Love and Investments

I’ve always talked about the problem of falling in love with your investments and I’ve seen it all over the 20 plus years in my office – tears, marital fights, family arguments, etc. As a Wealth Coach it is my job to be objective and impartial. I’m the number cruncher who can show you the decisions that need to be made and explain the consequences. I can even make a list of the non-financial pros and cons of whether to buy or sell.

However, I now find myself facing the same dilemma as I oversee a team of professional cleaners – cleaning what was once my home in San Francisco. A hasty move happened due to a lengthy hospital stay. As my husband and I try to make sense of whether we should sell or rent it, I feel my objectiveness go out the window. I crunch spreadsheets to no obvious answer. I resort to a simple list of pros and cons which brings me to 50% sell /50% rent.

It occurs to me that no number can make you unravel the college fund of a deceased son, or sell the family summer cottage, or as in my case, sell my former home that I now stand in after a long medical journey. There’s a lot more there than numbers in personal finance and I feel like that’s why I so eagerly embraced the coaching profession. When people think of a coach, they think of a coach of an athletic team. But a professional life coach is not like that. Unlike my Financial Advisor career, I don’t try to “fix” the client but rather work with what they have and where they are at. I also do a lot more listening – deep listening, since most of my clients I have never met in person. All of my coaching sessions are over the phone. The coaching conversation model has the client talking most of the time and it generally follows these 5 components:

1. Focus the conversation on what the ideal outcome would be like
2. Discover the possibilities
3. Plan the action
4. Remove the barriers, and identify support and resources.
5. Review and set the stage for next steps

More well known companies (Google, Kaiser, Dell, and Motorola) are embracing the coaching experience for their executives and the general public is catching the wave, too. The cleaners are gone now. I think I will call my Coach.