We all aspire to reach our highest ideals in leadership, becoming more effective and authentic while empowering those around us to do the same. Yet, navigating the path to leadership, especially in traditionally male-dominated industries like financial services, can be challenging. That’s why Elena Beckius, Senior Vice President at think2perform, is committed to helping others rethink how they lead and grow.
“We have the ability to make decisions differently than we have in the past, that will lead us to a different place,” says Elena. This perspective is not just about embracing change for personal growth, but also about creating opportunities for others to thrive in new and meaningful ways.
On this episode of Making the Ideal Real, Elena shares her personal journey in the financial services industry, discussing the challenges and triumphs of being a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field. Listen in to learn about the importance of mentorship, leadership and values in guiding career and life decisions.
Finding Mentorship and Representation
Elena’s journey in financial services began right out of college, despite her initial resistance to entering the field. “The only thing I knew I didn’t want to do when I graduated was get into any sort of financial services sales,” she recalls.
Ironically, it was this very path that led her to discover her passion for helping others achieve financial security. Early in her career, Elena observed that while there were women in financial services, they often occupied support roles rather than leadership positions. This disparity made her question her own place in the industry.
However, Elena found inspiration and guidance in a strong female leader named Jody, who was her group vice president at the time. Jody’s presence as a successful leader provided Elena with a powerful role model. “Seeing women in your industry is really important,” Elena notes, emphasizing the need for visible examples of female leadership.
Mentorship and representation became key themes in Elena’s career, as she recognized the importance of clearing the path for the women who would follow. This visibility not only encouraged Elena to persevere but also reinforced her belief in the significance of community among women in the industry.
Saying Yes to Growth and Impact
As Elena transitioned from a financial advisor to a leadership role, her focus shifted from individual success to collective impact. She realized that her true fulfillment came from helping others achieve their goals at scale. “I could work with a client and have a big impact … but if I helped a new advisor do the same thing, that impact across a broader practice was so much more fulfilling,” she reflects. This insight drove her to embrace leadership opportunities, where she could influence not just one advisor or client, but entire teams and their extended networks.
Elena’s approach to leadership is deeply rooted in values and personal growth. She shares how she continuously said “yes” to opportunities as long as they were challenging and enjoyable. This mindset allowed her to evolve her leadership style, learning from both successes and failures.
Elena stresses the importance of recognizing our own unique gifts and using them in leadership roles. “It’s really important that we see other people with similar gifts and abilities so that we can reflect on that … and embrace them in our work,” she explains. By embracing her own strengths and those of others, Elena has cultivated a leadership style that’s both empowering and high-impact.
Recognizing the Power of Values-Based Decision-Making
A recurring theme in Elena’s career has been the challenge of balancing professional responsibilities with personal commitments. She candidly discusses the pressure many women feel to excel in both areas, often leading to a sense of carrying “the weight of the business on your shoulders.”
Elena’s experience in navigating these challenges has taught her the importance of delegation and the need to let go of limiting beliefs. “In order to take off some of that weight, you have to grow,” she says, stressing the role of personal development in effective leadership.
Elena’s journey towards finding balance involved working with a coach and therapist to understand her own values and to learn how to delegate effectively. This process of reflection and delegation was crucial in allowing her to lead with integrity, both in her professional and personal life.
“When you make decisions in alignment with your values, you get the reward of being happier,” she says. Elena encourages others to take action, seek community support and make decisions that align with their true selves. Her story is a testament to the power of living authentically and leading with purpose, showing that it is possible to achieve success without compromising on personal values.
People in This Episode
Elena Beckius: LinkedIn
Transcript
Elena Beckius:
Actually seeing women in your industry is really important. Gathering women together is really important for companies to do because the women that are coming behind us need to see and interact, and see the Jodys of the world, or the Elenas of the world, or whatever. They need to see us leading and being successful.
Ryan Goulart:
That’s Elena Beckius, senior vice president of think2perform. We’re talking about how women expand their ability to grow, lead, and succeed through values reflection. I’m Ryan Goulart, and you are Making the Ideal Real.
