8 Tips to Building a Winner’s Mindset

As a financial advisor, a winner’s mindset can help you provide consistent results for clients, offer quality advice, and achieve your goals. Developing a winner’s mindset helps you keep focused and hone your craft. It also helps you through the challenges you will inevitably face along the way.

Successful advisors understand that success is not a destination but a journey. You work hard and develop a mindset that helps you achieve and maintain your success. Here are some tips to build a winning mindset.

1. Rely on Discipline, Not Action

It’s easy to look at other advisors that are successful and assume that it’s because they are just born with a special talent. Remind yourself that this is rarely the case and that you should never rely purely on your talents and gifts.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Recognize where your talents lie, utilize your strengths, and develop your weaknesses. Developing your weaknesses takes self-awareness and self-discipline. But it’s this discipline that will carry you beyond your talent. As a business coach for financial planners, I say give me a killer work ethic over natural talent any day. I can work with that!

2. Maintain a Long-Term Mindset

While it is important to keep your head in the present, you should also keep an eye locked on your future.

Sometimes, you may find yourself making decisions that address your present needs and problems at the expense of your long-term plans. Even though you want to be making the best decisions for your business now, you should keep in mind your future goals. Are your present decisions aligned with your future goals? If not, you may want to reconsider and align them with your long-term goals.

3. Be Resilient

Resilience is an excellent personality trait in this business, particularly during volatile or difficult periods. Resilience means persevering through adversity and maintaining focus on your goals no matter what.

Some may be gifted with natural resilience, but it can also be developed as you keep a dogged focus on your goals, and maintain positivity.

4. Be Flexible

It’s important to have goals and accomplish them, but sometimes plans change along the way. Expect changes and make contingency plans so that obstacles don’t become a major or permanent stumbling block.

5. Prioritize Your Passions

You want to avoid burnout, and you may be more susceptible to burnout when you aren’t mindful of prioritizing your tasks. People who get wrapped up in their passions with no game plan for achieving them are on a losing course. So are those who fill their time with a thousand meaningless tasks. They get a lot done, but they aren’t any closer to where they ultimately want to be.

First, recognize what matters most. Then, figure out the steps you need to take to get there. If tasks come up that don’t support what’s most important in your life, you can prioritize them lower–or decline them.

For example, if you’re offered a position at the head of a financial board but you’re really passionate about jumping into multi-family investing, you may need to decline the position. After all, you only have so many hours in a day and you’ve established that you want to spend a portion of them growing your real estate business.

Do the most critical tasks first (even and especially if they’re not the most fun). That way, the worst is done, and you’ll be more motivated to get to the easier stuff later. Don’t forget about delegation. Protect your time by delegating the things that someone besides you can do.

6. Trust the Vision

Sometimes, you might feel muddled about your work and direction. Keep your focus on your original vision. You will have to adapt your business as needed, but overall, you want to stay true to the vision that you had when you first began.

Do not allow failure or self-doubt to cloud your way. Additionally, avoid listening to the negative or short-sighted opinions of others that lead you to feel negatively about your work. Make the conscious decision to shut that out. Many of the most successful people had a whole host of detractors along the way, but they stayed on track–and ultimately had the last laugh.

7. Develop a Support Network

Not only should you avoid the negative opinions of others, but you should also be actively searching out a network of friends and associates that will act as positive support in your life.

Don’t just look for people who will always agree with you, but for people in your life that will be a positive influence, offer you perspective, and hold you accountable to yourself and your goals. Your winner’s mindset can be elevated with the useful support of others that have your best interests in mind.

8. Act!

You can’t just think your way to your goals, you have to act towards them. And action requires risk. While you want to be smart about your decisions, it is important to keep the fear of failure from getting in your way. You may make some bad decisions, but you can’t be successful if you’re paralyzed by fear.

If you don’t have all of these habits or traits, don’t worry. Winning mindsets are developed. Instead of stressing, get to work honing these habits that will help you be successful and meet your goals.

If you have questions about developing a winner’s mindset, contact me. I offer independent financial advisor coaching for wealth managers looking to thrive and realize their dreams in financial services.