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Contact Anne Bachrach at the Financial Services Speakers Network at anne@fsspeakers.net to schedule Bill Bachrach to speak at your next meeting or conference.

If there is one thing that holds the most power over your success, you can bet that it comes down to your beliefs. Before you even have the opportunity to consciously process the reason behind your actions, and the results those actions put in play, your beliefs are at work determining whether you are headed toward success or disaster.

There are literally tens of thousands of actions you take daily (some consciously, most unconsciously), but do you know how those actions are affecting your success? You can probably think of at least one action that you have taken in the past that didn't necessarily deliver the results you desired. With conscious awareness, you have the ability to examine and identify what went wrong, and what you could change to bring about a different result next time. This is an example of conscious awareness.

But what about all those times you make unconscious decisions that brings about undesired results? How do you stop them from occurring? Here is your opportunity to learn how to master your beliefs and head for success.

Tip #1
You are only as successful as your beliefs
Are your beliefs supporting your success? The most definitive way to know whether your beliefs are leading to success or disaster is to examine what you say to yourself. Do you typically think to yourself that you will be successful or that there’s no use in trying, because it will never work. The nature of your belief system – positive or negative – will be the single greatest determining factor in your success, so you had better start thinking success.

When the negative talk starts swirling in your head, just cancel it out – sweep it out – delete it. Focus on the positive (and what you really want) and remember that your success is completely dependent upon you and you alone. Although you can allow talk from those around you to negatively affect your progress, no one can prevent you from achieving your goals. The determining factor is always, and only, your ability to hold true to your belief in yourself.

There is always a way, so take a “no-excuses” approach to achieving your goals and you will achieve them.

Tip #2
Take ownership of your life
Are you the driver or passenger in your life? Don’t think for a second that sitting in the passenger seat is going to get you where you want to be. If you want to be successful, you have to make plans, take action and commit to achieving your goals. Surrendering the wheel to the "luck of life" will not give you peace of mind, but it will mean you’re in for a rough ride. When you give up control, you are at the mercy of whatever life throws at you, and you will most likely get everything you do not want. Success only comes from those who drive their own life. Don't just take things for granted. Create a game plan and focus on what you can control. YOU and your actions!

Tip #3
Are you a victim or a master?
There is one solid rule you can count on: successful entrepreneurs never think of themselves as victims. This is the major factor that separates the wealthy from the poor. The wealthy understand they are 100% responsible for their reality, making them masters of accountability. When there is no one to blame, there is no finger to point, and therefore, no crime. With no crime, there cannot be a victim. Period. There is something magical that happens when you take 100% responsibility for your own success – and that is a feeling of freedom. You are your own entity and you control your own destiny; it all starts with your beliefs.

Tip #4
Consider the results if you do or don’t take action
Becoming a conscious action taker takes some practice, if you’re not used to understanding how your beliefs shape your success or disaster. It may seem a bit daunting at first, but once you learn how to look ahead, you’ll be able to process decisions with greater accuracy. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. On one side, write this question; what are the possible outcomes, results and benefits if I take action? On the other side, write; what are the possible outcomes, results and benefits if I do not take action? From that list, circle the results that you most desire and you'll have the right action to take.

Tip #5
Listen to your gut
This is a tip that is too often overlooked. You would be surprised at how many successful entrepreneurs admit that they went on nothing more than a "hunch" and ended up hitting it out of the park. While this kind of instant success rarely happens, your gut can be more right than your head, in many situations. Approach decisions with an awareness of how you feel about them. Do you get a "bad feeling"? Do you get butterflies from your excitement? Stick to decisions that feel "good" and stay away from the ones that make you feel "bad."

When you expand your belief system, you expand your success. In addition, when you learn to make decisions based on your awareness of wealth and success, your beliefs will shape your success in the way you want it.

Anne M. Bachrach. All rights reserved.

Anne M. Bachrach is the author of the book, Excuses Don't Count; Results Rule!. She has 23 years of experience training and coaching. Anne helps financial professionals keep and get more clients while maintaining balance in their life. Through her proven systems, she inspires Advisors to stay focused and take action on the highest payoff activities that lead to their ultimate professional and personal success. Take advantage of the many complimentary resources on her website (www.AccountabilityCoach.com) and subscribe to her blog (!Anne's Blog!).________________________________________________________________________
If you're looking for a cost-effective way to help you stay focused and gain a competitive advantage to achieving your goals in the current economy, click here to learn more about joining Anne Bachrach's 90-Day Goal Achievement Group Coaching Program.

As a Trusted Advisor, your primary role is as leader of your Deliverables Team.  This leadership implies one of your major responsibilities is to serve as an Accountability Coach to both your Deliverables Team, and to your Community of Clients to help keep everyone focused on accomplishing those things which help clients actualize their Road Maps.

The term accountability is used quite loosely in conversation.  For our purposes, accountability resides in an individual, not in a process or a company. So, individual people are held accountable, rather than groups or larger entities.  

To be "held to account" implies there are consequences, but again for our purposes, simply giving an assignment to an individual is not the basis for accountability.  Rather, it is the acceptance and agreement by an individual that the responsibility for a thing resides with them, which initiates accountability.

