Building Your Health Account: A Guide for Financial Advisors with Stevyn Guinnip

What happens when the advice people need most goes against everything they have been taught to believe about health?

In this episode, Anne sits down with Stevyn Guinnip, founder and CEO of Grow Wellthy, to explore why trust is essential in health conversations shaped by fear, vulnerability, and long-standing habits. Stevyn helps financial advisors treat health like a long-term asset rather than a short-term fitness problem.

She explains why many high performers struggle to trust a slower, more sustainable approach to wellness, especially when the broader industry keeps telling them to push harder and do more. Through a story of rising trust with a client facing pre-diabetes and another of falling trust in a respected public figure, Stevyn shares what helps people feel safe enough to change.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why doing less can get better health results.
• What finally calms clients who feel health panic.
• How to make people trust your advice faster.
• Why sleep may matter more than another workout.
• What happens when a trusted expert disappoints you.
• Why people trust systems more than random advice.
• How imperfection can make you more credible.

Ideas Worth Sharing:

• “Trust is everything because the currency that I work in, which is people's health, is very personal.” - Stevyn Guinnip
• “ Actually, you need to work with your body and you need to listen to it, and sometimes you do less instead of more.” - Stevyn Guinnip
• “Whatever the image is, you have to stop and say, what is the real person, and are those things aligned with each other?” - Stevyn Guinnip

About Stevyn Guinnip:

Stevyn Guinnip is the founder and CEO of Grow Wellthy, a health and wellness advisory firm focused on financial professionals. She is an exercise physiologist, certified wellness coach, author, and speaker who helps advisors protect their health with the same intentionality they bring to building wealth.

Resources:

• Grow Wellthy
• Take the Quiz to Find Out Your Wellth Score
• Well-Advised Newsletter
• Get-Up! Challenge
• Grow Wellthy: The Financial Advisor's 4-Step Plan to Protect Your Health Like an Asset by Stevyn Guinnip

Connect with Stevyn:

LinkedIn: Stevyn Guinnip

Connect with Anne:

LinkedIn: Anne Claessen

Connect With Us

If you enjoyed this episode, follow The Rise and Fall of Trust wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re thinking about launching a podcast that builds trust and drives results, that’s our jam. Schedule a free call at Cashflow Podcasting to learn more.

