Five Things You Must Stop Doing to Achieve Success

“Smile and dial,” my mentor used to say about reaching out to prospects to grow my practice. And while I hated hearing that in my youth, experience has taught me wisdom in doing things the old-fashioned way.

To see success in your practice, here are five things you must stop doing.

1. Stop saying “yes” to everything

It’s easy to talk about everything you do to build your practice, but the often-overlooked aspect of growth is that you need to start saying “no” to certain activities.

Part of growth is experiencing new opportunities you didn’t have before – which is wonderful! But you need to be mindful that every time you say “yes” to something, you’re saying “no” to something else.

Your resources are finite and it’s impossible to do all the things all the time.

If you’re saying “yes” to bingeing Netflix at night, you’re saying “no” to practicing your prospect process.

When you say “yes” regularly, you’re not building your “no” muscles, which your discipline is built on. You must be able to say “no” to activities that drain your productivity.

The next time you’re tempted to say “yes” to something, be intentional about where your “no” is going.

2. Stop getting alerts on your devices

Turn these things off!

We’re so addicted to the dopamine hits from device alerts, it's ridiculous. We’re constantly bombarded with social notifications, emails, text messages, etc. These alerts crush your productivity and are rude.

Have you ever gone to the beach or into the woods only to have your serenity ruined by some selfish person blasting music on their Bluetooth speaker? It kills the mood and stifles your entire experience.

The same happens when alerts interrupt your client or team meetings and deep-focus time.

When you allow yourself to be interrupted, you deny your clients value. Every time a notice comes through on your computer, phone, or watch, it takes you away from your family, clients, and team.

Find me a top-performing advisor constantly receiving alerts, and I’ll show them how to double their practice.

Simply put, receiving alerts is destroying your productivity. It may feel like it's nothing, but it's everything.

3. Stop being late

If you can’t be on time for a meeting, cancel it.

When you’re preparing for a virtual appointment, be ready to enter that Zoom room five minutes early.

For in-person meetings, be ready to rock and roll 15 minutes before the meeting starts.

Advisors who can’t meet those standards are making poor decisions with their lives, and that’s what it comes to when you’re late.

Timeliness takes discipline – which you must have to make it to the top of this profession.

4. Stop looking for problems

Stop looking for problems that are holding you back and start looking for opportunities.

Too often, advisors say they can’t reach a successful level because of compliance, as if their success depends on this third party.

When I was younger, I thought I couldn’t be successful because I couldn’t text my clients. But then it dawned on me that there were people on the same platform as me, following the same compliance department as me, and yet these other advisors were more successful than I was.

What did they do differently? They weren’t looking for problems; they were looking for opportunities.

I had to stop making excuses and get to work, as do you. Instead of making up stories about why you can’t be successful, find a way to be half as good as the advisors who are crushing it, and you’ll transform your practice.

5. Stop practicing in front of clients

How often do you walk into a prospect or client meeting without practicing your script out loud? If you’re guilty, break this habit.

Top athletes, theatre performers, and financial advisors all practice their craft. You can’t stumble across success accidentally.

It took me a long time to believe this, and I thought going through my scripts word for word was silly, and I felt foolish doing it. Thankfully, experience has taught me otherwise, and I practice all my scripts until they become automatic, and I’d never just wing it facing a client.

If you want a top-performing practice, practice harder than everyone else.

Action Item

Pick something from this list and stop doing it. Put a Post-it note on your computer monitor, change the lock screen on your phone, and add a reminder wherever you need to see it to stop and put a positive spin on it. You want to have both sides of the action there.

For example, you will stop receiving alerts because you want to be more intentional with your time.

Matthew Jarvis, CFP®, ChFC, is the co-founder of The Perfect RIA, one of the industry’s most recognized advisor training platforms. Just 10 years prior, Jarvis was buried in debt, with a badly struggling practice and a morning routine of trying to figure out how to quit the industry

without looking like a failure. Through several turns of fate, Jarvis clawed from near failure to the top of the industry. Today, alongside running his incredibly profitable and successful practice, Jarvis guides other advisors on duplicating his success in their practice.

Read more articles by Matthew Jarvis