Page 21 - BusinessWest January 23, 2023

ing them as a group.”
Initially she thought maybe 20 or 25 of her colleagues
might be interested in being part of such a group. But to her surprise, 130 signed up for it, and most of them continue to join each week.
Light in the Darkness
For Jamrog, Four Wings has become one way to share and spread ideas and inspiration. Another is the book she recently wrote called Confetti Moments: 52 Vignettes to Spark Conver- sation, Connect Deeply & Celebrate the Ordinary, a title that really says it all.
The book, finished in August and launched in November, is now a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, popular with CEOs, team managers, and even families.
Confetti Moments is a collection of entries to a blog Jam- rog started near the start of the pandemic called Wednesday Wisdom, which was started to bring some light to some very dark times. To explain, she turned back to when the world shut down.
“I wanted to bring something positive to our clients in the wake of such uncertainty and depressing information every- where,” she explained. “So I started blogging weekly with uplifting stories that I thought would be a nice diversion for my clients.
“I did it every week for two years during COVID, and I came to find out that thousands and thousands of people were reading it and forwarding it to their entire companies or their departments,” she went on. “I heard from people who said, ‘my boss sends me this every Wednesday, and I love your sto- ries.’ And the feedback from my readers was ‘I wish you could package all these stories into a book — I would read the whole book again.’”
She did, and they are.
The 52 chapters in Confetti Moments take titles that include “Sometimes We Need a Wider Lens,” “You Can’t Take
It With You,” “Stay in Your Lane,” “Lower Your Expectations,” “What Our Scars Say,” and “When Eight Oars Are In Sync.” Collectively, they are designed to provoke thought and inspire positive change, said Jamrog, who is doing all this in addition to her day job as a financial consultant with MassMutual.
As she talked about both Four Wings and Confetti Moments, she said they were both born from a desire to broaden her impact as both a financial consultant and coach.
“There are opportunities to impact one client at a time — that’s a fine career, and many people do really well with that,” she told BusinessWest. “I got to a point, maybe five or six years ago, where I really wanted to have a bigger impact on my industry. I knew that the work my team and I do as finan- cial advisers is very, very good and very different than the aver- age advisor, and I wanted to teach that.”
This was the start of Four Wings, through which she now coaches roughly 100 financial advisors, who take part in monthly Zoom sessions. This consulting work started a few years before the pandemic, she noted, but it really picked up steam during the early months of the pandemic, when, as she noted earlier, advisors were isolated, their clients were look- ing for answers, and many were just searching for a guiding voice.
“It started with financial advisors feeling isolated, trying to help their clients financially, and being resourceful for them,” she said. “But they were realizing that many of their clients were just stuck; they couldn’t make financial decisions, or they [the advisors] didn’t know how to move them forward in the wake of such uncertainty and panic for most people.”
Three years later, the community of advisors she created, who pay a monthly subscription fee to take part, continue to meet, with participants from across the 413 and also across the country, all of whom are still helping clients cope with a volatile market, uncertainty, and growing fears about reces- sion and what might
come next.
“Advisors want to
Four Wings
“There are opportunities to impact one client at a time — that’s a fine career, and many people do really well with that.Igottoa point, maybe five or six years ago, where I really wanted to have a bigger impact on my industry.”
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Continued on page 23
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