Distraction-Proof® Advisor Ideas

When you’re going into an important meeting, there’s no greater feeling than knowing you’ve taken care of all the vital details.
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Each week during this Olympic season, I’m bringing you an Olympic lesson. And with the Olympic Games beginning tomorrow, I remember vividly what I was going through the night before the Games started.

I’ll never forget sitting at the top of a seven-story building in our Olympic Games village. I remember sitting outside, watching the sun go down over Seoul, just thinking to myself, “Everything’s done, everything’s ready, everything’s in place.” And I did think to myself, “I wonder how I’m going to be feeling this time tomorrow night?” You go through these thoughts, but they’re calm when you know you’ve done all the work.

Doing all the work meant I had done all the training, and I knew I had done that. However, it also meant I wasn’t leaving anything to chance. I always had four pairs of goggles in my bag: one pair, which I knew I was going to wear, that I was super comfortable with, but I also had three emergency pairs. If you’re an amateur at this, you’ll make the three pairs of goggles the day before. Not so if you know what you’re doing. Those three pairs of goggles, besides my regular pair—I’d already worn each of them for several days, getting them worn in so that if my main pair broke, I was ready with three other pairs I knew I had already worn and felt completely comfortable with. I knew I was ready for this time even if something untoward happened.

It’s the same with you as an advisor. When I was advising, there was nothing like the feeling of knowing I had everything taken care of the night before an important meeting. I had already printed out the documents; I wasn’t leaving it until the morning of the meeting. You need to do that, too. Print those documents you need the night before. Make sure the meeting room is booked and you’re on the schedule two or three days before the meeting so that you are sure there’s not a double booking that you’ll have to navigate through at the last moment. Make sure you have all the documents that you’re expecting that person to sign. Even if you think, “This is just the first step, they’re probably not going to say yes on the spot,” take them anyway. Have the papers marked out, letting the person see your expectations for and readiness to get started working together. You want to be best prepared for every opportunity you have.

That’s the language you use to finish strongly, to let them know what needs to happen next. Don’t let the finish just kind of drift on by. As you can seen in the video of me swimming in that final, the finish was deliberate—as deliberate as the start. Anyone can start well. It’s the finish that those people are going to have in their minds when they leave your office.

To make sure you do this,

1. Consider what you need. You’ve got to know ahead of time exactly what you need and exactly how you want that meeting to go.


2. Prep the details. Make sure you’ve got everything in place—that room’s booked and you know how long you have it for, those key documents are tagged for that person to sign, you know the meeting flow and how you want it to go.


3. Relax. That night before I swam was the greatest feeling I could have because I knew there was absolutely nothing now that was going to get left to chance. It was simply, let the day come to me. When you have done everything you need to do prior to that meeting, just let it come.

Get a good night’s rest, be excited about tomorrow, and the chances are you’re going to have a phenomenal performance.

I look forward to bringing you another Distraction-Proof Advisor Idea next week.