You're listening to Financial Advisor Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers who want to get more clients without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal. James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: Welcome to another episode of The Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. This is going to be part one of a four-part series titled - How To Think Better: The Greatest Skill You Will Ever Learn. And it's been a long time since I've done a series, I've only done one other series. It was about the financial advisor laws of power and that did really well. So, I figured I would do another one. And I was racking my brain about what to talk about, what would I do? What would I say? What would I put together? I thought it was gonna be copywriting. I thought it was gonna be content marketing, and maybe I'll do those in the future. But I realized that thinking is the foundation for all of the other ideas I had, because learning how to think better is a skill. And just like marketing is a skill that can be learned. Thinking better is a skill that can be learned as well. [01:20.6]
However, most people either don't realize it's possible to improve their thinking, or they don't think they need to improve it. To them, their ability to think is just static. It's just what they have, it's the way it is. If they have a V6 engine in the car right now, they think, well, that's all they can do. That's all they have. That's all there is. They can't upgrade to a V8. But I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's necessary if you want to improve in multiple areas of your life. Now, here's why learning, how to think is so critical. Your ability to think is directly correlated with your ability to accomplish your goals. You would do better if you knew better. And since accomplishing goals is all about solving problems becoming a better thinker will help you solve of these problems more effectively and more efficiently. Did you ever play a game in school where you had to make something with like a few unorthodox items like pipe cleaners and rubber bands and stuff? That's a good representation of how life works, because if you had everything necessary to accomplish all of your goals, you would have accomplished them by now. You need to think you need to stretch the limitations of what you think is possible. [02:26.6]
If you only have pipe cleaners right now, you better put those pipe cleaners to work and make the best thing that you can possibly make with those pipe cleaners. Too many people believe that hearing a voice in their heads is thinking. It's not, it's just chatter or worse it's the same old thoughts coming back again and again and the same old limiting beliefs coming back for seconds after eating you alive. When you learn to think better, you can have new thoughts that are constructive, that lead you to getting what you want. To continue with the analogy about the unorthodox items. You may have looked at a tissue box, a paper towel roll, and a few rubber bands is just stationary items like independent of each other, but give those things to a child and that child can construct a makeshift guitar or a ukulele. The child isn't restrained by as many of the limiting beliefs that you have, where you see just independent items. That's a good analogy you for what needs to occur in your business. And this is kind of what I talk about all the time, like multiple marketing strategies, different approaches, different angles. And I'm talking about how to think better on the financial advisor marketing podcast, because it's really easy to get into a client getting business building rut. [03:36.3]
Let's say that you've tried referral marketing for the past few years, and it's always been sporadic for you. If you learn to think better, you're more likely to realize that you need a system for generating referrals. You will begin seeing things that you didn't see before. You might see a system in another area of your business and apply it to your thoughts about referral marketing. And when that happens, it is magic. Again, you would do better if you knew better. I'm fortunate enough to have one of the largest email list in the financial advisor marketing space. And my email subscribers have told me that my emails get them to think differently. They make them realize that there are different possibilities for them. One of my recent emails talked about a Twitter ad that I ran, which got clicks for 10 cents each. And that ad was sending people to an email optin page. It was actually the 57 marketing tips, email optin page. I mentioned it a couple times on the show before. [04:27.7]
Some advisors thought that building an email list was the hardest part of email marketing, but I showed them a new way to think. I showed them that it's possible to get hundreds. If not thousands of email subscribers in a single day, not saying you'll get the same results. I'm not saying you'll get the same amount of email subscribers as I do, because I'm fairly good at this. I've been doing this for a long time, but I am saying that the only way to get started is to think about it. You have to contemplate it first. George Bernard Shaw once quipped few people think more than two or three times a year, I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice per week. Again, the chatter in your mind, the voices that just come up again and again, that's not thinking, thinking is about solving problems, it's about being methodical. You want to think to accomplish your goals. And it looks a lot like this. [05:19.4]
Sitting down on a Sunday evening and reviewing your week, ask yourself what went right? What went wrong? Look at what you wanna get done in the coming week. See if it's even possible. If it is possible, are you giving yourself too much time? Can you get more done? You might conclude that you can get a week's worth of stuff done in two days, which means you can recycle the time that you saved or the additional three days into solving bigger and better problems. And if you don't know how to do this, just sit down, start asking yourself questions, questions, trigger, real thinking, real thoughts. How can I get more clients what's working well, what are my natural strengths? What marketing strategies do I enjoy? What data do I have to support what I'm doing? What do clients like most about my business? Not what I think they like, what do they actually like, how am I doing right now? What am I struggling with? So on and so forth. Just start brainstorming. Write as much as you can, don't hold back. You can SIF through the information later and you can piece together a game plan. Now, why do most people struggle with thinking? Why is it not a skill that is an abundance in most people? [06:23.9]
