On a recent SEA call, one of my financial advisor clients was gripped by stress over a business transition. He believed in the move, but the fear underneath it was loud: what if his clients didn’t like it? He was so far into the spin that he couldn’t see the plan he’d already built to make the move a success.
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it because it’s simple and it’s true: stress makes you stupid. Stress and intelligence are inversely related. The more overwhelmed you get, the narrower your focus becomes, and the more likely you are to make the exact mistakes that create the mess you’re trying to avoid. This isn’t a new idea for financial advisor coaching at GRI. I wrote about the mechanics of it in Overwhelm: as stress goes up, intelligence goes down. Simple equation.
So what actually lowers stress in the moment, when you can’t just will yourself calm? Surrender. I don’t mean giving up. I mean the old, unfashionable idea that things are unfolding exactly as they should, and that whatever is in front of you is there to serve your growth, not crush it. Call it faith, call it God’s will, call it whatever framework works for you. Whether or not you can prove it’s true, believing it does something measurable: it drops the resistance, and with the resistance gone, cortisol drops with it. A relaxed nervous system has access to the full intellect. A stressed one doesn’t.
I didn’t learn this in a boardroom. I learned it on a jujutsu mat. When someone throws you in Ketsugo Jujutsu, your instinct screams to fight the fall, to brace, to resist. That’s exactly how you get hurt. The people who train longest learn to do the opposite: relax into the throw, roll with it, let the mat do what the mat is going to do. Surrender isn’t passivity. It’s the fastest way through the thing that’s already happening whether you fight it or not. Way leads on to way, and it leads on to way a lot faster once you stop white-knuckling the wheel.
Back to my client. Instead of trying to talk him out of his fear, I asked him one question: is this great unfolding here to serve you, or to crush you? He sat with it. Once he chose the frame that it was here to serve him, and specifically to serve his clients through a stronger business and a higher level of service, the fear didn’t vanish, but the resistance did. He stopped spinning and started executing the plan that was already sitting right in front of him the whole time.
This matters more as your business gets bigger, not less. Complexity is the tax success charges you. The more moving parts, the more surface area for stress to grab hold of, and the easier it becomes to lose the plot. A relaxed, centered advisor builds trust faster than an anxious one ever will, because likability and trust, the whole foundation of this business, come from a nervous system that isn’t broadcasting distress. If you want to go deeper on keeping your head when everything around you is loud, Eyes Wide Open and the Top Ten Reasons Why an Advisor Goes Dumb podcast both dig into the same territory from different angles.
Here’s the exercise. Next time you feel the spin start, stress, overwhelm, that tight-chested feeling that you have to do something right now, stop and ask the question: is this here to serve me or to crush me? Choose the frame that serves you. Not because it’s provably true, but because it’s the frame that gives you back your full intellect instead of the panicked, narrowed version of it. That’s the version of you that actually solves the problem.
Before you can surrender to where you’re headed, though, you have to be honest about where you actually stand. Most advisors are operating on a guess. Take five minutes and get a real answer with the Advisor Practice Health Scorecard. It’ll score your practice and tell you which of the four stages you’re really in, Survival, Thrival, Mastery, or Purpose, so you’re building your next move on fact instead of stress-fueled fiction.
Be wonderful.
Coach Ken
