Emotional intelligence includes the ability to spend most of your client meetings listening – not talking. If that sounds like a tall order, consider this: 

Emotional intelligence is a muscle that you can train.

In this episode, Matt Halloran talks to Carl Richards, a decade-long columnist for The New York Times and creator and author of “The Behavioral Gap,” about ways to practice emotional intelligence to help you connect with and educate your clients. Carl also shares how he finds the “crunchy bits” to inspire emotionally resonant content, and his advice for any advisor who’s still “the best-kept secret” in their area.  

Carl discusses:

• His trick for helping people solve their problems while barely saying a word 
  
• Two rules he used to drastically reduce how much he was talking during client meetings
  
• How to narrow down the unique problem you’re interested in solving for your audience
  
• The exact steps he would take, as an advisor, to accelerate his influence and grow his business
  
• And more
  

Resources: 

• PodRocket Influence Academy (Enroll for FREE)
  
• How much influence do you have? Take our free 5-min test
  
• Sketch Guy – The New York Times
  
• Orion Advisor Solutions
  
• FiCommPartners.com
  
• “The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money” by Carl Richards
  
• “The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money”  by Carl Richards
  

Connect with Carl Richards:

• The Society of Advice
  
• LinkedIn: Carl Richards
  
• Twitter: @behaviorgap
  
• BehaviorGap.com
  

Connect with ProudMouth:

• Do you want to podcast? Book a call with our Influence Engineers to get started!
  
• ProudMouth
  
• LinkedIn: Matt Halloran
  
• Twitter: Matt Halloran
  
• LinkedIn: ProudMouth
  
• Facebook: ProudMouth
  
• Twitter: ProudMouth
  
• YouTube: ProudMouth
  

About Carl Richards:

Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, which appeared weekly for a decade in The New York Times. Carl has also been featured on Marketplace Money, Oprah.com, and Forbes.com. In addition, Carl has become a frequent keynote speaker at financial planning conferences and visual learning events around the world.

Through his simple sketches, Carl makes complex financial concepts easy to understand. His sketches also serve as the foundation for his two books, The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money and The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money.