#51 Dr. Moira Somers – Transcript

Louis van der Merwe
Welcome to another episode of Financial Planners, South Africa. I’ve been looking forward to recording this episode with Dr. Moira Somers. Moira, it’s been almost three years since your visit to South Africa. And I can remember being in that small work group where you shared with us the work that you do. And I think I just read advice that sticks like a month before that. And for me, that was that kind of tipping point of just exploring the human side of money that little bit deeper. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I look forward to our conversation.

Dr. Moira Somers
So pleasure, thank you, I wish I could be there in person.

Louis van der Merwe
It was a wonderful community. And so on that day, I remember you talking us through what we can do to help deliver advice better and get clients to actually move to actually being in a point where they can receive advice, your book, that little booklet, it’s still on my desk, I use it almost every day, sharing the that pie that eats up your energy. And so for our listeners, can you maybe delve a little bit into how you got to writing that book, what was that prompt of, hey, this is something I need to write?

Dr. Moira Somers
Well, I am a neuro psychologist by training. And so much of my career has been spent with people who either have developed neurological diseases or significant health problems, and they find that they are knackered well, before the end of the day, they just don’t have, they just don’t have the energy mentally or physically to get to the end of the day. And so I started drawing this little pie that represented how life kind of uses up our mental energy over the course of the day. And what to do when when you’re not able to replenish and that got requested so often, you know, people would take it home. And that was like my precious, because it was it was a way of figuring out, am I allocating my mental energy in a way that really is in alignment with how I want things to go. I did my doctoral dissertation on procrastination. And one of the things that has always remained with me, Louis is this, this idea that sometimes we are using up mental energy, the way some of those instant on chargers that are in our office use up the use of hydro use up electrical energy, it’s just they’re always on in the background, they’re always drawing off. And when that’s happening at the mental level, it’s like it’s using up some of the cream. And what we get left is that icky blue skim stuff that really doesn’t allow us to do the best of of thinking and doing. So that was where that came from.

Louis van der Merwe
There’s been a bit of a shift to this kind of advisors as the role of thinking partners and helping clients, you know, have a better quality thoughts and I guess better, better decisions, facilitated through deeper questions. Do you think we’re moving too far away from our role as financial planners?

Dr. Moira Somers
Gosh, I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the profession. But from what I can see, I don’t think so I think there’s still a long way to go. And when I when I speak to my own, like my own friendship network, my own family network, the work that I do with patients, because I’m still a practitioner, and with with some of my financial psychology clients, I’m still hearing that, for many people going to a financial advisor is like the equivalent of being put through an automatic carwash. Do you have those in South Africa, where you drive in the beginning, and these brushes come and the water sprays down? And you you know, you come out, you get shot out the other end? And you’re?

And you just had to like sit back and let let the process happen? Because it was almost like you weren’t even consulted? And so my, my answer would appear to be that. No, I don’t think that professions swung too far yet. How do you go too far? On listening? How do you go too far on finding out what it is that matters to people? It can feel a little. I think, as in any profession, all of us have technical things that we’re responsible for, that we’re ethically responsible for, and that we’ve trained yours to do. And there’s the personal stuff. And in many ways, if you don’t get the personal stuff, right, your technical expertise doesn’t matter. Unless you get to work with people when they’re unconscious. Right? That that’s okay. Maybe, but for the rest of us, we actually have to engage people’s hearts and minds. We have to understand the context in which our advice lands, like not only their mental energy, what do they have the bandwidth for, but also the social context and the financial context. And in so many other contexts, so that we can really tailor our advice, and listen to what they’re wanting from us.

Louis van der Merwe
And I think your title of your book that you know, giving advice that sticks actually someone getting someone to implement it, you can be the best advisor in the world. But if you’re providing advice, and someone’s not taking it and taking action from that, it means nothing.

Dr. Moira Somers
Well, and, you know, sometimes I regret the the title evenly, because there’s a kind of arrogant Senate or there there can be right for all of us that we think we’ve got the solution, and these darn people who just won’t implement it. And so we’ve got to get better at making them comply. And, and that wasn’t the tone of the book at all. And it’s, it’s really what do professionals do, and I’ve been a professor at a medical school for decades, and the same demand dynamic exists within medicine. What do professionals do that is wrong that gets in the way of, of even eager patients or eager clients actually being able to implement? It turns out that we do a lot of stuff wrong, which breaks my heart to say that because I really like to be right. But if we can, if we could at least stop doing the wrong things, we would already be way ahead of the game.

