Tag Archives: decision making

Act Your Way into a New Way of Thinking

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Professionals who do not shed out-dated thinking, bias, and flawed decision making can be just as resistant to change as clients and members of the public—and as susceptible to mediocrity.

Good intentions, even solid logic, are often not enough to overcome ingrained or unconscious resistance to change which makes unknowing difficult.

Those who aim to change unproductive habits, like repeating “you know” or procrastinating, can attest to this.

Experience has taught you that trying to not do something is hard, so you’re sure failure is imminent. We get stuck in the past, because we are trying to talk (even when we call it think) our way into a new way of acting while stuck in the same place, real and mental. This inertia occurs in part because all we have to think about is the way things were done.

The reverse works: act your way into a new way of thinking.

Consciously alter behavior to the desired new pattern and the new way of thinking will gradually take hold. Begin by acting the way you want to end up behaving. Start by embracing new habits and your mindset will follow suit.

Pretend to yourself that you can and you will discover you can.

For instance, if you think you are shy about public speaking, and keep saying so to yourself and others, you’ll continue sabotaging yourself and holding back when speaking opportunities arise.

  • Start by pretending you are not shy.
  • Begin by never again saying or thinking “I’m shy.” That’s history.
  • Act as if you are comfortable speaking in public and you will be. Worked for me.
  • Gradually, take on bigger speaking challenges. You’ll discover you can communicate more effectively than you were telling yourself.
  • Regularly remind yourself that you are acting yourself into a new way of thinking to steadily move forward. Keep this commitment fresh in your mind.

[Except from What’s Your Point? Chapter 2, section 2.2.1 Defy Mediocrity & Resistance.]

© 2021  Copyright   PJ Wade The Catalyst   “What’s Your Point?  Cut The Crap, Hit The Mark & Stick!” All rights reserved.

Additional reading:
“What You Don’t Know…”

No one can or does know everything. What has 2020 taught you as a homeowner about what you don’t know?

Decision Barriers to Avoid (+ exercise)

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Are you decisive or do Decision Barriers get in the way?

How aware are you of how you make decisions?

Do you make decisions differently in the midst of a pandemic than you did before Covid 19 descended on the world?

Before the pandemic, did you make decisions differently when they were your decisions about your life than you did when the decisions concerned your clients and their lives or businesses? What has changed now?

Or has the pandemic kept you from much contact with clients and prospects, so you feel out of practice?

What do you want to improve about your decision making now and post covid?

Your normal approach before the pandemic…What did you say to clients and how did you compensate clients when you overlooked key selection factors or, in hindsight, didn’t choose the best approach to problem solving for them? Or did you stay silent and hope clients didn’t notice?

Your approach in the future…how do you intend to react to the issues in the previous question post pandemic?

The following excerpt from “What’s Your Point?” (to be published in 2021) Chapter 6 “What is Communication?” is an opportunity to take a close look at your decision making process.

Exercise: Action NOW Me — Anticipate Decision Barriers

Answer the following questions quickly and in writing (to engage your brain full on) for the most useful results.

  • Am I so focused on helping others make decisions that I forget to question how well I make decisions which affect my income and reputation?
  • What was behind my hesitation in the last tough decision I made?
  • Are the hesitation triggers involved in my other past difficult choices listed below?

Don’t be surprised if you can check off more than one barrier to that decision making. Simple decisions aren’t simple, after all.

Hesitation Triggers & Barriers

  • Procrastination
  • Lack of commitment to possible outcomes
  • Ignoring steps in the creative process
  • Undue pressure and arbitrary deadlines
  • Out-dated thinking, ingrained habits, and biases
  • Impatience
  • Fear, conscious and unconscious
  • Overconfidence
  • Personal agenda
  • Financial pressure
  • _____________ (What has experience revealed to me?)
  1. If I improve my decision making approach, can I think of three ways that will enable me to help clients with theirs?
  2. List three improvements to my support of client decision-making concerns which will be reflected in my bottom line.
  3. Identify three ways increased decisiveness will help me engage with prospects and clients more effectively.
  4. Select five ideas for marketing, business development, product design, or service delivery that are inspired by Hesitation Triggers & Barriers.

Do you understand that the more conscious you are of your decision-making habits, the easier it is to anticipate barriers and to achieve success for all concerned?

Re-visit this exercise in the future when faced with significant decisions to make. Compare what you did previously or “normally” with how you now anticipate decision barriers.

