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The Client-centred Blog

Welcome to The Client Centred Blog; Free content that shares a fresh approach to thriving as a financial professional in a rapidly changing environment.

This blog has its foundation in a new understanding of the human mind that gives you the ultimate platform for creating better results, thriving under any circumstances and living the life you want.     

I invite you to explore the materials, reflect upon how it relates to you and your business and enjoy the benefits.

The power of asking your clients permission   
“How do I get clients to open up more easily?” This was the question that came up in a recent coaching session I had with a financial planner client. Of course, there is more than one single answer but the one that we explored is especially important. This is asking...
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Why goals won’t bring you success and what will
I have been a goal setter ever since my mid-twenties. And when I look back, I notice that I achieved some of the things I set out to do and failed at some too. I used to be hard on myself over my perceived failures, thinking I was not somehow...
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Financial planner? What you need to know about influence
If you are going to build and maintain a successful career as a financial planner, then being able to influence people seems essential to me.
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Are coaching skills essential for financial planners?
Is one of your goals to be the best financial professional you can be by helping your client get the results they most want? If so, there is a set of skills that look to me as essential.
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Are you driven or drawn? Discovering the effortless path to success
We are led to believe that to achieve success, we need to strive and work hard; and that upon reaching our goals, we’ll find peace and happiness. But this is all being driven by fear. The flip-side to that is love, and when we are operating from this space, life...
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How to deal with imposter syndrome
Do you ever feel like an imposter in your role, that you will get ‘found out’, or do not deserve your success? If so, you are far from alone as this is extremely common amongst business people.
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Do you ever get in your own way? Here’s what helped me
Do you ever get in your own way? I know I do. I have times when I feel in a low mood, everything seems more difficult, and my natural zest disappears. Many times I have had clients say to me that the only thing stopping them is themselves. So, how...
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Time management for financial planners – why helpful tips are not the answer
How often have you felt like you had way too much to do, way too little time to do it, and you’ve stressed out as a result?
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The biggest challenge (and opportunity) in the financial planning process
In a perfect world a client goes through the financial planning process and implements the recommendations and advice they are given. As a result, they are happy and achieve their goals. Yet we are not living in a perfect world, which presents both a challenge and an opportunity for financial...
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20 bad financial adviser inter-personal habits
In this weeks’ blog I am looking at… 20 bad financial adviser inter-personal habits Look and see if any of these apply to you. Corrective action can make an enormous difference to your success.
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Integrity: It is more important than we think 
As professional people we value integrity, right? We like to think of ourselves as being a person of integrity and we want other people to act with integrity towards us. To me, this seems at the very core of trust.
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The most dangerous word in the English language
When we think back to when we were little kids, we never knew what limitations were. In fact, to little kids the very idea of a limitation is absurd. Our imaginations knew no boundaries and we lived in a world of pure possibility. You could be a superhero, be invisible,...
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Twenty signs you are on the path to truly great financial planning
What is the difference between ‘average’ financial planners and those who become truly great at what they do? I have been reflecting on this question for a while now and wanted to share my thoughts on this with you. I think it begins with the ‘want to’. Do you truly...
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My favourite Warren Buffett quote and why it matters
Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time and one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. He also has some very astute observations about life. My favourite is his observation that: ‘Busy is the new stupid.’ One time he was in discussion with another super successful person,...
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A simple guide to living in flow
Would you like to spend far more of your time in a state of ‘flow’? Flow is the experience of being totally absorbed in the moment, when time seems to stand still, and nothing else seems to matter. I was reading about the legendary tennis player Billie Jean King and...
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Why I stopped meditating
Last week I had a wonderful conversation with a friend who has a vast amount of experience as a coach and has worked with thousands of people. She observed that in her experience every single person always wants the same thing in the end. Ultimately, we all want to feel...
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How to transcend the financial planner comfort zone
Our comfort zone can be very limiting. For instance, it can hold you back from realising your greater potential, making a bigger difference to your clients, and experiencing greater success. So, in this article I explore what a financial planner comfort zone is and what it takes to transcend it. 
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Resilience: An essential key to building a financial planning practice
Have you noticed how resilience has become a hot topic in business? For instance, there are TED talks on it, articles in the Harvard Business Review, and covid brought into sharp focus how unforeseen events can literally change our lives in a moment. This article explores a deeper understanding of...
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Better time management for financial advisers and planners
As a financial planner are you as productive as you would like to be? Would you like to get more done, in less time, and with none of the stress? In this article I am going to explore the hidden factor that leads to genuinely better time management for financial...
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Building a financial planning business – overcoming the biggest obstacle
