Misguided Helpfulness

In this episode of the Purposeful Planning podcast , host Susan Bradley sits down with Dr. Moira Somers to discuss her book The Fault Lines of Finance: Understanding and Preventing Financial Misconduct. The conversation centers on what Dr. Somers calls "misguided helpers": well-meaning financial advisors, family office professionals, and other wealth advisors who inadvertently cross ethical lines not out of malice, but out of an overwhelming desire to be useful to clients navigating difficult transitions like divorce, illness, or loss. Dr. Somers unpacks how discomfort avoidance, empathic overreach, and a false sense of urgency fuel scope creep, and she offers practical strategies for catching these patterns before they cause harm, including pausing to ask whether one is truly the best-suited person for a task, building peer communities where advisors can safely surface their hardest and most emotionally charged cases, and treating attention to one's own personal life and well-being as an ethical safeguard rather than a luxury. The episode closes with a call for moral humility and moral courage, encouraging PPI's community of heart-centered professionals to recognize their own vulnerabilities and non-negotiables so they can serve families well without losing themselves in the process.