Taking it to heart
An Adviser Asks…
Is an agony-aunt style column where all members of the Financial Services community are invited to write in to ask for advice on any relational or ‘soft skills’ questions, dilemmas, issues or conflicts playing out in their working lives.
Got a question for Emma? If you’d like to ask for some advice on a dilemma or issue at work, please submit your question anonymously below.
TLDR
In this An Adviser Asks, Emma responds to a self-employed adviser who takes rejections to heart, exploring how separating rational from emotional responses - and reframing first meetings as collaborative discovery - can turn those moments into something far less personal and far more constructive.
Dear Emotional Finance,
I’m writing because I’m starting to wonder if I need to toughen up - or at least find a way not to be knocked sideways when things don’t go my way.
I work for myself and, on paper, things are going well. I inherited a decent client bank a few years ago, I’m not short of leads, and I get a fair number of referrals from happy clients and contacts. So far, so good.
But the problem is that my conversion rate (from first meeting to onboarding) is lower than I’d like, and when someone decides not to go ahead, I take it hard. Far harder than I think I should. And my wife agrees. She says I beat myself up too much and have unrealistic expectations of myself. It’s not just disappointment, it feels like a personal failing, as if I should be able to get it right every single time.
Last week hit me particularly hard. A couple were referred to me by the husband’s cousin, who’s been a loyal client for years. They completed all the paperwork ahead of time, the meeting went really well, we discussed fees and next steps, and they seemed keen. I left thinking it was all but confirmed.
Then… silence. After a couple of polite follow-ups, they finally replied to say they’d chosen another adviser. No explanation, just a short thank you.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept replaying the meeting, looking for what I might have missed, what I could have done better. I even started worrying about what they might have said to their cousin - and whether that could damage that relationship too.
I know the logical thing is to accept that not everyone will choose to work with me. And sometimes I do manage to reassure myself about that. But other times, I can’t seem to shake the belief that if I were truly good at what I do, I’d be able to win everyone over. People tell me “you win some, you lose some,” but I want to win them all. And when I don’t, I can’t help feeling like I’ve failed.
How do I stop taking it so personally and learn to let go when things aren’t perfect?
Yours, Taking it to heart
Dear Taking it to heart,
Let’s start by naming this for what it is - rejection. A couple, despite your best efforts to “win” them over, have chosen not to work with you.
And in your letter you are describing two layers to what you’re feeling in response to this rejection: a rational (thinking) response and an emotional (feeling) response. They’re intertwined, and both are valid - but I’m going to suggest that you need to approach each differently.
Firstly, let’s deal with your rational voice, which sometimes seems to be able to persuade you that it’s OK to ‘win some, lose some’. Or perhaps offers the insight that: “On balance, I have a healthy, growing business with loyal clients and regular referrals.” This part of you can see the bigger picture and knows that one ‘no’ doesn’t undo years of good work.
This rational voice also understands that there could be a myriad of reasons why any particular client says no, and none of them necessarily say anything about your competence or the rapport you’ve built.
The trouble is, the perfectionism that I detect in your letter can pull even this rational part into a trap. When you measure yourself against an ideal - the perfect conversion rate, the perfectly smooth onboarding process, the perfect reaction from every client - you’ll almost always come up short. That ideal is like the horizon: no matter how far you travel, it keeps moving away.
Dan Sullivan calls this “the gap” in The Gap and the Gain - the space between where you are and where you think you should be. The more you focus on it, the more you see what’s missing instead of what’s working.
The antidote, Dan says, is to measure backwards. Instead of asking, “How far am I from perfect?”, you might ask, “How far have I come from where I started?” This isn’t lowering your standards. Rather it’s anchoring your sense of progress in reality.
For you, that might mean tracking:
The number of clients who have signed with you this year.
The referrals you’ve received from happy clients.
The meaningful relationships you’ve built.
The confidence and skills you’ve developed since you started advising.
Those facts are the ballast that keeps the rational voice steady - and you can strengthen it by reviewing them regularly.
Secondly, there’s your emotional response to rejection.
Rejection of course stings us all. That’s because it usually engenders a feeling of not belonging, of being unwanted or excluded. From a relational standpoint, being chosen - or not - is tied to safety, security, and inclusion. And on top of that, it often triggers the much bigger and messier feeling of shame.
Big and messy because shame is a sly old fox. It has the power to shift the story from what happened (“They chose another adviser”) to what it must mean about me (“Maybe I’m not good enough” or “I’ve embarrassed myself in front of this prospect’s cousin”). And once that meaning takes root, it can pull in every past experience you’ve had of feeling unwanted or not good enough - the time you were left out by a friendship group at school, or turned down for a promotion, or ‘forgotten about’ when your Dad remarried - making the reaction feel bigger than the situation in front of you.
So, whilst the approach to the rational response is to ground yourself in facts and gains, the approach to your emotional response is to meet these feelings with curiosity and care rather than trying to ‘logic’ or ‘think’ them away.
You might notice the story you’re telling yourself and ask: “Is this really about this client saying no, or am I pulling in something older here?” If it feels more like the latter is true, this might be something to explore with a mentor, coach, or therapist.
Finally, I want to offer some thoughts from a practical perspective on how you frame your first meetings.
At the moment, it sounds as though you may be approaching them with the aim of winning the business. That’s an understandable instinct of course. And there will be meetings that end in a “yes” and others that end in a “no.” The wins can feel good, but the losses, as you’ve described, can land hard.
What if the purpose of those meetings shifted slightly - from an outcome of “winning” to an outcome of discovery? A space to learn about your prospective clients, to build a shared understanding, and to explore together whether there’s a good fit between you.
When you lead with discovery, you’re not handing over all the power to the other person’s decision. Instead, you’re inviting a collaborative investigation into whether working together would feel right for both sides.
You might find yourself asking:
What are you looking for in an adviser?
What would make this relationship work well for you?
What hesitations or concerns do you have?
What might hold you back from going ahead?
Questions like these do more than gather information. They also gently surface any uncertainties or hesitations while you’re still in the room together. They normalise doubt, invite honesty, and turn the conversation into something collaborative rather than transactional.
And my thinking is that if you already understand a client’s “wobbles” and “worries,” those moments when they don’t choose to proceed are less likely to trigger your own stories of rejection. Instead, they’ll sit within a fuller, more realistic picture of the complexity of the client’s decision-making, which is rarely as simple as a judgment on you or your work.
And that’s the heart of it. If you can combine this kind of curiosity with the habit of measuring backwards and meeting your emotional responses with kindness, those inevitable ‘no’s will start to feel less like verdicts that sting, and more like a decision you collaborated in making.
Do keep in touch, Taking it to heart, I’d love to hear how you’re getting on.
Warmly,
Emma at Emotional Finance
Got a question for Emma? If you’d like to ask for some advice on a dilemma or issue at work, please submit your question anonymously below.