Have you ever wondered how some professionals are really good at getting people to open up and some struggle?
I’ve always been interested in what makes people click. And when I started working in financial services around 12 years ago, I became fascinated by how clients reach a decision to hand over the management of their life savings to a perfect stranger.
I want to share a few insights from the field of neuroscience, psychology and communication that can help to settle a person’s mind, enabling them to think deeply and gain clarity about what they want out of life.
The bottom line is that they need to feel safe
They need to feel comfortable asking a ‘stupid’ question, sharing their hopes and dreams (which they may not have told anyone) and exposing their vulnerabilities – perhaps poor previous financial decisions. Without this psychological safety in place, the conversation will remain surface level, and the connection is unlikely to deepen.
This is what I really mean by ‘finesse’.
To help us, we’re going to draw on the field of neuroscience. Because it turns out that we can co-create a dynamic that can help our clients plan ahead more easily. Not only that, it can help them think creatively and collaboratively too.
But I’d like to back up and lay down some neuroscience basics first.
As we’re social animals, our brains are highly attuned to those around us. We’re constantly trying to decide if others are a ‘friend or foe’. No more so than when prospects meet you for the first meeting and try to work out whether to give you their life savings to manage.
As you may know, the brain organises incoming stimulus into reward and threats. We move towards things we want and away from things that threaten us. Rewards and threats activate different circuits.
All well and good.
But neuroscientist David Rock found that there are five domains that activate these circuits. In essence, we all have five social needs. His team observed that a perceived threat to our status activates the similar brain networks to a threat to our life. And a perceived increase in fairness activates the same reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward.
So although you may not think you’re threatening your prospect’s life when you’re simply asking them about their debt, spending habits or shining a light on their poor decision making, that’s what it can feel like.
Not only that, when our brain is in a threat response, we find it hard to think straight, our focus narrows, our creativity and productivity is affected.
The good news is that in the context of a first meeting, when our reward circuitry is activated, we can think more clearly and more creatively. We’re also able to plan ahead and collaborate more easily. And so the conversations we have are crucial.
So, what are these five domains or needs?
You can remember them by the acronym SCARF. They are:
- Status: our relative importance to others, how we see ourselves and how others see us.
- Certainty: our ability to predict the future
- Autonomy: our sense of control over events and our life
- Relatedness: how safe we feel with others and our sense of belonging
- Fairness: how fairly we perceive decisions involving us.
We’ll look at how to apply each one in the first meeting in the next article
But I hope now you can see how important the screening call and pre-meeting email are in offering the client certainty. You can read more about in my previous article.
In summary, understanding how to tune into psychological needs is crucial in developing relational intelligence. We’re wired for connection and the SCARF model can help us connect more deeply from the get go.