Million Dollar Thinking
I’m finishing yet another Million Dollar Consulting® College here in Newport this morning, and my next one in December is a third-filled already. I’m wonderfully surprised about the lifespan of something I thought would run for a few years back in 2005!
In April of 2015 I guess I’ll run the Tenth Anniversary Consulting College!
I always learn more than anyone, which is why I continue to run these sessions. Here is a portion of that learning from this week:
• You have to take prudent risk in professional services. No buyers look for resources in a crowd. The look for those who stand out.
• Intellectually understanding a point is insufficient. You need to emotionally embrace it and practice it.
• Most poor performance is self-inflicted by fear, guilt, low self-esteem, and inability to stand up to pressure (many of which are obviously related).
• When you coach or teach someone else you build your own skills tremendously.
• There is a tropism to make things more complex, when consultants’ value is really making the complex simple.
• We too easily become amateur psychoanalysts, a profession not even psychoanalysts are all that good at, and make the absurd assumption that the buyer is automatically the cause of the problem!
• Lack of language skills is the greatest contributor to feelings of insufficiency and the inability to take the role of a peer to the buyer.
• In our business, “research” is overrated. Look for evidence in the environment, observed behavior, and examples which prove or disprove points.
• We all need support systems and sounding boards we can trust to help us with perspective and decisions.
• This is a fantastic profession if we can stop getting in our own way.
© Alan Weiss 2013
