Focusing on What's Really Important to Your Clients

Mitch Anthony

The questions of investing, saving, insuring, and reducing debt only have relevance if we have articulated why we are going into this process. Vague answers will not suffice. Why do you want to invest? “To have more money,” most people will say. Why do you want more money? What will you use it for?  These kinds of questions help clarify our purpose as financial life planners and motivate our clients to stick to the wealth-building process. Consequently, you may ask some questions you didn’t expect, but your reason for doing so is to help clarify your clients’ goals.

Priorities are a personal matter––and so clients should be encouraged to disregard messages from society, parents, friends, or anyone else when deciding what their spending priorities are. This is a process where each person should listen to his or her own heart. Ask your client, “What do you value most, and what do you want to achieve in each facet of life?” Whatever your client identifies should become the basis for establishing life goals.

In our Financial Life Planning workshops, participants fill out a worksheet to determine their goals for the different aspects of their life, such as: work, home, health, family, community, leisure, education, and personal growth. Most people do not initiate a goal-setting process for themselves without some assistance or prodding from another source. It may be that clarity does not come to us regarding our goals until we are forced to write them down or verbalize them. Once our goals are on paper and staring back at us, we are compelled to wrestle with their variability and feasibility.

If you can play a role in facilitating the goal-setting process, clients will be more likely to discover a greater degree of intrinsic motivation regarding the financial plan you offer. Until those clients specify what they want and why they want it, they will be vulnerable to the changing winds of whim that comes from outside sources.

I believe that every person needs to discover the power of resolute, unshakeable motivation as it pertains to this process. Your clients will do what they should do when they completely understand why they are doing it. You cannot assume that the average person has thought through this process.

This type of self-discovery also offers the opportunity to help clients understand how their money is integrated into all areas of their lives. Once clients have articulated their life goals, they should be challenged to think about what role money can or will play in helping them to achieve each of their life goals. How will having sufficient financial resources give them more options for realizing their goals? Will economic security give them more time to focus their attention on what is most important to them?

There are simple, direct lines of communication that can be drawn between each client’s goals and the accompanying dollar signs. Many clients have expressed greater financial satisfaction when they see a direct link between their financial planning activities and their life goals. They also articulate feeling more motivated to make improvements in their money matters when they view financial resources as tools to support their own values and priorities.

Adapted from Your Clients for Life by Mitch Anthony (©2006 Mitch Anthony). Available at http://mitchanthony.com/BOOK_Clients_4_Life.html.

Contact him at mitch@mitchanthony.com.

© 2008 Mitch Anthony