Welcome, Elena, to Making the Ideal Real. I’m not going to ask you our initial question because you’re a frequent guest on this program. Welcome back.
Elena Beckius:
Thanks, Ryan. I actually, right when you were teeing up that phrase, I panicked for a minute thinking, “Do I have to come up with another definition of what making the ideal real means to me?”
Ryan Goulart:
Good thing you’re a think2performer and practice the freeze exercise every day.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah, there you go.
Ryan Goulart:
One of the things that we’re talking about today is just something that you have had experience in, in your career. You have also had some observations as to what it means to be a woman in financial services. I want to ask, to set the stage, what does it look like to navigate financial services, which has traditionally, unfortunately been a male-dominated industry? And anchor on success stories that you’ve observed, both in your clients’ and in your own experience. How did you get your start in financial services? What were some observations that you had initially, as you were just training to become a financial advisor?
Elena Beckius:
My start in financial services was right out of college. Ironically, the only thing I knew I didn’t want to do when I graduated from college with a finance degree was get into any sort of financial services sales. The lesson in that is don’t make any plans when you’re 21. But seriously, that was the only thing I knew I didn’t want to do was become a financial advisor. I didn’t understand what being a financial advisor really meant at the time. I just knew I had been recruited by a company that felt very salesy and not in alignment with my values.
But I did know, growing up in an entrepreneurial environment, my parents owned two small businesses over the course of growing up, and I knew that I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial in nature. Ironically, then, I had a conversation with somebody who was in our industry, and he had asked me what I wanted to do long-term. I said, “I want to do something very similar to my parents. I want to have impact on people. I want to be able to do my own thing, and create financial security. I want to make a difference.” Shout-out to Craig Smaagaard, at Generational Wealth, one of our clients that we love working with. He said, “I know you think you don’t want to be a financial advisor, but I think you do.” And he was right.
The more I learned about it, the more I realized this actually is really in alignment with my desire to help people and do meaningful work. But also, to create financial security. Doing work that you can create financial impact, both for not only clients, but also for yourself if done right. That was about 20 years ago, almost exactly that I started my day one as a financial advisor. It’s been a good ride.
Ryan Goulart:
In that journey, you start off as a financial advisor, what are some things that you noticed that you had to overcome? Everyone has a barrier, but sometimes, traditionally in financial services, there are more barriers for women. What were some things that you helped navigate around to understand that a bit more?
Elena Beckius:
The interesting thing about starting in the financial services at 22, right out of college, is that I actually saw a fair amount of women in my office. I just saw them in more support roles. It was interesting. We had a fair amount of women in the office. We just didn’t have that many women in my office that were in the financial advisor role trying to grow their own business.
The challenge in that is that you start to question, “Is this actually really right for me?” I see other women in different jobs doing different things. The good news for me is that the woman that was my group vice president at the time, her name was Jody. Jody was a really strong leader. While there weren’t a lot of women advisors that I saw compared to the men advisors, I got to see Jody leading the pack. For me, that line of sight to Jody helped me understand that, while I had a line of sight to what other women were doing that weren’t my role. Is that better or worse than what I was doing? It was just different. I had this idea that, “Well, if Jody can do it, maybe I can do it.”
The first thing that I’ll say is that actually seeing women in your industry is really important. Gathering women together is really important for companies to do because the women that are coming behind us need to see and interact, and see the Jodys of the world, or the Elenas of the world, or whatever. They need to see us leading and being successful. And we need to step back and help clear the path for them, and help them be successful, if that’s this industry or not. That would be the first thing I noticed is that there are women in financial services. There’s just not a lot of women, at the time, in advisor roles. That can be confusing for people.
Ryan Goulart:
Yeah. It’s a really good point. I love how you anchored on a role model or a mentor that was demonstrating skillsets that you wanted to emulate and make your own. We all try to think about or observe behaviors from leaders that made us feel good, and try to emulate those.
As you became a leader and learned about leadership, what were some traits that you took from Jody that were powerful for you?
