Your Best Life Forward, with Dr. Amy D’Aprix – Episode 483 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Dr. Amy D’Aprix, President and Founder of Lifebridge Strategies, talks about bridging the gap between the stages, changes, and events of life transitions, how life and money go hand in hand, using the right “script” in your interactions, the 3 levels of listening, why empathy is everything, and offers a tease of what’s to come.

About Dr. Amy:

Amy D’Aprix is an internationally respected expert on lifestyle issues relating to retirement, aging, caregiving, and family dynamics.

With a Ph.D. in Social Work, “Dr. Amy,” as she is affectionately known, provides down-to-earth, practical, and professionally informed guidance on Life Transitions to individuals, professionals, and organizations.

A compelling, pragmatic, inspirational speaker and coach, Dr. Amy has addressed thousands of Financial Advisors and their clients across North America. She has consulted for the financial industry and trained advisors for over 20 years, providing sound guidance in navigating Life Transitions to ensure the success of overall life goals and financial plans. 

This passion is reflected in Trusted Advisor of Choice, a program for financial professionals to better understand their clients’ concerns and LifeMap, an exclusive membership site to help advisor’s clients proactively prepare for the life transitions they face.

Amy is a Certified Professional Consultant on Aging (CPCA) and sits on the Board of Directors of the International Federation on Ageing.

She has authored the book, From Surviving to Thriving: Transforming Your Caregiving Journey and co-developed an audio coaching session and companion journal, Building the Bonds of Friendship at Midlife and Beyond. She also created the Life Memories Journal and Caring Cards to inspire more meaningful conversations between generations.

Dr. Amy is regularly sought out for her expertise to be featured on podcasts, radio, TV and in publications.

Learn more at LifebridgeStrategies.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Today’s guest is Dr Amy D’Aprix, president and founder of LifeBridge Strategies, a partnership with the Southwestern Family of Companies. An internationally renowned expert on lifestyle issues related to retirement, aging, caregiving and family dynamics, Dr Amy, as she’s affectionately known, has provided guidance on life transitions to individuals, professionals and organizations for over 30 years. Amy, it’s a pleasure to have you with us. One of the things we love asking our guests about on our podcast is a little bit of their history and their path that helped them arrive where they are today. Most people in their teenage years weren’t necessarily dreaming about the profession they made as an adult. In fact, they’ve gone through a lot of change and transformation in that period. But what did you start off being motivated towards as a young woman, and then how did that evolve?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
I love that question. Adam. I get asked a lot about, how did you get where to where you are? It’s a circuitous path, which I think it is for many people in their careers, and certainly for entrepreneurs, my background is social work. So I have a bachelor’s, a master’s and a PhD in social work. And my original thought was I was just going to work with older adults and their families, you know, to help them have better lives. And I did that. I did some of that. Early on, doors opened, and I walked through those doors, and I didn’t even know those doors existed at one point, you know, and then you walk through and you have an opportunity, and you find another opportunity in the future. So where that all led me was after I did work, I actually worked as a home care social worker and worked with families who’s had a family member with dementia, did a lot of work in policy, and then I ended up teaching at University for 13 years. I worked at university, both teaching social work graduate students and doing training around North Carolina on issues related both to aging and on the other end, to young families. And I was doing my doctorate at the time, and during that time, I thought, I’m not really cut out to be an academic. I love being in the classroom, but I’m not a researcher. I love reading research, and I really had one of those kind of existential crises about, Do I finish this doctorate, which I’m halfway through and have invested a lot of life energy and money into, or do I just stop it? And I felt like I should finish it, even though I didn’t think I was going to use it the way I originally thought. At that point, I got an opportunity to do speaking and to work for a company that offers a designation for business people around aging. That was like an intro to aging class. Certified senior advisor is the designation, and I started teaching for them all over the United States. That program got brought to Canada, and one of the big banks in Canada brought that internal and put all their advisors and their vice president through it, and they got to know me that way because I taught several hours in this three day program, and they asked me if I would come up on a work permit to Canada and help them figure out what to do for their clients on the non financial side of retirement, I did that in 2008 came up for a year and then ended up staying and we developed all sorts of training workshop for the clients around life transitions. And that’s really my love. Adam is helping people. How do they get through a life transition? And, you know, I say that’s the stages, changes and events we go through in our life, retirement, estate planning, caregiving, we developed one to help women have a better relationship with money, and suddenly I was completely immersed in financial services. What was interesting is I find financial services gave me a platform to do work that I hadn’t had an opportunity to do, and it was so exciting getting to have these conversations with people and help them through these transitions that just snowballed.