Well, first of all, it's not taught in schools. Second, most people have a really, really screwed up diets. In a recent podcast episode, I talked about cutting out all caffeine from my diet for two weeks. It was hard at first, but then by the end of the second week, I felt like I unlocked a new level in my mind. I was much calmer. I was more collected and I, I could think I could, I really could think like, sit-down, walk-through problems. I could conceptualize a lot better. And it was incredible, it really was. Third people don't sleep very well. If you long enough with no sleep or poor-quality sleep, the cognitive effects can be worse than driving drunk. I want you to imagine that you're an investor and you're evaluating a business when you discover that the CEO is drunk all day, every day. Would you want to invest in that business? Like work on your sleep. It's one of the best things you ever do. And if you want a bunch of recommendations, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/sleep. [07:23.7]
Another reason people struggle with thinking is because the results of their actions and this is true for everyone. This is me, me included as human beings. The results of our actions are not immediately obvious if we ate cheeseburger and immediately had higher cholesterol, higher blood pressure and medical problems that come from those things, we wouldn't do it. If we made an investment and immediately became wealthy, we would do it, no question. But there's a delay. The forces of the universe reward patient people. This is true with investing. It's true with compound and interest. It's true with health. It's true with marketing. It's, it's just the way the world is. And my heart, it breaks for financial advisors who don't build marketing assets within their businesses because they convince themselves that they won't work. Instead, they stay stuck on the marketing treadmill because it gives them a quick fix every day. [08:17.1]
When you build like an email autoresponder, it takes time and people think, well, why do that? You know, when it might not get its first appointment for a month, I would rather just make a hundred cold calls and get three appointments today. Why build a content library when you can message people on LinkedIn. That's not a bad thing, necessarily your inbound marketing strategies. It's like getting your parachute to open. Yes, you need to do stuff until your parachute opens. But when that parachute opens, it will just take you to a new land. You will soar, that's what inbound marketing is all about. Consequences, both good and bad and the world and the way that we live, they tend to be delayed. And they're also the result of many actions. And it's not just a cheeseburger, it's also what you have for breakfast. It's what you had for dinner last week. It's the exercise that you didn't do. It's the result of many different things. So, we fail to see the connections between our actions and our outcomes. And that's why we stay stuck. [09:14.8]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [09:37.2]
And here's something that can help you, well actually help both you and your clients within your financial advice business. The current version of yourself doesn't care about future consequences. It, it just doesn't. But the future version of you will care a lot. Take a minute upon how your life would be different today, if you made different choices years ago. It would probably be way different. If you made better choices, your life would be way better. If you made terrible choices, your life would probably be worse. Well, all you're doing is you're making different choices today to serve the future version of yourself, that's all it is. Once you become a better thinker, your enemy becomes in action, because if you do something and it doesn't work, you can learn from it. That's awesome. Over time, you will begin to see the connections and you will be a better thinker. It's a virtuous cycle. You become a better thinker. So, you implement better stuff and learn from that. And you learn to think better because of that. And it just goes on and on and on. [10:40.2]
But if you don't do anything at all, there's nothing to learn. Now I do wanna get into some things that you could do, some actual strategies to become a better thinker, but I do wanna give you one final warning. Do not ignore what I'm telling you in this podcast series. Especially if you are an intelligent person. Intelligent people, they think their intelligence protects them from cognitive biases and things like that. But the truth is it makes them much worse. The smarter you are, the better you are at rationalizing your excuses, building up arguments to support what you already believe and just be BS-ING yourself. That means you miss out on new information. And if you miss out on new information, you don't get to enter that virtuous cycle where you take the information, you implement it, you get new information, you implement that. You take your information and so on and so forth. [11:28.0]
So here is the skeleton of becoming a better thinker. This is what I'm going to give you this week. This is the meat of the episode, because this is the founding of all the mental models, I'm going to discuss in part two part three and part four, and improving your thinking really comes down to this. Before you can get into the fancy stuff, you need this. It comes down to the four skills - research, organization analysis and decision making. Research is about knowing how to find information. Something that's difficult for people to accept is that research isn't always convenient. Yes, I know we live in a world where we can Google something and find an answer. But if life's most challenging questions could be answered with a Google search. Then we wouldn't have them. A reason why my inner circle newsletter is so successful is because I write about a lot of stuff that literally cannot be found in a Google search. You will not find this on YouTube. You will not find it in a podcast cause I, I don't sure ain't going to explain it because if I tried to explain high level stuff, that's in an inner circle newsletter, I would get so many complaints from small-minded people, people who just can't understand the stuff. [12:35.0]
