It’s a beautiful, unseasonably warm day in February on the Northern Coast of California. The sun is shining where the Pacific Ocean meets the headlands of Marin County and the organic farms of the Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center.
I am here the day before the retreat, walking along the sand with some fellow financial advisors who have also decided to come early. We watch as a man leads his llama and two small dogs down the shoreline. We take in the beautiful scenery.
The next day, 25 financial advisors from throughout the Bay Area will attend the second annual Mindful Advisor retreat. Usually, these financial advisors attend crowded conferences at corporate hotels. But on this day, they’ve been inspired to spend time practicing mindfulness and carving out a whole day to grow their business by learning practices that cultivate spaciousness!
As they arrive, they are greeted with a slower pace as they become aware of the ocean, the smell of eucalyptus, the sounds of the Pacific loons and meditation bells.
The motivation for attending has little to do with escape from the stress of their businesses or lives. When we share why each of us is here, a consistent answer is to seek tools for becoming a better advisor to clients. One woman said: “I want to learn to listen and speak in a way that helps my clients transform their lives.”
At 10 a.m. we enter the meditation hall, known as the Zendo, to learn how to stare at an empty wall, put our attention on our breath, and not pursue the habitual thoughts of the mind. It sounds simple enough. In fact, on the surface it seems simpler and easier than doing cash flow projections back at the office. But as many discover, what may be simple, is not easy. This meditation training is designed to help cultivate a more focused and less reactive mind. We trust that training the mind will make us better advisors. With this kind of mind, we improve our focus and gain the ability to listen to the wisdom of our clients rather than to just give advice. We are also less reactive to the markets!
After lunch, we use mindfulness to take a look at our challenges as advisors. One advisor shares how difficult it is to keep clients invested when the markets are crashing. As we dig deeper, we realize that the self-talk around a market correction is more problematic than the decrease itself. He catches himself thinking, “Maybe it is possible to time the markets even though there’s no evidence. Maybe I should be in a different profession. Maybe I’m not good enough. If I don’t change my clients’ portfolios and stop the bleeding, they are all going to leave me.”
Every negative interaction in life produces some suffering, but we all tend to add on to our experience of the event with thoughts and internal chatter. These secondary thoughts are often more harmful than the event itself.
We end the day with a hike to the beach accompanied by the awareness that we are walking, listening and speaking more mindfully. We step forward with an openness to the present moment. There’s an exciting mystery to living this way. We resolve to commit to these practices so that our client interactions will be fresh, alive, creative, and full of possibility.
