YouPotential

Shaun Maslyk

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YouPotential explores what it truly means to live a life well lived — through the lens of psychology, money, and meaning. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk—Certified Financial Planner®, Financial Behaviour Specialist®, and Positive Psychology Practitioner—the podcast delivers science-backed insights, candid conversations, and real stories that help people live with more intention.

5d ago

Great at Work, Winging It at Home | Adam Holt

Episode Summary Adam Holt calls himself a recovering financial planner. He spent 28 years in the business and built Asset-Map, a tool that lets advisors draw a client’s whole financial life on one page. The idea started when he was a teenager, sketching live visual notes at Tony Robbins seminars his single mom paid for with the money she’d saved. The tension in this conversation is one a lot of successful people know. Adam was good at building companies. He read the books, hired the coaches, and tracked the numbers. At home, he was winging it. It took long talks with his friend and podcast co-host Derek Notman to admit it. They were both “virgin dads,” as Adam puts it, with kids three days apart and no playbook. So they went looking for one. A cold pitch led to a fathers’ mastermind on Richard Branson’s Necker Island. Branson asked them one question: how are you going to help more people? That question became a book built on interviews with more than 100 fathers. What stays with you is how practical it gets. Treat your family like a company built to last 80 years. Give it values your kids can repeat. Put one-on-one time in the calendar like your biggest client. And when you get it wrong, forgive yourself and keep going. Partway through, Adam turns the tables and holds me to a date with my own daughter. Key topics - The $10,000 college fund that went to Tony Robbins - Why we trade health for wealth, then try to buy it back - “If I was the CEO, would I hire or fire myself?” - Your family as an 80-year company, not a startup - The REBL framework: Responsible, Entrepreneur, Balanced, Leadership - Family values you can put on the wall - One-on-one time, 18 summers, and protecting the calendar - Self-forgiveness as the key to a meaningful life Five quotes 1. “We spend years of our health to get wealth, and then we spend all of our wealth to get our health back. And it’s usually too late.” [00:04:52–00:05:13] 2. “if I was the CEO, would I hire or fire myself?” [00:13:13–00:13:33] 3. “But when you have a family, you’re building a company that’s got to be around for 70 or 80 years.” [00:15:11–00:15:51] 4. “Why don’t I have the same passion and protection around my kid” [00:31:16–00:31:33] 5. “If you can forgive yourself and love yourself in a sense man you can go far because no one’s holding you back.” [00:53:46–00:54:06] About Adam Adam Holt grew up in New York, raised by a single mom who later became a realtor and a coach. He spent 28 years as a financial planner before building Asset-Map, which he says is now used by thousands of advisors in 20 countries. With Derek Notman, he co-founded REBL Dads and co-wrote REBL Dad, drawn from interviews with more than 100 fathers. He’s a former rower, a dad to a teenage daughter, and two months into taking his health seriously again. Guest links - REBL Dads: https://www.rebldads.com - REBL Dad (book): https://www.rebldads.com/book - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadamholt About YouPotential YouPotential is for people who are great at building businesses and want to be just as intentional about building a life. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk, CFP®, a financial planner and positive psychology practitioner.
Oct 8

Why Good Savers Struggle to Spend | Ben Carlson

Episode Summary Ben Carlson spends his days helping people manage their money. He came up on the institutional side: pensions, foundations, endowments, where spending is written into the rules. So he assumed individual clients would be the opposite. They’d spend too much. Instead, he found the reverse. Many of his firm’s clients spent forty years building great habits, watched the number climb, and now can’t bring themselves to watch it fall. The tension in this conversation is one Ben lives himself. He’s an old-school spreadsheet guy who tracks his family’s savings rate every year. When that rate hit an all-time high, his wife pointed out how few summers they had left before the kids leave home. Ben had to ask himself whether beating his own number every year was making him any happier. Then the conversation turns. Two years ago, Ben’s older brother died of pancreatic cancer. Ben talks about the hard conversations they had in his final months, why the money was the easy part, and what he found in his brother’s emails after he passed. It matters now because a generation of careful savers is reaching the point where the question changes. Not “will I have enough?” but “what is it for?” Ben doesn’t pretend to have it solved. That’s what makes him worth listening to. Key topics Why Ben’s cabin is an “emotional asset,” not a financial oneThe lunch-money habit that made him a lifelong saverWhy everyone’s biggest money bias is the one they can’t seeWhat investing through 2008 in his twenties taught himA record savings year, a spouse’s question, and the rethink that followedWhy wealthy clients ask their advisor for permission to spend“Enough,” contentment, and comparing yourself to your past selfGrief, his brother’s final months, and the letter he left behind Five memorable quotes “I don’t really look at it as much as a financial asset as like this emotional asset. And it does pay dividends.”“Like is getting this, beating that goal every year, is that really going to make me happier?” “It’s it’s bizarre, but one of the bigger problems we have is getting people to spend and enjoy their money.”“I’m comparing myself to 15 years ago, when I was in a job that I thought was going nowhere, right.”“And it’s funny because the money stuff really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.” About Ben Ben grew up around the water in northern Michigan and still calls the lake his happy place. He’s been a saver since he was a kid and is now learning, with some help from his wife, to spend a little more of it on the people he loves. He started his career managing money for institutions before moving into wealth management at Ritholtz. He writes about markets and investor behaviour in his own Midwestern voice. He’s a dad of three — a twelve-year-old daughter and boy-girl twins — and the owner of a pontoon he calls a couch that floats. His latest book is Risk and Reward.
Oct 1

