Aileen Miga stands on tiptoe, reaching up for an invisible object in a busy Starbucks in downtown Toronto. She wobbles for a minute, and then lowers her feet back flat on the floor before reaching up again, this time with ease.

The 39-year-old advisor at RBC Mutual Funds Inc. and RBC Life Insurance Co. is demonstrating one of the basic tenets of her practice: when you have a solid foundation, you’re less likely to falter when you’re trying to reach your goals.

“If we’re on the tip of our toes and we’re reaching for something, we’re not going very far because we’re afraid of falling,” Miga says, taking a seat. “But when we’re back on a solid foundation, we’re going to be much more successful.”

This exercise doesn’t look much like financial planning, but nothing about Miga or her career path has been typical. In the early 1990s, she left a customer service position at Royal Bank of Canada to put her business savvy to work, starting a company she called Blind Masters, a “mobile ultrasonic blind-cleaning service” in Hamilton, Ont.

She sold the company in the mid-’90s to take a district manager position at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. As a former business owner, Miga had a knack for consulting with entrepreneurs about how legislation and taxation affected their companies.

But something else about her job struck a chord. “Working so closely with these people,” she says, “I started to see all the emotional and financial dynamics of being a business owner, and the importance of succession planning. And I realized that what they really needed was planning.”

Miga left the CFIB in 1999 to earn her certified financial planner designation and insurance licence, and soon after became an advisor at the now-defunct Regal Capital Planners. When that firm was bought out in 2001, she joined Berkshire Investment Group Inc.

In 2004, Miga took a position as a private wealth consultant at Altamira Investment Services Inc. Miga was finally on a career path she found fulfilling — but something was missing.

“When I started to do financial planning, I realized that the process was extremely valuable. But I also felt it was incomplete,” she says. “None of the tools were available to me to create the holistic approach I wanted, and I knew that if I valued that approach, I would have to create the tools on my own.”

But Miga’s practice didn’t truly take shape until she visited her chiropractor, Janice Hughes. “Instead of telling her my back hurt,” Miga says, “I went in and said, ‘I’m a young mom, I’m building a financial planning practice, I believe in a holistic approach and I need to strengthen my own health so I can do this work.’”

The pair found that their seemingly different professions had a lot in common. While Hughes aims to align her patient’s spine to create physical strength and stamina, Miga strives to give her clients a solid foundation to achieve their financial goals and their life goals.

In a unique working partnership, Miga and Hughes co-wrote Inspired Wealth: Financial leadership for the 21st century. The book brings together Hughes’s life-coaching skills with Miga’s holistic financial planning philosophy to create what Miga calls “a personal development program” aimed at sustainable wealth creation.

In May 2006, Miga joined RBC and now serves 60 high net-worth clients, many of whom are small-business owners and executives. Her practice, she says, naturally attracts those looking for more than just a retirement plan. “I tell new clients that this is an opportunity to structure their finances in a way to achieve their life goals. And many people say to me, ‘I don’t know what they are yet’,” she says. “They’re busy with career and family.”

It takes more than financial planning to help clients make the connection between their values and their money. In 2001, Miga became a lifetime member (and an ongoing student) of what is now called Coachville, a New Jersey-based virtual university that teaches life-coaching skills. Miga continues to offer personal coaching sessions to entrepreneurs and fellow financial planners alike.

Miga says the coaching skills she has learned over the years were the missing pieces in her financial planning practice: “When you’re coaching someone, they often say, ‘I would love to do that, but what about the money?’ And when you take the financial planning-only route, people say, ‘OK, but what about my life? It’s not just about the money’.”

@page_break@As a self-described “wealth coach,” Miga says, she has to move her clients forward as a whole, not just accelerate their finances. The lessons of the coaching profession have paved the way. For instance, self-assessment tools help her guide clients to better self-awareness and a clearer understanding of why they do the things they do. “People are often distracted by everyday life and they lack an environment to focus. I think an advisor can create that environment,” she says.

Over the years, Miga has noticed that clients often know what they want, but not what they need. Part of her job as a holistic financial advisor is to uncover what motivates her clients so they can achieve their needs, which inevitably leads to achieving what they want.

While Miga’s clients trend toward the wealthy side, she abides by the philosophy that having more and becoming less is not a recipe for sustainable wealth. In other words, her clients are learning that keeping up with the Joneses isn’t going to make them happy if it means abandoning their values.

A single mother of two, Miga unwinds by cooking and entertaining when she isn’t meeting clients or spending time with her family. In the meantime, she’s building her business by holding networking events such as Wealth, Wine and Women, a wine-tasting event she hosts three times a year to introduce women to the value of financial planning.

Miga’s practice will continue to change over time, but her dedication to creating an environment that breeds introspection and success will hold steady: “When I meet a client, I ask myself, ‘How can I inspire them to achieve their dreams?’ I want them to feel better leaving our meeting than they did coming to it.” IE