When I say that people need to be well-resourced, your support and your relationship with your clients is crucial. But as important is their confidence in their own competence. Our confidence in our capacity to move forward and overcome obstacles comes from demonstrating to ourselves that we can inch forward—not that we have a great financial advisor who takes care of everything.
Now, this is true regardless of someone’s relationship to their event. Some people understand their place in their transition—what stage they’re in and how that affects their perceptions and relationships—and they’re engaged and ready to do what needs to be done. We call that Transition Flow, and the particular trait would be Clarity. Even when a client is in Flow, there is still plenty they can do to add to their own sense of confidence and resilience. We like to use these opportunities to delve deeply into values and the why of our decisions.
We have discovered that transitions require a set of skills that have a different goal than traditional financial planning has. They are truly client-centered. The client’s pace, the client’s capacity to move forward, the client’s degree of certainty, and the client’s need to regroup are what drive the work. Essentially, it is the client’s relationship to their major life event and even their relationship to the idea of change, that dictate how their story unfolds. It’s so meta!
I have no doubt that financial planners will continue to search for ways to better serve their clients. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over these nearly two decades, though, it’s that we need to look no further than the client in front of us for the guidance we seek. Transitions require a different type of financial planning, but probably more important is that they require a different idea of what financial planning is.
I’ll leave you with a distinction between doing and being. Much of the doing that is designed for the personal side is different, and at first that’s where most advisors spend their time. They are integrating the doing of the personal side with the doing of the technical side. But for some advisors, the myth of the primacy of doing appears, and the advisor realizes that the shift in doing was a catalyst toward a shift in being. That’s when truly transformational things happen for them and their clients. On those days, I couldn’t be more proud of my industry.
Susan Bradley, CFP, CeFT, is the founder of the Sudden Money Institute, and its training division, the Financial Transitionist Institute, www.financialtransitionist.com. She is speaking at Financial Advisor's Inside Retirement conference in Las Vegas on September 26.