Louis van der Merwe
So it’s not just oh, if I can figure this out, then all my clients will always comply. But everybody come on.

Dr. Moira Somers
Yeah, that’s right.

Louis van der Merwe
We had Dr. Megan McCoy on an episode recently, recently, and she spoke about when clients come to financial planners, they can feel financially naked, like those first meetings and, and the anxiety. But I think at the same time, financial planners can suffer from that anxiety. How have you seen that play out in the planners that you work?

Dr. Moira Somers
Oh, I love that question. Absolutely. First of all, many people when they’re nervous, have a tendency to talk, which is, which is problematic. Maybe if you’re a radio show host, that’s a great thing, like, let’s just keep doc fill up those times. But for most people, that’s a bit of a liability. And another thing that we often do, if we’re feeling nervous with a client, is that we want to kind of stretch our stuff, we want to show that they’re in good hands. And so we make some of those Cardinal errors I just alluded to, including not only talking too much, but talking too fancy, trying to prove that we’re smart. Or even if we’re not trying to prove we’re smart, we fail to catch ourselves using language that we ourselves wouldn’t have known until we’d gone through those four to 12 years of training that we went through. And so we end up kind of alienating people, even those who might be smiling and nodding and thinking inside, I have got not the faintest clue of what you’re talking about. So those are big things. Another thing that can get in the way of of advisors truly being able to be thinking partners, in addition to that talking too much so that you don’t know what it is you’re supposed to be partnering on is the advisors to professionals to have got this mental energy drain happening all the time needing to really think about stuff. And especially when you are committed to being an implementation partner, when you really want to help. You can feel like you’re like, oh, did that client do this? Did the client do this? Oh, I gotta remind them to do that. We’ve got a client, though, we’ve got a meeting coming up. And now I’m going to make sure that they’ve got everything in. And so a lot of a lot of advisors simply don’t have good systems in place for keeping track of that stuff, which, you know, has led me to join a FinTech company called nudge, which really is in addition to how it helps clients. It helps advisors by allowing you to not have that constant mental energy drain of, of having to be the Sheepdog in somebody’s life. So there there are different ways that it affects us. But there are also really good strategies for for keeping that manageable.

Louis van der Merwe
case, there’s quite a few hats that financial planners have to weigh. It’s now this kind of therapeutic process. It’s the planning but it’s then actually getting the client to take action and actually implement it. So with the transition as work, they talk about giving the work back Why is that so difficult?

Dr. Moira Somers
Oh, because it may mean that people reject our good advice. And that’s a bit of an ego spank. But do you mean or it can mean that we have to wait for readiness to happen or that we have to work several steps back where we have to refer out so that other people can do the work of getting folks. Right. It’s, it’s so it’s one of those things that I think new practitioners are often kind of stunned by, I remember even the difference between working in a hospital setting versus working in a, in my own private practice. And perhaps there’s a you know, the difference between working in a bank where there are certain protocols versus having your own financial planning practice, you recognize that, oh, that the conscious the context in which advice giving takes place, whatever that domain of advice is, really affects how it is you need to show up and what kind of follow up mechanisms you need to put in place and how you navigate to the right kind of clients for you and vice versa.

Louis van der Merwe
Mona, with this increase around kind of virtual consultations and virtual meetings be able to work remotely or working from anywhere, has there been unintended consequences of the relationships that advisors have formed?