Adam Outland
Well that’s an amazing story. What do you feel are some of the skills that you may have developed all the way back when you started doing social work that stuck with you?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Empathy is the first word that comes to my mind, you know, and I say, you know, when we think about empathy, I think we all have some idea of what that. Means, but, you know, but stepping into other people’s shoes, I say empathy is really about saying to someone, I see you, I hear you, I understand you, and conveying that. And a lot of people feel empathy, but struggle conveying it. So that became something I took from my early work. I also think a lot of the love of helping families, because I have a real I, you know, we live in family, whatever we call family. It could be family of choice. It could be our biological family, whatever it is. How do we strengthen families as they go through these transitions and help them have a better time? Because in key transitions like caregiving and when the estate, when the estate is settled, these are two key points, families often blow up, and I believe it’s mainly preventable if people only have what I call essential conversations and learn how to work together better.

Adam Outland
100%. I mean, empathy has been, kind of a fundamental trait in general to be successful, I think in business in any format, right?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Yeah, it really is. And I think we all crave it, right? We want to be seen and heard and understood, and we don’t often get it a lot in our day to day lives. So those of us who learn how to do it and business people who get good at it tend to be more successful.

Adam Outland
When you started the prior business that you’ve built up until this point, it was called Life Transitions, correct?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Yes.

Adam Outland
There’s always inherent risk when you start a company, and so a lot of people risk averse to doing that. What compelled you to start something for yourself?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Yeah, I think I’ve always been pretty entrepreneurial. In the time I was doing social work, a lot of times I also had a little side gig doing sales and something. This is a very weird combination, right? So I always felt a little who am I? Am I the social worker or the sales person for decades, probably at least for the first couple decades of my career, I felt a little out of step with people who just sort of seemed to know this was his Lear path, and they got a job. And so I, when I was working for the company that offered the designation CSA, I started to move out on my own, and I was an independent and a solo preneur at that point. So from the time I became a solopreneur, I had no net, right? Those of us who do these things often don’t have been met. And I think you have to have a certain makeup to do this, you know, I if you look at most people, as you said, Adam, are pretty risk aversive. They want the security. And when we talk about being an entrepreneur, we often don’t have external security. So we have to find that somewhere in ourselves that we’re okay. And I think I just always felt that if everything fell apart, I could always go get a job, but that I wasn’t really cut out at it. And I I want to tell you a funny story, because I’m now at an age a lot of my friends are starting to retire and from jobs with pensions, you know. And those of us who are entrepreneurs don’t usually have a pension, so one of my friends and I will sometimes say, why didn’t we just take a job and stick with it for 30 years, like other people do? But that’s not if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s not in your makeup. You know, one of the things I think I would have done if I had a job was I might have met a guidance counselor, like my dad. And what I joke is, I would have met a guidance counselor, but then I would have thought I could run the department, so I would have then gone and become the head of the department. Then I would have thought that there are a lot of things in this school that need fixing. And next thing you know, I would have tried to move on. So, you know, you have to know who you are as an entrepreneur. So I think I took the risk just because inherently I felt secure enough there would always be a Plan B I could operate with Plan B, and I kind of kept that in the background. And there were times it was really scary. I’ve gone through those times.

