The High Performance Playbook for Financial Advisors

But what if the real differentiator isn’t what you know — it’s how you perform?

In this episode, James reframes what it actually means to become a high-performing financial advisor. Using the analogy of elite athletes, he challenges advisors to think beyond knowledge accumulation and start focusing on performance standards: energy management, prioritization, effectiveness, and deep work. 

At the center of the discussion is one deceptively simple concept: The Top Three.
The three priorities that actually move your day forward. The three rocks that must go into the jar first. The three actions that prevent your time from being consumed by “sand” — Slack messages, inbox checking, and shallow dopamine tasks.

James also addresses a real tension inside advisory firms: how associates and lead advisors can use daily and weekly top-three priorities as a communication tool, not just a productivity tool. Because performance isn’t about working longer. It’s about working with intention — and walking away at the end of the day energized instead of depleted.

If you want to become a more effective advisor, a stronger teammate, and a more present human outside of work, this episode gives you a simple framework that compounds over time.

It’s not revolutionary.
It’s just relentlessly effective.

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Advisory services are offered through Root Financial Partners, LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. This content is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. Viewing this content does not create an advisory relationship. We do not provide tax preparation or legal services. Always consult an investment, tax or legal professional regarding your specific situation.

The strategies, case studies, and examples discussed may not be suitable for everyone. They are hypothetical and for illustrative and educational purposes only. They do not reflect actual client results and are not guarantees of future performance. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal.

Comments reflect the views of individual users and do not necessarily represent the views of Root Financial. They are not verified, may not be accurate, and should not be considered testimonials or endorsements

Participation in the Retirement Planning Academy or Early Retirement Academy does not create an advisory relationship with Root Financial. These programs are educational in nature and are not a substitute for personalized financial advice. Advisory services are offered only under a written agreement with Root Financial.

