Most of us in the financial services industry have been taught that persistence (a.k.a. high-pressure sales and is mainly negative-emotions based) is our ticket to paradise, but Trusted Advisors know the high-trust relationship (mainly inspiriting, positive-emotions based) is the key. And two things kill trust faster than anything else does: pressuring people and judging them. To listen, you must suspend your judgment and allow yourself to be fully present with the other person.

Listening is the opposite of pressure, which is like a brake on the wheel of progress. Instead, listening is the fuel of progress in the financial services business. Listening leads to success.

Genuine listening makes genuine honesty possible. When people feel both respected and heard, they are more inclined to reveal themselves. As a Trusted Advisor, you want people to tell you the truth about their money and their objectives, and you also want people to be able to hear and act on the truth you will be communicating. Both ways, the truth has a lot of power.

It's your job to convey active listening without ever saying a word, to create a space where truths can be spoken, heard, and believed. Trust is the key to having all three, and listening is the building block of trust. Indeed, if you don't have trust, people won't be willing to tell you their truth or be able to listen to the truth you tell them.

If you don't have trust, you can tell people the truth, but they won't believe it. Think about the last time you answered the phone and the telemarketer calling you wanted to know about your phone bill so he or she could "save you a ton of money" on long distance. Since there was no trust, just pressure and probably an annoying interruption of dinner, you weren't willing to reveal your current long distance charges. You didn't want to hear how you could save money, and you didn't really believe it could be done, anyway. Maybe you really could have saved money by switching, but the building blocks of trust were absent, so you'll never know, and you don't care.

One of the cornerstones of your business is having clients implement the plan you create for them. When you tell people the truth about the plan you design for them, if they trust you, they will recognize how your plan will benefit them, and they will implement it. They may have a question or two, but resisting, objecting, or procrastinating would be the furthest things from their minds. After all, they want the results from implementing the plan more than you want to sell investments and insurance.

If your clients are not implementing, then back up a few steps and reexamine your listening skills. Maybe you didn't really hear what they had to say in your initial client interview. Maybe you didn't simply ask and listen; maybe you got caught up in telling your story. Did you find out what inspires them? What moves them? What motivates them every day? Was it clear from those discoveries how you could help them make decisions that will move them toward those things? Are they clear about how taking action right now will give them the highest probability of achieving their goals in a way that provides greater values fulfillment? Did you make it clear that you weren't there just to sell stuff and make commissions, but that for you, it's all about them?

You probably know from personal experience that not listening causes pain in your personal and professional relationships--conflicts, misunderstandings, arguments, lost business, and hurt feelings--much of which you can avoid by listening. The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. Poor quality relationships lead to a poor quality of life. High quality relationships lead to a high quality of life.  People tend to listen least when they need to listen most. When the heat of emotion pushes your buttons and pulls your triggers--that is when you most need to listen. Unfortunately, it is also when listening becomes most difficult! Anger, frustration, and disappointment become like "emotional cotton" in your ears.

Carl Rogers described the power of listening in his book, On Becoming a Person. He wrote,

[Listening] is the most powerful force we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual and improving his relationships and his communication with others. If I can listen to what he can tell me, if I can understand how it seems to him, if I can see its personal meaning for him, if I can sense the emotional flavor it has for him, then I will be releasing potent forces of change in him.

Here is an exercise Carl Rogers recommends if you want to do two things: improve your relationship with someone you care about and find out how hard it is to really listen.

The next time you get into an argument with someone, stop the discussion for a moment, and as an experiment, institute this rule: Each person can speak up only after he or she has first restated the ideas and feelings of the other speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction.

You will probably discover that this is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. It takes courage, because to attempt to understand a person this deeply, to permit yourself to enter someone else's private world and try to see the way life appears to them, is to run the risk of being changed. And to most people, the risk of being changed is a truly frightening prospect.

But there is no growth without change. To change is to grow. If you want to grow personally and professionally, if you want to become more effective in your relationships, more effective at attracting and retaining ideal clients, then you must learn to listen a little bit better each day.

By Bill Bachrach, CSP & Steve Shapiro

© 2002-2003 by Bill Bachrach, Bachrach & Associates, Inc. and Steve Shapiro  All Rights Reserved. This is excerpted from the It's All About Them; How Trusted Advisors Listen for Success book.

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