Welcome to the March 2009 edition of Clear Your Roadblocks To Success.
Welcome to the March edition of our Clearing Your Roadblocks E-Newsletter.
This edition includes three timely articles entitled
- ‘Why The Preoccupation With Bad News?’,
- ‘Going Beyond The Comfort Zone’, and
- ‘Do Something That Scares You!’
February was a very busy month for us that included investing eighty hours in two different weekend personal development courses and properly launching our speaking marketing by getting a speaking folio, book and DVD into the hands of Advocis Chapters, managing general agencies and life insurance companies from sea to shining sea.
The reason that I share what we are doing is not to brag, but to demonstrate that we are walking our talk using the coaching systems that I offer my clients.
It’s the beginning of our fourth year of financial advisor speaking and prior to that we were floundering around in the marketing ocean not getting results until we committed to The Nineteen Rules Of Niche and The Marketing Funnel ala Chris Barrow.
Last year at this time we only had two financial advisor speaking bookings with the entire group of Advocis Chapters, managing general agencies and life insurance companies and we were investing our financial advisor speaking energy with Pro-Seminars and The Independent Financial Brokers.
I am thrilled to say that this year we have loads of financial advisor speaking bookings and preliminary conversations for 2009 and 2010. Check out Speaking In A City Near You.
These results tie into our big vision that includes;
5. The Advisor Mind Gym Product
4. Financial Advisor Workshops
3. Financial Advisor Speaking
2. Publishing Books
1. One On One Telecoaching
To support this vision, I have been working with a new camera to create video logs ( Vlogs) that will improve our message. Check out http://www.youtube.com/user/leadingadvisor
It’s 6:30pm PT, Wednesday, March 4th and I’m just about to land in Comox and Laura is picking me up and we will stop for dinner on our way home and I’m thinking of taking tomorrow off as I have been on the road since Sunday.
Enjoy the read and thank you for the opportunity to be of service.
Simon Reilly
The Financial Advisor Coach
Simon Reilly Coming To A City Near You
Why The Preoccupation With Bad News?
If I said to you, “aren’t you sick and tired of hearing negative news”, I would feed into more of the negative news as there is chance that my question could trigger a negative response.
Aside from that, I wonder what it is about some people that seem to enjoy being right about some sort of pending doom and gloom.
I believe that we give the news media a bad rap and the reason I say this is because of Ian’s Brown’s February 26th article in The Globe And Mail – Divas of doom find their fame in pedaling the direst of fortunes to pessimistic masses – Bleak is chic as demand grows for dark oracles of blood-filled streets and ‘zombie banks’.
Ian’s article isn’t talking about the doom and gloom of blood in the streets, civil wars, the collapse of Eastern Europe, and toppled governments coming from the news media. The bulk of the bad news in the article is coming out of the mouths of university professors.
I mentioned Ian’s article to Robert Gignac, author of ‘Wealth Is A State Of Mind’, at dinner on Tuesday, March 3rd and Robert’s response was that these purveyors of Financial Armageddon have been around for years and publish the same book every five to seven years with a different cover … sooner or later they will be right. It’s like the 36,000 DOW, sooner or later, it is going to happen as I recall someone saying in the early eighties that the DOW will never go past 3,000 points. Let’s all hope that prediction does not come true today.
My interest in Ian’s article is not about the doomsters and their predictions; it is about why they do it aside from the $50,000 speaking fees. There has got to be more to it than “bad news sells”.
On one hand we have the oracles of bad news and in the other we have the unconscious masses.
Ian writes that we seem to enjoy hiding under the blankets, being told how bad the future looks and that it shocks us into feeling like grownups and getting real and at the very least we should stop and take a closer look at what we are afraid of. (for a day in my life of taking a closer look at what brings up the fear in me, see the following article – Do Something That Scares You! )
It is like we have to become five years old again and get slapped and then be put in a corner to take a ‘time out’ and beg for forgiveness.
“There is a peculiar human need to contemplate disaster,” Vivian Rakoff, professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto says. Because there is the sense that if it gets bad enough, we can start over again”.
BTW – Rakoff is not a doom and gloomer.
There seems to be a thread in writing about and reading about doom and gloom.
As I get into this I want to preface that I am only wondering about all of this and wish to shed some insight and it is not my intention to attack. I say this because I believe that I will make real whatever I attack.
The creator of the doom and gloom could be attacking the system whether the system is right or wrong because they lack fulfillment in some way shape or form and still have something to prove. They could have an unconscious negative belief of “if I can’t or didn’t make the system work for me then I will attack the system in an attempt to destroy it and try to make everyone else as miserable as I am”. A person will get their need to prove met in a functional or a dysfunctional way, this law is non-negotiable.
