Financial advisors’ clients can achieve better outcomes by setting their own goals, says Dr. Kristy Archuleta, an associate professor at Kansas State University.

Many advisors feel that statement is correct, but Archuleta set out to try to prove it. The results of her experiment indicate that advisors can be much more useful to clients if they let the clients take the lead in setting goals.

“We often hear advisors say they work hard to develop a financial plan for their clients, but the clients do nothing to try to implement it,” she says. Solution-focused financial therapy may be the answer to that problem.

Archuleta conducted an experiment with clients and graduate students to test how much difference this approach can make. The results were published as a white paper, “Financial Goal Setting, Financial Anxiety, and Solution-Focused Financial Therapy: A Quasi-Experimental Outcome Study.”

The paper was accepted by the Certified Financial Planning Board’s Center for Financial Planning for its 2017 Academic Research Colloquium for Financial Planning and Related Disciplines.

Under the solution-focused approach, clients are prompted to set their own goals and then rate themselves on where they are in the process of meeting those goals.

“We asked them to decide what is one small step they can take immediately to move themselves toward the goals they say they want to achieve,” she says. “We have them think about what methods have worked for them in the past and how they repeat that in the future.”

The experiment on which the paper is based showed that clients were less anxious about their finances after a brief discussion with a student advisor using the solution-focused technique. The next step would be to determine if this short-term result can be maintained over the long-term, Archuleta says.

“This is the first study to test this approach in a controlled clinical environment and the potential outcomes of this approach applied to a financial setting are exciting,” she says in the paper. “Not only is the solution-focused approach a model that can be used by financial therapists, but financial planners and financial counselors can also benefit from implementing this approach with their clients.”

Future financial planners can use this method “as an effective way to interact and work with clients to produce successful outcomes and help clients to achieve goals,” she adds.