127
Chapter 6
The Mind-Set Factor
◾ Have you got what it takes to break through your mind-set barriers to
success?
◾ How do you define your consulting success?
◾ How is your mind-set serving you in life and business?
This chapter examines the Odyssey consultant mind-set, which will
always be preeminent to the Odyssey consultant skill set. We look at how
you define and measure success as a professional advisor and show how
to calibrate your own success in a holistic way. We explore the power of
harnessing positive psychology, which is central to cultivating the Odyssey
consultant mind-set. Embracing personal responsibility and understanding
the wider applications of the responsibility issue provide a foundational
discipline for so much of the work that successful consultants do.
Beyond the Mental Game of Consulting
Consulting based on your talent can be subdivided into a range of distinct
areas itemized in Figure 6.1. Frequently, the talents that you will harness
to become a great consultant are hiding in plain sight and are often taken
for granted. They are so interwoven through life/work experience that they
can be difficult to unravel and identify. Talent does however leave clues.
Takea look at the graphic and consider it in the context of your own life
and work.
128 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
The talent management model encompasses the yin and yang of life. Left
of the circle, on the performance consulting side, the focus is on what you
do and corresponds to the head and hand in the four levels of the consulting
model. It is composed of the skills, knowledge, and competencies of the
individual, all of which merge to deliver the task focus necessary to manage
a consulting engagement.
The opposite side of the graphic is all about personal mastery. In terms
of the four levels of the consulting model, it focuses on who you are. This is
the heart and the spirit dimension and embraces deeper personal qualities
such as emotional intelligence, personal responsibility, beliefs, and values.
These characteristics combine to deliver a process focus as distinct from the
task focus on the left hand side of the model.
The left-hand column, which sits outside the circle, lists the range of
consulting topics that you may engage in as your chosen area. The skill
sets listed within the diagram are then applied to whichever niche you have
adopted to achieve the task focus required.
Performance consulting
“What I do” head and body
Professional competency
Knowledge management
e job of consulting
Performance management
Financial intelligence
Wealth strategy
Business acumen
Human performance
Technical strategic insight
Customer focus
Innovation
Expertise
Professional style
e outer
experience
Task focus
Personal
mastery
“Who I am”
Heart and spirit
Character assessment
Emotional intelligence
Natural talents
Personal competence mastery
Personality factor
Success factors
Success anchors: happiness index
Natural principles of life
Attitude management
Personal responsibility
Intrapersonal intelligence
Learning to change
Social intelligence
Self-image psychology
Personal strategy
Image and values
e internal game
Teams
Feedback
Evaluation
Appraisal
Coaching
Mentoring
Personality
Advice
Customer
Rewardship
Leadership
Performance
Evaluation
Resources
Marketing
Productivit
y
Development
Int
erpersonal
Intelligences
Career management
Managing expectations
Pe
rformance
Career plans
Reward system
Confidence
Assertivenes
s
Conflict
Feedback
Self-concept
Emotions
Management
Respect
Worth
Family
Community
Love
Marriage
Heart
Wellness
Spiritual
Emotional
Mental
Physical
Purpose
Significance
Destiny
Power
Figure 6.1 The consultant’s talent management model.
The Mind-Set Factor ◾ 129
The competent consultant will successfully integrate yin and yang to
create congruence in their lives and businesses, seamlessly merging who
they are on the inside with what they do on the outside.
Converting Your Talents into Strategic Competencies
Competencies are created by the combination of behaviors, attitudes, values,
skills, learned practices, and emotional intelligence and are applied by effective
people to deliver superior results.
Competencies are also derived from your talents and are manifested
through your aptitude and attitude. Your talents are often obvious, yet they
may not always convert into the competencies that get superior results.
Therefore, a clear understanding of your talents is an essential first step in
achieving superior competence and consulting excellence. You are unlikely to
reach your full potential unless you are working in harmony with your talents.
The Odyssey Trusted Advisor Competency Model
We in Odyssey have developed a Trusted Advisor competency model. This
framework identifies the requirements for superior consulting performance,
measures the individual against that benchmark, and sets forth a development
plan to enable best results.
