Read more: Are you up for a behavioural change workshop?
Wealth Professional: Why can it be hard for professionals, including advisors, to come up with the right questions?
Warren Berger: There are a couple of reasons why it can be hard for advisors, coaches, consultants, and business leaders in general, to come up with the right questions. First of all, they may not be entirely comfortable asking questions because they may feel that their job is to provide answers. And that’s understandable—but what they should realize is that the best answers will tend to surface when better questions are asked.
The second reason it can be hard to ask the right questions is that there is no formula or foolproof list of perfect questions. There are key ingredients, however, that will help you to come up with questions that work best in a given situation. Those ingredients are curiosity, preparation, and listening.
Tapping into your curiosity will inspire you to wonder and explore what’s happening in your industry or the world at large, how all this is affecting a specific client, and what it means in terms of how you can best help. You need to take the time—before you ever meet with a client—to reflect on all of this and do the necessary research. And this will tend to inspire questions that you can keep in mind as you meet with clients—but you also should be prepared to ask fresh, spontaneous questions that arise during conversation with a client.
