‘I couldn’t even trade that day’

Yohance Harrison knows all too well how financial stress impacts decision-making. Just take the recent CrowdStrike and Microsoft outage – something which Harrison tells IN inevitably caused mass panic.

“I was in a position where I couldn't even trade that day,” he explains. “So that can create some stress. [Maybe a] client needs to take money out? Thankfully, I had a client that closed on a house [the day before the outage] that needed to get a wire out. If it was today who knows? Maybe they might not have closed on the house, so that can create stress.”

The outage reportedly impacted over eight million devices in the global IT crisis, cancelling thousands of flights, impacting train services, hospitals and even ATMs. But it’s not just tech issues that’s causing financial anxieties of late – there’s also ongoing political tensions and unpredictable future market trends.

“And of course, the geopolitical atmosphere can create stress,” adds Harrison. “The market's going up and down. Personally, we just suffered a hurricane here in Texas. I had a client who was without power for a week and a half.”

And Harrison’s certainly not alone in voicing concerns around unforeseen and uncontrollable financial stress. According to research from CNN, 71% of Americans cite money as a significant cause of ongoing financial stress, with 76% of households admitting to living from pay check to pay check. In order to combat these negative connotations, Harrison encourages his clients to participate in a freeze exercise.

This freeze exercise was created to help clients distance themselves from a super stressful situation – giving them a moment’s reprise to breathe and take a logical next step. When confronted with stress, Harrison advises clients to take a moment to freeze and ask themselves three questions: “What am I thinking? What am I feeling? And then what am I doing?”

“As they work themselves through that triangle of the thoughts to the feelings and what they're doing, I also hope that they can go back to what their values are and be able to bring their values into alignment of the decision they're going to make,” says Harrison.

He draws an analogy with the common response to encountering a bear in the woods: fight, flight, or freeze.

“Well, the third choice is freeze. And sometimes doing nothing is one of the best things you can do,” Harrison emphasizes.

To measure the effectiveness of these strategies, Harrison begins client sessions with a reflective question: “What has changed since the last time when we met?”. From there, he encourages clients to recount stressful situations they have navigated and how they managed to get through them.

“Tell me about some times where you had a stressor that we know was affecting your life or affecting your finances, and how? Tell me how you got through it - and how can you put yourself in a position so that you can handle those stressors better as they come up?”

Situations such as the CrowdStrike outage only serve to highlight how important psychological resilience is in dealing with financial stress – as well as ongoing regulatory changes.

“The landscape is constantly evolving, and one of the chief ways I express to clients that I'm aware of it is by making sure we understand that the one constant is change,” Harrison says. “We always have to accept the certainty of uncertainty. I don’t know who the President is going to be next year, I don’t know how many hurricanes are going to hit the East Coast this year, I don’t know if the market's going up or down. Part of being a financial advisor is developing a plan that accepts there are a lot of unknowns - and that's okay.”

For Harrison, his approach drills down focusing on distinguishing between what can be controlled and what cannot – and identifying the two quickly.

“There are a lot of knowns as well, and that's what we want to focus on,” he tells IN. “What do we know? What do you have control over? What do you have influence over? And what do you have neither any control nor influence over?”

And, to stay compliant in the uncertain market, Harrison relies heavily on thorough documentation and technology – much like many of his peers.

“It comes down to having client sessions, documenting the conversations, and using the technology we have today,” says Harrison. “I ask clients, is it okay if I record this conversation for my note-taker? Then I have that data so that as I prepare for the next sessions, I can always go back and refresh.”

This meticulous record-keeping proved valuable during a recent client interaction. One of Harrison’s clients reached out and asked what they should be buying considering the market is falling.

“I reminded her she mentioned wanting NVIDIA stock,” adds Harrison. “She responded, ‘I didn’t say I want Nvidia.’ I went back to the notes, took a screenshot, and sent it to her. She replied, ‘Oh yeah, I did say that.’

“Clients want to know that we're listening, that they're heard, even when they don't remember what they said.”