CE-Credits.ca Virtual Classroom – Financial Planners Forum

Robert Gignac will be speaking as part of the December 15th 2021 Virtual Classroom Event sponsored by CE-Credits.ca. His topic will be “The Benefits of Storytelling in a Holistic Wealth Management Practice” Details available here: CE-Credits

Presentation Synopsis – “The Benefits of Storytelling in a Holistic Wealth Management Practice””

Let’s take a look at the component parts of Storytelling – what is it really all about? Storytelling is the art of portraying real or fictitious events through words, images and sounds. It’s the logical/verbal part of what you do for us as your clients. When we’re talking about storytelling we’re talking about real or fictitious events. As it relates to your work as an advisor – I would focus in on the real events through words, images, perhaps sound (some of us are auditory learners…), some of us are visual but more of us want to hear stories from you. You know the expression – don’t confuse me with the facts, don’t confuse me with the data – but tell me a story.

What about Holistic? It’s in the title for this session, so let’s break it down. Holistic is: emphasizing the organic or functional relation between the parts and the whole. Does this describe what you do? I certainly hope it does and speaking on behalf of your clients they certainly hope it does because personal finance covers a wide array of components. Yes, there’s the stuff we always think of -money, investing, RRSPs, TFSAs but that’s the easy stuff of what you do for your clients. That’s the stuff that the average advisors do, you make it more holistic when you start to broaden the scope – things like insurance, wills, estates, tax planning, goal-setting, family legacies, etc. When you’re working with us, your clients, on those areas – that’s what will set you apart from the run-of-the-mill financial professionals, sets you apart from the crowd. The fact that you’re here today to acquire a basic understanding of storytelling for holistic wealth management in a financial advisory practice shows me and shows me (and Alan too…) that you don’t want to be one of the crowd.

 The four key takeaways will be:

1. Understanding the “How” and “Why” of Storytelling” – Storytelling is the most effective way to merge meaning and emotion. Meaning is data, it’s logic, it’s facts and figures. Emotion – that’s pretty much everything else about us as your clients and 75 to 85% of the time emotion will trump logic in a battle inside our brain – not for everybody – but for the vast majority of your clients.
2. Stop Using Data – Numbers mean we must measure things, add things, compute things yeah, we know it’s important we just don’t like it much as you do. What does it do? It brings back memories from school – of things that we no longer want to deal with. The other problem with data is facts are inherently suspect (and of course the popular “alternate facts”!).
3. The Building Blocks of Storytelling – What are the building blocks for telling stories? For some of you of a certain age demographic in the audience today you’re already humming the theme from CBC’s W5 in your head (otherwise known as The Fools Overture by Supertramp – but I digress…) the Who, What, Where, When and Why there’s your five W’s and lastly “How”.
4. The 7 Steps to Effective Storytelling – It all comes down to this: Define, Create, Choose, Hook, Elaborate, Refine and Practice

Stories can help bring that boring (and sometimes scary…) data to life and more importantly – allows us to make something old new again.

Join us at the November 17th 2021 Financial Planners Forum Virtual Classroom