Additional resource: Here’s an example of how to help clients by showing them how to deal with hesitancy and negative aspects of decisiveness in the context of your work together. This article is written to help real estate buyers and the real estate professionals who serve them address this topic —”Buyers: Hesitant or Decisive?“

PJ “To facilitate decision making, concentrate on shifting or transforming uninformed thinking into a constructive mindset. With the assistance of your professional expertise, guide prospects and clients so they pivot to an informed point of view.”

© 2020 PJ Wade The Catalyst  “What’s Your Point?” (2021)

Supercharge Communication: 3. Facilitate Decisively

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Supercharge Communication by continually perfecting and investing in EVERYTHING that you need to be effective at and are already good at…facilitate decision making to supercharge effective communication.

The following excerpts from Chapter 6 in “What’s Your Point?” explain why continually perfecting the art of decision making is a valuable, even essential, investment in effective communication for professional advisors and persuaders.

#1. Confident Decision Making

Effective communication is vital to sharing ideas, building knowledge, and making decisions. At its best, effective communication results in fruitful collaboration and confident decision making.

Experience has proven to you that facilitating confidently-made decisions benefits prospects and clients. And you! You’ll also establish value in your offerings to both groups.

Professional expertise should facilitate effective communication and negotiation to ensure that desired results are achieved or exceeded for clients. This should be true for every consumer transaction, business deal, meeting, interpersonal workplace interaction, professional consultation, and offering of products and services, whatever the medium, content, or context.

The prospect and client procedures you’ve employed to build your business and client base can be improved on by analysis of how decision making is facilitated. It’s that simple when there are no hidden, under-handed, compromised, dishonest, or criminal intentions involved.

#2. The core evaluation question is, “How can what the professional sees as relatively-simple decisions appear complex to clients?”

Your success is linked to how well and how consistently your communication, in all media, addresses this question when prospects and clients are selecting, choosing, evaluating, buying, selling, investing….

Professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, and advisors must have above-average skill and knowledge in decision making relevant to delivery of their advice, services, and products. This will include the perfected capacity to interview, facilitate, negotiate, and analyze.

Success for clients often rests with how effectively and credibly the professional communicates to create comprehension in each client’s mind.

“Why?”-questions are inherent to and embedded invisibly and otherwise in most procedures and decisions that require professional advice or intervention.

From financial and medical advice to purchasing and education details, consumers and business-to-business decision makers seek out knowledge, skills, and guidance to enable them to confidently make decisions that matter. The more quickly and completely they understand the whys associated with a specific set of choices, the more quickly and completely they can confidently make a final decision that is their best choice.

Professional communication expertise identifies and explains these issues to simplify and clarify what exactly must be chosen or avoided, and why. This reveals precisely what acceptance involves.

Professionals who do not understand what their clients do not understand, often say: “It’s a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision. You want it or you don’t. You do it or you don’t.” But it is not that simple to the client or would they hesitate?

Clients who are overwhelmed or distracted by details correctly and incorrectly related to a decision—even one described as simple by a professional—believe it is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision, and hesitate to act. They may feel they have more questions than answers and resent being made to feel inadequate. Pressure cancels out trust.

How do you assist prospects and clients in becoming confident about their decision making? What has proven to be your most useful tool in this process? How good are you at personally making decisions with confidence, especially under pressure?

#3. Mastering the Complexity of Simple Decisions

The significant professional purpose in communicating is to make good decisions easy and comfortable to make, and to help others—prospects and clients—confidently commit.

Professionals, advisors, executives, and entrepreneurs are decisive by nature, training, and goal-setting. It’s not surprising that many often think they are great decision-makers. Some even believe that making decisions quickly is a sign of decisiveness, which it isn’t necessarily.

Commonly, after a few years on the job, most professionals feel they have learned all there is about the decision making process. They believe it’s just content, in the form of product specifications, office procedures, and client “hot topics,” that change, not the decision-making process. Professionals who truly understand how ill-prepared most prospects and clients are to make decisions, understand how the professional can help. These professionals realize their value is linked to clients’ confidently-made decisions.

The more professionals understand about the process of deciding, the more useful they are to those that rely on guidance to make up their minds and end second guessing. This is true whether you sell goods, services, or both to individual clients, businesses, or organizations.

