Authenticity and Alignment: Keys to Effective Consulting
Part of your effectiveness in consulting comes from technical expertise applied to client needs. Another equally important part comes from your credibility and authenticity as a consultant. These qualities affect the trust you inspire, and therefore the influence you can have in your client’s decisions.
How do you develop authenticity? One answer lies in the process of aligning technical skills and abilities with what you believe is important about your work and what you want to contribute to others through your role as consultant.
Here is an exercise that can assist you in defining and aligning what matters to you about your role as a consultant. (Please Note: This exercise is patterned after a more general alignment exercise created by Robert Dilts, who developed it based on his work with neurological levels in the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.)
Find a quiet place where you will be undisturbed for a short time. Make sure that you have enough space to “walk through” the sequence of six locations described below. Mark each location with tape or paper, leaving a comfortable distance of one or more steps between points along the path you will walk. This will help anchor your experience at each point.
1. When you are ready, step onto the first spot you marked and recall or imagine a specific meeting with one of your current or prospective consulting customers. Imagine or recall the details of the environment around you at this meeting: The furniture, the wall colors, photographs or pictures, etc. What do you observe or sense about the person you are consulting?
2. With this time, place, and customer in mind, step forward to your next marked spot, and observe (in imagination) the consulting actions you typically take (asking the client questions, listening, taking notes, etc.).
3. When you are ready, walk to and stand on the third spot you have marked, and consider how you choose and link actions together to forward the conversation with your consulting customer. What enables you to make this conversation more than small talk? What capabilities and thinking skills do you draw upon?
4. Once more, step forward into your next location. In this spot, ask yourself why you want to use those particular capabilities as consultant? What is important to you about serving this customer well? What values and beliefs guide your consulting work?
5. When you are ready, step forward again to your next marked spot, and ask yourself the question “What is my ‘mission’ as a consultant? What role do I play in the larger scheme of things? Is there a symbol which might represent that?
6. When you have answered these questions, step forward again to the next location. Take a deep breath as you look up and ask yourself: “Who or what else may I be serving through this work as a consultant?” What vision or calling inspires you?
Take your time here to let yourself receive whatever inspiration arrives.
7. When ready, take this vision or sense of larger purpose back to the place where you examined your mission as a consultant. Standing in this spot again, how is your first impression of this mission enhanced or strengthened through the sense of vision or larger purpose you just discovered? You might want to breath in again, and raise your gaze to help connect these thoughts or impressions.
8. Step back once more into the spot where you examined your values or beliefs. How are these enhanced by your experience of consulting vision and mission? What values or beliefs are stronger? What new values or beliefs have emerged?
9. Continue, by physically stepping back to your capabilities/strategies spot. Pause to notice how your relationship to these capabilities may have changed, based on the larger purpose or frame you have just explored. How do your capabilities support your work as a consultant? What would you like to enhance so that you are even more effective?
10. Step further back into the spot where you originally observed the actions you take when serving a specific customer. Now, how do these actions reflect or support the experience and vision that you bring to consulting?
11. Finally, return to the spot where you began to explore your consulting environment. What new options or choices, or flexibility in applying your abilities as a consultant are available to you now?
You may want to take a few moments to let your impressions settle and absorb what you have experienced.
Completing this Alignment Exercise may surprise you with a sense of renewal and enhanced commitment to consulting, as well as an inside-out congruence that communicates to your customers.
It is very common for people to realize at this point that they are no longer limited to a particular time, setting, circumstance, or method as they consult. As you recognize opportunities that match your sense of professional mission, you may find that consulting becomes a natural channel for delivering the gifts that you uniquely offer.
If you would like to learn more about this alignment process and the work of Robert Dilts, we recommend visiting www.nlpu.com. For more on keys to effective consulting please see additional posts and resources on this blog, and also check out our teaching site at www.aligned4results.com.
Randy and Susan
© Aligned for Results, LLC