Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I am Matthew Jarvis and I kicked Micah off of the bus using our Jim Collins quote and I have Colleen from Q2 Consulting with us to give us some really great information on understanding both how you work and how you work with your team. Colleen, how are you today?

Colleen:
Doing well, thanks Matthew. How are you doing?

Matthew Jarvis:
I’m good. Colleen, we always start the podcast by checking in where in the world you’re at. So I’m in rainy Seattle. It’s been kind of a bad streak for me, but here we are in Seattle. You’re in beautiful Sedona, Arizona.

Colleen:
I’m in beautiful Sedona, Arizona. It’s 54 degrees outside and it’s sunny.

Matthew Jarvis:
It’s a beautiful place, Sedona. I was going through there, back in May, and it’s one of those places where you can’t tell if you’re in a postcard, right, or if this is in fact the real world because the scenes are so amazing.

Colleen:
Yeah. I always think of the … Every time I’m looking at the view, I get my finger up and I start moving things, like I’m moving the pictures on the phone. You know? It’s like, “Wow.” It looks like the background on somebody’s computer.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, it’s, it’s really amazing. Well, Colleen, I’m really excited to have you on the podcast for the listeners of the TPR nation, you know that Mike and I are big advocates of working with coaches, working with experts. Colleen is one of those coaches, one of those experts that we’ve worked with. And Colleen, you’ve got a background, not just in consulting advisors, but you in fact ran and worked in a very successful practice before you kind of took this next chapter in your life. Is that correct?

Colleen:
Yes, I joined a firm, became a partner. I was one of the first partners outside of the founder at Ewens Financial Advisors and the San Francisco Bay area. And we went from a dozen people two 75 and working with CPA firms and we just … We got pretty big, got over 4 billion approximately. Since I left for a few years, things have split up again and everybody kind of went back to being small, very successful though. Very successfully run. A lot of the things that I coach about or things that I learned at this firm having to do with taking a good company and making it great.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, that’s great. And I love … And Colleen, you’ve worked with our firm when it was just myself and Colleen from my office, different Colleen and Nathaniel, right? So Colleen’s experience works in these companies of all shapes and sizes, which I love and I to jump right into something that you helped us do, Colleen, which was the Kolbe exams and a lot of people are familiar I think with Kolbe, but for those that aren’t, and strategic coach is a big advocate of the Kolbe indexes. The Colby score kind of does this analysis, I’m trying remember how long the exam takes. Was it 20 or 30 minutes or half an hour?

Colleen:
Half an hour.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah. It asks these handful of questions that all seemed a little silly as I was doing them, but then the results come out and they’re yearly accurate, like you almost wonder if they called someone in your office because it says you’re really good at this, and you’re really bad at that. It’s like, “Oh, how’d you know that from these questions?”

Colleen:
I’ll tell you what, the first time I took it, it changed my life and I’ve seen quotes from other people that are saying that about Kolbe and I think, wow, they’re saying exactly the same thing that I thought when I first took it. I thought there was something wrong with me. I was exhausted by detail. I was exhausted by doing one thing after the other, completing a project, going through the entire process. So I was always exhausted. Yet there were times during the day when I felt energized and excited and happy, but other times of the day where I was just miserable.

Colleen:
So when I got the Kolbe and I started to understand that there were certain things that were sapping my energy in certain things that were fueling me, and that if I just had a team that could make up for some of those gaps, I’d feel a lot happier. And that’s actually when things just shot up from … I think we had about 80 million in advisory assets. And by the time I left my group, I say my team, the time I left, they were managing, advising one and a half billion, my personal team.

Matthew Jarvis:
Wow.

Colleen:
And young people. I mean, just the fact that we were able to put our strengths together made a phenomenal team.

Matthew Jarvis:
I want to highlight something you said just a minute ago Colleen, about that you felt that there was something wrong with you, right? So there’s these tasks that that kind of needed to be done, right? And we could sort of say like, these are your job call in, right? You’re the advisor, you have to do these things. But they were such energy drains. Those I think tend to be the things that you procrastinate that you don’t do very well on, you beat yourself up over and my experience was similar to yours, Colleen, you look and say, “Oh well this is just kind of how I’m wired.” These are the areas where I excel and now I kind of have a framework around it. If I can focus my attention there versus trying to just beat myself over the head on details are a great example. If I have to beat myself over the head on details of a client event or something, that’s really energy draining and it takes you away from your strength. It’s almost like we do the opposite of what we should do.