The reader of the doom and gloom could be stuck in some kind of pattern that goes back to when they were five years old and sent for a time out awaiting forgiveness from the matriarch or patriarch that sent them there. Their past time out is now replaced with taking a bad news break expecting that good news will show up and that they will be forgiven for their sins.
This same pattern reminds me of what is happening with some corporations who were asleep at the wheel for the best part of the decade having to go back to the government for forgiveness in the form of a bailout.
So here we are in the process of having a financial time out waiting for the matriarch and the patriarch of the money to forgive us for our senseless ways so that we can start anew.
I believe we are in one of the most significant times in history where governments on a global scale are reinvesting in infrastructure to jump start the economy without having to experience a world war … this experience that we are having will pass.
Going Beyond the Comfort Zone
The Recession Is A Choice, What’s Yours? financial advisor speaking presentation includes a segment on The Comfort Zone.
I’ve been reflecting about The Comfort Zone given that I see so many financial advisors stuck in it and my evidence is I just spoke to groups of financial advisors in two cities and when I asked them to raise their hand if they had a written vision, business plan and 90 day goals on January 1, 2009, not one of them raised their hand.
What is The Comfort Zone really?
It should be relabelled as The Experience Zone … we do what we are comfortable and experienced with.
Once in a while we will jump into The Willpower Zone and get what we want for a time and then fall flat back on our ass because The Willpower Zone is unsustainable.
Let’s not forget about The Instant Gratification Zone were we look for a quick fix in the form of drugs, shopping, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the consumption of all products containing alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, fat, salt and sugar. Note that I nicked the above list of medications off of James Redfield, who wrote The Legend Of Bagger Vance and The War Of Art, and his full quote is at the bottom of this article.
Like The Willpower Zone, after we get our quick fix with The Instant Gratification Zone we are right back where we started – struggling to survive versus being all that we can be.
There is another zone that we must face and to quote Chris Barrow; “To achieve a resolution that has integrity and sustainability it is inevitable, indeed necessary, to enter the discomfort zone. It cannot and should not be avoided, as it is an integral part of the process. Any resolution that has side stepped this area is unlikely to be robust and will collapse at some point.”
Going through The Discomfort Zone will lead us through to The Inspiration Zone which is essential to be all that you can be in any economy.
The Inspiration Zone is where we live our values and our vision and experience them through our personal and business goals combined with a business plan and 90 day goals.
Why do we resist The Discomfort Zone in our venti, half caff, non-fat, easy foam, extra hot, almond latte instant gratification society?
We have plenty of learned quotes to remind us:
“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain”
– William Faulkner“We cannot learn without pain”
– Aristotle“Doubt is pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother”
– Kahlil Gibran”
I believe the answer lies in this final quote that suffering is a choice.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
– Anonymous
To bring it all home, Carl Jung’s quote confirms that many of us are asleep in our subconscious mind doing what is easy staying in our justified busyness while our lives turn into dust.
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain”
– Carl Jung
Yes you will face fear by getting into The Discomfort Zone and the sooner you face it, the quicker it goes away.
I can show you how to eliminate your greatest fear in fifteen minutes. The same fear that is preventing you from writing your business plan, setting your goals, asking for referrals, attracting higher net worth clients and more.
The answer lies in my book, ‘Curing The Unmet Needs Disease’.
The theory is simple. Within The Discomfort Zones lies your unmet needs that generate negative beliefs and negative emotions and the book includes simple yet effective assignments that will help you break through to The Inspiration Zone.
These unmet needs that generate negative beliefs and negative emotions keep you stuck in a worse place than The Comfort Zone – The Sabotage Zone.
The Sabotage Zone includes behaviours like:
- Being a victim believing the world is always doing it to me
- Resisting change
- Withdrawing into the TV set
Unmet needs must be met and we will either meet them functionally or dysfunctionally gaining negative energy, through making excuses, not taking responsibility, and justifying.
“Avoid resistance at all cost. Resistance is an all-encompassing term for what Freud called Death Wish. Resistance cannot be reasoned with. It understands one thing. Power. Resistance takes on the form of drugs, shopping, TV, gossip, alcohol, drugs, and the consumption of all products containing alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, fat, salt and sugar. The greatest danger is Resistance knows when the finish line is in site and it will throw out one final assault.”
– Stephen Pressfield – The War Of Art.
What are you going to do that is different than yesterday?
When did you decide to quit?
Do Something That Scares You
It is a rare Tuesday afternoon with free time and I’m sitting in my Toronto airport hotel room in advance of an early dinner with Robert Gignac.