The process measures the consultant’s talents against the Odyssey con-
sultant benchmark. The gaps identified in the process then become areas
for development. As you work on those competencies, you will add value
to your practice which will in turn add to your value and influence with
clients. This process can also be implemented in a client workplace where
job definitions are unclear, and it can also be extended to recruitment and
career path development.
Your challenge as an Odyssey consultant is to meet and surpass the
talent requirements of the Trusted Advisor and to turn your natural talents
into competencies that transform your performance and results.
Defining Success as a Professional Advisor
What is success? How do you define success as a consultant and as a profes-
sional services firm? How successful are you as a professional? What criteria
130 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
do you use to determine how you’re doing in your business? What do you
need to stop doing or start doing to be more successful in your professional
practice?
There are many myths and much confusion about the concept of success.
Who motivates the motivator? Sometimes you are so busy directing, manag-
ing, helping, mentoring, coaching, and consulting with your clients that you
forget to “sharpen the saw” for yourself.
As a consulting professional, success must be universally defined to
embrace your full life, not just one or two aspects of it. Many managers and
business owners focus solely on the financial returns or results of success
while ignoring the antecedents. Conversely, other professionals fall in love
with the passion and freedom that their profession provides and sometimes
neglect the reality of the business or personal side.
Take a conscious look at how you have defined success in your work and
life before consulting and how you are defining it now that you are in consult-
ing. This exercise is very important as it will inform your consulting practice
and business priorities. It may be helpful to engage a coach to assist you in
discovering fresh insights and to bring clarity and focus to what you already
know about your current situation and to plan your future direction. It is also
important to expose faulty assumptions about success and what it means for
you as a successful consultant within a successful consulting business.
Six Dimensions of Success
Notice how four of the following six dimensions of success start with the
phrase “to be” and one each with “to have” and “to do.”
1. To be happy and have peace of mind
Peace of mind means being in control of your own destiny … to
enjoy the journey of life and work; to have the right balance and inte-
gration between personal and professional life; to feel connected physi-
cally, mentally, emotionally and spiritually to both sides of the work
life equation; to be carefree; to laugh often; just “to be,” less “have” and
“do” and more “be.”
Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. You are
likely to be happiest when you tune into your heart’s desire. What
motivates you? Are your goals clear? Do you feel you are creating the
opportunity to do your best work? Do you think you are acquiring
the opportunity to do enough of your best work to make it financially
The Mind-Set Factor ◾ 131
viable? These questions should prompt you to assess the values at the
very core of who you are and how they dovetail with your consulting
business.
The key to happiness, both as a person and as a consultant, is your
determination to dedicate yourself to a worthwhile purpose by devel-
oping mastery in the personal and professional competencies that are
consistent with your natural talents, behaviors, values, and intelligence.
You cannot be truly happy until you are clear about the inherent
possibilities within your own person.
In general, happy people are those with high levels of self-respect,
self-esteem, confidence, and personal pride. They have come to appre-
ciate the real value they contribute to their clients and never allow it to
be downgraded to a lesser status than it deserves. Lack of self-confidence
is the number one inhibitor of exceptional performance. It hurts the
client and consultant equally. Odyssey focuses on building consultants’
confidence.
Many unhappy people fail to take responsibility for this anchor ingre-
dient of success. You will never achieve peace of mind and happiness
by simply “trying to be happy.” Rather, it seems to come naturally as a
result of doing worthwhile work, where both you and the client col-
laborate as peers and have clear respect for each other.
Unhappiness is encapsulated in the ugly secret of life, and that secret
is fear. Fear manifests itself in self-doubt, poor self-image, shyness,
guilt, blaming, anxiety, mental distress, and disorder. In the context of
a professional practice, these negative emotions can also manifest in an
overfocus on deliverables, inputs, timeframes, tasks, and low fee-setting.
Aggregated together, these things rob us of peace of mind and our
natural right to be happy.
By contrast, confidence and competence go hand in hand with the top
echelons of professional work. One will never be found without the other.
The good news is negative emotions can be unlearned. Your current
position on the happiness–unhappiness scale is more framed around
who you are and the past choices you have made and less around your
technical abilities. The bottom line, however, is that you deserve to be
happy and have peace of mind.
An excellent way to change your position on the scale is to take total
personal responsibility for learning how to redefine and reframe happiness,
in both your personal and professional contexts, with life and work
integration as the goal.
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