Colleen:
Absolutely. You picked a great word there, procrastination, because people with different strengths procrastinate for different reasons. If you have a particular strength in Kolbe for example, you’re not … You’re going to procrastinate until there’s a sense of urgency.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Oh, it’s due tomorrow. Okay, now I can really get to this and energy is really high because that that urgencies. Other people will procrastinate because they don’t have enough data, don’t have enough information, and that’s never stopped me from getting out content, not having enough data, right? I’m just like dive right in. So everybody has a different reason. If they don’t have a plan figured out for how they’re going to do this thing, that might make somebody else procrastinate because there isn’t a plan.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah. Now, I have to confess, I did the Kolbe test myself years and years and years ago and I thought, “Well, that’s sort of amusing.” And I filed it away. I didn’t have that breakthrough moment that you had, but when you and I started working together, you had everyone on my team do it. Again, for those of you that this is totally obvious to, I apologize. For me, I’m a slow learner on these things Colleen Martin in my office, I realized that her Kolbe score in many ways as much different than mine. So an example for this would be when we do client education events, I love thinking up what the topic of the event should be and what the presentation should be about. I hate making a presentation. I absolutely don’t want to know how the room is laid out or what they’re going to serve or how we’re going to do the invitations in the mail.

Matthew Jarvis:
All of those things make my head hurt and none of them would get done where Colleen Martin, my office manager, the idea of trying to create the topic for the event or pick that kind of things, she would just never get to it. And so for a while we were kind of at odds on these things, right? She would try to pull details out of me, I would try to pull big thinking out of her. We would both get our energy drained away and then once we realized, well, your strength is details, and mine is big thinking, why don’t we just let you do the details and I’ll do the big thinking? And it worked really well.

Colleen:
Yeah. You’re a phenomenal team. You’re even better than you were. Good to great, right.

Matthew Jarvis:
Good to great indeed. So calling for offices that haven’t done the Kolbe test or haven’t done it for everybody, would really the first step be to take that Kolbe … They call it the A index.

Colleen:
Yes. The Kolbe A. There are different assessments that are … That you can use after. The Kolbe A is the basic one. This is one where it’s really about you and you have to be really … You have to be really careful when you take the assessment and be thinking about really how you naturally feel, how you instinctively feel about it. Sometimes people will take that assessment and they’ll take it because they’re interviewing for a position, for example, and they’ll think, “Oh, I better answer this in the way that I know that this job needs somebody that’s really detailed.” So whether I’m detailed or not, I’m going to answer things that way. The algorithms in it tend to catch that. But yeah, that would be the way to start is with is with the Kolbe.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah. And don’t try, like I said, don’t try to game the system, right? Don’t answer it the way you wish you were or the way you think you should be. Just to your point, answer it however, whatever comes to mind. If it says A or B and you’re like, “Well, I wish I could say A, but they real answer’s B.” Then please put down B.

Colleen:
Totally. I mean, that’s how you get to a place of joy. I mean, let’s just say you were doing this in advance of an interview. If you don’t fit the role, thank goodness, thank goodness they did this assessment and you found beforehand before you went in and you were set up to fail. So it’s important to be thinking about where you belong and go after that. That’s how you get that joy. I’m sure that once you and Colleen got that understanding of what provides joy to each other, right, that where you are in your group, you’ve got probably have more joy since then.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, we kind of have a much better time. In fact, I mentioned this example to you before we started recording, but I think it’s relevant to everyone. I was on the phone with Colleen Martin, my office manager. We were on the phone with a website developer and she kicks off the call by saying, “Hey, listen.” To the developer. I think the developer’s name was Kathy, she says, “Kathy, we’ve got four or five questions we need Matthew to answer and then everything else we’re going to do once he gets off the call.” And it was great.

Matthew Jarvis:
So I answered the four or five big level questions and then they, I assume talked about font colors and background colors and things that are really important for a good website. But if I … Before I would’ve stayed on that call, Colleen, before I worked with you, I would stay on that call and I would get snippy and I would get irritated and I’d be like, “Come on, can we just get done with this?” And then Colleen Martin, my office manager’s like, “Come on, this is actually important stuff.” Yeah, I get that it’s important, but I don’t want to hear about it. And so we would like drag ourselves by the fingernails through this, and now we just know this is my job, this is your job. And to your point Colleen, it’s dramatically improved. Not only our effectiveness, but just our quality of life at work.