There's Always a Bigger Fish | Michael Kitces

He's spent 26 years helping advisors grow. Then his two-year-old saw the bag by the door. Episode Summary Michael Kitces has spent 26 years in financial planning, and his firm studies something most of the industry takes for granted: how advisor well-being changes as income grows. His answer to whether money buys happiness is yes, to a point. In his firm's research, well-being rises with income and then levels off, and for advisors who keep resetting the goalposts, it can dip. There's always a bigger fish. He isn't telling anyone to stop being ambitious. He's suggesting they change what they count. Michael shares the morning his daughter saw his travel bag by the door and started crying, how it led him to rebuild his business around more time at home, and why he believes you can do well by doing good. Key topics Does money buy happiness? Why Michael says yes, to a pointWhat his firm's advisor well-being research shows about income, goals, and enoughThe bigger fish problem and why the goalposts keep movingKeeping your ambition while changing what you countThe bag by the door and rebalancing work and familyReach and impact as a driver beyond moneyWorking backwards from a long-term vision to the one next thingDoing well by doing good Memorable quotes [04:15] "Yes, to a point, right?" [13:35] "They have better clarity in essence on what is enough." [14:10] "I think I'd rather just hang out at their soccer game on Thursday and not go do another new client meeting." [17:14] "We're too goal oriented to say I'm not going to have goals." [36:32] "It turns out you can actually do well by doing good and those can live in alignment and harmony with one another." Bio Michael Kitces has spent 26 years in financial planning. He started out working with individual clients, became a director of financial planning, and went on to build Kitces.com, an advisor education platform that more than 27,000 advisors use for continuing education. He also runs the Financial Advisor Success and Kitces & Carl podcasts, and his newest venture, Advisor Economics, provides benchmarking and KPIs for advisory firms. Before financial planning, he studied medicine. He has played duplicate bridge with his dad at the same weekly club game for about 35 years.
Sep 24

Death Is an Ally, Not an Enemy | Dr. Ted Klontz

Episode Summary As a kid, Ted Klontz would look at the Christmas lights and think: this might be the last time I see these. He’s 82 now. He’s still thinking it, and he says it’s why his life has been so full. Dr. Ted Klontz helped build the field of financial psychology. He was also born with a hereditary bleeding disorder, into a family that managed it by reminding him anything could kill him. He has nearly died many times since. This conversation isn’t about his research. It’s about what a lifetime beside death has taught him about living. The tension is one most of us know. We’re busy growing the business, being a good parent, becoming somebody. Death feels unreal, so the moments slide by. Ted’s view is that mortality isn’t the enemy of a good life. It’s the thing that makes you pay attention to it. There are turning points. Around 2000, a near-death experience that wasn’t peaceful pushed him to start a deliberate conversation with his mortality. At 50, he saw that “be a good person and the universe will provide” wasn’t a financial plan. In his father’s last years, he started hugging a man who hadn’t touched his kids since they were three. Then came a final, unplanned 90 minutes where each told the other he was proud. Why now? Because Ted says the same approach works on money. Every habit we fight — overspending, avoiding, hoarding — began as a part of us trying to help. Go to war with it and you lose. Get curious about it and something moves. And because his answer to “what is enough?” took him a long, quiet moment, and was worth the wait. Key topics Mortality as an ally, and “it always is the last time” Why outside-in fixes for money behaviour fail The inner board of directors: parts that mean well and aren’t wise The family cost of changing your financial neighbourhood Parenting a “wild horse” without beating the nature out of it The last conversation with his father Love letters, planned ceremonies, and dying with no regrets Presence, enough, and legacy as how you live Five quotes “I would say that it’s an ally, not an enemy.” [00:06:57] “and it always is the last time, right? Like this will be the last time we talk. There may be another time, but there may not be.” [00:02:10] “the more peace I am with myself, the more I can allow him.” [00:29:53] “people talk about live each day as if it’s your last. And I really prefer live each day as if it’s your first.” [01:03:02] “Our legacy is not so much what we leave as it is how we live.” [01:10:31] About Ted Ted grew up poor on a farm and was the first of his clan to go to college. Some of them never spoke to him again. He was a schoolteacher before he was a psychologist. He’s been married 40 years to Brenda, has written love letters to the people who matter to him, and has already planned his own ceremony. On the day we recorded, he was sneaking popcorn into a nursing home for his 88-year-old mentor.
Aug 27

