Financial planning requires a clear understanding of your clients’ goals through personal conversations and insights to determine the most appropriate investment strategy – with the flexibility to adapt as needs change.

It should therefore incorporate a coaching way of interacting by asking the right questions to help clients identify solutions that underpin their investment objectives. Coaching is about asking a correctly structured question to help the client come up with their own solution to the situation they are trying to solve. Questioning has its own benefits and should be considered a useful alternative to advising or telling in a mentor/consultant role.

The essence of coaching

As financial planning specialists we spend most of our time telling clients what they should do to solve the situation they find themselves in. However, the only way we can influence our clients’ financial outcomes is to incorporate a very different way of dealing with our clients. We need to incorporate a coaching way of being, shifting from a “specialist” to a “coaching” role as illustrated in the diagram below:

Integrated behavioural coaching

For Integrated Wealth Planners who would like to incorporate a coaching element to their financial planning process , we have launched our Integrated Behavioural Coaching (IBC) course to all IWP-accredited planners to help you develop and enhance your client relationships.

Integrated Behavioural Coaching uses neuroscience and proven coaching principles to unpack and incorporate clients’ values in the planning process and help them understand the importance of a financial plan and sticking to it. This will allow you to have deeper, more meaningful coaching conversations with your clients that opens new possibilities and a clearer understanding of their relationship with money. As an Integrated Behavioural Coach, you are also able to add more value to your client engagements, further justifying the fees that you charge to your clients.

This course, together with using the IWP framework to build a plan based on the above elements, will help you build your competencies around:

• Unpacking and incorporating the client’s values in the planning process to help them understand what they are committed to
• Dealing with limiting assumptions
• Understanding what their patterns of behaviour are, and how the brain works in order to reset through practices, exercises and observations
• Practice in sensing and questioning into the whole human being, incorporating their head, heart and what they already know (their “gut instinct”)

The benefits of coaching and integrated wealth planning:

Coaching, together with Integrated Wealth Planning (IWP), incorporates the following elements:

• Behavioural coaching
• Goal visualisation and planning
• Helping the client understand their strengths and what excites them in life
• Helping the client understand their motivation around money