Transcript

Be A Better Adviser

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Root Ready Podcast. I'm your host, James Connoll. You are listening to this because you want to be a better advisor. So what can you do? Well, to be a better advisor, start thinking about things in this way. If you were to look at, let's say, an NBA player, and that MBA player was trying to become the absolute best at their craft they could be, what would they do? Will they just learn more about the MBA? Will they just study more about the NBA and plays to run? Yes, there's aspects of that that are absolutely helpful. But if they really wanted to be great at their craft, they would focus relentlessly on their performance, their physical performance, their conditioning, their ability to understand and read defenses, their ability to do things on the court that would make them perform at their best. We as advisors can learn something from that. Too often, if we want to become a better advisor, we think, okay, I need to learn more. I need to go get another designation. I need to go read more of Kitzy's blogs. I need to go listen to more podcasts. And yes, there is absolutely a time and a place for that. In fact, there's more of a time and place for that than there would be for an athlete simply because we, by nature, are knowledge workers. We are getting paid for what's in our head, not how well we can shoot the basketball, not for how well we can uh play defense on the other end of the court. So there's absolutely a knowledge component. But if that's all we're focused on, and we're not also hyper-focused on our own performance, we're not going to be the most effective advisors we can be. And so that's the focus of today's podcast. And in today's podcast, I want to do two things. Number one is announce something that me and the team have spent a lot of time putting together and we want to give it to you all. But number two is actually go into this, start breaking down one of the core components of what we put together. So that thing that we put together is called the High Performers Workbook. And in fact, if you go to the show notes of this episode, whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple or YouTube, click on the link in the show notes. That's going to take you to a page. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of that page, you can actually download a PDF version of this workbook that you can use and reference all the time. But the intent of it is to say, how can we equip ourselves as advisors, as professionals, to be the most effective person possible? Now here's the thing: this isn't just about squeezing all the juice out of what you've got to leave everything at work. To be the best advisor you can and go home totally exhausted. I had a conversation with all of our associate advisors last week where we actually started going through this workbook together. And one of the key points that I made is performance isn't just about treating work as this thing where you need to give all of your energy to it. So there's nothing else for you outside of work. No, the high performance workbook is designed to say how can you be a better person? How can you be a better husband? How can you be a better wife? How can you be a better father? How can you be a better teammate? How can you be a better advisor? All of these things come down to how can you prioritize? How can you recover? Ultimately, how can you perform? So that hopefully after a long day of work, after you've gotten everything done on your to-do list that you needed to do, you walk away feeling refreshed and energized, as opposed to walking away feeling like, man, I was busy all day. I got nothing done, and now I'm completely exhausted and have nothing to give to my family when I do get home. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about being a high performer. How can you be a better human? Not the natural intrinsic worth of you as a human, but your natural effectiveness as a human. Because the principles that you're gonna learn here, you can absolutely apply to your work. But they're also the same principles that are gonna apply to the rest of your life that will elevate your life and allow you to live a bigger, fuller, richer life. So make sure you go to the show notes, make sure that you download this because there's dozens and dozens of pages on this exact topic. I'm not gonna go through every single one on this podcast, but I'm gonna choose the one that in my experience has been the most profoundly impactful for me as a person. And it's super simple. There's nothing complicated. If you're waiting for the big grand reveal, the silver bullet thing that's gonna make you the most effective advisor possible, you're not gonna get that. It's just something very simple. But the simple things done consistently day after day after day after month after month after month, will lead you to places that seem insurmountable or that seem impossible today when you just apply that bit of consistency to doing them well over and over and over again. So the first thing I talk about in the high performance workbook, and the thing I'm gonna talk about in today's episode, is the importance of the top three. So your top three is just another way of saying your top goals. When you go to work, when you show up, when you crack open your laptop, what's the first thing that you do? Now pause and actually be honest with yourself. When you showed up to work today, if this is a workday that you're listening to this, what was the first thing that you did? Or if this is a weekend, think back to last workday, think back to Friday. What was the first thing that you did when you got to work, when you cracked your laptop open? Did you immediately get to work on what you knew was the most important thing, that project you're trying to tackle that you know is gonna take a lot of time and energy