Dr. Moira Somers
You know, in many ways, I think it has been really wonderful. And I’m, I’m actually hoping that advisors can lean into what it offers them, because the alternative is to kind of shake your fist at reality, which you can do, but reality is going to win every single time. For one thing, it does allow us to see the context in which our clients live, the the Zoom stuff, or the or the the virtual platform, we actually get to see people’s faces and see people interacting from a base in which they are much more comfortable. I think it leads to, it turns it on its head, people have had to put up with their own discomfort they’ve had to drive into often really busy city centres deal with the stress of parking, you know, go into your fancy schmancy office and feel like they’re on your territory. And this kind of doesn’t necessarily reverse it, but it but it helps to equalize it a little bit more. And so as an advisor, you can say I didn’t know you played guitar, or who’s on the wall, or who did that maintain more, it’s, it’s a lovely way of having people be just a little bit more at ease in their own skin. So that you can, you can begin to find out more about their lives. So I think that part’s Good. Are you concerned that something is lost in that loop?

Louis van der Merwe
I’m more surprised by how beneficial it could be. We have a client that has kept off her video for three sessions. And she said she felt more comfortable not having video on but she liked being able to see who’s in the office and we can still have a conversation. And that’s a client that will probably never put her foot in a financial planners office. And so we have the opportunity to now help and work through that process. There is a part of this reminds me of the old days of financial planners going to their clients in the evening sitting around the coffee table, or the dinner table talking about finance. And in South Africa, people have built up a resistance against that they are so afraid of being sold an additional financial product because that was the old sales, insanity. How do you approach those barriers? You know, that might be there just from a cultural perspective or past experiences?

Dr. Moira Somers
How long has it been since people actually did that? I think that problem will take care of itself, because people who had that experience will just die off and nobody, nobody will remember that. How long has it been?

Louis van der Merwe
Unfortunately, it’s still ongoing. There is quite a big an advisor force that works for insurance companies, it is very much changing. And there’s a lot of professional people in that. And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re giving bad advice. But the incentives are misaligned. So we have clients that are by default on defense, because they maybe have had a bad experience or their parents have had a bad experience.

Dr. Moira Somers
Yeah, I think that where such a meeting takes place is really far down the list of the problems. The problem is, you know, as you said, the incentivization being wrong, the the pressure being wrong, you know, I’m one of those people that I have such an appreciation for insurance. Like I don’t know, there’s just no other way to say it. I have my dad died when I was 13. I still remember the insurance person coming to warehouse and helping out my mom, the poor guy, he was probably like 20 years old, I remember his color was too big. Remember, he still had acne. I remember his name was Dennis like, but I just also remember that, because my parents had bought insurance, this was going to help us out at one of those catastrophic life junctures, you know, and working as a clinician, as I have for for the past 30 years, I see the difference between people who have insurance, disability insurance or critical illness insurance and those who don’t. So, you know, I think that there is a real benefit to being able to, as, as somebody who has a product available to be able to say, these are the benefits of this product and to sell it like I, but, you know, the, we all know, the dark side of that process as well, on the list of what has to happen is your own ethics as a professional, your company’s ethics around how things get incentivized and, and dealt with that that’s way higher than where the advice takes place.

Louis van der Merwe
Maura, how do you think that experience changed the way you see your finances today?

Dr. Moira Somers
I’ve probably spent way too much money on insurance from anything. I think there has always been in awareness of the fragility of life itself, but also of life plans. I’ve had setbacks in my life. And every, you know, as a transitions expert, Louis, that pretty much every life event has got money has got its tendrils into it, or the event has its tentacles into money. So sometimes I think I have been too financially nervous because of that of that early life experience. And so I’ve had to learn how to just kind of say, okay, the story, I’m, the story that I’m in the grip of right now is this, you know, and then just work through some of that, and being able to develop competencies that allow me to relax a little bit, to recognize that I have a higher than average need for savings, and just, you know, to be, I married a man who also lost his dad, when he was a teenager, and had a very different trajectory than then than I did. Because there, you know, there just weren’t the kind of safety nets for his family. And so we’ve had this journey together of, of dealing with, in some ways, scarcity mindsets that weren’t helpful, of trying to learn how to be protective without being crazy, because, boy, working as a clinician, and just living as a human being on this earth, I am so aware that anxiety is a beast with a bottomless belly, you can always find more to be nervous about and and you can tie money up into that so quickly. And so just learning to develop strategies for self management for self regulation about what can I control them? What can I can, what can I not? And what is a reasonable degree of precaution, and when am I just getting Neddy that’s been my path, you know, as that I’ve really had to take that on. Okay, you’re just you’re in the, your mental roommate is just like taking over your life right now. Get her back where she belongs,

