The Art of Helping Clients
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about the powerful opportunities we have as financial planners for our specific advice—and the manner in which we deliver it—to have a significant behavioral influence on the quality of our clients’ lives.
Going beyond the left-brain analytics of traditional financial planning to facilitate such an outcome is no easy task. To do so requires us to meet clients at the place of their past experiences, viewpoints, values, and, yes, biases. To expect them to see things as we do is to create a gap between us into which even the best financial planning science can fall, unimplemented.
Among other things, this means we must be in tune with the key aspects of our client’s history and relationship with money. We must advocate for those future scenarios that will most honor their values and are least likely to trigger the fears and self-sabotaging behaviors that can violate them. Both style and substance matter.
Clients’ past experiences create the “stories” they tell themselves that in turn become the prisms through which present events are framed—often in highly unhealthy ways. And the rigidity of this framing can lead to more stories about the future that can have the potential to violate their most precious values, a sure recipe for an unhealthy situation at many levels.
Fortunately, occasional moments present themselves in nearly every advisory relationship when this all comes together and breakthroughs can occur … if we are alert and have the skills to see such moments for what they are. In the words of Thaler and Sunstein1, such moments are ripe for a “nudge.”
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse (WealthCounsel) for bringing this to my attention.