Self-compassion is fast becoming part and parcel of burgeoning mental health and neurodiversity awareness.
But while advisers are focusing on ways to help clients with their financial resilience and showing compassion to their clients, it is also important for advisers to build better self-care and compassion into their own lives.
How can you care for others in an intensely people-focused profession if you are not caring for yourself?
This feature considers ways to understand intentional self-care and self-compassion, how to respond to clients who are sharing vulnerabilities, and ways to support colleagues who may be neurodiverse.
People who are neurodiverse can, but not exclusively, include people living with conditions such as autism, dyslexia, ADHD and dyspraxia.
The work done to encourage people with neurodiverse conditions and mental health disabilities to build greater intentional self-care and self-compassion into their lives, is now coming to be at the forefront of a movement of greater self-awareness among the general population.
So many people are altruistic and live lives of service that put them in stressful and emotional situations. Self-care and self-compassion can help ease a stressed adviser or colleague from the intensity and worry of a situation.
Self-compassion can provide ‘space’ in their heads and often around them, to process a situation or emotion so that the adviser can return to their responsibilities refreshed and with perspective because of the self-compassion they have shown themselves.
Business skills
Writing for Forbes earlier this year, executive coach Martin Evans said that “compassion - more specifically, self-compassion - is one of the most powerful and underestimated business leadership skills".
Moreover, having greater self-compassion can build helpful acts of kindness into a person’s day, which not only can help the adviser but also those whom they advise and the colleagues around them.
For example, one adviser builds advice around mental wellness, helping her clients’ have a healthy and positive relationship with their money.
Cleona Lira runs Conscious Money, and helps clients transform their attitude to money from anxiety inducing, towards being a life-serving resource. Quite often, this results in clients sharing extremely personal and often emotionally charged news with her.
Timpson is an insurance industry leader who was appointed as the Prime Minister’s disability champion, before handing over that role to Zurich's Peter Hamilton in 2021.
Timpson, himself with autism, has managed to carve out a very successful career - even being awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Years Honours' List - thanks in part to what he describes as ‘self-awareness’ and the resulting self-compassion.
Similarly, Hayley North, an adviser from Rose and North, has also been (recently) diagnosed with autism. She says she was originally believed to be neurotypical, that is, able to think, process and perceive information and situations in a neurotypical way – like the majority of the population.