Adam Outland
Yeah. Give our audience context for this business in particular, LifeBridge Strategies, that partnership with Southwestern Family of Companies, what is the problem that you’re specifically addressing?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Well, so as I was doing the speaking engagements for clients. What I realized was the advisors needed help in having conversations about these topics, so I developed some workshops for the advisors that were quite successful, but what they would say to me after the workshop is okay, so how do I say that to my client? And I realized they needed coaching around the conversations and how to do it. So I started our first product, which is trusted advisor of choice. And trusted advisor of choice is for advisors to we call it a practice Elevation Program instead of a training program, because it’s it’s really about working with advisors who want to take their practice to the next level. It’s framed around life transitions, so again, the stages changes and events that people go through. And it’s a modularized program with videos on the topics such as retirement, estate planning, caregiving, how to improve your practice with women, how to work with old. Adults, referrals, those kind of things. And in each module, besides the videos, we have some client facing tools. We have some advisor resources. And each mod for each module, there is coaching, available, group coaching, and Adam, we launched that during the pandemic. And I was very fortunate, because initially, the pushback I got was, advisors are not going to want to do training online. They had no other choice of ways to do it, and so we launched trusted advisor choice to fill the gap to meet the need of, how do you deepen your relationships with clients by better understanding their life and tying life and money together. And one of the things I say is that life and money go hand in hand. And what we teach in that program for the advisors is how to go where the client is, which is on the practical, emotional and family aspects of their life, express empathy. And then segue back to the business conversation. It’s that we’ve actually trademarked this process now because it’s been so successful, and it’s called Lyra, and it’s about going to the client, but coming back. And what’s great about it is then the advisor always feels in control of the conversation, because they know they can segue back and forth between the life conversation and the money conversation, which is key. So that was the big need we were filling with that, which was, you know, how do you deepen your relationships with clients, by understanding them better, expressing empathy better, and tying that to the business. From that, we developed life map, and that’s for clients, but the only place they can get it is from their advisor, Adam. What that is, are really robust resources for clients on these transitions. And again, it’s about strengthening the advisor client relationship, because what we found with trusted advisor of choice is advisors would say, Great, I’m comfortable having these conversations, and now clients are sharing things about their life, and I don’t have any resources for them on the life side. I only have resources on the financial side, and so it’s like opening a wound without a bandage. So we created this program that has, again, robust resources for clients from professionals who are top in their fields, and the only way they can get it is from the advisor. So it again deepens that relationship.

Adam Outland
You know, I hear the empathy come up, but it was really in the questions that you guide them to ask or not ask, curiosity and asking great questions. Is there a specific common question that you either guide in your trainings advisors to ask or not ask, that come to mind right now, just as an example?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Sure, well, and I’ve got to speak to the curiosity, because that is actually one of the things I say, is that you have to go into these conversations with curiosity, and you have to listen at what I call level three, which is listening for what’s not being said. So, you know, level one is listening to reply, and we think, we don’t do it. We all do it, and it’s actually an occupational hazard, because we want to add value. So we’re listening to add value. And then level two is listening to the content, which obviously is better. You know, you have to be present do all that. But level three is about going somewhere beyond that, and it’s about listening to what’s not being said, to what what the person feels about what they’re sharing with you. And you know, I often share a story around this that I sat in on an advisors training who was a really good advisor, and she knew this client really well. And the client was a 72 year old woman retired, didn’t bring her husband. She was a physician, but the advisor knew the client, and they had nice conversations. We went through a portfolio review, she went through some planning, and then at the end, right as the advisor is kind of wrapping up the meeting, and the client says, I’m going to Italy to see my mother. And the advisor responds at level two and says, which, again, is to the content. And says, Great, have a wonderful time. Let’s connect. When you get back, and I’m thinking to myself, this client 72 her mother has to be quite old. And the client did not look enthused. She looked upset, you know, and so I said to the client, How’s your mom doing? And she said, she’s not doing well. She has dementia. I’m not sure she’ll recognize me, and I’m guessing this may be the last time I see her. And I said, I am so sorry. I can’t imagine how hard this trip is. She said, it’s very, very hard. So in that moment, I made the connection that deepen, not the advisor, because they didn’t switch to level three. She had left the room and wanted to move things on, so that and the curiosity factor helps you get to where you are. And then you said, Is there specific questions? This is one I. Have advisors. Ask advisors often say, Tell me about your family. Instead, I ask them to say, tell me about the people that you want to take care of. When we look at financial planning or estate planning, now you may say, Well, what’s the difference? Well, the difference is they may have people who are not in their immediate family who they’re taking care of that you’ll never know about unless you say something. They may have a niece. They may have somebody outside the family. And what you want to do by asking these kind of questions is create context. The person knows exactly what you’re looking for when you ask a question like that, tell me about your family is you know, what do you want to know about? So asking questions with context is a key thing to do. And with advisors, I try to get them instead of saying, So, what are you going to do in your retirement, asking specific things like, So, what are the three most important things to you that you’re going to do in your retirement? And I had one advisor tell me he shifted to that question, and one of his clients said, wow, I’ve not thought about that. I’ve got two things I’ve been thinking about, we’re going to travel, and this client was a big golfer, I’m going to golf, but when you ask me about the third, I realize that my wife and I need to have different conversations. Those two things aren’t going to be enough for me to do. And they ended up getting to this conversation about how so many people struggle in retirement because they don’t have purpose. And the client came back and said that question for him was a game changer. So it seems like such a little thing, but specificity in questions and creating contexts makes a huge difference.

