Your Value Isn’t the Math. It’s the Meaning. With Tim Maurer

Hi, welcome to Financial Behavior Thought Leaders. I'm Mary, and this podcast that takes you behind the scenes with top speakers in financial services. So this season, we are focusing on the future of financial conversations, how we trust, communicate, decision making are all evolving, and what that means for you in the way we engage with money in both our work and our lives.

So whether you're in financial services, you're planning events, or you're simply navigating your own decisions, you're in the right place. And we're glad you're here. Make sure and subscribe, and we hope to see you more of you. So today we're jumping in and we're exploring why.

We're exploring the why story, not just spreadsheets, but that may be the most important skill an advisor brings to the table, but especially as AI takes over and really fills in more of the technical part of our profession. And to bring this to life is my friend Tim Maurer. I'm so grateful that he's part of one of Financial Behavior Keynotes group's speakers. And he's also known as the advisor's advisor. So let's dive into his perspective, his keynote, the narrative imperative, and how this shows up in real conversations. Welcome, Tim.

Thanks, Mary.

Glad you're here. Okay, so we're gonna start out with AI. It's everywhere. And let's just get to the nuts and bolts of it. AI can run your retirement projections, it can build your portfolio, it can answer any technical questions that you have. As we see our work as financial advisors getting more and more commoditized, what's left? What do we offer?

The stuff that was always the most important and the most impactful. That's the good news. I really genuinely believe this. I'm allowing AI to run meaningful portions of my days and my weeks. I've found it invaluable. I've found it to be so incredibly helpful in actually doing those things that you just said, whether it's in our personal lives or increasingly in our work lives. But the good news from my perspective is that you know for

Years for decades, really. I've been talking about the fact that personal finance is more personal than is finance. So now that we're seeing AI consume a lot of that calculative work that quite frankly we have been outsourcing largely with software and additional help for years, I think it is only gonna further streamline our processes and enable us to dedicate even more of that time to the most valuable conversations we can have with clients, Mary.

Yeah, no, I I totally agree. If anything, it brings the value that you bring as a human, as a person, even further and really solidifies what your value add is. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in your office. They wouldn't even be having the conversation. They'd go have it done by a a bot if that's where they were at.

Yes.

So let me ask you this question then. What are you seeing advisors lean on now that they don't as rely as heavily on I AI before the AI entered the picture? So what are we really focusing on now in terms of how we help clients and where our service deliverables are?

Yeah, I think some of the increased efficiencies that we're gaining through technology and especially the advent of AI are giving us more space and time.

And the first thing that is benefiting advisors is just the opportunity to hit the pause button for a second. Honestly, I think there's a nature to our work as advisors that accrues and aggregates over time. And it ultimately often leads to overwhelm, as you probably know. It's not like there's a compartmentalized nature to our work. It feels like we can always be improving.

Mm.

always be optimizing. So the first thing that I invite advisors to do as they do gain efficiencies through technology and AI is to pause for a moment, take a deep breath, get an exhale in, and enjoy the fact that you may not be overwhelmed for a second. Then we have the opportunity, often utilizing AI, to do an even better examination of our practices, because again, over time they have a tendency just to aggregate and accumulate and they become a

collection oftentimes of clients and specializations in many ways over the course of a career. So I invite advisors to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, a deep exhale, and first we can take a look at our practice and identify ways that we can improve that practice. And certainly I'm sure we'll be talking more about that too.

I love that. And I wanna start out with your keynote. It's called the Narrative Imperative. I want you to tell us what's the core idea behind this keynote? Well

Any guesses? Actually, I'll tell you what it's not. I've been I've been using the the narrative imperative as a keynote for many years and it's evolved numerous times over at least a decade now.

That I've had the opportunity to share this story. But here's the interesting part a lot of times people see narrative imperative and they think this may be yet another storytelling seminar. And I don't want anybody to think that I am discounting those because I do believe that storytelling is an art in and of itself. It's an art that's been around for thousands of years. I think that it is always going to be the dominant way that we communicate and we hear and we listen. But the narrative imperative is not about telling our story better, it's about listening.

