Becoming the Trusted Advisor
As an advisor, your clients’ trust is the foundation of your business. While your technical guidance and tactical execution are fundamentals of your practice, enduring client trust is built through your ability to connect deeply with those you advise. In doing so, you increase your value to them by supporting them in opening to new perspectives, identifying the possibility present in a bigger vision, and helping them to define their goals and align their resources to support those goals. It is through this client connection that your role transforms from the commoditized “technical resource” to the highly valued “trusted advisor.”
Most professionals who have chosen advisory-based fields—banking, financial advising, consulting, law, accounting, executive search, coaching—are drawn to becoming a trusted advisor to their clients. And rightfully so. Trusted advisors have deeper, more meaningful, more rewarding, and longer-term client relationships then their technically-astute-but-relationally-challenged counterparts.
Are you sabotaging your ability to become and remain your clients’ trusted advisor?
The Paradox
It may seem that the recipe for becoming a trusted advisor to your clients is to be the best at what you do—to have the greatest technical proficiency, be the smartest in the field, have the most respected network of colleagues and the most unrelenting dedication to those you serve. Those components all have impact on client trust, but the most important and irreplaceable ingredient? You.
In your best form, your combination of technical expertise, visionary intelligence, tactical execution, inherent wit (c’mon, of course you’re witty) and individual wisdom is a differentiator… it sets you apart from everyone else who, to the untrained observer, has the exact same offering that you do.
Feeling foggy-headed from too little sleep or edgy from too much caffeine? You’ll miss the subtle cue that your client is ready to shift his thinking from exploration to action, and the opportunity to illustrate your value by appropriately responding to that cue will be lost.
Show up to a client meeting with your thoughts still spinning on the 17 items on your “to do” list? Your clients know that you have brought only part of yourself to the meeting. If you’re not investing time and full attention in them, they are not likely to invest money in you.
Feeling uncomfortable in your own skin? Diminished confidence in your physical or emotional being, for whatever reason, just looks and feels like “lack of confidence” to your clients, and you begin to lose their confidence.
The Link Between Health and Client Trust
Physical fatigue, lack of mental clarity, stress exhaustion, and fractured focus diminish your ability to connect with clients, which is essential to building trust.
By honoring your health as a professional and personal asset, you not only fund a key element to the success and sustainability of your own practice, but you role model possibility to your clients and confirm their rightful choice of placing their highest trust in you.