Louis van der Merwe
oh, there’s some of those techniques that you can share with us just to regulate ourselves or someone that might be feeling like, I’m getting sucked into this bottomless pit of anxiety, maybe financial anxiety? Like, what are the things that you would do with your patients or share with your patients? Yeah,

Dr. Moira Somers
well, you know, I just did a three day retreat with advisors on this on this very issue. So let’s just talk about being human, whether you’re a client or an an advisor, or both. The good lord has equipped us with internal signaling systems, and they can’t lie like our body operates at about the level of your average golden retriever, which is to say, you know, it’s adorable, but it’s not terribly sophisticated. And that’s good. Because when

Louis van der Merwe
we’re excited

Dr. Moira Somers
yeah, so whatever emotion we’re feeling, we’re, you know, we call it emotion, but it’s actually a sensation. It’s a physical sensation. And so, just that willingness to say, what’s my body’s signaling me to write Now, it could be nothing, it could be something very meaningful. But if I don’t recognize that my body is activated, I’m going to be in trouble. So just that, that ability to say, I’m, I’m experiencing this sensation of, there it is, again, you probably know where in your body anxiety resides, you probably know where in your body anger resides. And especially if you’ve had injuries, or you have an illness, that that again, becomes one of those, it starts signaling to you as like, Oh, I’m getting a migraine, what’s the, like, yes, there’s a storm coming in. But also, that person is coming over for dinner. This seems to happen every time that person comes over for dinner. So so the body is a really good indicator, a leading indicator of what’s going on. And if you can further put an emotional label to that. So I’m noticing the sensations of I’m feeling angry, I’m feeling envious, I’m feeling really uneasy. Just the ability to do that changes things neuro psychologically or cognitively, it actually starts us processing this experience in a different way, in different parts of the brain, if the body’s inner Golden Retriever is, is meant to signal us to pay attention, when we do pay attention, it goes, you got this. Great. That’s it often just stops,

Louis van der Merwe
right? can go and lie down and now

Dr. Moira Somers
and then right and allow other parts of you to be in control. There’s some research that says, the lifespan of the average emotion is, you know, it’s got a shorter lifespan than a fruit fly, it’s, it’s 90 seconds start to finish in terms of the physiological cascade, unless you primate with the story. And that’s the third part. So notice what your body is doing. See if you can consciously put a label to it, or at least say out loud, my heart is pounding out of my chest. Let me just really lean into that sensation. Often that will stop it, then to say, the reason that I’m feeling this way is and then we’re often the story again, that Son of the Most did it again, right? Or I think I might have just blown it with his clients, or whatever we we’ve got stories we tell us and that that keeps the feelings going for a whole lot longer than 90 seconds. I think I’ve had some feelings going for decades, right? Like because I just, I’m so believe in the power of this story that I’m telling myself that the body just goes okay, you need some more of that neuro chemistry. I’ll give you some more that neuro chemists that

Louis van der Merwe
ingrain that even further, kind of. Absolutely. And so often it just continues happening.

Dr. Moira Somers
Yeah, it’d be good. Yeah, it happens because it’s happened. And because we are often so much more committed to being right, than we are to learning and changing. Yeah, so. So getting, getting awareness of the story is also part of the strategy for managing and regulating ourselves. And then, you know, everybody’s probably got you can have a Colin show about people’s favorite ways of reregulating. Some of the ways that people do it are effective, but not terribly healthy. You know, you could take a belt, a scotch, if you wanted to calm down a little bit, you could get yourself some liquid courage, you could, you could leave, you could do all kinds of things you could avoid, that aren’t necessarily the best thing for the situation. Or you could develop some strategies for just slowing down your heart rate or re regulating your breathing, some of which can be done in as little as 20 or 30 seconds, some of which require a little bit more of a prolonged period of self care. People have mantras in between sessions with clients or patients I have a certain ritual that allows me to kind of settle down from what happened in that meeting. And open up my my mind and my field of awareness. And even my heart if I can be kind of hoping to, to what’s about to come into the room with the next family are the next client. So those are those are some ideas,

Louis van der Merwe
in fact, like the sports stars doing a pre shot ritual or kind of getting into that into that mode into that flow. Sounds like you have That’s something that you’ve developed yet. We don’t often your financial plan and say I do this and this and this and this and this, and then I’m really ready for that client meeting.

