Journal of Financial Planning: May 2024
NOTE: Please be aware that the audio version, created with Amazon Polly, may contain mispronunciations.
J.J. Peller is a Carson Coaching executive business coach. He holds an economics degree from Wabash College and spent the first five years of his career at Merrill Lynch before finding his calling to help other financial advisers grow their businesses.
Jessica Colston, PCC, is an executive business coach with Carson Coaching. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Grand Valley State University and a master’s in leadership and organizational development from the University of Texas at Dallas. She’s passionate about partnering with firm owners to bridge the gap between their current situation and their desired success.
Greg Opitz is an executive business coach at Carson Coaching. He formerly served as managing director of certification services at the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards. He likes to say he spent four years educating advisers, seven years certifying them, and now he helps them enhance their business and their lives. Carson Coaching is the exclusive coaching partner of the Financial Planning Association. For more information, visit www.carsongroup.com/coaching.
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Physiologists told the late Sir Roger Bannister that it was impossible to run a four-minute mile. They told him it was dangerous and he shouldn’t even try. After he finished fourth at the 1952 Olympics, he considered quitting the sport altogether. But instead of quitting, Bannister set his sights on that four-minute mile—despite his crushing Olympic defeat and the naysayers in his ear.
Bannister faced what leadership coach and management consultant Ana Maria Lopez Caldwell, Ph.D., called internal and external factors serving as potential barriers to success. Bannister’s external factors were the physiologists who told him it couldn’t be; and his internal factor was that, at first, he didn’t even want to run anymore after the Olympics, much less attempt the impossible.
Then he did it. He overcame his limiting beliefs and external limitations and ran not just a four-minute mile—he ran it in 3:59:04. He achieved the impossible.1Harvard Business Review reports that Bannister inspired his rivals to be able to do the same. In the year after Bannister’s feat, three runners broke four minutes in the same mile race. In the months and years since, approximately 1,500 runners have broken four minutes.2
Oftentimes as firm owners, it feels like there are so many external and internal factors telling you things are impossible. But like Bannister, you can overcome these and achieve the growth you want. Plus, you might inspire other advisers and planners to do the same!
It isn’t always an easy feat to overcome limiting beliefs to achieve business growth. It takes a combination of things to get it done. We’re going to outline common limiting beliefs our members experience and offer tangible tips to overcome them.
Your own limiting beliefs are oftentimes your biggest obstacle. Once you eliminate those, it’s incredible what’s possible.
Limiting Belief No. 1: “I don’t have time to work on personal development.”
Working on your own growth can make it easier to grow your firm. Engaging in various forms of personal development can help you have more fruitful interactions with your loved ones, your team, and your clients. We recommend the following tips to work on personal development.
- Feed your mind every day. Read or listen to something or someone that uplifts, inspires, and empowers you to be your very best. Without feeling the drive and inspiration that comes from doing this, you might not do the work that’s required to grow.
- Journal every day. Journal about your vision, dreams, goals, who you want to become, what you want to create, and how you want to contribute to the world. Physically put pen to paper for this task.
- Schedule dedicated time out of the office for personal development. Schedule time both annually and monthly (or quarterly if that’s more feasible) to engage in personal development out of the office. This is so you can remove yourself from the temptation of being pulled into working on the business, which will ultimately happen if you’re at the office or your home office. You don’t have to use the end of year as the marker for your business or growth cycle. Some advisers focus on this deeper work in the summer when business may be slower due to people being on vacation.
- Blueprint your life and business. Sit down and map out (or revisit if you’ve already done this and see if it still fits) your vision, mission, and goals.
Limiting Belief No. 2: “I feel stuck!”
We oftentimes tell people that you stay stuck by ruminating on being stuck. And a quick way to focus on something else is to ask yourself better questions, like, “If anything was possible, what would I do right now to move forward?”
Also, engaging in personal development can expand and enrich your perspective on the world. When you do that, you have more ways to view a situation, which empowers you to stop thinking in the way that keeps you stuck. This can give you a chance to see a new, different path forward. Most people feel stuck because they don’t see any options for a next step.
Limiting Belief No. 3: “I need everything to be perfect.”
Perfection comes from a place of scarcity, says Lopez Caldwell. It reinforces the notion that you need to be perfect to be accepted and valuable. And this could lead to stagnation.
“There’s no room for error if you’re like this,” Lopez Caldwell said. “So, they experience stagnation, and that translates into [limiting] the type of success that they are able to have.”
