#11: Why Success Feels Empty Without These 5 Forms of Capital

Is it possible to have success and still feel like something’s missing?

If you've ever hit a milestone and felt more empty than accomplished… this episode will strike a chord.

In this episode, host Eric Pfeiffer takes us deep into a transformational conversation about the 5 Capitals—a framework that redefines what real success looks like. Drawing from leadership coaching, personal development, and spiritual alignment, Eric unpacks why so many high-performers feel out of sync, even when everything on paper looks perfect.

 

What are the 5 Capitals?
They're not just financial. Eric explores five critical areas of life and leadership:

• Spiritual Capital: Your core values and sense of purpose

• Relational Capital: The quality of your connections

• Physical Capital: Your energy and health

• Intellectual Capital: Knowledge, wisdom, and applied learning

• Financial Capital: Your income, assets, and ability to create wealth
  
  

Most leaders focus almost entirely on financial capital—often at the expense of the others. But as Eric shares, true fulfillment comes from investing across all five, creating alignment between your actions and your identity.

 

📊 Here’s a stat to think about:
According to a 2023 report by Gallup, only 23% of employees worldwide are thriving in overall well-being, despite rising global income levels. The takeaway? More money doesn't mean more meaning.

🎯 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why burnout is often a symptom of capital imbalance

• How to self-assess your current investment in each capital

• What it means to lead from alignment, not exhaustion

• A mindset shift that reframes productivity and purpose
  
  

Whether you're an executive, entrepreneur, or emerging leader, this episode is a masterclass in redefining success from the inside out. If you're ready to stop sacrificing meaning for metrics, this conversation will equip you with a new lens and a better strategy.

 

👉 Ready to recalibrate your life and leadership?
Tune in now, subscribe to The Productivity Pendulum, and share this episode with someone who’s chasing success—but deserves fulfillment.

💬 Leave a review and tell us: Which capital are you neglecting most?

 

 

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Everything seemingly that they could want, or these huge leaders of huge organizations or pastors of big churches, right? They seemingly, from a cultural perspective, have reached the pinnacle. You know, but for, but somehow their life spins out and I think it's because they don't understand this tool and they have spent all of their time investing in success and finances and they have depleted these other areas that we're gonna look at.
Like they, they know everybody. It seems like they're a part of the who's who club. Yes. A lot of these actors have these amazing physiques and they've worked so hard to engineer their bodies to perfection. Yes. True. They seem to have a lot of knowledge about the world and.
Yep. You know, we have quarterly goals and products and services that we want to sell or to produce, and then we want to know, did we sell them? And how much money did we make?

eric (00:04):
When I'm speaking to leaders about their own, personal lives and they're sharing about the struggles, it's not because they're not financially, successful and stable, it's because they've not paid attention to the other important dynamics going on in their household.
And in our book coming out we reference all of those original works because we want to make sure we give credit where credit's due. This tool was born out of a former organization that I was a part of, and it was our attempt to give language and a framework for people to make sense of the fact that in our culture, we tend to primarily pay attention to one form of capital, which is financial capital.
Rich in one of these capitals or whether we feel deficient or depleted in one of these five capitals, there are actually five capitals that every single day we as human beings in every area of our life are are working with. So if we're only thinking about financial capital, we're selling ourselves short.
And so when you ask people, Hey, help me understand what makes you significant. Where do you der or draw your sense of significance from? What is your purpose? Most of us are operating from a mindset where we just kind of feel like one more human being on planet Earth. We're born, we die. And maybe we do, or maybe we don't make much of a difference.
Why are we on the earth? What are we fighting for? Are we fighting for something bigger than ourselves? Are we a part of something bigger than ourselves? So traditionally, people will derive significance and purpose from different forms of religion, spirituality, family tradition heritage from a sense of of nationality.
Why am I here and what am I fighting for? So that's vision, capital, the currency, a significant pur sign, significance Ooh, and purpose. Say that fast five times. Yeah. Significance. Significance of the second capital on the list is relational capital. This is measured in friends and family and not just how many people do you have in your contact list or on your speed dial.
So, for example, we worked with an incredible company, this executive team, that when we jumped into working with them, man, they were siloed, fractured, they were withholding information, they were all territorial. They did not wanna help each other out. Why? Because they had spent years probably not investing appropriately into the relational.
So everyone has 24 hours and seven days. Energy is about the energy that we have to bring to our days and to any situation.
Intellectual capital. Intellectual capital is measured through the currency of knowledge, information that we've accumulated and acquired through classic education, books, podcasts, YouTube videos, whatever. Mm-hmm. And know how. Knowledge and knowhow. So it's not just about the information we've accumulated but the skills that we've developed.
It's measured through the currency of cash and assets. So money in a bank account or the assets, things that we own or have ownership in that we could, if we wanted, liquidate back into cash, boats, cars, homes, bicycles snowboards. And the list goes on and on. Any possession that we have, some kind of ownership of it becomes an asset for us that is a currency that we can leverage, for example.
I said, yes, you tell me. How are these five capitals at work? He said, well, first of all, I have a really clear vision for the significance and purpose of my marriage. Mm-hmm. And therefore I wanna invest in that marriage. And so getting a cup of coffee for her in the morning communicates love and care and a sense of significance around, I said, great.
I know my pour over friends right now are going talk about pour overs. That's the best, whatever it is. We had to spend money at some point to acquire these tools so that we could leverage them. That's right. So in, in a very simple example of something we do in life, we are constantly leveraging, investing or growing in these different bank accounts.
I tell people all the time. If you're really, really sick, then again, you can't do anything with that money except maybe go find a doctor. Yeah. So we're constantly trading on these and what we wanna make sure is that we develop a very clear ROI of what a wealthy life looks like. And a wealthy life is where we are growing and investing all five of these capitals such that we are getting the return in the different areas of life that we desire.
The ROI that I'm seeking, it's no different than if we just break it back down into financial capital. If you wanna retire, what do you do? You get a financial advisor and they start helping you think through what are you making and how can you grow these accounts, financial accounts and what are you investing long term so that you are prepared for retirement or for your kids' college fund or for to buy that vacation home or to go on a vacation or, to get that new car, to make repairs, to do whatever.
Because more often than not in life, and people hate hearing me say this, but it's absolutely the truth. More often than not, we are getting out of life in the long run, what we are investing into it. We need a clear investment strategy through the lens of these five capitals. So before I jump into a few other things that, that our listeners need to hear, Don, I wanna just pause here and just hear what's kind of popping for you.
People come to a, a major point in their life where they need to make a relational withdrawal, but they have not invested in relationships. So when they look around and they need help, there's nobody there to help them.
That's right. Yeah. So we have the privilege of, and I'm not gonna name any names. We have the privilege of working with the owners of a professional sports organization here in the States. And what blew me away is when the, this owner the majority owner, he invited me to a meeting and this family is worth billions of dollars, which, that's all public information.
I wanna make sure that they know how to operate really well, that they have a really clear sense of where they're going, what they're trying to accomplish, how to partner together, how to leverage their time, energy, and resource to get what they're running after they need to, what do they need to grow in terms of what they understand, their knowledge base and these different, assets that the family owns and, and how to leverage the finances and it, without, even, without him even understanding or knowing this tool.
I just wanna encourage us, no matter what our current personal value may be when it comes to finances this is a much bigger conversation than just money. This is a conversation about how do we envision the life that we wanna fight for, and then how do we invest strategically toward that? All right, so let me jump into the next thing.
Do I feel like, man, that bank account is full, you know, nine or 10, or it's middle of the road and it, we're not sure what to think about that, or it's depleted. Because what we need to understand is if what currencies we have at our disposal to leverage, to grow the areas of our life that we want.
How do we value each of these capitals versus the other? So let me just start with this. All five capitals are valuable, but they are not equally. I. Valuable. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't know what to do with it, intellectual capital, then you're gonna lose it. People who've won the lotteries statistically are bankrupt within a few years.

