The Flourish Feed Podcast

Gillian Stovel Rivers
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Investing

A series of curiosity driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. If you have already built the financial plan, the question underneath it is the harder one: what are the next thirty years actually for? The Flourish Feed goes after that question the way a wealth advisor would, using the science of attention, longevity and human connection to work out what the money is actually for. Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. who has advised Canadian families for over twenty years. Each week she sits down with one coach, researcher or practitioner and tests what they know against what she sees in practice. Guests have included Steven Kotler on flow and adaptive flexibility, and Dr. Jon Beale on measuring flourishing. Wealth here means four things you invest, not one: Time, Energy, Money, and Attention. Made for financially independent women and power couples who want a deep personal understanding of wealth and how to enjoy it at every stage of life. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovel Rivers who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CI Assante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Assante Wealth Management and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Assante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian at flourishfamilywealth.com to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.

  1. Sep 24

    20 years taking Canadians to Kenya: good intentions aren't good outcomes.

    A five-time Canadian long drive champion on why a contact is not a relationship, why she refuses the phrase giving back, and the question she leaves behind: who has access because you had access? Fareen Samji, Far to everyone who knows her, grew up in Mombasa, Kenya, won the Canadian Women's Long Drive Championship five times, and now runs Smashing Nines, a nine hole scramble series for women where nobody keeps score. She joins Gillian Stovel Rivers for Season 4 of The Flourish Feed. Golf, she says, is the vehicle and connection is the objective. At corporate tournaments she counted 140 men and four women, and the women were the ones selling raffle tickets. Her programmes give them somewhere to be a beginner first. Then the harder half: why she refuses the phrase giving back, why her Kenya trips are called knowledge shares, and what her father the Rotarian said when she asked how to help everybody. Her own test is blunt: am I creating change, or doing something that makes me feel good? Underneath it is the question Gillian keeps asking this season, what counts as wealth. Far's answer is that relationships are among the most valuable forms she owns, time is another, and for anyone with money to direct the question is where it goes rather than how much is given. Who you hire, who you buy from, who you introduce, where you create opportunity. Chapters: 00:00 The returns you cannot calculate 03:34 Golf is the vehicle 12:55 Vulnerability creates connection 15:15 A contact is not a relationship 23:46 The problem with giving back 36:50 Where your money actually goes 53:00 Which way does the pendulum swing? Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Send TFFP your thoughts!

    20 years taking Canadians to Kenya: good intentions aren't good outcomes.

  2. Sep 10

    Two-Time Chief Investment Officer: Lead With Profit and I Won't Fund You

    A two-time Chief Investment Officer on why capitalism fails, why he walks out of profit pitches, and why a gated community is proof something already broke.  Peter Hofstra spent 24 years running institutional money, twice as Chief Investment Officer, after helping build a technology company that went public. He opens Season 4 of The Flourish Feed with Gillian Stovel Rivers.  He explains why he has never owned a tobacco stock, why capitalism is a tool and not an answer, and what a founder gets wrong by opening with the money. Then the harder question: we price financial appreciation to the decimal and have no line for the coach who produces a generation of athletes or the parent who stays home and holds a neighbourhood together. His answer is that we have fit the world to the math instead of bringing the math to the world. Universal basic income, why the happiest countries got their desperate to zero, and why gated communities are a symptom follow.  For families with more money than one purpose needs: not every dollar has to do the same job. Some of it is meant to compound. Some of it is meant to fund a skating program.  Chapters:  00:00 Humanity Does Not Lack Capital  10:17 The Stock He Has Never Owned  12:29 Capitalism Is a Tool  32:03 What Money Cannot Count  43:39 Not Every Dollar Has the Same Job  49:22 AI Is Infrastructure  57:49 Bryan Johnson, Human Lab Rat  Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself.  Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures.  Send TFFP your thoughts!

    Two-Time Chief Investment Officer: Lead With Profit and I Won't Fund You

  3. Jun 25

    #39 - The Science of Staying Rad (Forever)

    The bottleneck in the age of AI is not the technology. It is the human brain, which is prehistoric and was never built for infinite information. Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and the field's best known writer on flow. He thinks the fear around AI is massively overhyped and that the real difficulty is older and closer to home: an ancient nervous system trying to operate in an environment of unlimited input, where the skills that matter are not the ones anyone was trained for. Which reclassifies a whole category of abilities. Creativity, focus, meaning making and resilience are not soft skills. They are survival skills for this century, and the people who will do well are the ones who can keep reinventing themselves rather than the ones who picked correctly once. He goes at technological unemployment directly rather than around it, and at using the tools for skill development rather than fearing them. Flow is his answer for younger generations in particular, and adaptive flexibility is his name for the trait that everything else rests on. The instruction underneath all of it is simple and hard. Stop fearing the future and start training for it. Chapters: 00:00 The crisis of human alignment 02:49 What AI actually is and does 09:54 Job displacement, honestly 17:48 Prehistoric brains, modern problems 27:11 Flow in an age of abundance 33:08 What cooperation costs 34:10 COVID as a cooperation catalyst 36:02 Group flow 38:16 The AI job market 39:59 Using AI to build skills 42:06 Flow for younger generations 49:38 Meaning in an abundant world 57:37 Adaptive flexibility Steven's work is at https://www.stevenkotler.com, the Flow Research Collective at https://www.flowresearchcollective.com and Syneurgy at https://www.syneurgy.com/ Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #39 - The Science of Staying Rad (Forever)

