The other day, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that adds fresh evidence to an intriguing trend described in some detail in THE NUMBER: how so-called “life planning” has begun to reshape the language and the practice of traditional financial planning.

Life planners, qualified ones at least, operate out of a set of assumptions quite different from those of traditional financial planners. Qualified life planners aren’t quick to whip out pencil, paper, and start sketching bond ladders. They take the position that you and I need to do some real soul searching, trudge through honest self-examination, before we can work out a conscientious financial plan to guide us to satisfying careers and retirements. A good life planner is one with highly developed listening skills, knows when to talk and when to shut up and, most of all, understands the line between enlightened counseling and playing shrink. Qualified life planners think of themselves as torchbearers who can help us illuminate hidden hopes, dreams, and fears, whatever might be blocking our way to emotional satisfaction and material security. The good ones know where to stop. If they run into serious emotional knots, it’s a trained therapist’s job, not theirs, to unravel them.

Some industry forego the torchbearer metaphor, preferring water sports analogies. They view life planners as snorkelers, people who sould stick to the surface, as opposed to pscyhotherapists, who have the equipment to go deep. The problem, of course, how do you know if a self-proclaimed life planner is content to snorkel, or aspires to scuba, or even can’t swim very well? Life planners, like most financial advisers, aren’t licensed. Others call themselves life planners, or life coaches, and don’t even offer financial advice. All they to do is hang out a shingle, or just add the words to a business card. Then there are the legitimate financial life planners, who are few and far between, qualified financial planners who go off to study at the feet of a small cadre of life planning gurus, some of whom you’ll meet up-close and personal in the pages of THE NUMBER.

In any event, as the Journal piece attests, more and more financial consultants are pulling on their face masks and flippers. Life planning is going mainstream. Such firms as Ameriprise (formerly American Express Financial Advisors), Citigroup, Wachovia, and Smith Barney, among others, are beginning to add life-planning tools to their financial consultants’ client-interaction kits.

The Journal quoted one financial consultant from on such firm, “We need to give clients a sense of security so that they are willing to share with us things they don’t want to tell other people.” She also remarked, “Most of the times, I feel like Barbara Walters.”

The question is, how much training has gone into elevating this woman into the exalted position of bond-laddering confessor? Until you are confident about a life planner’s skills and experience, it’s probably best to keep the details of spousal money fights, fears of career impotency, and raging jealousy about rich friends’ expensive toys, to yourself. Maybe one day somebody will pry these out of your emotional lock box, freeing your spirit to work on a financial plan that will carry you to greater bliss and harmony. And you will be better off for it. But that somebody isn’t going to get you there on just a good Barbara WaWa impersonation.