and just focus without distraction? Or did you crack open your laptop and you checked LinkedIn just to see what's going on there? Or maybe you logged on to Charles Schwab just to see what notifications you've got going on there. Or maybe you checked Slack or Teams or your email just to see what came in there. Now there's nothing inherently wrong about doing any of those things, but what you have to realize is if that's where you start, that's probably where you're gonna spend the entirety of your day. You're gonna spend the entirety of your day seeing what do people in my inbox need me to do? What do people in my Slack messages need me to do? What do people online want me to pay attention to? You're gonna go bouncing around from thing to thing to thing, you're gonna close your laptop at the end of the day, and you're gonna feel completely exhausted and like you didn't get anything done. Now compare that to this. You show up to work, you don't crack your laptop at all. Instead, you open up your binder that has something written down that says, here's the top three things you need to do. James, before you do anything today, you need to outline this YouTube video that you're gonna create. Or, James, before you do anything today, you're meeting with the millers tomorrow, you owe them a full tax analysis. You're gonna do that tax analysis before anything else happens. Or perhaps there's a client situation and you know you need to reach out to them and have a very difficult conversation about something. Don't let that be something you do later this afternoon. Let that be the first thing that you do. When you have those top three things that you can focus on, you don't need to go check your email to see what you should be working on. You don't need to go check Slack to see what should you be working on. You definitely don't need to go to social media to see what's going on there. You can focus fully on those first few things. And here's the thing that's going to surprise you it's going to shock you how little time it takes to accomplish those things when you are dedicating your full time and energy and focus to knocking them out. If you start doing the little things first, this is that whole rocks and pebbles concept. If you've ever seen that presentation, I forget exactly who did it, but you have uh a jar, you have a glass jar, and next to that glass jar, you have a bunch of rocks, you have some pebbles, and you have sand. And imagine for a second, you have that big glass jar, and the person first fills that glass jar with sand. That sand fills up, say, a third of the jar. Then after that, they fill it up with the pebbles. Well, the pebbles now fill up almost the entirety of the remaining free space in the jar. Then you have the big rocks. And if you try to get the rocks in there on top of all that, they don't fit. There's no room for them anymore. Now flip that. What if instead and keep that mental visual? Some of you have already seen this, so you get it, but for those of the of you that haven't, keep that mental visual. You have a glass jar that's filled up a third with sand. Let's call it uh almost the rest of it with these pebbles, and then you've got big rocks that you're trying to get in there and they just don't fit. Now, if you flip that, you have that same exact jar, the same exact rocks, pebbles, and sand, but now you put the big rocks in first. They fit no problem. You've got the whole jar to fit them in. Then you pour the pebbles in. And the pebbles are a little bigger, but they're able to fall through and kind of find their way into the nooks and crannies left by the rocks. And then finally you pour in the sand. Pouring in the sand, that sand's gonna find its way. That sand can fit itself between the rocks, between the pebbles. And what you have is a single jar can now carry everything. Everything fits into that. That's exactly what you're doing when you're setting your top three. You are saying, here's my rocks for the day, and this is what needs to get done. Because if you don't do that, your day is gonna be filled with sand. What does sand look like? Sand looks like checking Slack messages every seven minutes. Sand looks like checking the same email, reading it, seeing what's needed, saying, you know, I don't really have time to respond this to right now. I'm gonna mark it as unread and come back to it later. Sand looks like logging into Charles Schwab into Altrist and clicking around all the different notifications, even if they don't apply to you. See, sand feels like you're being productive. Sand feels like you're doing something, it's giving that dopamine release to you because it feels like something's happening. But it's the equivalent to eating potato chips. It's that quick dopamine release. Our body likes it, our mind likes it. But if all you're doing is eating potato chips all day, you're gonna end the day feeling pretty crummy. You're gonna end the day feeling pretty exhausted, and you're gonna say, I actually ate nothing of substance. Why do I feel so gross? Well, in that case, we know why. Well, the same thing when all you're doing all day is checking these notifications, pinging from place to place to place. So that's the importance of top three. Now, here's the thing with your top three: this does not just apply to the daily level. Ideally, you're setting your top three for the year. What do you as a person want to accomplish this year in your career and your progression where you want to be? What are the top three goals that you have that will get you closer to that? Then at a quarterly level, what are the top three goals? What are the top three rocks? And by the way, there's different things you can call this. Last year at Root Financial, we used the OKR framework, the objectives and key results framework. So we would have quarterly OKRs. Now this year, we've adopted the EOS framework. So we're now calling