By Stacy Allred, MST, CFP®, Joan DiFuria, MFT, and Stephen Goldbart, PhD
In the first part of this three-part series, we learned about how to build a thriving and connected family of wealth by promoting flourishing and combating languishing. We talked about the importance of solving issues such as purpose, stewardship, effective giving, future thinking, and harmony to be able to do that.
In this second part, we discuss how to create a learning roadmap that allows families to be curious, review the activities, and choose the competencies they want to pursue. In this way, we are able to help them flourish across multiple generations.
The 10×10 Learning Roadmap
As a trusted advisor, you have an important opportunity to expand your client’s thinking. You can provide a holistic solution that can help this family see around corners. But here’s the catch: It’s not just the kids who need to build skills. Navigating the opportunities, challenges, and risks of significant financial capital requires active involvement from the entire family. This isn’t a spectator sport for anyone in the game.
As modern advisors continually look for ways to differentiate and enhance value, they need a model and toolkit to attend to what matters most for every family member at every stage of life.
Although there are no easy answers, individuals, families, and the advisors who serve them, who are willing to put in the work, can create a learning family and focus attention on supporting family members of all ages to build competencies.
A holistic learning roadmap can help you and your clients achieve the number-one desired outcome—a thriving, connected family—by providing a model of intentional focus and commitment. The roadmap comprises 10 core competencies that are applied across
10 life stages (see figure 1). It highlights the importance of both a prevention mindset and a promotion mindset in order to navigate the opportunities and challenges of financial abundance. It invites users to metaphorically wear a reversible cape that gives them the agility to deflect the bad and cultivate the good.
Learning roadmaps need accessible onramps that invite family members of all ages to be curious, review the activities, and choose the competencies they want to pursue. We prefer methods that pull rather than push, engaging the energy and motivation of each family member and guiding each individual to a self-authored, exclusive plan that has the best likelihood of leading to action.
From our perspective, effectively navigating the challenges of wealth is a lifelong journey, and every life stage has milestones and learning activities. The 10×10 Learning Roadmap offers clients a chance to stop, look at where they are, consider key activities for their life stages, and choose where they want to go next on their learning journeys.
Clients’ chosen learning activities are tuned to their own life decisions, directions, and experiences. This results in a unique dynamic process that unfolds as each person progresses through the 10 stages of life. The process allows each person the freedom to redirect an individual learning path, explore new spaces, and revisit missed opportunities or past challenges with improved competencies and enhanced self-esteem.
Exercising competency muscles can shift, change, and refine one’s sense of core identity—who I am, what I’m capable of, and what really matters—as one moves forward in the life cycle. Contrary to outdated conventional wisdom, personal development doesn’t have to stop at some arbitrary or fixed point in life.
The 10 Core Competencies
The learning roadmap covers 10 core competencies—five external and five internal (see table 2 below). Each competency is exercised over the course of the 10 life stages via stage-specific milestones and activities. In other words, it’s the framework for a learning action plan for each family member in each stage of the life cycle. It encourages youngsters to learn the basics, adults to master the skills they need to meet challenges and opportunities, and seniors to carry out the tasks of eldering.
The 10 core competencies work in synergy to help accomplish the following:
- They build up and elevate the overall capacities of every family member.
- They span the arc of life, from childhood to senior years.
- They foster each person’s strengths and create a more resilient family.
A holistic learning journey addresses all the competencies essential at specific life stages and sets plans for obtaining them. The resulting roadmap helps families protect against family cultures that can be negative and/or destructive, leading to, for example, indecisive, unmotivated, or overly self-centered children. Instead, active engagement in a learning roadmap can help individuals cultivate life skills and competencies that move them closer to their true potential.
From Good to Great
Families that foster bountiful lives that go from “good to great” are aware of the opportunities and risks of wealth and seek to get in front of these challenges.
We’ve observed that families that thrive over time share the following commonalities:
- Active learning: They assign a high value to lifelong learning and plan to build and strengthen competencies required for each family member—and the family as a whole—to effectively integrate wealth and thrive.
- Strong culture: They develop a strong culture, fueled by a growth mindset and anchored by planning and core practices.
- Healthy communication: They continually enhance communication and conflict-resolution skills within and among generations.
- Wise parenting: They seek an optimal balance of love and support with high expectations of responsibility and accountability; in other words, they use an authoritative parenting style.
- Inclusive: They are attuned and open to each family member’s differing developmental capabilities and lifestyle choices.
- Informed: They make use of the most recent research on neural and psycho-social development.
- Manage change: They think through and plan for how to manage changes such as marriage, divorce, birth, and death, as well as blended family dynamics and sibling rivalry.
Stay tuned for the third, and final part, of this series next week!
For more in this series:
- How to Build a Thriving and Connected Family of Wealth Across Generations
- How To Implement a Learning Roadmap
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