The Financial Foundation of Health and Readiness

Brendan Duebner

The human performance community often focuses on physical fitness at the expense of other domains. Recent holistic approaches have improved the ways we address other domains, especially nutrition, mental health, and spiritual fitness. A weak area in many of these programs is financial fitness, and Life Skills for Soldiers is working to fix that.

Financial fitness is a dedicated domain in the DoD's Total Force Fitness model, but it's often treated as separate from the "performance" focused domains.

Our guest on this week's episode is Brendan Duebner, a former artillery officer who served at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and deployed to the Middle East. He served as a headquarters and HIMARS platoon leader and as a liaison officer to the Kuwaiti Artillery forces.

During his last year in the Army he started Life Skills for Soldiers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to improve service members lives through life skills education. Through this organization he has led a team of over 25 and raised over $150,000 including donations from companies like Nike and Google.

After leaving active duty he completed his MBA at Wharton where he focused on Entrepreneurship and Finance, and he still serves as a member of the Army Reserve's 75th Innovation Command.

In the spirit of measuring effectiveness, Brendan's team also publishes impact assessments from their pilot programs.