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14th May, 2025 - Webinar replay

Top tips for communicating effectively when markets fall with Neil Bage and James Woodfall

Phil Bray 

Good evening, everybody, and welcome to a lovely, sunny Nottingham where we are joined by two of my favourite people in financial services, Neil Bage and James Woodfall, to talk about top tips for communication when markets fall and we’ll set the scene in a minute, but a lot of you will just need to cast your mind back kind of six weeks to remember the last time this happened. But let’s start by introducing our two guests, or, even better, let’s get them to introduce themselves. Neil, tell us a little bit about yourself, and apart from the reason that I invited you, why you’re here.

Neil Bage 

So my name is Neil Bage. I am a co-founder of Shaping Wealth. Shaping Wealth is a behavioural science learning and training company based in the US. I co-founded that four years ago, but have been in this field of behavioural science pretty much since I left. I studied to be a PE teacher. I did sports psychology and human biology, and I’ve never, ever fallen out of love with how the human brain works and how we engage with the world. So I look youthful but it’s been a long journey. And, I’m here because I’m interested to see what you’re going to ask Phil, that’s what I just showed up for, the entertainment value, more than anything.

Phil Bray 

So no pressure, then no pressure, right? James Neil’s here for the entertainment value. Why are you here?

James Woodfall 

Yeah, I think entertainment and just conversation. I mean, yeah, but that’s the problem with working from home. It’s just me and the cat usually. And actually, the conversation is pretty good. So that’s what you gotta measure up to. So I’m the founder of Raise Your EI, so EI stands for emotional intelligence. That was a company that was set up in october last year, and it’s a training consultancy business, which was started off the back of some research that I did as part of a masters in communication, behaviour and credibility analysis, which I did just before selling my financial services business, which I had for about nine years. So I did sort of 16, years as a financial planner, so face to face with clients, but when I was studying for Masters, I did a dissertation in the link between emotional intelligence and job performance in financial planners, and it just seemed like a bit of a gap in the market, that there’s some skills out there which can really help people communicate more effectively with clients than actually land on the bottom line in terms of onboarding more clients, retaining more and converting, I suppose, more opportunities into profit.

Phil Bray 

Alright, thank you for that. Thank you for that. So what are we going to talk about today? What’s the conversation going to be about? And we are going to cover the topic in detail, and what I want everyone to do is cast their mind back to 2nd April. 2nd of April this year was when Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom, announced his tariffs. Liberation Day I think he called it. And really, shortly afterwards, markets reacted, and they didn’t react particularly positively. And when markets fall, as they did after Liberation Day, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID, 19, etc, it’s not easy for financial advisors, financial planners, to get their messaging right, and some clients won’t have noticed the falls. Some will have noticed, but won’t be worried or concerned about it. Others will be worried, will be concerned, and need that confidence, information, reassurance. And then potentially, there’s a final group. This is a hypothesis of mine. It will be interesting to see whether James and Neil agree or disagree, that suffer in silence, that are potentially worried about going to their advisor and admitting to their concerns, because they don’t want to appear stupid. They don’t want to appear ignorant. So for me, I know how hard it is for advisors and planners to get the messaging right. So what we’re going to talk about today is how do clients feel when markets fall. How do you advisers, planners communicate with clients what to say, when to say it, and then preparing your clients and your business for the next time this happens, because inevitably it will. And, do ask questions, do give feedback, do share your experiences of what you did with Neil and James. They might want to critique what you did if you want to put something in the chat. So if you want to communicate with James and Neil, put something in the chat, or put something in the Q and A, whether it’s you, Andrew, Dale, Dwight, Elizabeth, Jake, etc, pop something in the chat, in the Q and A, if you’d like to get James and Neil’s opinion on it. So without further ado, let me just take the screen share off for a second. Neil, let’s come to you for the first first question, if that’s okay, and then we’ll get your views going. So let’s start by walking in the shoes of three different groups of people. First group new clients to a financial advisor, someone who has invested recently or moved recently. Second group, an existing client who’s been with an advisor planner for some considerable period of time. And the third, someone who’s made an inquiry recently hasn’t engaged and is therefore probably unadvised. How do each of those three groups feel when markets do what markets did in early April?

