Find a TRUSTED ADVISOR (& Profit) So You Are Not Alone

When you want to create a course, the task can, at first, seem daunting.  Relying on someone as your Trusted Advisor can make the difference between success and failure.  Creating a course is not the only place that a Trusted Advisor matters—actually, they matter in every endeavor.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.”  Page 254 The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

“Follow an expert.”  Virgil, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”  Benjamin Disraeli

The Value of Your Trusted Advisor

Sherpas regard their mountaineering role with considerable pride and they are famous for helping climbers ascend Mt. Everest.  In 1953, Tenzing Norgay, Edmund Hillary’s Trusted Advisor, became one of the first two people to conquer the summit of Mount Everest. Another Trusted Advisor, Apa, set a world record by climbing Everest 21 times 7. Trusted Advisor’s climbs are impressive, but their primary role is getting others up the mountain.

The Power of a Mentor/Trusted Advisor to a Navy Seal

Eric Greitens is a Navy Seal and Rhodes Scholar.  He was asked this question by a member of the audience where he was speaking, “You have clearly reached levels of excellence in everything you have set out to do.  What do you credit that to?

His response was interesting.  He credits his success to “having the right kind of friends along the journey.” He expanded on that idea by saying this: “What I realized was that at every point in my life when I had started someone new, here were the right kind of friends and the right kind of teachers who were with me who helped me push through places of pain and fear and failure in my life.”  (Greitens, 2011)

Your Trusted Advisor:  Real-life Application:  Safer, Quicker, Easier

Maybe you don’t know how to market well, pivot your business, get past your own internal barriers, adapt with precision, use tools, or listen to your market. Or maybe you find yourself choosing between too many options. A Trusted Advisor can help.  In real-time and in real life, a Trusted Advisor acts as an expert guide who makes the path for you safer, quicker, and easier.

Your Trusted Advisor’s Input:  A Long List of Benefits (14, in fact)

Research has found a long list of benefits for getting Trusted Advisor input:

1. Reduces time, worry, and costs of making midcourse corrections
2. Increases feelings of strength (Wales, 2003)
3. Increases ownership of decision-making, affecting both yourself and close relations (Wales, 2003, p. 281)
4. Increases the ability to make decisions that you had previously found difficult  (Wales, 2003, p. 281)
5. Increases ability to link beliefs and values to your work
6. Creates synergy between the external changes needed and the internal ones (Wales, 2003)
7. Increases business performance  (Wales, 2003)
8. Increases acceptance of self (Wales, 2003)
9. Increases awareness of inconsistencies between what you say and do, and what you think and feel (C. Argyris, 1990)
10. Reawakens passion for work 3
11. Creates meaning in work 3
12. Increases your ability to be more honest about your own feelings and more sensitive to other people’s feelings
13. Increases ability to be honest and direct
14. Increases ability to analyze situations  (Wales, 2003, p. 280)

Your Trusted Advisor:  The Price of Clarity vs. Confusion

Coaching can be done through a course or one-on-one with a business coach, course coach, or life coach who fills the role of Trusted Advisor.  In fact, in one particular study, participation in a coaching program created better mental health, quality of life, and goal achievement 5.

Most importantly, coaching increases levels of insight 5. Insight is your true impetus for change, transition, and success.

One of the greatest gifts of a Trusted Advisor is facilitating your climb and sharing your knowledge.  Dr. Chris Argyris, in his article published in Harvard Business Review, entitled “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” says this, “Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning….”

There are two distinct types of learning:  Single Loop and Double Loop. “To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68 degrees is a good example of single-loop learning.

A thermostat that could ask, “Why am I set at 68 degrees?” and then explore whether or not some other temperature might more economically achieve the goal of heating the room would be engaging in double-loop learning.” 2  That’s insight.

A Trusted Advisor can be found by taking a course, online coaching, or finding a mentor, where knowledge is provided to get around obstacles, maximize returns on your effort investments, and learn to follow the path of your personal summit.

A Trusted Advisor can make your course business trip safer, quicker, and easier.

