Most service professionals share a distinguishing characteristic: they over-rate content mastery and under-rate personal connection. Professionals are less comfortable operating in the purely personal realm than they are in data-based, content-driven interactions. I have observed these patterns consistently throughout my career in professional services.

Nothing is more likely to cause an accountant, lawyer, actuary or consultant to break out sweating than the need to interact improvisationally one on one with a client without a clear agenda, in an area outside their zone of competence, with a potential sale on the line.

It feels, above all else, risky. Personally risky.

If you were to infer that professionals underrate personal skills because they are uncomfortable practicing them, I wouldn’t dissuade you. Here’s more evidence.

My online Trust Quotient self-assessment quiz has over 2500 entries so far. The quiz rates your own assessment of your credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation—the key components of the Trust Equation.

For professionals so far, the highest scores are for reliability; the lowest are for intimacy.

In other words: an under-rated and critical skill in professional services—the ability to form deep personal relationships—is, by participants’ own self-ratings, their area of greatest weakness.

In the seminar work I do with professionals, this is always evident. “Oh we couldn’t say that, that would be too direct. That might offend them. The client would be embarrassed if I did that. They might feel that’s unprofessional. I wouldn’t want them to think I was too emotional. That just isn’t done. That’s too risky.”

These people are professionals at mitigating risk—financial risk, professional risk, business process risk, sales risk, legal risk. Yet when it comes to mitigating emotional risk, they are often clueless.

There is no trust without risk. But pointing that out just makes professionals burrow even further into the hole of denial, claiming that their clients are robots who don’t really want their professionals to appear human.

What they need is a simple, formulaic tool for dealing with the perceived risk of increasing intimacy with other human beings. Hey, we could all use a little of that, right?

There is precisely such a tool, and I’m going to write about it in the next blog post. It’s called Name It and Claim It. It is a simple grammatical technique. It is a meta-tool, meaning it can be applied to whatever is causing you fear. It is easy to remember, and pretty easy to use.

There is no trust without risk. This tool mitigates emotional risk. Which means you can stop shutting down trust by no longer being excessively risk-averse.

Best of all, it works. Very well. Stay tuned for details, next post.