Professional and Personal Development
There is no substitute for committing to professional development. You are the key component of your business. Your success depends on how much you develop your success skills. No amount of technical expertise can overcome negativity or poor attitude. Financial advisors who are gifted technically, but struggle professionally, will never reach the level of success and happiness of those who have mastered both.
Many people contact me who are gifted technically. They have MBAs, CFPs, CIMA designations, and CFA levels one and two. They’re brilliant, yet they also struggle personally with their success and have never mastered themselves. They have never mastered their personal side. When you harness both and can master both, that is when your business explodes.
I want you to commit to growing personally and professionally. Read a motivational book each day. Listen to tapes and CDs, attend motivational and sales seminars. Maybe even find a coach. Another thing you can do is find the successful advisors you admire in this industry, call and interview them for a few minutes. Find out their key beliefs about success and the ways in which they achieve it.
Next, become a student of success and create a personal development (PD) budget for yourself. I call it a PD budget. The same as major corporations set aside money and funds for research and development to improve their processes to improve their products, their services, so should you. You are the product and service. So, set aside some money and really begin working on improving YOU!
Have a Level 10 Day
The next strategy for success is what I call committing to a Level 10 day. Remember when I asked my client to rank his days? I want you to do the same thing by creating a daily scorecard.
Begin with a sheet of graph paper or an Excel spreadsheet, whichever feels most comfortable. Write down numbers 1 to 30 or numbers 1 to 31, like a month of blocks on a calendar. Add an A.M. and P.M. measurement, and then a Final or Total. When you’ve finished, Day One will have a block for a morning score, a block for an afternoon score and then a total score at the end.
Use a five-point system for staying on track. So the maximum you can get is a five in the morning and five in the afternoon for a total score of ten. Level 10 days should not be given out lightly. Those are the days that everything works wonderfully… it flows, you are proactive, you are productive, you took on a great client, got a ton of referrals, and probably made a lot of money. That is a real strong Level 10 day; you probably went to the gym, worked out and you even felt stronger about it.
Just before lunchtime or whenever you take your midday break, take 30 seconds to give yourself a ranking from 1 to 5. I’m the first to admit this is subjective, but it’s still extremely valuable to find out how you operate. When are you strong? When are you weak? When do you have your most energy? Rate your morning from 1 to 5.
Before you leave the office for the day, I want you to give your self another score from 1 to 5 for the afternoon, based on being productive and proactive. Then add up your total for the day.
A score of 8+ is okay. If you are any less than 8, it was not a good day. What a sub-8 score tells me is that you are in trouble or at risk of not accomplishing your long-term goals. If you do 8+ or better, that’s wonderful and congratulations!
NOTE: The key thing is to look for trends. Some people are morning people, so their A.M. rankings are like four 5’s or five 5’s, then the afternoon scores come in and they’re bottoming out with 2’s and 1’s. Wow! Like what happens in the afternoon? If you notice similar patterns in yourself, pay attention to those trends and we’ll see if we can turn that ship around.More in our next issue! 