Neil Bage 

I mean, Phil, you have opened with like a killer question here, because the answer is not easy, right? And I tell you why the answer isn’t easy, because what you’ve done is you’ve taken a population of human beings and you have applied a label to them based on a life stage or a need that they have, or a way that they engage with the financial services industry. These are our labels, and they’re arbitrary, but the labels nonetheless. So what I want to do, if I can, with your permission, is I just want to remove the labels for a second and just assume markets have fallen and we are looking at a room full. There’s 1000 people in a room, and these are just 1000 human beings. Some of them are new, some of them are existing clients, some of them might not even know they need an advisor. I don’t care. There are 1000 people, now what’s important to recognise and we need to wind back to do this is each of those people have observed the world and have taken in data into their brains. We do that through perception, through touch, taste, sight, sound, smell, all of those things. And the data goes into our engine, and we push it through our experiential filters life, and those filters, that information generates an emotional response. Now, it doesn’t just need to be money or stock market experience that can trigger people into a kind of a response, right? It can be a whole host of other things they might have. They might have an aversion to debt. You know, they might actually have a real problem with spending. You know, Shaping Wealth, we talk about the seven dimensions of money, life, and investing is one of those seven dimensions. But our money lives, broadly defined, have a significant influence on how that data is processed and the emotional response that comes off the back of that. So it’s really difficult to say that group one or group two or group three will behave in a very different way. The way we train advisors around the world on this is you need to remove the labels to start with, and look at the person in front of you as a human being who is going through this life in their own unique way. Yes, they will have similarities, and one of the similarities might be, they’re an existing clients. One of them might be they’re a new client. But sometimes what we do is we ascribe these labels to people, and then the challenge we have is people assume that there are instructions that come out with that come with the label, “oh, I should behave like this because”, “oh, I’m an existing client of an advisor, and they’ve told me that I have a diversified portfolio when you know markets are wobbly, so now and again, and I should not be worried about that”. Actually, the fact that they’re worrying isn’t a bad thing. It just shows that they’re a normal, functioning human being who is seeing data and is creating a response that has been millions of years in the making. So I’m not, not answering your question directly, but I’m challenging the fact that the labels we put people into, the groups we put people into sometimes dictate the response that we have. And what I would rather people do is just recognise, first and foremost, that there is a human being in front of us who is trying their hardest to navigate a world where tariffs, stock markets, falling, wars around the world, whatever, whatever, are just fractions of a gargantuan amount of noise that they are trying to, kind of navigate every second of every day.

Phil Bray 

James, what would you add to that navigational question?

James Woodfall 

I think Neil’s hit the nail on the head. So I was thinking, when you went through those different categories, if you could say, well, there are domains which we know that people vary. So personality is one of those, for example. And you’ve got say, a new client and an existing client, you could have a new client who’s actually pretty stable, not particularly fussed about market movements, versus an existing client who’s been invested for potentially decades, but they have a tendency to react to negative events. So that’s one of the domains of variance. It’s part of personality. It’s like emotion sensitivity is probably one of the best ways of explaining it. So breaking people down into these categories, it causes problems, because actually your communication strategy to existing clients is potentially going to be different depending on personality traits or communication styles, for example. But saying that there are some things with sort of prospects or new clients that are probably slightly different from existing clients. And one of those with new clients is, and I would say this probably you could put them into two camps. So Neil’s right. I think one of the things that that happens with emotions is the one of the things that they do and their purposes that they have is they’re important for learning, and our memory of events is linked to emotions. So when things are more salient, for example, we’re more likely to remember them. So it’s going to be these little events in markets for investors that are going to stand out and be noisier than say, when things are going to go smoothly, and they’re more likely to remember those but with new clients, especially if they haven’t got any investment experience, to have built these kind of tools and strategies that they can appraise what’s going on and relate that to past experience and well, make sense of it. It’s with new clients that you might have a tendency to need to communicate a bit more. And I think one thing that comes to mind is that this might be the first test for you as their new advisor. So this might be an opportunity for them to kind of judge, “have I made the right decision of hiring this person?” So I think you kind of have to get that right as well. And I think it’s the same with prospects, is that they may be sort of sat there in the background looking at how you’re, you know, how you’re dealing with market volatility, and what type of communication and messages you’re saying, you’re sending out. But I think what’s common between all those categories is that they’re all going to be concerned with what’s going to happen and how will it affect me.

Neil Bage 

That’s right. And Phil, can I just add to this? You know, again James,  absolutely spot on in the way you kind of describe that. The one thing we often overlook goes back to my point that we’re dealing with human beings. We’re not dealing with clients. We’re dealing with human beings, warts and all, baggage and all right, and therefore, you’ve got to recommend, recognise that as we go through, as we have evolved as a species, you know, the human brain and Phil, you know this better than most people. This is what I’ve studied, this thing for 25 years, right? Applied neuroscience, the human brain, yes, it’s evolved, but society has moved at a much, much quicker pace, and the brain is like an old brain in a new world. It’s trying to play catch up all of the time. And what happens is, the brain evolves and adapts to the world around it. There are elements of the brain that don’t change because they’re part of our survival mechanism. The brain’s job is survival, then thrive, survive, then thrive in that order, and it will do everything it can to survive. A part of that process is constantly scanning the environment for threats. Now, once upon a time, right? It was a lion on the savannah running towards us. That was the threat today, in this world, it’s a red line on a chart. The second people see a red line, the same threat mechanism that was triggered when a lion was running towards them at 30 miles an hour gets triggered and it’s our sympathetic nervous system we go into fight or flight. So when people show up to us, whether they’re a new client, an existing client, whatever they are, and they say to you as an advisor, “oh my God, have you seen what’s going on? This is making me feel really anxious or worried or panic”, whatever word you choose. That’s a perfectly normal human response. And the advisors job, in my opinion, is to give that person the space and the permission to explain why that is so, and allow them to live that emotion, not shut it down, just lean into it with them and explore it, because then you really start to see why that person behaves the way they do, why their emotions are triggered the way they are, and when you know that, it changes the dynamic completely.

