Successful advisors know that believing in yourself can have a powerful impact on your attitude, motivation and overall success. However, there are times when uncontrollable issues such as market volatility, economic conditions or an occasional poor recommendation can leave you doubting yourself.
If this has happened to you, take comfort in knowing that your clients hired you because they like you, trust you and believe that you have their best interests at heart. Prove your clients right by believing in yourself, in your integrity, your honesty and your commitment to helping them; when you focus on things that you can control, you harness the power of belief.
Norman Vincent Peale said it best when he said, “People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success.”
So how can you increase your belief in yourself to become the advisor or agents that you’ve always wanted to be?
Let’s take a look at a step-by-step approach for creating powerful business belief systems.
Step 1: Understanding Your Current Business Beliefs
The best way to find clarity about your business belief systems is to simply fill in the following blanks, “What I believe about _______ is _________ because __________.” Simply insert any possible subject about the business in the first blank, the belief in the second blank and the rationale in the third. Now, you’ve got some understanding about what your belief system is on the subject. The real question is will your current belief system help you or hurt you in the long-run?
Take Frank P. for example, a veteran financial advisor with twelve years of experience who had a belief system that prospecting was a numbers game because most people don’t want to make any changes with their money. As a result of his belief on the matter, he would need to double his efforts to double his success.
Step 2: Explore New Possibilities
The next step is to be open to exploring new possibilities that there may be an alternative to a negative belief system. In order to do this, you need to question any belief system that limits your success. Remember, you weren’t born with a specific belief system. Instead, they are learned over time.
In Frank’s case, he needed to cope with his fear of rejection by creating a belief system around “Prospecting is merely a numbers game” so that he could eliminate any responsibility for his actions and not feel rejected. In other words, if prospecting is merely the-law-of-averages (you have to speak to “X” number of people to get one prospect) because most people don’t want to make changes with their finances than he shouldn’t be taking any rejection personally. Now, he had to test his new belief system.
So I asked Frank if working twice as hard is something he wanted to do or was he open to learning how to work twice as smart. He quickly chose the latter. So, I taught him three techniques for handling common objections. We practiced the techniques using role play until he got the hang of them and he was ready to try them out with prospects.
Step 3: Reinforcing Your New Belief System
Once you are open to new possibilities, you must be willing to take action in order to reinforce a new belief system.
Since Frank understood and could role play these new handling objections techniques he was more confident to give them a try. He made several calls and over the course of a week he realized that overcoming objections is merely a process. This simple realization was all he needed to reinforce a new belief system about prospecting which was, “Prospecting can be much easier if you are prepared for objections because people are open to a second opinion once they see the value in it.”
Why Your Beliefs Shape Your Results
If you can relate to keeping a negative business belief system that is holding you back, apply the aforementioned three steps to reshape your results. Holding onto something that is not moving you forward is a sure fire way to sabotage helping others. If you can harness the power of belief you will understand how much control you actually have in shaping your own destiny!