Transcript

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It just reminds me of a quote from Elvis Presley when he was getting interviewed by the press, and they were like, Is the man Elvis Presley the same as the image? And his answer was, The image and the man are very rarely the same thing. And I was like, I think that's true. And a lot of high profile people. It just reminds me of a quote from Elvis Presley when he was getting interviewed by the press, and they were like, is the man Elvis Presley the same as the image? And his answer was the image and the man are very rarely the same thing. And I was like, I think that's true in a lot of high-profile people. Welcome to the rise and fall of trust by Cashflow Podcasting. Here we explore how trust is built, broken, and everything in between. She is a health strategist for financial advisors. A really interesting job and profession, I think. Stephen, I don't think I've ever met a health strategist, especially for, you know, financial advisors, a very targeted specific group. So I'm super excited to have you on the podcast today and talk with you about trust. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. Yeah. So tell me a little bit more, like a health strategist for financial advisors. What exactly does that mean? What do you do? What does your day-to-day look like? Yeah. So I work with financial advisors and help them. I call myself a thought partner. So basically, we're just like, okay, we want your health to be good today, and we want your health to be good in 10 years and 20 years. We want you to have a full health account, just like you have a full bank account when you need it in retirement, right? So instead of them just putting dollars away for retirement, we want to make sure we're preserving and protecting and growing their health. And that includes four main ways that I do that. One is through their mindset. Are they looking at the right numbers? Are they collecting the right data? Do they know what they're even doing? Are they being mindful of that? And then we look at are they recovering? I call that the mend stage. Are they too stressed out? Do they get enough sleep? How are they doing on that level? Then we move up this pyramid, I call it the hierarchy of wealth, to meals and say, all right, are you getting enough food? Right? Is it enough the right kind of food, the right balanced budget food? And um that's gonna serve you and not leave you depleted in some area. And then we finish out that whole sequence with movement. And are you getting the right kind of movement that's gonna prepare you so um you don't have risk of falling, so that you have enough muscle mass? And really, financial advisors are all about risk assessment and they're just trying to minimize risk from a financial standpoint. That's what I'm doing as a health strategist is trying to help them reduce their risk of health events through chronic disease or accident injury, those types of things to preserve their best quality of life now and in the future. I love how practical it is, and especially that you don't only focus on movement, but it's also rest and nutrition as well. Like it's really the full picture, which sounds extremely valuable. Well, it is, especially because I am an exercise physiologist by trade. I have a master's degree in exercise science and spent 20 years telling people you need to exercise more and you need to do sets and reps and zones and all these things. And now it's kind of funny that it's the fourth thing I teach people and it's just a piece of the pie, and there's a whole bunch of other parts that make you actually healthy. And it makes a lot of sense, right? I think if you exercise a ton, maybe even, you know, I know that I have in the past exercised too much, and that's not healthy either. Like I didn't feel good. It's not, especially if you have someone who I had someone who came to me and she's raising small children. She has her own business, and she's like, Stephen, I know I just need to get up earlier than everybody else and go to the gym. And and I was like, No, actually, you need to sleep more, right? You can't go tear your body down if it's going to not have time to recover and repair at some point. So there's a hierarchy of order of how these things happen. So there's actually a lot of cardio junkies out there or you know, gym rats who were like, let's just dial this back a little and give your body a chance to recover. So I get that. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I've definitely been there. Well, Stephen, what impact does trust have to your on your business, on your life? Like kind of like what what's the role of trust for you? Trust is everything because the currency that I work in, which is people's health, is very personal. It is very, it can transform a lot, but it also can feel like it, they're exposing themselves, right? Vulnerable, they're vulnerable when they tell me they had, you know, six cookies, or when they say that their weight is not where they want it to be, or that they, you know, tell me that their doctor wants to raise their medication again. They feel like a failure. And that's very vulnerable, especially for people in the industry that I work in of financial services, where they're always taking care of other people and supposed to have all the answers. Other people trust them with their money. And so they just feel like, oh, I don't, you know, can I really let someone know that this isn't all where it needs to be? Right. So that has to be a very safe space for people to trust me. And also you have to the trust to go against traditional status quo of what health and wellness industry says, right? So the industry says, you want to get healthy, you have to work hard. Like go home, go harder, go home. Eat fewer calories, move more, join the gym, lift hard. You know, all of these like you have to do more, you have to grit through it, you have to really kind of battle your body in a way. And when I tell them, actually, you need to work with your body and you need to listen to it. And sometimes you do less instead of more, they're like, Oh, that can't be true. I can't do nothing, right? So there's there's that piece of the trust too, is to trust the process and trust that what they've hear on Instagram isn't necessarily the whole story. Yeah, exactly. I think you have a really good point. I think also like historically, I I feel like, you know, like this focus on rest is really a more recent, recent thing, right? I at least I learned about it way more recently, like maybe a couple of years ago. But for many, many years, it was like just train harder, just do more, go to the gym more. So then if you're the person who says, no, actually, I think you need to sleep more, you need to rest, you need to recover, I can totally imagine if people have been told decades, right? Like, oh no, I'm just you need to do more, you need to do more, to then be that that voice that says, no, actually, it's it's different. Like, people need to trust you to then actually do that. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, and I get it. I was one of those people. I was a self-proclaimed night owl, and I would get the second wind at 11 or 12 o'clock at night, and I would write papers and I would clean the house and do all whatever, and would stay up all the time very late and just thought I did well without much sleep, and I couldn't have been further from the truth. And I actually had a really serious health event that I talk about in my book of being quote healthy, but nearly dying of sepsis because I was not taking care of myself in that way. So I can speak from experience and I think trust to know I've been there, I know where this road leads, and it's important to listen to your body and slow down sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. So we're already touching on, you know, one one thing that we that we can kind of like well use is maybe a negative way to say it, and that we can we can use to build trust with people, which is maybe vulnerability, you know, speaking about our own experiences. But before we go do too deep into that, what is the story of rising trust that you wanted to share with us today? A success story where trust was hugely important and beneficial for a relationship or a situation? Well, specifically in my world, professionals in the finance industry will come to me and they're kind of at their wits' end. And there's like, I don't know what's going on, this isn't working, I'm kind of scared, and I need to do something quick about my health because they're going in a direction they don't want to go. So someone came to me and she said, Help. I need to learn it all today and I need to implement it all yesterday, and I I can't, I can't be pre-diabetic anymore. Right now, I have to get it fixed. And she was frantic and she was very, very stressed. I said, Let's get on a call because we already had a call booked, but I said, let's get on a call sooner and let's let's calm these fears down. And I said, it's really, really important that how you think is how you'll go, right? So if you think you have to fix this right now and you're really stressed, you have this entire cascade, a chemical cascade coming from the brain and the adrenal glands and just bathing your body in stress, cortisol, negativity. And that is not the path to you being successful a year from now or five years from now or 10 years from now, right? This so if we're only thinking in days, then you continue on this path. But if you want to think in decades and be healthy in the long term, then let's let's try a new way. And let's take this piece by piece, layer by layer, in the right order and be take a breath, sleep on it, and let's just go and follow the dopamine. Let's follow that chemical cascade, what feels good, what feels right, what feels sustainable. And she did. You could just kind of see the stress, just leave her and say, I think I'm in good hands, I think she knows what she's doing, she's been here before. I can let this sit and go at her pace. And she saw the most phenomenal results faster than she ever thought she would. We just celebrated that she is now officially out of pre-diabetes mode or range, and she is well within really healthy blood sugar ranges, as well as, you know, 40 pounds are gone, she's sleeping better, she doesn't need a nap in the afternoon, like everything turned around, but she just had to take a moment and trust that the process works and that I was there and I had her back. Yeah, wow, that's amazing. That like those results, that's that's that's that's huge, honestly. That's really just a new person. It's amazing. Yeah. So what do you think it is that made her trust you when you said, like, hey, listen, we have to take the long-term approach here and we need to think in decades. Like when you said that to her, like what do you think was the thing that made her trust you enough to say, okay, Steven got this? Well, I think it's it's two things. One is repetition, because I'd already said it to her in our first call, and I'd already put it in a module, in a video to her that she was watching. And this was our our second call, kind of an emergency call. So it's repeating again, the same thing that she just wasn't hearing. Like this is what we're doing. But then also I was able to show her inside of the modules that we're working through together that there are each of the things she wants to address have a spot and a place, right? We are getting to that. They're just a parking lot right here. Once you get this understood, then you're ready to learn that because what she wanted me to do was open everything up to her so she could try to implement as much as she wanted, as much as she could at one time. And I I just told her, kind of like in math, you know how there's an order of operations? You do your multiplication before you do your addition. You know, there's there's an a way that you have to actually do the math equation. And that's how it is for this too. We layer this when it's ready, we layer the next ones, and she could kind of see the system. And I think that is when she got it. And she's like, oh, this isn't just random. It's not just a bunch of hacks that I have to try to see which one works for me. There is a system that if I go through it, I will come out on the other end having found the path that I need. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think like the consistency is that the message is the same, right? Like first call, that was the message. In the video, that's the message. The emergency call, that's the message. So I think the consistency is what I'm hearing. But then also that you have a framework, right? That you can show something. I can definitely see that that would put someone at ease, like, oh, okay, this is a framework. Like this is it, this is a thing. This is not just, you know, something that Steven's telling me now. No, this is what she thought about a lot and put into this framework that exists. Yes. I have this one, this one slide that I show that's all this different like mind map of all the things that connect and all the metrics and everything that I've put together and how this all works together. And I t I show it to them just briefly and say, I just want you to know a lot of thought has gone into this, right? You don't have to know any of what I just showed you. The only thing takeaway is that this is very systemized and thought out, and there's a reason we do it like this. And and I I guess maybe they're just used to, you know, when you when you work with maybe a personal trainer, which I've been a personal trainer, they're only working on one thing. When you work with a a uh physical therapist, they're working to heal one thing. If you go to your kidney doctor or your skin doctor or, you know, all the different types of doctors, they're working on their silos. This is the first time that a lot of them have worked in their health from all the angles. What are what it like, how do you feel? What does the science say? What do you like? You know, what get what's going to give you results, what worked in the past. And we looked at all, we look at all the different parts of it, and we then create a body of evidence for