Elena Beckius:
I don’t know if it was traits maybe that I took from Jody. I think, had Jody not been in her role, I may not have pursued leadership and leaned into some of my own natural skills, and abilities, and interests had I not seen her. I think part of it is recognizing that we each come to the table with unique gifts and abilities.
It’s really important that we see other people with similar gifts and abilities so that we can reflect on that, and understand them, and know them, and embrace them, and leverage them in our work. I think the biggest part was just seeing her, and then recognizing … Probably not even at the time. I don’t think I sat there and I was like, “Oh, Jody and I are a lot alike.” To me, Jody was just so far down in her career and so high up in the company. But I think what maybe I did was starting to notice what leadership and influence was about, and how she went about doing that. And realizing, “Okay, I can do this in a little way.” Then I grew that and expanded that.
I think part of the beauty of starting in an industry when you’re really young is that, in some cases, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I just said, “I’ll just keep saying yes to opportunities until it no longer is challenging or it’s no longer fun.” Those were my only two parameters at the time. I want to be challenged. I want to have fun. I already knew I was going to be making a difference. I’ll just keep saying yes, until those two things aren’t true.
I don’t know if that answers your question or not.
Ryan Goulart:
No, it does. Yeah, it absolutely does. I love how you phrased that. You did do the Jody, you said yes to a leadership role.
As you made that transition from an advisor to a field leader, what was that journey like for you?
Elena Beckius:
As I reflect back on my transition from advisor to leader, I think part of the reason for that was, if you look at any career that you have, there’s parts of your job that you love. And there’s also no perfect job. When I was serving clients, I loved the impact. I love to make a difference for clients and help them get to a place that they wouldn’t have gotten on their own. But when I started having the ability to help other advisors do the same, I realized that I had so much more enjoyment, and helping them make a difference with the people, the clients that they were serving than I did on my own.
I could work with a client and have a big impact, and help them do some really creative strategies, and it would be fulfilling for me. But if I helped a new advisor do the same thing with one client, that could turn into two clients, that could turn into three, and 100. That impact across a broader practice was so much more fulfilling for me because I knew it wasn’t just one-to-one. Now I could have an impact across a full practice of clients. That’s what initially drove me into leadership.
Then as my leadership career progressed, it wasn’t just that I was impacting one advisor for the better, and helping them grow and get closer to what they want for themselves. Now I could do it across multiple advisors that were having impact across multiple hundreds of clients. You think about that escalation of impact, it just was really meaningful for me. I found that the more influence and leadership I could share with the people that I led, I was helping them get closer to who they wanted to be and the impact that they wanted to have.
That’s why, to this day, I always say my professional purpose is to help people know, embrace, and steward their gifts. So that they can do the maximum work, whether that’s in their workplace, professionally, or in their community, or in their family. But helping people do that, and then scaling it across an organization, was even more fun. It wasn’t perfect, but it was much more in alignment with the impact that I wanted to have broadly. That was a little bit of my journey of why I kept saying yes, as long as it was challenging and fun.
Ryan Goulart:
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What comes to mind, too, because you do a similar role here. You help guide, and mentor, and steward people’s gifts as a coach. You’re someone that is growth-oriented. You’re growth-minded. You’re constantly learning. What are some things that you learned as a leader, and now as a coach, that you have been able to help solve some problems for others? Those others being advisors.
Elena Beckius:
There are so many, I think, over the years, just being in business and leadership for as long as I have. There are so many things that I have had to learn the hard way, or I failed at and I learned from. Maybe that’s lesson number one, is that sometimes it feels like you’re failing or you’re not doing as well as you can, and it’s an opportunity for learning.
But I would say, related to our industry, and especially related to women in financial services, one of the biggest things is that as a woman in financial services, whether you are leading a practice or whether you’re more in a leadership role in a firm like I was, is that sometimes you feel like you have the weight of the business on your shoulders. Whether that is real or whether it isn’t, that is your perception and it feels so heavy. That’s a heavy weight to have on your shoulders.
