Workshops
  • The Client-Centered Advisor
  • The Relationship Pyramid ™
  • The Seven Stages of Money Maturity®

The Client-Centered Advisor (1 Day)

“What matters most?” This is the question that lies at the heart of the four relationships that anchor and orient the client-centered advisor toward a richly fulfilling professional practice. It is a question with four areas of exploration: What matters most to me? to my client? to my fellow professionals? to those I hope to serve?

As a financial professional, creating and maintaining a truly client-centered approach requires that you examine and nurture these four interrelated dimensions of your professional life: being true to yourself (Authenticity); exploring the values and priorities of each client (Understanding); committing to highest standards and activities (Implementation); and communicating your unique value proposition (Articulation).

This workshop will take you through all four dimensions by means of exercises that clarify values in each sector of your professional practice, determine where gaps may exist, and initiate actions for deepening and expanding in each area.

The Relationship Pyramid™ Workshop (2 Days)

We begin to learn the dance of relationship in the earliest weeks of life, and our experiences with others from that time forward have a powerful shaping effect on how we enter into and participate in all future life relationships.

This workshop will help you to view your relationship development in the areas of close family relations, social relationships, your relationship with your self, and how trust can emerge and develop in your one-on-one relationships, whether personal or professional.

The workshop will include a variety of experiential exercises, to facilitate both awareness of what works for you now, and where you can grow in effectiveness by learning specific relationship skills.

The Seven Stages of Money Maturity Workshop® (2 Days) -9 CE's (Seven Stages of Money Maturity® is a licensed service mark of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, Inc.)

What is it designed to do?  Financial advisors and planners have traditionally been skilled in the technical aspects of money, and often have been trained in highly effective sales techniques as well.  However, clients also need advice about how to best integrate life goals with financial resources, an advisory relationship that generates ease and trust, and recommendations that clearly put their well-being ahead of product sales.

The purpose of the Seven Stages workshop is to enable individuals to find freedom and financial security, regardless of their economic circumstances, by developing clarity, ease and a sense of purpose in the participant's relationship to money.  Financial planning deals with life issues such as divorce, death, illness and disability, unemployment, retirement, and other life events that can have very painful consequences for the client. By combining the emotional skills modeled and taught in this workshop with the traditional planning skills acquired by most advisors, attendees will begin to be able to establish broader and deeper relationships with the client…clients for life. 

All of us have received messages around money in childhood that, for better or worse, have become the basis for our thoughts and actions in regard to spending, giving, earning, saving and other behaviors quite relevant to financial planning.  These messages, when unrecognized, can sabotage even the best financial strategies.  This workshop will assist planners in being able to recognize and defuse these messages, both in themselves and in their clients. Even more importantly, the workshop will give the advisor tools for evoking and ranking the heart-felt life goals and values of the client, including legacy goals, so that the financial plan will support the true aims of the client and not only obvious money goals such as retirement, education, and estate planning.  As a result, clients become inspired and ultimately take more ownership in their plan, because of its relevance to their life!

Finally, having an overview of the entire developmental process that each of us must go through in order to be mature in our money behaviors and interactions helps the advisor realistically assess the probability of successful plan execution with each client, and where the obstacles or stumbling blocks are likely to arise.

To summarize, participants will gain:

      1. Perception:  How to recognize and defuse incomplete and partial childhood messages that disrupt and confuse the financial planning process due to contradictory behaviors;

      2. Skills:  How to guide the client into recognizing and acting upon what is most important for his life, as well as for his money;

      3. Knowledge:  An overview of the developmental process that leads to mature understanding and actions in relationship to money;

      4. Connection:  How to be responsive and effective when client emotions surface in the course of the planning relationship, with relationship skills developed during the training.

What is the desired outcome?  Financial planners and advisors who attend the Seven Stages workshop will have the opportunity to experience the necessary insights around their own relationship with money that will allow them to truly serve their clientele from a place of personal experience. Financial planners and advisors will also have the opportunity to develop preliminary relationship skills necessary for working with clients in regard to the human dimension of money, whether it is in relation to painful feelings, self-sabotaging messages, lack of vigor for plan execution, or lack of clarity in regard to life goals.