It's February, and love is in the air. Heart-shaped chocolates fill the aisles of grocery stores, rom-coms fill the queues of streaming channels and financial planners watch clients fall in love with their financial planning presentations and leave each meeting with beaming smiles and joy-filled hearts.
OK, perhaps that last point is wishful "fin-rom" thinking.
However, as a financial planner, I wholeheartedly believe that helping clients fall in love with their financial lives is a gift that isn't out of reach and one that's good to give all year round.
Recognizing positive emotions
Once many of us in financial planning began working directly with clients, we realized that in many cases psychology courses would have been more beneficial than much of our numbers-based curricula. Unfortunately, we typically encounter this truth in the most trying moments, such as market sell-offs, family loss, divorce and reliving past financial traumas. We find ways to counsel and guide clients through those moments, calm them down and help them relax. I think of this act as playing defense against negative emotions. Instead, what if we began to utilize these skills during positive times in our clients' lives? What if we learned to use these skills to play offense by utilizing positive emotions, such as love, care, joy and gratitude, to guide clients toward more fulfilling financial decisions?
Introducing 'heart coherence'
Researchers with the
Many advocates of heart coherence discuss it in correlation with meditation. Although countless studies exist that tout the stress-reducing benefits of meditation, our clients have not hired us to lead them through a guided meditation session. We must find other ways to introduce and engage positive emotions in our planning meetings.
Facilitating fulfillment
I've found it relatively simple now that I understand the basic principles of actively employing positive emotions. For example, imagine a client coming into your financial planning meeting overwhelmed and eager to discover how many more years they must report to their desk job. This scenario is a financial planner's bread-and-butter calculation; cue the "How Many Years Until Retirement" report! You run the report, deliver the news of, say, nine years, and the client leaves the meeting with relief via financial clarity. Perhaps the report even produces a shorter time period than they'd feared. If we were financial physicians, we'd say that the client's symptom was treated, but the root cause of their frustration with work remains.
What if the conversation went differently when the client explained their struggles with work? Instead, imagine you acknowledge their pain with their current job and continue asking about other areas of their life. Instead of resorting to problem-solving at the first opportunity, this gives the client more space to share. With some guidance, perhaps you uncover their love for the nonprofit work they've been doing on the weekends. When they share about the difference their work has been making their face beams with joy. In this scenario, we should pull that loving, centered energy back onto the subject of their daily vocation.
Instead of leaving your office with nothing but a nine-year tether to their daily grind, they leave your office with an additional financial planning projection that has them feeling engaged and optimistic. This plan might calculate a reduced salary and a longer work horizon in exchange for a full-time position with the nonprofit that fills their life with much more passion and fulfillment.
In theory, helping your clients fall in love with their finances may be as simple as helping them find the love that already exists in their life and helping it grow right along with their net worth.
