I’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence of the unreconstructed boy’s club view of financial advice just lately.

It’s all about sales, mate. Get on that phone and smash some targets, Big Dog. The leads aren’t weak, YOU’RE WEAK. Etcetera, etcetera.

I like to think it’s all part of the natural death rattle of advice-as-hard-sales and, to be fair, it’s mixed in with more encouraging voices.

I enjoyed hearing Sarah Steele of Yellowtail talk powerfully about the importance of leaving room for vulnerability when giving advice, with which I absolutely agree.

The framing of financial advice as tough-boy sales ignores the inconvenient fact that advice just isn’t something you can ‘sell’ to people

There are many great women in advice, doing great things. But facts are facts, and women are still an embarrassingly small minority (16%, according to Personal Finance Society data – which is humiliatingly low for a sector purporting to take itself seriously from a simple inclusion perspective).

But there’s a further irony in all this, in my view. It’s not just the fact that women can be as good at this job as men.

And I have a fundamental problem with that patronising narrative – that we blokes are letting women in because, hey, they’re just as good as us in some ways (basically, advising women).

The truth is more radical than that. We need them.

The old salesy tactics have become less relevant than just being an authentic person who’s genuinely interested in helping people

I’ll choose my words carefully, so the ‘What about International Men’s Day?’ lads don’t get their compression boxers in a twist: traditional feminine-coded qualities are, in my view, much more relevant and useful in financial planning than traditional masculine-coded ones.

We need more of this so we can be a better industry.

I’ve always had a girl brain, but I haven’t always been the toe-curling shrine to militarised wokeness you see today. I was forged in the hellfires of a salesy national IFA, and I take some morbid pride in the fact that I held my own among those filth-flinging Morlocks.

I did a stint in bancassurance, FFS. I’ve delivered fictionalised business pledges to regional door slammers with the best of them.

I was a successful ‘product seller’ to the extent that I once got bussed off to the polo, to stand in an enclosure with all the other target-smashing scuzzbags who didn’t understand a bloody thing about either polo or how to hold a champagne flute correctly.

The role rewards people who can lean into their feminine-coded attributes, not the opposite

So, it’s not like I can’t do that stuff. It’s just that, over the course of these 20 or so years, I’ve come to realise it’s not the best way to do the job, or even to gain clients.

The phony masculinisation of service jobs has been old hat for 60 years.

I suppose it was necessary, otherwise all those ‘Needlenose’ Ned Ryersons who had just been dragged out of farms and factories and told to sell insurance policies would have become permanently limp.

Greg Moss: Why we can’t hold on to the decent new talent

But the framing of financial advice as tough-boy sales ignores the inconvenient fact that advice just isn’t something you can ‘sell’ to people. Good advice, anyway.

People need to want it. The process needs to be truly relational to be worthwhile.

As we’ve moved towards a planning model, and the emphasis has shifted to ongoing services over wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am product flipping, the old salesy tactics have become less relevant than just being an authentic person who’s genuinely interested in helping people.

You need real trust – not the fake, short-half-life kind you get by using parlour tricks you read in your copy of Spin Selling.

Another thing I can tell you about the best advisers I know (male and female) is that they’re not emotionally buttoned down. I don’t know many Gary Cooper types who have done well in advice.

Traditional feminine-coded qualities are much more relevant and useful in financial planning than traditional masculine-coded ones

I’m unapologetically emosh. Go on, try it. Say something nasty below the line and I’ll cry at you. Or attack you at a CPD event. It can go either way, so you can’t say you weren’t warned.

It makes sense though, right? It’s the flip side of emotional intelligence, which is the number-one attribute in a good planner in this humble man’s opinion.

So let’s discard this absurd idea that a good adviser is a person who can make 1,000 cold calls and not completely depersonalise when they hear 990 ‘Sod off’ replies.

That’s not a sign of resilience; it’s a sociopathy red flag.

The point of this ramble is definitely not that women are ‘naturally’ soft, or that they have a monopoly on emotional intelligence, or so-called soft skills.

Decades-out-of-date gender stereotyping has no place anywhere, and not in my job.

The phony masculinisation of service jobs has been old hat for 60 years

The point is that I reject the made-up white-collar machismo. It isn’t just irrelevant to financial advice; it’s the opposite of the truth.

Whatever your pronouns, if you’re new to advice you’d do well to understand that the role rewards people who can lean into their feminine-coded attributes, not the opposite.