After his presentation in November at the NRMLA Annual Meeting, Reverse Mortgage magazine sat down with Fuentes to find out more about the processes he uses. Those methods include showing clients how the brain and body work together, using sleep, circadian rhythms, sunlight, exercise and other tools to build their “dopaminergic stack”—the neurotransmitters that keep people functioning at their fullest and rewarding behaviors that help them to excel. “If you have a basic understanding of how to regulate and cultivate effective dopamine management skills, you’re good to go,” says Fuentes, former chief administrative officer at Financial Freedom Senior Funding Corp. He started his career as a management consultant for Ernst and Young, after obtaining his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also helps people find those times in a day— about 90-minute cycles called ultradian rhythms— where they are reaching peak creative and meaningful performance. Those cycles can be repeated up to four times per day if you understand them and know how to push reset buttons between cycles through rest, different work, walks, exercise or other means. “People who are extremely productive and have high dopamine, they can probably do four ultradian cycles,” Fuentes says. “But it’s not realistic to do four every day, for months on end. You burn out.” Here is an extended interview with Fuentes, edited lightly for style, length and clarity. Reverse Mortgage: Tell us a bit about what you do. Lon Fuentes: I do executive coaching. One area is strategy coaching. What areas can you tweak and how do you tweak them so you get better performance? Whether it’s in sales or whether it’s personal productivity, I am obsessed with the idea of productivity. In other words, how can you make your work life better? When I’m talking to an executive, let’s say, a sales executive or an operations executive or a president of a company, I try to give them what they want, but my goal is to somehow move closer to what they really need. RM: How do you do that? You talk about using the CliftonStrengths tool by Gallup, which measures the natural patterns of how someone thinks, feels and behaves. LF: Yes, the CliftonStrengths finder is the most sophisticated, quantitative tool for understanding a profile of a person’s action in the world. It’s for when we don’t know where people are coming from, or we don’t know what their preferences are—in terms of their style and what kind of fuel jazzes them up versus what type of fuel challenges them or dampens their spirit. For example, I discovered that when you are training salespeople, you cannot assume that they respond to a leaderboard. “Hey, Bob, you’re doing OK. You’re beating everyone in the leaderboard.” But guess what? There are some very successful sales executives and producers in the reverse mortgage world who do not have high competition. In fact, their competition is in the bottom drawer of their strengths. And you say, “Well, isn’t that impossible?” No, it’s not. Because what they value is not competition. In essence, they’re competing with themselves. They’re trying to make a better version of themselves every day. They’re obsessed with performance, but they’re not obsessed with beating the person at the top. They’re obsessed with increasing their score. That is a totally different attribute, and you can measure that. If a person has a bad performance and you try to motivate them with the wrong carrot, you think you’re using a carrot, but it has become transformed into a stick without you even knowing. That’s a lot of wasted time. Now, having said that, CliftonStrengths wasn’t popularized until about 20 years ago. People were able to understand differences among salespeople or performance, which is fine. I’m not saying that’s not effective. What I am saying is, if you validate with more refined tools, there are more quantitative and qualitative increases in your ability to predict and help the person. Nurturing Your Talents continued on page 28 Nurturing Your Talents continued from page 25 26 REVERSE MORTGAGE / MARCH–APRIL 2023
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ1MzY1