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Written by: Chris Carnazzo | Your Money Cues
Something feels off.
You can’t quite put your finger on it. You have just spent hours building a flawless financial plan. The recommendations are rock solid, the math is bulletproof, and the strategy perfectly aligns with what the client explicitly told you they wanted.
You sit across the desk and present the plan. The client nods, flashes a polite smile, and says, “This looks great. Let’s do it.”
But the energy in the room shifted. You shake hands, the meeting ends, the paperwork comes back signed. And then… nothing. The transfers do not happen. The insurance review never gets scheduled. The plan sits in a drawer, and you are left wondering what went wrong.
“The Perfect Plan Is Rendered Useless in the Absence of Execution”
That line comes from Brendan Frazier, Chief Behavioral Officer at RFG Advisory and host of The Human Side of Money podcast. His mission is teaching financial advisors the behavioral and emotional skill set that turns a written plan into a client’s actual life.
Frazier is pointing to a specific body of research. In a 2019 Financial Advisor Magazine study of 138 advisors who deliver formal plans for a fee, roughly half of clients implemented less than 20% of the plan’s recommendations within six months, and nearly a fifth implemented nothing at all. Combined, that is about seven in ten clients walking away from a paid financial plan having acted on almost none of it.
Why does this happen? If the math is right and the client consciously agreed, why does the plan die a quiet death?
At FPA NorCal, psychologist Dr. Frank Murtha put the problem perfectly: “Financial planners don’t say the wrong things to their clients. They say the right things when the client is not yet ready to hear them.”
How could you have known they weren’t ready?
It was written all over their face.
The Fake Smile and Ekman’s “Hot Spots”
When a client says “yes” but their body feels a “no,” they create a subtle physical mismatch. Dr. Paul Ekman, the pioneer of microexpression research, refers to these moments of incongruence as “hot spots” in his foundational book Telling Lies.
A hot spot occurs when someone’s spoken words clash with their nonverbal signals. In a financial planning meeting, this is rarely a malicious lie. More often, it is a client trying to mask discomfort, shame, or fear.
Take the fake smile from our opening scenario. A genuine smile of agreement reaches all the way up to the eyes, creating crow’s feet. But a fake smile stays trapped in the bottom half of the face. The client is smiling through an uncomfortable recommendation not because they agree, but because they want the conversation to end. As Vanessa Van Edwards explains in her People School curriculum, which I am certified to coach, “Fake happiness is all about giving people permission.” That tight, polite smile gives you permission to move on from a topic that makes them secretly anxious.
The Brain Mechanics: System 1 and System 2
To understand why clients say one thing while their face broadcasts another, we have to look at the underlying brain structures. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman famously divided our thinking into two modes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: System 1 is fast, automatic, and emotional, while System 2 is slow, logical, and deliberate.
When you talk about money, you are almost always triggering a client’s System 1. If you propose a strategy that secretly terrifies them, their amygdala, the brain’s fast, automatic alarm system, flags a threat instantly. This neurological pathway is known as the “Low Road.” Because the amygdala processes threats faster than conscious thought, it fires off an involuntary microexpression of fear or anger before the client even realizes they are upset.
This matters because of what it reframes. When you trigger a client’s System 1, you are not just fighting their logic. You are brushing against their survival instinct. The job is to make them feel safe enough that System 2 can come back to the table.
There is a reason those involuntary signals skew toward fear. In their 1979 paper introducing prospect theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that losses register roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains. Frank Murtha translates this into practitioner language as F = 2G, fear is twice as powerful as greed, and frames a client’s fear in a planning session as the perceived loss of control. That is the mechanism running beneath the conversation. The cue is what shows up on the face a fraction of a second later, while the conscious mind is still trying to catch up.
A split second later, the prefrontal cortex, Kahneman’s logical System 2, catches up. But deliberate thinking takes effort. Because the brain is lazy and generally avoids social conflict, System 2 often just rubber-stamps the emotional reaction and builds a polite cover story to make it sound reasonable.
The mouth delivers the conscious, polite answer: “Sounds good.” But the amygdala already gave you the unconscious truth through a flash on the face.
The Reality Check: We Are Not Mind Readers
It is incredibly empowering to understand the biology of these reactions, but we must stay grounded. Emotional stuff is complicated, and people are rarely transparent about what they actually feel.
The reality is that the half-second flashes of microexpressions are a bonus, not the foundation of your practice. You cannot tell exactly what a client’s deep-seated money script is from a single glance across a conference table.
But you can look for the clues.
Ekman’s concept of hot spots teaches us that while we cannot read minds, we can spot the exact moments when a client’s internal narrative conflicts with your advice. As Van Edwards notes, “reading microexpressions is the single best way to spot sales hesitations.” If “sales” feels off because you work fee-only, the same logic applies to advice hesitations. The label changes; the mechanism does not.
Reading those cues lets you diagnose in real-time whether a client’s hesitation comes from the timeline, the price, or a deeper emotional trigger.
When you spot a hot spot, whether a fake smile, a flash of fear, or a quick smirk of contempt, you follow Van Edwards’ golden rule: “The first emotion shown is the truth. Everything after that is public relations.”
What to Do When You Spot One
You do not use this to play “gotcha” with your clients. You use it to realize they are not ready to hear the financial advice yet. The hot spot is your cue to stop the spreadsheet presentation, slow down the pacing, and get intensely curious about the emotional loop happening underneath the math.
Try this in your next meeting. Do not chase every microexpression. Look for one moment where the words and the eyes do not quite agree. That single hot spot is your invitation to slow down and listen deeper.
Related: A Ten-Year-Old Ran My IRA
References and Further Reading
Ekman, P. (2009). Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. W. W. Norton and Company.
Frazier, B. The Human Side of Money podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-human-side-of-money/id1509519096
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-292. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914185
Klontz, B. T., Britt, S. L., Mentzer, J., and Klontz, P. T. (2011). Money beliefs and financial behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory. Journal of Financial Therapy, 2(1).
Murtha, F. FPA NorCal May 2026 presentation.
Peterson, R. L., and Murtha, F. (2010). MarketPsych: How to Manage Fear and Build Your Investor Identity. Wiley.
Van Edwards, V. (2022). Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. Portfolio.
Van Edwards, V. People School curriculum. Science of People. https://www.scienceofpeople.com/training/people-school/
Where Formal Financial Plans Fail. (2019, December 3). Financial Advisor Magazine. https://www.fa-mag.com/news/where-formal-financial-plans-fail-52847.html