/ 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:
Read more
To Ensure Success, Financial Advisors Must Fight Through Mental Roadblocks and Self-Doubt
/ 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:
Read more
How Financial Advisors Can Take Control Over Their Time
/ 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.
Read more
Why Mediation Skills Matter for Financial Advisor Success
/ 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.
Read more
Keep Your Clients Focused on What’s Knowable and Important
/ 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.
Read more
Self-Discipline Is Key
/ 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.
Read more
Conquering Your Clients’ Financial Fears
/ 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.
Read more
How Advisors Can Inoculate Themselves from Fee Compression
/ 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.
Read more
Automated Marketing for Financial Advisors – 5 Ways to Improve Your Practice
/ 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.
Read more
5 Risks You Run If You Grow Your Practice Too Fast
/ 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.
Read more