At a time when financial planners are under attack from disgruntled clients reeling from the dramatic loss of capital and income, progressive thinking planners see this as one of the turning points in a profession struggling for greater credibility and influence over a client's financial affairs.

To these new generation advisers, the current environment is an enormous opportunity to become more relevant and valuable to their clients, not to feel threatened and insecure.

If we've learnt one thing from the past 18 months it is that we know what a financial planner can control and what they can't. More vitally, clients now know this. Investment returns and market performance are out of the control of the planner and the consistent focus of this industry to portray itself as "investment experts" is wrong.

Advisers have jealously guarded their "expertise" around asset management and the ultimate outcome of that asset, investment returns, since the birth of this industry. Primarily this was due to the fact that advisers have been paid to do just that: invest and manage the assets of clients. But financial planners must finally let go of this sacred cow and accept that their role is far more fundamental and responsible than managing assets, vaguely suggesting that they have some influence over investment outcomes.

The key message is to do a better job in educating and informing clients about their financial goals and lifestyle expectations. Financial literacy is ridiculously poor and this industry has largely survived on "blinding clients with science," rather than empowering and educating them to become more involved with their financial plans. Financial plans of the future will be simpler, easier to understand and more meaningful to clients on their lifetime goals.

The investment industry's simplistic mantra to assuage client hostility on losses is to "keep your nerve and think long term." This fails to recognise the concerns and underlying issues of clients and why they invest and take advice form planners in the first place.

Clients seek professional advice to gain comfort and peace of mind that they will reach their goals and desired lifestyles with certainty.

Financial planners exist for one primary reason: to improve the quality of life for their clients. How do we, as simple financial advisers, achieve that lofty and broad goal ?

Have we given clients more confidence or less in reaching their financial outcomes during this particularly volatile period of investment markets?

To become a new generation adviser, planners need to focus on clients and their underlying issues, their life aspirations and goals and their desired lifestyles. Ultimately clients pay financial planners to help them achieve a quality of living; whether that be saving for retirement or a shorter term tangible goal.

The recent investment shocks have rocked clients and they are now clearly uncertain about whether they can afford the lifestyle in retirement they originally planned on, For some clients who have never had confidence that their financial plan would indeed get them to their destination must feel rudderless in a violent storm.

New generation advisers know that their role is to empower clients to become self-sufficient in all areas of money management. This is more than simply lazy investing of lump sums. Research conducted in 2002 by marketing research firm Intellectual Capital on the future of advice suggests that clients will use planners to help influence better savings behaviours and control their cash flow as the core role of the advice relationship.

Future planners will also build their advice and position their value around a deeper understanding of clients' needs and expectations and work to manage the trade off between these expectations and the actual or desired lifestyle outcomes.

Ultimately financial planning is about helping people reach their lifestyle goals, not the dazzling technical detail of a weighty financial plan. The financial plan is simply a means of getting there. But along the way clients experience turbulence and temptation. The progressive planner will accept the role of coach and mentor to guide clients into better money management behaviour and to keep clients non track and clear about where they are headed. That will achieve more confident, resilient investors than a self serving message about "thinking long term."

So how can financial planners redefine their role to become more influential and relevant ? The key is to understand their lifestyle expectations and aspirations. If planners have a clearer picture on where a client wants to go and why, then it is easy to become more central to helping clients reach the milestones to these goals.

This is more difficult than it suggests as the average client doesn't know what they want or where they are headed. They have generally a poor level of clarity about their lifestyle aspirations and expectations and thus, fail to engage in the financial planning process.

If planners adopt a more holistic lifestyle approach to their financial planning process, they will find clients more actively engaged in the financial plan, and ultimately, taking greater responsibility for its implementation and outcomes. Wouldn't that be a utopia that all financial planners would desire?

Many financial planners see lifestyle planning as a vague, soft and fluffy issue. That's largely because lifestyle planning is a poorly understood term and, as a result, there is little serious efforts in this country to embed a true lifestyle emphasis into the traditional financial planning process. The result is that planners continue to work in a vacuum where a client's core underlying needs and expectations about lifestyle are separated from the technical plan construction, The future will see progressive planning firms who can integrate both lifestyle and technical planning into a cohesive, more meaningful document, a true guidemap to a client's financial journey.

Best practice advisers will change the dialogue they have with their clients, right from the first introduction meeting to annual review meetings. New generation advisers will ask more questions about lifestyle expectations and have a more consistent, systemised process to more accurately assess risk and reward. This will allow a client and a planner to jointly agree on the trade offs of financial risk.