Dr. Moira Somers
Well, often, we just don’t set up our days to optimize us, we might set up our days to optimize efficiency, which means stacking meetings or, you know, looking over the patients or the clients file right before, but we forget to optimize us. So our brain might be like, Okay, I got this. But our receptivity might be really off, you may be way too full. From what happened previously, we can’t receive any more because we’re overflowing from, from this previous thing, or from what happened with our kid or our spouse or our neighbor.

Louis van der Merwe
Maybe they should be a guideline, like when they say, You shouldn’t be shopping for food, when you’re hungry, you shouldn’t be managing your diary when you’re busy.

Dr. Moira Somers
That’s right, and you shouldn’t you should not go into a client meeting still revved up from the previous one, you’ve got to deal with the remains of the day, the remains of the session, or you’re just not bringing your ageing to the table?

Louis van der Merwe
What do I want to talk a little bit about multiple people in a client meeting? And so what I mean by that, as we see this trend for firms to bring on board more and more advisors into meetings, like three advisors, or four team members, with one or two clients, how do you still have these deep conversations? When there’s a there’s an audience? How do you find that balance between growing your firm and creating a repeatable process and training people yet, cultivating a safe and secure space to have these deeper conversations that financial planning and life planning requires?

Dr. Moira Somers
I think a lot of it has to do with asking who it is that you’re serving, and, and making sure that you’re serving the client’s needs as well as the needs of your firm, anxiety, keeps a lot of people out of advisors office, like we just first of all, anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed mental health condition. Secondly, it has skyrocketed during COVID during the pandemic. Thirdly, Money makes people really anxious. So usually, I’m gonna give Scott these levels and then you go into a room of strangers you don’t know to with people you don’t know. There’s lots of them there. And they want you to get financially naked, right? It’s kind of like, do you really want to have your proctologist bring in the team while you bend over? Like? Probably not? So figuring out, does everybody need to be in every team meeting? Or in every client meeting? Is that necessary, and to watch how it is that you even asked for permission? I mean, sometimes within the medical setting, we say, we do this in a team setting. So these are my team members, and you’re not even asking permission, because this is how you do it. But we know that there are consequences to that. And sometimes people vote with their feet, and they don’t come back. So being able to have some feedback mechanism from clients to say, How was this meeting for you? And if you are going to have a bunch of people in a meeting, then for goodness sake, use the experience to maximum benefit 14 development as in, don’t you dare go to a meeting where there are other people who could examine your performance without having a mechanism for getting feedback on your performance, and for you to give others feedback. So you know, simple questions like, What’s one thing I could have done differently? Or did you notice that things felt awkward there? What was going on? What did I miss something? Did I make a Mr. Soros to get yourself into this position where you can be where you can see feedback as an gift and a blessing. And then to use client meetings with multiple team members in it to harvest it, don’t let that go to waste.

Louis van der Merwe
One of the transition this plan has said that she often has walking meetings with our clients, right? They go for a walk and they have a conversation and can probably be a lot more productive than sitting around a boardroom table and, you know, looking at the figures,

Dr. Moira Somers
you know, it depends on the session, for sure. Sometimes you have to be at the boardroom table or looking at a computer but movement is one of the ways of actually dealing with anxiety right again, it’s that golden retriever However, it’s settling down the central nervous system so that it can, it can do its best thinking, it’s, it’s all, our central nervous system is always designed to kind of deal with the most pressing issue. And when we’re nervous, we do not rise to the level of our best self, we sink to the level of our training, we sink to the level of our practice or our habit. And so if we don’t have ways of getting out of a heightened emotional state by by getting our by feeling safe with somebody, then then we won’t. So the advice, I often go for walks with patients who are almost inert with depression or grief, to say, we’re gonna go for a walk, we don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But I’m a psychologist, that’s, that’s, you know, not wanting advisors to, but you can certainly think of some situations where it would be helpful to go for a walk with a novice client, to go for a walk with a grieving client, you’ve seen somebody who’s just lost to be able to say, you know, would this be helpful? Would this be helpful? Just take your cue from them?