After completing my first go at my new financial advisor speaking presentation, Recession Is A Choice, What’s Yours? I’m taking the time to do an inventory of the feelings that I am experiencing; appreciation, confidence, contentment, delight, encouraged, energized, enthusiastic, excited, grateful, happy, involved, joyful, peaceful, pleased, peace, satisfied and thankful.
I believe that positive feelings have a vibration as do negative emotions, and with so much going on in the world it can be so easy to get sucked into negative emotions so I’m taking a break to write out, integrate, and magnify the positive feelings that I want to experience.
You can use unmet needs, negative beliefs, and negative emotions in functional and dysfunctional ways.
If you are like me, you have likely experienced or may be experiencing the negative belief that “I am afraid that what I am doing may not be good enough” or “I am afraid that what I am doing may not work” especially in this economy. These negative beliefs are propelled by the unmet need of worthiness and fuelled by the negative emotions of anxiety and fear.
Meeting an unmet need is non-negotiable and it must be met and our unconscious mind can drive us dysfunctionally if we don’t make a conscious choice.
I consciously make the choice to meet the unmet need of worthiness through the driving needs of:
- Challenge
- Control
- Connection
- Nurturing
- Power
Now I must admit that I can feel plugged by my negative belief of “I am afraid that what I am doing may not be good enough” combined with negative emotions of anxiety and fear when I set aside a perfectly good financial advisor speaking presentation in favour of an untested idea.
At the same time, I refuse to deliver the same financial advisor speaking presentation over and over again – I loathe the idea of coming out with the same financial advisor speaking presentation and stories because there is a good chance that after speaking to 10,000 financial advisors coast to coast that some of the financial advisors have seen me before.
So there, the driving need of Challenge gets met immediately because part of my financial advisor speaking presentation is to Challenge the financial advisor audience to think in a different way and of course I get Challenged by thinking a different way and creating a brand new presentation.
The driving need of Control is met because there is a deadline, a beginning, a middle and an end and the presentation has to be better than good … it has to be outstanding … if one is going to be a financial advisor speaker – be outstanding or don’t show up at all!
Driving needs of Connection and Nurturing are also met because I must Connect and Nurture myself at a deep level and really own the material that I am delivering at a deep level or I will come off incongruent – that is where the inside doesn’t match the outside and if a financial advisor speaker is incongruent they better bring the chicken wire because the financial advisor audience will throw tomatoes or worse yet, eat the financial advisor speaker alive.
When the financial advisor speaker is congruent, when they know their material, when they have done their own work to clear their unmet needs, negative beliefs and negative emotions they create the space of the financial advisor audience to do the same creating a safe environment to think outside the box and get out of their comfort zone.
When the financial advisor speaker can demonstrate how they embrace their emotions, the entire financial advisor audience grows from the process.
“We cannot grow without pain.”
– Aristotle
The combination of driving needs of Challenge, Control, Connection, Nurturing all combine to magnify the Power that comes through in the delivery and it shows up in the financial advisor speaking, financial advisor coaching and financial advisor writing that I do … and as you can see I am taking a little liberty with the Power tempting the search engine spiders with the repeat writing of financial advisor speaking and financial advisor coaching.
Power is honoured in another way through the financial advisor speaker testimonials.
I’ve just lived through and given you a demonstration of functional ways to get my unmet needs met while meeting the granddaddy of all unmet needs of safety and worthiness at the same time.
When unmet needs of safety are not met consciously one spends an enormous amount of time selling and selling, and selling and selling because one doesn’t and can’t ever feel safe because of unconsciously selling to get their unmet need of safety met never fulfilling the need leaving the financial advisor feeling unsafe, unworthy and burned out.
The key is to learn how to meet your driving needs and add value to others, add value to others and add some more value to others.
Having said all of this, the only time that we think about sales is to set our intention, the goal that we want to achieve at the beginning of the year/month and then we celebrate at the end of the month having met and exceeded our goals.
Last month ( February ) we booked five financial advisor speaking presentations, this month ( March ) we have a conservative goal for three and I believe we have four tentative financial advisor speaking bookings as a result of the meetings that I had on March 2nd.
Curing the Unmet Needs Disease
In Simon’s latest book you’ll discover the REAL reason why you are frustrated, stressed, and falling short of your financial goals.
There is a cure for this disease, but you won’t find it in a motivational seminar or a workshop on closing techniques. Nor will you be able to cure it yourself by working harder or spending more time prospecting. It’s deeper than that.
International Values and Behavioral Analyst, Business Coach, Speaker and Author
Executive Coaching Tips for Financial Advisors
Speaking at a City Near You