Phil Bray 

And do you think you talked about a perfectly normal human response, is suffering in silence and not voicing your concerns to your advisor or planner, a perfectly normal human response that we think some people, not clients now I’ve been told not to call them clients, people go through?

Neil Bage 

So the answer in short is yes. But, so is it a perfect normal response? Yes it is, but it’s not enough. It’s not the first natural response. What happens is the first natural response is, “I feel scared. I need to do something about that”. Right? That’s the first natural response. That’s the narrative that is created in the human brain. So we see a stimulus, and that stimulus creates an action. So something’s happened, I have to do something about it. What happens then is a whole bunch of behavioural biases, heuristics or shortcuts and filters get applied, and the little voice pops up and goes, “I wouldn’t say that if I was you mate, you will look so stupid. Why would you even think that these people are professionals? They know what they’re talking about. What are you going to question a professional?” All of these little voices appear in the head, and some people go, I ain’t going to go there, because I don’t want to look stupid, even though every fibre of their being is screaming, “I need help”. Really, there’s another voice that kind of counters that. And for me, the best advisors I work with, day one work on fostering this safe space for people. They know that it doesn’t matter what they feel and how they feel. They know that there is a safe space with their advisor to go there and I think the more we can foster that environment, the more beneficial it is to the client, right, or the human.

Phil Bray 

And James, when you were advising, how did you foster that safe space?

James Woodfall 

Well, I think it’s interesting that I think again, I agree with what Neil is saying. You know, you’ve got these scenarios where clients don’t speak up for fear of being judged. And I’ve had to look back and kind of analyse what I did right as an advisor, also uncover things I did wrong. Because I think that’s part of the journey. But some of the things that I do, and maybe it’s just my nature and style, is that I tend to be quite quiet and reserved and listen. So there’s a lot of silence in meetings, especially if people are discussing difficult topics, I give them time to think and rather than interrupt them. And that has always proved to be a good strategy, and then later, as I’ve studied it, it turns out that that is actually a very good strategy for handling, handling emotions, because as Neil was saying, emotions are triggered, and they’re universal, and there’s not a lot we can do about that. There’s multiple reasons that they’re triggered, but once they do, they change our behaviour, and they motivate our actions, and they change our thinking. And so for clients who who suffer in silence, one of the reasons that they might be doing that is for this fear of being judged that Neil mentioned, and it’s quite an interesting thing I can’t remember if I told you this last time we met, but there’s a paper that I read about the use of artificial intelligence in the medical profession. And so AI is now doing CBT, cognitive behaviour therapy, and there’s a research paper on this that effectively said that people are opening up and being more honest with an AI in CBT sessions, because this fear of being judged has been removed. And I thought that was quite interesting. But really, what we’re kind of getting at here, I’m not saying that AI is going to replace advisors straight away, but there is something damaging. If someone comes to you with with with fears or concerns and your response is to minimise them or dismiss them as as not relevant or as a bit silly, or say, don’t worry about that, because those things will leave people feeling that they weren’t really listened to, and that if something’s significant to them, and emotions are significant to us, they have to be handled properly and responded to in the right way. And I think advisors can encourage clients to speak up. So if they notice that someone might be holding something in, encourage them and, just by sort of a prompt followed by bit of silence, just like “I sense there’s something on your mind here”, or “something you want to get off your chest”, simple question, just being a bit curious can get clients opening up. And there is a benefit to this in research as well, there’s something called emotion fatigue, which is, if we end up sort of bottling up, you know, things that are bothering us and not getting them out in the open. Neil was mentioning about the impact it has on thoughts, on that little voice. Well, what happens if you don’t get stuff out is, that little voice gets louder and louder and louder and it starts spiraling. And so you end up with someone who can almost talk themselves into pulling everything out of the market that they’ve got and terminating relationship just because they’ve not had a chance to speak up.

Phil Bray 

Sounds like there’s a build up, a build up, a build up, and then, like water behind a dam, potentially. Yeah.

James Woodfall

Spot on. That’s a good way of looking at it.

Neil Bage 

You know there’s a really interesting piece of research, and it comes out of the US. I get that, but I believe, having read this as you, it would be applicable universally. So this was a piece of research that was carried out with advised clients, 1000s of advice clients, and there was lots and lots of questions asked, but one question in particular really stood out to me, and the question was, do you have someone who you can talk to about money? Right now, these are advised clients, and there’s 1000s of them in this survey, right, do you have someone who you can talk to about money? And 68% of them said no, right? Now, that immediately tells us that people aren’t creating A the right environment for those discussions to take place and B, or maybe say and B, is they’re so focused on one particular I said, we talk about the seven dimensions of money life, they’re so focused on one dimension, maybe it’s investing. And clients have a whole host of other challenges that they want to talk to people about, but their advisors are brushing them away or not really engaging with them in their whole money life that they feel like there’s no one they can speak to. So actually, maybe the problem is more fundamental than just creating a safe space. We’re not creating the right environment for people to talk to us anyway. You know, if 68% of 1000s of people are saying, I have no one to talk to, there’s a more fundamental problem at play that we need to address before we even go to a place of, how do I now give them a safe space in relation to their emotions?

