When we feel helpless, we often want to act. Yet sometimes sitting with the discomfort is the best move we can make.

These are difficult skills to learn and they are not ones we will ever master. Our firm recently brought in two professors from Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education to lead a two-day staff retreat on mindfulness and compassion. Much of the work we did addressed simple awareness. Were we doing a good job of noticing what others were experiencing and then dealing with it rather than ignoring it? In client relationships, noticing and checking things out are the only way to help clients bring congruity between their actions and their values. I have thought of times where I have noticed things and let them pass, but who was I serving?

Our issue may not be that the playbook is going to change but that we are not operating from the right playbook in the first place. We can help our clients be both capitalists and poets, but in order to do so we may need to change our personal definition of feeling secure in client relationships—so that it means accepting the unexpected as it arises and moving toward it rather than from it. 


Ross Levin, CFP, is the founder and chief executive officer of Accredited Investors in Edina, Minn.

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