Advisors who know how to generate Incisive Questions™ to free their client’s mind from untrue limiting assumptions hold a key to creating the best plan.

Incisive Questions™

What happens when the mind breaks through?
What steps has it taken so quickly that we do not see the steps?

Simply put, this break-through process is the mind asking itself an Incisive Question.

Here is how it seems to work:

Our thinking, feeling, decision-making and action are driven by assumptions. The good ideas and feelings come from true liberating assumptions. The bad ones come from untrue limiting assumptions.

So, to breakthrough from bad to good, the mind seems to go through roughly this sequence of questions:

1. What am I assuming that is limiting my thinking here?
2. What am I assuming that is most limiting my thinking here?
3. Is that assumption true?
4. What is a liberating true alternative to the limiting assumption?
5. If I knew (insert true alternative), what would I think or feel or do?

On paper this sounds pretty dry. But in practice it is one of the most scintillating and transformative things human beings do. The mind does it for itself in a flash when it can. When it can’t, it does it a bit more slowly, but just as powerfully, with the help of those five questions and extraordinary attention from another person.

For example, if your goal js to restructure your time, the first question is: What are you assuming that is stopping you from re-structuring your time? You find as many assumptions as you can. Then with questions 2 and 3, you find the key untrue assumption. Then through questions 4 and 5, you build an Incisive Question. And voila, your mind breaks through. A new, true, liberating reality emerges.

Begin to listen for the untrue limiting assumptions your clients are making as they speak. And construct an Incisive Question for them that will free them from it. Asked gently, an Incisive Question will open your clients’ minds and their hearts.

You, the Advisor, have expertise. Lots of it. You studied for it, paid for it, developed it, have been honored and rewarded for it. You charge for it. You and your clients rely on it.

This obvious expertise your clients want is financial, technical, legal, transactional knowledge.

But there is another expertise they want from you. It is the not-so-obvious ability to be a Thinking Environment every minute for them. They want this. They will choose you over other Advisors if you provide it. They want to think for themselves. They want to figure things out, say things, discover things, create things they have never had access to before. They want to be asked. They want to be listened to, exquisitely.

But when they make their first appointment, they do not tell you that this expertise is more important to them than all the rest.

So when your client enters your office, it is vital to remember that there are now two experts in the room.

You know your field and they know their life. But most important, as the expert in the Thinking Environment you liberate the expert in them. The result is a plan of extraordinary value.

Creating a Thinking Environment for your clients so that they can think for themselves about both the technical and the transcendent aspects of planning is to catalyze two kinds of expertise into a breath-taking and life-changing experience.

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE THINGS WE CAN OFFER OUR CLIENTS
IS THE FRAMEWORK IN WHICH TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES.