Any one dealing with a Financial Planner will expect them to behave with integrity and honesty. That must surely be a given. I guess they would also want their Financial Planner to be sincere.
So there are times in our lives when boundaries might be breached.
A colleague and I were at a client meeting this week when they told us that they had purchased a holiday home in a seaside resort.
They were clearly very pleased with their purchase. In fact the property had been featured in a local newspaper and a copy was produced and shown to us.
Here is where the boundary was tested.
Frankly the property looked awful. It was a dilapidated building in a run down area. What was I going to say? “Gosh how nice” or possibly I should just say nothing at all.
The client leaned across the table and pointed at the photo of their property. Fortunately for me it wasn’t the one I had been looking at but a really lovely apartment in a stunning area the photo next to the one I had been looking at!
I pride myself on having a sense of humour and said to the client “thank goodness for that because I was really struggling to work out how I was going to say something complimentary and still sound sincere had it been the other one”.
They certainly enjoyed my moment of discomfort but it made me think. How often during the day do we say things to comfort other people that on reflection are not what we are really thinking?
Can a Financial Planner be honest and operate with integrity but still have times when they are not sincere? An interesting thought.