Colleen:
Right, right. That’s the joy that I’m looking for. You know, people talk about having joy at work and there’s just little bit too much of that puritanical mindset from the very old days, hard work, that’s what makes the job, you know? Well, you can do hard work and have fun at the same time.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, you really can. Now, Colleen, how does the Kolbe score, how do you recommend using the Kolbe score in the hiring process? So I know that in our office, anytime we’re interviewing somebody, once they kind of go through the initial screening, but before we even meet with them, or at least have a second meeting with them, we have them do their Kolbe test or requests their Kolbe test. For example, I don’t want to hire, and this could be wrong, but I don’t want to hire a relationship manager with a 10 quick start because they’re going to be bouncing around. They’re probably going to want to start their own [inaudible 00:11:04] business. I want someone with a really high follow through, great fact-finding. How do you recommend that firms use that when they’re looking for employees?

Colleen:
Well, the first thing, and this kind of goes back to where I believe Kolbe and these assessments fit in the whole grand scheme of things. I look at everything from the big picture. You know what’s … You’re going to have a good place to work where people are happy and they’re expelling and are productive, and you can go from good to great. You have to all be very well aligned in the vision of the firm and what you intend to do in order to accomplish this vision, you’ve got to know what your boundaries of behavior are. And you’ve got to have, as Jim Collins says, the right people on the bus, know what the seats are on the bus, and know what the roles are. So this isn’t just about a job description, this is about figuring out what do you actually want the results to be for this person.

Colleen:
So you have to start with a role description. So you can be looking at what is that person actually going to be expected to do in order to call their role successful? That’s the very first thing that that needs to happen. When it comes to the Kolbe, the Kolbe is just one piece of many items, right? So you’ve got the role description, you’re going to have the resume because you’re going to know the person’s experience and what they’ve learned, what kind of knowledge they have. If you need a second language, you will know they have that, right?

Matthew Jarvis:
Sure.

Colleen:
So there’s really three parts to the mind. There’s the cognitive, which is everything that you’ve ever learned and your experience. There’s the affective, which is your feelings, your values, your preferences, things like [inaudible 00:12:41] and some of those will fall into that category, of really sort of your personality. And then Kolbe is … It’s not really personality, it’s not skills, it’s instincts. And the word is conative. You have cognitive effective and conative. You have these three pieces and when you’re looking to hire somebody, you need to understand all three.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yes.

Colleen:
The Kolbe’s going to tell you in what kind of circumstances that are going to excel, in what kind of behavior they’re going to excel, the affective part values, making sure that the people you’re hiring are aligning with your values and obviously the experience. So beyond that, having a structured interview, making sure that every person is interviewed in exactly the same way. And that’s … Like if you want to just have a good hiring practice, those are the things that you’d want to stick to. So Kolbe is a piece of it and Kolbe has a special … They call it right fit and anybody who’s Colby certified, we did these for our clients. You can also get it on your own by going into the Colby website, but that would have you, let’s say Matthew, you were going to hire somebody to be a junior advisor.

Matthew Jarvis:
Sure.

Colleen:
So you would take a Colby seat and you would basically say you take it identifying what the outcomes are with that role. What’s that person going to have to do to reach those outcomes? And so then they’ll take your A and that C and they’ll compare it to that person’s A and they’ll give you a range of success. So the candidates would be measured from A to F, right? An A candidate would be perfectly appropriate for your Kolbe A and the C that you took that determines what that person’s going to have to do in their role. So it’s also who the supervisor is, right? Your Kolbe is going to make a difference as to whether they’re going to be a good fit.

Matthew Jarvis:
Totally.

Colleen:
We’ll need to fit the people who are already there, especially somebody they’re going to work closely with.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah. Well, I liked that last part. Especially someone you’re going to work closely with, right? A lot of people in TPR nation have maybe one or two people or a part time person. This process, while it might seem kind of cumbersome, these three different areas, it’s really essential for someone that you’re probably going to spend more waking hours with than anyone else in your life. Right? So Colleen Martin, my office manager, we spent a lot of time together and if our personalities don’t align in an area, not that we have the same person, we almost have opposite personalities in so many ways, but if they don’t groove together and really Colleen’s process, you explained to us how we find this groove, it’s really going to be struggle. And I think it applies even if you’re getting a part time virtual assistant or some kind of contractor, right?

Colleen:
Oh, yeah.

