Leading Advisor Financial Advisor Coaching

Out Of The Void Of A Daily Blog & Speaking This Summer Blog

June 1, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

Back when I started my blog in the beginning of 2006 I made a commitment to write a blog every business day as I believe there is nothing worse than arriving at someone’s blog and seeing that their last post was 18 months ago.

(National Geographic)

At the same time, not having a lot of writing experience, knowing that I may not be able to maintain the commitment, I wrote every working business day no matter what. Some of it was garbage but there were a few gems along the way; one gem is that I found my voice and was able to write my first book.

“There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth.” – Heinz R. Pagels

I’m revisiting my daily blogging commitment again. Given there are about 250 working days per year and I’ve posted over 2200 blogs over the past 6 1/2 years, I believe I have maintained my original commitment.

“Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void” – William James

I’ve written one of these kinds of blogging reduction blogs in the past but “no matter how hard I try, they pull me back in.” I suppose I have created quite the habit and one could say that it is a functional habit conditioned by the ideas of Stephen Pressfield who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance.

However, my blogging commitment has been at the cost of consciousness, energy and time for other projects.

So for the coming months of June, July and August I am going to reduce my daily blogging commitment to blogging once a week minimum. I am also going to be doing more delegation of the blogging work by asking Deanne McAndrews, Leading Advisor’s Customer Service Virtual Assistant to create Blogs by editing / depersonalizing my client e-mail correspondence that is about financial advisor personal and professional development.

“It is not known precisely where angels dwell — whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.” – Voltaire

Who knows, you could see five blogs per week.

Who knows, this blog could become June’s e-newsletter.

I’m writing this blog on Tuesday, May 28th on an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Philadelphia via Toronto to present the One Page Business Plan on May 31st at Lincoln Investment’s 2012 National Advisor Summit.

This will be my last speaking presentation until September and I want to create Buffer Days for the following in the absence of blogging and speaking while still being very busy with my clients on Focus Days and still having plenty of Free Days to enjoy the summer on Vancouver Island.

  • Overhaul my information management system
  • Oversee the installation of a new CRM system
  • Attract one-on-one coaching, workshops and speaking referrals
  • Market one-on-one coaching, workshops and speaking in the USA
  • Volunteer for Advocis and NAIFA
  • Volunteer for Compassion
  • Attract a publisher for my new book
  • Oversee the updates to my FaceBook site
  • Start Vlogging for client assignments and public posts
  • Read and integrate The Psychology Of Selling into our coaching practice

“Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.” – Paul Klee

 

Filed under: Sales & Marketing
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Best February – April Blogs Revisited

April 20, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

It’s Friday afternoon, April 13th, and I’m back in Toronto after speaking at Advocis Durham’s 11th Annual Professional Development Day.

Laura will be landing in Toronto and @ 6:30pm I’ll be picking her up at the airport and then we will be having dinner with Bob Gignac.

We are flying to Florida on Saturday, April 14th to visit family in advance of speaking at Equitable Life’s Leaders’ Conference in The Bahamas on Friday, April 20th.

I still have client e-mails to do and I don’t have a blog written for next week Friday, April 20th, and given that I want to take next week off here are links to the Best February – April Blogs Revisited.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized
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Our Web Site Domain Host Didn’t …

April 19, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

Our website was down for over 24 hours March 25th / 26th, 2012.

Our web site domain provider didn’t send a domain renewal reminder; there is no our, there is only we – we didn’t remind ourselves

I am posting the picture of what our visitors see when this happens to remind us that we need have backup systems for everything.

At the same time we have switched our web site domain host to GoDaddy as I understand that they have better customer service that includes sending an e-mail reminder to renew your domain.

 

Filed under: Vision & Planning
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Announcing Leading Advisor’s 11 New Coaching Web Site Pages

February 27, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

Here is a milestone that we have been working on since last summer. If you don’t get the words right in your business plan and web site, you might build the wrong business.

Our new coaching web site pages with related videos help financial advisors to discover the Inspirational Clear Your Roadblocks™ Coaching Program and the Scientific One Page Business Plan™ Coaching Programs that we offer.

