Proverbs 15:22 tells us “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”

If you are even remotely like me, you’ve done everything by yourself for your whole life and your private enough that others are very seldom involved in your decision making.  What if they steal your idea?  What if they think less of you because your not all that smart?  What if your heading down the wrong course and they have to correct you?

Do you hear the sub-tones of self doubt and echoes of self-esteem questions?

Business is about solutions.  No business is going to succeed unless you help somebody or solve some type of problem.  Look at your business plan.  It began with a view of helping clients/customers by using some unique method.  Did that idea come out of the blue, or was there a process behind the discovery.  Perhaps all your experiences add up to the solution or it came from someone saying something influential.  Either way – it didn’t drop out of the sky the way we had hoped ideas would appear.

That brings me back to advisers – who are they and why do we need them?

The first and most important advisor is yourself.  I know that may be contradictory to what you expected, but there’s a good reason for that.  We all have a lot of internal talk going on that guides us through each day.  It’s our conscious.  Whether you believe that God put it there or that it is our ordered neurons firing out thoughts, its there guiding us on right and wrong, good and bad, fight or flight, act or ignore.  You’ve heard the saying that ‘your first thought is normally right’ and there’s a reason for it.  Our mind knows instinctively what is best for us. We need to listen!!

And that the second thing about advisors;  we need to listen!!  As we find trusted people to reach out to, we have to step back from the boss role for a while to listen to other experiences and views.  There is nothing as powerful as the same situation viewed from a different perspective.  What I’m learning about advisors is that they never (literally) see things the same way I do.  They may agree with my choices, but they never see it in the same light.  The right answer is still the right answer no matter what direction you come from to get there.

Where do advisors come from?  I had plenty when I was young and I made new friends all the time.  Some led me in wrong directions, most helped me move forward.  Now, as I start something entirely new in my life,  I don’t have the network that was there in the past.  My new direction is a path not tread by my old buddies.  They want to help but they don’t have the experience I need.  So they put me in touch with new people or I find myself reaching out in a strange world for people I don’t even know.

Where are you at with your advisors – are you seeking?  Are you building trust?  Are you listening, evaluating and enacting?

Believe!