Who Told You to Want That? | Fotini Iconomopoulos

She was offered head of the Americas. She asked who told them she wanted it. Fotini Iconomopoulos grew up in her parents’ restaurant in the Niagara region, the youngest child of a Greek father who left his village with a grade nine education. The nickname came early — the negotiator — because in that house, volume was the price of being heard. She learned to make her case, and then she learned that the case only works if you know what the other person actually wants. At seventeen she was teaching her own father product knowledge in the leather and fur boutique he opened because he’d seen her commission cheques and decided she shouldn’t be earning them for someone else. Two decades later she was inside the corporate machine, and a manager offered her the obvious next step. She turned it down. She’d just come out of a training that made her write and rewrite a single sentence until every word in it earned its place. Thirteen years on, that sentence hasn’t changed — and it works as a filter for everything from which clients she takes to whether it’s worth being angry in traffic. The conversation moves through what happens after the filter is in place. She turned down the money and got easier mornings. She quit the job that no longer matched her values without a plan, and found fifty messages waiting on LinkedIn — clients who’d been told she’d left and replied that they’d never hired the company in the first place. “It wasn’t a fall per say. It was a choice. But I jumped and I had all these people there waiting to catch me.” Then the part I keep returning to. Asked what let her stop squirrelling money away, she named a line most people never say out loud: she’s hit the baseline. Not a target, not a projection — a floor she is confident she has cleared. What it bought her wasn’t a bigger life. It was head space. And with the head space, she’s now setting money aside that isn’t for her at all: a fund so her nieces can come along on the trips. Memorable quotes “Who told you I want to be head of the Americas? That job looks awful.” [10:56] “I always felt like money was freedom I didn’t need to ask my parents for.” [21:07] “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, because if you run your mouth off, you can pay me all the money in the world and I don’t want to work with you.” [37:17] “A lot of people mistake empathy with agreement.” [32:52] “There’s a baseline you have to hit in order to have the freedom. And I know that I’ve hit the baseline.” [57:55]
Aug 20

