Nowadays… This Beats Giving Advice!
Your best clients don’t need more answers and solutions from you.
They need the conditions to find their own.
(I wish I’d realised that decades ago!)
If you lead a financial planning firm, you’ve spent years building technical expertise. Right?
You (and your colleagues) arrive at meetings armed to the teeth with facts, solutions, graphs, and projections…
But here’s what our forward-thinking financial planning clients (The Soul Millionaire ‘Tribe’) have discovered…
The real gold is NOT in the numbers.
It’s in the client’s own genius mind — if you can help them access it.
What if you could help them think more clearly… more creatively… more courageously…
than they have done in years?
What if the ‘space’ you’ve created for them feels so SAFE…
That they share with you what they’ve never shared with anyone else?
Ever!
That’s the heart of A THINKING ENVIRONMENT.
Not a trick.
Not a tactic.
It’s a way of being with someone that gives them the best possible conditions to think for themselves. And think well.
Nancy Kline (president of international leadership company ‘Time to Think’) puts it simply:
“The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the THINKING we do first.”
The Thinking Environment is at the heart of what we do in our Soul Millionaire ‘Tribe’ (of Financial Planning Leaders).
We learn it. We apply it. We use it to help study new business ideas.
Together.
Why not join us – as one of our 4 GUESTS – for our SEPTEMBER Tribe Meeting.
And we’ll be there to welcome you warmly.
The 10 Components of The Thinking Environment… make the principles very practical:
- Attention – Listening so deeply they feel valued, not judged.
- Equality – Giving them equal space to speak.
- Ease – Removing urgency so their best thinking emerges.
- Appreciation – Noticing what’s right.
- Encouragement – Replacing competition with generosity.
- Feelings – Letting emotions surface without shutting them down.
- Information – Sharing facts openly.
- Difference – Welcoming diverse and opposing ideas.
- Incisive Questions – Removing limiting assumptions.
- Place – Creating an environment that says: “You matter!”.
Of course, you’ll need to fulfil your Planning, Advice and Guidance roles!
Eventually.
But when you create a Thinking Environment:
team meetings become energising…
client reviews become breakthroughs…
and you stop being the answer-giver…
becoming instead their Better-Thinking Partner.
Next time you sit with a client or team member, ask yourself:
“Am I creating the best possible conditions for them to think more Clearly, Creatively, Courageously?”
When you do, you don’t just improve the conversation…
you change the FUTURE they choose!
