Building Resilience as a Financial Adviser
15 min read
Financial planning is a technical profession, but it is also a deeply human one.
Clients come to financial advisers at important moments in their lives. Sometimes they are approaching retirement. Sometimes they are selling a business, going through divorce, receiving an inheritance, dealing with bereavement or trying to make sense of a future that feels uncertain. These are not just financial events. They are emotional events too.
That means the adviser’s role is bigger than simply analysing a problem and recommending a solution. Resilience matters. The adviser must help the client think clearly, feel understood and make good decisions.
My final POWER Webinar of a three-part series puts the spotlight on the adviser. Not the client. Not the plan. Not the product.
Because the way we show up has a significant impact on the quality of the client conversation.
The human dimension of financial planning
In parts one and two of this series, we looked at the human dimension of financial planning from the client’s perspective.
In From transactional to transformational: redefining the adviser–client relationship, I talked about the difference between advice that is mainly focused on products and transactions, and advice that is focused on the client’s wider experience of life.
A transactional relationship is often centred on solving a financial problem or implementing a product. That can be useful and necessary. But a transformational relationship goes deeper. It asks what the advice is really for. Is the client experiencing more peace of mind? Are they clearer? Are they living with greater confidence and wellbeing?
That is where the real value of advice is felt. The value is not only in the plan or the report. The value is in the client’s lived experience.
In Working with emotion: helping clients navigate emotionally charged moments, we looked at the emotional nature of life transitions. Retirement, divorce, bereavement, inheritance and business sale all have financial implications, but they also affect how people see themselves and feel about their future.
This third part of the conversation is about the other half of the relationship: the adviser.
How do we, as professional people, show up as the best version of ourselves?
“The health of the helper”
Many years ago, I came across a phrase from the psychologist Dr George Pransky. He talked about “the health of the helper”.
That phrase caught my attention.
In many helping professions, there is a lot of emphasis on the methodology, the process or the technique. The assumption is that the method is what creates the change. But George was pointing to something different. He was saying that the state of mind of the practitioner matters enormously.
That made me wonder whether the same thing is true in financial planning.
Does the adviser’s state of mind affect the client’s experience?
After working with many advisers over the years, it looks completely true to me.
The adviser’s presence, clarity and wellbeing are not small details. They shape the quality of the meeting. They shape how the client feels. They shape how well the adviser listens. They shape the quality of the questions asked. They shape whether the client feels rushed, judged, overwhelmed or settled.
Many advisers would say that what clients ultimately want is peace of mind. Clients may not always use those exact words but often that is what sits underneath the financial questions.
They do not want to keep worrying about the future. They do not want to keep ruminating on past decisions. They want to be able to live their lives with greater confidence and clarity.
But it is very difficult to bring out peace of mind in another person from a mind that does not know peace.
That does not mean we have to be calm all the time. That would be unrealistic. But it does mean that our own state of mind is part of the work.
Why resilience matters
We live and work in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Clients feel that. Advisers feel it too.
Markets move. Regulation changes. Businesses face pressure. Clients arrive with complex needs. Technology is changing the profession. The news cycle is often unsettling. Many advisers are outwardly functioning but inwardly carrying a lot of stress and pressure.
On paper, they may look successful, they may feel depleted.
That is not sustainable. It is not good for the adviser, and it is not good for the client.
Resilience is usually understood as the ability to recover from setbacks. The word has roots in the idea of something being bent out of shape and then returning to its original form. In human terms, resilience is the ability to come back to balance after difficulty, pressure or change.
For advisers, resilience is not about becoming tougher or learning to tolerate more pressure. It is about returning to clarity more quickly.
No one lives a setback-free life. No advice business operates in perfect conditions. The question is not whether pressure will arise. It will.
The more useful question is: how quickly can we return to a clear, present and responsive state of mind?
Watch my POWER Webinar here:
Resilient advisers, better outcomes: showing up calm, confident and focused
We live in the feeling of our thinking
One of the most helpful things I have learned is that we are not experiencing our circumstances directly. We are experiencing our thinking about our circumstances.
That may sound simple, but it has profound implications.
Most of us have been brought up to believe that our feelings are caused by what is happening outside us. A difficult client makes us stressed. A volatile market makes us anxious. A busy diary makes us overwhelmed. A bad day at the office makes us feel low.
But if we look more closely, our experience is being created through thought in the moment.
We live in the feeling of our thinking
If we have anxious thinking, we feel anxious. If we have angry thinking, we feel angry. If we have clear thinking, we feel clear. Thought and feeling are inseparable.
This matters because if we believe our state of mind is being caused by circumstances, then life becomes a coping exercise. We have to manage everything outside us in order to feel okay inside. That is exhausting, because we cannot control everything outside us.
But when we begin to see that our experience is coming through thought, something changes. We stop taking every thought so personally and seriously. We begin to see that thought is transient. It moves. It changes. It passes through.
A young child is a good example of this. A child can be deeply upset one minute and laughing the next. Their thinking moves through them. They do not usually analyse it, judge it and keep it alive in the way adults often do.
As adults, we think about our thinking. We worry. We replay. We imagine difficult futures. We treat passing thought as if it is solid reality.
That is often what brings us down.
The mind has its own immune system
We all understand the idea of a physical immune system. If you cut your finger, the body immediately begins to repair it. If pathogens enter the body, the immune system responds. It is precise, intelligent and powerful.
It also looks to me as if we have a mental immune system.
The mind naturally returns to clarity when we do not interfere with it too much. Peace of mind is not something we have to manufacture from the outside. It is closer to our default setting than we often realise.
The problem is that we can obscure it with too much thinking.
When we are caught up in our thinking, we may feel stressed, anxious or overwhelmed. But that does not mean clarity has disappeared. It is still there underneath the noise.
This is important for advisers because clients also have this capacity. A client may arrive in a meeting with a busy or fearful mind. They may be anxious about retirement, worried about markets or unsettled by a life event. The adviser’s job is not to force them into calmness. It is to create the conditions in which their own thinking can settle.
That is one of the most valuable things an adviser can do.
Why presence matters more than technique
We live in a technique-heavy world. Advisers often want a script, a model, a better question or a new process.
There is nothing wrong with good questions or good processes. They can be very useful. But they are not the whole answer.
The same question can land very differently depending on the state of mind of the person asking it. A question asked from genuine curiosity has a different quality from a question asked because it appears on a checklist.
The same is true of listening.
The highest form of listening is listening with nothing on your mind. That means listening without preparing your next answer, without judging, without rushing and without imposing your own assumptions on the client.
To be listened to in that way is powerful.
It helps the client settle. It helps them feel safe enough to say what is really going on. It also helps the adviser hear more than the surface facts.
This is closely connected to The Client Experience. The quality of an advice relationship is not determined only by technical work. It is also shaped by how the client experiences the conversation, the process and the adviser.
Every client meeting has a feeling
If the adviser is tense and the client is tense, the meeting is unlikely to feel productive, even if the agenda is covered. If the adviser is calm, present and curious, the client is more likely to settle. If both adviser and client are in a clearer state of mind, the quality of the conversation can be very high.
The content matters, of course. Advisers need to give accurate, appropriate and compliant advice.
But the feeling in the meeting is often what the client remembers.
Did they feel heard? Did they feel rushed? Did they feel judged? Did they feel clearer at the end than they did at the beginning?
A client who feels understood is more likely to engage. A client who feels calmer is more likely to think clearly. A client who thinks clearly is more likely to make wise decisions.
That is why the adviser’s resilience is not just a personal wellbeing issue. It is connected to the quality of advice and the client outcome.
Preparing for client conversations
Advisers often ask me if they should have a routine before client meetings. Should they take 15 minutes of quiet time? Should they do breathing exercises? Should they go for a walk?
My answer is that there is no single technique that works for everyone.
