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Welcome to a special episode of Soundbites, brought to you by Investment Executive and sponsored by Canada Life. This week we’re starting a new series that will run throughout 2026 featuring Chris Reynolds, co-founder and executive chairman with Investment Planning Counsel. Chris is well known in the Canadian financial management industry as host of the Turning the Page podcast. He’s also written a powerful new book filled with insights about the world of financial advising. It’s called The Six Circle Strategy: The Entrepreneur’s Journey to Wealth and Freedom. We’re going to be talking with Chris about those six circles in six episodes this year — starting today with the first circle: Vision. He talks about learning to love your job, and the importance of having challenges and we started by asking why knowing yourself is the first step to success in business and in life.

Chris Reynolds (CR): One of the first chapters in Sun Tzu’s Art of War is ‘Know thyself and know thy enemy.’ And if you want success in the long run, you have to ‘know thyself.’ When building a vision, it’s critical to know what you’re good at, but also know what you’re not good at, or what you don’t like doing because in the long run, it’s very hard to stick to something that you’re not naturally good at. There’s an expression, “work on your weaknesses.” I actually believe in the exact opposite. I think you should ignore your weaknesses all together and only work on building your strengths because you’re going to have obstacles. Every businessperson knows you start something, you’re going to fail at it, you learn from your failure, you start again, and you go even stronger. And that’s why I can describe it as a circle. By knowing yourself, you know what you’re not good at, you know where you can focus. And that just helps you get over those challenges that are inevitable in your business. You want to do the things you enjoy with the people you enjoy being around, and create value for people that you like. That’s the secret to life.

The danger of squandering one of life’s most precious commodities: time

CR: At the end of the day, the only asset that all of us possess is time. Like, that’s it. We only earn money so that we have, at some point, more freedom. But as I see it, people waste money all the time. I see people taking a lot of time off. They just do it in the office — which is crazy to me. From my point of view, when you work, you’re incredibly focused, you do the tasks that need to be done, and the rest of the time you don’t work at all. And the most successful people that I know — and I’ve met successful people in all walks of life, but specifically in the wealth management business — are the ones who are the most guarded with their time. Everything is scheduled. Everything is a system. Everything is a process. And they never waste time. They focus on really what’s important and everything else in their lives, they either outsource, they delegate, or they systemize. And if you can outsource it to companies that are better than you at doing whatever that is, delegate all of your weaknesses to somebody else, and systemize everything else so you don’t think about it, your life will be just grand.

How learning to love your job starts with developing a healthy mindset

CR: It’s possible to love your job. You can love anything if you have the right mindset or the right perspective. And the example that I use in my book is when I started in the insurance business, I didn’t have any passion for selling life insurance. I didn’t wake up and say, ‘I can’t wait to flog some policies.’ But what I do love is helping people. Changing the perspective, now I was on a mission to help as many people as possible. When I built IPC, I don’t like managing people. In fact, I hate it. But what I do love is working with people and mentoring them to be their absolute best. So, now I’m not managing them anymore. I’m helping them be their best at whatever position that they’re in. By changing that mindset, I went from something that I probably wouldn’t have liked, to something that I loved to do. So, when you have things like that, you just have to ask yourself, ‘What is my real mission? What am I really doing here?’ And if you can just get passionate about that, it’s way better than just, ‘Meh, I just have a job doing this.’ What is the result that you are getting paid to produce? Can you get passionate around that result? And sometimes the answer is no, and then my choice is, ‘What can I get passionate about? What result could I get super passionate about?’ Because I tell you, the people who are super passionate about what they do are always the most successful.

The relationship between career challenges and personal fulfillment

CR: I think life is full of challenges. Challenges are something that you just know, anticipate and actually look forward to. Because challenges throughout life are a way for you to get better. One of the reasons I wrote The Six Circle Strategy is because it is a circle. You know that you’re going to get challenges. You’re going to start something, and you know at some point you’re going to fail. When you do it again, you’re going to be better at it. You’re not going to make the same mistakes again. And then that will lead to future successes, and onward and onward. Challenges are just a way to learn so that eventually you’re not making those mistakes again. That leads to your personal fulfillment. When you felt the most alive. It’s generally when you were overcoming a challenge and you won. And that’s what life’s all about. Those challenges are what define your success in life.

Committing to your vision

CR: To be successful at anything, you need commitment. Having a vision is the easy part. Everyone has a vision. Everyone says, ‘I want to be rich. I want to take five months off a year. I want to be in better shape.’ Those are just platitudes. It’s not really the vision, it’s the tactics that are necessary to make that vision come true. And I use the example in my book. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I thought, ‘I’m going to get in shape.’ Usually what people do is, they go weigh themselves, and then they go and sit on the scale on a regular basis to see if it’s working. That never works, by the way. That has no effect on your actual fitness or motivation. All I focus is, is how many times I went into the gym. As long as I went into the gym 180 days out of the year, I was probably going to be in better shape than not doing it. Over a three-year period, going 180 days to the gym, you’re in a whole lot better shape. So, focus on the tactic that needs to be done for that vision to become reality. That’s the real secret. And that’s where commitment comes in. You have to commit to that tactic, not the vision.

And finally, what’s the key takeaway on developing a life-defining vision?

CR: When I mentor people, I tell them, take a blank sheet of paper and on it, write down three things. What do I love doing? What would I do if I wasn’t even getting paid for it? And what am I naturally good at? So, in that same category: what do I like to do, and what am I naturally good at? Then, what can I be the best at? In other words, what is it that if I really focused my attention, I could be the best in my industry, in my firm, in the world? What could that be? And then in the third column, what drives my economic engine? Because you could love something, you could be the best at it. But if it doesn’t pay, that’s just called a hobby. So, you want something that somebody will pay for. And what somebody usually pays for is when you bring economic value to them. So, what result can you bring to other people that people will pay you for? Once you have that, then you say, what is my vision to utilize these things to get to that end result. So, once you know — going back to our original talk — once you ‘know thyself,’ it’s easy to figure out where that will lead in a vision. Because if all those things are not aligned, you can work all day long, you can do whatever you want, but you’ll never achieve your vision.

Well, those are today’s Soundbites, brought to you by Investment Executive and sponsored by Canada Life. Special thanks to Chris Reynolds of Investment Planning Counsel. He’ll be back soon to walk us through another circle in his Six Circle Strategy. In the meantime, you can get more insights from Chris at his “Turning the Page” podcast site. You can even schedule a ‘virtual coffee with Chris’ to discuss issues specific to your practice. You’ll find that at IPCC.ca slash Turning the Page. Join us again next week for another episode of Soundbites. Thanks for listening.

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