You’ve heard the old adage that we expect women to lead in business like they don’t have families, and we expect women to show up in their family life and mother as if they don’t have work. That’s not even taking into consideration some of the other hats that we wear in our community. I’m not saying that men don’t experience this, too. But we all carry this weight of the business or the practice on our shoulders. One thing that I have had to learn is that, in order to take off some of that weight, you have to grow. I know it’s so obvious when I say it now, but in real-time, when you have the weight of the practice on your shoulders, you don’t always slow down enough to say, “I have to stop doing what I’ve always done in order to step into a role and lead differently.”
For me, it took actually working with a coach and a therapist simultaneously to start understanding some of the beliefs that I held on how to do that, and actually how to let go of some of those limiting beliefs. And start delegating. And not just delegating here and there, on what’s easy to delegate. I think about sometimes, with the clients that we serve, it is really easy to delegate some pieces of the business. It is really easy to delegate setting appointments. It gets easier to delegate doing the financial planning and developing advice. But it is really hard to delegate relationship management. It’s really hard to delegate lead generation, when the practice is based on your brand. It’s really hard to delegate client service long-term.
Those things actually require you to stop doing what you’ve always done, and understand that you may have to delegate some of those things through people. I think that has been a huge learning for me, is just be aware of all the hats that I wear as a woman in this industry. And how do I go about handing over those hats to other people effectively, and creating an environment where people can be successful wearing those hats? Sometimes, Ryan, the hardest part is knowing that they aren’t going to wear those hats the same way I do and that’s okay.
Ryan Goulart:
I always have these quotes in my head, but I never give effective attribution. I’m making this comment, knowing that the comment itself is said by someone else other than me. The comment is, don’t expect you from others. It’s so hard because all we know is us. All we know is how we’ve done things, like you had mentioned earlier, of we didn’t know any better. We didn’t know any different. Once you know, then you realize that, “Oh, wait, there is a different way to solve this.” Sometimes there’s even a better way. If we’re okay saying that to ourselves, that someone did something better on a project or in a task, then that’s actually a good thing. I love how you framed that.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah. I think that, on the easy things to delegate … I don’t want to say easy. For some people, even the easy things are hard to delegate because they care so much about their work. But for our conversation today, I think that there are easy things that we can delegate.
The harder things to delegate, sometimes we have to actually see it successfully done elsewhere. Way, way back, this was probably not quite nine years ago. I was in my first senior leader role, and I just felt so lonely because there weren’t a lot of other women doing what I was doing. There were one or two other women at the time, not close in my geography. I didn’t get to see them all that often. I’m not saying that I couldn’t pick up the phone. But I was really desiring to be in relationship with actually other women.
I pulled together a cohort of women. There was actually a woman, Dena Froiland. At that time, she was in a senior role within compliance. And there was somebody from legal, and there was somebody from our fraternal side of the business, and there was somebody from distribution. We would only get together quarterly. We all wanted to do it more. It was actually those conversations of seeing how they had some of the same challenges that I did. We were able to talk about how we’re all dealing with it differently. The idea of delegation, that’s ultimately what it always came back to. It was what are the things that we’re really willing to hand off? Then what are the things we’re not?
For me, one of the things that I was not willing to hand off was the care for my family. That meant that I might have to hand off something more in the business. I see that with clients now, that I coach and work with, is going through the same types of values-based decisions. What do I value and what am I willing to hand off? It probably always ends up being that we need to hand off more and we need to trust more. We can’t do a drive-by delegation of just, “Okay, this is yours now. Take it.” But actually work with folks, and help them be successful knowing it might look different.
Ryan Goulart:
I love that. It connects directly back to something you said earlier about being aware of all the hats. Even in how you had those conversations, you’re assessing the hats. It’s not just professional delegation. It’s also assessing possible personal delegation. Then you’re reflecting on values. That was awesome, how you phrased that. Because it’s easy to get trapped into only professional, and then I’ll figure out personal at another time. It’s actually we need to show up in all areas of our life, and also assess all areas of our life.