Here is an overview of the pages and the links:

Coaching Landing Page

Clear Your Roadblocks™ Coaching Program

Landing Page

Corporate Webinars

Corporate Workshops

Telephone Coaching

Live Coaching

One Page Business Plan™ Coaching Program

Landing Page

Corporate Webinars

Corporate Workshops

Telephone Coaching

Live Coaching

 

Filed under: Uncategorized
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Booked & Tentative Financial Advisor Speaking Dates For 2012

January 11, 2012 by · Leave a Comment 

Our financial advisor speaking dates are starting off with a bang for 2012.

In previous years, I have done as many as 32 financial advisor speaking dates and with 8 financial advisor speaking dates confirmed, we are already up to 25% of our financial advisor speaking dates goal.

Laura and I are using DropBox to track the Tentative Speaking Dates as they come in so that we don’t overbook ourselves and we just ran into a situation this morning where we have two clients looking for the same date in March.

Here are the Tentative Speaking Dates from prospective financial advisor speaking clients that we have on our list:

  1. March 1
  2. March 15
  3. March 28
  4. April 17
  5. April 19
  6. April 21
  7. April 24
  8. April 25
  9. April 26
  10. May 15
  11. May 16
  12. May 17
  13. May 18
  14. May 22
  15. Nov 6
  16. Nov 7
  17. Nov 20

If you are looking at having me speak at your next financial advisor conference, please give us your commitment as soon as possible.

 

 

Filed under: Financial Advisor Speaking
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IOS 5, iCloud, iPhone & iPad x 2, iPatience, iPractice, iPerfect, iTried, iTired, iOptimistic

October 17, 2011 by · Leave a Comment 

This is the first selfish blog that I have written about myself or Leading Advisor since the end of August while cutting back blogging to once a week at the beginning of the week and making the blogs about the personal development and practice development issues that financial and invest advisors are facing.

I’m writing this selfish blog as my first blog direct from my new iPad 2 using the onscreen keyboard and acknowledging that after a few days of on and off working with the iPad it’s going to take a little bit of iPatience and iPractice to make iPerfect.

In a few minutes I will cut and paste this blog from the iPad Notes into WordPress and I’ve no clue how that will go because I have to set WordPress up on the iPad … I suppose you will see if I am successful if this blog post arrives.

Even with the genius of Steve Jobs, I still have the old TV generation attitude that I want to push a button as soon as it comes out of the box and have it all work.

This is ludicrous given that I’ve never experienced this from my first 1980 Wang PC days that turned out to be non-IBM compatible after thousands of dollars and weeks of programming to create my own CRM system as there was no CRM software in those days.

But not so fast.

This could have been the case if Laura and I had not purchased our iPads right at the same time that Apple had done the IOS 5 upgrade which included the iCloud.

So first steps were to upgrade our iPhones and new iPads to IOS 5 and iCloud and the whole process went well considering there we’re millions of Apple customers doing the very same thing at the same time.

Happy to say that I didn’t have to pay Microsoft a fee for an operating system upgrade through from Windows 95, 98, NT, XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Getting the IOS 5 and the iCloud for free seemed a bit strange.

My experience seemed rather ironic considering there were millions of BlackBerry customers all doing something else this past week.

All in all, the iPad set up went seamlessly and happy to say that I didn’t have to summon our IT team to set the iPad and things like e-mail accounts which is always the case in a PC world. It has always been buy a computer and call our IT team to help to set up the PC, the e-mail, the data sharing and a whole lot more.

( for the record, I’ve just switched to the wireless keyboard that I bought with the iPad as the onscreen keyboard is too sensitive for my impatient clumsy fingers just at the moment )

My plan for using my iPad is a follows:

On a business note I’ll use it as a Business Organizing Tool so that everything related to creativity and planning is in one place to include things like:

  • Leading Advisor’s One Page Business Plan
  • Projects List
  • Budget Cash Flow & Sales Activity Calculator
  • Apps like Dragon Dictation, Evernote, Mind Mapping, WritePad etc.

