Every client that walks into an advisor’s office is carrying an invisible financial script. One they didn’t write. One they can’t even see.
And what drives their worry, their fear, their questions about the portfolio? It’s never actually the portfolio.
There’s always something deeper.
Here’s the core tension I think about a lot, and honestly, this is one of those pieces that is hyper-personal to me because it’s something I live too.
We are analytical beings (at least those that I know in this industry). That’s how we’re trained. That’s how we think. And yet the value that clients place in their advisor tends to almost always be in the non-analytical parts of the relationship. The emotional connection. The depth. The feeling that somebody actually gets them.
Our skills as advisors are tilted heavily toward analytical, and less toward emotional intelligence.
And that imbalance matters more now than it ever has.
Because as AI takes over more and more of the analytical edge, the advisors who win are going to be the ones who can get to the depth of what’s actually driving a client’s fear and anxiety. Not the surface level stuff. The root. It’s something I talk about a lot, because it’s something I believe will matter a lot in the years to come.
And so here’s what I’ve come to believe: every client question, every client concern, every client action is not because of the news or the markets of today. It is always because of something that happened in the past. It’s always easier to point to something in the present. A great advisor, a FutureProof advisor, is the one who can get underneath that.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I have a four year old and a seven year old at home. And research shows that money beliefs are formed between ages four and six. That scares me a little, honestly. Because I’m sitting there right now, framing and forming their mental views of money in real time. And I’m not sure I’ve done all the right work despite being in the industry.
Think about what that means though. At four to six years old, you have no prior knowledge. You have nothing to compare anything to. So what you hinge on is what you see. That’s your whole world. If you see your family fighting about money, money becomes a combative thing in your mind. And from there, one of two things usually happens. Either you carry that combativeness with you, or you overcorrect completely to one of the extremes. Either you become dismissive of money entirely, or you become hypersensitive, chasing it because somewhere inside you’ve decided that the more you have, the less combative things get.
Every client who walks in our doors as advisors has built those preconceived views before they ever met us. Before we ever showed them a financial plan or a portfolio.
There’s another concept worth knowing which is called emotional tagging. Where money comes from carries emotional tags.
Clients who come into money through a life insurance payout, or a divorce settlement, or a wrongful death lawsuit, they almost never spend that money on anything that feels enjoyable. No luxury vacation. No big purchase they’ve been thinking about. They push it toward conservative, low-yield vehicles. They try to create distance from the money. Because spending it on something good feels wrong, and it doesn’t replace the person or the pain behind it.
So think about what that means for us as their advisor. If we go in and recommend getting that money into a high-growth portfolio, or we suggest they take a trip, we are misaligned with them at a fundamental level. And they probably won’t tell you that directly. They’ll just be uncomfortable. They’ll call more. They’ll second-guess everything.
But if we understand the emotional tag on that money, we can meet them where they actually are.
I think about this story I came across in the research. A couple that inherited five million dollars. They’d been frugal their whole lives, careful, intentional. And when the inheritance came, instead of feeling relieved or grateful, they became depressed. They kept asking themselves, what is wrong with us?
Nothing was wrong with them. The money had been unconsciously framed as unearned. As something they didn’t deserve. And the advisor had to reframe the whole thing. Not around the financial plan. Around legacy. Around the idea that this wasn’t an unearned windfall. It was a final expression of love. The person who passed away was still finding a way to care for them and protect them, even now. That reframe changed everything.
That is not therapy. That is understanding humans. And understanding humans is what allows us to do our job better.
A few years ago I had a couple come in who had built up this number in their head. Ten million dollars. That was their number. The finish line. The thing that, in their mind, meant they had made it. They were disciplined, they were patient, and then a major liquidity event pushed them over it, not an inheritance, but an earned liquidity event. I remember when they came into the office. I was excited for them. I said, you’re there, congratulations.
And one of the spouses looked at me and said, thank you. But I still don’t feel great. I still feel a little empty.
That moment stuck with me. Because everybody on the journey to a number is convinced the number is going to change everything. And I get it, I really do, because I’ve felt it too.
When I passed the CFA exam, I had built that moment up in my head into something enormous. The letter came. I read it. I felt good, showed it to my brother and my dad. And you know what happened about ten minutes later? I was on the phone with a client. Life just continued.
And I had to sit with that. Because why had I made it into such a thing? The honest answer is that I struggle with imposter syndrome. I struggle with the desire to feel accepted and validated. And I thought that credential was going to give me that feeling. It didn’t. The world continued right on.
That’s how money works too. When you get to the number, you still have to wake up and do the same things. Your house still needs care. Your kids still need you. Your circle of friends hasn’t had that same liquidity event, so your world doesn’t change the way you imagined. And if you don’t have a deeper purpose going in, you are going to feel empty even when you’ve hit every number you set.
That is what we are really helping people navigate.
The obvious pushback here is one that I feel too: I am not a therapist.
I know. I’m not suggesting you to be one. But here’s the reality. A lot of what we do every single day is, well, it’s kind of therapeutic. We walk clients back from the edge. We help them understand why their fears are unwarranted. We help them give themselves permission to spend money they’ve earned. We help them get over concerns and find some peace. That’s not so far from what a therapist does, even if we’re doing it through the lens of financial planning.
What I’m suggesting isn’t that you sit people on a couch and ask them to process their childhood. It’s that you start gathering puzzle pieces. Every client conversation, if you’re paying attention, gives you one or two pieces of who this person really is. Their earliest money memory. The way their family talked, or didn’t talk, about money. The language they use when they’re anxious. Over time, you build a picture. The edges first, then the corners, and eventually the inside starts to fill in. And the clearer that picture gets, the more valuable you become to them. Because they feel understood. And when they feel understood, they open up more, and you get more pieces.
Pay attention to the language.
When a client uses words like always or never, those are signals. Absolute language like that is rigid. And rigidity in money thinking always comes from something in their past. Those words are invitations. What led you to believe it’s always that way? What made you feel like it could never work? You don’t have to make it heavy. You just have to be curious. And if you bring genuine curiosity to every client story, you will never stop learning and you will never stop getting better at this job.
Start weaving in some narrative questions. Not all at once, not as a checklist, but as the conversation opens up naturally. What is your earliest memory involving money? How did your family earn their money? What do you remember about how your parents related to it? Those questions open doors that a financial plan alone never will.
We can’t control the markets.
We can’t control the headlines.
We can’t control how our clients emotionally respond to volatility in the short term.
But we can control the depth of the relationship. We can control how well we understand the person sitting across from us. And in a world where AI is getting remarkably good at the analytical side of this work, that depth is no longer just a differentiator. It’s the thing.
The best tool you have to help your clients navigate an uncertain future is a genuine understanding of what shaped them in their past. Their fears are not about the market chart on their screen. Their hesitation is not about the interest rate. It goes back further than that.
Every client is telling themselves a story about money. Most of them don’t know it. The ones who are lucky enough to have an advisor who can help them see that story, understand it, and sometimes gently rewrite it, those clients don’t leave. They don’t chase the competitor with lower fees. They stay. Because what you’re giving them isn’t a portfolio. It’s clarity.
And that is something no AI model is going to give them.