Editor’s note: Chris Holman is a Master Certified Coach, executive coach to financial advisors, and author of the book Discovery Shift: Why Talking Less and Listening More Wins Business. He will host a Discovery Workshop on February 9–10. Find details and register here.
When I first began studying discovery meetings in 2018, I thought I was looking at a communication problem. Advisors asked too many closed questions. They talked too much. They rushed. They missed emotional cues.
The fix seemed obvious. Ask better questions. Listen more carefully. Slow things down.
That assumption didn’t survive contact with reality. The advisors I watched were capable, ethical, and well-intentioned. Many were successful by any external measure. Yet their discovery meetings consistently failed to surface what actually mattered. Prospects cooperated. They answered questions. They nodded. Meetings felt productive. And then nothing happened. No clarity. No commitment. No forward momentum that felt earned.
The early mistake was subtle. We treated discovery as a communication problem. It wasn’t.
Ambiguity is the threat. Not poor listening
The first real insight was uncomfortable. Discovery wasn’t breaking down because advisors didn’t care about listening. It was breaking down because discovery itself is structurally threatening.
True discovery suspends certainty. The problem is not yet named. Emotion appears without labels. Contradictions surface. Silence stretches. For a profession trained to reduce uncertainty and demonstrate competence, that suspension registers as risk. Advisors don’t rush because they are impatient. They rush because ambiguity triggers their nervous system.
Planning, structure, and intake show up early because they regulate the advisor, not because they serve the conversation. That reframing changed everything. Advisor behavior stopped looking like resistance or weak skill and started looking like self-protection.
Intake wearing discovery’s name
From there, another uncomfortable truth emerged. Most meetings labeled “discovery” were never designed for discovery in the first place. They were intake meetings. Efficient. Professional. Safe.
Intake gathers information. Discovery creates conditions for meaning. Intake feels productive even when nothing meaningful is revealed. Discovery feels slow and exposed even when it is doing its best work. The industry rewarded intake for decades and then wondered why trust felt thin.
This also explained why training alone rarely stuck. Listening was not a skill problem. It was a condition problem. Advisors often knew exactly what they should have done. Under pressure, they couldn’t access it. Money intensified emotion. Evaluation pressure activated self-monitoring. The harder advisors tried to listen, the more effortful and performative they became.
Effort backfired. Control returned. Once we looked at discovery through a nervous-system lens, familiar patterns started to make sense. Talking is not just a habit. It is a relief. Silence triggers ambiguity alarms. Talking delivers dopamine and restores control. Habit circuitry takes over under load. The prefrontal cortex degrades precisely when restraint is required.
Advisors don’t talk too much because they want to dominate. They talk because biology is doing what biology does.
Pressure shapes outcomes more than questions ever did
This revealed a force that had been hiding in plain sight. Progression pressure. The urge to move forward before meaning stabilizes. Advancement begins while the prospect is still forming their own understanding. Once progression pressure enters, prospects shift from reflection into cooperation. They answer in ways that keep the meeting moving. Advisors mistake compliance for engagement. Meetings “go well” and go nowhere.
Slowing discovery did not reduce efficiency. It changed who stayed in the room. Discovery turned out to be a selection mechanism. Speed and certainty attracted shoppers. Slowness and ambiguity attracted partners. Intake selected for low emotional cost. Discovery selected for seriousness and readiness. Advisors did not lose good prospects by slowing down. They filtered out mismatches earlier and more cleanly.
Every advisor recognizes the moment when a conversation clicks. For a long time, that click was chalked up to chemistry or luck. It isn’t. The click happens when internal regulation effort drops. Pace slows. Silence stops feeling dangerous. Both parties stop managing the conversation. Trust forms before insight. Ironically, advisors often destabilize this moment by trying to help.
What we still don’t know. And why that matters
None of this has led to tidy conclusions. The work has shifted from techniques to thresholds. How long ambiguity can remain productive. When pause has done enough work. How an advisor knows meaning has stabilized enough to advance. How fear can be recognized without drifting into therapy. What replaces conversion as the felt success signal when revenue and identity are still on the line.
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the current edge of the work. What feels clear now is this. Discovery is not a meeting skill. It is a pressure environment.
Advisors do not need better scripts. They need conditions that make restraint possible. Intake is becoming automatable. Interpretation, presence, and regulation are not.
Discovery has quietly become a human advantage rather than a sales step.
And the work is unfinished. Which is exactly where it belongs.