Pulse Check

Let's talk about the thing nobody in our industry puts in their Instagram highlights: money stress. Loan officers are historically bad with their money. Commission based income can be a rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows.

We spend our days working through the finances of our clients and many of us don't put the same effort into our own plan.

Uncertainty is a terrorist in your body. A 2016 study in Nature Communications found that people's stress responses peaked not when they knew something bad was coming, but when they didn't know whether it was.

The stress also limits cognition. In a 2013 study in Science, researchers found that financial worry measurably lowered performance on cognitive tests. The researchers compared the hit to losing a full night of sleep.

Financial strain is consistently linked with poorer sleep, and poor sleep affects mood, energy, emotional regulation, immunity, physical performance, and the list goes on. If you've been watching your HRV or resting heart rate since our earlier issue, a stressful month tends to show up there too.

Money stress is a predictable response to unpredictability. The fix isn't more willpower. It's more structure.

From my trusted CFP

I asked my trusted CFP what he'd tell someone in our shoes. Here it is in his own words:

Here are the things I'd focus on:

Pay yourself a consistent monthly amount.

Deposit commissions into a separate account, then transfer a sustainable amount to household checking each month. Strong months build the cushion that supports slower ones.

Build your lifestyle around a conservative income estimate.

Keep recurring commitments manageable during slower periods. A record month may justify a one-time celebration, but think carefully before adding a permanent monthly payment.

Build a reserve for income swings.

Start with one month of essential expenses and build from there. Depending on other household income and obligations, six to twelve months may be a reasonable longer-term target for someone relying heavily on commissions.

Give every large commission a plan.

Before spending it, allocate money toward taxes, reserves, upcoming expenses, expensive debt, and retirement. Include an intentional amount for enjoyment.

Don't spend your pipeline.

An application or scheduled closing is a forecast. Make spending commitments based on money received, and consider how you would handle commissions arriving a month late.

Plan for taxes and predictable expenses.

Review withholding or estimated payments as earnings change. Set aside money for annual insurance, holidays, repairs, and licensing costs so predictable bills don't become emergencies.

Have a weekly 15-minute money check-in.

Review cash, upcoming bills, spending, and expected income—with your partner if you share finances. Agree ahead of time on what spending gets reduced during slower months.

Why this works on the wellness side too

Here's what I love about his list: it's a stress management plan disguised as a financial plan.

Remember the three problems from earlier? Uncertainty, drained bandwidth, and bad sleep. His advice hits all three.

A consistent monthly paycheck and a real reserve take the uncertainty out of a slow month. You already know how the bills get paid, so your body doesn't have to stay on high alert waiting to find out.

Deciding your budget in advance means the hard decisions are already made. You're not trying to think clearly about money when money is the thing clouding your thinking.

And a weekly 15-minute check-in is a lot easier on your sleep than lying awake at 2am running numbers in your head.

We're the people clients trust to guide them through the biggest financial decision of their lives. Let's be just as intentional with our own. Your future self, and your nervous system, will thank you.

This newsletter is for general educational purposes only and isn't individual financial, tax, or investment advice. Please talk with a qualified professional about your specific situation.

When I left physical therapy for mortgage, I had one major concern. Would I still matter to people the way I did in healthcare?

With treating patients, the impact was obvious. You could see it. Someone would progress from functional limitations to return to regular activity. I wasn't sure originating a mortgage would provide the same experience.

The best moment of my healthcare career came from a patient who sustained a spinal cord injury in a car accident. His doctors at Stanford told him he wouldn't walk again - this included his daughter who was a surgeon. He spoke very little English, and my Spanish wasn't going to win any awards, but somehow we understood each other perfectly on one point: we were going to try anyway.

So we did. For months. Small gains, bad days, more small gains. And then one day he walked.

We both had tears in our eyes. Now, I am not a crier. My reaction was pure Jerry Seinfeld: "What is this salty discharge?" But there was no hiding it. That moment is my Why. Honestly, it's still a work in progress, hard to define but some combo of helping people and having purpose. I admit I was worried I wouldn't be able to achieve that in mortgage.

Here's what I didn't expect from the mortgage industry. Being a part of a team who helped a family get the keys to their first home hits the same place. For a lot of our clients, this is the biggest financial decision of their lives and the goal they've been chasing for years. Maybe decades. A place to raise their kids. A place that's finally theirs. Proof to themselves that they made it. Being a part of them achieving this goal hit my Why. Let's be real, not all clients see our value. The ones who do make this all worth it.

Start with Why

Simon Sinek's book Start with Why makes a simple argument: the people and organizations who inspire others begin with why they do something, then get to how and what. His Golden Circle puts Why at the center, How around it, and What on the outside. Most of us communicate from the outside in. The best do it the other way around.

His most famous line: "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it."

In our world, the What is mortgages. The How is our service and process. But the Why is what gets you through the chaos, rejections, shoppers, and hard days.

Adam Grant at Wharton ran a study with university call center fundraisers. The ones who spent just a few minutes meeting a student went on to raise dramatically more money than those who didn't. Seeing who you help changes how you work. There's a health angle too: a 2019 study in JAMA Network Open found adults with a stronger sense of life purpose had lower mortality risk.

