How does the state of our mind affect the way we make money decisions? You came to the right place to find out. Keith Baker’s guest today is Jonathan DeYoe, founder and CEO of Mindful Money. Jonathan explains to Keith Baker how mindfulness creates a space between the external stimulus and your response. It’s that moment of calm you need to make the right decisions based on facts instead of emotions. When you adapt mindfulness in your finances, you start making better decisions. How can you practice mindfulness? Tune in to find out!

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Mindful Money: How To Make Better Money Decisions With Jonathan DeYoe

Investing In Your Happiness

I'd like to thank you for sharing your time with me. If you're looking for practical tips and advice on how to put the power of the banking system into your investment accounts, then you are in the right place. If you want to learn from my mistakes so that you can both avoid and profit from them, then pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink because this show is just for you. I'm dedicated to giving people like you and me the knowledge and confidence for successful and profitable private lending.

[caption id="attachment_3155" align="alignleft" width="194"] PLP 134 | Mindful Money Mindful Money: Simple Practices for Reaching Your Financial Goals and Increasing Your Happiness Dividend[/caption]

If you're looking to join a community of private lenders then head over to the Private Lender Podcast Facebook group to connect with other private lenders and to share experiences, stories and opinions. While you're at it, head on over to the PrivateLenderAcademy.com to learn more about the forthcoming course on private lending and click on Apply Now to register for pre-launch discounts and other goodies. I was a little skeptical when I first learned about our guest. I wasn't sure he'd be a good fit for the show at first because I didn't spend a whole lot of time digging too deep, but after speaking with him for a minute, I knew he had to be on the show so we booked it. I'm happy to share Jonathan DeYoe with you and hopefully introduce you to him.

As I've shared in previous episodes, I am on a bit of a mindfulness journey. I like to sign off wishing you mindfulness from every episode. Given that life has happened to me in the last few years, divorce, etc., I'm happy that someone has applied the mindfulness approach to money. As I look back, I wish I would have applied mindfulness years ago especially to money because at least in my case, with the relationship with my ex, money wasn't a huge issue but it was large enough. If we both had been mindful about it, maybe things would have been different, at least on the money front. I’m not saying I'd still be married but the awareness and the understanding would have been a lot better. Such an approach can eliminate a lot of the money pains and ill feelings that couples have. Let's go ahead and get down to the brass tacks of this episode and get straight to the interview with Jonathan DeYoe.

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Lender nation, I am throwing a curveball to you because we're not going to talk about private lending and all but we will be talking about money. Our guest has an interesting approach to money, one that I certainly want to use this platform to get out into the world and more people to learn and that is mindfulness. Early on in my practice, unfortunately, mindfulness was not court-ordered for me so I'm doing this on my own little by little. Jonathan DeYoe, welcome to the show.

I'm excited to be here, Keith.

Jonathan has nothing but good reviews on Yelp and whatnot. He is in the Berkeley, San Francisco Bay Area if you want to get in touch with him. This whole mindfulness thing, I don't have the words but you do. This is what you do on a daily. Let's start with your practice, your financial advising and how you bring that mindfulness element to the complete lack of financial literacy that is taught or the vacuum that is teaching financial literacy in the United States. Jonathan, the floor is yours.

[bctt tweet="Mindfulness is when you create a space between the stimulus that the world gives and your response. " via="no"]

Maybe a little background makes a lot of sense. In a brief nutshell, I'm a seminarian. I came to California to study at the Lutheran Seminary, turned Buddhist academic, turned financial advisor. The concept of mindful money comes after a long journey of self-discovery, comparative religion, philosophy, psychology and trying to figure out how people work and the decisions we make. I started in 1996 and wrote the book in 2007. After 10 or 11 years in the business, I had this semi-epiphany that it's the decisions we make that create our problems or our successes. The question is how are you making your decisions?

If you have a space between “Oh my god,” or, “Yay,” and a decision where you can think, you can make a better decision. That's where mindfulness comes in. It’s creating that space between the stimulus that the world gives us and our response. Mindfulness has been studied and practiced for thousands of years, specifically to resolve this issue of our over-reactivity to the stuff that's coming at us from outside of us. It turns out in finance, there's a lot of that. Putting those two things together became exciting and became something that I was like, “I figured out. This is my mission. This is what I want to share with the world.”

Before we got on, I sat on my stairs for a few minutes. I didn't meditate but I started noticing my breath. I’m trying to bring it in and give some of that space. When ADD was going around and all the rage in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, my father was convinced I didn't need any medicine. I just needed a good ass whooping. That's all. I missed out on that boat so to speak. Had I gone down that route, my life would have been a little different in terms of disidentifying the news media, Instagram hits and all the stimuli that are coming in and molding decisions.

I sat there, trying to find that space and not try to attach to any thought, which is hard. This interview was a guided meditation for me. You talked about that space and where this is all coming from. You are a seminarian which is awesome. It's funny because Friedrich Nietzsche was also studying to be a Lutheran minister before he went to the University of Bonn. You had a personal journey then you got to this point. You’ve been doing it for many years now. You have got to be the one lone voice in the darkness talking about mindful money. How do you convince people? How did you lead that horse to water?

[caption id="attachment_3156" align="aligncenter" width="600"] PLP 134 | Mindful Money Mindful Money: Don't take from the ‘serious money’ to refill the 2% money.[/caption]

I almost didn't want to name the firm, Mindful Money. In 2001 when I started my own firm, I named it DeYoe Wealth Management until 2019. A couple of years ago, we changed the name. My book was published in 2017 and that's when I put it all together, mindfulness with money, why that's important and how to use those two things together. I was the only person talking about it and I thought that if I brought it out there, my peer group would say, “That's soft. That's silly. How can you say that? You're full of crap,” that kind of stuff and I would feel small.

I discovered how much I'm afraid of not being believed in. I need people to trust me and to believe in me. If I don't have that, I don't value myself as much. That's a deeply personal thing. I'm coming to realize some things about myself after years and years of working too hard, trying too hard and all kinds of stuff. The fear of not being accepted in my industry where this philosophy or this belief system drove me to turn away from it for years and years. Finally, I said to my team, “This is what I want to do.” I girded myself for the barbs and they're like, “That's what you believe. That makes a ton of sense. Let's do this thing.”

Now we're all together and doing this thing in the world. It's cool. We're not entirely alone. There are 3 or 4 books that are entitled Mindful Money. Years ago, somebody won a Nobel Prize for behavioral finance. Daniel Kahneman has a new book and I recommend this book, Noise. He used to talk about how we have all these biases and our biases are problematic. In my opinion, the benefit of mindfulness is it enables you to get over some of the biases. If you're aware of the biases and you're aware of your experience of the current environment, you can go, “I'm having an emotional response I don't need to have.”

His latest book is all about noise. In our social media world, there is so much noise...