The other day I called a body shop after discovering a small crack on the inside edge of the door of my new (used) SUV. I didn’t know what the part was called—just that something didn’t look right. The receptionist was polite but peppered me with industry lingo: “Is it near the A-pillar? The hinge mount? You mean the inner panel or the outer skin?” I was out of my depth. My vague description didn’t help, and the more I tried to explain, the more frustrating the conversation became. Eventually, I just asked (begged): “Can I come in for an estimate? I think we’ll get further face to face.”

Driving over, I couldn’t help but realize how often this same dynamic plays out in our profession.

In the world of financial advising, it’s easy to “talk shop” with clients—throwing around terms like sequence risk, duration drift, direct indexing, Roth conversion windows, and standard deviation. These concepts are second nature to us. But for the client on the other end of the conversation, they may be nodding politely while silently lost. Not wanting to sound uninformed, they agree or move on—when what they really need is clarity, not jargon.

This is the paradox of being a professional: the more deeply you know something, the more conscious you must be of how you share it.

Clients don’t need a firehose of technical detail, nor do they want to feel talked down to. They want to feel confident in their decisions. That requires us not only to understand complex strategies, but to translate them into stories, visuals, and analogies that resonate. It requires us to pause and ask—not do you understand? but what’s your sense of this? or would it help to walk through an example?

At Golden Wealth Management, we strive to make the complicated simple, not simplistic. That starts with knowing when to stop “talking shop” and start listening.

Sometimes, just like with the body shop, the best service starts face to face.