142 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
Your Self-Concept and How It Affects Your Consulting Practice
Self-concept is made up of your natural inborn talents, nurtured attributes,
beliefs, values, emotional intelligence and learned experiences. As a consul-
tant, your performance potential is directly related to your self-concept. It
tends to predict your degree of mastery in your area of endeavor.
Your self-concept is stored in your subconscious mind and controls your
thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and actions. It triggers your responses to people,
situations, and circumstances. Its memory storehouse is huge and tends to
categorize every incident as a belief or as a habit, depending on your early
life conditioning. You have hundreds of mini self-concepts for all areas of
your life, some are good and some are not so good.
Your self-concept is made up of three overlapping parts: self-ideal, self-
image, and self-esteem. Understanding how these three elements work
together is essential to your overall interpersonal and applied competency,
your talent delivery, and long-term success (Figure 6.6).
1. Your self-ideal is the person you would most like to become—“the
future me.” It helps determine your current strategies, future purpose,
and create direction in life. It can act as the motivator for growth and
change as a consultant. When people leave the corporate world and
choose to be a consultant, the ideal self is a work in progress.
2. Your self-image determines your current performance—“the current
me.” It is how you view your current self, your presence and capabili-
ties, and how valuable you feel yourself in the moment, as a person and
as professional advisor.
Self-ideal
“Future me”
Self-esteem
“My value”
Self-image
“Current me”
Figure 6.6 The three parts of the self.
The Mind-Set Factor ◾ 143
3. Your self-esteem is the emotional evaluation of one’s own worth. Self-
esteem can involve a variety of beliefs about the self and is heavily
influenced by your self-ideal and your self-image.
Let us look at each of these in turn.
Your Self-Ideal
Your self-ideal is a combination of the qualities that you admire most in
other people. Since early childhood, you have been exposed through fam-
ily, school, media, and life itself to qualities such as integrity, courage, wis-
dom, humility, compassion, love, and forgiveness. These qualities have been
calibrated in your subconscious mind. Their importance in relation to each
other creates an ideal of the best person you could be.
Where animals have a natural survival instinct, humans have a natural
success instinct. Consciously or unconsciously, you continuously strive to live
up to your ideal. The clearer you are about what that self-ideal is, the more
likely you are to reach your goals in both your personal and work life. The
test then centers on the degree to which your current behaviors and actions
are congruent with your ideals.
Setting clear, written goals and acting on them is a big step towards
attaining your self-ideal.
Closing the self-ideal gap starts with “imagineering.” There are, of course,
endless possibilities within your imagination. Who are your heroes? Your
professional role models? Heroes can inspire you to become all that you
aspire to be. Role models can show you what you need to do to achieve
your goals. Let us look at both:
◾ Role models are people you can emulate. If you are in a position to
work closely with them, so much the better. They do not have to be
famous. The role models in your sector should have at least one talent
that you have, be more proficient than you in one competency area,
and be available on a regular basis so that you can watch them in
action.
◾ Heroes or heroines differ from role models, but they can also help you
clarify and work towards your self-ideal. Your heroes personify your
values and ideals. They represent who you can become. A society
writes its history by naming its heroes and glorifying their greatness.
144 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
Reading the autobiographies and biographies of great leaders and
achievers—Gandhi, Mandela, Jesus, Napoleon, and Churchill—helps
you compare their ideals and values with your own.
If you have no heroes or heroines, perhaps you have not identified your
values or highest ideals. “Everyone is equal”—the common-man ethos—is
a kind of antihero phase that societies go through periodically. It does not
work. Your heroes or heroines take responsibility and accomplish things.
They should inspire you. If you look up, you will be drawn up.
Having a magnificent obsession clarifies and brings focus to your self-
ideal, which helps crystallize your self-image and raises your self-esteem.
You can choose to make consulting a magnificent obsession.
Your Self-Image
Your self-image is your inner mirror. It is how you see and think about
yourself, right now. You constantly “look” in this metaphorical mirror to
check how you are doing physically, mentally, and emotionally. You use it to
determine how you should respond to circumstances and people. It is your
current reality checkpoint.
The key to self-image is “as within, so without.” There is a perfect correspon-
dence between your inner state of mind and your outer reactions and actions.