How AI Is Changing Your Well-Being | Llewellyn van Zyl

He builds the AI systems that measure how people are doing. Then his accountant opened the spreadsheet. Episode Summary Prof. Llewellyn van Zyl sits in an unusual seat. He’s a psychologist and a data scientist who designs AI-driven assessment and well-being systems for large organisations — and he’s one of the people warning loudest about what those systems take. He walks Shaun through one his team built for a consulting firm that wanted to predict burnout without asking employees anything. Clock-in times. Clock-out times. Email volume and response speed. Sentiment drift in Teams messages. Billable hours climbing past the hours actually worked. Four deviations, and by his account they could flag burnout three weeks out at 96% accuracy without a single question being asked. His position isn’t that the technology is the problem. It’s that these systems have to be built to protect human agency, and that most aren’t. If you can’t trace how the output was produced, he argues, you’re accountable for it anyway — it still goes out with your name on it. The most useful part is the personal one. He caught himself a few months ago unable to do basic things he used to do alone. So he keeps a weekly list of skills he refuses to lose and deliberately takes the harder path two or three times a week. And he tells the story of trusting his own bookkeeping agents completely, handing the file to his accountant, and finding out it was fundamentally wrong — but it looked right to him, and he was proud of it. All of this rests on a longer story: a hundred papers on well-being, a burnout none of his own science could reach, a near-fatal infection, and a friend whose definition of success was making her eleven o’clock yoga class. Key topics - Predicting burnout from behavioural deviations, without asking a question - Digital twins: building a working model of a person, then simulating what might help them - Where the human has to stay in the loop, and why accountability doesn’t transfer to the tool - Crutches versus capacity: what the calculator and the GPS took, and why this time is different - “Hypotheses to be tested rather than suggestions to be incorporated” - The journalist test: why you catch errors in your own field and swallow them in everyone else’s - His own weekly practice for keeping skills he refuses to outsource - Why most one-size-fits-all well-being programs don’t work, and what a bottom-up alternative looks like - Redefining success after burnout, and where money sits in a well-being model Memorable quotes [57:27] “Never in our in our history have we gotten to a point where we can outsource critical thinking, emotional capability.” [47:04] “So we can predict with a 96% level of accuracy a person’s level of having burnout over three weeks without asking us a single question.” [57:27] “You have to take these things as hypotheses to be tested rather than suggestions to be incorporated.” [1:01:51] “fundamentally wrong, but it looked right to me, and I was very proud of it.” [12:46] “But that group, the average, doesn’t exist. So therefore the intervention can’t work.” Bio Prof. Llewellyn van Zyl is a psychologist and data scientist living in the Netherlands. He is a professor of positive psychology with the Optentia Research Unit at North-West University and Chief Solutions Architect at Psynalytics in Eindhoven, where he builds bottom-up, AI-assisted well-being assessment. More than 100 scientific papers, 13 books, 50+ keynotes. He wrote the AI-IARA framework on human agency in AI systems. He wakes up at two in the morning because he wants to.
Aug 6

Why You Think About Money the Way You Do | Deep Cuts with Shaun Maslyk

You’ve watched two people receive identical news about money and react like they heard different sentences. One of them was you, once. Episode Summary Most financial advice starts at the behaviour — spend less, save more, invest consistently. All of it is good, and almost none of it survives contact with a belief you’ve never examined. This episode goes underneath the behaviour, to where it comes from. Shaun opens with a story he didn’t understand until adulthood: seven years old, a family reunion, seventy-five dollars’ worth of painted rocks, and a feeling he mistook for being about money for the next thirty years. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being noticed. That misreading shaped a career, and it took a long time to see. From there the conversation moves into the work of financial psychologists Brad Klontz, Charles Chaffin and Ted Klontz — specifically the idea of financial flashpoints. A flashpoint isn’t a belief; it’s an experience. The belief is what your brain made of it, usually before you had any context to judge it with. Those beliefs become money scripts, money scripts drive behaviour, and behaviour produces outcomes. The chain runs in one direction, and most of us only ever try to intervene at the last link. The centre of the episode is a client’s family: grandparents who came to Alberta from Ukraine expecting good farmland, got land that was nearly impossible to work, and concluded that financial institutions couldn’t be trusted. They kept their money on the farm. More than a hundred years and three generations later, that conclusion is still shaping how the family handles money — and nobody in it could tell you where it came from. It’s the clearest illustration in the episode of what makes these beliefs so durable: once you stop examining them, you stop experiencing them as beliefs at all. Key Topics Covered • Why the same raise produces relief in one person and anxiety in another • What a seven-year-old actually learns from an afternoon of unexpected success • The difference between an experience and the meaning you gave it • How a belief that protected your grandparents can quietly cost you • Why recognizing yourself in more than one money pattern is the point, not a failure of the test • What a strength looks like when it’s taken past its usefulness • The gap between “Do I have enough?” and “Do I feel like I have enough?” • Why almost nobody is actually chasing money Memorable Quotes [1:49] The math isn’t different. Their relationship with money is [3:44] I wasn’t really chasing money. I was chasing what money represented. [7:15] Not because of what happened. But because of what you believed it meant. [15:05] Not because they doubted the math. They doubted the feeling. [17:40] The event isn’t the script. The meaning you gave the event… became the script. About Shaun Maslyk Shaun is a Certified Financial Planner and Financial Behaviour Specialist who went and got a master’s in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, largely because the financial planning tools kept answering the wrong question. He’s spent more than fifteen years across the table from business owners, professionals and families making money decisions, and four hundred episodes of YouPotential asking people what they were actually building. Resources Mentioned • Psychology of Financial Planning — Klontz, Chaffin & Klontz (Wiley, 2022). Where the financial flashpoints framework comes from. • Klontz Money Script Inventory — free assessment. About YouPotential YouPotential explores what it means to build a life that feels right from the inside — through conversations about money, purpose, relationships, and meaning. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk. “Sometimes it’s not the answers we learn from — but the questions.”
Jul 30

