• Don’t rush them. Patience doesn’t seem to be a skill that is valued in financial advisory. But no one benefits from keeping things moving for the sake of it. Sitting with what is, and establishing a course of inquiry around what is, is a far wiser strategy when a client is in passage.
• If necessary, encourage a shift in their mindset about their event or about their finances, or even about the big decisions they are faced with. I’m sure if you never heard about mindset again it would be too soon. But it’s real. Our mindset—our beliefs—matter. Mindset interventions have been shown to affect how we experience situations we are in, and major life events are no different. Think about it: Things that occur are just phenomena. They’re neutral. And what we do with things that occur is perfectly human—we instantly assign a value to them. We put them in a category. Negative. Positive. Devastating. We develop a whole world of beliefs about them—an entire narrative. And as mindset research shows, just as quickly, our body responds in kind. And our actions follow—with consequences that are sometimes less-than desirable and entirely avoidable.
There are some events that are nearly impossible to think about as anything but traumatic and tragic from the start, no matter who you are and what your vantage point is. But most events are only dealt with as if they are negative or problematic because we have decided they are. Growth opportunities are everywhere for those who are curious and open, and I hope you think that part of your job is to foster the growth and transformation and are hallmarks of transitions.
• Guide them through their self-exploration. Questions about core values and identity can go unnoticed by the untrained eye. When your client keeps changing his mind about what he wants to do when he grows up—three years into his retirement—that’s probably because he has lost touch with his core values or he is grappling with who he wants to be during his retirement. After all, when you’re planning for retirement, everything is theoretical. But once you are inhabiting the space of retirement, what you thought you would feel like or think or desire could very well be different from your reality.
Finally, there is always the possibility that the client feels like their inner resources are simply insufficient to meet their perceived demands of the situation. The continuous efforts to adapt to change over months and years can be exhausting. This feeling of depletion that sets in during passage is what we call transition fatigue. As you can imagine, such a state can be debilitating and affect decision-making and relationships, to say nothing of mental, physical and emotional well-being. When your client, four years after the death of her husband who had been ill for years, doesn’t return your phone calls and suddenly (in your mind) hires a new advisor, that could be because you didn’t notice what she was going through and obviously had no protocol for meeting her needs.