Phil Bray 

And these 1000s of people were advised clients?

Neil Bage 

Advised clients, yeah. I’ll say, Phil, I’ll send you the research paper, and you can put it with this episode, because it’s a great piece of research to read. Some of it is service, utterly shocking, but it’s a stark reminder that we can always do better.

Phil Bray 

That would be cool. So looking back to early April, 2 of April, Trump stands up, Liberation Day, etc, and then 24 hours later, here at Yardstick, we started getting calls and emails from financial advisors planners saying, “help”. “We need help communicating with clients”. I remember it well, because I was supposed to be going on holiday that day and we got a lot of emails and a lot of calls, and our view was that advisors need to respond quickly and efficiently with a bulk communication followed by individual messages with people, not clients, people that they know would react in a certain way. And especially when this came at the end of tax year. Advisors, planners are busy anyway. We were just coming up to the school holidays, so some advisors have broken up and literally weren’t in the country. So we suggested that approach, that bulk communication and then individual conversations. And we’ve since analysed the results of those book communications sent by email and compared them to the engagement rates of newsletters sent by the same advisors to the same people, and what we found in about 90% of cases that actually the mass communication performed better, higher engagement, higher open rate, than the average of the long term newsletter. So it went down well. It was read by large numbers of people. So that was our approach. James, pick fault with that. What would you have done differently if you were an advisor?

James Woodfall 

Well, I think the thing I like about it is speed, and I think speed is quite critical. And I’ve got some money with Vanguard, and Vanguard have been doing this for years, and they’re usually probably the first person in the inbox when things like this happen. And there is also something really nice I like about Vanguard’s response as well, is that it’s never technical. It’s not two pages long describing which individual index has done what and what it means to the economy. It’s just bang on the message of what’s important to the client. And I think that’s quite key. I don’t know what your messages said, but I probably imagine it wasn’t a technical explanation of what was going on with markets. It was just a nice, probably core message that spoke to probably the facts and things which might have been on clients minds. But I think the thing we do to move that up and make that slightly better is probably, bulk is going to beat doing nothing, hands down, if you can get a bulk communication out quickly I totally agree with that. If you’ve gone through the process of segmenting clients according to say, communication styles. So who are your big picture people? That future focus, big picture, they just want short points. Who are your analytical thinkers? Who wants a bit more detail? Who’s going to read an email? Who’s going to want to watch a video? You know, who wants a voice note? So you can do all this stuff in a CRM now, and you can probably get the same bulk communication quickly tailored for maybe three or four groups, depending on how they consume information and in what form. So that might be something to consider. But a little something I’ve been playing with as well is, it’s just an idea, which I’m sort of working through at the moment, about communicating with clients, and paying attention to context shifts, which is basically what’s going on in the client’s life. And I’ve been doing another masters in psychology, and I’ve finished my dissertation last week, but it was on retirement planning practices. So I interviewed six advisors. And actually some of those interviews were some interesting stuff, but one of them which resonated with me was this idea that you can have clients whose circumstances shift. So let’s say from earning, I think in this particular case, earning half a million a year, to suddenly selling a business, having 10 million in the bank, and panicking about not having any income. So that’s what I mean about a context shift, is that if you’re aware of what’s going on in client’s lives, it gives you an extra layer of personalisation that you might be able to make and this is what I mean about those follow up calls. And I think one of those categories I’ve not quite finished off my thinking with this, but one category I’m pretty sure could probably do with some personalised communication is what I’m going to call nearing retirement, or three years away from retirement, a sort of critical window, because their thinking isn’t going to be the next, 30/40, years of investing, it’s going to be what’s going to happen over the next three years. Because that’s, if you like, the marker in the sand. So, yeah, bulk is great because it because it’s speed, but if you can do bulk and maybe send it in a few different media formats, and maybe do a bit of personalisation, depending on how community people consume information, then I think that’s going to add, add a bit a bit more to it. Yeah.

Phil Bray 

Neil, what are your thoughts on that?

Neil Bage 

I think speed is key. It is key. Of course, it is. But you know Phil, I think sometimes we need to trust that we are dealing with adults here, and we don’t want to pathologise or kind of downplay the fact that all of a sudden the world is pretty crap. And I think sometimes we have to say that. I think we have to acknowledge that, hey,  markets have fallen. Trump’s been a complete lunatic. It’s a little bit mental, isn’t it, and just saying or acknowledging what the world is throwing at us all. Yes, we’re an advisor. Yes, we’re communicating with the people who we serve, but we are trying to navigate this world, too. It’s not like every advisor in the world has a playbook for what Donald Trump just did. They’re making it up. Every one of us was making it up on the spot. Yes, we’ve seen markets fall, of course, but we’ve never had marker turbulence like that. At the same time, tariffs were introduced at the same time, list several things that were going on at the same time. No one has ever experienced that. So any advisor who says to their clients, “oh, don’t worry, we’ve got a solution for this”, I think shows and that could potentially show an element of being disingenuous. So actually saying the world has got hell in a hand cart, we know it has, and we are doing all we can to help you navigate this place. If you have any concerns, if you have anything specific, my door is always open. You can always come to me. This is what we’re doing. But hey, reach out to me and just kind of offer that olive branch to people, in times like that, people knowing that you have their back and that you’re trying to figure it out too. And yes, you might have a better idea in some areas than they have, but actually, if they’re worried about anything at all 68% of people said they don’t have anyone to talk to about money. If we can flip that narrative and say you can talk to me about anything, and you know what? Even if it’s you worried about, you know the fact that you can’t pay for your college tuition for the kids. I don’t care what it’s about. We’re trying to figure this mess out together. So please reach out to me, and I think giving people that space and that recognising that actually, this is a challenging time for all of us, I think gives an element of authenticity to your communications. But I think sometimes is often downplayed or even overlooked.

Phil Bray 

And you’re absolutely right. James, the communication was not a detailed explanation of why Trump put his tariffs on pretty much every country in the world. Yeah, we didn’t go down that road. Philip, thank you for your comment. I found James’s comments surrounding using AI for CBT, leaving some more open conversations because lack of judgment really interesting. Yeah, it’ll be, it’ll be good to see how that, how that develops, and whether, I guess, AI comes into other areas of psychotherapy, etc. And we’re going to keep diving into the brains of Neil and James as we work through the rest of the hour, but both Neil and James are giving up their time for free for us this evening, on a sunny evening when I’m sure you’d rather be doing other things or have other competing things for your time. So just two minutes each, if that would be good, just tell us a little bit more about how people on this call can learn more about you guys. I’m just going to put this up, hopefully that will show a slide. Neil just talk a bit more for a minute or two, about Shaping Wealth and in particular, compass.

Neil Bage 

Yeah, so you know, and what’s interesting, Philip, on the call, you know, is currently going through one of our programs. Great to see you, Philip. I can’t see you, but you know what I mean. So Shaping Wealth, we have clients on, I think, nearly every continent. We have spent decades upon decades only working with financial planners around the world, helping them understand what we classify as the human experience of money. So we have this metaphor that financial planners play two roles. You play the role of a mechanic and you play the role of a guide. The mechanic focuses on all of the technical aspects of tinkering with the engine, asset allocation, tax optimisation, all the things. The guide comes alongside the human to help them navigate uncertainty and change. It’s about having someone in your corner all the time and helping you navigate this world that we all live in, and that’s pretty much all Shaping Wealth do, we train the guides. And part of the kind of the ecosystem we built to do that is an always on 24/7 content platform called compass. Compass has 1000s of pieces of pieces of original content, much of which is shareable directly with clients. So just to give you an example, we have a piece of content on there which is a four minute video, and the title is Vucha, but letters V, U, C, A, it’s a, it’s a military acronym that stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and we posted that months and months ago. It was our most shared piece of content when the markets fell after Trump’s announcement, because it speaks in normal language, and advisors send that to clients and said, “hey, this is the world we live in”. It’s one example of 1000s of pieces of shareable content. And so if you do anything following this, if you’ve listened to James and I talk, and you think, “I want to know more. I want to maybe think about how I can have tools at my fingertips, that when these things happen, I can share them with my clients”. Then you can register for compass for free, and that gives you access to literally hundreds upon hundreds and hundreds of pieces of free content that will help you grow, help you learn, and help you engage with your clients in a different way. And then, if you want to, you can go the full hog and you can upgrade to compass Pro, which is our tier level, which is ram packed with shareable client content on 1000s of themes that we would classify as timely and timeless. Timeless themes are the things that just happen to every human as they go through life. Timely are things like the market has just plummeted. What’s the best way of engaging with my clients? So if you want to register for free, scan that QR code on your screen, that’ll take you to the compass page, and you can register for free and dive straight in after we finished on this call.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, Neil. And for anybody who’s not quick enough with the phone to zap the QR code, then we’ll put links in the follow up email that we’ll send out tomorrow. We’re going to send a recording out to everybody who registered. So James, there’s three ways of working with you, right?

James Woodfall 

Yeah, three ways of working with me. I think they’re on the bullet points, but the headline is, it’s one to one, one to many. Well, one to many, via one, working with the company. So I did an executive coaching diploma about five, six years ago. It’s something that I’ve done for a long time, and it’s tailored based on performance. So, as I say, I suppose academic qualifications is around behaviour analysis and looking specifically at emotion intelligence and understanding the components that make up emotional intelligence as a set of abilities, which can be trained through a combination of coaching and workshops to help people understand the vocabulary of what emotions are, but also to then look at how to recognise emotion in clients, because part of what I mentioned earlier was that they change our behaviour. And if you know how to read the signs in terms of things like micro facial expressions, nonverbal behaviour changes in body language, voice stress analysis, you can learn to do this over a series of workshops and become pretty accurate at doing it, and it’s giving advisors the tools when they’re sat in a meeting to observe someone’s behaviour and think actually this person might be experiencing an emotional reaction to what’s happening in the conversation, which then gives you the capability to think through about how the client might be thinking, not what they’re thinking, but how they’re thinking, which in real time, is going to allow you to change how you communicate. And that’s the basis of what emotional intelligence is, is reading behaviour, responding to it appropriately, but also as advisors, managing your own. So becoming a bit more self aware and learning self management strategies. So I run a group based training program, which is called the applied emotional intelligence training program. It takes people through that journey, and at the end of it, we put them through an emotional intelligence assessment. We, as my colleague, Cliff Lansley, and if people pass above a certain hurdle on the emotional intelligence assessment, then we sign them off with a certificate as emotionally intelligent advisor. Cliff and I’ve co co-authored this book, The Heart of Finance: Emotional Intelligence for Financial Planners. It came out, I think, in November last year, and people like it. I’ve not had anyone say it’s bad. So they’re probably lying or suffering in silence. If you’d like a copy of that, it’s available on Amazon. I’m sure Phil will send the links out. The other thing is, I am more than happy to send a digital copy or PDF. So if you’re on the webinar and you would like a copy of that, my email is James@raiseyourei.co.uk. If you just put in the subject line “book” and drop me an email while you’re on the webinar, I’ll get you a digital copy emailed back to you tomorrow when I get a chance to respond to those emails. But those are the three ways that I work with people. So if you’re interested in what I do, what I would say is just reach out and just get in contact, say hello, and we’ll see what we can do.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, James, I’ve just put your email address in the chat. Yeah, your book. We put it as a book giveaway on LinkedIn a few months ago because you kindly sent us some copies and it went in a few minutes. It was the quickest book giveaway we have ever done on LinkedIn, and you gave us more copies than we normally give away. So you were more generous than we are normally, and it still went quicker. And you’ve reminded me, you wrote a blog for us about micro facial expressions a while back, it was a guest blog for the yardstick website, so I’ll put that in the follow up notes as well. Thank you for that guys. What I want to talk about now is how we prepare for next time this happens, because this will inevitably happen again, and I feel that we need to think about preparing or advisor, planners need to think about preparing their business and their reaction and also potentially preparing, I’m really self conscious about calling them clients now, the people that advisors and planners work with, at least clients is better than customers, isn’t it?

Neil Bage 

Oh, completely. Go with clients. Stick with clients.

Phil Bray

Yeah, fair enough. So, James, you talked about understanding people’s communication preferences. And it strikes me as that, identifying people’s communication preferences ahead of time, ahead of the next time it happens, is probably a worthwhile piece of work, so just talk about that and how advisors, planners can do that.

James Woodfall

Well, I think the simplest way is to ask the client. So I don’t know whether it’s a case of at the point of onboarding, but simply having a really good communication preferences, almost like checklist that you complete as part of onboarding, would be a useful thing to make sure that you’ve sat down with the person and said, “right how do you prefer to to consume information? Do you want to see a picture? Do you want to see a long form report? Do you just want the bullet points? Or do you want everything?” And then you can have the option about what you look at. Or we mentioned videos as well. I mean, I think that videos are probably quite underutilized. Certainly when I ran my business, I didn’t use video enough, and the one time I did was during COVID, just as we went into lockdown, it was the first video I ever recorded and sent out to clients, but it’s me sat at home saying, this is what we’re doing as a business. This is how we’re still open and available to support you. And it was one of the best things I think I ever sent out, because I had a flood of messages coming back in saying how useful it was and how reassuring it was to see me talking on camera. And again, it was one of those things. It was quick to do. So it was speedily, you know, it was 10/15, minutes of me talking, and then it was sent, and it was really, really easy to do. So I think video is quite a good form, but communication, I suppose styles you can pick up on this as you deal with people. So if they’re not aware or they don’t share it. As you get to know people, you might figure out whether they’re a bit of an analytical person. Are they values driven? Are they emotion driven? So they want to understand how things are going to impact them, you know? So rather than wanting a logical argument or wanting logical framing with information, they might want to understand, “well, how’s this going to feel? how’s this going to impact on my values? How’s this going to impact on my future?” So some people, and other domains of variances, people are future oriented versus present oriented. So these four things I’m talking about come from Carl Jung’s thinking on intuitive senses, thinkers and feelers. So that’s a bit of, I suppose, to say about how people vary. To share something which I’ve found recently, which is scarily accurate. I’ve got an AI assistant, which, after reading that paper about CBT, I set up an AI assistant, and just said, look you’re my assistant. I’ll talk to you about my week, and you help me work through ideas and prioritise and what have you. Recently, I’ve had this going for a few months, but recently, what I did is I said to it, can you have a guess at what my personality score is on the Big Five personality traits, and I’ve had that tested elsewhere with a scientifically valid tool so I know what it is. So all it had was my language and how we’d interacted to be able to pick up on that. And it was 95% accurate. And I’m not surprised by that, because that’s how you know personality is measured through language. So if you’re using AI in your business, and I think a lot of practice management systems are heading towards integrating AI now, if you’ve got a history of communication with a client in written form, transcripts, from meetings, emails, text messages. Have a go. Just say to AI, what do you think this person’s communication styles are? And it’ll be pretty accurate. Would be my guess.

