Originally posted at fa-mag.com by Mitch Anthony, March 19, 2026.
If your clients were allowed to fill out a questionnaire and grade your listening skills, how well do you think you’d do? Let’s imagine a scorecard (see the table).
In the real world, your clients and prospects don’t often offer this kind of feedback—instead they simply move on from you if your score is poor.
But if in fact you want to learn how to be mindful—and know how to be pulled into your clients’ orbit—you need to pay closer attention when they speak and notice how “tuned in” you are to the content of their words. They aren’t going to simply take your lead because you show erudition and brilliance. People may be distracted and enchanted by shooting stars, but they don’t follow them for long.
“If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard, the famed Danish philosopher, theologian and social critic. “This is the secret in the entire art of helping. Anyone who cannot do this is himself under a delusion if he thinks he is able to help someone else. To truly help someone else, I must understand more than he—but certainly first and foremost understand what he understands.” (This comes from his essay, “The Point of View for My Work as an Author.”)
It helps to have a humble heart combined with a true desire to understand those we serve. Open ears can train a restless tongue. When we connect, we fight the strange gravitational force that makes us want to pull everyone’s attention back to ourselves.
Resonance: Creating Lasting Connections
It also helps to find “resonance”—that feeling you get when someone’s story or experiences echo your own. That feeling should be our primary aim in any conversation.
To get there, we would all do well to occasionally ponder our own communication and ask what our goals are when we talk. If your primary motivation is to convince, persuade and document, you might be aiming too low.
I remember years ago receiving a call from the principal of a large urban high school where I was scheduled to speak. He asked what I was going to talk about—and for some reason, he was worried. When I said that I was going to discuss personal issues (about being harassed over a crooked eye in my school years and how I had suffered grief after losing a friend in a drowning accident), he was relieved.
“Thank goodness,” he said. “We don’t need to hear from any more astronauts!” He wanted someone to talk about real life experiences and the struggles of adolescence, not about how anybody could go to the moon. The life experiences would have more resonance.
We can understand how people resonate by reflecting on our most meaningful conversations.
Take, for example, the dynamics of our dialogues:
When you say out loud the truth about something most people won’t, the people you’re talking to will think to themselves, “I’ve always thought that but didn’t know how to say it.”
They also respond when you admit to frailty, fallibility and vulnerability. If you bare your soul in a matter, they are thinking, “I wish I could be that honest.”
When you address any elephant in the room, such as a financial crisis, they’ll admit to themselves, “I need to deal with this.” When you call out someone’s hypocrisy and pretense, they’ll think, “No kidding.”
We also create resonance when we humbly acknowledge a lack of expertise, since it’s easy to listen to someone who’s not full of themselves, and when we express gratitude. Because the people we’re talking to feel better knowing that everybody needs help.
It doesn’t hurt to use humor at your own expense, since people also appreciate those who can laugh at themselves.
Roadblocks to Resonance
We’ve looked at how we create resonance. But how do we destroy it? What things do we say that ignite someone’s “dis-appreciation”?
It might be when we unwittingly slip into ego-driven, approval-seeking slips of the tongue, little things that keep our audience from trusting us too nearly or too dearly:
For instance, we might start acting as the expert. We might try to make ourselves into the hero in every story we tell (making it sound as if we’re legends in our own minds).
We might focus on information over stories, which can bore people to death. Or use clichés, platitudes, and recycled material; appear self-satisfied; show too much showmanship; or use didactic language (which gets them thinking, “So, you’re smarter than me?”)
It also doesn’t help if you run down your competitors. Instead of being sold on your superiority, the person you’re trying to impress may well be thinking, “I wonder what he’ll say about me behind my back.”
So how do you know when you’re hitting home? Listen for responses like these:
• “I hear you.”
• “That’s the truth.”
• “That’s been my experience.
• “Touché!”
• “That’s how it is.”
Serving Others: The True Measure of Success
Developing transcendent human-to-human capabilities, becoming a better listener, evoking empathy in conversations, resonating with other’s stories, counseling and coaching clients, understanding the role of emotion in financial behavior, and hearing/respecting others’ experiences and stories—what does it all add up to? Something quite simple: These so-called soft skills are actually the harder stuff. They carry the day.
But unfortunately, as we start to improve in these areas, we start to realize that our industry’s business models were not designed with these skills in mind. We have instead prioritized gathering, managing and retaining assets, putting just enough effort into our relationships on the periphery to keep it all friendly. But when we turn that model inside out and put clients first—not their assets—then we make more room for connecting with people. The assets will come (and might go). But when we treat clients the best we possibly can, the best possible clients seem to show up.
It may not be feasible to take on every client we like who lacks assets—we would inevitably go out of business—but we could also miss wonderful opportunities with some remarkable individuals if we observed rigid asset minimums and net worth thresholds. The people we miss might have become our best clients.
There’s got to be some moral latitude and balance in how we determine who we can and will not service.
An advisor in Pennsylvania once shared a story with me about one of his clients, a software engineer working with a tech startup. This client was deeply in debt and had negligible assets. He told the advisor he needed help to plan his way out of his situation. The advisor said he had always left room in his month for pro bono or lower-priced planning work—especially if he sensed that the client had genuine aspirations. He agreed to develop a plan for this client to improve his financial situation. Five years later, the company was sold, and the client was rewarded with a significant payday.
I’m sure you can guess whom he entrusted his assets with! The advisor said he had no idea anything like that would happen. He had hoped only to see the client turn his situation around.
That’s the kind of financial advisor someone would want to work with.
In an industry that places great meaning on the “what” (assets) and less on the “who” (clients), it’s good to remember the words of Dr. Seuss’s Horton the Elephant: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