  4. Jun 18

    #38 - The Biology of Synchrony

    The thing that predicts trust, learning and performance is not found inside a single brain. It is found between brains. Dr. Michael Mannino is a neuroscientist, an AI strategist and Chief Science Officer at the Flow Research Collective. His field is interpersonal synchrony, and the finding is literal rather than poetic: when people are genuinely connected, their brains, bodies and behaviour align in measurable ways, and that alignment predicts cooperation, creativity and results. He has watched it in classrooms, boardrooms, elite esports teams and therapy rooms, using hyperscanning to record more than one brain at once. Which leads somewhere useful for teams: synchrony is not sameness, and a group needs enough diversity to stay intelligent while staying aligned enough to move. The physiology is the surprise. The vagus nerve, gut health and the brain as a prediction engine all turn out to sit underneath what we experience as intuition and rapport, which means connection is a bodily state before it is a social one. And the question the whole conversation bends towards. As machines get more capable, what gets more valuable is not raw intelligence, it is the ability to connect, coordinate and make meaning together. In a culture obsessed with optimising the individual, the next gain is between people. Chapters: 00:00 Alignment and performance 03:14 Finding the neuromarkers of synchrony 06:18 How hyperscanning developed 10:32 Physical, cognitive and relational performance as one thing 14:47 Synchrony against diversity in a team 20:23 Context and dopamine 23:55 The brain as a prediction engine 26:35 The vagus nerve 28:49 Gut health and synchrony 29:41 Team flow and collective ambition 31:15 Synchrony in team dynamics 32:57 Why it feels so good 34:31 The brain state of team flow 36:50 Competition against collaboration 39:29 Why it decides performance 40:50 Synergy, and AI in team synchrony 43:13 What COVID did to teams 46:41 Building human connection deliberately Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #38 - The Biology of Synchrony

  5. Jun 11

    #37 - The Wisdom of Leadership

    Leadership built for scarcity does not work in abundance, and most leaders are still running the old operating system. Andrew Cohn runs Lighthouse Consulting and arrives with an unusual combination behind him: law, leadership consulting, higher education and spiritual psychology. He has coached inside Fortune 500 companies and mission driven nonprofits, which is why the conversation moves between stakeholder capitalism and the internal state of the person leading without either one sounding like a digression. His claim is that presence and internal clarity are leadership assets rather than personal indulgences. A leader who cannot pause cannot ask the question that changes the room, and the impactful question is most of the job. Group flow and psychological safety follow from the same place. The rift he names is worth sitting with. Organisations invest heavily in external capability and almost nothing in internal development, then wonder why capable people come apart in transition. Identity is what is actually under pressure at those moments, not competence. For anyone leading through a change they did not choose, and for anyone whose achievement has stopped meaning anything. Chapters: 00:00 The human operating system in abundance 03:53 What makes leadership hard now 07:30 Shareholder to stakeholder capitalism 11:36 The impactful question 15:18 Group flow and psychological safety 19:35 Internal against external development 24:13 Identity in transition 28:07 The power of the pause 33:50 The emotional environment a leader creates 36:16 Where AI fits Andrew's work is at https://lighthouseconsultingllc.com and he hosts the Spirituality and Leadership podcast. Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #37 - The Wisdom of Leadership

  6. Jun 4

    #36 - The Metabolic Cost of Everything

    Success is a debit. We treat only losses that way, and miss that achievement costs enormous energy on the way to being worth it. Dr. Sarah Sarkis is a clinical psychologist turned executive coach, and her frame is the metabolic budget. Energy is finite and it is spent across every domain of a life at once, so ambition in one place is quietly withdrawn from somewhere else whether or not anyone accounts for it. Overspend and the system corrects without asking. Her phrase for it is regressing to the average of your best habits, which is what burnout actually looks like from the inside before anyone calls it that. The fix is not more discipline. It is oscillation, moving deliberately between flow and recovery rather than trying to hold one state. She maps five autonomic response patterns, urgency, withdrawal, control, overconnection to threat, and regulation, and the value is in recognising which one you default to under pressure. On a team it matters more than individual capacity, because a team can only move as fast as the person who withdraws the most. And the line to keep for a world that is not getting simpler. Anybody who says stress can be eliminated is selling something. It cannot. You adapt to it. So be careful what you allow to become normal. Chapters: 00:00 Energy as wealth in uncertain times 02:20 The metabolic budget 04:00 What ambition costs 06:40 Overspending, and regression to the mean 08:00 Five factors of flourishing and their price 10:00 Undoing an imbalance 12:00 Balanced against burnt out 14:00 Oscillating between flow and recovery 16:00 Small consistent experiments 20:00 The neurochemistry of flow 24:00 Persistent stress and the intentional pause 30:00 The myth of an optimal state 35:00 Urgency and withdrawal 40:00 Control, threat and regulation Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #36 - The Metabolic Cost of Everything

