focus on what's important Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

To Ensure Success, Financial Advisors Must Fight Through Mental Roadblocks and Self-Doubt

April 1, 2024 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Being a financial advisor can be an enriching career with both monetary and personal fulfillment. The price for such success is years of hard work, sacrifice, and overcoming extended bouts of mental roadblocks and self-doubt that can shatter one’s self-confidence and potentially derail a career.

These mental hurdles can manifest in various ways but are almost always a result of intentional or unintentional behavior that hinders your own success or well-being—in other words, self-sabotage. It’s like consciously or unconsciously throwing a wrench in your own engine by the actions you take, such as procrastination, negative self-talk, perfectionism, quitting tasks prematurely, and avoiding challenges.

It can also transpire through unhealthy mindsets such as fear of failure, fear of success, low self-esteem, imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, and limiting beliefs.

Few careers are as demanding as being a financial advisor, which makes it imperative to avoid doing things that can make it more difficult. All these actions and mindsets are avoidable, but it takes a conscious effort to weed them out, using “emotional self-regulation” – a process of monitoring, evaluating, and modifying your behavior. Here’s how it works:

How Financial Advisors Can Take Control Over Their Time

February 19, 2024 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

As a financial advisor, your most valuable resource is your time. If you are not in control of how you spend your time, then you are not in control of your results. Controlling your time and injecting your schedule with the right mix of high-payoff activities is vital to achieving your goals.

However, time is a diminishing resource, which is why it’s so valuable yet so challenging to manage. Advisors must find a way to maximize their critical high-payoff activities, such as client interactions, prospect meetings, and prospecting, while allocating sufficient time for other essential activities that need to get done, such as administrative tasks, marketing, and planning. Advisors must also be able to allocate adequate time for professional and personal development and ensure there’s enough left over for a healthy work-life balance.

Why Mediation Skills Matter for Financial Advisor Success

September 4, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

When most people think of mediation and negotiation, it typically refers to lawyers or third parties who facilitate dialogue between two or more parties to help them reach an agreement. In practice, financial advisors sometimes find themselves in the same position, having to resolve conflicts between a client’s family members or within their advisory team, where it’s essential to find win-win solutions.

Disagreements about money are common among married couples. Money conflicts are often rooted more deeply in people’s attitudes and beliefs about money, or, in some cases, money is not even the primary issue. However, in almost all cases, it involves two or more people who don’t know how to engage in productive financial conversations.

For Financial Advisors, the Road to Success Begins with Solid Prospecting Habits

February 6, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

For financial advisors, there’s nothing like the thrill of signing a new client. But it doesn’t take very long in the business to realize that, without prospecting, those thrills can be few and far between. While signing new clients is the opportunity all advisors relish, they must first create those opportunities, which can only be done through continuous prospecting.

Most advisors consider prospecting to be the most challenging aspect of their work. The challenge for many is doing it consistently and effectively enough to produce sufficient opportunities. For some advisors, prospecting is an afterthought, only becoming necessary when their pipeline dries up. But with the typical lead-to-prospect conversion process lasting as many as six months, that could mean weeks or months before signing a new client.

Successful advisors know that the key to sustainable growth is a constantly replenished pipeline through persistent prospecting. The only way that happens is by building solid prospecting habits.

Here are the essential success habits advisors must develop to become effective and consistent prospectors.

Keep Your Clients Focused on What’s Knowable and Important

May 9, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

The media has always run rampant with scary headlines. That’s how they increase readership or website traffic. However, in this period of increased market volatility, economic uncertainty, geopolitical upheaval, mixed COVID signals, and deepening political divisions, the headlines can be incredibly overwhelming or, at the very least, extremely distracting.

Trying to consume all the news coming at us 24/7 is like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s critical to understand that the barrage of bad news and hype around market events can trigger emotional reactions that often lead to making costly decisions around their finances.

Self-Discipline Is Key

April 4, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

An Advisor once sent me this message:

“You mentioned in one of your webinars that talent by itself means nothing. The key is to develop that talent into a skill. In your opinion, what is the most underappreciated skill among great advisors?”

Listen to this audio episode or read the transcript below to learn what I think great Advisors’ most underrated asset or skill is.

Conquering Your Clients’ Financial Fears

February 21, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

One of the most powerful emotions we all experience is fear. When it comes to our finances, fear can drive us to make decisions we later regret. More often, fear leads to decision paralysis when we retreat to the comfort of indecision or simply bury our heads in the sand.

To many people, their financial future is a threat to their well-being – the fear of not being able to retire, the possibility of losing one’s job, or being forced into early retirement. These are all financial threats that breed the worst kind of fear. Many people cope with them by doing everything they can to avoid them. That can be a lot easier than facing their fears, especially if they lack confidence in solving the problem.

How Advisors Can Inoculate Themselves from Fee Compression

November 8, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

In our last post, we highlighted four critical issues financial advisors face in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, impacting the way they approach their businesses and the way clients are responding. In the next month or so, we will take a deeper dive into these issues, the challenges they present, and how advisors can meet them head-on for a greater chance at success.

At the top of the list—an issue familiar to all and well-covered here in past blog posts—is fee compression.

Automated Marketing for Financial Advisors – 5 Ways to Improve Your Practice

August 3, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

For many business owners marketing is tough and likely not the reason they started their business in the first place! As a Financial Advisor, your work is primarily focused on money management and building client relationships, not marketing. Having said that, a proactive and well-planned marketing initiative can go a long way in improving and growing your practice, so you can do more of what you love.

5 Risks You Run If You Grow Your Practice Too Fast

November 18, 2019 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

It’s natural to strive to grow your business, but too rapid a growth can bring with it a host of problems. By taking on too many clients and ‘running before you can walk’ you might damage your practice in the long run.

“The fuel of persistence is patience, the ability to tolerate delays while persisting.”

Elite advisors all share an important trait – that of patience. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. If you don’t see that success requires time and effort, you will remain at a mediocre level.

Here are five consequences of attempting to grow your practice too fast.

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