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Zen and the art of financial planning

If this sounds all rather blue sky or new age, it is far from it. It is in the field being ploughed by George Kinder and Bill Bachrach, who run similar courses, and my first contact with Dr Nemeth was at the Institute of Financial Planning’s conference last October.

It was her presentation to the IFP conference that inspired me to take her four-day course. The approach has some very practical and, for financial planners, forward-thinking applications.

The essence of Dr Nemeth’s presentation is about bringing “clarity, focus, ease and grace” to life. The first question she posed to her audience was “Would it be all right if life got easier?”

There is a spiritual element to the course in that the philosophy of Buddhism underlies her approach and Nemeth’s course attracted a wider audience than financial planners. This introduced a useful broader perspective within the course structure.

The approach is to develop you as an individual to help both remove the pressures of working life which can distract us from that clarity and focus, and waste time, and to provide the skills to communicate with clients at a deeper level and so coach them in making the important and lesser financial decisions that will affect their lives.

Not surprisingly, core to the training is clear communication. A financial life coach works with the client to establish important and meaningful money goals and to establish what action can be taken to achieve those goals.

Within the financial planning context it is about helping people understand their relationship with money and what it means to them as an individual.

The kinds of skills that Dr Nemeth looks to develop within financial advisers are miles away from the commission-based financial advice that has dominated the industry over the years.

I believe it is a further step on from straightforward financial planning in that rather than concentrating on investment returns and the accumulation of money, this approach places emphasis on what is important to clients as people and helping them understanding how their money and the financial planning process fit with their personal goals.

Applying philosophy to advice

The skill for individual financial planners will be to relate the technical, product, tax and regulatory aspects of financial planning to the philosophy. But in my view, clients respond very positively to someone who attempts to discover their values and builds a financial plan based on those values.

The approach championed by Dr Nemeth can offer valuable lessons which financial planners can use to develop their businesses. In my view, this is where financial planning should be heading as part of its progression to becoming a recognised profession.

So convinced am I of the potential this approach brings, both for clients and for staff, that I will be taking the five-day advanced training programme in Stockholm in April to become a certified coach.

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Mastering Life's Energies
with Dr. Maria Nemeth

As a successful business person, you look for ways of working that will benefit everyone involved; you, your clients, your organisation. In addition you look for ways to create a business model that will bring more income and more client referrals. The Mastering Life’s Energies seminar provides you with powerful tools to help clients achieve remarkable results – including financial success. You will learn to create a powerful alliance with clients, thus promoting and enhancing your own business. You will bring clarity, focus, ease, and grace to your life as well as theirs. Designed for people in service professions such as life coaches, financial planners, and business leaders, Mastering Life’s Energies has been offered worldwide to a variety of successful people. Let us show you clear, pragmatic strategies to help you and your clients live the lives you were meant to live. The seminar will be limited to 40 participants. It provides 26 units of ICF Core Competencies for Continuing Education and/or Portfolio Development. It also provides 26 hours of Continuous Professional Development for professional advisers.

Register today for Maria's upcoming Financial Life Coaching Seminar.

Adviser profile: Life coaching guru Maria Nemeth spreads the word

I credit myself as a rational sort of chap. So when I opened one of Maria Nemeth’s books, Mastering Life’s Energies, and immediately fell upon statements such as ‘Our experience is luminous not when we are thinking about living our lives, but when we are fully engaged physically with reality’, I mentally filed it under the label ‘New Age Mysticism, Californian vintage’ and left it at that.

Close encounters

Thinking my research was done, I was unprepared for the experience of meeting the luminous Nemeth in person, founder and director of the Academy for Coaching Excellence. It’s not her striking physical presence – her dignified carriage and graceful gestures – it’s her way of behaving towards you that overcomes scepticism. She relates to you.

She treats you – a stranger – like a respected but close personal friend. This does not mean she confides intimacies, nor expects any; but simply that she pays you close attention, and in a relaxed way that I would call natural were it not so unusual. She is responsive to everything you express, and shares something genuine of her own.

She is so good at simply talking to people that it makes it plain how bad at it the rest of us are. Like many journalists, I tend to speak at people, as if I were composing an article out loud. Others clam up, or mumble, or are too loud, or in other ways miss the beat of the conversational dance.

Nemeth is, by contrast, a world-class communicator. Chatting to her is the conversational equivalent of dancing with a trained ballerina.

Starting from a spiritual Mecca

Nemeth lives in Sacramento, California, and grew up in Sedona, Arizona, famous for its red sandstone rock formations, and today a Mecca for seekers of spiritual vibrations – though when she lived there as a girl it was just like a ‘beautiful Western movie’ she says. She became a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor at UC Davis School of Medicine. However, she much prefers to practice life coaching because it is a ‘proactive, optimistic and action-oriented approach’.

‘What people value is relationships that matter,’ she says. ‘That’s the key to a full life.’

She teaches people how to create those relationships no matter what they are doing, so that when, at the end of the day, ‘your head hits the pillow, you know that you have added value,’ she says.

There is no ready-made formula, and to attempt one would lead to a stilted version of what she teaches. ‘Be authentic,’ she says, ‘be yourself’.

An uncomfortable subject

Another of Nemeth’s books, The Energy of Money, explains how life coaching can improve people’s relationship with money. ‘Money is an uncomfortable subject for most people to talk about,’ she says. The results of a survey showed that many people ‘would rather talk about their sex lives than about money’.

‘We love money and we hate it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it. Money can be a source of great joy and creativity, or it can bring frustration and misery. It can bring families together and can separate them,’ she says. Nowhere are people’s fears and hopes about money more in evidence than when they meet with a financial planner. ‘Many people approach the whole area of financial planning with trepidation,’ she says.