that particular unique individual that's going to help them get to their specific goals. But what's interesting is even though each person's individual, the fact that there's a system that helps us go through and collect all the things and figure out which ones we're going to put on their plate is reassuring and creates a lot of trust for them. Yeah, I can absolutely see that. 100%. Okay, so I think we already have some really good takeaways, you know, from your from your rising trust story, but now I'm also really interested in your falling trust story. This is usually where we get the juicy details. Okay, so I'm a very trusting person. I want everyone to be good and everyone to always have the best intentions and can be somewhat gullible in that way. I have learned that we have to test everything, right? So I come from a research background where I looked at all the studies. You can find a study that says whatever you want in the world, basically. And so being really having a skeptical mind and looking at is it double-blind placebo-controlled studies, how many people were in the study? Was it like eight people or 7,000 people? And that helps us understand science and how we should take action moving forward, right? So I consider myself now to be a fairly rigorous judge of what's fluff and what's actually good information. So I found someone that I trust in this industry who had some really great ideas. And um, he wrote a great book, top-selling book for like the last two years or something called Outlive. And the author is Dr. Peter Atia. And I he has he has great ideas, great concepts, and I teach those to my clients and we explore those together. Recently, though, there was a release of files that in the United States, the Epstein Files, and this beloved researcher, in-depth doctor and researcher on longevity, health span, and all the things that I teach, was found to be in those files and making some very crude remarks and some things that are very distasteful. And at first I was I was gut punched, right? I was just like, uh that's trust falling. He had a lot of people trusting him on all of his social media and his podcast and his books and was contributors to all of these health wellness companies. And see that fall for him is is unfortunate and and problematic for him. But it also was something that I was like, wow, I thought, I thought I knew how to judge. I thought I knew how to find people who knew the science. And he does. He did, he does. Um, but then I have to, you know, talk about it with my clients and say, what do we do with this? You know, these ideas coming from a place that we don't we there's some mistrust there now. How to how do we reconcile the the person with the data? And and that's been a challenging situation that we're navigating our way through currently. Yeah, exactly. I can absolutely understand. It's like it's such a shock, right? Because you obviously don't see this coming. He's like the last person I would have seen in the in the files. Like we expect certain types of people to be in files like that. He was not one of those people that was even on the radar. So that's why you're just like, what? Yeah. Yeah. I I know what you mean though. Like a scientist, someone who is, you know, actively working in in like how the health space, you know, the greater good, trying to help people do better, right? Exactly. That's that's that's really we like that kind of feels really weird. I I totally understand what you mean. So to clarify, you haven't you haven't met this person in in person, right? It's like through content that you do you feel like that makes a difference? That if you, you know, who knows if you like meet people in person that uh there's just more that you can pick up on. Do you do you think that would have changed things potentially? I do because after I started looking into it, you could hear people who knew him from his past who had been around him in person. You start to see those people come up and bubble up and their experiences with him just kind of like, you know, maybe it's they call it an ick factor or something which less off, or you know, something like that where you can kind of get a vibe for someone. And it just reminds me of a quote from Elvis Presley when he was getting interviewed by the press, and they were like, is the man Elvis Presley the same as the image? And his answer was the image and the man are very rarely the same thing. And I was like, I think that's true. And a lot of high-profile people, whatever the image is, you have to stop and say, What is the real person? And and are those things aligned with each other. Yeah, exactly. I'm also like, can you share a little bit more? Like, what how are you moving forward with this? Or are you really still figuring it out? And do you like literally have no idea? That's also totally fine, of course. Because I wonder, because the science is still doing the science, right? Like the science is true, even though this person had you know a very different background than what we all expected, but the specific work that he did is is still true. So what what are your thoughts on that? Or how are you navigating that? Maybe it's still a work in progress, but can you share a little bit more? I'm just curious what your thoughts are. It's funny because I my husband actually heard about it first before I did. I don't know, I was busy doing something. He's like, Did you hear the news? And I was like, No. And he told me, my gut reaction is to go get the book and burn it and to burn down everything that I ever learned, discard it immediately. And then after I sat with it for a bit, I was like, that's a bit childish. Okay, so I've always told my clients when you hear things, eat the meat and spit out the bones, right? With everything that you encounter, there's probably something you can learn, and there's something that you just is distasteful and is not good for you, and you need to spit that piece out. And so we actually, after one of our group calls, I we stayed on and I said, if anybody wants to talk through this, hang out with me and we'll, you know, turn off the recording and we'll just have a candid conversation about it. And there were some emotions there because when I have a new client come on board, I would send them that book, among other things. But I would send them that book as like, here's a good place to start. Do I still send that book out anymore? Currently, I do not. Will I someday? Probably not. Not, but what can I do instead? Is there something I can replace it with? Then I go through and look at the content and like, well, does this mean that you know grip strength that he talks about all the time is is we should disregard that? And no, actually, grip strength is a proven longevity metric that we should work on, right? So going through each of the pieces and saying this is still valid information, we don't endorse what he did and we don't promote it or want to add fuel to that fire, but we also can take the truths that are in there and recognize that. So it's it's a process, obviously, because it hasn't at this moment been that long. And there's there's a lot of people still pretty mad about it. I'm not mad. I see it for what it is. I want to just glean the information that helps my clients, and then let's just move on. Yeah, I think it's what you said. It's a very immature way to deal with it. Like I think was also after the shock, right? Because this happened, like how? Right, no one saw this coming. Right. Yeah. How does it be? Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Is there anything that you are like would look out for when you, you know, would start following, you know, a public figure from now on? Or is there anything that you I don't know, that you're that you would question that you didn't before? Absolutely. I was having another conversation with my family about this, and it is a little bit sad to say it, but now if there's any public figure, I automatically assume that there is probably something in the closet that is not trustworthy, right? And so then just going in with a bit more of a a shield, right, to filter the information without getting too caught up in things, even though it looks really good, and just kind of always understanding that to get to that level, there's probably been some things that they would do that I wouldn't do, and have been some and and it's it's showing up in in all levels of uh public service or religion or politics or schools or whatever you name it, it seems like if someone gets to a certain level of really high fame, it's a good reason to kind of pause for a moment and just ask look around a little bit harder, maybe. And and unfortunately assume that there's probably something that is going to make them not be who you think they are. Yeah, like questioning how did they get here, but I feel also sometimes that fame changes people as well. So maybe how they got there is fine. But then once they're famous, I do like just in general, from the many, many, many stories that we have heard about famous people in you know all different industries, that is something that I personally think about some famous people. Oh, I wonder if they're okay, if that makes sense. I know, and I hate that because I, like I said at the beginning of this conversation, I'm a naturally trusting person. I want people to be trustworthy. And the fact that I have to just put that little, you know, barrier between me and people and assume that there's probably something that is not good is kind of sad to me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I do think it speaks to also like meeting people in person in terms of trust building, that there is still, I don't think that in business you have to meet with all your prospects in person. I mean, it's really difficult for financial advisors for you and me, because we are we were just chatting before we hit record, we're in different countries at the moment than where our clients are. So that makes it a bit more difficult. So it's just it's just not possible, of course. But there is, I think there's still a value in it if you want to build a lot of trust relatively quickly. I do too. I in fact, that's why I try to jump at any opportunity to do a conference, right? Like to to meet, I've met in person many of my clients and will go out of my way to travel to make sure that I have an opportunity to see them in person because I think that is the ultimate trust, is to really be in their presence and them to see you, not be perfect, right? Yeah, I'm not perfect in any way. I struggle with many of the same things my clients are working on too. And when they see, like, you know, I met a client one time, my family met up with his family at a restaurant, and I love Trader Joe's Swedish fish, and they're they're candy, right? They're sugar. And he and I had a bag of them, he's just like, Oh, you have candy, you're you're healthy. I'm human. And they're just like, oh my gosh, my mind's blown. So it's just little things like that. Yeah. I mean, I think it adds to the trust building, to be honest, that you're not perfect. Can you imagine if you were, then that would be so that would feel so weird and unattainable and maybe not approachable. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Steven, thank you for sharing your stories with us today. I think we had some really good little takeaways. Like I already mentioned it after your rising trust story. I think you know, your falling trust story, it's just kind of like an unfortunate thing. I don't think there's anything you can do really to avoid trusting a person who then, you know, has done things that you are absolutely not on board with. And, you know, sometimes that we just figure, figure that out later. It maybe shows the value of in-person meetings and you know, being able to look each other in the eye and actually actually seeing each other, seeing people's vibe, body language, all of those, all of those really good things for trust building. But then also like from your rising trust story, the consistency in messaging, having frameworks or you know, things that you can show clients that really show, like, hey, there is a lot of thought that went into this, it's huge trust building. I think, especially with potential clients or you know, new clients. I think having that, I think that's already a really good takeaway that we can have from today's conversation. I'm so glad. Yeah, really good ones. If people want to learn more from you, what's the best place to go? I post on LinkedIn every week, many times a week, and try to give client stories and little tidbits of things that I'm learning along the way of this health journey. So follow me, Stephen Gwinup, on LinkedIn. Go to growwealthy.com and take the health quiz and just see how you're doing. And then once a month I give out a newsletter, which is actually called Well Advised. And that's where I gather, again, all kinds of stories and do something called getups. So on Saturdays on all my social medias, I do a 15-second getup video, which just means I'm standing somewhere, usually in Madeira, um, with a waterfall or the ocean or something behind me, or I was just in Barcelona or Ireland, and I'll do a get up wherever I go. And you can see me do that, and then you get on the ground and you get back up and practice that skill that's a really great life skill, so that you are, you know, don't have a lot of risk moving into older age. And then you can even send me your videos if you want to practice and do a get up. I will feature you on my social media stuff too. Amazing. I love it. I think it's such a good little challenge for a Saturday. I think that's a really good one. We'll also make sure to have all the links in the show notes. So if you're listening, you can go to the description below and click the links there. Definitely make sure to connect with Steven on LinkedIn. I I think you have really good content and like you said, like some really good little tips here and there. So I would highly recommend it. Stevie, thank you so much for making the time to come on the podcast today. It was a pleasure having you here. Thank you so much. Want to build trust at scale? Go to cashflowpodcasting.com and launch your own podcast.