Unlocking Better Financial Advice Through Neuroscience: What Advisors Need to Know
As a financial advisor, you know that helping your clients manage their finances is about far more than crunching numbers and reviewing asset allocations. Beneath every financial decision lies a complex web of emotions, subconscious beliefs, and deep-seated patterns shaped by personal history and brain chemistry.
My conversation with Tessa Santarpia, founder of Visualize in360, reveals how the latest neuroscience insights can transform the way you work with your clients – as well as understanding your own “money on the brain.”
(Listen to the full conversation here: https://referralcoach.com/ep-103-tessa-santarpia/)
Understanding Negativity Bias
All humans enter the world with a brain wired to spot threats. This is known as negativity bias – an evolutionary survival mechanism that ensures we react more strongly to perceived dangers than to opportunities. In the realm of finance, this bias shows up when clients panic during market downturns, obsess over negative headlines, or focus more on potential losses than gains.
As Tessa Santarpia explains, when clients see bad news (“red on the chart”), their nervous systems respond as if threatened. Blood flow shifts away from parts of the brain responsible for logic and planning towards the fear center (amygdala), limiting the ability to make rational decisions. This can result in behaviors like risk aversion, panic selling, or abandoning long-term plans.
What can advisors do?
Techniques like reframing (presenting volatility as movement, not danger) and anchoring (redirecting focus to long-term goals and past recoveries) can help calm clients, returning attention to rational thought. Simple grounding exercises – showing up with a calm, steady energy – are essential, as clients unconsciously “mirror” the advisor’s emotional state through their own nervous system.
From Survival Mode to Growth Mode
Many clients operate in “survival mode,” especially if shaped by stories of scarcity or financial trauma (think parents who lived through the Great Depression like mine). My parents saw money as something go “guard” rather than something to “grow.”
In this state, financial choices become overly cautious, sometimes to the point of missing opportunities for growth. Emotional hijacks – agitation, urgency, avoidance, or catastrophic thinking – signal that the survival brain has taken over.
Advisors can spot these hijacks by tuning into language (“What if we lose everything?”), behavioral shifts (withdrawal, indecision), and emotional tone. Empathy plays a key role: rather than judging clients for overreacting; recognize this as a normal human response.
To bring clients back to growth mode, advisors should validate their feelings, normalize setbacks, and re-center clients on what they can control. Focusing on process goals – habits and behaviors driving long-term success – restores agency and fosters forward momentum.
Advisors: Managing Your Own Mindset
Advisors aren’t immune to negativity bias and emotional hijacking. Fear of rejection, dwelling on unhappy clients, or comparing oneself to competitors can trigger stress and block effective action. As Santarpia emphasizes, “Advisors have the same brain wiring as their clients.” Awareness is the first step: notice recurring self-sabotage or fear-based behaviors.
Neuroscience-backed practices like listing daily or weekly “wins,” or consistently tackling small, uncomfortable outreach tasks, help retrain the predictive brain to focus on opportunity rather than threat.
Another key concept from Santarpia: emotions are not feelings. Emotions are physiological responses rooted in past experiences, while feelings are interpretations created by the mind. This distinction is crucial for understanding why we can’t just “think our way out” of stress. Instead, allow yourself to experience emotions physically – through breathwork, grounding, or movement – before shifting your state.
Money Stories: Going Deeper with Clients
Our relationship with money is often formed in childhood and influenced by family beliefs and early experiences. Toxic money stories (“There’s never enough” “Money changes people for the worse”) persist into adulthood, creating unconscious blocks. Advisors can facilitate meaningful conversations by gently surfacing these patterns – not as therapists, but as guides helping clients gain clarity.
Storytelling and relatable examples are powerful tools, engaging the same emotional processing centers where money beliefs reside. When clients reflect on their story, they develop self-awareness, often leading to more informed financial choices.
Striving for Long-Term Gains
Both clients and advisors gravitate toward short-term comfort – whether through impulsive decisions or avoiding tough conversations. Neuroscience shows that the brain’s reward system (dopamine) spikes in anticipation of achievement, not the result itself. This can drive risk-taking or sudden shifts in strategy, but meaningful financial growth requires tethering decisions to long-term goals, revisiting one’s “who am I becoming?” process, and persisting through discomfort.
Bottom Line:
Advisors who understand brain wiring – empathy, reframing, grounding, and identity-based coaching – can help themselves and their clients break free from reactive cycles. By building awareness around subconscious influences, validating emotional experiences, and shifting focus to process-driven growth, financial advice becomes not just about wealth, but true well-being.
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