Adam Outland
Also not telling people that you can imagine things that they’re going through, but instead telling them that you can’t imagine things they’re going through. You know, people aren’t feeling good that you’re sitting with, but you want to relate and say, Oh man, I can imagine that must be really hard, when maybe what they prefer to hear, and what’s probably reality, is to say, I can’t imagine, I cannot imagine how tough that must be.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
And you know, one of my favorite takeaways on empathy is you can say to somebody, if they cut you off guard, I’m so sorry that you’re having to deal with this. And, you know, I don’t even know what to say right now, except I’m so sorry that is a great thing to say instead of trying to say something profound. Or, you know, I think that again, if we think about being present and wanting to convey to somebody that you see and hear them, and it’s hard when we get hit in a going to be business or personal with something pretty significant somebody’s going through. It’s a skill that we all need to practice. You know, I always joke. Some people think, of course, I must be great in empathy, because I teach it. And I used to joke when my daughter was a teenager, don’t ask my daughter, she had a different perspective on that.

Adam Outland
But in, you know, in reality, that’s, it’s, it’s really important training. And I often, you know, as a consultant with that training and background that I have, have often thought that people often misconstrue consultancy or sales as being very scripted. And I often reflect on the fact that it’s actually what we’re all very scripted. I mean, we all have our response mechanisms to introductions. It’s Hi, how are you? I’m good. How are you? It’s just what we say, and you don’t even realize it. Do you go to a different country? Like if you go to Germany and you ask someone walking down the street, Hi, how are you doing? It’s so weird to ask that question to a German that they’ll look at you and they’ll tell you exactly how they’re doing and it’s not well. So I always think that, you know, good, effective sales training and script building helps us build more effective language to truly be impactful in life, versus we grew up with, which is most likely not the best script.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Yeah, I agree with you on that. You know, very few of us grew up in homes where we where we heard warm, empathic responses to things, and it wasn’t because they weren’t loving people. It was just a different time, right? And a different approach to parenting.

Adam Outland
That’s right, yeah, that’s such a good point. What’s the vision where you want to take Lifebridge into the future, and what’s your hope in terms of impact?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
I always want to have a huge impact. So I’ll start with that. I’m here in at this time, in the world, at this time, to do what I can to make people’s lives easier and to help people have better quality of lives and more peace of mind. So that’s that’s the impetus for what drives everything I do. We have two offerings right now, the trusted advisor, choice for the advisors, life map for the client. And the goal there, again, is to help clients, really all of it is to help clients have better quality of life as they go through transitions. So our goal is to work with advisors all over North America and beyond to help them have again practices that are, you know, the other word I like to use is more fun. It’s more fun to do business this way than it is to not really know your clients. So help advisors have more effective businesses and help their clients get through life more easily. That’s our vision. We want. Take it, you know, as big as we can to do that, and then behind that, Adam, we have another offering that I’ll just tease, which is called Essential conversations. And I’m excited to really get life map and trusted advisor out there, so I can start getting essential conversations out to the world.

Adam Outland
I love that. But in any part of the population where you can focus on, you know, just instilling curiosity at a different level is helping everyone. Because we could all benefit from being better students and learning how to listen first and ask better questions instead of coming in. We have a kind of a crude expression that you be in their industry often shows up and throws up all over their thinking they have all the things and the magic sauce that’ll help. But while we are driven by adding value, usually greatest value can add is understanding.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
And I think it all comes down to authenticity, right? If we can just bring our authentic selves in. And when we’re nervous, we’re not as good at it, and when we’re, you know, feeling pressure in our businesses, it can be sometimes hard to do that, but that authenticity and true caring for those people that we’re interacting with that comes through and people want to work with people who care about them.

Adam Outland
100%. One of the kind of lightning round questions I always love asking; pieces of technology, is there an app or something that you found useful or constructive in your practice, business with advisors?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Well, I have to tell you the thing I’m I’ve been drawn to AI, and I’m not using it a lot, but I’m using quad or cloud, depending on how you say it. And I’ll tell you how I use it, because for me, this is making a huge difference in speed of getting things done, but also in creating more depth. So I act like Claude is my graduate assistant, and so I ask Claude questions that come back with, you know? So I’ll give you an example. We create these client facing tools that are around life issues. So now, after we do that, I go to Claude and ask a question about that topic area and see what comes out from AI that we might have missed. And what we’ve done on a couple of the tools is is really deepen and improve them based on those responses. And so sometimes I use Claude to generate an I, you know, as I’m thinking about an idea and thinking, Where should I take that? And sometimes I use it, and on the other end to say, how did we do but it is like having a graduate assistant in who does this in three seconds. So I’m only using AI like, a teeny little bit, but I’m amazed how much it’s shifting how I do my work in a really positive way.

