Hi everybody. The next in our series of great advisor frameworks is all to do with around how you prepare yourself before you walk into the room with a client. Now as I said before, quite often we prepare our materials and we get everything printed up and everything bound in our folders and everything looks great. But what the client needs is you. They already expect that you can do all the stuff that’s in the paperwork. But what they need is you. And so I think it’s a really important thing to remember how to prepare yourself for that meeting.
Now, there are some universal laws of physics. The universal laws of physics say that if I let that go, it will drop. It will always drop. And the universal laws of physics also say this, that no two things can exist in the same space at the same time. So for instance if I try to put the red one where the blue one is, it can’t work. And so when we talk about things like that we’re thinking about communication and communication is like that, no two things in the same place at the same time. Communication takes up space.
Now, just use this little analogy for me, here are you and this is your communication space. This is your head, and your head is full of all of the things that you’re going to carry into that meeting. Some of them might be useful, some of them might be like, “I was caught in the traffic. I’ve had a fight with the kids this morning. My mom’s sick. I’ve got to get the car in to get it serviced.” All of those things that you carry around in your head. And then your client comes in and they’ve got their version of the world, and they’ve been caught in traffic. And they’ve got worries and they’ve got problems and things like that. And what happens is that when we get into that first few minutes of the meeting and I try to tell them what I know and try to empty my head, their head is too full to receive anything. So, as a master communicator my job is to empty out all of the parts of my day that I don’t need for this meeting.
Now I go in with space in my head, now the universal laws of physics say we’ve got a bit of a chance because if I can get that person to start to talk and download and tell me what’s going on for them, now there’s space for me to be able to deliver my messages to them with them having the ability to be able to hear that.
So, really critically we call it emptying the glass. How would you empty the glass? Some advisors that I know just go for a walk around the block. Others sit down and do a short meditation. Whatever that is, if you can do some when you get into the room you are absolutely and totally present with your client, and you’re allowing them to empty their glass before you start to fill it for them.