Welcome back, I'm so glad you're here. Each week I want to just create a follow up episode for you. That's just all about the action steps from the longer podcast earlier this week. So every week, my goal is to just distill the episode down into a couple of bullet points that I want you to take action on immediately to make impact in your business. So really, I'd like to just take, you know, anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, boil it down into a couple of bullet points that are super actionable or will adjust your mindset, or tip tricks, whatever. So I am your host of the Efficient Advisor, libby Gray. We welcome. If you're new here. I'm so glad you found this podcast and I started from scratch built and sold by age 37, a 100% referral only planning practice that I grew to seven figures as a solo advisor, all while working just three days a week and taking off 14 weeks a year. And I swear it was all because of systems and processes. And I'm here to walk alongside you and to show you how to do exactly the same for you and your business and to help you take immediate actions on the most important strategies for scaling, organizing and creating less stress and overwhelm. It is time to take that one right next step to build both a business but, even more importantly, a life that you love.
Speaker 1So this week's episode was with my friend, brendan Fraser. He is all about behavioral finance and in this episode we really delved into how he got into this kind of area of study and how he kind of saw a trend, as he was consulting to advisors, that advisors were doing a lot of almost like therapeutic work and not so much about the numbers as it was about the emotional side of money and the decision-making process that our clients were going through. And so he kind of went down a little wormhole with that and has built a whole brand and business around really understanding the humanized side of money. So Brendan's really great and he had a couple of big takeaways for me that I just wanted to call out on this shorter ideas to implement episode. So number one was this idea that emotion is always going to trump logic. So logic is not necessarily going to be what your clients are using to make decisions. So if we are coming at them from a hey, this is the most logical thing for you to do standpoint, where we're just showing them facts and figures and numbers and we're missing the emotional side of decision-making and really getting under the hood and understanding what it is that drives and motivates your clients. And I will link in the show notes for you guys the episode on ideal client avatar. I feel like it really keeps coming up lately. But everything is so centralized around really understanding what it is that your clients have experienced in their past, how financial advisors have played a role in that or have not played a role in that. Understanding what motivates them, what are their fears, what are their concerns and I've said it before, but the idea is, how do we enter a conversation that our clients are already having inside of their heads? So, instead of trying to logic them to death, really trying to understand their emotional decision-making capacity and then deliver logical solutions based upon those emotions. So I thought that was really great.
Speaker 1The second big takeaway that I had from Brendan something that really stuck out to me was this idea that the most powerful question you can ask is a follow-up question. I thought that was really great and I shared in the longer episode a little bit about how you know you have those people in your life who they're so busy thinking of the next question or thinking of their response to something that you said, versus asking that next good follow-up question. So I can think of a couple people in particular. It's like I don't even know that they heard the answer, much less heard the answer, and really wanted to understand and go down that rabbit hole. So I shared in the episode that I grew up in a household full of journalists and everybody was in the TV world and one of the questions or one of the things my dad told me about asking questions when I started doing this and interviewing people he was like just follow your curiosity. So when you ask a question, think of what is the next logical question that you would wanna know and just try to go deep on a couple of levels, so like asking more than one follow-up question and really kind of just going where your natural curiosity takes you.
Speaker 1Which leads me to my next point that Brendan and I kinda talked about was this idea of having a framework of questions so that you're not scripting it, you're not winging it in the meeting, but also striking this balance between being able to ask questions and follow your curiosity and still having structure for your meeting, so still having a business intent, a purpose of the meeting and one of the things when we were talking and Brendan said the most powerful thing you can ask is a follow-up question, I started asking him like well, what are some of your favorite questions to ask? And he shared with us his 3E question framework that the questions should be easy to answer, they should be exciting for your client to answer and they should have some sort of emotional component to them, and that these types of questions are the questions that are just gonna crack people wide open and let them start sharing. So instead of coming in hot and asking them questions about if they're on track for their retirement plan, instead asking them these questions that will get them kind of fired up to share why they're coming in to see you and what about retirement sounds amazing to them. And asking these three E questions I thought was really really cool. So we need to be intentional about the questions that we're asking.
Speaker 1So make a list of questions that you like, ones that get a good response from clients. Get really really clear and narrow down those questions to be the absolute best questions for that meeting. So kind of tying in again establishing the structure and the purpose of that meeting is really important and then defining which questions are going to really drive the transformation that you're looking for in that meeting. So every meeting we show up understanding that our clients are most likely feeling one way, and then we as planners want to have a goal of how we want them to feel when they leave that meeting, whether they feel relief or they feel like, oh, finally I'm making some progress on something or I'm doing the thing, or maybe it's just I'm feeling more organized about my financial picture. Whatever the feeling you are shooting for in that particular meeting is narrowing down the questions to make sure that they're driving towards that feeling. And I loved how Brendan said the way that I determine what is the best question from my framework or from my list is if I could only ask one more question and kind of getting that down to like three, four, five kind of staple questions that you show up to with every intention of asking during a meeting if it makes sense and if there's an opportunity to do so. So I thought this was a really great episode.
Speaker 1Make sure you check out Brendan's podcast, the Human Side of Money, and his financial planning firm is Wired Planning. I will go ahead and link all of the things that we talked about today in the show notes. Thank you guys so much for joining me for yet another week of this podcast. I am so grateful for you, my fine listeners, and I hope this podcast has helped you in some way operate a little bit more efficiently in your financial planning business. Thank you so much and I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week. Thank you.