The first time you went through one of your profession’s or organization’s decision-making procedures with a prospect or client, it required a lot of concentration, thinking, remembering, and analysis on your part to genuinely engage and serve. Prospects are going through your process for the first time, so remember what that felt like.

Each subsequent training session and actual sale seemed to require less conscious thought from you, even though details varied with each prospect and client. If the professional is selling services or products, particularly when standard, frequently-repeated procedures are used, the prospect or client may be at an even greater disadvantage.

After years of experience, many prospect and client service procedures are second nature to you. They can be carried out almost effortless, and you may feel they do not even require your full attention. Some professionals have gone through the process so often without giving the prospect or client individual attention, that the professional feels they could fill out the form alone. That is not necessarily a valuable progression for prospects and clients, or for the professional.

Conscious effort is required to observe opportunity for improvement, and to identify weaknesses or redundancies in procedures and processes. Have you reached the stage where you can work on auto-pilot? How is that constructive progress? What are you missing that clients, who are not jaded by repetition as you are, and competitors, anxious for opportunity, would value or could contribute?

#4. The following discussion relates to guided persuasion, presented as friendly helping and caring concern. This is not a discussion of high-pressure tactics or heavy-handed selling, which have no place in professional communication.

  • Do answers to the following questions represent information that is readily available to you, or that is largely unknown to you?
  • How many decisions are there for prospects to make from the first prospecting contact until the transaction is finalized and follow-up is complete?
  • Do you have a flow chart or similar outline of this process to share with prospects and clients? If not, how does that foster continuous improvement to the clients’ benefit?
  • How many decisions do you make in managing this process?
  • How is each procedure documented, analyzed, and checked for compliance with legal and ethical standards to protect the interests of the prospect and client?
  • How frequently and thoroughly is each decision-making procedure reviewed and revised?

Your goal in this evaluation should be to identify aspects of decision making—clients’ and yours—that make deciding seem simple with experience and complex without, or without trustworthy professional advice.

© 2019 PJ Wade, TheCatalyst.com. Except from “What’s Your Point?: Cut The Crap, Hit The Mark & Stick!” (print book publication: 2020)

⇒ Example of how real estate professionals could supercharge communication.

Supercharge Communication: 2. Interview Inventively

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Professional advisors and persuaders are surrounded by overlooked or ignored communication opportunity. One common missed opportunity involves not interviewing inventively.

Among the under-utilitzed communication techniques at professionals’ disposal are INTERVIEWING & KEY QUESTIONING. These powerful information-gathering tools involve interview questioning with the selective use of closed and open strategic questions.

That’s were the “inventively” comes in.

Supercharge Communication by continually perfecting and investing in EVERYTHING that you need to be effective at and are already good at…interview inventively and key question creatively to supercharge effective communication.

The following excerpts from Chapter 13 in “What’s Your Point” explain why continually perfecting the art of interviewing inventively is a valuable, essential investment in effective communication for professional advisors and persuaders.

#1. Questions to Open Minds and Hearts

Do you know how to ask questions to generate answers you may not have expected or realized you need?

Often, when we are sure we know all the answers, we ask questions based on our assumptions, not what individual prospects and clients want to know.

Whether you’re discussing a referral, convincing a potential client to work with you, deciding how best to help a client, or investigating a client’s negative response to advice, are you skilled enough to ask mind-opening questions?

How do you trigger client responses that provide information essential to helping the client, even if they don’t understand exactly what you need to know?

Sometimes, when interviewing clients, you are probing for opinions, observations, and concerns that prospects or clients may be unaware of themselves. What is your reaction when you encounter issues and perspectives you have not come across before? What about topics you would not normally think of inquiring about? Use your experiences to help prospects and clients understand how to help themselves.

QUIZ: Quickly identify which of the eight questions—four in the introductory paragraphs above and four in the bullet list below—are open and which are closed questions.

To unearth choices and potential pitfalls for others, professional-grade interviewing and questioning skills are essential:

  • Do your professional interviewing or information-gathering techniques need upgrading?
  • For instance, how do you deliberately use open-ended questions when gathering information?
  • Do you use closed questions when short factual answers like yes or no will move the interview along to the next significant section?
  • How do you create an effective series of open and closed questions?

Quiz Answer: The eight questions are, in order: closed, closed, open, open, closed, open, closed, open.

#2. Improving your communication powers is easier than you expect.

