Clearing Internal & External Clutter

Kristin Keffeler, MSM, MAPP is a thought leader and consultant at the forefront of a global shift in family wealth advising, known as Wealth 3.0. She works with affluent and enterprising families, rising gen, and the professionals who support them. As the founder of the consulting firm illumination360 and the Chief Learning Officer for the Johnson Financial Group, she specializes in human motivation and behavioral change, family dynamics, family governance, rising gen education and development, and intergenerational collaboration.

Drawing upon her research and years of private practice advising and coaching the rising generation in affluent and enterprising families, Kristin believes that members of the rising gen are uniquely positioned to create significant impact in the world and uses a lens of strengths to help them—and those who guide them—to ignite their potential. Her recent book, The Myth of the Silver Spoon: Navigating Family Wealth & Creating an Impactful Life, captures this approach.

 Kirby Rosplock

Welcome to the Tamarind Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirby Rosplock, and today we have a very special guest. Kristin Keffeler is here with us. She's a newly minted author and written a fantastic book that we're going to talk a little bit more about. It's called The Myth of the Silver Spoon. And Kristin is an incredible consultant, advisor, chief learning officer. She wears many, many different hats. But, Kristin, I just want to welcome you and hear a little bit more about your story and how you got to be doing what you're doing and your new book.

Kristin Keffeler

Awesome. Thank you, Kirby. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, maybe it would be worthwhile to share the quick story of how I got to be sitting in this chair that I'm sitting in today, and then we can dive into the book. Because I think there's some fun stuff that we can unpack there together. So I've been a consultant and a coach in this space for almost two decades. When I first started my work working with ultra-high net worth families and enterprising families, I was 29, which is, like, really way too young for anyone to take me seriously as a consultant. But back then, really what I wanted to do and what I set out to do was to coach the rising gen in affluent and enterprising families, to help give them a feeling of empowerment so that they could feel like they could actually sit at the decision making table in their families and the decision making table of their own life. And we didn't even call them rising gen back then. We called them next gen. And that's a cohort that I also am a part of. So I'm the second generation in my family, and really the pathway for me getting into this work was because I was just trying to figure things out myself.

Kristin Keffeler

So it's spent a lot of my 20s... My dad and oldest brother started a company. When I went to college, they took it public and then they sold. So all these sort of wealth events happened right at a time when I was coming out of college, getting ready to go to graduate school. And I had these two paths in my life where, one, I started a master's degree in public health and was spending time really sort of embedded in the public health world, right, a world of public service. And all of my friends were there to be public servants in some way or another. And then also on this alternate path, we started having family meetings and talking about estate planning, and I was signing documents at the big building downtown and big conference tables and never knew exactly what I was signing. And so there were these two elements of my 20s that just felt like they were parallel paths, not intersecting paths. And I spent a lot of time in my 20s trying to figure out how do I build the skills to even know what we're talking about at these meetings? And we had great advisors who were heartful and kind and I still walked out of meeting after meeting not really understanding what we were talking about or how I could actually be a meaningful steward, right?

Kristin Keffeler

Like that was always the, "we're sharing this with you because we want you to be stewards of what we've created". And this, without knowledge about what that actually meant or what we were talking about, it was impossible for me to consider how one might be a good steward. So ultimately, that led me to this work, which the short version of the story is I feel super lucky. I've always had rising gen, and that work with the rising gen in families deep in my heart because I feel like there's so much potential and so much power in the rising generation in these families that have generally significant wealth and significant social networks. And there's also a lot of areas where there's just hidden tripwires that we don't do a great job talking about and to point out where someone who is raised with wealth and privilege, who by all outside counts, everybody says you have everything, like why, one, how could you have any problems? And two, how could you not just be knocking out of the park? You were born on Third Base and recognizing that there is hidden tripwires, that make it, psychologically speaking, that make it more difficult for rising gen to really find their way and the more we can shine a light on them.

Kristin Keffeler

We can help them sidestep them, and then we can help them build the skills so that they ultimately can use the financial capital and social capital and human capital in their world to do something, to live a life of meaning. So that brings me more to today. I eventually got a dual master's degree in public health and business and I love the business side of things. It was an accidental business degree, which is a story for another time, but it turns out I loved getting it. Really happy that I have that skill set and then ultimately went back to the University of Pennsylvania and got a Master's in Applied Positive Psychology. And so my work today in this book is really sort of the confluence of all of those areas of interest. So it's exciting to have had the chance to have written it.