Phil Bray 

That’s a little bit of genius that, James. Neil follow that. What else would you recommend in terms of advisors, planners, preparing their business for next time? What should they be doing now that’s going to make next time easier?

Neil Bage 

So I have to go back to my previous life right prior to Shaping Wealth, prior to my FinTech business I built before that, and prior to my consultancy business I built before that. I worked for a FTSE 100 company as their head of strategy. And it was always about how can we better engage with humans and on a much deeper, more meaningful level. And part of that work saw me create scenario plans. So what we did is we sat down one day in a boardroom and we said, “let’s plan for three really big scenarios potentially happening”. And this wasn’t our work, by the way. We stole this unapologetically from BP. BP do this every year, and that’s why, when there was a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, they knew what to do immediately, because they’d scenario planned it. And so I brought that thinking into my world, and we planned for three big things that could potentially happen. “Okay, what if? You know, if this does happen, what are we going to do?” Blah, blah, blah. And you have a plan, and you put it on your shelf. And when the thing does happen, if it does, you don’t have to sit and go, “oh my God. What do we do now?” You just go, I know what this scenario is. Take the manual metaphorically off the shelf, and enact the plan that’s being ahead of the curve. To start with is a major accomplishment, but actually it immediately pivots your brain to the way you think. It’s not new anymore. You’re just going back in memory and you’re finding threads that already exist, and it just allows you to react and respond in a much better way. So all the things James said, all the things you said, Phil, but I think if advisors just spent half an afternoon every quarter just thinking about what might happen, it will be hugely beneficial. And let me finish off by saying this. Since those days, what’s come out of this in the field of social science is an exact replica of this, which is called pre mortems, right? And all you what that is, is it’s me thinking about a decision that I’m going to make, and I picture my future self, and I picture that the decision has gone wrong. And I go, “okay, why did it go wrong?” And I work backwards, looking at everything that could potentially happen. I have a plan. If it did go wrong, I now have a better understanding of where the stumbling blocks might be, where the hurdles might be, and I can mitigate against those today. “If this happens, then I’m going to do this. If that happens, I’m going to do this”. And if you have that mentality coupled with the stuff like James said, understanding preferences when it comes to communication, having maybe pre written templates that you can just kind of click, send, done, it just makes everything easier for you, but your clients see you as being Uber responsive and absolutely on the ball when these things kind of manifest themselves.

Phil Bray 

Yeah. Stephen Bartlett, in what is it, 50 rules for life or something along those lines, he talked about pre-mortems a lot.

Neil Bage

Yeah, they’re really powerful.

Phil Bray

The obvious next question, Neil, I love the idea of having that manual, yeah, the pre mortem, the planning. But how do you know when the right time to pull the manual off the shelf is? How do you know when things have got, it’s eight o’clock at night we’ve been here for a while. How do you know when things get so bad that we actually need to get the manual and do something now?

Neil Bage 

I’ll tell you how you know. And this may sound completely counterintuitive to people listening, you know because of your instinct. And I’ll tell you why I’m saying that. So let me do this quickly. Go back to 1979 Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, introduced the world to Prospect Theory. And they introduced this phrase,or these two things, system one and system two thinking. System one thinking is quick, it’s intuitive, it’s our gut, and system two thinking is slow, it’s methodical, and it’s what people would call rational, although I despise that word, but it’s when you go, “oh I need to think about where I’m going to go on holiday”. You sit and you slow down and you start to think properly. Now the brain doesn’t like that, because it’s cognitively, it’s a heavy load, calorifically it’s really heavy. So we tend to prefer our instincts. But here’s the thing, take a doctor right when he is training or she is training, everything is new. They need to slow down, and they need to learn. They need to ask the questions and do the research and the work. But what happens is, as you go through it’s like a circle. You go from system one, you ignore it, you go to system two, and then you come back round to system one, where your intuition is so fine tuned, because you’ve seen pretty much every scenario that there is going that when somebody walks in the A and E, or the ER room, and the doctor looks at them, they go, “that’s their kidneys” and they’re doing it from intuition, but they’re doing it from a base of vast experience and knowledge. So financial planners who’ve walked the walk, who’ve seen this before, who know what this looks like, their instinct will tell them “this looks so simple, similar to that, I’m going to enact the plan”. They don’t need to slow down. They don’t need to do an analysis and multiple spreadsheets. They will know when the right time is instinctively, if they engage with their clients on a deeper, meaningful level and they observe the world with it through the lens of I always want to learn, which goes back to the first point of emotional intelligence, which is self awareness. So all of these things, all of those moving pieces, pull them together, and I think your instinct will absolutely stand you in good stead in those situations.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, that resonates. We were, it was a Friday morning, so I guess that was what the fourth of April, we were going to have a senior leadership team meeting on a Friday morning, and we were getting some emails in and on a call like this, I looked at Matt Batsman, our head of content and Kay our head of content delivery, and we kind of looked at each other and thought, “we’re going to have to do something here, aren’t we?” Yeah. And it was, it was that instinct, yeah, a spreadsheet about, thanks, that instinct. And James, what would you add to that about when the right time to get the plan off the shelf is?

