Presentations
  • Transforming Client Relationships: Life Planning
  • Listen, Then Inspire
  • You Don't Need a Couch (Why Planners don't have to be Therapists)
  • Silver Divorce or Courageous Conversation?
  • Carrying the Torch, Living the Dream©

Transforming Client Relationships: Life Planning

A Two-Hour Introduction to Relationship Skills for Financial Advisors

Today’s pre-retirees are already life-long learners, serial careerists, passionate about their avocations, and unwilling to devote their extended years entirely to play and leisure or to simply marking time, waiting for life to end.

A desire for early retirement may in fact be a drive for more meaning, more significance, deepening relationships, and self-expression, whether at work or at home. However, neither clients nor financial planners have learned the simple skills that facilitate moving through emotional responses to money issues.

Galvanic Communications offers financial planners the skill set and methodology for building relationships with clients that facilitate the discovery and implementation of these core values and life dreams, whatever the age of the client.

To introduce this relationship skill set, Galvanic Communications offers advisors a two-hour workshop on the basic approach and skill set required to assist clients in visioning and actualizing a comprehensive life-centered financial plan.

Listen, Then Inspire (1 Hour)

In financial planning, the relationship with the client significantly impacts the effectiveness and success of the financial plan.  In this brief workshop, we will touch on some of the most basic skills for creating trust and commitment in client relationships, including empathic listening and eliciting deep goals and values.  By structuring the financial plan around the most important aims of the client, both client and planner are inspired to resolve obstacles and fully accomplish the plan. This presentation will be a first step toward that process.

You Don't Need a Couch (1 Hour Webinar or Presentation) as featured at the FPA Conference in Seattle, 2007

Many financial professionals are uncertain about learning relationship skills and life planning processes, assuming that these "soft skills" will somehow inadvertently cast them into a role akin to counseling or psychotherapy.

However, nearly every money professional has had the experience of a client in the office in a highly emotional state around a money issue... so the question becomes, do you have the skill set to deal effectively and competently with those normal human emotions that frequently arise in relation to money issues without concern you will slide down a slippery slope into a psychological swamp?

This presentation will introduce you to skills that can be learned and developed to facilitate all money conversations, and that are designed to keep the meeting on track as a financial planning engagement.

Silver Divorce or Courageous Conversation? (1 Hour Presentation)

An emerging trend in Japan, the US and Europe is the rising divorce rate among couples facing or entering retirement. This trend has been dubbed "Silver Divorce" for obvious reasons. It is emerging because couples are looking at extended life in retirement, but without any notion of how they actually want to spend those years, either as individuals or as couples. Often, they are very hesitant to have those conversations with each, fearing the potential consequences.

But when the "courageous conversation" doesn't take place, divorce may - and assets and families divide, leaving both partners with fewer resources for extended living.

The financial advisor is the only professional who is forward-looking, able to facilitate these courageous conversations that include values, aspirations, legacies, and financial resources. In this presentation, we will look at the role that only the financial advisor is positioned to offer, as guide and facilitator for planning a future life in retirement that is truly worth living.

Carrying the Torch, Living the Dream© (1 or 2 hour presentation)

What happens once the "torch" of a fulfilled life is fully ablaze,when dreams have been converted to goals, and the strategic plan that supports them is being implemented? How do planners and clients stay the course, keep the torch lit, and navigate all the inner and outer obstacles that may arise on the path to realization of the plan and the dream?

Using a mix of ideas, discussion and exercises, we will explore how to stay on course, to manage "drift," to stay true to our most important values and goals.