Financial coaching: uncovering your financial blind spots

There are some 370,000 registered coaches in the UK, covering business coaching, life coaching, management coaching, executive coaching and financial coaching. The latter play a key part in achieving financial wellbeing. After all, having someone objective to help propel you and your wealth into a successful future can be a valuable tool.

Blind spots

We all have blind spots.

Literally. Just where the optic nerve joins your eyeball, there’s a blind spot in each of your eyes.

If you don’t believe me, try this very simple experiment: focus on the black dot with your right eye. Close or cover your left eye. Then slowly move your head forwards and backwards – and at a certain point the star on the right will disappear.

Frenchman Edmé Mariotte first discovered this in 1668, causing a sensation in the scientific community.

But humans have always suffered from not quite seeing what’s in front of them. “Can’t see the wood for the trees,” goes the old saying. Or, or as the author Michael Crichton wrote, “A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.”

The objectivity industry

By a similar token, humans have long known the value of objectivity. Ancient rulers had their counsellors and ministers, modern politicians their special advisers, and company boards their non-executive directors.

With hundreds of thousands of professional coaches – and around another 60,000 fitness coaches – the objectivity industry is alive and well in the UK.

Including in financial services. It’s not surprising when you consider the close links between financial security and comfort and happiness. It’s even one of the 10 key measures the Government uses to assess national wellbeing.

Financial coaches excel here because unlike financial planners – which are often seen as a one-off or short-term agreement – financial coaches offer a lifetime relationship.

Financial coaching

If you Google ‘financial blind spots’, you get some 40 million results.

Not all of them lead to financial coaches – but there’s an argument they should!

And this is because financial coaches can identify your own individual financial blind spots and deliver the required objectivity to address them – helping you towards agreed, future goals.

As you might imagine, the relationship between coach and client is a very personal one. It has to be. The coach must build a detailed understanding of her or his client’s psychology – specifically the way they think about money, life goals, saving and spending.

The more they can understand the way someone thinks, the better then can identify those blind spots, and the more effective they can be in preparing for and sailing through life’s transitions.

Your financial personality – with all its very human behavioural and cognitive biases – will have a significant bearing on your path towards successful financial outcomes.

As with every other type of coaching, a good financial coach can help you optimise strengths and compensate for weaknesses.

Who benefits most from coaching?

There is some empirical evidence on the ROI for coaching. Trade bodies like The Institute of Coaching report that 80% of coaching clients in general have increased self-confidence and 86% of companies saying they recouped their investment.

But the success of any personal relationship is always a blend of the tangibles and intangibles. When a friend or colleague helps us out of a hole in life, we rarely get out our measuring tape afterwards. It’s about our greater confidence in overcoming the challenge and the satisfaction we feel after the event.

The same is true for financial coaching. By being part of the decision-making process, by having the confidence boost of an expert by your side, clients always feel more empowered and also more likely to stick to their decisions.

And this is the case whether you’re starting out or close to retirement, employed or steadily building your empire, an inheritor or self-made … and all compass points in-between.

Everyone can benefit from financial coaching because the value is in seeing the things you might not, asking questions you might not have thought of, and suggesting answers you may be unaware of.

At First Wealth, we financially coach clients every step of the way to provide consistent, flexible, support to get them where you want to be.

If financial coaching sounds like something you might benefit from, please get in touch on hello@firstwealth.co.uk or call 020 7467 2700.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/blind-spots#:~:text=A%20crisis%20is%20the%20sum,facts%20noted%20and%20facts%20ignored.&text=If%20there’re%20weaknesses%20you,your%20blind%20spots%2C%20it’s%20embarrassing.

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319319/number-of-fitness-instructors-in-the-uk/

[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/qualityoflifeintheuk/may2023

[4] https://instituteofcoaching.org/coaching-overview/coaching-benefits

[1] https://growthidea.co.uk/blog/14-business-coaching-statistics-that-prove-its-power#:~:text=The%20UK%20is%20one%20of,million%20full%2Dtime%20working%20population.

This document is marketing material for a retail audience and does not constitute advice or recommendations. Past performance is not a guide to future performance and may not be repeated. The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and investors may not get back the amount originally invested.