  7. May 28

    #35 - The Economy of Her

    The issue is not talent. The issue is proximity to opportunity, and that is a design problem rather than a pipeline one. Andrea Mac is a revenue strategist, and she is on to argue that the coming transfer of wealth to women changes nothing on its own. Inheriting money is not the same as generating it, directing it, or deciding where it goes. The systems that determine who earns, who owns and who gets funded carry on unless somebody redesigns them. Her overlooked lever is sales. Not as a personality trait, which is how it is usually framed and why so many women opt out of it, but as a repeatable predictable system that can be learned. She treats revenue generation as the skill that has to come before investing, because you cannot deploy capital you never produced. The reframe that lands hardest is what counts as capital allocation. Every referral, every vendor contract, every hiring decision is one. Which means the power to redirect money is already in far more hands than the investing conversation suggests, and it is exercised weekly by people who do not think of themselves as allocators. Her name for what that builds is a female informed economy, and her definition of it is reciprocity over extraction. Chapters: 00:00 Why women holding 40 percent of global assets matters 02:48 Where the growth is coming from 04:13 The myths, and the design flaws underneath 05:55 Revenue before investing 06:32 Sales as a system, not a personality 08:22 The training gap 09:48 Aligning values with revenue 11:42 Household and partnership dynamics 13:09 What unpaid labour costs a career 15:05 Flexible paths and income stagnation 19:42 Proximity, networks and deploying capital 20:40 Ownership and agency 26:13 Supporting women led businesses on purpose 30:40 Building an inclusive economy 39:36 Revenue as the accelerator 43:51 Community driven financial systems 44:20 Women in capital allocation roles 45:23 Using AI to widen access 48:38 Getting real output out of the tools Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #35 - The Economy of Her

  8. May 21

    #34 - The Nexus of Human Potential

    Skills are additive. Attributes are what show up when everything becomes uncertain, and you cannot apply a known skill to an unknown environment. Rich Diviney spent twenty years as a Navy SEAL officer and now writes and teaches on performance. His distinction between the two is the spine of the episode. A skill is trained for a situation you can name. An attribute is the elemental driver that decides what you do when the situation is one nobody prepared for. That makes attributes the thing worth knowing about yourself, including the low ones, which he treats as blind spots to account for rather than flaws to fix. On a team the balance across people matters more than any individual's profile, which is why the same person can be excellent in one group and ineffective in another. Then identity, and his sharpest line. The words I am are two of the most powerful in the language, because identity drives behaviour and physiology rather than merely describing them. The best thing you can do under uncertainty is decide which identity serves the moment. And the reason it is on a wealth show: in a world shaped by AI, human value may lie less in what we do and more in how we behave when things stop being predictable. Chapters: 00:00 Attributes in uncertain times 02:51 What SEAL training teaches about skills 06:07 Mindset 09:05 Attributes against skills 11:55 How attributes drive performance 15:03 A worked example 17:51 Low attributes and blind spots 21:04 Balance in a team 23:53 Self-reflection and growth 31:26 Extraversion and introversion 32:58 Task switching 35:44 Self-awareness 36:52 Insouciance and humility 38:40 The power of identity 45:31 Identity through change Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, Senior Wealth Advisor, CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. Visit www.assante.com/legal for important legal and regulatory disclosures. Connect with Gillian: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers https://x.com/GillianStovelR https://www.instagram.com/gillianstovelofficial https://flourishfamilywealth.com/ #flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself Send TFFP your thoughts!

    #34 - The Nexus of Human Potential
See All (42)

About

A series of curiosity driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. If you have already built the financial plan, the question underneath it is the harder one: what are the next thirty years actually for? The Flourish Feed goes after that question the way a wealth advisor would, using the science of attention, longevity and human connection to work out what the money is actually for. Gillian Stovel Rivers, MA, CFP®, CEA, is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd. who has advised Canadian families for over twenty years. Each week she sits down with one coach, researcher or practitioner and tests what they know against what she sees in practice. Guests have included Steven Kotler on flow and adaptive flexibility, and Dr. Jon Beale on measuring flourishing. Wealth here means four things you invest, not one: Time, Energy, Money, and Attention. Made for financially independent women and power couples who want a deep personal understanding of wealth and how to enjoy it at every stage of life. Know Thy Wealth, Know Thyself. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovel Rivers who is a Senior Wealth Advisor with CI Assante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Assante Wealth Management and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Assante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors; please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian at flourishfamilywealth.com to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.

Information

  • Creator
    Gillian Stovel Rivers
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    42
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Flourish Feed Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Flourish Feed Podcast