On the Social Media side of things, the iPad fulfills a dream of having a one place tool to easily read, mash up ideas and write articles, blogs, e-newsletters and social media posts from:

  • Business magazines
  • Financial advisor and investment advisor publications
  • Social media groups

My final thought is another reason that I am doing this is for the challenge to embrace change.

“Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch

The only thing left is to create the iTime, the time blocks to make it all real.

So in closing on the; IOS 5, iCloud, iPhone & iPad x 2, iPatience, iPractice, iPerfect, iTried, iTired, iOptimistic … how did it all go?

I couldn’t get WordPress to accept my login and password from the iPad.

So I tried to e-mail this blog to my main computer and the e-mail would not go through from the iPad.

I sent up a free @me.com e-mail that came with the iCloud that would not send e-mail so I deleted it and then my regular e-mail account worked just fine.

So I’m just about to post this blog to WordPress from my main computer.

I just received an e-mail from Liz Urichuk my Virtual Assistant, to let me know that iPad has a WordPress App so I’ll try the App another time as I am going to leave the iPerfectionism for now as I am iTired and feel good that iTried and remain iOptimistic.

 

Filed under: Vision & Planning
Tagged: ,

Do We Work With Big Hitters Or Consistent Hitters?

August 24, 2011 by · Leave a Comment 

We had a referral to an advisor that was looking for a coach that works with big hitters.

What is a big hitter? It is said that a big hitter is one who carries a lot of weight and influence in the work that he/she does.

Is a big hitter always a consistent hitter?

Michael Jordan said that he shot a thousand baskets a day until he reached the NBA, and based on Michael’s career it would be safe to say that he was a consistent hitter.

Then there is baseball, while I’m sure there are challenges in basketball, baseball seems to have been riddled with controversy with the use of steroids to maintain being a big hitter.

A big hitter is not sustainable because it requires the sustained use of power.

Power used to be a popular buzz word, but is now being replaced by strengths. Power generally means you have power over something: over yourself, over another, over circumstances. With strength, there is no competition or need to have power over something because you’re so naturally strong, there is no threat. A coach works to strengthen their clients more than empower them, because if they’re strong, they’re naturally empowered without empowerment being the focus.

We help our clients get their needs met and build on their values, vision and business plan.

We work with consistent hitters and among some of our clients are owners of practices with teams of 5 – 12 junior advisors / marketing assistants / back office assistants earning $600,000 to well over $1,000,000 in gross income specializing in life, CI, DI, ILA’s and money and some are MDRT top five national or provincial producers with leading life insurance companies.

Free One Page Business Plan Webinars September 9 & 28th – Register Now!

Announcing Leading Advisor’s One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars and the One Page Business Plan(TM) Webinars!

“If you don’t get the words right, you might build the wrong business and may never get the numbers right.”

The dates for the One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars are:

  • Friday, September 9th at 11:15am EDT
  • Wednesday, September 28th at 12:30pm EDT


Who should attend?

  • Do you have too many scattered ideas?
  • Do you need to focus on a few?
  • Do you need to jumpstart your business right now?
  • Do you have no time or interest in writing a 50 page business plan?
  • Do you need to determine if you’re focusing on the right things?
  • Do you need an effective blueprint to keep yourself and team focused?

Then consider a fresh, simple approach to business planning that will enable you to focus on what is important…the One Page Business Plan(TM) – a powerful tool for building and managing a business. It’s short, it’s concise, and it delivers results quickly and effectively. There can be no question as to where your business is headed when it is in writing, especially when you have the key essentials about growing your business clearly specified on a single page.

Is this another ho-hum course on business planning like the ten others you have attended – no way! I know how to capture the essence of any business in just a few minutes using the innovative key word and short phrase techniques using the One Page Business Plan(TM).

To Register for the One Page Business Plan(TM) Free Webinars:

Call Laura at 250 248-6012 / 1 877 248-6012 or e-mail Laura at lreilly@leadingadvisor.com and you will receive your GoTo Meeting Webinar Link, Phone Number and Access Code.

  • Friday, September 9th at 11:15am EDT
  • Wednesday, September 28th at 12:30pm EDT

 

Filed under: Clear Your Roadblocks
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