FINANCIAL PLANNING
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inancial planning requires you to have meaningful conversations with your clients to get to know them, and to understand their financial goals. Through personal interaction, you’ll be able to determine the investment strategy that’s right for them – and one that has the flexibility to change, just as clients’ needs change. Incorporating an approach that involves coaching will enable you to ask the right questions to help clients identify solutions that underpin their investment objectives.
“The guiding principles of the coaching team are to understand, disrupt and inspire with every opportunity”
The essence of coaching As financial planning specialists, we take a very different approach to dealing with our clients in order to influence their financial futures. At Old Mutual Wealth, we have a team of financial planning coaches that train financial planners to carry out coaching conversations with their clients. This helps planners to engage in a way that enables the client to clearly articulate the life they want to plan for, as well as to contemplate how their money can best support their plans. Planners who understand their role as financial coaches allow clients to independently consider financial planning questions without influencing them in a particular direction.
“Coaching moves into the realm of interpersonal and relationship-building capabilities” Coaching is about asking a correctly structured question to assist clients in finding their own solutions to the financial situations they are trying to solve. Questioning has its own benefits and should be considered a useful alternative to the advice or guidance of a mentor/consultant role. What is coaching? Coaching is not psychotherapy or counselling, as these focus on resolving deep psychological and emotional issues. Coaching is also distinct from mentorship. Financial planners often confuse mentoring with coaching, and this comes as no surprise, as most planners are comfortable to impart their technical skills in the form of knowledge, advice and teachings to their clients. Planners then recommend solutions and outcomes that are based on their own interpretation of the facts and figures that are collected, analysed and presented to clients. Coaching moves into the realm of interpersonal and relationship-building capabilities. Here,
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facilitating and demonstrating empathy, good listening skills, good questioning skills, emotional intelligence and building rapport with clients are key. Quite simply: Coaching is a conversation. It is a conversation that has an impact on the individual and it engages with the client directly. It helps clients to think through situations, gain clarity and insights around these situations, and to ultimately move forward to achieve a specific outcome or goal. Coaching is, therefore, the best method of taking a client on a journey from where they are now to where they want to be. The coach is merely the facilitator, the guide, the custodian, the steward and often the partner of the client who is visually guided on this journey. Good coaches make clients the drivers, allowing them to navigate a clear path to reaching their ultimate destinations. Why coaching? When it comes to talking about money, we often feel strong emotions, even stress. When we feel stress, our limbic system takes over and we are unable to think rationally. This can happen to all of us, no
matter how self-aware we are. We ask ourselves, “Should I go offshore? Should I save more money? Or should I cash in my pension fund?” All too often these questions come from things we’ve read or maybe heard other people talking about. A planner’s role is to help clients through this; to hold up a mirror so that clients observe what’s really happening. By asking questions that make sense in the moment, clients strip out the emotion and talk to the facts rather than assumptions. In short, coaching helps to bring clients back to a place where they can make good decisions and manage their behaviour around money. Coaching as part of the advice framework At Old Mutual Wealth, we have entrenched coaching into the advice process, including the tools and solutions that planners deliver to their clients. We have developed a client engagement process that makes up part of the advice-led integrated wealth
