Return On Impact

How to apprentice your secret sauce

What if you could replicate your secret sauce in someone you wish to mentor?

Think about your slow-motion ability to gain trust in an instant, or to lead a client to a fresh perspective they couldn’t find on their own. High-impact advisors often long for a mini me. It’s not an ego thing. It’s a slow poke of reality that you tolerate absent resolution.

Return On Impact™

Picture a recent great day, the fairy dust of your Midas Touch sprinkled with joyful abundance. This non-financial return that your high-net worth clients receive from your relationship is a powerful form of ROI. Rewind that same day, knowing you could apprentice another soul to achieve similar results. This is your Return On Impact.

The unseen truth of how you Nail It

The underlying nuance of your personal magic is multi-layered in its complexity. Rather than a secret, it’s actually an unseen truth comprised of two components. The first component is your affective gifts. Psychology experts at Kolbe.com say, “A person’s affective strengths lie in their ability to use emotion effectively. Your affective traits evolve and fluctuate given your circumstances.”

Affective traits are the skills of your life experiences. They are why new clients reveal lifelong secrets in the early days of your relationship, and how you explain complex topics in simple terms. They allow you to see the far side of a problem with shooting star immediacy- a problem others can’t formulate much less resolve.

Throughout 25 years of asking top 1% advisors what makes them unique, most will name one or all of the affective gifts described above. If these gifts are the norm amongst your best-in-class peers, maybe they're not the real secret embedded in your sauce. The tendency to assign credit where it's not actually due blocks deeper exploration. Your affective gifts, that first component of your magic, are only half the story. They're the icing of your impact, not the cake.

It's tough to read the label from inside the jar

The second magical component is your innate gifts: a powerful mechanism elusive to the conscious mind. Dictionary.com defines innate as: “Inherent in the essential character of something; arising from the intellect rather than through learned experience.” This marionette of your genius has been with you since birth. It lives in your subconscious yet it drives your days.

Cracking the code on your secret sauce requires awareness of your Intrinsic Value Cycle (IVC). When you can finally see your three-step operating system in plain sight, you can deploy it with foresight, predictably nailing it whenever you wish.

When you’re facilitating a big breakthrough in slow motion, providing immense value and observing it at the same time – that happy place of nailing it – your innate gifts are in motion.

You know when you’ve landed in that zone, but how did you get there? The answer lies in your Intrinsic Value Cycle, the three-step operating system of your secret sauce. It’s a repeatable pattern of behavior that facilitates your most profound moments of impact.

From mentorship to apprenticeship

Your quest to mentor the next generation of leaders and rainmakers is a dance of shadow and debriefs. They sit beside you in meetings, observant sponges, anticipating the chance to unpack it all afterward. Yet the journey is misaligned from the start. Affective traits are not transferrable. They’re not even the primary mechanism in play.

It is your IVC that is driving your biggest relational wins. Because it is a repeatable pattern, it is teachable. Instead of mentoring your affective traits, awareness of your IVC allows you to apprentice your innate gifts. Finally there’s a learning model for your magic – a clear cycle of prepare, execute, fine tune and repeat.

The search for an authentic brand: a classically misguided quest

You head out in search of a new brand. A multitude of creative firms rise to the occasion of your quest. You pair up with a talented firm – two well-meaning parties with the perception that a common set of success metrics leads your journey.

"Never confuse movement with action."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In our experience, when high-impact firms begin the journey to codify their brand, their underlying craving is for words to articulate their gifts. Giving language to your innate magic requires keen awareness of what’s playing out real-time when you’re nailing it. When we speak with firms who pursued a brand without that awareness, they describe a result that didn’t feel authentic – a good story, just not their story.

Consider giving your quest a higher bar - awareness of your innate gifts. Ensure that all parties to the journey have the same success metrics. If together you hit the true bull's eye of your aspiration, you will feel the win in your soul.