invest in self-development Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

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 Financial Advisors Quit

February 12, 2024 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

It’s estimated that nine advisors out of ten don’t last three years in the industry. That seems high for a career that offers so much promise and potential. Most people come into the business checking all the appropriate boxes for having what it takes. Still, when you consider the gap between reality and expectations of fledgling financial advisors, it begins to make sense why most choose to leave the business.

To put it bluntly, not everyone is cut out for a career as a financial advisor, even for those who do check all the boxes. However, with a better understanding of why many financial advisors quit the business, you can beat the odds by avoiding that fate.

The reasons why financial advisors quit are varied, but here are some of the most common.

What No One Tells You About Being a Financial Advisor

October 24, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 2 comments

In my opinion, there has not been any better time to be a financial advisor. At a time when the world is inundated with chaos and hyperbolic media noise, financial advisors are proving their worth. An increasing number of people are seeking guidance and clarity beyond the cookie-cutter world of robo-advisors and financial pundits.

Those who seek a career in helping people achieve their life ambitions with personalized advice have the chance to be very successful and personally fulfilled. However, with less than 300,000 practicing financial advisors in a country of 330 million people, relatively few people are choosing that path, and even fewer are succeeding.

5 Steps to Create and Sustain a Winner’s Mindset

November 30, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

I’ve already written about self-sabotaging behaviors, and how to avoid them. But today, I’d like to address the flip side of the coin: How you can actively develop and maintain a winner’s mindset.

I’ve known many hugely successful advisors in my time. And they all have certain traits in common:

– They take a proactive approach to time management;
– They don’t make excuses for themselves. Instead, they take on and eliminate or bypass obstacles;
– They surround themselves with positive influences and accountability partners;
– They constantly expose themselves to positive messages and ideas.
– They get help when they need it.

So here are five things you can do to help develop that winner’s mindset – and sustain it over time.

4 Reasons Financial Advisors Should Invest in Education and Self-Development Early On

May 11, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Why Advisors Should Invest in Education and Self-Development Early On

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Warren Buffett is perhaps the most successful investor there ever was. Not from just one or two big hits, but from a long string of investment successes over more than six decades. But he didn’t get where he is now without studying very hard at Wharton, then at Columbia, where he studied with the legendary Benjamin Graham.

Further, like a Roth IRA, self-development pays off the most when you do it aggressively early in life. The benefits of learning and knowledge compound over time (as long as you keep learning).

Here are four reasons why you should start investing in education and self-development as early in your Financial Advisor career as you can.