Kirby Rosplock

Well, your backstory and your personal experiences really enrich the voice in your book and I'm sure it's also why you find the connectivity so natural and so easy with your families and with your clients. And I definitely feel kindred to you and that if it wasn't coming from a similar background where I felt like I didn't have the skills and resources completely to handle sort of the fact pattern I was born into that really helps galvanize this need to help others, right? And it is a way an extension of your public health work, right? You're just using it and doing it in a different sort of cadre of clients.

Kirby Rosplock

But let's talk about your book, because there's so many cool elements in this that I want to talk about, but I think I want to focus on the middle part of your book, which is talking about clutter. And I have to say, in my grown up years, I've determined that I'm much happier when I am not consumed by clutter. And I want you to tell us a little bit more about the four clutters that you unpack in your book, because it's fantastic.

Kirby Rosplock

You talk about money, identity, relationship, and contribution clutter, and I would just give me a highlight or a preview of what you share in the book.

Kristin Keffeler

Yeah, absolutely. Let me first start by saying that I think the analogy of clutter, really once it started forming for me, that this is what I very often would talk to clients about, sort of the clutter in their way. But I hadn't really connected that idea to a bigger framework and really thought through kind of like, well, number one, what is clutter actually in our lives? And two, how do inner beliefs and the mindsets we have drive outer behavior? And how do those two things create this cycle of inner clutter and outer clutter? And one of the great things about writing a book is that it forces you to crystallize your thinking so that you can actually share that thinking with others more coherently. And that was one of the outcomes of this for me, was actually having to really distill, like, what do I mean when I say clutter to people? And what I realized is that we all have a common understanding of what clutter is generally in our lives, right? It's generally the disorganized, nonessential stuff that accumulates in sort of the shadowy places, right? Think, like, closets and drawers, not foyers and front yards.

Kristin Keffeler

It's not the stuff we project to the world. It's the stuff that we're like, I don't really know what to do with this right now, and we shove it away to be dealt with another day. And it's generally a disorganized mass of stuff that probably, when you really look at it, doesn't really serve you and you don't need. And so that idea of clutter being a disorganized mess of stuff that we hide away to be dealt with another day is, I think, really compelling. Because I think probably most people I know have also had the experience, at least, of cleaning out their clothes closet right? Where you're like, I don't even know what I want to wear because I can't see anything. And then you go through this thing doesn't fit. This thing's got a ripped arm, and you clean it out, and suddenly being in your closet feels kind of exciting again. And that same feeling applies to or that same process and feeling applies to this idea of these other kinds of clutter that I typically see in rising gen. And so you named them. The four main types of clutter I see are money clutter, identity clutter, relationship clutter, and contribution clutter.

Kristin Keffeler

And so let me unpack those. So money clutter is generally the kind of things that are like false beliefs or old ways of thinking that we probably don't even know that we have. It's like we've inherited some belief system from our parents and grandparents and some of it might be really helpful, right? It may be things like we put on our pants one leg at a time just like everyone else. Or it may be things that are not helpful. Like I have heard more rising gen than I can count say that when their parents told them we earned all this so you could go find your passion, we just want you to go find your passion. And they're like 21 and going, well, I must have that missing gene because I don't know how one would go do that. And then they feel lost and then they feel stuck and then it turns into a cycle where that belief that I must not have anything to contribute, right? And then it starts to build up this contribution clutter which we'll get to in a minute. So money clutter is like it's both the internal beliefs and the mindsets we have around money and wealth and what those two things mean to us and then often extends out into outer clutter, like having a lack of basic financial skills or the ability to really know kind of how to budget or why would it matter to understand cash flow.

Kristin Keffeler

And the fact that not understanding those basic personal financial skills makes it so that a rising gen continues to feel really stuck and feel like they are in arrested development because they don't know how to really, what it takes to support their own life. So money clutter is a big mass of stuff. And in the book, I define money and wealth as being interrelated but different. Money being sort of the day to day stuff we interact with. Like you can pay your rent or your mortgage or buy coffee and wealth being an abstraction. It's so big that you're looking at numbers on a page. You can't really figure out how to interact with something called wealth. And in order to get to the place where you could effectively interact with something called wealth, you have to build the personal money skills and then eventually build beneficiary skills and build the ability to actually interact with the ecosystem that is around this thing called wealth. The advisors, the structures, stuff that the people who are familiar with your work know that you help people plug into all of those skills so that's money clutter. So identity clutter is typically the second kind.