Listening for our clients' stories better and seeing how we can best come beside them as a guide. So we may get the opportunity if we have the opportunity to serve a prospect as a client. We may get the opportunity to play a role in their story, but always remembering it is actually their story. So, yes, it is important for advisors to understand their own story, to be able to tell their own story, but it's much more important from my perspective, and I believe this is.

one of the big lessons from the field of behavioral finance is that we need to be able to see, to listen, and to pick up stories from our clients better and see where we can intersect with those stories in order to optimally deliver our services.

Well, and you do mention and talk about how important it is for advisors to recognize and articulate their own story before they can help ignite someone else's. So help me understand how does your own self awareness matter really in the work you're doing?

It's true.

Well, it matters deeply because oftentimes we think as advisors that we are the objectivity in the room, that our clients may be these emotional bundles of biases as as as kind of V1 of behavioral economics seem to communicate it almost in a pejorative way that we are just a big bundle of biases as humans. And I think that we as advisors have had a tendency to see ourselves again as the rider, if you will, if you're familiar with the elephant and the rider metaphor, something that

Ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm.

I definitely address in this particular talk, System One and System Two from Daniel Kahneman. We tend to see ourselves as the system two in the room, the objectivity. The challenge is this: we cannot separate our clients from their emotions any more than we can separate our emotions from ourselves. So whereas we have a tendency to see ourselves as the objective ones in the room, oftentimes we've just used our system two to rationalize the emotions that we

grew up with and inherited anyway. So first we absolutely do, in my opinion, need to take a look at our own story, our own personal money story that normally involves taking a look backwards to identify what some of those underpinnings were and some of those benchmark experiences in life that may have shaped us. And then I have the privilege of sharing like one of the big whopper experiences that dramatically shaped the way I look at money and work and life for that matter.

Well, and I think that's an important part of it is that you're not saying you're telling the story in the client meeting by any stretch of the imagination, but you're doing that deep work. You know, it's the iceberg analogy is people are only seeing the top 10%. You're doing the deep work, the 90% beneath the surface that people don't see. So that when you do show up to the client meeting, you're fully present, you're fully prepared. And that is the gift, quite frankly.

Right.

Yes.

That you're giving them in that moment. And let me be real frank: I think on the opposite side, that's what they're paying for: your presence, your ability to listen, and to be able to re-articulate some of the solutions that you're hearing them say in their own story. Fair?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. It's definitely fair. A presence is definitely an important word in the midst of this. I think the word that encompasses much of what we will always have the opportunity to deliver for premium, I believe, is genuine wisdom. And presence is a part of wisdom. Wisdom tends to be silent. There are a whole list of adjectives that we could use to define what wisdom actually looks like. And rarely is it about rhetoric, which is kind of ironic because I spent an awful lot of time talking and writing. But nonetheless, the point is it.

Right.

Is that wisdom that clients are looking for? This is going to be a composition of our education, our experience, our credentials, but not just the stuff in the professional domain, because the way we think today and the way we respond to financial stimuli was likely baked into us way before we studied for the certified financial planner designation, way before we started sitting in front of somebody with the privilege on our business card of that word advisor. And so we need to better understand our.

ourselves, we talk about the cobbler shoes all the time. Who among us could recommend good portfolio management or long-term disability income insurance? If we had not done that exploration ourselves, I think advisors get that, but the qualitative part of our work.

Is not soft skills. It indeed has a technical backdrop to it. It's just different from the quantitative work. It's qualitative in nature. And we also need to understand ourselves from a qualitative perspective because our own biases are going to reign supreme, not just in our lives, but in the lives of our clients. And when you really think about it, that is a powerful and in many ways concerning consideration.

