not wanna look at it. And that just causes our problems to compound, which is what happened in the monastery, right? On the flip side, you can be anxious around money, and that can ha- show up in a bunch of different ways.

But for a three, one of the bigger traps is what I call the blinger, which is that n- need to use their money and their wealth to buy status symbols so that I look good in the eyes of the people around me. I want the fancy clothes, the nice car, the big house, the gold watch, what the stuff that I think is going to help me stand out and look good or to the people around me, and that can be a real spiritual trap for the three.

So there's a quick overview. Maybe you wanna go deeper on those.

[00:17:47] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. I'm curious, just thinking about myself, I think it's so interesting because thinking about all of this in this framework lets you start thinking about things that maybe you've [00:18:00] never really dug into. For example, it's really easy for me as a financial advisor to be like, oh, what is the cliche?

Like the cobbler's children have no shoes. Mm-hmm. I don't watch my investment accounts.

[00:18:12] Douglas Lynam: Right.

[00:18:12] Abbey Henderson: I, when you ... It never really, until I started learning about this, it never really occurred to me. That's what I think is just like, oh, I don't have time, could have deeper meaning.

[00:18:24] Douglas Lynam: Yeah. And it's a pattern. And then once you see the pattern, then you can do something about it.

And until you name it, then you're gonna be running on autopilot. As Carl Young often said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And so this is an unconscious pattern that threes tend to have, and once you can ... And we all have a, have these patterns.

Mm-hmm. They, they're different for each type, but then now you can actually, all right, that's the pattern. Now, how can I take a countermove to maybe move in a healthier direction?

[00:18:53] Abbey Henderson: And I think it's interesting too that someone can have both. I might be more of the burying on [00:19:00] my own investment portfolio, but maybe more of a blinger when it comes to giving, because I l- I love to give money in lots of different places and philanthropy is like my thing.

And again, I never really thought of it necessarily through that lens. Do you, do, what do you think points someone into the different ... Would it be like childhood messages that pointed me into being a blinger in one category and a barrier in another?

[00:19:28] Douglas Lynam: That's a really hard question to answer.

[00:19:29] Abbey Henderson: Yeah.

[00:19:30] Douglas Lynam: Uh, the simple answer is yes, but what were those messages and how did they show up?

It's really hard to, to anal- it takes a l- many hours to unpeel and unplug that, those messages, but the simple answer is a yes, but why hard to diagnose that one.

[00:19:46] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. We may never ... Each of us individually may be able to point to something and may also-

[00:19:51] Douglas Lynam: And some of it's cultural and it's familial. And so it's not just our parents to blame.

It's a lot, also the culture that we live in.

[00:19:58] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. [00:20:00] I'm curious, because you've worked with a lot of clients l- using this framework. I'm curious if you have any sort of success stories or do ... What happened ... I'm sure your clients have aha moments.

[00:20:14] Douglas Lynam: Yeah.

[00:20:15] Abbey Henderson: Do you have any sort of favorite stories where you're like, "That really- Yeah.

made a big difference."

[00:20:21] Douglas Lynam: Yeah, I opened the book with a, with a client, I'll call her Sarah, classic type three, right? And she was living the high life, she was a corporate lawyer and making a pile of money, but then everything was going to the fancy dinners, the first class travel tickets, the wardrobe that made her stand out.

And she had a husband who was a type four, and so they actually had a really interesting relationship that was fun, funny to untangle, but essentially found herself in a situation where she was maxing out her credit cards, even with the six figure salary because she just had to look better than everybody else around her.

And the image was what mattered, not, it was like the difference between looking wealthy and [00:21:00] actually being wealthy are two very different things. And I don't know about your practice, but I'll tell, this is another sidebar, but at my old firm, when I was in Santa Fe, we had a, a really nice office downtown and right next to us was a couple great restaurants.

And when I would see my clients pull up into the parking lot, they were often driving used Subarus or Simple Toyota something. And then I was seeing all these other workers at the restaurant, the servers driving up in these tricked out Mercedes and Monster cars. I'm like, "What? Like, why is there this disparity?

It's like really wealthy people tend not to care about those status symbols because they care about building up their wealth in their bank account, not what everyone thinks about how they look."

[00:21:43] Abbey Henderson: Yeah.

[00:21:43] Douglas Lynam: And so with, in Sarah's case, it was like, okay, we need to flip this to, but go back to the story. Yeah, Sarah finally figured it out and was like, "Okay, this is a trap.

This is causing me suffering and it's not the life I wanna live. How can we undo all this and actually live an authentic life [00:22:00] where I can have the, the security that really matters to me, the real wealth that really matters to me and for my family, rather than all this just mindless ego stuff that's serving no purpose that no one really cares about any way other than you.

[00:22:16] Abbey Henderson: Mm. And so did you find that, like, through understanding the motivation, she was able to make changes more readily than she would've been otherwise?

[00:22:28] Douglas Lynam: 100%. Yeah. 100%. Especially when you see that it's, when you can point out how much suffering it's creating for themselves and it's, and then that is almost always the impetus for real change.

It's like when you're present reality, we don't tend to make big changes until we're brought to our knees, right? And the pain of staying the same has to be greater than the pain of changing. And when people get to that point, they're ready to find a healthier way forward.

[00:22:53] Abbey Henderson: What I think is really interesting about this approach as well is you can have the same behavior [00:23:00] on the face of it, which maybe you can come up with an example of this, but the same behavior, but it can really be driven by two different motivations, and you really need to know the motivation to be able to change the behavior, not just know the behavior itself.