Kristin Keffeler

Or it's another kind of clutter that I see really commonly. And this is false beliefs and kind of maybe a missing sense of who I am as an individual, separate from my family name, separate from my family wealth, that it's really about either accepting other people's projections onto me as an individual. Like, oh, I come from the XYZ family. That must mean this about you. When you're not known as an individual, you're known as part of the whole that the community around you already has this sense of what it means to be a part of that whole because of your family name or your known family wealth story. And so often, trying to find one's own identity in the midst of a significant and prominent family is like a journey that's so much harder than you would think it would be, right? Whether it's feeling like you're not good enough because the bar for success has been set so high that just being kind of like even an above average worker, contributor, earner isn't as amazing as a father or a grandmother or someone who just had that Midas touch. And so really trying to carve out a sense of who you are separate from your family and ultimately able to reintegrate into your family while still holding that individual identity is super important. And such an important developmental thing that happens during the twenties and can often get lost. So that's identity clutter.

Kristin Keffeler

Relationship clutter is one. This one actually came out really clearly in the research I did when I was at Penn and I was trying to understand what were the character traits and skills that rising gen who were thriving in their lives, who were just truly knocking it out of the park? What were the character traits and skills they had in common? One of the things that came out of that research was that they had at some period in their life, they had a friend or a boyfriend or a girlfriend that they absolutely knew loved them for who they were, who they are, and not for their family name or for the benefits of being a friend. And in that they really had this felt lived sense of an authentic friendship, of like, this person has my back. And while it seems like that shouldn't be so hard to find because culturally we have a pretty confused relationship with money and wealth and power and prominence, it is more difficult than one would think to actually build the skill that radar to know, like, when am I in an authentic friendship and how does that feel and what does reciprocity feel like and equality feel like in a friendship when it can get quickly obscured by the power differentials that happen when one person has more wealth and can invite a friend on a vacation or those kinds of things?So that relationship clutter is so essential to deal with because our felt sense of worthiness in the world comes in part from the relationships we're in, from the sense of I am worthy and lovable because I am not because I have. And so it's another really important piece of the puzzle.

Kristin Keffeler

And then finally, contribution clutter. This one I called contribution and not work clutter because I think work has such a strong association with paid work. And we all know that it's not necessary to get paid for your work in order to really be a contributor. It does help in my work. I've experienced that getting paid often is a way that rising gen can start to prove to themselves that I can do this on my own. I know I could earn on my own if I needed to. There's some value to that, but it's not necessary to get paid in order to contribute. One of the things that I have seen time and time again is that for rising gen who are in a situation where they don't have to work in order to cover all their expenses, there's this sense that there's a confusion around removing the financial need to work somehow removes the human need to work.

Kristin Keffeler

And as humans, we are wired for contribution. We are wired to know that we matter, right? That I bring this unique skill set into the world in whatever big or small way that I might, and that I'm a part of a cycle where I give out and I get feedback that it matters that I do that without having some felt sense of contribution. It's really tough to have a real experience of meaning. And without meaning, it's really tough to have a sense that you matter. And so this idea of really sorting through the difference between the drive to work because you have a financial need and the drive to work because you want to bring your gifts and skills to the world, it's just an important and very sticky place of clutter.

Kirby Rosplock

So talk to me, and you can pick any one of the clutters that you just identified, but what's a good practice to organize or to shed some of the clutter that is maybe your anchor, your hurdle, your roadblock, or just not actually contributing to you thriving? What would be one pathway to start, to organize or to let go of some of those unneeded clutter items?

Kristin Keffeler

Yeah, it's a great question. I talk about in the book, I actually outline a seven-step process for doing just that. And maybe one of the things that we could do that would be helpful, I'll have to pull it together, but in chapter one of the book, I actually outline the clutter-clearing process. So maybe we could pull that together and give that as a download for listeners so they actually have the seven-step process. Basically, what I've outlined is that there's both inner clutter, right? And I just talked about that being sort of mindset and belief system and kind of this internal landscape that we filter information through that comes in from the world into us. And that tending to that inner clutter makes it so that we can be more aligned and specific as we start to tend to the outer clutter.

Kristin Keffeler

And outer clutter is things like being clear on the outcome that you want to create. Right? It might be like, this is a clearing. Clutter is like a lifetime long process. It's all part of each of our evolution, is to recognize, like, I'm unhappy with something in my life.

Kristin Keffeler

It's not working. I need to recognize what are the beliefs that are getting in the way of my ability to change that. So in this case, let's pick money clutter and think about how often I hear rising gen get really tangled up when they feel like maybe they may want to actually support themselves or even know what it would take to support themselves financially. But they have this sense of, like, that is sort of big, that's a whole territory stuff I don't know anything about. I'm an artist or I'm a philanthropist. I don't know how the money stuff works. And so they have a belief that they can't or are not skilled to know how that works. And then that manifests itself in an outer behavior of not engaging, like when quarterly statements show up or when the family's advisor says, hey, we should talk about your investments. There's always a sense of like, no, you take care of that. I don't understand this stuff. And all of that perpetuates this sort of inner and outer experience of being very stuck and in some ways, infantilized. Right? Like, we can create a system and rising gen, and our client families can buy into the system where they don't have to really know what it takes to support their lives, to understand how money flows in and out of their life, to be engaged in those decisions.