One person told her that going to see his financial planner was almost as anxiety-provoking as going to see his dentist. He was frightened he would discover what he had done wrong, and where his faults lie.

When people are in a state of fear, their amygdalae – small, almond-shaped structures in the brain – fire, and they enter a flight/fight/freeze state. People's frontal lobes shut down and they cannot think clearly about what they want in life. So financial planners should ‘create an environment in which the amygdalae cool down long enough to have a conversation about what is really meaningful’, she says.

Nemeth cites research in the US into why some doctors get malpractice suits. The research found there was no real difference in practice. Doctors who did not get complaints made mistakes too, but their patients had a strong sense of relationship with them, and when the doctor made a mistake they apologised.

Many financial planners ‘report spending time developing clear plans for the people they serve, only to have these reports gather dust because clients have done nothing to implement them,’ she says. ‘In addition, there’s stiff competition for clients in the financial planning field. For example, a financial planner could have a good relationship with the head of a household, but upon that person’s demise, the heirs might take their business elsewhere,’ she says.

Spreading the word

‘It’s a very practical approach,’ says Duncan Glassey, the Scotland-based principal of Wealthflow who has teamed up with Nemeth and Shrewsbury-based financial planner John Kenny-Levick, chief executive of Wealth Port, to offer financial life coaching seminars, workshops, and classes in the UK and continental Europe. Their organisation, Financial Life Coaching, offers teaching programmes including coach training, personal growth and continuing education. Financial life coaching is based on Nemeth’s Academy for Coaching Excellence.

‘It’s not woo-woo,’ says Kenny-Levick.

‘It’s not therapy,’ Nemeth herself says. In therapy, demands are made of people to reveal their pasts or bad experiences. Life coaching makes no such demands, but offers encouragement and focus.

Glassey, who became a certified financial planner in 2003, found that traditional approaches to financial advice ‘do not work for many of us’. He trained as a mediator and re-established his religious faith. Now his career goal is to help develop financial life coaching in the UK.

‘When I first started practicing financial planning over 15 years ago I used a fact-find,’ he says. ‘It contained mostly quantitative questions to determine how much they owned, how much they spent, how much they paid in taxes, how much insurance they had, how much return they wanted on their money, etc. The section on goals was very brief. It listed typical goals that many people have, such as retiring at a certain age, providing for children’s education, family security in the event of death or disability, saving income taxes, estate planning, etc.

Several years later, the questions became more open-ended and actually gave them opportunities to have some goals that were not listed. The results were somewhat better, but far from ideal. Now we probe our clients’ values, goals and attitudes about money. Fifteen years on I’m still practicing financial planning, I just got better at it,’ he says. ‘Before we worked with our clients’ assets; today we work with their hearts,’ he says.

Glassey developed the Wealthflow system, and has worked out how financial life coaching can be applied to cash flow management, risk management and insurance, investment planning, retirement planning, tax planning, and estate planning.

Solutions for a tight spot

Kenny-Levick was drawn to financial life coaching after he ‘had a couple of experiences with clients who were in a tough place, and I was inadequately equipped to help them,’ he says. He gives one example of a devoutly Christian couple who were split over whether or not to move house. The wife wanted a better house, but the husband felt this was too materialistic and was contented living within their means.

Responding to an email from Glassey, he went to a presentation by Nemeth. He then attended a four-day course given by Nemeth in Stockholm. ‘I came away very relaxed and I now knew how to deal with awkward clients,’ he says. Like Glassey, Kenny-Levick emphasises the practicality of Nemeth’s approach. It’s ‘not psycho-babble,’ he says. ‘It gets risk out of your business if you know the client.’ In the end the couple bought the house, and he is due to meet with them again in a few days.

One of Kenny-Levick’s business-owning clients who benefited from the advice process wanted to know more. ‘When we explained to him about the Maria Nemeth model and that some described it as "touchy feely" he said it was the opposite – "it is more like kicky punchy" the client said.’

Kenny-Levick is currently taking the second stage of Nemeth’s training called Empowering Life’s Energies (ELE). ‘I intend over time to become an accredited master coach and course leader with Maria’s model,’ he says.

The way of the life coach

In her public presentations, Nemeth often opens with the phrase ‘Would it be OK with you if your life got easier?’ She explains that many people equate success with working very hard. She shows the audience a film of two runners, one blind, the other sighted, participating in the scenic and challenging 7.5 mile Dipsea Race, negotiating difficult, uneven paths, rough hewn steps, climbing and plunging through hills and valleys alongside California’s Pacific coast. Nemeth asks the audience, ‘Who is the coach?’ – the sighted man or the blind man. The correct answer, it turns out, is that both are, because the blind man also offers encouragement and needs to show the sighted man how to lead him. It’s a ‘dance’ she explains.

To become a good life coach, one ‘needs to learn how to become exquisitely coachable,’ she says.

‘A coach creates an environment in which people can discover what has real meaning for them,’ says Nemeth.

Five things people who are successful at creating relationships look for

• They strive to see where the person they are coaching is already competent


• They strive to see that this person has hopes and dreams, and desires to make a difference. They may talk about their dreams and goals in a loose way – get them to relax, to draw that deep breath like a sigh of relief


• They see that this person is capable of discovering their own answers. You don’t have to give them the answers. If it’s their own plan, then (a) they are more likely to carry it out, and (b) they are less likely to complain about their financial planner


• People who are able to create relationships that last in business are able to see that the person in front of them has much to contribute to life. Strive to see something in your client that inspires you. They may be telling you their life story, or the story of their business. Your mentors saw something great in you, so that greatness came to the fore


• Whoever is in front of you deserves to be treated with dignity and respect