Louis van der Merwe
Can we explore a little bit more those clients that is in that early stage of grief, sometimes it’s really hard to actually get things to move forward. And so what would be helpful to use as a framework maybe for those early stages of grief,

Dr. Moira Somers
you know, I think there’s often a protectiveness, and, and a wisdom, just a built in human wisdom about staying inert for a time when you are in grief, you’re so you’re kind of supposed to be grieving, a major attachment has just been disrupted, and humans are fundamentally attaching creatures to move into action, when you kind of have other work to do is to invite some really regrettable decisions. And so I think we we advisors would, it would behoove them to kind of respect what the primary needs are, and to check that out with the client. So if getting the insurance papers in place, so that you can keep the lights on and get food on the table. If that is part of the what absolutely needs to be done now list than then be there to do that, that this is one of those times where professionals really earn their salt by figuring out what could they take off their clients plate to implement themselves, to be able to say, ethically, of course, if you want to sign this, I can take it from here, you don’t have to do anything else. But if you don’t want to sign this, if you want to wait till you’re able to, you know, really think about it or talk about it more, we can also do that, you can help them, you know that part of the thinking partner thing is having you will, at a certain point in your career have dealt with far more death through your clientele than any one of those clients will have. So you will be able to say, these are the things that typically are most important to be done in the first couple of months. Do you have anything else that you know of? What what are you concerned about? Would you like me to get going on this so that you can do the other things that you need to do, which might include a whole lot of nothing for a while,

Louis van der Merwe
was find that pot more challenging when someone just wants to do so many things, getting them to take time to grieve and to say, Okay, well, I’m comfortable not doing this now.

Dr. Moira Somers
Yeah. I mean, just listen to the language getting them to like, well, good luck with that. It’s like trying to get somebody sober. In the history of alcohol, nobody else nobody has ever got somebody sober. We might, at the most we can turn somebody into a dry drunk if we lock them up. But that’s not the same as being a healthy, sober person. It’s all internal work. And so we can’t get somebody into action without their permission. And, and so to have that fundamental respect of, you’re the expert on money, and they’re the expert on their life and somehow we’ve got to make, you know, we’ve got to make a sandwich out of the bread and the filling. They’ve got to come together. So we can’t get people to do do anything without permission and still be respectful about it. But you can do a whole lot of offering, you can ask for permission to share ideas you can offer to take things off the plate, you can ask for what would they find most useful right now? And what do they have the bandwidth for? Sometimes when people are grieving, just like that poor little Pimply neck, dentists, insurance agents like, yeah, I can get out of bed for this right and, and that’s an that’s weird, no matter who it was, it was just a blessing that somebody was coming at a time in our life when we were bereft and alone. So you just never know how it is that you can be a gift.

Louis van der Merwe
Or Moira, we had a lady that wrote a book on the process of grieving. And she said that when her mom passed away, the insurance agent printed out all the forms, put it in an envelope, edit a chocolate on top and put it underneath the door and said, sign here, and I’ll come and collect it. And this nice, small act of kindness can actually make that process is less scary and still completely difficult. But just that little bit easier.

Dr. Moira Somers
Well, you know, society is really big, on some kind of internally determined consensus about when you should be over this. It’s generally a whole lot faster. Our assumptions about how quickly they should be done are generally a whole lot faster than the reality of how long people are still, in the process of dealing with getting adjusted to being married and then getting adjusted to not being married. or preparing for retirement and then being retired. One sec gifts of being a financial planner, and Anna, especially people who really do the the life planning work and the and the transition work is that they’re willing to be there. When other people just assume that you the client has gotten on with things. Right? Well, you’ve been retired three months now it must be must be great. A Yeah, yeah, that’s great. I just lost my huge part of my identity, it’s super, an advisor will understand that, that retirement may not be all of that. But you’ll still be there. Because that’s your job, right? You’re you’re walking with people through the seasons of their life, especially those seasons when money is changing. And so every, you get to show up without those assumptions with your with your curiosity, and your openness to finding out what really is going on for them. That’s a, that’s a pretty cool profession.

