When it comes to financial matters, do you trust your instincts?
Dana Anspach certainly does, and she’s an award-winning financial adviser and the founder and CEO of Sensible Money, a successful investment advisory firm.
Anspach is also a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant, and she uses Kolbe for her team and her clients alike. In fact, Sensible Money was recently named on the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing privately-owned companies, and Anspach attributes a lot of that success to their use of Kolbe practices.
Before she discovered Kolbe, Anspach was arrogant. She says so herself.
“I may not have expressed arrogance on the outside, but I think sometimes what I was feeling on the inside would be along those lines,” she told David Kolbe in a recent Powered by Instinct podcast episode. “I would think, this is easy for me, why can’t you do it?”
And then, a transformation in her way of thinking changed everything. She learned that certain things came easy for her because those were within her strengths. And other things, tasks she struggled with, were easily achieved at high levels by others.
That feeling of arrogance was replaced by a sense of respect and admiration. She stopped looking to clone herself in the office and started embracing a diversity of strengths in her organization. Before she knew it, her team of herself and one and a half employees grew to 15 strong.
“We use Kolbe for all of our hiring,” she explained. “We won’t hire without it. We train on it throughout the year, and we use it as we’re putting people into teams. We’ve even shifted teams around in various ways to improve collaboration.”
Perhaps Anspach’s favorite use of Kolbe is in better understanding her financial services clients and their instinctive needs.
“For example,” said Anspach, “those who naturally problem solve by researching will sometimes send a list of 20 questions. And it can be easy if you don’t understand their nature to interpret that as distrust. Why are they questioning everything? They must not believe what I say. But that’s not it at all. They just need a lot of information, and they have very specific questions. And so, it helped us to understand that.”
Sensible Money has some clients who don’t naturally walk through all the numbers. They instinctively go to the bottom line. In that case, Dana’s team knows to provide an overview with key takeaways. Other clients instinctively need the whole story. For these clients, Dana’s team goes in order, shows what they gathered, and systematically breaks down how they came up with the result.
This approach has been a gamechanger for both Dana’s team and the clients they serve.
“It helps us understand how to present and share information,” Anspach explained. “And even more importantly, how to not misinterpret some of the questions and reactions that we would get from clients. There is an understanding around why they react in various ways.”
A self-diagnosed “assessment addict,” Anspach has tried pretty much every assessment on the market. She’s taken CliftonStrengths assessments, DiSC tests, Enneagrams and Myers-Briggs to name a few. But Kolbe is the only assessment she’ll use for her business. So, what made her experience with Kolbe stand out?
“I saw it in people’s behavior every single day, and I didn’t have that same experience with other assessment tools,” Anspach clarified. “Once you really understood how someone operates, for me it was just so prevalent in their behavior. You know how someone’s going to go about something. You might not know the final decision they’re going to make, but you are going to know how they’re going to go about gathering the information or how they’re going to go about doing the project.”
It turns out, in the competitive world of finance, the only bigger advantage than trusting your instincts is understanding the instincts of others.
If you’d like to leverage your personal instincts in your financial decisions, the best thing you can do is take Kolbe’s Financial MO+™ assessment.
The FMO+ is a supplemental report to the Kolbe A™ Index. It takes your result and identifies ways to use your instincts to make better decisions about money and finances. It also gives tips, customized to your MO, to reduce financial stress.
Listen to David’s full conversation with Dana here, or watch the full episode of Your Instinctive Strengths, Your Money, and Your Team.
