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PAY ATTENTION AND EARN TRUST
By Bill Bachrach, CSP & Steve Shapiro
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Trust cannot be built where judgment is present. --Stuart
Wells
Most of us in the financial services industry have been taught
that persistence (a.k.a. high-pressure sales and is mainly negative-emotions based)
is our ticket to paradise, but Trusted Advisors know the high-trust relationship
(mainly inspiriting, positive-emotions based) is the key. And two things kill trust
faster than anything else does: pressuring people and judging them. To listen, you
must suspend your judgment and allow yourself to be fully present with the other
person.
Listening is the opposite of pressure, which is like a brake on
the wheel of progress. Instead, listening is the fuel of progress in the financial
services business. Listening leads to success.
Genuine listening makes genuine honesty possible. When people
feel both respected and heard, they are more inclined to reveal themselves. As a
Trusted Advisor, you want people to tell you the truth about their money and their
objectives, and you also want people to be able to hear and act on the truth you
will be communicating. Both ways, the truth has a lot of power.
It's your job to convey active listening without ever saying a
word, to create a space where truths can be spoken, heard, and believed. Trust is
the key to having all three, and listening is the building block of trust. Indeed,
if you don't have trust, people won't be willing to tell you their truth or be able
to listen to the truth you tell them.
If you don 't have trust, you can tell people the truth, but they
won 't believe it. Think about the last time you answered the phone and the telemarketer
calling you wanted to know about your phone bill so he or she could save you a ton
of money on long distance. Since there was no trust, just pressure and probably an
annoying interruption of dinner, you weren't willing to reveal your current long
distance charges. You didn't want to hear how you could save money, and you didn't
really believe it could be done, anyway. Maybe you really could have saved money
by switching, but the building blocks of trust were absent, so you'll never know,
and you don't care.
One of the cornerstones of your business is having clients implement
the plan you create for them. When you tell people the truth about the plan you design
for them, if they trust you, they will recognize how your plan will benefit them,
and they will implement it. They may have a question or two, but resisting, objecting,
or procrastinating would be the furthest things from their minds. After all, they
want the results from implementing the plan more than you want to sell investments
and insurance.
If your clients are not implementing, then back up a few steps
and reexamine your listening skills. Maybe you didn't really hear what they had to
say in your initial client interview. Maybe you didn't 't simply ask and listen;
maybe you got caught up in telling your story. Did you find out what inspires them?
What moves them? What motivates them every day? Was it clear from those discoveries
how you could help them make decisions that will move them toward those things? Are
they clear about how taking action right now will give them the highest probability
of achieving their goals in a way that provides greater values fulfillment? Did you
make it clear that you weren't there just to sell stuff and make commissions, but
that for you, it's all about them?
You probably know from personal experience that not listening
causes pain in your personal and professional relationships conflicts, misunderstandings,
arguments, lost business, and hurt feelings much of which you can avoid by listening.
The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. Poor quality
relationships lead to a poor quality of life. High quality relationships lead to
a high quality of life. People tend to listen least when they need to listen most.
When the heat of emotion pushes your buttons and pulls your triggers that is when
you most need to listen. Unfortunately, it is also when listening becomes most difficult!
Anger, frustration, and disappointment become like emotional cotton in your ears.
Carl Rogers described the power of listening in his book, On
Becoming a Person. He wrote,
[Listening] is the most powerful force we know for altering the
basic personality structure of an individual and improving his relationships and
his communication with others. If I can listen to what he can tell me, if I can understand
how it seems to him, if I can see its personal meaning for him, if I can sense the
emotional flavor it has for him, then I will be releasing potent forces of change
in him.
Here is an exercise Carl Rogers recommends if you want to do two
things: improve your relationship with someone you care about and find out how hard
it is to really listen.
The next time you get into an argument with someone, stop the
discussion for a moment, and as an experiment, institute this rule: Each person can
speak up only after he or she has first restated the ideas and feelings of the other
speaker accurately, and to that speaker s satisfaction.
You will probably discover that this is one of the most difficult
things you have ever tried to do. It takes courage, because to attempt to
understand a person this deeply, to permit yourself to enter someone else s private
world and try to see the way life appears to them, is to run the risk of being changed.
And to most people, the risk of being changed is a truly frightening prospect.
But there is no growth without change. To change is to grow. If
you want to grow personally and professionally, if you want to become more effective
in your relationships, more effective at attracting and retaining ideal clients,
then you must learn to listen a little bit better each day.
Don't be a salesperson. Be a Trusted Advisor.
© 2002-2003 by Bill Bachrach, Bachrach & Associates, Inc.
and Steve Shapiro
This is excerpted from the It's All About Them; How Trusted
Advisors Listen for Success book. Bill Bachrach is the author of four industry-specific
books. His third book, Values-Based Financial Planning: The Art of Creating an
Inspiring Financial Strategy, is written for the clients of financial professionals.
It teaches clients and other consumers how and why to build a Financial Road Map®,
as well as how to find, recognize, and work with a Trusted Financial Advisor. For
information about his speaking services, training programs, or to order his results-oriented
books and learning systems, contact Bachrach & Associates, Inc. at 800-347-3707
or visit their website: http://www.bachrachvbs.com.
Request your free audiotape of Bill Bachrach 'live' via www.bachrachvbs.com
and sign up for the free monthly Trusted Financial Advisor e-zine.
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