George Kinder is, perhaps, best known in this industry as a trailblazer in the life planning movement. He created and institutionalized an approach to financial advice that focuses on “the human side” of planning. It is meant to put the client at the “center of the conversation” to “meet unique goals” and “unlock the greatest meaning in their lives.” There are now over 600 professionals who have gone through Kinder’s trainings and become Registered Life Planners.
In his new book, The Three Domains of Freedom: Each Moment is Yours, Your Life is Yours, Civilization is Yours, Kinder draws on his expertise in financial life planning as well as mindfulness, which he’s practiced for much of his life.
Released this month, the book argues that there are three domains of freedom for living a fulfilled life, and Kinder says each one has applications for retail financial advisors.
But at the end of the book, he calls for a new fiduciary standard, one that would apply to all institutions, including corporate, non-profit and governmental, and extend to all stakeholders, truth, humanity, democracy and the planet. Kinder crafted a one-sentence legislative proposal, dubbed “fiduciary in all things,” or FIAT for short, which would require all institutions to place the interests of those stakeholders above their own self-interest.
Kinder hopes to start a movement to spread this fiduciary standard. He started by speaking with hundreds of people in the financial services industry and promoting the idea throughout the Registered Life Planner community.
Kinder recently spoke with WealthManagement.com about the book’s three domains, the movement to promote his fiduciary proposal, and how his grand vision applies to financial advisors.
This interview has been edited for style, length and clarity.
WealthManagement.com: What’s the backstory to writing this book?
George Kinder: The three themes in the book—each moment is yours, your life is yours and civilization is yours—have been major themes in my professional life and personal life. It starts with the notion that each moment is yours. I’ve been reflecting on, what is the nature of freedom? I’ve practiced mindfulness for 50 years, so I’m an experienced meditator and all of that. People talk about mindfulness, and they’re primarily talking about its benefits in terms of reducing stress, of giving a greater longevity to you, of creating health. What people don’t really talk about is, what is the nature of mindfulness itself? It’s a practice toward the mastery of the present moment.
One of the questions I ask large audiences these days is, “Have you ever experienced a moment of freedom in the past?” And I tell them it’s a trick question. I get everybody to raise their hand, and they remember walking the beach or making love or playing with their kids or something special, something entrepreneurial. And then I tell them they all got it wrong, that none of us have ever experienced a moment of freedom in the past. The only time we’ve ever experienced it is in the present moment. And so the mastery of the present moment becomes something very interesting.
How that relates to life planning, is a couple of different ways. One is that in our training, we train people to deliver their clients into their client’s dream of freedom. And we use mindfulness in every training. One of the ways that it delivers freedom is that it strips our habitual thinking of all of our self-stories, of self-orientation, of clinging and grasping and pushing things away, all oriented around ourselves. The freeing of the mind like that means that we’re better listeners because we’re there for who the person is. We’re not constantly feeding it through our own loop of who we are. That’s the first domain.
The second domain is life planning. In our first and second engagements with clients in life planning, we work toward helping clients get excited about their own vision of freedom. When a client has the excitement of that, when they catch it, there’s nothing that stands in their way. They always go for that dream of freedom.
And the third domain is the one where fiduciary comes in. Of course, fiduciary is part of being a life planner; it’s part of being a great advisor; and it’s obviously a very active theme for all of us in the financial industry right now. And the third domain, the domain of civilization, is the one that we’re most troubled by, in a way. The politics of the day, the constant polarization, make us feel that we’re disempowered there and even codependent on the powerful forces that are there, whether they’re corporate or governmental or political.
And what I do in that third domain is first, I inspire people to recall all the things that democracy and capitalism over the last 300 years have delivered for us, which is pretty incredible. The smartphone that I’m using, is something now that 90% of humanity has.
Secondly, if we could actually rely on whatever is shared as being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, can’t you imagine all of humanity, all of America, all of the country, in fact, making a pretty good decision on what is the right thing for this next election, for instance, for democracy?
What I argue is that over the 250-year timeframe that the Industrial Revolution has taken off and created all these amazing things, if it was the very best system, we would see at the top of every hierarchy of power, whether it’s government or corporate or nonprofit, the best of humanity, right? Because we would’ve naturally developed that. But we don’t see that.
There must be something wrong at the base of our creation of institutions, of our system of creating those institutions. My thought then was, "Well, what if we required of each institution a humane response to us as humanity so that they’re paying attention to our values ahead of their own self-interest?" It’s similar to what we ask of a great advisor: to put the client ahead of our own self-interest. Here I’m looking at civilization, and I’m saying each of our institutions should be required to do the same thing and do it in regard to the planet, democracy, the truth, and humanity, all their stakeholders
WM: How does this apply to the financial services world?
GK: The fiduciary question in the financial world is a question about a sales force of advisors versus independent, often fee-only advisors and how it’s set up; it’s the classic polarization of community. So there’s one set of advisors over there, and there’s one set of advisors over here. And that’s how the worst of media sets us up. Setting it up like that robs us of seeing the real issue, which is, why aren’t these large product companies and large institutions advocates for and owners of their own fiduciary responsibility?
