What % of Your Potential Have You Achieved as a Financial Advisor?

What is your “hidden” potential? Do you believe that you are capable of far more than you have yet achieved during the course of your career and/or whatever calling you have chosen?

For decades, Sir John Whitmore has researched this very point. He is the chairman of Performance Consultants International and one of the pioneers of the coaching profession. His book, Coaching for Performance, is still regarded as one of the seminal books on coaching.

Over the years, he’s asked the thousands of participants in his coaching programs to self-assess their potential in their workplace, with this simple question:

What percentage of your potential have you achieved in your career?

The results are fascinating. The range of answers is from the single digits to over 80 percent. Yet the average for each of his workshops, and cumulatively, is remarkably close to 40 percent.

The context of this survey is instructive. This is a self-assessment. There are no absolute benchmarks, i.e. my 40 percent might be completely dissimilar and divergent to your 40 percent depending on what we each see with regard to our respective future potential(s). In other words, even though you might have achieved great things in your career in the eyes of others, because you have a strong self-belief and high expectations for yourself, you may “only” be at 40 percent (or whatever) as judged by what you aspire to achieve.

As a coaching firm to successful financial advisors, this backdrop inspires us to ask the following questions:

• As a financial advisor, what percentage of your true potential have you achieved over the course of your career?

• Given your complete potential as a person, what do you believe that you are truly capable of as a financial advisor?

• If there were no constraints around you, what is the limit to your potential?

• If you believed that anything was possible, what is the limit to your thinking?

• What if you were even bolder in your thinking?

• What if you had all the support that you needed, what would be possible then?

[Coaching Note: Take 10 minutes of quiet, focused time and consider the questions above. What is your real potential? What are you truly capable of? What would you really like to achieve?]

How Coaching Unlocks Your Potential

One of the essential constructs of coaching is to create a safe environment where people are able to tell the truth about themselves. Once this “truth” becomes self-evident, coaching identifies the external and internal blocks that obstruct the demonstration of the remainder of your potential.

As coaches, we see financial advisors in terms of their future potential, not their past performance. We believe that most everyone possesses more capability then they currently are expressing. The key to successful coaching is finding the various ways that this potential can be accessed…and unleashed.

Are you ready for coaching? The complimentary Coaching Decision Kit is a good tool to guide you in your choice.