Yale happiness scientist: How wealth advisors can lead with emotions

December 13, 2022 5:54 PM

"As a stress researcher colleague of mine says, we're only supposed to feel stress five minutes in our life: right before we die." Emma Seppälä, happiness researcher and faculty director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program, speaks at the Investments & Wealth Institute conference in New York City.

The roomful of financial advisors fell silent in rapt attention as they closed their eyes and listened for the rhythm of their brain's inner traffic.

"If your thoughts were like cars, what's the level of traffic right at this moment?" asked Emma Seppälä, a scientist specializing in happiness research who lectures at the Yale School of Management.

"Is it a highway? Country road? Somewhere in between? Times Square?"

As she spoke at the Investments & Wealth Institute conference on Nov. 30, Times Square crowds honked horns and jostled in the streets below. But nobody heard them, in the carpeted room high up in the New York Marriott Marquis on Broadway.

Outside the conference room doors, Yale School of Management — which creates educational materials and a course for the Certified Investment Management Advisor certification — had a table with promotional brochures about their programming. The school's students are all presumably tearing down a multi-lane highway and Seppälä, who authored a somewhat oxymoronically titled book called "The Happiness Track," wants to help them slow down before they crash.

Seppälä asked for a show of hands for each level of mental traffic; advisors were going at a mix of different speeds in the room.

"If you have a highway going on, and you go into a meeting with someone, they can tell. And they don't feel like you're with them," she said.

This can cost harried financial advisors business in all kinds of ways, Seppälä said, from failing to connect as leaders with their teams to missing an important client opportunity. It can also lead to lasting damage in their personal lives.

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Financial advisors can burn out from constantly serving high-need clients while trying to satisfy the requirements and wants of their life outside of work. A study published in June in Financial Planning Review found that women financial planners are more likely to experience burnout at work, especially at larger firms, and certified financial planners across the board report struggles with work-life balance. But with the unending flow of distracting or alarming information in the news, meetings, texts from spouses and client emails, advisors can feel a constant assault of emotions demanding their energy, and impairing their focus.

As humans we weren't made to operate this way, though. "As a stress researcher colleague of mine says, we're only supposed to feel stress five minutes in our life: right before we die," Seppälä said, to general laughter.

She referenced research on African savanna animals by her colleague, Bob Sapolsky, in his book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" which showed that the body's stress response only activates in the wild when an animal needs to fight or flee. "When we are chronically stressed, our immune system goes down. We are less able to attend, to pay attention and to remember things, which is burnout."

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Many Americans appeared to become more aware of this dynamic during the pandemic. Still, Seppälä said, stressful emotions are expected to be compartmentalized and often left unaddressed because they're socially inconvenient — treated like shoes to be taken off, she said. That creates a vicious cycle.

"You're stressed, you go home with the people you love the most, and then they pay the price for your stress," Seppälä said.

"A lot of modern diseases like cancer, diabetes — at the root, the cause is inflammation. Stress leads to inflammation. And mental health obviously is really impacted… Emotions matter. We can't take them off."

In the rest of her speech onstage, Seppälä gave several simple tips for financial advisors to benefit, personally and professionally, from living in tune with their emotions at work. The talk also came as wealth management, industry-wide, increasingly recognizes how behavioral psychology applies to finance.

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Below are five takeaways that you can apply to your own practice.

Start with self-awareness

Calming yourself and acting in a way that draws people toward you, not away from you, starts with giving yourself permission to be self-aware, meaning observing your own mind, Seppälä said.

"Self-awareness is so key. It's the number-one skill that, when you have it, you can really maneuver through your day in a way that you can optimize for what your state of mind is."

Seppälä asked advisors to listen to their inner voice when they are about to enter a stressful situation and make plans to mitigate some of the anticipated stress. For example, if they are about to meet with a person "that pushes all [your] buttons," maybe put it off for half an hour and do something to shift their mental state in the meantime, so they feel more prepared.

Train yourself with life-saving breaths

Seppälä said the conventional wisdom is "change your thoughts, change your life." But it can go the other way around, and the body can lead the mind in getting to a calmer place — even something as simple as breathing the right way can help, Seppälä said.

"What researchers have found is that when you change the breathing according to the emotion, you can actually evoke the emotion. Actors know how to do this, they learn to breathe in the way that corresponds to emotion and evoke that emotion."