Absolutely. Okay, so speaking of the elephant in the room, I think a lot of advisors are still treating client meetings like a math problem, coming in to to offer all these solutions, fix their problems, and be the hero of the day. What would you tell those advisors that are still treating their client meetings like a math problem instead of a story?

Mm-hmm.

Well, for one, if you are establishing a detailed agenda, and I know this is gonna run counter to what a lot of us would prefer to believe, but if we are walking into a client meeting and we have a very detailed agenda, I think that is problem.

Ha ha.

Number one, we don't know what that client is walking through the door with. And yet we have an opportunity at the very beginning of every single meeting. Whether that's an intro meeting with a prospect, whether that's the first discovery meeting you're doing, or whether or not it is the 50th annual review meeting, in any of those cases, our clients are going to be walking through that door with a host of things that have been going on in their life and in their money since the last time we had the opportunity to see them. So I like to give clients the safety, if you will, of knowing Mr. and Mrs.

Client, as you probably know, there are going to be a couple of things on our agenda that we want to discuss today. But what's most important to us is what's most important to you. So, what are the items that you're bringing in today that are on your agenda that we could ensure that this is a successful meeting? And so that is like just to me a very generically excellent way to begin virtually every single meeting with a client or a prospect for that matter, because if you give clients and prospects the space to tell us.

What they need, they will. The last thing we want to do is fill that space with our own thoughts and ideas and interrupting the flow or the thought process of our clients.

So it's really making the whole meeting less about me as the advisor and more about you as the client and giving that space. Well, and it the parallel here is just fascinating because that's what we talk about when we teach listening skills is leaving enough space for that space to be filled, not by you.

Imagine that.

Mm-hmm.

And not by someone jumping in, but allowing the client to respond in their time and in their way and being comfortable in that, which can be really uncomfortable. It can be really uncomfortable to sit in silence. It can be really uncomfortable to come to a meeting with a very small agenda or no agenda at all.

It can be. And yet, when we do, and when we become comfortable with that, I think it is one of the most gratifying things because we do really then take on more of a coach approach to the work that we're doing where it is truly client driven and client centric. Let's remember for a moment, let's even just go look at our websites. How many of our websites said something about a client centric process and then just went on to develop our own agendas and tell people exactly how we're going to run these meetings? There is a way to navigate.

navigate a practice to navigate a meeting in a way that is genuinely client-centric. And there's that's that's partly what this keynote is about is the beginning stages. I think of it as the 101 for applied

Behavioral finance, applied behavioral economics, words that we should never be using, by the way, in a client meeting. That's a whole other story. But it should be running through as a thread. We've been talking about behavioral economics, behavioral finance, I think, for at least over a decade now. You'd find sessions at conferences, but it was really more about cocktail party fodder. I don't think that we have seen a predominant application of behavioral finance and economics within our client experiences. And what a great opportunity we have.

Especially now at this moment where we are gonna see increasing commoditization of much of the quantitative aspects of our work, that we can get even better and feel more secure, feel more confident in having that meeting that has more space in it because it's it's space for the client, and we then become much more of a guide than a teacher or a consultant.

Guide not a dictator. and I liked the idea by the way you should coin this phrase, coach approach, to be able to go in and help. Love that. Okay. So you've given me some highlights here. Who is the talk best suited for?

Ha ha

Well, I here's the thing.

advisors at every level sounds like a convenient way to discuss this. I think that if you are toward the beginning of your career, this is the session that I would have wanted to hear early in my career. I feel like I had to learn a lot of these lessons the hard way. I feel like at the beginning of my career, I was young and I looked even younger, and I wanted to prove myself. And so I went into every meeting with the desire to prove that I was smart enough. I was going into every meeting with the notion.

That I should answer every unasked question. Thankfully, early on, a mentor of mine pulled me aside afterward. He said, Tim, you're really bright, you're really engaging, but I want you to know something. You don't have to answer every question that has never even been asked. And in truth, that's one of the other big lessons we've learned from behavior economics. The best time to answer a question is when it's been asked. It's when somebody's curiosity is genuinely piqued. And so, yes, this is a session that I would have wanted to.

