Waiting while your clients are hemming and hawing about making an important financial decision is no fun.

As a financial advisor, you probably have a decisive personality yourself, says Rosemary Smyth, a business coach and owner of Rosemary Smyth & Associates in Victoria. Your education and professional background enable you to make changes and decisions with confidence. However, your clients are unaccustomed to making these types of choices and often are impeded by a fear of making the wrong decisions.

Walking your clients through a process that informs and encourages decisiveness will empower them — and make your job easier. Once clients are confident enough to decide on one outcome, future decisions will be less difficult.

Here are the three steps to helping clients make decisions:

1. Review the choices
Volunteer to go over the client’s options. This initial step demonstrates that you are patient and that your client can depend on you for guidance. When defining their choices, Smyth says, provide no more than three options.

For example, you are talking to a client with low risk tolerance about diversifying their portfolio to include foreign investments. Suggest no more than three funds that meet those criteria.

When you’re reviewing the options, be clear about the various features of each product, such as management fees and portfolio managers. For clients who have a tendency to overanalyze their options, provide a strict deadline for a final decision.

2. Examine the options
You want your clients to fully understand the differences between the options they have in front of them. One way to help move the decision along is to list the pros and cons of each possibility. Also, ask your clients to explain what they feel are the positive and negative elements to these choices.

“When the ‘cons’ come up,” Smyth says, “you can see what it is that is triggering their fear.”

Another method of qualifying these options is to ask your clients what is the most important factor to consider in making a decision.

For example, a client might say she cannot fathom losing more than 5% of her investment. That is something for you to consider as you look at possible investment options.

You can also reframe the situation by asking your client what he would do if a friend had asked him for advice in the same circumstances. This method allows clients to see the decision more objectively.

3. Implement the decision
“Once they go through the process and they’ve made a decision,” Smyth says, “tell them that you’ll get started right away.”

Don’t lose the momentum, Smyth says. Maintaining progress will make your client feel good about having made the decision.