Advice That Sticks. Moira Somers

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Why People Seek Advice

      Throughout this book, we’ll be considering the question of why people frequently fail to implement excellent financial advice – the kind of advice that has the potential to benefit lives, permanently and profoundly. But before we dive into those troubled waters, we’d be wise to back up a few steps and consider a more fundamental question: What leads people to seek your advice in the first place?

      The question is so fundamental that it often gets overlooked. Getting in touch with the answers can transform how you show up for your clients. It can tell you when to put a relative emphasis on client experience versus technical expertise at differing points of contact with them. Not incidentally, it can also be used to guide your marketing efforts, making sure that they’re targeted at the issues of concern to your potential clients.

      Your own reasons for seeking advice

      Think of some recent times that you reached out for some counsel. What were you hoping for?

      Maybe you needed to confirm something you had already investigated: I think this repair is covered by the warranty. Can you verify that for me?

      Or it could have been that you were looking for solutions to a longstanding dilemma: How can I get my dog to stop jumping on people?

      Or perhaps you were stuck with a number of complex options that were all emotionally wrenching: What would you do if it were YOUR dad showing signs of dementia?

      Or maybe you just needed a perspective that you couldn’t get on your own: Does my butt look big in this muumuu?

      Whatever the particulars, you asked for advice because you wanted help in solving a problem. The help you were seeking may have come in one of many forms: information, guidance, reassurance, etc. If that advice met your needs, you left the encounter with a better knowledge of what action to take, what decision to make. If the encounter was helpful, you would have been left with greater confidence and calm. But if that advice did not help you solve your problem, you would have left the encounter feeling just as dissatisfied or unsettled as when you started – or even, unhappily, more so.

      Having an unsolved problem creates a state of mental tension; solving the problem allows the individual to return to a state of psychological equilibrium or homeostasis. Returning to a settled state just feels better, plain and simple. Such quietening or settling can occur even when people are asking for help that seemingly has no emotional import whatsoever, and even when they end up rejecting the advice they’ve been given. (We’ll delve into this paradox in a subsequent chapter.) But remember this: All decisions have an emotional component to them. People seek advice to solve a problem so that they can feel more settled.

      The wisdom of the collective

      Reflect again on your own recent experiences of advice-seeking. Chances are you reached out for advice because you believed it would lead to a quicker, better, more satisfactory outcome than you could achieve on your own. And chances are you would have been correct in that belief. The quality of people’s decision-making is often demonstrably better when they consult with other people.

      One of the highest-rated game shows in television history is the international phenomenon, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The game requires contestants to answer a series of multiple-choice questions of varying difficulty. Any wrong answer results in immediate ejection from the show. When they’re stumped by a question, contestants on that game show have a one-time option of polling the studio audience, and then deciding whether to go with the majority answer or strike out on their own.

      I’ve often wondered how much help could be offered to contestants by an audience made up of people from all walks of life. The questions run the gamut from science to history to entertainment and beyond – it’s like a high-stakes version of Trivial Pursuit. So how useful are the collective guesses of a non-expert audience? In their fascinating book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour, authors Ori and Rom Brafman were able to put an end to my wondering. According to the Brafmans, the audience is correct 90% of the time. That’s far better than the odds the befuddled contestants start out with.

      Asking for guidance from a relatively random group of non-expert strangers makes sense if you’re in a time-pressured, do-or-die situation on national television.^* Blessedly, that is a rare event. Most of the time, we’re able to be more discerning about the people we reach out to. That’s a good thing, because the decisions we face are usually a good deal more complex. The answers we seek are not so much cut-and-dried factual ones; they tend to be more nuanced and personalized than that. Nevertheless, the take-home message remains: If we’re looking to make the best possible decisions for our lives, other people are often our best and most important resource.

      The common ground of financial experts and tattoo artists

      Why do people seek your advice? What is it that people are hoping to get from you, the expert? Until quite recently, the answer would have included access to a product or a body of knowledge not available elsewhere.

      There was a time when financial experts had unique and privileged access to the tools and expertise of their trade. If folks wanted to buy insurance, stocks, bonds, or mutual funds, they needed someone to do it for them. This was true of pretty much every profession and trade prior to the mid-1990s. Training and credentials gave experts an exclusive ‘lock’ on such things as procedural training, trade publications, and purchasing and sales rights. Regulatory guidelines СКАЧАТЬ