Financial Coaching: a client led journey with respect and understanding

A man called Paolo was on stage talking to a crowd of low-income workers about how to raise their kids. He was just coming to the end of his speech when somebody stood up to ask a question.

“We have just heard,” a worker said, “some fine words from the doctor, but have you ever been in any of our houses, sir? Where the kids are dirty, hungry, crying and making a deafening noise? And when people have to get up at four in the morning the next day to start it all over again? No, sir, you have not!”

This is the true story which inspired Paolo Freire to write his book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a masterpiece in the philosophy of education.

Freire proposes that education contains politics, bias and agenda among its reason, but argues that the relationship between the learner and the educator is more important, where they become jointly responsible for the process in which they all grow. For Freire, education and life more broadly starts with one principle: Everyone has something to teach you.

Freire recognises that mutual respect and understanding applied with knowledge and teaching, lead to a more lasting education framework, to improve our understanding of the world.

The Financial Wellbeing Collective endorses these ideas in the way our financial wellbeing coaches relate to the people they serve. Using a listening, empathetic demeanor, allows for the trust and nurturing of understanding, in our behavioral economics wellness program.

Our financial coaches will tell you the client leads the journey, not the coach. The secret recipe is listening.

If you were to recognise the frustration that follows repeated attempts to change your financial outcomes, only to end up where you started, or even further behind, would you try again by enlisting someone who truly listens to you?

Our financial coaching clients say that 90% of the time they were satisfied with their improved money management capabilities after our six-step program.

Perhaps Freire’s ideas about the relationship between pupil and teacher is as paramount as he proposes, and our coaches are just as much a part of our success as educators, as the content itself?

If you would like to be more in control of what may originally appear to be a random financial life journey, then get in touch with us and let us help you light your own path where we may learn from you, along the way.

Malachy O’Donnell is a Program Coordinator at the Financial Wellbeing Collective. He is a qualified Financial Planner with 25 years’ experience as a personal finance and business coach with post graduate qualifications in Banking and Finance.