One-Third of Your Clients Are Ready to Leave (Stephen Wershing)

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

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Tags: Client Experience, Copyright, Current, Feedback, Investment Opportunity, Investment Options, Investors, Loyalty, Moving, Northstar, Paradox, Referral Opportunities, Referrals, Relationships, Respondents, Simple Satisfaction
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The Key to Sleeping Better

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

By Norm Trainor

Many finan­cial advi­sors tell me that they suf­fer from sleep dis­or­ders. I have expe­ri­enced dis­rup­tive sleep pat­terns since my child­hood. Often, I will wake up at 3 or 4 AM and have dif­fi­culty get­ting back to sleep. My mind kicks in and will not rest. I think about my busi­ness and the chal­lenges we face. Like many high achiev­ers, I am dri­ven to achieve busi­ness goals and my focus is on what we need to do to accom­plish our objec­tives. At times, my desire to achieve those goals gets in the way of my performance.

My wife, Wendy, is a Mar­i­tal and Sex Ther­a­pist. One of the things she has taught me is that anx­i­ety is blocked excite­ment. When­ever we expe­ri­ence anx­i­ety, it is a result of los­ing touch with our excite­ment. Many suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sors have dif­fi­culty in dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between goals and work­ing to the best of their abil­i­ties. They don’t wake up in the morn­ing and say “I’m going to work to the high­est level of my capa­bil­ity today.” They start out with a goal. It is the goal that moti­vates them. The pro­found point of dif­fer­ence is in the pur­suit of doing your best ver­sus need­ing to achieve an out­come. You learn to give up your attach­ments to results. If you are true to your pur­pose, what will hap­pen is meant to be. If you do your best and do not achieve your goal, it is the right out­come. This is a pow­er­ful insight and, yet, we are often left with the ques­tion, what do we do about it?

For many finan­cial advi­sors, the drive is to reach a desired rev­enue goal e.g. $150,000, $500,000, $1,000,000, etc., not to be the best they can be. You change the inner game when you pur­sue your goals as a means of ful­fill­ing your capa­bil­ity. The para­dox is that pur­su­ing a goal often gets in the way of peak per­for­mance, espe­cially when anx­i­ety comes into play. We begin to obsess and worry about the achieve­ment of the goal. As a result, we lose touch with our excite­ment about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

One of the best ways to achieve bet­ter out­put is to let go of your attach­ment to results. If you are doing your best, then being attached to out­comes can only reduce your out­put, let alone qual­ity of life. Goals are use­ful in that they give us a tar­get to pur­sue. When we con­vert those goals into objec­tives i.e. spe­cific mea­sur­able results within a stated time­frame, we can track our progress.

What is impor­tant is to keep the end game in per­spec­tive. Our work is not about reach­ing a goal. At its best, work makes us whole. It is a means of express­ing what is impor­tant to us and gives us mean­ing. We spend more time at work than in any other area of our lives. If we are not enjoy­ing our work, it takes a toll on the rest of our lives. So, next time you wake up at 4 AM and find your­self obsess­ing about work, take a minute to re-connect with your excite­ment about what you are doing and why you are doing it. This will allow you to fall back into a pleas­ant and rest­ful sleep.

Norm Trainor is the founder of The Covenant Group, a com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in prac­tice devel­op­ment for advi­sors. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit his Web site at www​.covenant​group​.com.

Fol­low The Covenant Group at:

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Tags: Anxiety, Attachments, Back To Sleep, Business Goals, Capability, Desire, Excitement, Financial Advisors, High Achievers, Inner Game, Insight, Losing Touch, Norm Trainor, Paradox, Peak Performance, Performance Anxiety, Sex Therapist, Sleep, Sleep Disorders, Sleep Patterns, Wife Wendy
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Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Here, below, we share with you this thought pro­vok­ing pre­sen­ta­tion made by Psy­chol­o­gist Barry Schwartz on the para­dox of choice. As an advi­sor, you may have encoun­tered the prob­lem of poten­tial clients tak­ing a very long time to decide on a course of action that you have pro­posed to them.

As a for­mer advi­sor, there were times (in hind­sight, of course), in fact, I’m pos­i­tive, that I over­whelmed poten­tial clients (and they stayed that way) because I was try­ing too hard to impress them by lay­ing the (invest­ing) world at their feet. In a nut­shell, keep it sim­ple. That makes for much eas­ier deci­sion making.

Barry Schwartz takes aim at a cen­tral tenet of west­ern soci­eties: free­dom of choice. In Schwartz’s esti­ma­tion, choice has made us not freer but more par­a­lyzed, not hap­pier but more dissatisfied.

Click play to watch:

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Tags: Aim, Barry Schwartz, Central Tenet, Estimation, Freedom Of Choice, Hindsight, Investing, Long Time, Nutshell, Paradox, Psychologist, Western Societies, World At Their Feet
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