Learn what it means to be present.
Get accustomed to sitting with the myriad uncertainties that are quite ordinary in the universe of transitions. Not every question can be answered when you want it to be. Or how you want it to be. You have to be okay with that. And you have to model being okay with that for your clients.
Change your mindset about what it means to be a financial advisor, and retire the notion that you necessarily know what’s best. The client is the expert on themselves, and will always show you how they are feeling (and if that’s at odds with what they say, believe what they do). You just have to learn how to listen to their various forms of messaging.
Cultivate compassion for yourself. Why? Because it improves your own well-being and broadens your capacity for others.
This journey involves a fair amount of unlearning of how we were all taught to be as financial advisors. But we now know that much of the style of leadership we thought was desirable, the skills we developed and the emphasis we prized simply doesn’t map onto clients-in-transition. And that’s because it doesn’t map onto clients-as-humans, with all of their inconsistencies of thought and emotion, and all of their preferences and values that we were never taught how to systematically access and incorporate into our work.
So here we are, as an industry, in a space that isn’t new for other, more mature fields. We are experiencing a crisis of identity and purpose similar to the one educators have been grappling with for decades. What should the role of the advisor be? I think that the highest use of our personal resources and time is to teach our clients healthier ways of being not only with their money, but also with pivotal moments in their lives.
Susan Bradley, CFP, CeFT, is the founder of the Sudden Money Institute, which began 17 years ago as a community of practice seeking to better serve their financial planning clients by developing process and tools for the personal side of money and for clients going through transitions. This think tank created the Certified Financial Transitionist (CeFT) designation, and a division for training and certification called the Financial Transitionist Institute. Bradley speaks frequently in the United States as well as internationally, and is the author of Sudden Money: Managing a Financial Windfall (Wiley 2000).