And I wonder sometimes if that's where we sometimes lose clients, because we're not really addressing the motivate- the right motivation or the one that's going to actually help them change what they're doing.

[00:23:25] Douglas Lynam: If you just say, just budget better or save more, that's just, it's true, but if you don't understand why they struggle with their budgeting- Yeah.

why they struggle with overspending and really helping soothe the inner anxieties and fears that are driving the behavior, then it's just, you're fighting against gravity, essentially.

[00:23:43] Abbey Henderson: And sometimes it can go either way. I know I have clients that I struggle to get to spend the money they have-

[00:23:49] Douglas Lynam: Yes. ...

[00:23:50] Abbey Henderson: when they're, they have plenty to live the life they want to live, which is a relative statement that's different for everybody, [00:24:00] but they're still feeling like they can't.

[00:24:03] Douglas Lynam: Right. I see it all the time too. Like I just was talking to a client, they had six million dollars in the bank and it's, and they're just ret- they're retired. And I'm like, "So what are you gonna do for fun now? Are you gonna go on those vacations? Are you gonna travel? You're like, I don't wanna spend that.

I don't..." You've only got another 10, 20 years left if you're lucky and maybe five or 10 of those are good, why don't you travel now while you can?

[00:24:23] Abbey Henderson: Yeah.

[00:24:24] Douglas Lynam: And especially when ... I won't reveal other details, but you know your health is gonna decline. Get this, do it while you're, you have the ability to do it and not just, "What are you saving this for?

It's not, can't take it with you.

[00:24:36] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it goes back to all of the types all have their issues. There's no one that's better than the other. So as we're starting to wrap up, what is your ... I'm super curious. What is your sort of elevator pitch to clients about why they should explore the Enneagram process?

[00:24:57] Douglas Lynam: Because it's gonna help you, as the [00:25:00] Greeks would say, Socrates is know thyself, right?

[00:25:02] Abbey Henderson: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:02] Douglas Lynam: But most importantly, it's gonna show you the self-defeating patterns that you tend to fall into that are going to cause unnecessary suffering for yourself and the people around you that you love. So it's a s- really a suffering prevention tool in the arena of money in particular, but in life in general, because the, these patterns aren't just in your financial life, they tend to repeat across all aspects of your life.

And when you can see it and you can understand it, life gets a lot easier because you're not running yourselves in the same ditches over and over again.

[00:25:36] Abbey Henderson: Yeah. And I would also maybe throw in there, one, the opposite of suffering is being able to grow and flourish.

[00:25:43] Douglas Lynam: Yes.

[00:25:44] Abbey Henderson: So it is through self-awareness that's giving you a path to more easily, I would say, or with le- with less, more ease, less friction to be able to grow and flourish, which who wouldn't want that?

[00:25:57] Douglas Lynam: Which is a point, a very important point because [00:26:00] unlike other personality systems, what's un- unique about the anigram is it has a growth model built into it. It's not static. There's many levels of health and the, and I've got these really cool ego maps, maybe we could talk about another show or whatever- Yeah.

but really showing you what does the shadow structure for your personality look like and what is the higher side or sort of the enlightenment structure of your pa- personality? What is your highest self? What does that flourishing really look like and how do you get there? And that, when you're living in that higher self, life is better.

So why not shoot for that?

[00:26:29] Abbey Henderson: Love it. I think that is the perfect place to wrap this up. Tell our listeners where they can find you, buy your books, we'll link to everything, but you tell us first.

[00:26:42] Douglas Lynam: Yeah, you can find me on my personal website is douglinum.com. My professional led website is Course Management Investment Advisors is the name of the company.

And you can find my books where booksellers everywhere, but Amazon is always the easiest, Taming Your Money Monster, and then also from Monk to Money [00:27:00] Manager is my first book.

[00:27:01] Abbey Henderson: Love it. Thank you so much. This is just fascinating and we have only barely scratched the surface of this. So I really appreciate it.

Well,

[00:27:08] Douglas Lynam: thank you.

[00:27:09] Abbey Henderson: Yeah, coming on.

[00:27:09] Douglas Lynam: Appreciate you.

[00:27:10] Abbey Henderson: Thank you.

[00:27:11] Wendy McConnell: This has just been a love fest, hasn't it? We, he loved you. You love him. We love ... I love both of you. And Abby, if people have more questions for you, how can they get in touch?

[00:27:22] Abbey Henderson: All the usual ways. So always love to hear from listeners. You can email me at Abby@abaressfinancialgroup.com.

@aberisfinancialgroup.com is also the website, and then LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, all the places.

[00:27:38] Wendy McConnell: Gotcha. Okay. Thanks to both of you, and thank you for listening today. Please follow and share this podcast with your friends. Until next time, I'm your producer, Wendy McConnell.

[00:27:52] Outro: Thank you for listening to Wealth Beyond Riches.

Click the follow button to be notified when new episodes become available, and be sure to visit our website [00:28:00] at www.abarisfinancialgroup.com. Don't forget to click the follow button to be notified when new episodes become available. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest, and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Abaris Financial Group.

The opinions voiced in Wealth Beyond Riches with Abby Henderson are for general information only, and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine what may be appropriate for you, consult with your attorney, accountant, financial, or tax advisor prior to investing.

Guests on Wealth Beyond Riches are not affiliated with Abaris Financial Group or New Edge Advisors, LLC. Advisory services offered through New Edge Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor.