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In this episode of Financial Behavior Thought Leaders, host Dr. Mary Bell Carlson welcomes Amy Mullen, president of Money Quotient and one of Financial Behavior Keynote Group’s exclusive speakers. Amy is widely recognized for her work in helping financial advisors transition from a transactional approach to building truly transformational client relationships. With a background shaped by both hands-on experience and academic study—including earning her CFP—Amy’s journey to the keynote stage is both unexpected and deeply rooted in a passion for the “human side” of financial planning.
Mary and Amy’s conversation digs into Amy’s path from a behind-the-scenes support role at Money Quotient to her place on the main stage, sharing stories of the early days sitting in on training sessions and the evolution that led to her expertise in values-based planning, effective client communication, and advisor development. Amy’s keen insights are enhanced by the foundational research of her mother, Carol Anderson, whose pioneering work in understanding the gap between financial knowledge and behavioral change continues to drive the mission of Money Quotient today.
Throughout the episode, Amy offers a preview of her popular keynote focused on adapting to evolving client expectations—a timely subject as both clients’ circumstances and the financial planning industry shift rapidly. She discusses new research highlighting the perceptual gap between advisors and clients around values, communication, and cultural inclusivity. Amy also opens up about her own creative pursuits, giving listeners a glimpse of the art—and science—behind her approach.
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Amy Mullen, CFP® is President of Money Quotient, Inc., an organization founded in 2001 that teaches financial professionals how to bring science to the art of relationships. In this role, Amy conducts training, provides individualized consulting, and frequently presents at national financial industry conferences on the benefits and effectiveness of a values-based approach to financial planning, understanding clients’ financial motivations and how to guide them through change, and creating long-lasting client-planner relationships. All programs and consulting provide a multi-disciplinary, evidence-based approach to financial planning that take into consideration both the practical and emotional aspects that promote financial well-being and life satisfaction. Outside of the office, Amy enjoys hikes, photography, live music, and cooking.
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1. Transformational Over Transactional Relationships:
Amy emphasizes the need for financial advisors to go beyond numbers and spreadsheets—truly engaging with clients’ values, motivations, and life goals. Transformational relationships are built on understanding the human side of finance, not just the analytics.
2. Values-Based Financial Planning Matters:
Drawing on her mother’s influential research, Amy explains that even highly motivated clients with financial education often fail to implement good financial habits unless their emotional, values-driven motivations are explored. Tapping into clients’ core values through discovery and visioning creates meaningful engagement and facilitates real behavioral change.
3. The Communication Gap is Real:
Amy highlights surprising research findings: while 89–90% of advisors believe they thoroughly understand their clients’ values and goals, only 30–50% of clients feel their advisor does. This gap signals a pressing need for ongoing, conscious communication rather than one-and-done discovery conversations.
4. Client Preferences and Needs Evolve:
Advisors should regularly check in—not make assumptions—about clients’ preferences regarding meeting types (in-person vs. virtual), their financial anxieties, and even their cultural influences. Major life events can shift priorities, and only by asking can advisors maintain current, relevant relationships.
5. Effective Advising is Both Art and Science:
Amy’s creative background informs her holistic approach: just as manual photography blends technical skill with artistic vision, effective financial planning combines analytics with emotional intelligence. Regular self-development and training in “soft” skills like communication and empathy are just as critical as technical expertise for modern advisors.
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00:00 Journey to Becoming a Speaker
06:17 Values-Driven Financial Planning Insights
08:13 Emotional Engagement in Financial Planning
11:22 “Understanding Planner-Client Relationship Dynamics”
16:58 Advisors’ Knowledge Disconnect Revealed
18:34 Revisiting Client Priorities Post-Pandemic
24:33 Blending Art and Science
25:34 “Embracing Humanness Amidst AI Change”
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Financial Behavior Thought Leaders. Join us next time for more insightful discussions with the voices influencing the financial industry.
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If you’re looking for a speaker who helps advisors adapt with empathy, shift from technical to transformational, and truly connect with their clients, Amy Mullen, CFP® is who you’re looking for.
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Mary Bell Carlson [00:00:12]:
Hi, welcome to Financial Behavior Thought Leaders. I’m Mary, and this podcast takes you behind the scenes with top speakers in financial services. So whether you’re a financial advisor booking a client event or an event planner looking for the perfect keynote, or a financial professional wanting to learn more from industry thought leaders, you’re in the right place. Today we’re featuring Amy Mullen, one of Financial Behavior Keynote Group’s exclusive speakers and president of many quotient. Amy is at the forefront of helping advisors shift from transactional to transformational client relationships. Her keynote explores what it truly means to make evolving client expectations and how advisors can strengthen relationships in a new area of financial planning. Thank you so much for joining us today, Amy. We’re excited to have you.
Amy Mullen [00:01:00]:
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:01:03]:
So before we dive into the keynote, I want to hear what brought you to the main stage. How did you become a keynote speaker?
Amy Mullen [00:01:11]:
Yeah, well, it’s kind of funny because it definitely wasn’t something I had planned. It wasn’t something that I was mindfully pursuing and actually just kind of fell into my lap over time, really. So back in 2001 and 2002, when we were working on building out our business at Money Quotient, I was much more focused on putting together the systems that were going to service the advisors and support the advisors. And I found myself, when I sat in on trainings that we had with these advisors, I found myself feeling compelled to add some thoughts and comments to the conversation. I was a little bit at first intimidated because I had not had the CFP education as of that time. I am a CFP now, but at that time I wasn’t. So I felt these are very highly educated people. And I might add a silly or stupid comment here or there, but I still felt compelled to add to the conversation.
Amy Mullen [00:02:29]:
So I was brave and raised my hand and threw in some thoughts. And it seemed as though my comments were really well received and people felt that what I was adding to the conversation was valuable, I think partially because my perspective came from more of an effective communication or behavioral type perspective. And I kind of realized over time that this was not necessarily things that they had been already educated in. So they did find that those comments were very helpful. And slowly over time, I became the person who ran the trainings and was the teacher of the trainings in teaching. 2008 was the first time I got up on stage and I did a presentation, which was really well received and also happened to have a lot of thought leaders in the audience. My very first presentation, and I got a lot of very positive feedback from them. And that was the beginning of me being more purposeful in my pursuit of a public speaking.
Amy Mullen [00:03:43]:
So it’s, it grew from there. And now I’ve been presenting all over the US I’ve actually done some international presentations as well. For what is it now? That makes, I think, 17 years of speaking.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:03:58]:
Yeah. And you’ve recently transitioned to this role of president of Money Question as well. So tell us about that.
Amy Mullen [00:04:06]:
Well, Money Quotient was started by my mother, Carol Anderson, and she, her heart is really in research. And so over time she was trying to better understand the relationship between financial professionals and their clients and what helped them to be really successful so that clients were actually adapting to better financial behaviors, healthy financial behaviors, and actually implementing the strategies that the financial planners were recommending to them. So she wanted to understand the dynamics in that relationship and what would help it to be successful. And so she had a good decade plus of research and development of workshops and resources that financial professionals could use before we began Money Quotient. And actually she had asked me if I could come help her start the business. It was supposed to be temporary, and I fell in love with the work that she was doing and so ended up going back to school and getting a lot more of the foundational, multidisciplinary perspective that she was teaching. That’s when I got my CFP education as well. And then the more I got into it, the more I realized that I felt pretty comfortable in the teaching and speaking world.
Amy Mullen [00:05:46]:
And so again, it wasn’t something I was pursuing. But over time I realized I had some skills in this area. So continue to pursue it well.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:05:57]:
And really you’re known for three important areas, and that’s values based financial planning, effective client communication, and really advisor development. And you give workshops and webinars. I mean, you’re constantly doing something. So tell us what these mean and why do they matter to financial professionals right now?
Amy Mullen [00:06:17]:
Well, I’ll start with the values based financial planning. And this comes from really a lot of the discoveries that Carol, my mother, was making over the years when she was really trying to understand why some people were successful in their financial lives and why others were weren’t implementing strategies even when they were educated. So probably it was, I want to say, the 80s when Carol stumbled upon research that showed that even when people sought out their own financial education, because we all know most schools don’t require personal finance as a requirement in their education. So a lot of times people have to find their own financial literacy courses to, to better understand they have to their self determination they, that is required for them to find the education that they need. But even when they sought out their own financial education and completed the courses, there was still little to no statistical correlation to them actually implementing those strategies. And this blew her mind. So she, it was kind of the, the key spark that made her want to understand what is the missing piece. If there was that determination to begin with, what happened to it? And why didn’t they follow through on actually implementing what they learned from those courses? And so she continued to do research with various nonprofit organizations and discovered that a lot of it had to do with no emotional connection to the financial education that they were receiving.
Amy Mullen [00:08:13]:
So in other words, the financial education was talking a lot to their analytical brain, their neocortex brain that understand facts and data, but there was no kind of emotional hook that would build their motivation to actually take action and implement. So part of what Carol discovered was how important it is to tap into the emotional brain and find personal reasons why an individual would want to take action in, in their financial life. So when you, when a client is able to gain clarity around what their core values are, what’s most important to them, it raises their excitement, it raises their motivation to do whatever it takes to get to a vision of a life that’s aligned with what’s most important to them. So really doing this kind of personal discovery, gaining clarity around core values and developing a vision are real core pieces to having success with clients, implementing financial behaviors and really being more mindful about the decisions they’re making in their lives.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:09:33]:
Yeah. So it really is not just relying on knowing the numbers and the facts and the figures. It’s not just showing a spreadsheet. It’s really connecting to the human side.
Amy Mullen [00:09:43]:
Exactly.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:09:43]:
Of what makes those emotions tick.
Amy Mullen [00:09:46]:
Right?
Mary Bell Carlson [00:09:47]:
Yeah.
Amy Mullen [00:09:48]:
Oh, in terms of the other things that you mentioned, effective client communication and advisor development. Well, I mean, these kind of go hand in hand because one thing that we very quickly recognized is that these financial professionals really focused on the financial strategies in terms of their education and they weren’t really taught, you know, how to guide people through a discovery process to raise their own awareness, how to have effective communication that leads to follow through. So it became clear that in order for them to implement a more kind of multidisciplinary values based approach, they also needed to understand effective communication skills and kind of develop more awareness themselves in moving forward. So that’s where we decided to really focus our training on helping them to build the skills necessary to have more, more successful client relationships.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:10:56]:
Well, and I think that leads right into your keynote. Right. Adapting client or adapting changing client expectations. And I think that as you think through this, we’re living in a day and an age where things are constantly changing. Even month to month or week to week, things are changing quickly. So talk to us one about what is the core message of the speech? Who’s it best suited for and what can the audience take away from from it?
Amy Mullen [00:11:22]:
Well, it’s best suited for all financial professionals really, not just financial planners, who tend to be kind of our core audience, usually at conferences, but also counselors, coaches, educators. I think all of all of the research findings that I share in this presentation are incredibly important for financial professionals to understand to, to really have successful relationships. So this particular presentation is providing outcomes from Carol Anderson’s latest research. So she had a research project that she was working on with a few other financial professionals, some professors at different universities, including Kansas State and University of Georgia, I believe. And they were looking at how the effects of global events that have occurred and national events that have occurred over the last 15 years. How has that affected the planner client relationship? And do the planner and the client think about their relationship in the same way? So in other words, what’s the planner’s perspective of their relationship and what’s the client’s perspective of their relationship and do they match? So it was really interesting, the findings. There were four areas that they were looking at specifically. One was what was both of their perspectives on just how much the advisor understood about their value values, about their personal goals, about, you know, what’s, what is driving some of their financial goals or what’s the motivation behind some of their financial goals.
Amy Mullen [00:13:25]:
Another area was around their perspectives of virtual meetings and whether they have preferences in, in using the virtual platforms for their meetings. Another area was how much financial engagement anxiety the clients were feeling and how that affected the planner client relationship. And then lastly, they were also looking at issues of cultural inclusivity as well, because that seems to be a rising topic area in our culture, having more inclusivity. So how, how much does that affect the planner client relationship as well? So it was very shocking actually. Without giving too much away, I will say that there was quite a gap in the planner’s perspective of what they felt they knew about their clients in terms of their personal goals and values, like I shared before, but also their perspective of what their clients preferences were in virtual meetings, their perspective of how much financial anxiety their clients were feeling and then how Important it was to understand the client’s cultural beliefs and influences of their culture on their financial decisions. So there was a big gap between what advisors felt was happening in those relationships and pardon, what the client was thinking their advisor understood about them.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:15:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that what’s really interesting about as you go through this is that different perspective. You think you present or say something in a certain way and that they’re in taking that information. But what we hear you saying is, no, that is not how they’re receiving that information. So I want you to dig in and let’s just do one area. You can either tell a story or dig into some of the findings of that. Kind of give us a very specific example of what that opposite reflection looked like in reality.
Amy Mullen [00:15:42]:
Right. Okay. So in terms of the qualitative data gathering, that advisors were very confident that they were doing both. In the research, it showed that having these elements as a part of the discovery process, which means a values clarification process, a visioning process, and also a process that will result in more meaningful goals for the client. It was very clear that there was strong statistical correlation to trust and commitment in that client relationship. So there’s really strong statistical correlation that when these activities they, these discussions around core values, vision and meaningful goals are embedded in the process, there’s very high statistical correlation to trust and commitment. And the advisors were very confident that they were doing this well in their client relationships. And so it was probably around 89 to 90% of advisors were strongly believing that they did this well with their clients.
Amy Mullen [00:16:58]:
When their clients were surveyed, however, it was more like 50% and under, it was going down into the 40 percentiles and even the 30 percentiles in, in these specific questions about does your advisor talk about these things with you? Does your advisor understand this information about you? So a lot lower percentages of clients felt that their advisors knew this, which was eye opening, because when advisors are being fiduciaries, these are things that they are kind of required to, to understand. And when their clients don’t think that they understand that information, that should be a real strong red flag that something needs to change. So the, the, the professors that were exploring this, studying this, along with Carol, they came to a lot of hypotheses as to why there might be that perspective gap. And it has to do sometimes with potentially not documenting what they’ve learned about it. So maybe they were having these conversations out loud. And because it was said within the office, the advisor makes an assumption that the, the client knows. I understand this about them, but has no documented proof about it. Or it could be that maybe in the beginning of their relationship they had a really great discovery process.
Amy Mullen [00:18:34]:
But over time, particularly because we have these kind of mind shifting experiences like the pandemic, the advisor potentially hadn’t gone back to see how some of these experiences had affected, affected or shifted what their priorities are or what their values are. I do think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings between a planner and a client in their relationship is I think a lot of planners believe that once they’ve understood what their client’s values are, that they never change. So now we have this understanding, we can move forward. We don’t need to come back and revisit it. But the truth of the matter is when we experience things like the pandemic and it can really teach us things, teach us new lessons that end up shifting our values and our priorities a bit. So they may feel like my advisor no longer knows me as well as they used to. So this also makes the case for needing to go back and revisit some of this discovery again.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:19:44]:
Yeah, and I really hear two things coming across. One is maybe overconfidence bias from a financial planner standpoint of yeah, yeah, I got you, no problem. But secondly, that constant need for reevaluation for staying engaged just because you signed a client 20 years ago.
Amy Mullen [00:20:02]:
Right.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:20:02]:
And, and this leave and leads into that generational planning. Right. Just because you work well with the patriarch of the family doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to continue with the matriarch or even more so with the children or grandchildren of that. And so I think all of those things that you’re saying is it’s not a one and done, it’s an evolving, that’s the human part. Kind of going back to what you said at the beginning. That logical side of our brain likes to think, yeah, did that check that box. Move forward. But what’s evolving is the human side, the emotional side.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:20:36]:
Right. And so going back and rechecking in re engaging what is one takeaway that you feel like planners, if they just implemented this one small thing, could make a huge difference in their outcomes, I think.
Amy Mullen [00:20:53]:
I mean, for all of the four areas that I talked about that they studied, I just really encourage advisors to not make, make assumptions and to ask. So in other words, like with the virtual meetings, even if they told you in the beginning of their relationship that I’m fine with virtual meetings, they should go back and regularly ask because some of the research also shows when they are addressing complex decisions or they have some sort of emotional arousal, their. Their desire to see that advisor in person and increases. So even those preferences can change from time to time. So not making assumptions. I think it’ll be perfectly understood by the client if you present it that way. I feel like I know you really well. We’ve had a lot of great conversations that I want to regularly check in with you to make sure your preferences or your values or things haven’t shifted.
Amy Mullen [00:22:02]:
These experiences can really change what we feel are our priorities, what’s important to us. And I don’t want to lose sight of that. I want to always have a current picture of your perspective and your preferences. So when you’re going into those annual meetings, be sure to not make assumptions about what preferences or what values your client has. And let’s revisit those. Those things with them and actually ask them to help update you on any of those new experiences.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:22:36]:
And it really goes into asking good questions and listening. Right. You have to ask. They’re not going to come out and tell you they don’t know unless you ask them. And so I think that just adds to that richness of when you’re working with people. You’ve got to constantly be priming that pump and helping them understand not just the process, but help them understand themselves. Because at the end of the day, that’s what you’re getting to. You’re a big fan of life planning, and I think that’s what really makes a difference in the long run.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:23:10]:
Would you agree?
Amy Mullen [00:23:11]:
Yes, absolutely. In fact, that’s. The materials that we ended up developing are all about life planning because of that core missing piece that Carol began to really understand, the, you know, finding those personal motivations, the personal meaningful goals. So life planning discovery process is. Is definitely what leads clients to wanting to adopt healthy financial behaviors and adopting those strategies.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:23:45]:
I love it. Well, Amy, it’s always a pleasure to have you. I want to know one thing. Speaking of evolving and changing, what is something new that you’re into that most people don’t know about you?
Amy Mullen [00:23:56]:
New that I’m into. Well, I have recently got into watercolor painting, which is super fun. I found that. To back up a minute, what I originally went to school for was photography. And not a lot of people know that either. So I come from a real kind of creative, creative background. And what I loved was about kind of manual photography. The old school photography with film and developing is that it did require both sides of the brain.
Amy Mullen [00:24:33]:
There’s the, you know, analytical side that understands the chemistry and the math behind taking good photographs. But then there’s also the creative brain, which is part of our emotional brain. And so what I enjoyed about it was putting those two things together. And I believe that’s why I love this work that we’re doing now so much too, because there is both the art and the science of trying to understand humans and what will move them forward and what will help them help themselves. Essentially, there is both the math side of it and analytical side of it, but there’s also the creative side of, of designing lives that are going to be meaningful. So I’m trying to endeavor into more art to feed my creative brain as well. So. So watercolors is my most recent endeavor.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:25:34]:
I love it. Well, and I think that is the value, right? Like, at the end of the day, we’ve talked a lot about AI and how everything’s changing or even the outside world. We live in a quick changing era and at the end of the day, it’s the humanness that brings us all together. And that creative side really keeps us interconnected. Amy, this has been great. Thank you so much. And if you’re looking for a speaker who helps advisors adapt with empathy and shift from technical to transformational to truly connect with our clients, you can learn more and book Amy Mullen at Keynote Financial. Thanks for joining us on financial Behavior Thought Leaders.
Mary Bell Carlson [00:26:14]:
We’ll be back soon with more conversations that bring you closer to the leading voices in financial services. See you next time.
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