I write about a lot of heavy stuff. Just I'll leave it at that. In order to get the information that you really need, you know, let's take the newsletter for as an example, I'm just gonna continue with this. You have to a know that the newsletter exists. You have to B find the newsletter and you have to C sign up for it. That's not as convenient as a Google search. It's not as convenient as going on YouTube and typing in a few words, but it does go a long way. Sometimes conducting your research, it involves finding a specific person and paying for a meeting with that person. Yes, it costs time and money, but what's the alternative. What are you going to do? Otherwise? Are you not get the results that you want? Are you really gonna stay stuck for another year or two? That doesn't sound appealing to me. Research can be hard. Get over it. [13:18.4]
The next step is organization. Organization, you already know what this is. I had a podcast episode about how financial advisors can get organized or like organization tips for financial advisors. If you wanna go back and listen to that, do you like a search organization or control F organization. Andd I thought it was gonna be one of the least downloaded episodes, but I ended up doing pretty well. Information without application is useless. And organization puts you on the path to application the best advice I can give you here and this step about becoming a better thinker is have a place to capture all of your ideas. I don't care if it's a notebook, if it's app, I don't care what it is. It could be something like Evernote. I want you to get everything together so you can organize it. You can take what you need and leave what you don't. Your idea bank, where you have all the ideas in one place, it will become your secret weapon that only you have, because it will come from your research. And your research is what your competitors are not willing to do. So, this is, I know people say like, oh, this is my secret weapon. This is my secret weapon. But like, this is literally like for real, your secret weapon. [14:23.2]
The third step is analysis. And analysis is basically just making sense of information. What good is information if you don't know how to use it or how it applies to you. There's not really much I can add here because analysis comes with topic, it's a little different. The way you analyze something, it varies based on what you're looking at, where you're getting the information, how you did your research. And there's really, like I said, there's not much I can add. But the fourth step is decision making. And this is choosing what to do with the information once you've done your analysis. You could have all the right information, but you could still do the wrong thing with it. I see this sometimes with my email marketing system, financial advisors will try to take it and make it work with something like code email. And it's not meant for code email. So, they did their research got organized, they checked it out. They validated the stuff that I told them about email marketing working really well. And they did their analysis once they went through the program. Then they made a decision to use it, but they used it in the wrong way. [15:23.4]
The email marketing system that I have that I'm talking about, it's meant to be used with an autoresponder sequence. So, by definition, someone has to opt in for that. There are no cold emails you know, if an email is cold, nobody opted in for the email. And that kind of is a completely different thing. Trying to take an effective autoresponder sequence and use it as a cold email campaign is like, I guess, like trying to take a boat and drive it on the road. Boat is a great transportation tool. A car is a great transportation tool, but they're both meant for different contexts. And when you're at the decision-making stage, please don't try to find the perfect solution. Try to find a better solution, try to get better than you are today. Find the solution that can put you in a better position. Let's say you're a financial advisor and you know, you should have a niche, but you haven't decided on one yet. You hem and hall trying to find the perfect niche while time is just, is ticking away and you're not making any real progress. [16:25.6]
In this case, having a niche, a niche to begin with, just something that you start with is going to put you in a better place than you are now. That's how you have to approach a lot of these things. Another example, like our chest flies, the absolute best chest exercise you can do. Probably not, bench presses are way better, but if you aren't doing any chest exercises, then yeah, dumbbell flies are gonna be better than nothing. They may not be perfect, but they're better. Once you get to a better so solution, you can almost always adjust. It's very rare that once you pick a solution you're trapped. Like, because this solution can't be changed. It, it can be changed most of the time. [17:02.4]
So, to recap, the foundation to becoming a better thinker, involves research, organization, analysis, and decision making. And in the net few episodes, I'm going to dig deep into various mental models and explain how you can apply them to solve problems in your life and business. I promise these will be simple or as simple as I can make them there. There are lots of critical thinking techniques out there. I mean, I could talk about decision matrix analysis, multi-attribute utility theory, stuff like that, but it's really complicated. Nobody wants to hear about that, you know, I could bring that stuff out and talk to you about that stuff, but it wouldn't be simple. You wouldn't be able to use it. You would get overwhelmed. You would just turn the podcast off. And I found in my life that people don't use the complicated stuff, right. Even though they could have a Ferrari in the garage, they don't use it because they don't know how to drive it. Wow. That was probably a bad metaphor there or a bad analogy, whatever one. But you get the picture. People don't use complicated stuff. [18:02.2]
So, I'm going to try my best to keep this stuff easy, to understand and use. So, make sure you tune in next week for part two of how to think better. This is going to be awesome. I'll catch you next week. [18:13.4]
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