The Life Circle of Planning

“My life has much more relevance than simple economics after a lifetime of living and contribution. I refuse to be thought of as a balance sheet.” Legacy: The Giving of Life’s Greatest Treasures, Regan Books, 1999, p. xxi.

The Life Circle

Too frequently, we in the legal and financial professions have a tendency to see life as a financial counting game and to define our clients by their net worth.

Many of the people we advise, however, recognize the shallowness of this notion, as did Harvard physician Dr. Barrie Sanford Greiff. “My life has much more relevance than simple economics after a lifetime of living and contribution. I refuse to be thought of as a balance sheet.” Legacy: The Giving of Life’s Greatest Treasures, Regan Books, 1999, p. xxi.

While we as professional advisors are primarily trained to focus on the financial, legal, investment and tax issues that affect our clients, we shortchange our clients if we fail to understand and honor the wholeness of their lives in the counsel we give and the services we provide. Material wealth, standing alone, is devoid of much real meaning. Likewise, if our counsel and services relate only to the client’s money, without regard to the rest of the client’s life, our counsel and services are without much real value.

The Life Circle is a visual reminder to our law firm that there is much more to our clients than their bank accounts, and much more to life than the accumulation of material assets. It helps us remember that the most important things in life are usually not things.

The Life Circle helps us recognize that all of our clients come to us with a Heritage that links them to the past, to the peoples and places, to the cultures and traditions from which they come. All of our clients are part of a Family that shapes their identity and their deepest beliefs and values. All are connected to the larger human Community through their work, their friends, the organizations to which they belong, the causes they support. Through the Stories of their past and their Vision of the future, they seek Meaning and ongoing Learning, and they define for themselves a sense of Spirituality and Stewardship for life’s blessings. These various components of the clients’ life give meaning and purpose to their Material Wealth.

While The Life Circle teaches, on the one hand, that Material Wealth by itself is without much real value, it also shows, on the other hand, that if the Material Wealth piece is missing, there is a gaping hole in the picture. In the real world, the circle of life is incomplete without adequate Material Wealth wisely tended. This reality points out the importance of the counsel and services we provide to the sense of wholeness the client seeks in his life.