Building a financial planning business is not easy! In fact, you are far from alone if you find it challenging. This article explores one of the biggest obstacles of all and how to rapidly get back on track.
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To succeed you must have self belief… really?
If you have a goal or outcome that is important to you and you want to go for it, then what does self belief and whether you have it or not have to do with it?
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How to have bigger impact with clients
How much impact am I having? This is a great question to reflect upon when it comes to your client relationships. Whether you have just met someone new or have been working with someone for a decade or longer the amount of impact we are having in that person’s life...
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The two styles of selling and why one of them is toxic
Although you could fill a small library with books on selling it seems to me that there are two distinct styles. You could call these pushing and pulling and here is how they contrast. Pushing is based upon trying to persuade, convince or entice someone into buying a product or...
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Who are the financial advisers of the future?
Going back to when I became a self-employed financial adviser in 1991 it was a sales role. I had my one week of training and then was expected to go out and make money immediately. This is why the attrition rate was so appallingly low. Oh, how things have changed!…
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Getting the impossible things done
Do you want to get things done? By this I do not mean your day-to-day routine work. I mean projects that are significant accomplishments in your life. What is on your ‘impossible’ list? Writing the book you have always wanted to write? Completely re-engineering your business? Learning a new skill...
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Labels are for jars, not people
Have you ever been told you are not listening? I have. It did not feel good and I thoroughly deserved it. I was new to coaching and was very enthusiastic about sharing my knowledge with my client. So enthusiastic that I thought what I had to say was more important...
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How do you measure your success when life is completely unpredictable?
If there was one thing we learned in 2020 is that life is unpredictable. None of us really know what is going to happen in the next hour, day, week, or month, do we? We can make plans, set goals, have expectations and yet just as we have all recently...
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Do you love what you do?
Going back a while I was invited to speak at an event for advisers at The Etihad stadium in Manchester. I spoke about creating better client engagement through being curious about what it is that clients want from life rather than just focusing on products and investments…
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Getting out of your own way
I was recently in conversation with a client and he said to me that the next month at work was going to be difficult. So, I asked him why he thought that and he explained that several staff were due to be away on training and this was going to...
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The one thing that will help your financial planning business prosper
How do I get my financial advisory practice off the ground? How do I get more clients to notice my financial planning services? If you’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do from a marketing sense to entice new clients with no luck, it could be time to take...
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Shoulder Taps
The impact you can have on another human being has a lot to do with how much you realise you can impact them. How do you see your role as an adviser? You can operate at the level of arranging transactions, you can see yourself as providing a service or...
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Why regulation will never improve the public’s trust in Financial Services (and what can)
Most people I come across in Financial Services are caring, dedicated and highly professional people who do great work for their clients. On top of this a great many of those, like you, continually strive to improve and I have huge respect for this because it takes time, effort and...
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Which screw to turn
There is a famous story about FedEx, the delivery company. In the US the central hub of the business is in Memphis, so all overnight packages go through here. One night the conveyer belt system suddenly stopped working bringing the business to a halt. It meant that the packages could...
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Growing your business in the quickest, most efficient way possible – Here’s how
Something extremely valuable I learned from my coach is that every system is perfect for the result it creates. For instance, … If you are only getting half of the business that you want, then your current system is perfect for that result. If you are working fifteen hours a...
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How do you know if a client meeting is going well?
Have you ever wondered why young children are able to indiscriminately enjoy almost everything and anything they do? Whatever situation they are in they seem to find a way to be absorbed in the moment and have fun. As adults we often tend to lose this capacity. Business can be...
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Why mental clarity is the biggest game in town
Imagine someone who absolutely needs to be in the moment. For safety's sake. Say someone like a surfer who is out there in the ocean hanging ten. Picture this surfer riding a huge wave. Can you see how thoughts don't help the surfer? What's the surfer doing? Paying attention to...
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Never be derailed by adversity again
There is no question that many, if not most, businesses have been severely affected by the lock-down. For instance, if you are a retail outfit then you have had no choice but to keep your doors shut. A similar situation with restaurants and bars. Advisory firms have been unable to...
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What is the highest value your clients can get from you?
A few years ago, I attended a conference in Oslo and one of my memories is of Dr. Aaron Turner making a particularly powerful point. Aaron shared a story about a time he was holidaying in Hawaii with his family. They were spending some time on the beach and he...
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The power of simplicity in a world of complexity
The human intellectual mind loves to make things complex. And this is just as true in the financial world as anywhere else. We could have a much simpler tax system - but we choose not to. We could vastly simplify pensions - but we choose not to. We could make...
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There is an easier way to do life