Matthew Jarvis:
If you were expecting them to do ABC and in their mind they’re thinking XYZ , it’s always going to be a source of frustration for you and I think this is where, and Colleen, I’d be curious your thoughts. I think this is where a lot of advisors struggle with their team. They say, “Oh my goodness.” In fact, I hear this all the time, Matthew, if only I had a Colleen Martin in my office, if only I could hire her away from you, then I would have a successful practice. And I say … First of all, I say, “Good luck because she gets paid really well. She’s not going anywhere. But if you can offer a better package, you should because she deserves the best in life.” But the bigger part is you’ve just got to find the right person. My Colleen not be a good fit for you. She might be the worst person in the world for you to work with, but it’s a good fit for me, and it’s because we went through that work.

Colleen:
Yeah. I mean, this is one of the biggest investments you make. I mean, your time, the amount of time you put into bringing somebody new on, onboarding them. Nevermind all the HR stuff you have to do. But the training, the mentoring, getting them … I mean, you’re really doing everything twice or the first three to six months, right? Can’t just leave them on their own. And so it’s a huge investment. If you take this time up front, put your effort into doing the best you can to get the right person.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah.

Colleen:
You’re going to be a lot more successful. I mean, nothing’s perfect, right? I mean, there are some people who are pretty good actors when they come in here. Doesn’t always work, even if you think you’ve done all the right things.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, it really does. So I get it’s totally a great piece of the hiring process. As you pointed out, it’s not the hiring process, it’s a piece of it. But how about … We talked about just a minute earlier for existing employees, whether you have one or two or five or 10. So if you’ve never done these kinds of assessments, Colleen, how would you recommend we get started on that? Would it be to take the Kolbe and then do the cross scores and just see what Kolbe comes up with? Would that be a good starting place?

Colleen:
Absolutely. I mean, I don’t see any reason why not. Things don’t have to be done in any particular order. I’m a fan of making sure you start out with the roles and the roles kind of depends on what’s the firm trying to accomplish? Then you go back to that whole big picture. But yes, I would have you all take the Kolbe and start to understand yourself first. And then Kolbe’s got these awesome reports called the A to A where it compares to people with different Kolbe scores and then kind of tells you, the biggest mistake you could ever make and is expecting Matthew to give you all the details, you know, that kind of thing. Right?

Matthew Jarvis:
Yes.

Colleen:
Or the biggest mistake you could ever make is to ask Coleen to finish 12 projects. That’s me, it’s Colleen.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yes, yes.

Colleen:
And I thought to myself the first time I read one of those with myself and my husband, I thought, “I wish I would have had this when we first got married.” I mean, there would’ve just been so much less friction, just the kind of normal friction that happens in any relationship, just knowing that no somebody else, for example, somebody really long in fact finder as an example, needs to know what the conversation is going to be about before you start into the conversation. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, Matthew, but you sit down and start talking about something and Colleen says, “Wait, where is this going? What’s the point of this conversation?” Right?

Matthew Jarvis:
Yep. Yep.

Colleen:
And that’s the kind of thing that helps that person absorb the conversation better when you know that that’s what they need. They need to know where this is going so that they can listen better. So it just increases your ability to communicate. And I think Kolbe, for just communication purposes alone or just knowing how to communicate with somebody properly is excellent.

Matthew Jarvis:
I have to laugh. You mentioned doing it with your husband and I did it with my wife Jackie and we did that A profile, the A profile comparison. And when Jackie read the report, she kind of laughed. She says, “Do we pay for this? Because these are all real obvious things.” It’s like don’t try to load Matt down with details and don’t try to … These are obvious, this is 101 stuff. Because she’s pretty insightful. She’s a smart gal. But for me, these are the things that it said for Jackie were super insightful.

Matthew Jarvis:
Kind of like, hey, let’s focus on one project at a time. Let’s take one thing to completion before we jump into 10 other projects. And these were actually, to your point, it eliminated a lot of friction in our relationship, mostly friction I was causing, I’ll be real honest. I want to have 10 projects at the same time. I’m sure you do too. No, no. I just want one and I want to take it to the end and then check out the next one, or Jackie likes to have the details before we jump. I would say, “Let’s sell our house. We’ll figure out how to move our stuff later. It’s not a big deal.”

Colleen:
Right. Yeah. And the interesting part is that usually it’s the long quick starts, which are the … Oftentimes the entrepreneur, not always, a lot of my clients are high fact finder. High follow through, and short on the quick start … So not really the definition of an entrepreneur but it is pretty common. And when you’re wanting to do everything … When you’re wanting to jump without having all of the details, that can cause a lot of friction. So most of the world, Matthew, the majority are more high fact finder, high follow through, particularly in terms of authority figures.

Matthew Jarvis:
Interesting.