To get early on in my career probably would have saved me about a decade worth of beating my head against a wall and doing a whole bunch of things the wrong way. And yet at the same time, what I find is that as we get more experienced as advisors, we tend to believe we have it figured out. Whether we have consciously articulated this or not, once we have the experience and we've been through a few different market cycles and we've had the opportunity to work with scores of clients, we have a tendency to think that now.

So true.

we have it figured out. And so I actually find that it is newer and younger advisors who are normally on the edge of their seats when I'm giving this talk. And oftentimes it is the more experienced advisors who are leaning back the way I probably would be if I was in the session you were giving to, because it's natural and it's largely subconscious. But I'm inviting those advisors to lean up.

to get toward the edge of their seats, to develop that intellectual curiosity that I do absolutely we believe we need more than ever right now, in order to stay not just relevant, but like potent in the lives of our clients.

Tim, answer this for me. Why is it more important now than it was even five years ago to lean in?

Well, because of how you launched this thing, the truth of the matter is somebody can sit down with Claude and they can build a financial plan the way we were taught to build them twenty five years ago or

When we we were learning the craft. And this is a fact. I I feel as though I've had the privilege over the course of about 29 years in this industry of seeing at least two meaningful sea changes thus far and what we actually do and how our services are delivered. And I believe that we are in the middle of one right now. You know, the term inflection point is something that you really only recognize in arrears. I think the inflection point has happened. We're actually

Mm-hmm.

Somewhat on the other side of it. Our phenomenal CEO, Heather Fortner, who I believe is also on your platform, believes that the industry is going to be demonstrably changed within the next five years for sure, and maybe even three. And therefore, this is this is your opportunity. This is our opportunity to claim the space that I don't believe AI will ever be able to hold. I don't ever believe that a multi-million dollar client is going to make a job change or sell a business or choose to retire.

On the basis of what they learn from Claude for 20 bucks a month, despite the fact that they could do an awful lot of the calculative work with that tool. I believe that we can be even better empowered with those same tools to deliver even more accurate work on the quantitative side of things more efficiently, providing even more space for the truly valuable wisdom that we have to convey to our clients as a guide.

I love it. I love it. If you want to learn more about Tim and bring this keynote to your audience, visit us at financial behavior keynote.com forward slash speakers and you'll find everything you need. Now, Tim, in in summary, here's how I want to pack this up. I want you to give some really practical takeaways here. So if an advisor is like, Man, Tim, I am loving this and I need help drawing out a client story in thy next meeting.

What's a specific question they can ask or what is the right moment to pause and make space for that?

I like coming up with what may be a natural opening question for you. There are a number of folks within the industry who have done an amazing job of giving us great questions to ask. And in some cases, we might even see like lists of questions that claim to be verging on perfect. And I'm not really into those. I don't want to impress a client with my question.

Mm.

I want to, if then anything, I'm gonna impress them with my ability to keep my mouth shut, which again is a challenge. So I think coming up with what a good opening question is. My good friend and one of my mentors, George Kinder, has a classic, and it is simply, why are we here? Now, a lot of people might not be comfortable with George's question because it is very, very purposefully super.

Yeah.

open-ended and it took a lot of guts for me to say it for the first time and employ it and it is one of the primary go-tos that I use anymore. The reason it works so well is because of its breadth, because it communicates something, it conveys something even in the question itself, that there A is a reason we are here and that B, it could be any number of things. It might be something on a spreadsheet. It might be something totally different. And so it gives the client that safe space.

And but whatever that opening question is for you, go sorry, go ahead.

Well it

I was gonna say, even on that question though, it puts the power differential back to the client, which I think go walking into the meeting, especially as a female walking into a financial meeting, I already feel behind the curve, right? A lot of your females are going to feel like, I don't want to be here. I want to get out of here as fast as I can. But that one question just turned it on its head of saying,

It does.