The world we live in consists of the visible and the invisible. The form and the formless. The finite and the infinite. The business world focuses almost exclusively on the visible, the form and the finite. If you want to improve results in any area – marketing, sales, leadership, management,...
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Should you be coaching your clients?
Coaching happens within a conversation and strong powerful conversations are about being fully present, listening deeply and asking questions.
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The most-read blog posts of 2019
I was looking back over 2019's blog posts and I wanted to share the 5 most read with you again. You never know which ones are going to have the most reads and sometimes it can be a surprise. I enjoyed re-living the inspiration for each one and hope you...
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Why not even Richard Branson can help you
What is stopping your business becoming a much better business? It is an interesting question to reflect upon, isn't it? One of my clients, Noel, is an entrepreneur who has started several successful companies. His latest creation is a tech business in the financial sector, and it has gone from...
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Uncertainty is inevitable, insecurity is optional
On Monday we had our second live day of 'The Freedom of Mind Programme' and we gathered at the inspiring Henley Business school on the bank of the river Thames. The brilliant Kim Hare lead the day and one of the posters she put up on the wall read: Uncertainty...
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Twice the productivity, with half the effort and none of the stress
Is twice the productivity, with half the effort and none of the stress a realistic goal for you and your business? And whether you think it is realistic or not, how much difference would this make to you? Many business people, if not all, are on the lookout for edges...
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What does a reformed prison inmate have to do with us?
Last weekend I attended my favourite annual conference, the 'Life 2.0 Three Principles Conference'. It was my 7th conference and in that time the number of people attending has tripled to around 900. On the drive home afterwards the friend I attended with asked me if any moment stood out...
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The truth about breaking bad habits
Reaching your next level of success is so often about what you stop doing, rather than what you start doing. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith found this in his work with senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies. He even wrote a book about it called 'What got you here, won't get...
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Without the fear, what would you do?
Fear, if misunderstood, is such a debilitating emotion. When I began my coaching practice it soon became obvious that the business and personal challenges that people experienced were almost always some kind of fear in disguise. I noticed that when people were stuck or struggling - to get clients, build...
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Does goal-setting work?
As we enter a new year it is that time when many people make plans, set goals and resolve to be a new, improved version of themselves - new year, new you and all that. A couple of days ago I read that something like 40% of people resolve to...
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Is over-thinking your barrier to a more wonderful life?
My good friend Alex Manzi created a popular podcast called Dreamers Disease where he interviews inspirational guests about what they do, why they do it and their motivations. A few weeks ago we met up for a coffee and came up with idea of sending his subscribers a couple of...
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The biggest lie that holds you back
Do you know what the biggest lie we tell ourselves is? I cannot change. This false belief is at the core of why so many people get stuck in a rut, living out the same old thinking and behavioural habits, often for years. It is also apparent that one of...
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No pain, no gain vs. no pain, no pain
Dusan Djukich wrote in his book 'Straight-line Leadership', "Most failure comes from quitting too soon." I guess we have all had projects, ideas and changes we intended to implement but, as he says, we have quit too soon. If we had stayed in the game, then we would have created...
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Who pushes your buttons?
One fine sunny day Theresa was driving down the M20 towards the south coast with her friend Gavin, enjoying the conversation. That was until another car, driven by Jean-Claude, overtook and cut dangerously across Theresa causing her to brake hard. Theresa was not going to let him get away with...
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Resilience – The essential key to suffering less and accomplishing more
Have you noticed how resilience has become a hot topic in business? There are TED talks on it, it is being written about in the Harvard Business Review and organisations are beginning to realise that high resilience levels are a major factor in creating sustainable success. Often, the most successful...
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Quick guide: Get more of your best thinking
There are many factors involved in the process of creating, running and continually improving your business. Getting clients, servicing them, building an infrastructure, innovating, responding to changes... Success in any of these activities is under-pinned by the quality of thinking that is brought to each one. A client and I...
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Qualified financial planner – but holding back?
Just recently I had lunch with an adviser friend of mine and he revealed to me that despite becoming a certified financial planner five years ago, regularly attending meetings and events for planners and wanting to only offer a financial planning service he is not actually doing it. He said...
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Selling your services – are you pushing or pulling?
'To effectively engage someone, you must be operating from a higher level of consciousness than the other person at that moment'. Garrett Kramer, Stillpower At a time when consumers have more choice, are more demanding and less tolerant of being placed under any kind of negative pressure it has never...
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The hidden secret of effective business building
"Why is it that with all the information available today on how to be successful in small business, so few people really are?" Michael Gerber When it comes to building a better business and one that provides more of the rewards that you want there are two kinds of change...
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John Dashfield spent 14 years as a self-employed adviser. Since 2006 he has been a coach, mentor and author helping advisers create transformations in their business and personal lives.

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