Colleen:
A lot of teachers are high fact finder, high follow through. So we kind of get a little bit of that chip on the shoulder about how we operate. Right?

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. You know what, another tool that we got from you Colleen when we worked together, and I confess, I can’t remember if we’ve got this directly or indirectly as we worked was this idea of activities that are energy building and energy draining and the Kolbe points set out. And I think we’re all sort of aware, maybe not consciously of activities that we just dread doing, an activity that we really love doing and what I had never thought about on this is how it relates to my team. And again, I apologize for being a slow learner, but I knew that I had things I like to do and things I didn’t like to do. And it never occurred to me that the same was true for my team.

Matthew Jarvis:
Again, I’m a pretty dense guy, but it turns out that there are things that they like to do and there’s things that they dread doing. And one of the things we adapted after we worked with you was sort of this permission of in any kind of setting, whether it was our whole team or just two of us to say, “This has really become energy draining from me. I need to step away from this and come back or we need to approach this differently.” Whereas before we would just slug through it and people would get irritated and snippy and it just really didn’t work well.

Colleen:
Yeah, that was the energy reconnaissance where I had you list here all the things that fuel me, I can do them all day. They energize me, I could just go on all night. And then the things that sapped me, that just suck the life out of you and knowing what those things are and being, being able to be really authentic with each other. One of the core values of QT Consulting is authenticity. And that is being able to say, “If we want to succeed together, then you need to know that if you’re going to have me go through the workflows and all of the action items on the CRM, you’re just going to kill my energy. I’m not going to be able to call any of my COIs and make appointments with prospective clients and all of that.”

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah.

Colleen:
So somebody else has just got to do that for me. We’ve just got to have that authenticity. So the energy reconnaissance gives you the ability to get all that stuff written down. And if you don’t want to share that with your boss, for example, use it to find ways to do things in alternative ways.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, I really like that. And to your point, be aware of that and kind of get past this mindset of well I just need to toughen up and pull up by my bootstraps and kind of this old school, like I’ll suffer through it and the more I suffer, the better employee I’ll be, or the better manager I’ll be. There’s alternatives to that. Right? So if paperwork drives you crazy … Another quick example I’ll use, creating PowerPoint decks. I give a lot of presentations, a lot of PowerPoint decks, PowerPoint decks take me hours to create and it sucks all the life out of me because I get stuck on like should be the font be 14 or 15, I don’t know why, it drives me crazy. I don’t like them when I’m done.

Colleen:
It still doesn’t look good.

Matthew Jarvis:
It still doesn’t look good. I’m still like, “Geez, I can’t believe I spent that many hours and this is all I have to show for it, but darn it, I should be able to do this.” So now I sketch out my PowerPoints on a piece of paper. I draw a grid on a piece of paper, I draw them out with a pen, I don’t draw very well, and I send them to our PowerPoint designer along with my notes, either typed or just narrated, here’s how I see this going. And she finds images and graphics, takes it to 80% then I look at it and say, “I really want this graphic instead of that one.” And what was this massive time and energy drain for me is now a great thing. And they look a lot better than they did before.

Colleen:
Yeah, that is … You’ve really taken this far, Matthew. Yeah. The ability to eliminate, delegate, or barter with somebody in your office, right? Just because you’re CEO doesn’t mean you can’t do something that might seem minor, but because it’s your strengths, you ought to do it because it will energize you. And if you really want to get to being the most productive, this is a great way to start. If you’re just on your own, you don’t have to have a team. Kolbe works great for teams, but if you’re on your own, you’re a solo advisor and you’re trying to figure out what do I outsource? Maybe you’re not that great at marketing. Maybe you ought to be outsourcing the marketing.

Matthew Jarvis:
Sure.

Colleen:
Maybe you ought to have somebody else who comes in and puts prospects in front of you. Maybe that’s something that you’re not good at. And you got to you learn these things through the Kolbe, the kind of things that you are not really good at and yeah, maybe that’s how you outsource.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, that’s perfect. You know what? Another example of that, when we have new prospects and we’re creating financial planning, I don’t like the data entry at all. It just … It’s a huge energy drain for me. So Nathaniel on my team combs through all the documents. He has this endless attention to detail. He loves this stuff, puts it in a spreadsheet and then I just can spend 20 minutes looking and I can pull out all the key action items, throw it on a piece of paper and then I’m brilliant at presenting it to the prospect. Nathaniel’s terrible at that. The idea of presenting the stuff to the prospect makes them shutter. And so I think, Colleen, to your point, find what you’re good at and then trade, barter, get some way to exchange some of that out.