The banks, insurance companies and mutual fund companies—why do they not consider themselves great fiduciaries for their community, for truth, for democracy and for the planet? If they did, it would transform everything. If banks had the notion that they were fiduciaries and therefore didn’t lend to any company that wasn’t a fiduciary themselves, my God, what a difference it would make in the world and in terms of the troubles that we have and how diminished all of those troubles would be quite quickly.
WM: What are you proposing institutions do exactly to put something like this in place?
GK: It’s a one-sentence legislative proposal. It’s kind of a contract to live by. It takes off from the ESG thought and the work that was done, including a business round table, to make ESG something that every corporation, or many corporations, would have committees on within the corporation.
I realized that there were two limitations to that approach. One is that it’s voluntary. The other weakness is that it doesn’t include democracy or the truth. It includes humanity, it includes the planet, environment. But the truth is so important these days, as we see from how polarized the media is. People don’t even realize that certain approaches to truth are being made. What I thought was, let’s make this the law of the land and let’s include truth and democracy in it, so there can’t be an undermining of the primary values that we have as humanity, which I think are our wisdom, compassion, kindness, democracy, honesty and integrity.
WM: What should financial advisors take away from the mindfulness portion of the book?
GK: The reason we train with it is because it makes you a better listener because there’s less self-centeredness in it. And fiduciary is about placing others’ concerns ahead of our own. So that immediately makes us a better advisor because of that listening quality.
But in terms of our own life—the empathy, the relaxation. We never get to full mastery of the present moment, but as you get stronger and stronger with it, you understand that in any moment, at any circumstance, you can let go of what’s troubling you with the crisis that you’re in the midst of, and just come back to being right here, right now. And when you do that, it is such a relief. And you realize the world isn’t all driven by the fears and anxieties and neurotic stuff that you’re launched into in some way. But in fact, the world is really simple. It’s based on just being here as a breathing being and your senses being able to smell and taste and touch things.
WM: Yes, being an advisor is one of the most stressful professions. What’s the life planning process you discuss in the book? Is it the EVOKE (“Exploration, Vision, Obstacles, Knowledge, and Execution”) process?
GK: I ended up being not stressed at all as an advisor. And I think the main reason was that when I was with a client, I let go of everything. I was just there for them, and it was spacious, it was at ease, it was empathic, it was friendly. And rather than being there around the money, you’re there around who they are and about your relationship to them. And that’s a beautiful thing as opposed to a stressful thing.
The primary two that I talk to in the book are the first two, the E and the V. The exploration is a place of listening and building trust.
And then in the second stage of EVOKE, you build a terrific vision. And then the vision is so inspiring that most clients can’t say no to it. But there are obstacles that come up because, finally, you’re getting what you always wanted. And whether it’s time to write the great American novel or to act on TikTok movies or whatever it is, spend more time with your kids, your family, there are the obstacles that come up as to why you haven’t done that already.
And that’s where there are two obstacles that come up more than any others. The first one is me. I’m blocking myself. And that’s why mindfulness can be helpful, and a life planning process can be helpful. And the second one is money. I can’t afford to; I’ve got all these bills to pay and all these other things. And what happens when the inspiration is very high is that you are willing to make the sacrifices that you need to make in the money area so that you see it much more clearly. Where are you overspending your time on scrolling through your machine or watching TV or excess spending in one way or another? Where can you cut those things back so that, in fact, you’re living the high of your prize, of what it is that you want to keep your eyes on.
WM: What are your thoughts on the direction of this country and the current political environment? Joe Biden just recently dropped out of the presidential race. There was an assassination attempt against Donald Trump. How does the book address a lot of the issues happening around us?
GK: The advisory community is all over the map politically. From the standpoint of the fiduciary, the investment advisors are primarily supported by the Democratic propositions. But more classically, people in finance have been more on the Republican side of things.
Part of my life plan was writing a series of books that are essentially about mindfulness in nature, and they’re an intermingling of photography and poetry, all my own. At the end of that work and at the end of this book, for the first time in 30 years, I said, "I’m going to put my books aside and dedicate myself to what’s happening in the country right now.” My main theme for that is democracy; I think that if you lose democracy and the rule of law, our whole system falls apart, including whatever it is that the great corporate endeavor and growth of economics have done for us over the last 250 years. So, I’m passionate about making democracy really work and making it a stronger place. That’s why this legislative proposal is called “Fiduciary in All Things,” and we abbreviate that to FIAT.
My endeavor is to try to make this as well-known and as popular as I can with the audience that I have primarily in the U.S. but across many cultures. My response to what’s going on right now is that it’s time for us to have a fiduciary culture, to have a culture that is trustworthy in all things, where we can trust every institution that we have to be humane in their response to us and to the civilization that we’ve crafted and that we value.
WM: Are you hoping to take this to any kind of government entity and try to pass legislation?
GK: I’ve talked with a number of people in government and many lawyers about the legislation itself. But at this point, the most important thing is to build a movement. It could be a very small percentage of all of humanity, but a large number of people everywhere, and people who might have influence who go, “This makes sense.” Then we go to the legislative process and we reach out to the government entities and people serving in government and the attorneys who relate to them and say, “Let's make this happen.”