Since starting my career Financial advice has changed beyond all recognition. Twenty years ago as a fresh faced newly qualified financial adviser working for a bank my job was to sell financial products to the banks customers.

Now financial advice, if done right, is a completely different proposition. It’s about independence, it’s about transparency, it’s a role where we use our professional expertise to help our clients achieve our goals…and now (and most importantly) it’s about having conversations far deeper than just where the money is invested.

If I went back twenty years I’m not sure that the 23 year old me would have understood that proper financial advice is about helping people ensure that money is a tool designed to help our clients live the lives they want and whilst the technical knowledge we share with clients about how to invest and how to make sensible tax efficient decisions, the fundamentally important thing we do is to ensure that we map out a clear plan to ensure that our clients have clarity over their financial affairs and make decisions using money as a tool to live the life they want.

This has meant that twenty years ago my job was most closely described as ‘salesman’.

However know, and whilst the ‘job title’ might be the same, what I do is morphed into a combination of technical expert, relationship developer, plan constructor, trusted confidant…

…and Coach.

You see part of what we do with to support our clients, who are mostly relatively well financially established, questions which drive them towards happier lives. This often means we discuss a lot more than the money including what they want from their lives and how the money they’ve accumulated can help them live the life they’ve often worked so hard to achieve.

Coaching isn’t what I was originally trained to do so in the past few years I’ve been doing loads of training to get better at this particular skill. To be frank I’m still a work in progress but one thing that has helped me recently is watching a documentary which recently popped up on Netflix.

“The Playbook : A coach’s rule for life” interviews top sporting coaches about what they’ve learned about success, achievement and life through their experiences through sport. The interviewees include NBA legend Doc Rivers, “The Special One” Jose Mourinho, the consistently USA football coach Jill Ellis and Serena Williams mentor Patrick Mouratoglou.

Here’s my recommendation. If you work in professional services and your work involves in helping people make important decisions about how to move forward with their lives, take the time to watch The Playbook. I found myself nodding at important points but also taking loads of notes to reflect on how I could use these insights to improve how I support my clients.

I believe that our job as professionals to continuously evolve, learn and improve our skills and knowledge so we can help our clients better. Some of this comes from the books we read, understand the changing technical landscape but every now and again learning comes from a Netflix documentary about sport…It certainly did for me…

Give it a watch and tell me what you think. What coach provided the best insight? and what did you learn which you could potentially use to support your clients?