Your Trusted Advisor:  Getting You There Safer

The Trusted Advisor also affords the non-expert prevention of wrong steps.  Unfruitful trails waste time and energy.  Unknown blind spots create problems a climber never even knew existed.

Psychological blind spots are commonly summed up with the phrase, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  And it’s the thousand little “blind spots” that are the advantage of hiring expertise.

Your Trusted Advisor:  Getting You There Quicker

One theory of expertise is that it comes from pattern recognition.  When a Trusted Advisor has seen many different scenarios across a wide spectrum, patterns emerge.  This pattern-recognition ability leads to quick judgments, accurate application, and the ability to go to the nexus of the issue.

Your Trusted Advisor Will Impact Your Income

Pattern recognition also helps experts know how to correctly weigh the variables presented in a problem.  Good analysis doesn’t treat all issues as equal.  Expert discernment means the capability to distinguish between true and false, good and bad, what matters most, and what does not matter at all.

A non-expert often places equal value on everything, while a real expert knows exactly how to order priorities.  Competing demands, noise, and attention can be quickly cut through to solutions and profit.

Kip Cullers, an American farmer, is often called “the Babe Ruth of soybean production.”  He breaks yield records almost every year with his soybeans. Though he doesn’t give up all his soybean-growing secrets, he has developed quite a reputation for helping others, even with other crops.

Farmers in Brazil were hurting because of their low orange yields.  They blamed these stunted yields on disease.  Because of his extensive experience, pattern recognition, and analysis skills, Kip determined the real problem–a drainage and water use problem.  The benefit of his expertise to Brazil for his Trusted Advisor’s Input?  Orange yields jumped from 800 cases to 2,000 per area 4.

Like Kip, the Trusted Advisor shuts out what is not relevant and keys in on what is, zooming in on the right solution.  And income explodes.

Your Trusted Advisor:  Getting You There Easier

The mark of a pro is the ability to make something difficult look effortless. One of my favorite parts of any Olympics is ice skating. The skaters glide so beautifully and effortlessly. A simple few minutes of flips and spins could catapult them to fame and a place in their sport’s history. All that for fewer than ten minutes!

And yet, we all know that those ten minutes represent hours and hours and hours and years and years and years of grueling hard work.

Michelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

But the beauty is this:  The difficulty endured by the Trusted Advisor creates greater ease for the persons hiring them.  There is even a term for this level of on-automatic competence: “unconscious competent.”  Skilled Trusted Advisors have access to unconscious “shortcuts” in methods, tools, strategies, and instincts that allow them to get someone else to their goal with relative ease. All those years have been rolled up into “easy.”

Like the Trusted Advisors/Sherpas on Mount Everest, the trail may require a lot from the climber, but the trip is certainly made safer, quicker, and easier because of the Trusted Advisor.

Take a Course & You Are Hiring a Trusted Advisor

Although it takes tremendous skill, knowledge, and persistence on behalf of the climbers of Mt Everest, nobody does it alone.  They have teams, tools, and Trusted Advisors who make the entire trip possible.  The summit awaits, but if an individual climber insists on going it alone, he or she will never make it.  When you take a course, you are accessing the Trusted Advisor to facilitate your business heroism.  Let us be your Trusted Advisor.

References:

1. Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organisational Defences. Needham Heights: Allyn & Bacon.
2. Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99-109.
3. Boyatzis, R., McKee, A., & Goleman, D. (2002). Reawakening Your Passion for Work. Harvard Business Review, 80(4), p86, 88p, 84c, https://bit.ly/3IaGP27 .
4. Dodge, T. Busting Barriers. DTN/The Progressive Farmer. Retrieved from http://buff.ly/1HLrQpQ
5. Grant, A. M. (2003). The impact of life coaching on goal attainment, metacognition and mental health. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 31(3), 253-264, retrieved from https://bit.ly/308iyDV.
6. Greitens, E. (Writer). (2011). The Heart and the Fist, CSPAN2 Book TV.
7. Lallanilla, M. (2014). What Is a Trusted Advisor? Live Science. Retrieved from http://buff.ly/1e7VrP3
8. Wales, S. (2003). Why coaching? Journal of Change Management, 3(3), 275-333.