As such, a case could easily be made that one individual doesn't hold someone else accountable, even though that statement is often made.  What is actually meant when someone says "I am holding you accountable" is that an individual, usually someone who has a stake, is aware of the responsibility being assumed by another and is offering to help them remain focused on fulfilling their responsibility.  The offer, in effect, is to help remind an individual of the promise made to be responsible for a thing.  By that understanding, accountability comes from within; we hold ourselves accountable, and others around us can only help us stay more focused and attentive to the responsibility we accepted.  A person who has not fully accepted that a thing is their responsibility, or feel that they should not be "held to account" for its completion, will not be "held accountable" for it.  That's not to say there won't be consequences. It says that the consequences will be felt for something that the individual, for right or wrong, does not feel accountable to.

This is probably why the term "accountability" has a somewhat negative connotation to some. It hearkens memories of another individual thrusting a responsibility onto them, which they did not accept, but for which negative consequences resulted.  With this understanding lets outline why, in your organization, accountability should be viewed as a positive thing, rather than a negative thing.

With this understanding, accountability can and should be embraced by both your community of Ideal Clients and your Deliverables Team Members as a positive thing.

Consider this, if you eagerly accept a task or dearly want something, you naturally anticipate your willingness to be sufficiently focused on it to envision seeing the thing through to completion, right?  You would, then, welcome help from others to maintain adequate attention on it and would appreciate those around you alerting you when your focus wanders too far from this thing for which you are now responsible, right again?

So encourage your team to gladly hold themselves accountable to the efforts required by their own objectives and to appreciate those who help them remain focused on their accountabilities.

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Follow the story of how one Financial Advisor successfully moved from being an Investment Content Expert to a Trusted Advisor delivering fully comprehensive financial services through a team of experts. You may sign up for "The Kate Wilson Case-Study" at no charge at http://trustedadvisortoolkit.com/. Mark McKenna Little is a speaker, author and Trusted Advisor who works with advisors committed to implementing comprehensive financial services.

Last night I was on a Southwest Airlines flight coming back from a week in Houston. I was tired. I put my head back and just closed my eyes. After I heard the clunk of the wheels going up, I looked over to see who I was sitting next to. He was a young man, maybe about 25 or so -- handsome kid. I found out later that he was from Thailand, going to school at UCLA. Anyway, he was typing furiously on his Apple Computer. I couldn't help staring because everything on his screen was moving incredibly fast yet taking perfect form. It looked like he was writing a book, with charts, graphs and pictures. In fact, some of the charts, graphs and pictures seemed to have motion to them. "Interesting," I thought.

"Are you writing a book?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I'm just putting in my notes from today's meetings."

"Interesting notes," I said, motioning to the screen with the moving images.

"Yes, I'm working on a project that allows me to visualize virus particles."

"Like I said, interesting."

"I'm working with a biologist at a Houston hospital. Would you like to see what virus particles look like?"

"Absolutely," I said.

He turned the screen toward me and I watched, fascinated, as he continued to type in machine code of some sort. After a moment or two there was a visual of what looked like a smudge on the screen.

"Watch this," he said with a smile on his face. He hit a key and the smudge turned into a donut-looking thing that had spinning particles, each distinct from one another, but held tightly within the donut. It looked like a miniature universe.

"With a special algorithm I am able to see these invisible particles on my computer screen. Cool, huh?"

"Very cool," I said.

"My name is Peter," he said, putting his hand out, "I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Physics at UCLA."

"Well, Peter, pleased to meet you. My name is Tom Voccola and it looks like we are in the same business."

"Are you a physicist?" he asked.

"No," I said, "but we're both involved in making the invisible visible." I don't know why I said it, but there it was.

"Really, what things are you making visible?" he asked, closing his computer and shifting toward me with an air of curiosity.

All I had to do was recall the past few days in Houston and I said, "I work in business, Peter. I work with human beliefs, values, thoughts, visions, desires and emotions, to name just a few. These things are invisible to us, until called into question, yet they operate in the world just as surely as a hammer when it hits a nail. We're not aware of what these invisible human programs are going to be or when they will appear, but they do. And when they do they manifest themselves as human behaviors that affect the world just as surely as a virus does."

"Fascinating," he said. "Can you give me an example?"

"Perception is not reality," I said.

"Pardon me; isn't it supposed to be 'perception is reality'?"

"Yes, it is, but that's precisely why we have so many problems in the world. We accept our perceptions, usually from our five senses, as reality. Before you guys in science began making the invisible visible we had no idea that there were germs or viruses. But now we know better. And now that we know these germs and viruses are real, people like you are trying to see more clearly how they operate and once you understand, well, I assume you will begin using nanotechnology to influence how they operate."

"Exactly," he said, "think of all the lives we can save?"

"I do," I said, "and I truly appreciate it."

I am glad there are people like Peter in the world. His curiosity, talent and drive may save the world one day.

As financial advisors, the first step in being able to influence our lives, businesses and our families is to accept that there are indeed invisible forces at work – as essential as the food we eat -- yet with the same power and devastation as a bomb. What are the empowering beliefs or limiting beliefs, for example, that are running your business? With the awareness that our human internal operating system runs on beliefs, comes the ability to see, to notice, and to observe them more clearly. Only then can you hope to consciously influence the outcome.