You will always tend to live up to, or down to, your current assessment of your-
self. Nowhere is this manifested more than in the level of fees you charge your
clients. You can immediately see the connection with your self-ideal.
When you are clear, positive, and happy with your self-image, your per-
formance goes up, your talents kick in, and your attitudes and interactions
give you energy and creativity. When your self-image is poor, you experi-
ence stress, self-imposed inferiority, and envisage all the ways that things
will fail to work out.
Your Self-Esteem
Your current reality, good or bad, is the sum of all the choices you have
made. All choices have consequences, and these consequences go towards
creating your self-image. Self-esteem is the barometer that shows how your
self-image is moving towards or away from your self-ideal.
Self-esteem is your reputation with yourself. It is best measured by how
much you accept, respect, and regard yourself as a valuable and worthwhile
The Mind-Set Factor ◾ 145
advisor. The higher your self-esteem, the happier, more enthusiastic, and
productive you will be as a professional consultant.
Self-esteem is the foundation of personal growth, career development,
and advisory achievement. It is also central in the development of peer-level
respect with clients. Clients, consciously or subconsciously, often deal with
advisors as a vendor or a mere supplier. Unfortunately, the majority of advi-
sors allow this form of relationship to develop. They then suffer the conse-
quences in ad hoc, low-impact assignments and of course, low fees, which
in turn lower self-esteem. It can become a downward spiral. This is often
the root cause for those who leave the profession.
Your positioning with the client as an advisor is as clear an indicator of
your self-image as you can get. How you intend to reposition yourself is a
factor of your self-ideal visualization. Your self-esteem is the key mechanism
to trigger your mind-set and skill set changes to be the best consultant you
can be and to fulfil your purpose.
Writing Your Personal Strategy
The primary objective of writing your personal strategy is to bring clarity
and focus to who you are and what you do—in written format. There is a
particular power in setting out your personal strategy in writing that you do
not get if you merely imagine that strategy. For more guidance on this pro-
cess, see our 2013 e-book, Crossing the Rubicon: Seven Steps to Writing Your
Own Personal Strategy, which outlines the seven-step master formulation
process in great detail.
When working with clients, the Odyssey consultant often recommends
that each member of the client team work on their own personal strategic
plan using the Rubicon process. The logic is that if you can think strategi-
cally for yourself, if you can understand who you are on the inside and
what you want to do on the outside, you will be better positioned to create,
understand, and implement the strategy for your organization.
A Word on Responsibility—A Consultant Obligation
Responsibility underpins your success as a consultant. Taking 100% responsibil-
ity and being accountable is absolutely critical to reaching your personal and
professional potential and doing your very best work as an expert in your field.
146 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
The scope of responsibility begins with personal responsibility and
broadens to client responsibility, corporate, community, and environmental
responsibilities.
In his classic book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen
Covey states, “Proactive people recognize responsibility. They do not blame
circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior
is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a
product of their conditions, based upon feelings.”
Responsibility is the willingness and the ability to respond and act posi-
tively to situations and human interactions. Personal responsibility is the
ability to take charge of your own life.
The key to developing a great professional practice is to recognize your
own responsibility mind-set. That is, your natural human tendency to justify,
defend, and rationalize why you are not making the progress you know you
could and should be making.
The first step towards taking full responsibility is to take the decision “to
be” a successful professional advisor, “to have” the financial freedom that
you deserve, and “to do” the kind of work that feeds your passion.
Professional responsibility means taking ownership, in a purposeful way,
for the sequence of events in your professional life and career. Professional
advisory responsibility means identifying your natural talents and mastering the
competencies and consulting opportunities that flow from them. It is also
about knowing your limitations.
Invest in Yourself
To reap the lucrative benefits of a high-fee practice, your first responsibil-
ity must be to invest in your self-development. This will require a para-
digm shift for many advisors who think they are entitled to success based
on their expertise, education, and experience. The people who can help
you most in unblocking the professional dimension of your advisory career
are the successful experts in your field. Connect with mastermind groups,
find an accountability partner who will “tell it like it is,” join the Odyssey
MasterClass, or contract a coach.
One of our Odyssey graduates said recently, “Seeing the world from the
desk as the contracted help is a giant leap from corporate responsibility to
personal and professional responsibility. It requires a significant transition in
thinking … and acting.”
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