It’s hard to work on your business when you’re so busy working in your business.
We all know that professional development is important. From a tactical perspective, you have CE requirements to meet. Strategically, you want to continually raise the bar of excellent service you provide your clients. That includes keeping abreast of new information, staying on top of changes in the law and regulations that effect financial planning as well as deepening your skills and understanding in key areas.
Professional development is also one of the things that helps you stay interested in what you’re doing – it keeps your work from feeling stale to you and to your clients.
(We all know that not everything that counts as CE is professional development and not everything you do to develop professionally counts as CE but there is a lot of overlap and the approach you need to adopt to actually get them done is the same.)
So, how to cram professional development time and CE into your schedule?
I suggest a threefold approach.
1. Spend time thinking and talking about how important professional development is to you and what positive things you expect to get from doing it. This works like the anchoring exercise in the goals visualizations process – you are more likely to accomplish something when you have a clear picture of it in your head and when you share your expectations out loud to someone else – don’t underestimate the power of accountability.
2. Make professional development activities a scheduled routine. Commit to spending some time in professional development activity each and every month. Commit to this activity with as much seriousness as you do with client appointments. Put time in your calendar. Don’t let yourself postpone or cancel unless you would postpone or cancel a client appointment in the same circumstance.
3. Choose professional development activities that you are actually interested in. If you leave CE for the last minute, you rush around taking whatever class you can fit in before your deadline, preferably one that doesn’t cost much. Sitting through a seminar on a topic you care nothing about (thinking about all the things you could/should be doing) creates even less motivation for you to follow through on more professional development next time. Doing some professional development every month allows you the time to look for topics and learning experiences that really interest you and/or will benefit your clients.
All these suggestions boil down to having your actions and your beliefs match.
When you follow through on professional development, you stay fresh and interested, your clients receive even better value and you have the tools you need to make your business more successful.