Continuing education is an important part of every advisor’s development, but there’s no sense taking the time to learn new skills if you’re not going to put them into practice. An important thing to consider before heading off to your next conference or seminar is how you’ll ensure that you actually put some of the lessons learned there to use.

The solution to this problem is simple, maintains Dan Richards, president of Toronto-based Strategic Imperatives Ltd. and co-host of the Top Advisor Summit, held in Toronto this past June: it starts with a piece of paper, a pen and a little bit of awareness.

George Hartman, a coach and facilitator with the Covenant Group in Toronto, agrees: a written action plan is key to making things happen. In fact, he says, the likelihood of action doubles to 40% from just 20% when an advisor moves from only acknowledging a good idea to writing it down.

Richards, who frequently presents seminars to advisors on client communication and practice management, calls the failure to put new ideas into practice “the single biggest pitfall that advisors experience in attending any educational event, conference or business-building session.”

He says it’s a universal problem, and the first step in solving it is to identify its causes.

“That’s the first key to change: recognition that it is a problem and understanding what the barriers are,” Richards says. “The two most common obstacles to overcome are old habits or resistance to change, and failing to give sufficient priority to the new activity we want to put in place.”

Distraction is also a significant barrier to action, Hartman adds: “What seems like a good idea at the time then gets lost when we get back into the day-to-day activities that we need to do to keep the business going.”

Often advisors will walk out of a seminar with binders full of notes and their heads full of new ideas. But then they become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information presented.

“The problem is almost never not enough ideas,” Richards says. “It’s too many.”

One solution he suggests: at the end of a presentation or seminar, pare down the advice to just two or three manageable items on which to focus. That, in turn, develops into an action plan.

“A written action plan doesn’t have to be a 12-page document,” Hartman says. “It could be a simple one-page statement that says, ‘I will do this by this time’.”

Richards agrees. An action plan that focuses on the first two or three weeks after the session is a must.

“If you don’t start in the near-term,” he says, “nothing happens.”

And in order to keep that priority from shifting to the back burner, it’s important to find strategies that keep you from losing steam during the first six to eight weeks spent developing the new habit.

Time-blocking is one such strategy, Richards explains. “If you say, ‘I’m going to focus on developing referrals,’ then block half a day a week — say, every Thursday morning — and use that time to focus on that particular task.” (For more on time-blocking, see story on page B11.)

Paul Drouin, vice president and advisor with Raymond James Ltd. in Ottawa, says the timing of implementation depends on the type of change. Drouin’s team has quarterly meetings, he says, and he wouldn’t impose any sweeping new ideas for change upon his staff during the period between meetings.

“We have projects in the hopper that we are working on,” he says. “And we don’t want to screw everything up for the quarter.”

But that’s not to say that some changes can’t happen right away. For example, Drouin attended Investment Executive’s OTX (Office of the Future) conference in 2007 and was intrigued by a specific scanning technology that was presented there. He returned to the office and asked his administration staff to learn the system and start using it immediately to create the company’s monthly newsletter.

It was a relatively minor change, he says, but one that made the company’s newsletter system more efficient — and thus freed up a good chunk of his staff’s time for other work.

Drouin points out that talking about ideas with the people with whom you work helps give substance to plans: “There are always advisors out there — a lot of Type A personalities — that want to do everything. I was one of those, and I quickly learned that I can’t do everything.”

@page_break@Hartman agrees that involving other people in the process of implementing new ideas is an important element of success. In fact, he says, when you tell someone about the idea and ask them to hold you accountable for your plan to implement it, the likelihood of taking action doubles to 80%, up from the 40% likelihood when you write things down.

“I suggest making an appointment with the person to whom you have committed,” Hartman says. “Say: ‘By the first of August, here’s what I’m going to have done. Let’s get together at 9 a.m. on the first of August, and I’m going to report to you on my progress’.”

Adding another person to the mix, he adds, further increases the likelihood the job will get done.

And when you do get the job done, and done on time, treat yourself! Richards says putting reasonable rewards in place to celebrate successes — whether they are as grand as a trip to Tuscany or as simple as a nice dinner out — will reinforce your desired performance.

“It’s a matter of priority,” says Hartman. “You know, the old ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ matrix. Something like launching a marketing strategy could be very important. But because its two or three months down the road, it’s not as urgent as the client who is calling [now], looking for an adjusted cost base of his or her portfolio. Often, in an advisor’s world, the advisor gets busy dealing with the urgent and not necessarily the important.”

But top advisors make sure that they accomplish the important things first. IE