Vanessa Bennett is using neuroscience and cognitive energy to improve the health and wellbeing of financial services professionals. She explains her approach to Jayson Forrest.

An academic report last year garnered attention for all the wrong reasons, by confirming what many financial planners already knew, that regulatory and compliance demands were the leading contributors of stress for practitioners.

The report, ‘The Australian Financial Advisers’ Wellbeing Report’ – a first of its kind study into the health and wellbeing of Australian financial planners conducted by The e-lab and Deakin University – reported that a concerning 82 per cent of practitioners said they found regulatory and compliance demands to be ‘highly’ to ‘very highly’ stressful.

Add to this the 73 per cent of planners experiencing high levels of burnout from work; 67 per cent dealing with some level of depression; and 17 per cent indicating they were depressed most or all of the time.

Not surprisingly, the findings don’t paint a good picture for the mental health and wellbeing of financial planners, and it’s a picture that Vanessa Bennett is all too familiar with.

Having previously worked in financial services for over 20 years, including senior roles as an Associate Director with Macquarie Bank and as Head of Financial Adviser Distribution for Dimensional Fund Advisors, Vanessa knows exactly what workplace stress and burnout looks like. It was during this time in the industry that she witnessed high levels of burnout.

It was also during this time that Vanessa was also involved in instructing fitness classes, which forced her to become incredibly organised in order to juggle both the demands of her career and fitness instructing. She credits this balancing act to her obsession with being organised and getting work done in the easiest way possible.

This obsession became a slow burn idea for Vanessa, who realised that too many people were simply busy with being busy, and not being as productive as they could be. She knew people needed help to better manage their own time and stress levels.

“I have always believed that people deserve a way to become more productive in what they’re doing, and in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s an effort to achieve,” says Vanessa.

In 2012, this belief became the genesis of Next Evolution Performance – a high performance coaching company – where she was able to combine her financial services experience and fitness coaching skills to help build people who were both physically and mentally healthy and therefore, able to better optimise their productivity, energy and profitability – and all without burnout.

Cognitive energy

As CEO and Co-founder of Next Evolution Performance, a core part of the coaching process that Vanessa and her team use revolves around neuroscience and cognitive energy.

At its most basic, neuroscience is the study of the nervous system – from structure to function, development to degeneration, in health and in disease. It covers the whole nervous system, with a primary focus on the brain.

“The brain is an incredibly complex organ,” says Vanessa. “Our brains define who we are and what we do. They store our memories and allow us to learn from them. Our brain cells and their circuits create new thoughts, ideas and movements, and reinforce old ones. Their individual connections are responsible for a baby’s first steps and every record-breaking athletic performance, with each thought and movement requiring exquisitely precise timing and connections.”

Vanessa believes what makes the high performance coaching at Next Evolution Performance different from other offerings, is its use of cognitive energy, which she says is the key foundation for performance. Cognitive energy is also known as mental energy or emotional energy.

“Most people either don’t know about cognitive energy or understand it, let alone know how to optimise it,” says Vanessa. “Optimising cognitive energy in all working environments is the gateway to everything, from productivity to a success mindset.

“When working with clients, cognitive energy is our starting point. It sets us up for building greater foundations for improving productivity, energy and profitability, while avoiding burnout at the same time.”

Frameworks based on science

With an astonishing 73 per cent of planners experiencing high levels of workplace burnout, Vanessa’s approach to using cognitive energy is to first assist clients in precisely understanding what it is. The next step is to use science-based frameworks to help clients optimise their cognitive energy by spending less of it unnecessarily, and to maximise the use of it in a sustainable way.

According to Vanessa, the frameworks can be used in different ways. The frameworks essentially enable people to reach an end goal, although how people implement that framework is different for each individual or team.

“By tailoring these frameworks to individuals and teams, people are more likely to stick with them and implement the frameworks. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cognitive energy,” says Vanessa. “So, our role is to guide people through the process, to help them find the best way to implement the framework that’s suitable for them and their team.”

And while many business coaches focus on getting the internal systems right to make sure a business’s compliance is as easy as possible, Next Evolution Performance differs by addressing the human-element of a business – the people – by approaching issues, like compliance, in a more productive way. It does this by harnessing the collective cognitive energy of the whole business to help people better manage these issues.

