Getting Clients to Follow Your Advice: The Self-Sabotaging Client

Another thing that might work is storytelling. Tell your clients about other people who chose scenarios that have ended very badly. If you have the patience and the empathy, I would also take time to explore how they are about decision-making in general. What was it like for them growing up? What bad decisions and good decisions have they made? Have they ever regretted not making a decision?

Try to get behind some of their emotions and help them understand themselves better, so they're not led around by their irrationalities and their fears.

Doing something stupid can be dangerous. But doing nothing can be very dangerous, too. So I think it's a question of learning where the client comes from, empathizing with their feelings to lighten the emotional charge and using storytelling to lead them in the sane and rational direction where you think they need to go. 

Kol Birke: That's a great point. In psychology they talk about hot states, when you're emotionally triggered—scared or angry, for instance—and cold states, when you're more rational and can think clearly. You don't want to ask clients to look into past mistakes when they're in that hot state. But after they've calmed down and are in a more rational place, you can check in with them about what they wish they hadn't done in the past. Then you might ask, "To avoid that in the future, what would like me to help you with?" 

Olivia Mellan: I like that way to frame it. Also Barbara Shapiro, president of HMS Financial Group and a Certified Divorce Finance Analyst, told me that when a client's eyes glaze over and they can't hear you, that's the time to return to conversations that are safe and pleasurable—maybe talking about personal things like their grandkids—to get them out of this dysfunctional mode so they can think and feel without stress. It's really important to track your client's emotional level carefully. 

KB: I have a trick that I suggest to advisors called "Come with me." When you're meeting with the client, have something up on the wall somewhere else in your office, a picture of a sailboat or a mountain or whatever. If you see your client reacting to stress, it means that adrenaline and cortisol running through their bloodstream are making them unable to think clearly or act in their best interest.

Say, "Come with me, I want to show you something" and walk them over to the picture. It doesn't really matter what you tell them; the important thing is to get them moving so the stress chemicals start to drain out of their bloodstream.

Along those same lines, one of the things I talk about with my clients is having a non-financial emergency fund. What I mean by that is "What can you do that always make you feel better?" It could be tennis, cooking, singing or going for a walk with your pet. Make a list of two or three things that reliably make you feel better in a stressful situation. Then if you call me up in a state of stress when you're about to make a big decision, I'm going to tell you to go to that list before making the decision. Go play a tennis match and then call me back. 

OM: I call this list "Back to One." When you're in the stress mode, what's the first thing you do that gets you out of the stress mode? Everybody has a different "Back to One" list. 

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• Read the original Investment Advisor column and the entire series of scenarios.