Many veteran advisors contact me with the following questions:
In my 33 years of consulting with Olympic, World Champion, and professional athletes, and comparing them to elite athletes who never reach those heights, I have come to a major conclusion:
Everyone is gifted, but most people need
help ”unwrapping their gifts,” because those
gifts sit dormant, buried under layers of
self-doubt, fear of failure, and feeling like
they really don’t have what it takes to
make a lifelong career of financial advising.
Once advisors recognize and believe in their special “gifts,” they can literally separate themselves from the competition.
Helping advisors to uncover their true “gifts” requires understanding the cause of their insecurity and planning game-changing alternative thinking habits.
In earlier blogs, I have discussed the “Impostor Fear,” very common among advisors at various stages in their careers. Many advisors, like many elite athletes, feel like impostors, having much less belief in their ability than their managers, parents, colleagues and spouses have in them. These advisors attribute their current “success” to luck and in their heart of hearts believe that sooner or later the bottom will fall out when these people realize that their “hero” really is inadequate.
The fastest way to eradicate this fear is to recognize the thinking patterns that develop it in the first place, and then changing your thinking to healthier habits. Here are examples of thought patterns that lead to insecurity and the “Impostor Fear:”
Understand that those thoughts are self-sabotaging and are not usually based on rational conclusions, but instead on irrational fears about what might happen in the future.
Whenever you catch yourself thinking negative, self-defeating thoughts about your career, stop those thoughts dead in their tracks by snapping a rubber band (e.g., the fat kind that come in the mail) on your wrist, while saying to yourself: “Stop this silly thinking right now.”
Next, substitute more rational thoughts such as the following:
Once you practice eliminating the negative, self-sabotaging thoughts that have kept your true “gifts” buried, and replace those thoughts with healthy, rational, positive thoughts about your success, you will begin to separate yourself from the competition, build your book of business and flourish in your advising career!