Adam Outland
Yeah, but it’s pretty amazing how it’s going.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
It IS amazing. And I know we have lots of concerns about where it’s going, but I’m pretty excited about what it’s doing for me and my business.

Adam Outland
I love that. And what’s something that you’ve learned here in the last couple of years through your work directly with the advisors or the client that you didn’t know before. Like, what’s I mean, we’re always learning, but is there something that’s that light bulb moment that over the last few years that’s really come to you through these conversations and discussions that you that you have so often?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
I think that one of the things that surprised me with the advisors, that I learned was how many of them struggled to make that connection, because they were afraid of being intrusive in clients lives, and so that was an interesting thing that we had to work through about, you know, because curiosity, you know, you think about, They’re sitting with someone. They’re talking about deep life issues. It’s like, how far can I take that conversation before I’m being intrusive? And so I was surprised by that. That was something that was kind of a surprise. And also with the advisors, how open they were to adding the things that I talk about into their practice. You know, the people I work with want those relationships with clients, because you do better work. And I think on the client side, you know, a lot of the people I work with are financially well off because they’ve got financial advisors. And one of the takeaways is that we all, we all are struggling with the same things. It doesn’t matter what are income level you know, if I ever thought money solved problems, I let that belief go when I started working with ultra high net worth clients. You know, more money, more problems, sometimes with your if you haven’t done the work about yourself and your family and you’re not grounded. So those things that we do to ground ourselves, to learn, to grow, the things we do to cement things in our families, they matter and matter no matter what income level you’re at.

Adam Outland
There’s an organization you might be familiar with called Tiger, 21 people who come together peer to peer, advisory to some degree, where they have a certain amount of liquid well. Wealth that presents, within itself its own challenge. And, you know, some people listening to this might be a challenge I’d like to have, right, but you know, in conversations with a couple of their chapter leaders, what, what I’ve found is that, yeah, one of the big challenges they face because of wealth is the is the secession planning component. Oh, yes, you know, giving your wealth to your child. If you don’t do it and you have it, it can screw up the relationship. And if you do do it and you have it, then it can screw up the teenager or whoever is about to have it, if you don’t construct it in the right way. And there’s very personal things, even as a consultant, working with business leaders of companies, when you come to the business being passed the next generation, yes, that they’re, they’re incredibly challenged by and it’s often not the structure as much as it is the emotional implications of the relationships itself.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Everything you said, I concur with. I get to work with business owners sometimes. And you know, it’s, it’s like having a baby that you’re, you’re thinking, how do I, how do I pop past this baby to someone else, or or, and one of the issue with business owners that surprised me was they often give absolutely no thought to this, and they say, I’m just going to work forever. And the problem with that is, at some point they’re not going to be able to work in that business. Something hits them now or because they pass on, and they have to, you know, and a lot of people haven’t done very good planning. And I think that’s another takeaway I had, is I’ve been working with or on behalf of older adults and their families for about 40 years now. And I think one of my big surprises is, or big takeaways is, people don’t do very good life planning for that last third of their life. We do it well for earlier than the last third. So that’s one of my real passions, is helping people do that planning so they have choice, control and independence and have the best quality of life possible. So that was a huge thing when I started working. You know, again, doesn’t matter what income level you’re at. People often don’t think about those things.

Adam Outland
Yeah, being intentional with your life at every stage.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Yes, at every stage. And we’re, you know, we’ve done a better job early, and then we sort of get people say, Oh, I’m going to retire. And they sort of see that as one long stage. But it’s actually many chapters within that to continue to have passion about your life forever. In order to do that, we have to be intentional.

Adam Outland
Well, you’ve just made me decide to alter the final question. I always end with asking our guests to give what advice they might give to their 20 year old self. But I mentioned a different question. Okay, what advice would you like your 100 year old self to be able to tell you now?

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
Oh, I love that. That’s a great question. When I think about that, I think about what I would hope because I’m 62 so it’s almost 40 years to continue to plan your life, to continue to stay engaged and continue to make sure you have purpose and connection for the next 40 years, because that’s what’s going to get you through.

Adam Outland
Well said. Thank you so much for giving us your time, Dr. Amy.

Dr. Amy D’Aprix
I appreciate it. Thank you.