"Like I said, Peter, we're in the same business you and I. And it's good to know there are others engaged in changing the world by making the invisible visible."

Entrepreneur, speaker, author and CEO Guide, Tom Voccola is the CEO of CEO2, a Chief Executive Consulting Firm specializing in the rapid transformation of corporate and organizational cultures. Tom is the co-founder and past Chairman of the Los Angeles area CEO Round Table for the American Electronics Association, and the author of The Accidental CEO – A Leader’s Journey from Ego to Purpose. His life's work is to inspire a new generation of leaders who transcend ego and its fear based agenda. His work gives executives immediate and authentic access to new levels of power, influence and freedom within their organizations.

Systems TouchPoints are client points of contact that your clients touch but don't get to keep. They include things like your parking lot, building, office, phone system, furniture, car, website, system for handling referrals, the speed with which you answer your phone, systems for processing checks or client transactions, and more. System and Process TouchPoints are critically important because they bring certainty and consistency to the client experience. Most financial services businesses are people and product dependent which makes the business very vulnerable.

A product dependent business is especially problematic when you, the advisor, do not have direct control over the product. How would you like your livelihood to be dependent on a healthcare product in the new era of Obamacare? When you don't control the product, your business is very vulnerable to the outside influences of the product creators, the people who select the products for your firm, and the government who regulates, or in some cases competes, even with you.

A people dependent business model relies on the personality and network of the advisor for its success. This too, is dangerous. What if the advisor gets sick or disabled? What if they don’t have the greatest looks, personality, way of being or a large network? What if they don't always "connect" with clients on a personal level? All of these can put the entire business at risk.

A business model with strong System and Process TouchPoints, on the other hand, does not rely on people or products for its success. The phone is always answered promptly and consistently with the same greeting. There is a clear Ideal Client Profile in place so everyone inside and outside the firm knows exactly whom the firm is designed to serve. There is a system for winning new clients that is perfected, regular and predictable. The advisor can generate new clients AT WILL simply by executing the new client strategy.

The agenda for each meeting is sent out the same number of days in advance and follows a predictable format. All meetings for the entire year are scheduled in advance so that the client, the advisor and his or her deliverables team can plan appropriately. Client deliverables are spelled out clearly for the client and there is an internal checklist that the advisor and his team will use to deliver consistently and on time. There is a process for opening the office in the morning and closing it at night and a process for everything that happens in between that touches clients.

The ultimate example of System TouchPoints on steroids is Amazon.com. Tell me about the last conversation you had with your representative at Amazon? Exactly! Never! Why? Because their entire business is DESIGNED to require NO Human TouchPoints whatsoever…Every client need has been anticipated and pre-programmed into their website so that you can get ANYTHING you need on planet Earth with a single click. And it works flawlessly…more than a million times a day. Note also that their business is NOT product dependent or supplier dependent. They can run any product imaginable through their systems and ensure an exceptional client experience.

Which business do you believe is worth more to a potential buyer; Mr. Personality, John Jones Financial Planning Business in which John is known as "the go to guy for EVERY financial question and quandary", or Amazon.com? This is not just a question of scale. Let's assume for the sake of argument that both businesses are generating the same bottom line. What happens when you take Mr. Personality out of the picture (which is certainly what would happen if the business were sold)? The business would collapse like a house of cards. What advisor could possibly step into that set of shoes?

The Amazon systems and processes are on autopilot. They run with or without Jeff Bezos. The entire business is product and people INDEPENDENT. The cash flow and client experience are PREDICTABLE. That business is worth MUCH MORE to any business person or investment banker because ANYONE (with basic business sense) can run it profitably.

So what does your business look like? Is it system and process driven creating predictable revenue and new clients according to a written plan? Do you have a documented process for every client TouchPoint that generates a predictable positive response from every client? Are your revenue, expenses and profitability on track to deliver your ideal income and deliver Your Ideal Life in Four Years, or Less? If not, you need to get busy right now designing a business model as bulletproof and profitable as Amazon.com. Or, borrow a page from Bachrach & Associates, Inc. at www.IdealLifeAdvisor.com and visit www.TrustedAdvisorToolkit.com where the systems and processes for your business are already built, market tested and ready to go! Why reinvent the wheel? Amazon your business today and you'll be bulletproof regardless of what happens in the market.

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Rick Barrera is a nationally acclaimed marketing consultant and author, known throughout the Fortune 500 for his extraordinary speaking ability and his unique approach to brand building. His consulting focuses on helping companies design unique client experiences that drive high levels of referrals. Rick's research on the strategies used by breakthrough brands like Apple, American Girl, Starbucks, Chico's, Lexus, Tivo, and Google will change your thinking about marketing forever.

His impressive client list includes Abbott Labs, AutoZone, Bayer, Caterpillar, IBM, Intel, Merrill Lynch and Verizon. His newest book, Overpromise and Overdeliver: How to Design and Deliver Extraordinary Customer Experiences is both a Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller.

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