Blue Chip Issue 81

COACHING
Helping you take your
business further
Financial 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 essence of coaching
As financial planning specialists, we take a very different approach
to dealing with our clients 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 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, facilitating and demonstrating empathy, good listening and
questioning skills, emotional intelligence and building rapport
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