There’s a line in a book I love, Inner Excellence, that I read to our coaches recently:
“The bigger your goals are, the smaller your group of peers becomes.”
I’d been sitting with it all morning, fresh out of a cold plunge and four cups of coffee deep, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised it explains something most advisors feel but never say out loud.
The financial advisor community you surround yourself with matters. Especially when you decide you want something bigger.
Bigger Goals Require Being Deliberate About Your Circle
Here’s the part nobody warns you about. When you decide to go ten times bigger, or a hundred times, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay what you’re willing to pay. Fewer people share your discipline, your boundaries, or your appetite for being uncomfortable.
That doesn’t make you better than them. It just means you have to be deliberate about who you spend your hours with, because you are quietly becoming the people you spend the most time around.
It also means some people won’t understand you, and a few will judge you. If you want to do extraordinary things, you have to be emotionally ready for that.
How Your Peers Influence You as a Person?
Look at the conversations you have every week. What do the people around you consider possible? What do they accept as good enough? How do they respond when you tell them you want more?
Those conversations help shape your own standards. Spend enough time around people who challenge themselves, and being uncomfortable starts to feel like part of the work. Spend enough time around people who are comfortable standing still, and it becomes easier to explain why you’re standing still too.
Now look at the room you live in most of the time. Every time you scroll social media, you’re letting other people’s priorities into your day. Every time you watch the news, you’re giving more of your attention to a conversation you didn’t choose.
It rubs off.
And sometimes the pull comes from closer to home: a staff member who’s coasting, a friend who isn’t up to much, a family member who’s comfortable with how things are.
This isn’t a nice conversation. But what you want to achieve decides whether you can afford to have it.
Why Are Peer Support Groups Effective?
In a financial advisor community, the value comes from being around people who understand the work and are willing to challenge what you believe is possible. You can talk through a problem, hear a different perspective, and have someone ask whether you actually followed through.
We wrapped another Slight Edge Accelerator recently, and I watched this play out in real time.
Put a room of advisors together who are all willing to explore going ten times and a hundred times in their goals, and something happens in the side conversations, the dinners, the walks between sessions.
Nobody is selling anything. Everyone is pushing everyone else’s boundaries a little further.
During that one week, one advisor brought in $800,000 in new assets while he was away from his desk, and another brought in $400,000 while we were still in class.
Work less, make more.
Those were their individual results, but the bigger point is what happens in the room: you get to see people approaching their business differently. You start questioning the limits you’ve accepted in your own.
Choose a Financial Advisor Community That Challenges You
Keeping company with people who are up to something stacks the probabilities in your favour. But there’s a harder half of that truth.
Choosing a higher-level circle also means outgrowing some of the circles you’re in.
That’s why we build community into what we do. Through Peerage, our financial advisor community, a small, invitation-only group of advisors serves as a working board for one another. Members bring real business challenges, offer candid perspectives, and keep each other accountable beyond their time together.
Because one good conversation can challenge your thinking. Staying connected gives people the chance to ask what you did with it.
Take a look at your own circle. Are the people around you stretching what you believe is possible? Are you doing the same for them?
Extraordinary is just ordinary things, extra. And you can’t do the extra alone in a room that’s content with ordinary.