So what's your Why?

For a lot of us, it's close to home: our families and our kids. Building a life for them, being present for them, showing them what hard work looks like. That's a powerful Why.

For many of us it's also bigger than ourselves. It's knowing that on a given Tuesday, you helped someone change their life. Most people never get to say that about their job. We get to say it every time a file closes.

I thought I was leaving impact behind when I left healthcare. Turns out I just found a new way to achieve it. I hope you realize the impact your work has on people's lives.

You've probably heard the line "comparison is the thief of joy." It gets credited to everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Mark Twain, though as far as anyone can actually prove, none of them said it. Doesn't matter. It's stuck around this long for a reason.

It happens when you open the Mpire loan officer leaderboard on our company Mx portal. You know the moment. Even if you've been crushing your personal goals, there are some monster producers at this company and it is easy to get discouraged seeing someone doing better than you.

A psychologist named Leon Festinger studied this back in 1954, and the short version is that comparing ourselves to others isn't optional, it's how we're wired to make sense of how we're doing. You can be exactly on pace with your own goals, hitting the targets you set for yourself, and still feel behind the second you see someone else's numbers.

So the "just don't compare yourself to others" advice you've heard a hundred times is kind of missing the point. You're going to compare. The real question is what you do with it once it happens.

There's a piece of sales research I ran into that splits this apart nicely. When you look at a top producer's numbers and think "why do they get all the business," that's one kind of reaction, researchers call it malicious envy, and it actually predicts worse performance. But when you look at the same numbers and think "let me find out what they're doing differently," that's a completely different reaction, benign envy, and it predicts better performance. Same trigger. Same leaderboard. Opposite outcomes, depending entirely on which direction your brain takes it.

There's actually a name for this move. Psychologists call it reappraisal, deliberately changing the story you're telling yourself about a situation instead of trying to shut the feeling down or push through it. It sounds small, but the research on it is pretty convincing: people who reappraise a stressful moment handle it better, both in how they feel and in how their body responds to it. It's a specific, trainable skill.

This is where I think Mpire actually has something going for it that's easy to take for granted. The culture of this company is different. It's evolved into a place where we can learn from each other. You feel comfortable to ask the top dogs what they are doing that works and they will give you, in detail, the blueprint in order to do it yourself. That's the whole leaderboard problem solved in one conversation. The number on the board doesn't have to be a verdict on you. It can just be a name to call. The leaderboard is built for healthy competition. Use it for motivation and a directory of who you need to learn from if you want to do more business.

Try this: Next time you get in your head, change the question. Not "why aren't I there," but "who's there, what are they doing, and what would it cost me to follow suit." There is your reappraisal.

I've got a big birthday this year, and I decided this was the year I'd get in the best shape of my life and run a half marathon. So I tried to compress the timeline: I pushed the mileage and pace, and lifted heavier and more intensely. I got hurt instead, and ended up with both a calf and abdominal strain. My impatience put me further behind schedule than if I stayed consistent with my plan.

I saw the same pattern for years as a physical therapist. The patients who improved fastest weren't the ones cramming one brutal session before an appointment to make up for two skipped weeks. They were doing five unremarkable minutes a day. Tissue adapts to what you consistently ask of it, not to what you occasionally demand from it.

What the research actually says

It takes months to become a routine based machine. The supporting study (Lally et al., 2010, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology) tracked people building a daily habit and found it took 66 days on average for it to become automatic. The thing that made it stick wasn't intensity. It was repetition in the same context, over and over, past the point where it felt like an accomplishment.

Where this shows up in the business

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen studied this exact pattern in companies for their book Great by Choice, and gave it a name: the 20 Mile March. Picture two people hiking 3,000 miles across the country. One does exactly 20 miles a day, every day, through good weather and bad, and refuses to push further even when conditions are perfect. The other sprints 40 miles on easy days, then collapses and does nothing when it gets hard. Same average pace on paper. The disciplined hiker reaches the finish line. The other one is still in Kansas City. Collins found every company in his study that outperformed its industry by 10x had some version of this self-imposed, unglamorous, relentlessly consistent pace.

This applies directly to prospecting in the mortgage industry. It's tempting to think the win comes from the big splashy push: the one great event, the one perfect pitch, the one campaign that lands. But that's not how it actually plays out. The mortgage and real estate playbook for actually earning repeat referrals isn't a great gesture or event, it's a full year of small, predictable actions. You win by showing up every single week.

The big swing feels like the thing that will change everything. Usually it's the boring, repeatable, measurable, slightly unglamorous version of the plan that actually does.

This week's question: Where in your business or your health are you waiting for the big move, when what you actually need is the same small one on repeat?

Everyone is talking about biomarkers. I genuinely love this shift in wellness. What used to require a lab appointment, a waiting room, and someone jabbing a needle in your arm has turned into something almost anyone can do from their kitchen table. Comprehensive blood testing doesn't even require a doctor's referral anymore. It's part of a bigger shift toward proactive testing, where you get to look under the hood before anything actually goes wrong instead of waiting for a symptom to force the issue.

