Blue Chip Issue 81

COACHING Helping you

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 82 www.bluechipdigital.co.za

COACHING 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 selfaware 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 planning proposition. We have made our advice framework available as part of the value proposition we offer to financial planners. This proposition is successfully in use by accredited financial planners. The concepts developed are based on robust, tested and proven international best practice standards that are continually reviewed to stay current and relevant. We enable planners to overlay the advice framework with the “softer skills” of coaching that will automatically assist them in engaging with clients on a much deeper level. This means that planners will be able to differentiate themselves effectively as part of the value they offer to their clients. Our coaching programmes At Old Mutual Wealth, our focus is to help you capitalise on opportunities and, ultimately, build a profitable practice that is sustainable over the long term. We offer courses, modules and workshops designed to incorporate coaching methodologies and best practices that help to develop and enhance your client relationships. Our team of qualified financial planning coaches is professionalising the industry by assisting planners with their client conversations and processes, and by supporting them in delivering a unique client experience. The coaching specialists at Old Mutual Wealth believe that coach-led financial planning is a life-changing philosophy that generates passion for possibility, rather than living a life of fear or limitation. Their approach to lifestyle financial planning is to champion positive futures every day. They coach, mentor, train and inspire financial planners to leverage the philosophy of integrated wealth planning and to give clarity to clients about their lives and how their finances fit into them. The guiding principles of the coaching team are to understand, disrupt and inspire with every opportunity. By engaging with you to develop client conversations, models, processes and services that are unique to you and your role as an advisor/planner, our coaching specialists are able to present a client experience that is authentic to you, and profitable and attractive for your business. Partnering with an Old Mutual financial planning coach will: • Enable you to recognise your clients’ individuality by focusing on realising their goals and aspirations over time. • Allow you to coach, educate and empower your clients to make informed decisions and keep track of their plans. • Ensure that you are delivering on promises by providing a plan and solutions that are directly aligned with your clients’ goals, as you manage expectations and deliver reliable outcomes. Contact us to find out more about coaching and how it can benefit you and your clients by emailing us at futurefit@omwealth.co.za www.bluechipdigital.co.za 83