You don’t need to be perfect. Overcome this by:
- Fostering a growth mindset. One way to get over a scarcity and perfectionist mindset is to embrace a growth mindset. Keeping yourself in a growth mindset allows you to be more open to the possibilities of what you can achieve.
- Going outside your comfort zone. Pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and learning new things develops more self-confidence and will allow you to think and act in ways that you wouldn’t without getting uncomfortable first.
Limiting Belief No. 4: “I don’t want to ask clients for referrals because I don’t want them to think I’m just trying to grow my business.”
We know that asking for referrals is a pain point for many planners and advisers. But it’s necessary.
We recommend that you write out all the ways that your clients and anybody they introduce you to will benefit from working with you. Realize you’re not growing your business only to put more money in your bank account—you’re asking for introductions to people to work with you because you know that you can genuinely help them avoid potential financial pitfalls. You can help them live a higher-quality life in so many ways.
Limiting Belief No. 5: “I don’t want to grow too big because I don’t want to manage that many people.”
Get help! If you don’t like being a manager of many people, you can hire people who love to do that. Then you can just manage one to two people while your team manager does the day-to-day management of everybody else. People make excuses for why they don’t want to grow a bigger firm. The reality is, oftentimes, growing your firm—in the right way, of course—could actually be the best way to alleviate the same so-called problems that you don’t want to experience by growing your firm.
Limiting Belief No. 6: “I can’t possibly grow.”
You’ve grown your firm to where it is today. Perhaps that’s three times or five times bigger than when you started. But when faced with the prospect of growing three to five times bigger from where you are now, this limiting belief might start to creep in.
But here’s the good news: you’ve done it before, and you can do it again.
Focus on what you know works when it comes to marketing and prospecting. We know it’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects (is that podcast really going to bring you more clients?). Identify the fundamental business activities that got you to where you are now and start doing them again. Or, if you’re already doing them, find a way to improve the process.
Ask yourself, “How many things have I done that worked so well I stopped doing them?” What we mean by that is perhaps before the pandemic, you were having fruitful passion prospecting events. But you stopped (for a good reason) and haven’t picked those up again. Sometimes we fall off from doing things that have worked. Make it a point to revisit some of those fundamental marketing activities that worked in the past and commit to restarting them or making them better.
Limiting Belief No. 7: “I’m not good at business planning.”
You don’t have to be “good” at business planning, but you do have to be intentional. You can do that by:
- Setting your goals. The first step to being intentional is to outline and make a plan to achieve your goals. Being intentional isn’t just about growing the business, it’s about being an effective, solid leader, providing your clients with the best solutions and experience. This also means that you have to keep up with industry trends and tech.
- Setting aside specific time blocks. Schedule specific and regular time blocks to work on the business. Put yourself in a different environment to get this done, if possible. For example, take a walk and record your ideas on voice notes. You can change the venue and the method but be consistent about keeping the time.
- Join a mastermind group. Bouncing ideas off other firm owners could be helpful to gain some insights into how other firm owners are doing things.
‘Help Is on the Way, Dear!’
If you’re a Robin Williams fan, you likely pictured him as Mrs. Doubtfire running across the restaurant shouting this line in the classic film. If you’re experiencing any of these common blocks and limiting beliefs, you can get help from any number of places.
First, you’re reading this, so you are likely an FPA member. Connect with your FPA peers—and peers across the profession—to see how others handle these common roadblocks. Take advantage of all your association has to offer—from the Knowledge Circles3 to the in-person events4—to meet more members and build your network of masterminds.
Seeking professional coaching is another route. There are multiple coaching firms in the industry and the profession. Arguably, the best thing to do is get a skilled coach who can help you think through all the above general ideas in a way that’s customized to you. Working with a coach to overcome these limiting beliefs and grow your business is akin to how you work with your clients to overcome their limiting beliefs when it comes to their finances.
We’d venture to say that without his fellow runners and coaches, Bannister might not have overcome the limitations he faced to run that 3:59:04 mile. Don’t let your own limiting beliefs be the reason you don’t achieve your goals.
Endnotes
- See www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records/hall-of-fame/first-sub-four-minute-mile.
- See “What Breaking the 4-Minute Mile Taught Us About the Limits of Conventional Thinking,” from Harvard Business Review at https://hbr.org/2018/03/what-breaking-the-4-minute-mile-taught-us-about-the-limits-of-conventional-thinking.
- See https://fpalearning.onefpa.org/live-knowledge-circles and https://fpalearning.onefpa.org/on-demand-knowledge-circles.
- See www.financialplanningassociation.org/search/event.