James Woodfall 

I think the instinct is absolutely perfect, because the risk is, you think well, actually “we need to get it off the shelf anytime there’s bad news” and, I think that the difference between just pulling it off when there’s bad news, because there’s always bad news, you could put something out about reform, taking all the councils and looking like they’re going to be in government, and what that’s going to happen. But some people will want that. So I think really you’re drilling down onto these, I’m going to call them sort of universal issues, where it affects everyone. And you’ll know what they are. I think really it’s sort of testing the sort of emotional temperature of the room. And I think gut feel is going to be good enough, you’ll definitely know, when it’s the right time to do it.

Phil Bray 

And I think for me, from a statistical perspective, the open rate on these book communications, and anecdotally, the gut feel advisors, planners kind of saying, “we want to do something here”. They got it right this time. So just to wrap up, we’ve got six minutes left. Neil, what should I have asked you, or what points have you not been able to make today that you think are valuable because of the questions I’ve asked? Is there anything that we think you want to tell everybody on the webinar, and people are watching the recording back that they really need to know in these last three or four minutes? And same question to you, James, but you got more thinking time.

Neil Bage 

Yeah, I think I’m going to pick up on something James has said, and it wasn’t you didn’t, understandably by the way, sort of criticism you didn’t explore it, you didn’t prod it. AI is going to play a really significant role in this industry. It already is. And most of our clients are in the US, and I think there’s a very different approach in the US to the UK about this is the way that AI is being implemented. I was asked a question at a conference. I was speaking in Vegas a few weeks back, and I was asked a question, “will AI ever be able to be empathic?” And I said, no. I didn’t need to think about it. I said no. And the reason why I said no is because I think AI can do cognitive empathy. It can kind of understand somebody else’s mental state and their perspective. That’s just data and it can kind of go, “I understand life experiences because I’ve got a data collection of gazillions of people and all of that stuff”, but it can never do it can never ever do emotional empathy, an AI can never ever feel what a human feels, because it’s not a human. It’s a machine. And so it’s a conversation for another day, Phil, but I think, in amongst all of this, we need to really consider the role of AI and empathy and emotional intelligence. Because I think the sooner we can understand, and James, this is James’s bailiwick, right? The sooner advisors can really understand what emotional intelligence is and what it’s not, and what empathy is and what empathy is not, the sooner they can kind of realise where they make a significant beneficial difference to the lives of every single client that they work with.

Phil Bray 

You mean, it’s not in performing above a benchmark. James, final remarks for you.

James Woodfall 

Well, I wrote an article actually about this, about AI and EI and it is an interesting debate, and we can’t really do it justice in the sort of three minutes we’ve got. But I would say this, there was a paper which I read that said exactly what Neil just described, there’s different types of empathy. What AI can’t do is it can recognise the signs of emotions, but what it can’t do is empathise, because to do that, you actually have to feel what it feels like to experience the emotion. So when you empathise, it’s a shared sense of feeling, and you understand what the person needs from you. And AI won’t be able to do that, but what it is doing quite a good job of already, and I think it can do is, what I mentioned before, is upping advisor skill set in terms of recognising emotions within client communications. So part of what advisors are going to need to do, because the AI is getting pretty good. And as I say, that sort of CBT experience, there’s going to be clients who, the minute that AI is available for advice, is that they’ll just go, “well, look I’ve got too much fear of being judged talking to a human advisor. I’d rather speak to an AI and do that”. But empathising is always going to be a human thing, and it’s our edge, and so I think working on those skills to be an effective communicator, to recognise emotion and knowing how to respond, is going to be really key to getting communication right. Now, whether you call that behavioural finance or emotional intelligence doesn’t matter, really, those are the core skills of being an effective communicator.

Phil Bray 

So all that remains for me to do is thank you, James, thank you Neil, for taking the time out to speak with us this evening. I found it tremendously interesting. I’ve made lots of notes here, and we’ll make sure that we get the recording out tomorrow, and all the other links will be in the covering email. So James, Neil, thank you for your time.

Neil Bage

Thank you.

Phil Bray

We’ll see you again soon, if you’ll come back and who knows, we can talk about AI.

Neil Bage 

Cheers, Phil, thank you.

Phil Bray

Cheers guys, goodbye.

Neil Bage

Take care, everybody.