Louis van der Merwe
I can’t think of any, any better. As long as you leave the ego behind. It reminds me of that Ryan Holiday book, The Ego is the Enemy. And from what I’m hearing, it sounds like it’s more and more. It’s something we need to work

Dr. Moira Somers
on. Well, healthy boundaries, certainly healthy boundaries for that ego. You do have, you do have things and sometimes you do have to be kind of assertive and putting it forward. But it’s that always needs to take a backseat to the respect for which the respect you demonstrate for clients abilities to say no even to perfection. That is fundamentally there. Right. And, and so learning how to work with that.

Louis van der Merwe
More, do you think these areas that’s been neglected? Like obvious developmental areas for financial planners that’s been neglected?

Dr. Moira Somers
Well, I think one of them is finding ways to get feedback. That’s a problem to actually, especially during the training phase. Well, I say especially because that’s the only time you really have a captive audience, right is, is during that training phase. We don’t do well at watching what advisors do and say in meetings, and and letting them know that they’ve got this little tick. They’ve got this little quirk, that when they get nervous, they do this, that we don’t often we just don’t have the supervisory capacity or haven’t built it in to give people feedback and stuff. We’re mostly what we are concerned about in training programs is the technical correctness of the advice that people gave, and we don’t, we don’t look at the interpersonal effectiveness or the intra ethics personal experience of the advisor, lots of programs within the health sciences have turned that around. You use jargon. Most people don’t know what hypertension means you have to say blood pressure. And sometimes you have to explain to people what blood pressure means, you know, being able to catch what the trainee is saying and give them some alternatives to that. I was reminded of, because I just did this three day retreat with advisors on on the personal side of things about being in the office with my supervisor when I was a trainee, when I said something to a patient who was dying of, of COPD, used to be called emphysema. It’s a lung disease, and it’s the biggest risk factor for it is smoking. And the person came in reeking of cigarette smoke. It was a it was an outpatient. And I said something like, well, you’re obviously still smoking, you should you should be quitting. And the my advisor stepped in at that point. But when the patient left holy cow, did I get a dressing down? About? Yes, that’s technically correct. Information that smoking is not good for you. But you have no idea. You have no idea whether that person should be trying to quit, right? You have back to the mental energy with what pi that we started this conversation, you have no idea what else is on his plate, the man is dying. It’s probably a few things on his plate right now. You have no idea what he’s, you didn’t try to find out? Does he want to quit? Has he ever tried to quit? What’s happened, what’s been useful, what hasn’t? Maybe this is the only good thing left in his day to day experience. Right. So even when something might be absolutely correct on one level, you need to find a way as a trainee to get corrected, when you’ve missed something on another level. And it can go the other way, you can be so caught up in empathy with the client that you or you can be so caught up in being intimidated by a client that you might pull your punches, or you might not offer things you may have bias, that that leads you to think that this kind of person clearly needs this, or this kind of person clearly doesn’t need this. And so to find ways of getting and receiving feedback is critical during the training process. And like I said, if you are going to have client meetings with multiple team members in them, for heaven’s sake, make use of that by making sure you get and give feedback.

Louis van der Merwe
And so this is not just a short questionnaire, it’s someone that’s critically looking at the experience, how engaged with the client, all of those which it can be very complex.

Dr. Moira Somers
Sure, it can, but we don’t, we don’t learn complexities, we learn little step by step thing. So the feedback needs to be accordingly. Here’s, here’s one thing you might want to try next time, or did you notice this? That’s how we get better.

Louis van der Merwe
I love that. And as you’re saying this, I’m thinking, how are we going to be implementing this in our business? Through joint meetings? And like, is there a purpose? Mira, this has been so wonderful, it’s so helpful for myself for the financial planners listening to this. I want to thank you for the work that you do. If anyone wants to reach out to you. Where can they learn more about your work?

Dr. Moira Somers
They should invite me to South Africa, don’t you think? But in the meantime, I’m officially inviting

Louis van der Merwe
you

Dr. Moira Somers
I would love the world to open up the get money mind and meaning.com is my website. And if they’re interested the book is called advice that sticks.

Louis van der Merwe
Thank you so much.