An important part of my work is to help with an individual’s or couples’ or business owner’s financial decision-making.

As this is dealing with finances, the process leading to the decision can be, if we are not wary, over-prescribed or sanitised. For instance, we can look at what something costs, its charging structure, or in the case of an investment option how it has performed in the past.

In other words we can just take a bit of information and process it and analyse it and weigh up its value or significance in regards to the whole. A similar-type function to a comparison website.

It’s not that the information is unimportant, far from it. Its just that it may not be the priority consideration or it may have to be contextualised.

Sometimes we refer to decisions being made on both hard facts and soft facts. A hard fact is the information-based aspect such as how much something costs, or how it has performed historically. Another hard fact would be how old someone or how much money they have in the bank.

Soft facts relate to lifestyle wishes, future goals and so on.

There is another soft fact and one which has far more importance than may be apparent, at first glance.

This is what we call “behaviour”. This is a tricky subject to summarise in a few lines, but essentially someone’s behaviour is a mix of their characteristics, traits and biases.

Everyone has these, and so one person may be described as a risk taker and someone else a risk avoider, as one such trait.

This is important to understand, and highly influences the ultimate decision.  A risk taker may be prone to looking at information and decide to “go for it”, to take a leap, where a risk avoider reigns in, and decides to do something “more sensible”.

This is where it gets interesting, and where I come in, because there are commonly situations which arise where the risk taker makes a better decision “being sensible” and the risk avoider “going  for it”.

This means when we get to key decisions, we must consider hard and soft facts, but also factor in whether our internal nature and biases have to be worked through to see a clearer picture.

The advice process which leads to, hopefully,  great decisions is therefore far from prescriptive.

It helps to bring these other crucial aspects in, on top of the core information processing.