Look for the credentials of the "experts" in our industry and you'll have a hard time finding them. You'll find people claiming to be experts at relationships or motivation or speaking, but you won't easily find advanced training in those things. You have to wonder where the good people learned those secrets.

Picture a street corner deep in Mexico, "Psssst, meester, you want a date? Post cards? Turquoise jewelry? How about the secret to business relationships?"

The world's largest ball of paper scraps. The perplexing question probably looks in your mind like the world's largest ball of paper scraps – a big jumble of advice and opinion. Some of is old and moldy. Some of it is just plain wrong. Can it be unraveled? Is it even worth it? I believe it is worth it, but I don't suggest sticking your head into that big ball of jumbled stuff. Instead, why not just go to the source of the best advice.

Going to the source. Before we can look at the source, we need to understand some truths about the financial industry:

1. No matter what area you work in, this is a relationship business.
2. Advisors who focus on relationships make more money.
3. Product features and benefits have nothing to do with relationships.
4. Relationships live in the realm of communication psychology.
5. Communication psychology has a collection of best practices.
6. That collection of psychological best practices is called "Neuro-linguistic Programming."

The conclusion is – if we build better client relationships, we'll be more successful.

However, rather than wade through the big ball of scrap paper searching for some truth, let's look at what creates relationships and find the most effective ways to implement them. For example, any relationship can be broken into these steps: 1) read people, 2) build rapport with them, 3) connect with them, 4) build trust, and 5) ultimately communicate with them in a highly meaningful way.

Learn and employ that process andyou will become more successful

If the advice works, it is probably rooted in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). It was developed in the early 70s and it is nothing less than the best practices extracted from the world's most effective psychotherapists and hypnotherapists. It is a User's Manual for connecting with people at a meaningful level. There simply is no better source for that kind of information.

Let's look at what helps you build meaningful, profitable business relationships

Reading people. The most effective way to read people is by discovering how their minds are wired. You can visualize the wiring as an expansive set of switches. Those are called "Meta programs." That's the most effective way, but it's also pretty difficult and complex. So, instead, let's look the easiest way to read someone.

The easiest way to read someone is to recognize his or her personality type. I said "easiest," but if you do a Google search on "personality types," you'll quickly discover as much confusion and posturing as you find from the United Nations. It seems, every psychological behaviorist has a different way of testing and measuring your personality type.

What's wrong with testing for personality type?

It's absurd. There's nothing new in personality types. After all, Plato wrote about them! Myers Briggs Type Indicator is based on the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961).

Let's look at a chart taken from my book Face Values. As you can see, it shows the connections between the various personality type programs. Although there isn't always a clear one-to-one mapping, the commonalities are significant enough to enable a comparison.

What do you need to know about personality types to increase your success? You need to know two things:

1. How to recognize someone else's type, without giving them a written exam.
2. What to do with that information.

It's fun to learn about ourselves. It's enlightening to discover that our oddities are actually part of a cataloged psychometric category. Of course, it's interesting to get your aura read, too, but neither one will take you one step closer to building a relationship. After all, you don't go into a meeting talking about how interesting you are, do you? Uh oh – if you do, you're in big trouble, and I suggest getting your aura read!

About seven years ago, before we began studying NLP, we were looking for a personality type program to use in our own business. Since they're all basically the same, learning about one will tell you about all of them. I found a nice program called True Colors and took the certification training. (Interestingly, the trainer was a former priest who had a very strange concept of business.)

True Colors was pretty much the same stuff I'd learned in my university psychology classes. Remember, there's nothing new there. As I began to teach seminars in this program, people kept asking me, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mikie baby, that's all peachy, but how do we recognize those people and what do we say to them when we find them?"

The psychological difference that makes the difference. The questions were haunting, and I burned to answer both of them. Then, an amazing thing happened. I got an idea; isn't a personality type really is just a consistent behavior? If I'm an expressive, I express most of the time. If I'm an analytical, I analyze most of the time. Simple behavior. Sounds logical, right? I thought, if I do the same thing over and over, don't I express that on my face? And, if I do, won't my face begin to form wrinkles that correspond to my behavior?

That was my premise and I began to test for it. Guess what – it works. That's the idea behind my book Face Values – how to read people and adjust your presentation to connect with them in less than three minutes.

* If you want to look deeper into this, just go to www.aboutpeople.com/Products.html.

Face Values is probably the most practical class in personality types because it teaches you how to read people when they come into your office. With a little practice, you could literally be able to recognize anyone's personality type in just a few seconds. That would tell you the person's values and communication style. And, with those things, you should be able to be more successful with the next step in building business relationships – building rapport.

Face Values is – by itself – not an NLP process. However, it's a perfect addition to the skills NLP practitioners use to read people. I do this in every seminar and keynote I do. I take people at random from the audience and tell them things about themselves that I should not know. I see their personalities as clear as day. I also see their internal conflicts – they're just combinations of conflicting personality types. If you want to learn how to read people as a way to more easily build better relationships with them, these skills are vital to you.

By layering on the NLP skills, I can hear language patterns and beliefs in every-day conversation. From that, I can usually determine if someone is likely to change jobs a lot, is divorced, is likely to cancel an account or will be extremely conservative. And, I can determine that from just one meta program – one of sixty!

Rapport – the big magic. First cataloged in the 1960s, then refined as an NLP process, rapport building quickly became one of the most popular NLP skill sets in America. It also quickly became very misunderstood and grossly misused in our industry. Unlike what you might have heard from some "motivational speakers," rapport is not a trick to get people to believe you. It's not magic and it's not instantaneous. However, if you follow the process carefully, you will connect with the other person at a level that might scare you.

When to implement rapport. For several years, transition planning, legacy planning and life planning have been a popular selling tricks in our industry. My friend Bruce Wright teaches Macro Strategic Planning, and my other friend Scott Farnsworth teaches the Perfect Balanced Life. None of those programs work unless you can get into a deep rapport with the other person – before you begin to ask questions. Those questions require trust, and you can't develop trust until you have a solid foundation of rapport.

Without the rapport being established first, you won't get good answers. You'll be asking serious questions about work-life balance or what do you see yourself doing in five years. But, you'll be getting shut out by the prospect, "Er, Mike, I don't feel comfortable discussing those things with you at this time."

Rapport is a process that gives you the insight of the other person's experience. Remember the expression, "Walk a mile in my shoes?" Well, when you go into rapport with me, you will feel as thought you have been walking in my shoes. But if I'm wearing cycling shoes, you'll probably fall down.

Remember when I said that rapport is not magic? While that's true, it can be the logical result of a process. Yes, you can systematically go into rapport with someone. I've identified five levels of rapport that will give you increasing depth of rapport, in most cases. Just take one level at a time, and before you know it, VOILA! You're in rapport.

Recap. We began this journey looking to find the answer to what the most successful advisors do. We discovered that they use one or more techniques or applications of relationship building. Some of them do these things unconsciously. Then, we began to look at the different elements of building a meaningful, profitable business relationship. We learned that many of the best practices for building business relationships come from Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP).

In conclusion

The research has been conducted for eons. And, it proves that when you focus on the relationships, you make more money and are more successful. This is true in psychotherapy as well as the financial business.

In the next months, I will explain more of the steps in the relationship-building process. In the meantime, if you want to get more information right away, just go to www.aboutpeople.com. You'll find what is probably the most comprehensive relationship-building system in the business world – certainly in the financial industry. In fact, if you'll go to my homepage, you'll see a schematic of the model we developed.