Colleen:
Yeah. Conversations with people where there is uncertainty about the outcome. That can be very nerve wracking for somebody.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah.

Colleen:
Talking off the top of their head, fielding questions they haven’t had time to prepare for. Absolutely. That’s something that some people do very, very well and some people are not … Not really comfortable with that at all.

Matthew Jarvis:
I love it. I love it. Yeah, so again, I’d just like to in front everybody thank you for the work that you did for our team. And then of course people can look you up at QII Consulting, so Q2 Consulting. And then this podcast is all about taking action. First action item for those of you who are in the greater Phoenix area, Colleen, you’re doing a presentation for the FPA of Phoenix on March 25th is that correct?

Colleen:
That’s correct. It’ll be at the Skysong in Phoenix and we’ll start it bright early at seven 30 in the morning. We’ll go from seven 30 to 10, 10 or 10:30. Yeah, it’d be a workshop, we’re providing discounts to teams to attend workshop and providing a discount to the Kolbe for everybody who takes the Kolbe, wants to take the Kolbe to come in and do the workshop.

Matthew Jarvis:
Yeah, that’s great. So you can go to the FPA of greater Phoenix website. You can find that information March 25th. So if you’re in the Phoenix area, that’s action item number one. Action item number two, or I guess it’s number one if you’re outside of the Phoenix area, is if you haven’t already, go ahead and do the Kolbe A profile for yourself. Do it for everyone on your team, however big that is, whether that’s one person or 50 people. And then do the A profile file, the A profile to see and yes, that’s some expense and you’ll have to spend a few hundred dollars on it. It’ll probably be some of the best money you spend this year.

Colleen:
Yeah, and that’s, you can go directly to Kolbe.com for that.

Matthew Jarvis:
I will also throw out for our backstage pass members, if you log into the backstage pass, of course there’ll be a transcript of this, but I will post my Kolbe scores as well as my teams and the cross score so that you can kind of see how our team looks, and again, my score is going to be different than your score, it’s going to be different than my team’s score, but that way you can get a feel for how this works in different sizes of teams. Even though Micah wasn’t on the podcast, I’ll have him post the disc profiles. He’s a big disc fan, so he can post those and see those as well to kind of just get some insight on how this works. Colleen, other action items? I’ve got one more on my list, but any that you have on your mind that people should take action from this podcast.

Colleen:
Well, I would just … I mentioned Clifton StrengthsFinders, which is-

Matthew Jarvis:
Oh, that’s another good one.

Colleen:
It’s on the affected side of things, but it also is where you are at your best. There are 34 strengths and you can really inexpensive, it’s like 20 bucks to get the … To look at your top five. And I’ll say that that had a big change for me as well. Understanding that ideation, coming up with ideas, is a really right strength of mine, but it also has a shadow, and understanding that our strengths have shadows is really important.

Matthew Jarvis:
It’s really interesting.

Colleen:
As Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach always says, you don’t have to act on every single idea that you have. And you kind of learn that. And once you understand that, it’s a big one for you.

Matthew Jarvis:
It really is.

Colleen:
So I would recommend that one as well.

Matthew Jarvis:
Okay. So the Clifton StrengthsFinder, that’s awesome. The last action item I’ve got on my list would be to look at your calendar for today or for this week, for this month, whatever activities are on your calendar that you’re dreading. You’re saying, “Oh geez, I really don’t want to do those.” Or kind of look back and say, “What did I do this week that I just dread doing?” Find a way to get rid of that off your calendar. Now if going to work is what you dread, then maybe you need to look at a career change, but short of that, PowerPoint design or planning this or prospecting or whatever it is, find a way to eliminate it, to delegate it, to change it, to work around it, but stop trying to muscle through it. If you could muscle through it, you would have already gotten through it, so muscling through it and willpower alone will not get you to the next level.

Colleen:
Great advice.

Matthew Jarvis:
You’re so kind. Well, Colleen, thank you so much for being on the podcast. You gave me way less grief than Micah does. He always is ribbing me the whole time. So really it was a pleasure and I think … I’m trying to think when we’re going to cross paths again. I was going to be in Scottsdale at the worst time of the year, but you’re going to be in Hawaii, so we’ll have to find another time to cross pass for sure.

Colleen:
Yeah, that sounds great. We’ll make it happen.

Matthew Jarvis:
For sure. Well, Colleen, thank you so much. And for all of our listeners, until next time, happy planning.

Colleen:
Take care. Bye.

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