Hello everybody. It’s Brian here on behalf of the GAF team. Now, you know that GAF stands for Great Advice Frameworks. And one of the things we want to do today is to show you a framework that we use pretty much in every session that we do. It is around communication and alignment. And we talk about this concept of content and context. So if I just ask you the word green, I wonder how many ways you can think of green. How many contexts can you have? So for instance, if you are a golfer, you would know what green meant. If you were an environmentalist, you would know what green meant. If you were an American counting your money, you’d know what green meant. If you were somewhat seasick, you’d know what green meant. If you were naive, you’d know what green meant. And what we know is we can’t be talking about one contextual green, if it’s not aligned.
And so it might be that we’re talking about environment and somebody else was talking about money. We can’t get agreement. So as a professional, what we want to be able to do is to align our context with our content. So the content is all of the things that you do for your clients. Now I’m sitting in a financial advisor’s office today, and I’m thinking about the work that my financial advisor does for us, my wife and I, and they organize our estate planning, our asset protection. They work on our investments, insurance, cashflow, et cetera. All of those things. Now what’s really important for us is that the advisor knows exactly what the context is. Context here is what gives meaning to the content. So for instance, if I’ve got a context of the environment, then I understand what green means. And when our advisor works with us, what we want to be able to do is to work inside the content, but from a context of what makes a great life for us and our advisor knows this about us, that the first one is we want to have a context of freedom.
If all of this that they’re doing for us feels constraining, then we’re not likely to follow the plan. We want to have a sense of being able to create a lifestyle for ourselves. Really, really importantly, family is a critical factor for us. If we have a plan and we can’t go and visit our grandchildren and our children, because we don’t have enough money for that, then the plan has no relevance. And then also to some degree, we would like some security. Now, if the work that my advisor does for me in these areas of estate planning, investment and so on, can provide us with a context or a sense of freedom, lifestyle, security, and family, then the model, sorry, the work that they do has a relevance for us. So when we’re working with any of our clients in the advice world, what we want to be able to do is align the content with the context. Context gives meaning. So now there’s a relevance to the work that you do for the people that you work with.