Advisor burnout: why it's a problem, and what to do about it

Shannon, everyone in the financial world has to be struck by all the indicators showing how stressed people are about money these days.

My theory is that money stress has been piling up since the pandemic.

Tell me, how are planners and advisors affected by their clients' anxiety?

That is such an interesting topic.

I don't think we have it put back on us sometimes, you know, like if a client is stressed, how does that impact the planner and the advisor? And I can say from personal experience, it does impact us.

If you're holding space for people all day, having conversations about stress and holding that space for their anxiety and their worries.

And when people are stressed, sometimes they're not the nicest in an email.

Sometimes they don't have those boundaries.

build up over time, you know, it's like death by a thousand cuts and adds to that layer of stress.

At least I feel that personally.

And I have heard this echoed with some of the advisors that I work with.

So I kind of see there's two aspects to the stress.

There's one, there's the emotional toll.

You're dealing with people who are stressed all the time.

It can't help but rub off on you.

And the other one is time.

People are demanding more of your time and that has to have an implications on your ability to do all the things you need to do.

What is the time impact? Like how squeezed do you get by all the calls and the emails and the other reach outs?

Yeah, I think that's a part of it, right? Especially as stressful things happen and then people email and they want an answer right away.

And I think, too, even some of the things that we've been talking about on this podcast where it's like, oh, now you have to do all these other things.

So if you were stressed before, now make sure that you're reaching out proactively and remembering that client-specific thing and also taking a life coaching course and then explaining your value.

Yeah.

So I think that the time that is required goes up and up, which is why advisors are often looking for those bigger portfolios, bigger fish, because then you can actually, if you don't have to take on as many clients, you alleviate sort of that... feeling of rats in your stomach when your inbox is exploding.

I do think that the amount of time it takes to do plans and manage stuff is a lot.

I don't manage assets, so I can't necessarily speak exactly to how much time it would take to do some things.