Two years ago, I attended George Kinder's two-day life-planning workshop and wrote a column about it. I was forced to admit that I had lost all my journalistic objectivity about Kinder's life planning model. I took sides. Not silently but with great enthusiasm.

The workshop participants were training to help financial planning clients identify their passions in life, get excited about them and get started on their journeys immediately.

When I met George Kinder 15 years ago, he was a CPA and financial planner who wore loud Hawaiian shirts and khaki pants to planning conferences and wanted to spend more time in Hawaii. He accomplished that by setting up a second practice there, and in the meantime took pictures and wrote poetry for a book he would publish about the Hana coastline in Maui, called A Song For Hana & the Spirit of Leho'ula.

In 1999, he wrote The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, a book about the money hang-ups we all have and how they get in the way of living out our dreams. The book was intended to help readers work through the emotional issues around money first so they would be ready to do the nuts and bolts of financial planning.

In 2000, Kinder sold his financial planning practice, and two years later he founded the Kinder Institute to work full time on training planners, which he is now doing all over the world (recent workshops have taken him to the Netherlands, South Africa and London, as well as the United States). Kinder believes each person has a "poetic genius," that can be uncovered and pursued. If a person is willing, he can follow this passion and create the life he dreams of, Kinder says.

In September, I went to one of Kinder's five-day training workshops in Dorset, England, about two hours south of London, for those who want to become registered financial life planners. The participants in the workshop were already financial planners (except for me) and all British. The workshop was held at Gaunts House, a lovely old 2,000-acre estate with an immense red brick 18th century mansion. The house had dormitory style rooms and shared baths, no heat, no water in the rooms, no bar and no coffee but instant. (The British drink tea.) We spent a week there telling each other the most intimate-and sometimes what we considered shameful-stories from our pasts.

After dinner on a Sunday evening, we were each instructed to draw a "life map," in color, on a large sketching pad. We also had to write out answers to questions about our ideal day, ideal week, ideal year. Then we had to compare those to our current day, week and year. When I did, I saw how my entire day is eaten away by big blocks of obligations, and my life-which I thought was totally free because I work for myself-is completely swallowed up by tasks and duties. I'm in a cage. When I realized that I can't even take a morning or an afternoon off, I got really depressed, so much so that I mixed up the time the next morning and was still in my room moping while everyone else was in the library waiting for me.

When I finally got there, we chose partners for the week. Mine was Simonne Gnessen, a life coach who works in Brighton, and who was so delightful and insightful I've promised myself she will be in my life forever. (She agrees!) Each person presented his life map. Tracey Evans drew herself in the middle of the page with arrows of pressure and stress aimed at her from all directions-from her planning practice, from her family and from three children now in high school who will all be going to college at the same time.

Another participant, Christopher Mellor, drew a tombstone with seven words in black letters: Born/Had Fun/Made a Difference/Died. Chris was a man of few words and difficult to crack until George and Tracey persuaded him to open up during the workshop. He claims to be the better for it and plans to continue on this path.

George is perhaps best known for the "three questions" he recommends each person ask himself-and that each planner ask his client: How would you live your life if you had all the money you needed? What would you do differently if you learned you had only five to ten years to live? Finally, what would you most regret if you had just 24 hours left?

George calls the life planning process that he teaches "EVOKE," each letter standing for a part of the process-"exploration," "vision," "obstacles," "knowledge" and then "execution."

The workshop itself covers the first three of these letters, the first meeting being exploration. To demonstrate the process, George worked with Rajesh Modha, one of the participants, using Rajesh's answers to the three questions as well as his current and ideal days. If you are going through this with a client, at this point you should also have a rough idea of the client's budget and balance sheet.

In his book, Lighting the Torch: The Kinder Method of Life Planning, Kinder explains that the purpose of this first meeting is to build a bond of trust with the client by talking little and listening much. He asks the client first if there is anything urgent to deal with and second what he would like to accomplish in the planning process. He listens without interrupting, pausing after the client says something and then asking, "Anything else?" The keys are to be quiet, listen carefully and ask open-ended questions if you ask anything at all.

The partners work together, two at a time, in front of the "audience." The idea for this client meeting is to explore what the client wants to do in her life, looking at her ideal days, weeks and years. The planner is enthusiastic and tries to get a feeling of what exactly would make the client light up.

The second meeting is the vision meeting. The planner mostly listens, but then after giving the client a pause, asks again, "Anything else?"
Sometimes in this meeting the client comes up with something new. For example, Rajesh began reflecting on how his father wanted to be a doctor and was about to begin college in Uganda when the government was overthrown and his father had to leave on the next plane to London. He was wearing shorts and sandals and had five pounds in his pocket. Rajesh is the first generation of his family in England. He wants to make up for his father's lost dreams and also to make a successful, thriving business that will make his father proud. He became a financial planner just weeks before he came to the workshop when he split his business off from his father's mortgage business.

The third client meeting is the "obstacle meeting." Once the client has explored his interests and accepted a vision for his new life, he typically goes home and gets depressed, which is just what happened to me. He begins to think of all the obstacles that prevent him from achieving these dreams: kids in college, a lack of money, a lack of education, or a lack of time, courage or motivation.

When the client comes in for the obstacle meeting, the planner asks him if anything in his life circumstances has changed and then addresses the obstacles in a positive, upbeat way. Kinder tells planners to restate the client's vision within the first two minutes of that meeting. For example, he might say: "If we could get you the extra time to take acting classes and a reduced work week so that you could begin to audition for plays, how would that make you feel?"

If the client says only "OK," Kinder says he's not yet motivated enough. The advisor should continue to ask about possible obstacles and respond to them and perhaps bring up an obstacle or two of his own, responding to each one in a way that dissolves it. Then Kinder ups the ante. "What if we could make time for you to take acting lessons and start auditioning within three months? Or next week? How would that make you feel?"

Most people waste time because they are not living their heart's dream, Kinder says. A planner can routinely find extra hours in the day or even an extra day in the week for whatever it is the client wants to pursue-a law degree, rabbinical studies, saxophone lessons, more time with family and friends or the creation of a new business that so far has only been a fantasy. "The more the client feels your energy, the more excited he feels," Kinder says.

Once you have taken care all of the obstacles-gotten them out of the way and made light of them-you end the session with plans of action: When you go home, you will enroll for Hebrew classes, begin putting money aside for your trip to New Zealand, leave work at noon every Wednesday so you can go to the museum or library, find out how many credits you need to complete your master's degree in business. Invite the client to name additional action steps that he will take when he gets home.

When I was preparing to go to England for the workshop, I must admit I was skeptical, if not downright suspicious, of these stories of so many people turning their lives around on a dime and then living happily ever after. I just don't believe most people are happy-or have the capacity for it, for that matter.

But in the five-day workshop, I realized that a big part of the transformation occurs because the client feels, perhaps for the first time in his life, that someone is interested in him, is listening carefully, and truly believing in his power to change. When I returned to New York, I signed up for a two-day drawing and painting workshop, a series of Apple workshops to learn how to get more out of my Mac, made plans to spend a weekend with my daughter, started meditating every day, as well as writing and drawing in a journal and making time to explore creative pursuits.

I also signed up for the six-month mentorship program that the Kinder Institute offers, which leads to the RLP designation. How's that for action?

Mary Rowland can be reached at [email protected]. She has been a business and personal finance journalist for 30 years and has written two books for financial advisors: Best Practices and In Search of the Perfect Model.