A powerful tool some financial advisors may be overlooking in their rush to talk with clients is silence, according to Mary Martin, financial advisor coach and author.

Being willing to be silent allows the advisor to be a different kind of listener and to be open to hearing what the client means, Martin said in an interview.

Martin calls her technique, which she teaches in an eight-week course that earns the graduate 7.5 CFP Board continuing education credits, “mindfulness.” She is about to publish her book, “Mindfulness for Financial Advisors,” which she said is “lovingly subtitled “Humans Being Financial Advisors.” Martin explained that her work is not about behavioral finance because that niche is about the investor, and her work is aimed directly at advisors.

“Mindfulness is about the advisor’s skills and what he or she is capable of bring to the table,” she said. Martin, who is located in Jupiter, Fla., started teaching the course in 2019 and 191 people have graduated, with some people taking the classes multiple times.

Mindfulness requires the advisor to discover his or her assumptions and to actively listen to the client. Being silent is part of that strategy and is practiced during the course she teaches. It also requires advisors to look at themselves to judge their own state of well-being.

“Before I started this, I was told not to do it—people said advisors would not want to go through these exercises,” Martin said. She acknowledges that the approach is not for everyone. “But getting in tune with your own stress levels and your own emotions makes you approach situations differently. The advisors who do this experience their practices differently.

“My book and course are about advisors leading and leveraging with what makes them human. They learn grounding skills and practices to increase their cognitive flexibility, their emotional flexibility and their tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and change. These are skills of ‘being,’ as opposed to skills of ‘doing.’

The course is based on science and research and follows a path similar to the study of interpersonal neurobiology. That subject was given the top paper award by the Financial Planning Association in 2020.

“Mindfulness is a practice that cultivates the cognitive and emotional flexibility we need to meet whatever arises in and around us, without getting dysregulated. The powerful byproduct of the practice is that you meet your own humanity, which is like a bridge to the humanity of others,” Martin said in an email.

“It makes it easy and natural to be in a state of compassionate care for others once you've met yourself. This isn't talked about enough because people are (taught to) train your brain for peak performance. But your ability to authentically and easefully connect with others—especially those who are very different from you—comes from having done the work of connecting with yourself,” she said.

“Our nervous systems regulate how we react to others and if advisors can regulate their own nervous systems they can change the way they approach situations,” she added. Martin said she helps advisors know more about themselves, and “once you know about yourself, you can learn more about the people around you, including clients. That is the bonus that comes out of this training.”

During the course, Martin leads the students through exercises that cultivate awareness about themselves. Advisors learn if they make assumptions, if they are closed to certain ideas, and if they should respond differently to situations. The course takes work and requires vulnerability, she said.

“Advisors are certain about their technical skills but they are not certain about their awareness skills,” she said. Advisors should think of themselves as being witnesses to what the client is going through. Clients who work with these self-aware advisors say they end up talking about topics they never planned to broach, she added.

Martin is quick to explain that she is not telling advisors how to sell a product or how to get more wallet share from their clients. The course requires a guide, or teacher, and is better practiced in a group setting, which the classes provide, she said. The fee is $350 for the eight-week course and additional information can be found at www.marymartinphd.com.