However, this transformation does require moving to conscious, deliberate expression in every medium.

As suggested throughout “What’s Your Point?,” this involves shifting to focused, strategic communication where results matter every time. In all cases, the more you know about your target and about your goals in talking to or emailing them, the more effective the interview and the more useful the results.

Professional advisors and persuaders have many communication tools at their disposal. They just may not realize this without training. One of the most powerful information-gathering techniques—interviewing—involves the selective use of closed and open strategic questions. Combined with listening loudly—active, respectful, engaging attentiveness—communication gets supercharged.

Do you find that there can be a lot of talking or emailing when you communicate, but not many decisions that people stick to? Your failing as an interviewer may be the weak link.

Can you automatically and seamlessly switch from open to closed questions as required? If not, you may benefit from training and practice to be a fully-professional interviewer and an effective facilitator.

#3. Strategic Question Review

(1) Closed questions elicit yes, no, or one-word “just the facts” responses.

  • Professionals who are in a hurry, or disinterested, often fall naturally into asking closed questions to gather only the facts they need for their decision making.
  • They may also intend to avoid listening to more information that they want. This just falls short of actually cutting prospects or clients off.
  • Some professionals ask a series of yes-or-no closed questions to qualify prospects. This almost one-way communication can seem abrupt and unfriendly.
  • Closed questions can change the subject, politely or otherwise, quicken the pace, or relay a sense of urgency.
  • The exact wording of closed questions is important to learn precisely what is essential. It is also necessary to avoid responses that dodge an issue.
  • In emails, these questions illicit short responses. These may reveal little about how the responder feels or what they understand.

(2) Open questions trigger information downloading, generate opinions, and unleash knowledge.

  • Thereby shifting the interviewer’s role to one of listener.
  • Open questions, which begin with what, how or why, require detailed responses or descriptions from the prospect or client.
  • To clarify a crucial issue, ask similar, but slightly different, open questions at a few stages of the interview. You may uncover differing answers that surprise even the client.
  • As with all skills, practice pays off. Have a set of open questions ready to ask when you meet with prospects and clients.
  • In emails, when you need detail, make sure you ask an open question, perhaps even two.
  • By mixing closed and open questions, the interview can become an engaging conversation or a lively collaboration.

#4. Learn as much as you can about prospects and clients before the interview.

This preparation makes your queries more natural, more logical, and more fruitful. Those being interviewed will relax and be more receptive when they understand your client-centric purpose.

Your intent must not be to take advantage, but to create the best services and achieve the best returns for prospects and clients:

  • Before you ask anything, disclose all conflicts of interest and fiduciary responsibilities to prospects or clients.
  • Explain how you’ll protect their rights, privacy, and interests during the interview. Also during the entire extreme-excellence service delivery process. This will make them feel at ease and well-served.
  • In advance, ask their permission to ask questions, so they genuinely are in control of the discussion.
  • Remind them that, just because you ask a question, they do not have to answer unless they want to—no explanation necessary.

Are you always ready for anything and never at a loss for the right question?
If not, why not?

© 2019 PJ Wade, TheCatalyst.com. Except from “What’s Your Point?: Cut The Crap, Hit The Mark & Stick!” (print book publication: 2020)

⇒ Example of how real estate professionals could supercharge communication.

 

10 TIPS for Complex Decisions Made Simple

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Professionals, including advisors, executives, and entrepreneurs, are decisive by nature and training, so it’s not surprising that many often think they are great decision-makers.

Some professionals even believe that making decisions quickly is a sign of decisiveness, which it isn’t necessarily. Commonly, after a few years on the job, most professionals feel they have learned all there is about the decision-making process. They believe it’s just content in the form of product specifications, office procedures, and client “hot topics” that change, not decision making.

The more you understand about the PROCESS OF DECIDING relative to your target market and business, Continue reading →

5 Foresight Strategies for Avoiding Hindsight Remorse

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You can be certain in the face of uncertainty.

Beforehand, success is less about knowing you’re right, and more about taking steps to ensure you’re not proven dangerously wrong after you decide.

For instance, pundits and professionals usually can’t agree on the state of the market and where the economy is headed, but if you’re certain you want to become a business owner, or you feel ready to move on from this business and into the next, go for it.

That’s not encouragement to “jump in over your financial head,” or to go against obvious economic or social warning signs in your industry or area. This is encouragement to take a close look at Continue reading →