(00:25):
And I can tell you Donna, I have worked with so many very, very rich, financially rich. People mm-hmm. Who are living lives of desperate loneliness, despair, and depression. Because they traded, they sacrifice the relationships of their life on the alter, trying to make more money or acquire more education.

dawn (00:26):
No, I, I'm just excited to get to this next part where we talk about the alignment.
Mm-hmm. The problem with that is, is that when we have these. Capitals misaligned we're not prioritizing or valuing them appropriately in relation to one another. We start making the wrong investments. We start trading less valuable capitals. For gr for, I mean, we start trading more valuable capitals for less valuable capital.
When we have the list in the right order, we are investing. Ooh, I like that. That's good. That's a very different way of looking at how we prioritize, order, make decisions. Things become much more clear and everything starts to work together in a much more symbiotic way than. The normal way that we do it, which just feels like we're depleting.
There are two things we need to think about when we think about our investment strategy. Number one, it is always in our best interest to trade the less valuable capitals for the more valuable capitals.
So I invest in my clients, not just intellectual capital, but I invest a lot of relational capital. I get to know my clients. We become friends. We spend a lot of time together processing deep and meaningful things across every area of life. And so we develop relationships. And guess what happens? Very often these clients who have, who are much richer than I am in financial capital, have a bunch of toys.
Mm-hmm. For financial capital that I couldn't afford. I can't afford a yacht or a lot of the toys that these folks have. But I get to trade the relational capital, which is more valuable for the financial capital. Right. I get to learn from my clients. That's intellectual capital. Things that I would never learn if I wasn't working with them and they didn't trust me.
They're looking for relational capital because leadership is a lonely endeavor and they want partnership in it, and they're always looking to grow their vision capital. They always want to develop a clear sense of who they are, what they're fighting for, and why they're fighting for it. So that's the first investment strategy.
You're also gonna have to invest time and energy, which is physical capital. The very thing you're trying to grow, you're gonna have to invest intellectual capital, you have to do some research. You're gonna have to go out and learn about what it is that you're wanting to increase in terms of your health and fitness.
The sooner we wake up to the fact that every interaction, every engagement in our life, from the moment we wake up all the way through our sleeping patterns is an investment, we are investing one of these five capitals, or multiple of these five capitals. The problem is we're not clear about the ROI. We want.
And so I'm curious when, let's say our listeners are waking up to this reality like, oh crap, I do not have an investment strategy for my life. What is the first step that you would tell them to start an A, a better investment strategy or to get. Vision capital at the top and order everything correctly, what's one thing that they can do?
Let me articulate what is the ROII want I. What do I want from my marriage in this season? What do I want from my relationship with my kid, my kids in this season? What do I want from my physical health in this season? What do I want from my sense of significance and purposes? What do I want in any of these areas?
Right. And then that usually begins to clue us into, we start to then become aware of the investment strategies that we're currently employing, usually subconsciously. And then we can ask the question, do I need to recalibrate any of these so that it better fits the direction in which I'm
Performance. So if today's episode helped you rethink what really matters in your life and leadership. We would love if you send it to somebody that could also benefit from this if a, a specific leader came to mind. And don't forget, in our show notes, we have a free course for you, the five shifts to become the leader that you wish you had.