It definitely led to somewhere else then, right? You had some decisions to make to say no to some stuff. That was probably harder, as it materialized.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah. There were decisions that I had to make, personally and professionally, that were really hard to make. I think when I look back on those decisions, and I will just say this with so much confidence, the thing that helped me make some of those tough decisions, Ryan, was being very, very clear about my values. And being very clear that, if I am somebody who knows myself and loves myself, then I need to make decisions that actually are in alignment with the type of decisions that somebody who knows themselves and loves themselves, and understands their values would make.
We talk about it a lot. If you’re going to coach yourself on what to do, given these decisions that you have to make, sometimes it’s like, “Okay. Well, if I’m coaching Elena, and I know who she is and I know what she values, and I know that she has this decision to make, what would I recommend that she does?” Can I look at women around her, and their examples, and their leadership, and what they’ve done? Can I learn from them? For me, a lot of what was creating tension in my life is how do I show up as a human being first, and take care of myself so I can love and take care of the other people in my life, and I had this career. Those were always at tension.
The thing I think about now in working with women advisors so often is that they have some of those same tensions that they hold. But there are so many different ways to run a successful practice while still showing up for yourself. That gives me a lot of hope for our industry. I actually think that women have really led in that lane of being a successful financial advisor doesn’t mean that I can’t be successful in other areas of my life.
Ryan Goulart:
A lot of what you’re sharing is ways in which you, as a coach and leader, help steward the gifts of the advisors, and direct reports, and coachees that you have through empowering them. They are the ones that effectively make these decisions, but you give them the insight and tools to be able to do that.
As someone who is considering making this journey for themselves, what would be some key takeaways that you might be able to share with them on where to start?
Elena Beckius:
The action component is the first step. One of the things that I would say is that we have this one precious life to live. There was a time, I think, when I believed I am just doing everything that I can do, and there’s no other way for me to do this. Taking action to say, “I’m willing to try some things, and I’m willing to do things differently,” is the first step. Is really just saying, “I have autonomy and agency in my life to do something different.” In my business as an advisor. In my role as a mom. In my role as friend and community member. “I actually don’t have to keep doing what I’ve always been doing.”That’s
That’s number one is that sometimes, we hold onto to limiting beliefs that say, “I’m in this role, it is what it is. I’m stressed out of my mind and no one else can understand this. And I’m on an island.” And that’s simply not true. We have the ability to make decisions differently than we have in the past that will lead us to a different place. Number one is take action.
Number two, don’t do it on an island. Most of us can actually just get up and start swimming, and get to a place where we can do it with other people. And that we can do it in community. That community of women that I was in was life-giving for me. Because I was like, “I’m not on an island, even though I told myself that so many times.” That, “No one else can understand what I’m dealing with right now.” As it turned out, they could, and they had different ways of dealing with it, and I learned from them, and they learned from me. It made me really a lot less lonely.
Then number three, I would say, is make decisions in alignment with who you know yourself to be and the values that you hold dear. Because when you make decisions in alignment with your values, you get the reward of being happier, period. When you make decisions not in alignment with your values because somebody is asking you to do something, or the role is telling you that this is how you have to show up, you may say yes just because you’re a helper. But it’s not in alignment with your values. It’s not bringing you closer to who you were created to be, and that doesn’t feel good. That is where you’re like, “Something isn’t right.”
The hard part about that is that, when you take a step back and you realize, “Wow, I’ve made all of these decisions and said yes to all these things just because somebody wanted me to because they knew I could do it. I got myself into this situation, and I can action my way out.” I can realize that, back to the first recommendation, which is take action, that I actually can do something about it. That’s super empowering. It is life-giving when you feel that weight of the world on your shoulders.
Ryan Goulart:
Awesome. Thank you for coming on.
As we wrap this episode, we’re committed to helping you make the ideal real. If you found this program helpful, share it and help someone else make their ideal real, too. Until next time. For think2perform, I’m Ryan Goulart. Take care.