Kristin Keffeler

And it doesn't mean that we all have to be financial experts. I would not consider myself a financial expert, but I would consider myself someone who is actively engaged in understanding how money flows through my life, where it's coming from, how it's invested. What do I think about those things? How do I hire good advisors that I trust so that when they give me information, I can distill that and trust that that's all part of understanding and clearing money clutter is being able to cultivate a beneficial mindset. Like, I am capable of this, and in fact, this will be part of me owning my own life. Right, so you cultivate that beneficial mindset. You recognize that there are beliefs that a belief would be like, I am really intelligent. I've proved that many times in my life in other domains. I can bring my intelligence to this and learn this too. That's a beneficial belief. And then when you decide, okay, now what do I need to do about that? You can start tackling little things, right? Okay, I'm going to set up a meeting with our family office advisor, and I'm going to ask them to help me understand these quarterly statements.

Kristin Keffeler

Or, I'm going to ask them to help me understand my personal cash flow. Let me see where money is coming in. Help me understand how I could track where money is going out. And all of that is part of an upward cycle of clutter clearing, where each time you get more education, more a stronger level of confidence. And then that is this upward cycle that supports your ability to learn new things in bigger, more complex domains and eventually feel like, okay, now I know how to sit in the driver's seat. Now I can actually think about the role of being a co-trustee and what that might entail. How might I really be able to serve that role well? Is that helpful?

Kirby Rosplock

Super helpful. And I love thinking about the idea of being stuck, not as you don't care, you're not good enough, you're not competent. But maybe it's just a wake up call to say, if you're feeling stuck, then you might actually be burdened with some of this clutter that we're talking about today. And it might actually be a call to action, to not wallow in your sorrows or your self pity or your frustrations, but to actually pick up Kristin's book. And I would equally say that this is powerful for parents and grandparents and advisors who are trying to figure out how to help people get more clear and focused on what is going to make them the best self, right, their best version of their self. And I do really love your book because I know you're talking to a lot of sort of rising gen, but the reality is you're talking to all of us in this book, and we can all take a moment to just reflect and say, boy, spring shouldn't be the only time that we think about cleaning. Maybe there's an opportunity to let go of some stuff that isn't really helping us, isn't really propelling us forward.

Kirby Rosplock

It might be anchoring us to things that past legacy modalities that just don't apply to where we are today. So I love just the framework that you provided, the guidance, the steps and process to approach it. This is a Wiley publication, so you can certainly get the book on Wiley, but where else do you see Kristin, a lot of people finding your book.

Kristin Keffeler

So certainly Amazon is like sort of where everybody goes first. But if anybody is interested in buying in bulk, I have copies that I can share at a discounted price to ship out to a family office. I've had a number of family foundations and family offices ask for copies for all their family members, and I'm really happy to send those out at a discount. And I think you make a really good point, Kirby, that I want to underscore again, which is this book was written for the rising gen, but it was also written for their parents and for their advisors. And there are specific chapters in here for all three. Parents and advisors also have their own special chapters in here. And I think that as advisors are listening to this podcast, I've had quite a few advisors email me and say, I picked up your book because I wanted to read it before giving it to clients. And I realize I have quite a bit of money clutter, like I have some work to do before I can be better at serving my clients because I have some stuff I need to clean up.

Kristin Keffeler

And I think the same is true for parents, where we think that we all have our blind spots and the places where we may be passing on beliefs about identity. Well, this is who we are. That can have a really positive upside and it can also be very limiting for a rising gen to decide who they are. If there's only this like our family looks like this, we do this, we're this pillar in our community. So I guess I would just say as a concluding invitation to that, probably anybody listening to this podcast has some hat that is relevant in this book, right? A rising gen, a parent or an advisor. I think we all have some work to do around our collective relationship with money and wealth and recognizing that the more we clean our own clutter, the better we can one be on our lives, but also be for our families and for our clients.

Kirby Rosplock

Fantastic. Kristin Keffeler, author of The Myth of the Silver Spoon, pick it up, download it, get your copy today. It's an incredible contribution to our field and I'm so grateful for your friendship, the work that you are forwarding, and all the good that you're bringing to us on Tamarind Learning podcast. So thank you so much.

Kristin Keffeler

Kristin, thank you for having me. Kirby, I'm excited to have been in this conversation with you.