If going for a walk helps you clear your mind, go for a walk. If making a cup of coffee and sitting quietly helps, do that. If reading something inspiring helps, do that. If exercise helps, do that.
But do not turn it into a rigid formula.
The more useful direction is to learn to listen to your own inner wisdom. What do you need in that moment? What would help you come back to yourself?
There have been times when I have arrived at my office with a busy mind and realised that sitting at the desk was not the best thing to do. On one occasion, I drove to the coast, walked for an hour, listened to the birds and the waves, and returned with a much clearer mind.
That worked for me that day. It does not mean everyone should go for a coastal walk before a meeting. The point is not the activity. The point is learning to recognise what helps your mind settle.
First meetings can carry a lot of emotion
A client may have been thinking about speaking to an adviser for months or even years. They may be worried, embarrassed, uncertain or unsure what to expect. Money can be a daunting subject. So can the future.
One useful question before a meeting is, “What would make this a brilliant use of your time?”
That question starts the conversation before the meeting begins. It gives the client permission to say what matters. Some clients may send a short reply. Others may write a long explanation because they have had a lot on their mind.
When the meeting begins, I would still check in again. I might say, “Thank you for sharing that with me. It was really helpful. Before we begin, can I just check what would make our time together most useful for you today?”
That keeps the meeting alive and responsive. It also prevents the adviser from assuming that yesterday’s concern is still today’s priority.
The aim is to meet the person in front of you, not the version of them you have already made up in your mind.
Long-term clients also need fresh attention
It is easy to assume we know a client because we have worked with them for years. Annual reviews can become routine. The conversation can become familiar, and sometimes even a little stale.
But a year is a long time.
A client may arrive at the next meeting in a very different state of mind. Their family situation may have changed. Their health may have changed. Their confidence may have changed. Their relationship with money may have changed.
If we go into the meeting assuming we already know them, we may miss what is really happening.
A useful way to approach a review is to come in fresh. Be curious. Be open. Let the client show you where they are now.
That does not mean ignoring the history. It means not being trapped by it.
The adviser as trusted thinking partner
The future of financial planning is not just about being the expert with the answers.
Expertise matters. But increasingly, the adviser’s role is also to be a trusted thinking partner.
Clients do not only need information. They need help thinking clearly about their lives, their money and their decisions.
That is a different kind of value.
It requires technical competence, but it also requires presence, humility, curiosity and resilience. It requires the adviser to create a space where the client can slow down, reflect and make decisions from a clearer state of mind.
The client is also an expert. They are the expert on their own life. The adviser brings financial expertise, but the client brings lived experience, values, hopes, fears and context. Good financial planning happens when those two forms of expertise meet well.
Building resilience within advice firms
Resilience should not be left entirely to individual advisers. Advice firms also have a role to play.
If a business culture rewards constant busyness, back-to-back meetings and immediate responsiveness, advisers may find it harder to bring their best thinking to client conversations.
Firms can support resilience by creating more realistic meeting structures, allowing space between emotionally demanding conversations, encouraging reflection and making it acceptable to talk about pressure before it becomes burnout.
This is not just about adviser wellbeing; it is also a commercial issue.
Advisers who are calmer, clearer and more present are likely to have better conversations, build stronger relationships and create more trust. That can affect client retention, referrals, team culture and the overall quality of the advice process.
It is about understanding how the mind works, recognising when we are caught up in our thinking and returning to clarity more quickly.
For financial advisers, this matters because the adviser’s state of mind affects the client relationship. It affects listening, judgement, curiosity, trust and the quality of the meeting.
Clients often come to advisers because they want peace of mind. They want to feel clearer about the future. They want to make good decisions. They want to live well.
If we want to help clients experience that, we have to understand it in ourselves too.
The more resilient we are as advisers, the better placed we are to help clients think clearly, navigate uncertainty and create better outcomes.
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External links for more information
FCA: Delivering good outcomes for customers in vulnerable circumstances
A post for practitioners – collective knowledge from George and his colleagues
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