A Calling Is Built, Not Discovered | Dr. Bryan Dik

He got down on his knees and begged God for a sign. What he got instead was a letter from the registrar. Episode Summary Dr. Bryan Dik is a vocational psychologist at Colorado State University who has spent more than twenty years studying one old question with new tools: what is a calling, and why does it matter? His answer starts with his own story — a bright college sophomore so paralyzed by choosing one path over another that he pleaded for a burning-bush moment that never came. He picked psychology because he had the most credits in it. Two decades later, that path of least resistance became the defining insight of his career: a calling is built, not discovered. Bryan breaks a calling into three dimensions: a transcendent summons (something beyond yourself drawing you in), purposeful work (your days align with what matters most to you), and a pro-social orientation (the work benefits someone besides you). Then he makes it concrete: the road construction flagger who is genuinely grateful to flip his sign all day, because for him the job is about keeping people safe. If a flagger can find that, Bryan asks, what excuse do the rest of us have? But this isn’t a pep talk. Bryan is honest about the dark side — how people with a strong sense of calling are vulnerable to workaholism, burnout, and exploitation, and about the season he dreaded going to work in a role he calls toxic. And he’s honest about money: the startup he co-founded and sold after eleven years, the payout that “was not life-changing” but was satisfying, and how four sons approaching college quietly changed the math on what he says yes to. The conversation lands where most of Shaun’s guests eventually do: the tension between meaning and money isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a reality to manage — and it is not all or nothing. Key topics Covered Why the “lightning strike” model of calling fails most people The three dimensions: transcendent summons, purposeful work, pro-social orientation The flagger, the hospital custodian, and meaning in unexpected placesJob crafting: the conversation with your boss most people never haveOrganizations’ responsibility for decent, dignified workBurnout, workaholism, and the oxygen-mask problem for the deeply committedMoney after the exit: how a payout and four sons changed his calculationsThe artist’s compensation strategy: a stable job that funds the real work Memorable quotes “And so for the rest of us a calling is built. It’s not something that’s discovered.” Timestamp [08:15] “He’s like grateful for the opportunity to flip that sign.” Timestamp [16:28] “The more focused we tend to be on contributing to other people’s well being, the happier we tend to be as well.” Timestamp [10:07] “Sometimes you can be so committed to the purpose of what you’re doing, that you’re not paying attention to the toll that it’s taking on you.” Timestamp [43:35] “Should I choose my passion or should I choose an income? No. That’s too simplistic. There’s always compromise. I mean, there’s always compromise. That is true, but it is not all or nothing.” Timestamp[56:35] About Bryan Dik: Bryan Dik is a professor of psychology at Colorado State University and one of the world’s leading researchers on calling and meaning at work. He co-founded jobZology and co-invented PathwayU, a career assessment platform now used at more than 200 colleges and universities, and today leads The LIVE Project — the largest longitudinal study of vocational exploration ever attempted. He’s the author of Make Your Job a Calling and Redeeming Work. He’s also a long-suffering Michigan sports fan and a father of four sons, which — as you’ll hear — changed his relationship with money more than the startup exit did. Connect with Bryan Dik: Bryan Dik: https://bryandik.comThe Live Project: https://theliveproject.org Resources mentioned: The Fabric of This World by Lee Hardy · Adam Grant’s call-center scholarship study · Make Your Job a Calling (Dik & Duffy, 2012) · The LIVE Project (Lilly Endowment) About YouPotential: Conversations with researchers, builders, and thinkers about money, meaning, and a life well lived. Sometimes it’s not the answers we learn from — but the questions. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk.

YouPotential explores what it truly means to live a life well lived — through the lens of psychology, money, and meaning. Hosted by Shaun Maslyk—Certified Financial Planner®, Financial Behaviour Specialist®, and Positive Psychology Practitioner—the podcast delivers science-backed insights, candid conversations, and real stories that help people live with more intention.

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Shaun Maslyk
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2025 - 2026
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67
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© Copyright 2026 Shaun Maslyk
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