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Written by: Chris Carnazzo | Your Money Cues
Financial planning is already a competence-heavy profession.
Clients expect you to understand investments, taxes, retirement projections, estate planning, insurance gaps, and complex financial decisions. That makes finding the right mix of warmth and competence tricky. Advisors need to project enough competence that clients trust your expertise, while also creating enough warmth that clients feel safe enough to fully open up.
That balance is exactly what led me to bring the question to Vanessa Van Edwards, one of the foremost researchers on human behavior and nonverbal communication. I had the opportunity to ask her directly while training as part of her first cohort of certified People School coaches.
So I asked her:
What is a good balance of warmth and competence for a technical helping career?
She explained that financial conversations are naturally going to lean heavily toward competence. That is the nature of the work. The goal is not to become endlessly warm or overly social. The goal is to establish enough warmth early in the meeting that the client relaxes and becomes receptive to the competence that follows.
As she put it:
You want to start off with a foundation of warmth so that paves the way for your competence.
That perfectly explains the warmth-versus-competence model that research in social psychology has documented for decades. Humans evaluate other people on two dimensions: do I trust you to have my best interests at heart (warmth), and do I believe you can actually deliver (competence). When both are high, you land in the Charisma Zone. When they are not, the consequences shift dramatically.
Charisma Scale
When warmth and competence are both high, you land in the Charisma Zone. Clients feel emotionally safe and confident in your ability to guide them. That is where honest conversations about fear, overspending, shame, uncertainty, and money scripts actually happen.
If competence is high but warmth is low, you slide into the Competent quadrant. And here is where the research gets sharp. Your client respects your intelligence. But their brain has already filed you under a threat. High competence with low warmth reads as cold, calculating, even dangerous to the human nervous system. So instead of relaxing, they tense. They nod through the meeting while quietly withholding the real story. You finish the meeting thinking it went well. They leave having already decided not to come back.
This is not about likability. It is about threat-detection. Susan Fiske’s research on stereotyping found that humans make this warmth-and-competence judgment in the first few seconds of an interaction. The judgment happens faster than conscious thought. By the time you sit down across the desk, your client has already decided whether you are safe or a threat. That five-minute window after they sit down, the slow version of that snap judgment, is your only real opportunity to shift it. Miss it, and the rest of the meeting is an uphill climb.
Front-load warmth
One of the most interesting parts of her answer was that warmth starts before you even speak.
She pointed out that family photos, vacation pictures, hobbies, sports memorabilia, and other personal ornaments act as warmth cues the second a client walks into the office. As she put it: “I’m a person, not just a spreadsheet machine.”
Then she introduced what she calls the assumption of friendship. Assume connection first. You already share common ground with the client. They care about their family and financial future. You care about helping them protect it. So instead of approaching the meeting guarded or overly formal, you walk in assuming warmth and goodwill already exist.
That naturally changes your energy.
Three to five minutes of genuine warmth is usually enough to create the emotional foundation that allows the competence-heavy middle of the meeting to land.
Sprinkle warmth through the competence
The warmth does not disappear once the numbers come out. You sprinkle it back in.
Discussing a child’s college fund, you pause and say: “Sarah’s seven now? Ah, love that age.” The recommendation itself does not change. But the conversation feels human again instead of purely transactional.
Small pronouns do the same work. Saying “as we work through your plan” or “we’re going to figure this out together” keeps the client emotionally connected while the meeting stays competence-heavy. Tiny warmth cues. Small dial adjustments. But enough to keep the client emotionally connected to you while the substance stays rigorous.
And that is really the point.
You do not need endless warmth.
You need enough warmth for the competence to land.
Related: The Deferred Life Syndrome: When Preparing for the Future Delays Living Today