Master These 5 Levers to Achieve Life Satisfaction and Financial Freedom

Have you ever wondered just why it can be so hard to achieve that next level of success and fulfillment in your life? Sometimes we feel frustrated; stuck in a life that isn’t as fulfilling as the life you really want. It’s not that you don’t have some level of success or progress and it’s not that you don’t have the material things to show for your effort but, at some level, you aren’t as satisfied with your life as you’d like to be. Maybe you actually feel pretty good about life at the moment. You’d perhaps use the word “decent” to describe it.

But, what if you wanted to improve all areas of your life from your social relationships and health to your career, business and your finances by a multiple, what would that be like for you? How would that feel? What would you need to do? What would you need to stop doing?

Well that’s all part of what I call the Life & Wealth Achievement Formula. Think of it as a mix of personal finance and life coaching principles with a heavy dose of high performance elements.

The formula is based on five concepts that I refer to metaphorically as levers. I use the metaphor of a lever because I want you to associate the image of a lever with the fact that you have the power to choose how to move each of these levers.  

In the world we live in today, a feeling of control is a wonderful thing. The reality is there will be changes and shifts in market dynamics, legislation, country laws and taxation, and all of those things are, indeed, out of our control. But, if you understand and use the 5 Levers, you’ll have a strong platform from which to easily respond to these changes.

Let’s dive into the Levers and what goes into them. As we go through each of them, I encourage you to rate where you think your lever is right now. Is it in neutral? Maybe it’s in a low gear or in reverse.

Lever #1: Assets

This lever is all about your human capital – your skills, your knowledge, your experience, which is all about your ability to generate income through your career or through entrepreneurship. The leverage comes from how well you convert your human capital to financial capital.

Lever #2: Aim

When I talk about aim, we’re focused on obtaining clarity around what you want. When I talk about aim in this context, you’re developing the skills that go into the act of designing. The short-sighted path here is to minimize this concept to goal-setting, particularly those “common goals” you can choose from a checklist or similarly an “investment objective” also chosen from a predetermined list, usually ranging from “conservative” to “aggressive”.

But the question is “What was the process you used to arrive at that goal, that outcome?” Goals need direction to be effective. Your money needs purpose. It can’t work effectively for you without it.

So in Aim we are doing the work of arriving at purpose. We start with very tactical, day-to-day issues to arrive at high level direction in the form of vision.

This lever is affected by three elements, all of which are driven by data rather than pulled from thin air:

1. Your Life as measured via your level of satisfaction in the 7 Facets of Daily Living.

2. Your Lifestyle. This is made up of the

• costs of daily living, and the
• costs associated with funding future planned expenses

3. Vision. A lot of people talk about vision as it relates to time, but in my opinion specific outcomes that are time based are actually goals.  You need to think of vision as your future self or your future life without the constraint of time.

Do you know people who seem to be busy all the time, but don’t seem to move higher on the economic or life satisfaction meter? They’re chasing the latest financial fad or they’re following the prescription of rules of thumb they learned in a book and they can’t figure out why they’re not getting the results. It’s because the action doesn’t directly tie back to their aim. And this leads to the third lever: Alignment.

Lever #3: Alignment. At its core, alignment is about strategy. Think about what makes the difference between pros and amateurs in sports and in the performing arts. Amateurs do a whole bunch of things but they don’t have a strategy behind why they’re doing it. The pros usually have tight alignment between outcome and resources, which drives the specific action they take.

Alignment is effectively about controlling today for:

1. Money. Cash flows in and out in the present, but the present cash flows include those commitments made in the past and they also include an allocation to our future self. The question is how much to each?
2. Time. How do you allocate your time to all of the projects and activities in the areas of life you want to improve?
3. Resources. Again, what’s available to you and how can you best utilize them?

So, alignment is about knowing what to do, making decisions based on strategy rather than falling for the latest idea.

• Should you be focused on debt payoff like all the books and blogs tell you?
• Should you be focused on shifting at least 10% of take home wages into an investment account before you do anything else, like many blogs, books and programs tell you to?
• Should you always buy instead of rent?

The alignment lever is about how well our decisions are tied to our best opportunities. It sets you up to take the action that has the most impact to your future.

This is where the ability to think strategically makes a big difference between selecting goals that become stepping stones vs those that are keeping us busy.

Lever #4: Action. This is all about how well you are executing the projects needed to carry out the strategy.

• This is about your tax structuring
• This is about your spending plan
• This is about automating where you can
• This is about clear direction for your financial capital
• This is about building momentum through a lot of small wins

Lever #5: Attention. The last piece of this framework is attention. We need to measure and iterate.

• How well are you converting your human capital to financial capital?
• What is your Quality of Life (QOL) Indicator saying?
• How well is your business or career supporting the Asset Lever? (We need to measure that because, if you remember, the elements of the Asset Lever all affects the elements of the Aim Lever.)

I know for many people measurement can be like fingernails on a chalk board but it’s necessary, I promise. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make its way into this framework. Remember, the pro athletes and performers review their tape and their stats, then they work with their coach on what needs to be adjusted. Seeing what the results are based on the actions you’re taking, plus how your financial capital is working and closing those information loops provides increased confidence. This leads to increased competency and ultimately to direct control.

The mastery level of this framework is to be so dialed in to your own life that if you adjust one lever one way, you know how all the other levers will react.

So, that’s really what my framework or what I call the Life & Wealth Achievement Formula is. It’s about coordinating and integrating all the levers so that you can achieve a higher level of satisfaction in your personal and financial aspects of your life.

I hope you found this overview helpful.

If you’re at all like many of my successful clients and friends, you’re probably wondering where you are with these different levers. Maybe you’ve thought about that already based on the descriptions, or you could download the 5 Levers Quiz for some additional insight.

In the worksheet, you’ll be able to score yourself in the 5 levers of the life and wealth achievement formula. Access the 5 Levers Quiz by clicking HERE.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. Follow me so that you can benefit from the free training and resources that I’m going to give you. It’s the one way I know that I can easily be your mentor as you design and build a cross-border life of your design and achieve financial freedom.