those same things rocks. So whether it's rocks, whether it's OKRs, whether it's goals, set something that works for you at the quarterly level. Then each week it's important to say, okay, if those are my quarterly rocks, if those are the things I want to do this quarter because they're going to allow me to move forward to my closer to my annual goals, then this week, what do I need to do? Think of this as that smallest atomic unit of whatever your long-term goals are. It's not realistic to think that every single hour of every day you're working towards your long-term goals. It's not even realistic to think that every single day you're going to be doing something that moves you closer to your quarterly goals, which moves you closer to your long-term goals. But at least on a weekly level, are there things you can do that are moving you closer to those quarterly goals? So every single week, what are the top three most important things you can accomplish? Then at the beginning of every day, ideally the day before. So it's 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, I'm wrapping up. I'm gonna write, what are my top three things I need to accomplish for Wednesday? Why am I doing that on Tuesday? Well, I'm doing that because I'm fresh. I have context. I've seen exactly what I'm working on, I'm seeing what the priorities are. Versus if I go home, I spend time with my family, I spend time doing other things. I wake up in the morning, I got stuff going on. I show up Wednesday morning, I'm thinking, I have no context. What the heck should I be working on? You do it's gonna take me some time to kind of get that machine going again. Versus if I do something at the end of the day, I'm already in movement. I'm already in motion. I see what's happening. I can check my weekly top three to say, okay, what are the weekly top three things I need to do? I can break those down to say, is there anything I should be doing tomorrow on Wednesday? I have context of what did I work on today? What are those unresponded to Slack messages or emails or tasks I need to do? Can I set those as one of my daily top three? So, what you're starting to do is you're starting to break everything down. And again, at the weekly level, that is kind of that smallest atomic unit of your progress towards your long-term goals. But then at the daily level, you're also setting a top three to say what should you be doing each day? Sometimes, yes, you're making progress towards your weekly top three. Sometimes you're just getting stuff done. Now, if you're in a busy review season, you're getting stuff done. You're not working on a lot of projects. There's not a lot of new stuff you're doing. You've got a lot coming at you. You're reviewing stuff for clients or meeting with all your clients, your daily top three, your weekly top three is almost all just gonna be focused on staying on track for clients. So here's how you should be thinking about this. Your daily in your weekly top three, that's gonna help you with your efficiency. It's gonna make sure you're working on the right things, getting things done in a timely manner, not jumping around from thing to thing to thing, and then realizing you never actually got around to doing the thing that was gonna move you quicker to where you want to go. Your quarterly in your annual top three, that's gonna help you with your effectiveness. Are you actually moving in the right direction? So if efficiency is speed, effectiveness is direction. There's a Stephen Covey quote, something along the lines of this is like the difference between a clock and a compass. The clock is efficient. It tells us at all times what the time is, what's progressing, it tells us that exactly. But the clock is a symbol of efficiency, of time, of measurement. But what do we think of when we think of effectiveness? Well, the compass is a symbol for that. The compass gives us direction. It's not just how fast are we going, but it's are we going in the right direction? So think of your quarterly and your annual rocks, your quarterly and your annual top three is am I going in the right direction? And then your daily and your weekly hopefully are a derivative of your quarterly and annual goals, but they're making sure am I moving through this at the right speed by working on the right things here. So that's the daily top three. And again, for me, if there's one single thing that I could do that says if all of the things in this workbook, of all the things that have helped me become more effective and more efficient, it's the daily prioritization of my top three, the weekly prioritization of my top three, the quarterly and annual prioritization of this. And nothing here has to be complicated. Sometimes people get frustrated with this because there's nothing new here. There's nothing here that seems like, well, this is an epiphany. That's the point. It's not the complex things that are going to get us closer to where we need to go. It's the very simple things that are just frankly difficult to do day in and day out because it's easier to pink around. It's easier to let our mind wander aimlessly as opposed to thinking deeply about what are we actually trying to accomplish. Now, here's an add-on. This is not going to apply to everybody in the same exact way. Last week I met with a lot of our associates and we went over this and I asked them for feedback. I said, what's the biggest challenge implementing this? And the feedback was pretty unanimous. It's, hey, our time is not our own. So at Root Financial, there's one associate financial advisor for every lead financial advisor we have. And a lead financial advisor, assuming they've hit a certain amount of time in the role or metrics within the role, they have a dedicated associate. So here's the reality. I can say this all day long. Okay, set your top three, do your top three, prioritize what matters. But how do you take that? And how do you balance that against, well, my time isn't always my own. I'm existing to support my lead advisor who exists to support our clients. So this was a really good conversation that we had. And it made me reflect on a couple of things. Of what is the value of your daily top three, even if you're in an associate role where your day is not necessarily your own? Easy enough for me to say, as a CEO, no one's going to come to me and say, James, I need you to do this right now. You have to do this right now. I get to the freedom to carve out my day the way I think my day should be carved out. If you're an associate financial advisor listening to this, that's not the case. Heck, even if you're a lead financial advisor listening to this, you might say that's not the case because I have to answer to my clients. I have to be available to my clients. All that's true. But let me address each of those things. First for the associate financial advisor. The associate financial advisor feedback that I heard was how do I do this while balancing the fact that I need to be available, I need to support my lead. And here's the reality. One, you should absolutely still do this, but the daily top three in doing this, what it does is it becomes the foundation that actually helps with that communication piece. If you're an associate, assume that your lead advisor doesn't know what you're doing every day. If you're a lead advisor, assume your associate doesn't know what you're doing every day. Now, sure you're talking together a lot, you're in meetings together a lot, but in between meetings, assume the other one doesn't know what you're doing. So here's how the daily top three comes into play. I have an associate advisor. Let's call that associate advisor uh Ari. Ari was the first person to come on and actually serve as my associate advisor, along with many other roles that he was doing at the time. And Ari doesn't have a daily top three, and I don't have a daily top three. So all of a sudden something comes up and I say, Ari, I need you to do this. And he kind of feels like there's other things he should be doing, but there's really no basis for saying so. So it's okay, James, sure. I'll do that. Now that might not have been the most effective thing for Ari to do, but we didn't have something pre-established. We didn't have a daily top three. Now imagine that same exact scenario. The day before, Ari has set his top three, and the day before I've set my top three. And I've set my top three, not just scribbling down the top three emails I have and saying respond to these, but I took the time. I took a few minutes to say these are the most important tasks that need to get done. Ari did the same thing. Now they come to Ari with a priority. And Ari says, hey, James, that sounds great. You know, we established these top three, or I established these top three because these are the priorities we have for the day and even for the week. What would you like for me to deprioritize here? You know, my priority, James, was to finish that plan for the millers, like we had talked about. You're now asking me to go research this thing. Happy to do so. But where would you like me to do that? Is this more important than researching this project for the millers or completing this task for the millers? And when we have that, now all of a sudden I can say, oh no, Ari, I'm sorry, you're exactly right. The Miller plan is way more important to this. Let's go ahead and table that request I had of you to research this other thing over here. And so what this now becomes is a communication tool, is the top three is your way of making visible the things that are invisible, making visible all these priorities that you have. But again, if I'm a lead financial advisor, I don't know exactly what my associate financial advisor is doing all the time, and vice versa. And so make that assumption that neither of you know exactly what the other is working on all the time in this weekly and daily top three is your way of making that visible. So when the communication happens, when I ask Ari to do something, it's not just okay, well, sure, James is my lead advisor, so I've got to do it. It's no, James, here's here's what I'm working on. And remember, we met at the beginning of this week to kind of go over our weekly top threes together. Has anything changed? Or do you want me to deprioritize one of these things? So by being able to visualize that or see what's actually most important and see what the other is working on, that communication becomes far easier. It's not already, I think you should do this because I want you to do it. And it's not already saying, James, no, I'm not gonna do this because I want to do this other thing. It's here's the priorities that we both set. So the takeaway here: associate financial advisors, lead financial advisors, in a weekly huddle at the very beginning of each week, absolute best practice to share with each other what your weekly top three are. Make sure you're aligned there. Make sure you're going into the week together because once you see those priorities, then as other things come up throughout the week, you can continue to reference those as the things that need to be focused on. Another thing that came up as we went through this was you're gonna have some seasons where your top three in no way covers everything that's going on. It might be spring review season, it might be fall review season, you might have 10 plus people you're meeting with this week, plus another several plans that you're preparing for next week's meetings. How on earth can you distill all of that down into a top three? There's 15 things that all seem equally important. True. Here's the thing though. If you have 15 things that seem equally important, and you don't even just choose three of those to prioritize, you're gonna likely bounce from thing to thing to thing