Advice Adherence

Dr. Moira Somers told Michael Kitces that there are three things any customer/client/patient will need in order to adhere to your advice: agreement, conviction, and confidence.

They must agree to the underlying facts. The story we are telling has to make intuitive sense to them.

They must-have conviction that the next steps are worth following. They must believe that “if I do this, then that will happen.”

They must have confidence that the results will be in their best interest. “Not only will that happen, but it will be good for me.”

It’s easy to give advice and end up with half-baked agreement, weak conviction, and low confidence. “I guess you’re probably right. I’ll take a look at it, ok?” We might try to tell ourselves that’s a win because they didn’t say no, but if we’re being honest, it’s really not a win. Advice without adherence helps no one.

We should also remember that before we even give advice, we have to first establish an emotional connection. In the same way, giving advice comes before adherence, if we don’t first establish trust, our advice will fall on deaf ears. In industries where it is hard to differentiate between providers, there is no better differentiator than literally connecting with someone so that they look at us differently. We only gain that perspective in their minds by making emotional connections.

There’s an old saying that goes, “they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s old for a reason. Once we’ve established trust and someone knows how much we care, then we can use our professional experience to offer advice. Finally, as Somers says, in order to make sure we are really making a difference we have to seek adherence and focus on agreement, conviction, and confidence. When we accomplish that, we have clients for life.