An important part of addressing that ‘human-element’ is working with ‘accidental leaders’. According to Vanessa, many small businesses, including financial planning practices, often have staff who become ‘accidental leaders’. These type of leaders find themselves in a leadership role they didn’t expect, or don’t know how to perform in it, or even don’t want to do.

“We call these people ‘accidental leaders’,” she says. “So, another big part of what we do is provide financial planners with frameworks that make leadership easier for them. We want to help planners spend far less time leading, but still get great leadership outcomes, so they have more time to spend with their clients, which is a win-win for everyone.”

Cracking established beliefs

But how can financial planners use neuroscience and cognitive energy to better understand themselves and their clients, in order to manage and promote stronger health and wellbeing?

“It’s a great question,” says Vanessa. “The way we approach it is that once we sort out a person’s cognitive energy and their mindset, we do some more advanced work around ‘beliefs’. Beliefs are the sum of our experiences. Beliefs are not wrong. They are our truths, but they might not be the truth according to others.”

According to Vanessa, both financial planners and clients have beliefs. Planners have beliefs around productivity, staff recruitment, how they train staff, and remuneration. Vanessa recalls many meetings with planners who refuse to charge clients what they should, because of their internal belief systems and issues with self-worth.

“Clients also have beliefs. When they first walk through a door to see a financial planner, they have set beliefs around money, what a financial planner is, and what their service expectations should be,” she says.

“If we can crack these established beliefs, that’s where we can really start to get the magic happening. It doesn’t happen overnight. But once we get the cognitive energy right, then we can work on the mindset.”

So, how does Vanessa’s team go about ‘cracking’ established beliefs?

The process Vanessa uses involves looking at the client’s goals, establishing what their beliefs are concerning those goals, and if there are any beliefs that don’t match those goals, then it’s about tackling those beliefs individually.

“We get our clients to really question a lot of their beliefs, and to think about better beliefs to have in order to achieve their goals,” says Vanessa.

“So, if a financial planner wants to increase their fees by 20 per cent but their belief is that clients won’t pay that, then that belief is not aligned with the planner’s goal. That means we either have to change the goal or change the belief, but we still need to make sure both goal and belief are aligned.”

Avoiding burnout

With over 20 years spent working in the financial services industry, Vanessa has been able to draw on that experience when coaching planners and advice businesses.

“Having come from financial services, I understand the demands and stresses of this industry. And so, working with financial planners is a joy for me. The importance of their work cannot be underestimated. They work in such an important area, helping to improve the lives of everyday Australians and providing them with peace of mind,” Vanessa says.

“So, we understand planners. We know they are time and energy poor. But because we have been working with planners for over 10 years, we have developed some great tailored solutions that we know work for them.”

To avoid being one of the 7-in-10 planners who experience high levels of burnout from work, Vanessa believes it is essential for practitioners and advice businesses to address any potential adverse issues before they occur.

She explains: “It’s far better to set up frameworks for planners as leaders, as well as their teams, to prevent problems, like burnout, from happening. If you have a really great high performance culture, which is clearly articulated, it makes it easier to recruit people, to retain people, and for those people to feel inspired to do their best work. By doing so, you are more likely to avoid burnout and avoid any mental health issues.”

Through her work with planners and firms, Vanessa is acutely aware that it’s much easier and far cheaper to address issues before they become problems. She refers to the ‘opportunity cost’ of waiting until you have a problem, which she believes is particularly relevant for the profession.

“Waiting until you have a problem before adequately addressing it leads to staff turnover,” she says. “The cost to replace a team member is 2.5 times that person’s salary. So, if you’re paying someone $100,000, that’s effectively a hit of $250,000 to your bottom line when you consider the costs of hiring and training a new person, and the downtime between personnel. And that doesn’t even include the cost of the toll that it takes on other people’s productivity and mental health as part of that overall process.

“We also knew that pre-COVID, 50 per cent of people of working age were going to develop a mental health problem, and that figure is even higher in financial services. So, imagine if 50 per cent of your staff are going to be off work or have reduced capacity and productivity. Just think about the maths around that and your bottom line!”

But for those businesses Vanessa works with that plan ahead and address potential issues before they occur, they generally increase their profitability by around 20 per cent.

“These businesses feel they are getting an extra two hours of productivity per person per day. That’s not insignificant when you consider salary costs alone, let alone the ability to bring in new revenue. So, from a profitability perspective, mental health, physical health and cognitive energy absolutely makes great business sense.”