Fitness Podcast Features Brendan: Weighing In on Money, Markets & Mindset

What do a CrossFit gym owner and a financial advisor have in common? In April, both witnessed how quickly fear can take hold when markets dip.

Brendan joined Mike Collette, owner of Prototype Training Systems, on a podcast following Liberation Day to unpack how emotions—especially politically charged ones—shaped client responses. 

Find out:

• What a “normal” market pullback looks like

• How political beliefs can influence financial perception

• How reframing “unprecedented” market events can change investor confidence

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Podcast Episode 81: The Community Conversation with Brendan Sheehan

In this episode, Mike Collette (Founder of Prototype Training Systems) sits down with Brendan Sheehan, Owner of Waymark Wealth Management, to talk about navigating financial market volatility - and how our emotions can impact decision-making during uncertain times.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

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Transcript of Coffee With Waymark:

Hey, thanks for joining me on another episode of Coffee With Waymark. Today's episode is a little bit different. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to put a link to a podcast that I was invited to participate in back in early April. The podcast was run by a friend of mine who owns a CrossFit gym in Westborough, Massachusetts.

His name is Mike Collette. He owns the company Prototype Training Systems, and we talked at that time about the extreme emotions that people were going through right after Liberation Day and when the market dropped about 15%. I referenced in the podcast a number of slides over that timeframe, and I think, you know, two things:

One - I think it's good to just listen to the podcast and listen to what we were actually talking about real time while people were going through some really extreme emotions. And then two, just kind of a little debrief on that. You know, who knows if the volatility is done, but at least today when I'm recording this, which is middle of May, things have definitely calmed down, volatility has definitely calmed down. So I'm gonna give you a little bit of a recap of what he and I talked about at the beginning of the podcast. And if you want to listen to the rest of it, you can kind of get an impression on what they as a gym were going through during the same time that we as a wealth management firm were going through on the wealth side of things.

So let's start here. I'm gonna start sharing a slide. So this slide here is that stock market pullbacks of five to 10% are common, and even the bigger ones (10 to 20%) the average is about one per year. Now again, in early April we saw about 15%, which is kind of normal. So why were people so upset? I had some pretty extreme reactions to this where clients were calling me and really looking for a lifeline. They were very panicked and very upset about everything that was going on, and it was very curious to me because the economy is still in pretty good shape, and while the market took a 15% plunge in a very short period of time, people had very extreme emotions, even though what's on the screen, I think logically, they understood.

And again, I've referenced this in the podcast, I think it's this chart right here. And what this is pretty much saying is that your perception of how the economy is doing is very much influenced by your political affiliation. Again, no big surprise if you're a Republican and a Republican is in the presidency, you will think the economy's doing great, and on the flip side, if you're a Democrat and a Democrats in office, you're gonna think that the economy is doing pretty well.

But when the opposite is true - Republican's in office, but you're a Democratic voter, a lot of times you'll think that the economy's not doing so well. And similarly, if a Democrat is in the presidency and you're a Republican, you might not think that the economy's doing all that well.

And I think this is really what happened. And I touch upon this a lot in the podcast, where the people that were calling who were panicked, invariably, were the liberal and democratic clients. My clients who are Republican and a little bit more conservative leaning, thought this was pretty much what I went back to over here - normal, no big deal. And you know, frankly, you know, the response that I got was that Trump's got this under control and this is part of the plan.

But going back to my Democratic clients who were really, really panicked about this, I had to remind them, well, one of the things I kept hearing over and over again was, “This is unprecedented. We've never had this situation.” And again, I would try to reframe it and say, no, we really have. If you look at some of these things that are up on the screen here, these were unprecedented things. Obviously, September 11th, unprecedented. COVID, last time we had seen that was a hundred years ago with the Spanish flu. Hurricane Katrina. Bird flu, all the different things that have happened in the world up here on the screen were truly unprecedented, but as we all know, the market came back. And so I kept trying to have to reframe that for people. But again, emotions really took over. And you know, I always say behind me, I got two degrees, a financial planning degree and a psychology degree.

And in this one I really, really had to leverage the psychology of this, and it really boiled down to this chart here. When the market is way up here, people have happy feelings, euphoria, thrill, excitement, et cetera. But then when it starts coming down, they feel the anxiety, the denial, the fear, the desperation, and even despondency.

And it was very interesting in this specific case. In April, 2025, what happened was, my liberal clients were further down on that downward slope than my Republicans were. My Republicans were anxious. There was a little bit of denial in there, but certainly not in the capitulation and panic that I saw with the liberals and the more democratic clients.

So again, I urge you to listen to the podcast. You can see a little personality between Mike and myself. We are friends. And again, I think you'll see from his perspective what he was seeing was people were pretty much that being very draconian about their spending.

That this market event happened and all of a sudden they said, I need to quit my gym membership. And so we were both seeing that, just in different industries. People having very extreme responses to what was going on in the market. So again, I urge you to give it a listen.

Thanks again for joining me and remember to be well and do good.

Brendan is the Managing Director for Waymark Wealth Management. He has extensive experience in comprehensive wealth management. His focus includes retirement planning, behavioral finance, investment portfolio construction, education funding, insurance & risk management, taxes, charitable giving, and estate planning. Brendan has an ability to take clients' complex visions and distill them down to simple action plans, helping them move from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.

Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor. Member FINRA/SIPC.

The LPL Financial Registered Representatives associated with this site may only discuss and/or transact securities business with residents in specific states which are listed on our website at www.waymarkwealth.com

The opinions voiced in this video are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.