Stand out from the traditional professional and position yourself for the future.
Let’s face it, the pandemic has turned our lives upside down in so many ways: working from home has grown at lightning speed, confinement has limited our interactions with family and friends while homeschooling has become the norm. The sanitary measures have transformed the “client experience” into a completely different “experience”…
What if we looked at it all from a whole different perspective, in fact, from the perspective of human behaviour? After all, we’re humans at the service of other humans, right?
The pandemic has placed humans before their greatest fear – that of death.
The physical death of course, but also the death of “how it used to be” and “how it’s supposed to be”.
Before the pandemic, your clients were on a path: saving or growing their assets, retiring at 62 and a half, buying a cottage, and moving to the country at 65…
And now, thanks to the pandemic (yes, yes, I wrote that correctly thanks to), everything is turned upside down: values, life priorities, etc. The pandemic has allowed many people to get off the treadmill of everyday life to reassess what they really want.
And this is why YOUR role is so important.
The difference between a professional advisor and THE trusted advisor is courage: the courage to initiate conversations that I call of the second level conversations, that are true, deep, impactful.
Knowing that the pandemic has confronted your clients with their biggest fear, death – and in this case, let’s talk about the death of “how it used to be” and “how it’s supposed to be” – the trusted advisor will have the courage to ask introspective questions.
Being a trusted advisor isn’t only about giving out information. The value of the trusted advisor lies in the transformation they offer; allowing his clients to bring to light what’s really important to them, to overcome their limiting beliefs, in short, to challenge the status quo.
The trusted advisor’s greatest value is helping their clients challenge the status quo.
The conversation with our clients can be initiated in different ways. Here are my favorite questions to start those second-level conversations:
- What have you learned about yourself during the pandemic?
- If there were one or two elements of the confinement that you would like to keep in your post-pandemic life/routine, what would they be?
- What was your best discovery during the coronavirus crisis?
- How has the pandemic influenced your vision for the future? Your values? Your life priorities?
Obviously, these conversations are very different from “How are you? Yes, confinement is hard…” and other conversations on Trump, vaccines, or the weather… But if you want to stand out (and be truly relevant to your clients!), you have to get to the heart of their (sometimes unconscious) concerns.
The professional-expert will keep talking about the plan, the strategy, the things-we-must-do, while the trusted advisor will dare to step out of his comfort zone in order to challenge his client’s comfort zone.
This could be the beginning of a new era because, ultimately, as we all know, the magic is outside our comfort zone…
And it’s outside of our comfort zone that we see that…so much more is possible……
It is always with great pleasure that I read your comments. You can contact me Sara.Gilbert@Strategist.cc, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and now Instagram.
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