I recently did an at-home test. It showed up in the mail, took me about 10 minutes, I shipped it back, and had results in 2 days. No lab visit, no waiting weeks, no fighting for the early morning appointments because you have to be fasted.

Here's one part that matters to me. I hate needles. Genuinely, deeply hate them, and it traces back to a bad experience years ago that I still feel a little bit every time someone mentions a blood draw. This test had none. No needle at all. If I could get through it without breaking a sweat, pretty much anyone can. And with more of these platforms now using AI-assisted analysis to interpret results, you're not stuck trying to make out a PDF full of numbers trying to figure out what's actually normal for you. The interpretation side has gotten just as accessible as the testing itself.

So here's a question worth sitting with. If something in your body were quietly going wrong right now, would you actually know it?

For most people, the honest answer is no. Not because they're not paying attention, but because a lot of what matters most doesn't announce itself. Chronic kidney disease can progress until you've lost 75% of function before symptoms appear, and roughly 9 out of 10 people who have it don't know it yet. High blood pressure and rising blood sugar follow the same pattern. Quiet, then suddenly not quiet. Bloodwork is one of the few tools that lets you catch these things while they're still just numbers on a page, not problems you're living with.

There's a second piece to this that I think gets overlooked even more. Most people supplement blind. Multivitamins, vitamin D, fish oil, whatever's trending, without ever testing to see if they actually need it. Research suggests over half of people taking vitamin D supplements weren't actually deficient to begin with. On the flip side, deficiencies that do exist often go completely unaddressed simply because nobody checked. You cannot optimize what you haven't measured. Testing turns supplementation from a guess into a plan.

If your goal is longevity and staying ahead of problems rather than just catching disease after it shows up, here's where I'd focus:

ApoB. This one's underrated. Instead of just measuring the cholesterol inside your particles, it estimates the actual number of atherogenic particles circulating in your blood, which research increasingly shows predicts cardiovascular risk better than standard cholesterol numbers alone.

A1C. Gives you a picture of your average blood sugar over roughly the past 2 to 3 months. Catching prediabetes here creates a real window to intervene before it becomes something bigger.

Triglycerides and HDL. Most useful in context, alongside A1C, fasting glucose, waist circumference, and blood pressure. Together they paint a much clearer metabolic picture than any single number alone.

hs-CRP. A marker of inflammation. It won't diagnose a specific disease on its own, but paired with the other markers it adds real context to your cardiovascular risk.

Liver enzymes (ALT, AST, GGT). Especially useful to track over time, particularly if you're making changes to your weight, diet, alcohol intake, or exercise routine.

Kidney function (creatinine/eGFR). Gives you a baseline most people never think about until something's already wrong.

Testosterone. For men, this one matters more than people realize. Low levels have been linked in research to higher all-cause mortality, increased insulin resistance, and higher cardiovascular risk. One study on firefighters found men with low testosterone had four times the odds of fatty liver disease, independent of age or BMI. It often shows up as nothing more dramatic than low energy, which makes it easy to write off as just being tired.

Vitamin D. Influences far more than bone health. It plays a role in immune function, inflammation, and insulin sensitivity, and deficiency is common even in people who assume they get enough sun.

One more thing worth knowing. Large, long-running studies consistently show that the real value isn't a single perfect test result, it's the trend over time. People who maintain healthy blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol over years tend to live longer and stay healthier while doing it. A single test is a snapshot. Testing at regular intervals is what turns it into a story about your actual health.

You cannot fix a problem you don't know you have, and you cannot fine-tune something you've never measured.

With that said, aren't you curious?

I finish every workout the same way. Fifteen or twenty minutes in the sauna. It's become the part of my routine I look forward to most.

This morning that quiet ritual got interrupted by a sound I did not sign up for. There was a guy making these loud, wet slurping noises, sucking sweat off his nose and mouth. Over and over. It was truly disgusting, and for the first two or three minutes it consumed me. I was running through my options. Say something. Get up and hand him a towel, a little passive aggressive gift to make my point. Just leave.

Then something shifted. Instead of reacting to the noise, I got curious about my reaction to the noise. And I decided to see if I could just tune it out. Not ignore that it was happening, I could still hear it, but stop letting it hijack my attention.

It took a few minutes. But it worked. The slurping didn't stop. My relationship to it did.

I have heard people talk about meditation my whole adult life and never really got it. It always sounded like sitting quietly and thinking about nothing, which seemed both impossible and pointless. What happened in that sauna made it click for me in a way no app or article ever did. Meditation isn't the absence of distraction for me. It can be the practice consciously redirecting your attention until the thing that was driving you crazy loses its grip on you.

This lines up with how researchers describe attentional control, the trainable ability to direct and hold focus even when something is actively competing for it. It's a skill, not a fixed trait, which means the more you practice it in small, dumb, low stakes moments like a sauna, the more available it is when the stakes are actually high.

And by the time I got up, I genuinely felt more level than when I walked in. Not because the annoyance disappeared, but because I had proven to myself, in real time, that I get to decide what gets to live rent free in my head.

What's your version of the sauna guy, something small and annoying you deal with regularly that you could use as free reps for this? How can this affect you in your business?