You're here for my opinion. You're here to think, yes, here's why I'm here. And it allows them to open up. And quite frankly, that's where you get the story. That's exactly how the the story begins, shall we say?

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Yes, yes. And so that is an opening question. There are a bunch of others, and often that are promoted. So I'm not going to throw a whole bunch of them out there. I think a bunch of them are great. I don't think any of them are perfect. But what really happens next is the most important thing. So it's kind of the follow-up question. And and there are two directions that we can go. We can go with broadening questions or deepening questions. And oftentimes we haven't examined what those questions might be to identify the effect that they would have. For example,

Yeah.

Sure.

Tell me more seems to be a natural thing to say. So if we start with a good open-ended question, like why are we here? And they say something, we could say tell me more. But the one thing I would caution you is that that is quite specifically a deepening question. It's going to go deep into one thing. Whereas at the beginning of an engagement, especially, but even at the beginning of any and meeting, we probably want to broaden. We want to ask questions like, what else?

What else is a broadening question? Whereas tell me more is a deepening prompt. And so this is one of the skills that we can pick up as advisors: how to be the most effective questionnaires. Do I want to be more open-ended? Do I want to be more targeted? Do I want to be broadening? Do I want to be deepening? And there are good answers to all those questions, and they normally come in conversation as advisors. But those are just a couple great examples, I think, of what might be a helpful.

Start for somebody making a transition into a more open ended, more client centric domain.

Well they're simple. I mean the end they

They are.

Two, three words, right? It's not a big list that you're feeling that that feels inauthentic to you. Is it simple reflection points back that allow the clients to take it where they want? The other part I really heard in there is a lot of intentionality. That's what you're doing as an advisor. Is you're being very intentional with that client and allowing them that space. I would say there's one piece that I want to know about before walking in the room. So you as the advisor, how do you

Yeah.

You prep yourself to get the right headspace to prepare for a meeting like this that you're about to walk into.

Mm-hmm.

Well, what comes back to mind is where we started in this conversation, which is one of the things that AI gives us the opportunity to do, it has already increased our efficiencies for anybody who's using it. So that means that before that meeting comes up, instead of one more email, one more phone call, we now have a little bit more space. Let's use it. In order to be the most reflective, if you've just had an argument with your spouse or child, or you've just had a disagreement with a coworker or

Or you even just walked out of another meeting because they're backed to back.

Then you probably are not going to be in the optimal headspace. So I'm not recommending you have to sit down on a magic carpet and and do five ohms before you walk into a meeting. Some people do that, and I think they found it to be helpful. But I do believe that it is important. Just go for a walk. You know, Nietzsche has this great quote that he said, never trust a thought that you've had indoors. And I think we've learned a lot about the value of just going outside.

a little bit of movement. So taking a pause in whatever way works best for you, I think is the best way to prepare ourselves for a meeting so that we can be fully present in that moment.

Awesome, awesome. If there was one final takeaway that you wanted to leave with us, what would that be?

Here's the good news, advisors, and here's my encouragement. Yes, there is stuff to learn, and there is stuff to practice about being the best advisor in the next generation of financial advice that is unfolding before us. But the chances are very good that it is actually about less rather than more. For a long time, I think we felt like I need to learn more, I need to learn more. It's such a broad and deep subject matter, financial planning. It can be very, very intimidating to get.

All of that knowledge base. Well, now the knowledge is changing faster than it ever has before. The good news is we've got new tools to keep up with that knowledge change. Therefore, the best way that we can learn to be in a meeting is often about talking less, conveying less knowledge, about listening more. And so we are actually communicating less, less flowery language, it's more common language, and it's just more of space creation for our clients. So the good news, my encouragement is it's less, not more.

Nice. Beautifully said. And I think simple and profound all at the same time. And that's what you want your clients to walk away. Something they understand, but also gives them a deeper level to think about. Tim, just absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for joining us.

Absolutely.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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