to thing. This is a priority, that's a priority, that's a priority, that's a priority, and you start bouncing around between them. Because they all have equal importance, you don't know exactly what you should be prioritizing. So it becomes very easy to bounce around between all of them. So sometimes just having a top three to say, I get these 15 things might be of equal importance. Now, the reality is they're very rarely all the same exact importance. Some might even be more important just because the timing of when you needed to do them. If it's the same exact thing for two different clients, but one client you're meeting with in two days and one is in nine days, same exact thing, but you're gonna prioritize the thing a bit sooner. You're not as an advisor needing to pick your gaze up all the time and say, okay, let me take a big step back, let me scan the horizon, let me see all the things going on, have 15 priorities you're constantly trying to balance between. No, you've already written out your top three. Even if those top three are the same exact importance as things four through 15, at least by focusing on those things, you can be relentless until those things are done. Check those three things off, go to the next three. So it just becomes a focus mechanism, even if you're not capturing all of the stuff you're trying to do. And here's another thing you will never ever capture all of the things you're trying to do. There are so many things that will always be in front of you by focusing, by prioritizing. Three, even if there's way more than three things you want to get done, and I can guarantee you that will always be the case, at least that's always the case for me, by focusing on three, it's doing a couple things. Number one is forcing you to really think deeply about if I could only do one thing, or if I could only do three things, what would they be and why? What's going to be of most strategic importance? Or what as an advisor do I know needs to be finished first? Or which of these clients do I know maybe have more complexity going on here? So I need to prioritize what's going on with them. It forces you to think deeply about what the actual top three would be. But number two, it prevents you from bouncing around from many different priorities without an anchor to which ones you actually need to get accomplished first. So keep that in mind. This is not a silver bowl. This is not going to accomplish or solve everything for you. But simply by making your priorities visible, it's going to help with your communication between lead advisors and associate advisors. And it's going to give you this thing that in the midst of a crazy hectic day, when everything seems to be going wrong, you're getting calls, you're getting slacks, you're getting emails, fires are constantly coming across your plate. You constantly know what to go back to. When you have that free moment, when you have that time carved out to do something, you can go back and you can prioritize your top three, as opposed to constantly going through that framework of what should I be working on now? What should I be working on now? What should I be working on now? You know what you should be working on now. And until that's complete, you don't need to ask yourself that question again. So as we wrap up, I want to acknowledge one final thing. And that is what I said before. None of this is going to blow your mind with, wow, this is so revolutionary. Wow, this is so incredibly different than anything I've ever heard before. You've probably heard the same message a million times before, but still, you don't do this. And you don't do this because this is hard. It is hard to wake up every day and ignore the temptation of going online to check social media right away. It's hard to wake up every day and avoid the temptation of jumping straight into your inbox to see what's going on. It's hard to wake up every day and force yourself to do the strategic work first, the deep work first, the meaningful work first when it's so much easier just to check email, to check Slack, to check notifications. It's like eating those potato chips. It's cheap dopamine. We like that cheap dopamine. We like to feel productive. But if that's how you start your day, you're gonna finish your day feeling exhausted and unproductive. If you start your day by doing that hard thing, go back to the rock example. You are filling your glass jar with the rocks first, then the pebbles next, then the sand after. You're going to accomplish way more. And not just that, you're gonna finish the day feeling so much more energized, have so much more energy to go home to spend with your family, with your friends, than you would have had you simply pinged around all day chasing these meaningless distractions. So I recognize that it's simple, but it's also very hard. And the best performing advisors, the best performing professionals, heck, this is not unique to financial advisors, are the ones that can prioritize their performance. And this is one of the things that me personally, at least, has found to be the most impactful in my own personal efficiency and my own personal effectiveness. So, as a reminder, if you want the full workbook, go to the link in the show notes. You can click on that. And at the very bottom of that page, there's a PDF download. If this has been helpful, if you've listened to this podcast, if you've shared this podcast with anyone, would you do me a favor and leave a review? Whether it's on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, or if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe and like this. I want to make sure this is a resource that growth-minded advisors all across the industry have access to so they don't have the things holding them back from being the best they can possibly be. Thank you for listening. That's it for this time, and I'll see you all next time.