MBFW Continuing Education for Professionals

20 Continuing Education Hours
Click here for professional associations’ continuing education sponsor and approval list

MBFW Program overview:

Financial advisors play a critical role in the lives of their clients. The support and guidance advisors offer at each step of the financial planning process is often essential to a client’s financial health and welfare, and in turn their client’s ability to meet their needs and obligations and pursue their interests and goals.

However, research from fields including behavioral finance, neuroeconomics and financial psychology continue to describe human factors such as emotion-driven behaviors, cognitive bias, and personal psychology which can often complicate and prove problematic to successful financial planning and personal finance. The research also shows that the practice of mindfulness advances the development of capacities which address many of these challenging human factors.

Mindfulness is an innate human capacity rooted in present moment attention and awareness which can be further developed through specific forms of mental exercise. The research indicates that practicing mindfulness fosters a process of optimization that ripples throughout major areas of mind and body functioning, improving individual cognitive, emotional, physiological and behavioral operations and promoting their integration as a unified, coherent and regulated operating system.

The benefits of mindfulness have significant implications for more effective personal finance, and financial health and well-being. Practicing mindfulness supports the ability to maintain or return to present moment awareness, recognize and understand more fully what is at play, remember what is truly important, align with personally held values, goals and intentions, and respond consciously rather than react from habit, emotionality or impulsivity. The net result is improved decision-making and more skillful action.

The MBFW program is a pairing of mindfulness-based practices and the framework and philosophy of the wellness model. Experiential with significant didactic elements derived from the empirical literature, the program is grounded in the principle that the development of a personal mindfulness-based practice and approach to money, personal finance and financial life is essential to effectively integrate the educational components of MBFW. Upon completion of the program, participants will have a personal foundation in mindfulness practice, and a direct understanding of the benefits of mindfulness and the applicability of mindfulness to money-related issues translatable to professional related-services and working with client populations.

This continuing education program is designed to help you:

  1. Understand mindfulness as both an inherent human capacity and a personal practice.
  2. Develop a personal mindfulness-based practice.
  3. Develop increased presence, non-reactivity, stress-reduction and compassion.
  4. Enhance intra-personal and interpersonal awareness and relational and communication skills.
  5. Recognize the benefits of mindfulness.
  6. Understand financial wellness as a dimension of the wellness framework and philosophy.
  7. Recognize scientifically-derived human factors relevant to personal finance process, financial life and financial well-being.
  8. Gain understanding of the neurobiology of financial related stress and implications of stress reactivity to financial life.
  9. Learn to mindfully utilize the facets of financial wellness in daily life.
  10. Recognize how mindfulness is supportive to the personal finance process.