Studies with Yale and Harvard students experiencing stress, as well as research with veterans experiencing PTSD, she said, all showed that deep breathing interventions were more effective than other forms of stress mitigation such as mindfulness exercises and "emotional intelligence interventions."

Seppälä led advisors through an exercise in deep breathing: Take a deep slow breath in, counting for several seconds, hold, then exhale slowly counting several seconds.

"Just like when you go to a gym, you're building your muscles — you have that strength. When you're going out in the world using your breath, we can train your nervous system to be calmer. As such, it's more resilient, when you're faced with life stressors."

Breathing deeper can even be life-saving. Seppälä shared the story of a Marine Corps officer her husband knew who had been hit with shrapnel from a bomb in Afghanistan and instantly nearly lost his legs. The officer, whom she called "Jake," began to breathe as he had been taught, in a way that helped him call for help and tourniquet his own legs before falling unconscious — later he was told that, had he not done those things, he would have died.

"Jake's injuries were so severe, he's lost both his legs, but he's alive," Seppälä said. "He's in the U.S., he's working, he has a family. Because he was able to handle his emotion in the most excruciating of times, using his breath."

Take a shower, tap into genius

Financial advisors should cultivate idleness to maximize their creative potential, Seppälä said.

When someone is dealing with a problem, either personally or professionally, they tend to reach their "aha moment" while doing relaxed activities such as taking a walk, exercising, cooking or listening to music.

"Especially in the U.S., there's the sense that you always have to be productive, and that idleness is the devil's playground. And then you've got to just work, work, work all the time," said Seppälä, who is originally from Paris, France — where workers get two months of vacation every year and Catholic holidays, "plus half the year you're on strike," she joked.

American work culture, by contrast, "doesn't value what can happen when you take time off."

Seppälä urged advisors to take all of their vacation time and avoid checking their phones during that time off. "Whenever you're on your phone, that's when [you] might miss a focused, concentrated moment and you're missing out on the opportunity to tap into that creative genius."

She acknowledged that for their industry and line of work, though, this might be hard. "In your industry, are you allowed to do that or not?" she asked. "Do you have to sleep with your phone under your pillow?" The room laughed.

"You do? Well then spend a lot of time in the shower!" More laughter.

Seppälä said one of her friends who is a creativity researcher takes several showers a day just to tap into their "innovative potential."

Avoid saying "calm down"

Here's a simple tip Seppälä had for advisors who want to avoid dealing with an anxious colleague or family member: Do not, under any circumstances, tell them to "calm down."

She turned to a slide in the PowerPoint onstage: "NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF CALM DOWN HAS ANYONE CALMED DOWN BY BEING TOLD TO CALM DOWN."

Saying "calm down," whether to a colleague or to oneself, suppresses the emotions but doesn't neutralize them — or acknowledge them.

"When you're angry, heart rate increases, your stress response is activated, inflammation increases in your blood, your blood pressure increases, etc. It's already playing havoc on your body. And when you suppress the emotion, guess what? It intensifies all of those things. It's like you're taking a soda can and shaking it up."

This is because when the stress response is triggered in the body, the brain loses its prefrontal regulation, or ability to think clearly, Seppälä said.

What Seppälä recommends instead is "reappraisal," or acknowledging and addressing the matter in a constructive way, which reassures the brain and body that the threat is actually under control. This can mean trying to find the silver lining in the situation, putting the source of threatening emotions into perspective, or using the situation as an opportunity for further growth.

For example, she said, someone could turn the hurt over being passed over for promotion into motivation to fire up their resume and seek a better job elsewhere.

Invest in plants, invest in yourself

Closeness to plants can be immensely beneficial for mental health and productivity, Seppälä said. "Exposure to nature in any form, lowers your anxiety and depression, stress, impulsivity; boosts mood, well-being, relaxation, attention, memory, creativity and innovation."

Advisors don't have to live close to a national park, or even a smaller park, she said, to experience this.

"If you're in an urban area, even just having plants in your office has an impact. And if you don't even have windows, having a screensaver with nature on it, or a poster on your wall, has an impact. That's how profoundly wired we are to be connected to nature."

Having a better mood and more creativity isn't just a nice-to-have in this economy, though.

"CEOs across countries, across industries, the number-one thing they look for in incoming employees is creativity," Seppälä said. "Above integrity, above intelligence. Because if you don't innovate, there's no point — you can't beat the competition, right?"