As your business grows and challenges arise, you should seek the counsel of others to ensure your business thrives and prospers. You want to make sure you are making decisions that are going to maximize your prospects and profits. But how do you know the advice you receive is going to get the results you want? In addition, what keeps you from following good advice and why do you follow advice that may be questionable? Following are the three biggest mistakes professionals make when it comes to getting and following advice.

First and foremost, you must get good advice. The biggest mistake nearly all professionals make is getting advice from unproven sources. In other words, they are getting advice from colleagues in their industry who are experiencing comparable or only slightly better results. Instead, they should be getting advice from professionals who are getting much better results. They are following the followers instead of following the leaders. By far, the best way to get good advice is to get it from someone who has experienced great success.

During the first nine years of my career, I worked exclusively with insurance and financial advisors. Quite often an advisor would use a prospecting or sales system because someone recommended it to him. I was always surprised when the advisor followed that recommendation when it was made by someone who was experiencing similar success. For example, an advisor earning $50,000 per year would get prospecting and sales advice from an advisor earning $50,000 or $60,000 per year. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find an advisor earning $200,000 or $500,000 and follow his or her advice? To make matters worse, there were many prospecting and selling systems that were used by many “average” advisors. I would prefer the advice of one advisor earning $300,000 over the unanimous advice of four advisors earning $50,000 to $60,000.

Once you make sure you are hearing good advice, the battle is not over. Many professionals make the second mistake, which is not following good advice. The main reason professionals do not follow good advice is that they prefer to follow safe advice instead of good advice. Thousands of years of evolution have trained the human mind to follow survival instincts. Unfortunately, survival instincts encourage you to avoid risk and subconsciously, some of your instincts may even be there to help you avoid stressful situations. The reality of business decision-making is this: some business decisions require risks to be taken and some business decisions may put you into a stressful situation. Good decision-making may require you to overcome your instincts.

This leads into the third mistake many professionals make. They follow bad advice. There are a couple reasons that this happens. The first reason people do not follow good advice is because they trust a source they know is not the best. I have an amusing story about this. When I was a kid, I loved reading and studying maps. My mother, on the other hand, has a million fantastic skills, but reading a map is not one of them. On one particular vacation, dad was driving while mom and I read the map. We approached the highway we needed. I told dad to turn right and mom told him to turn left. Dad knew which one of us was most likely correct. However, something else (as a married man, I now understand) influenced his decision. When choosing what advice to follow, make sure you are aware of other factors that could cloud your decisions.

The second reason people follow bad advice is that they are doing it for someone else. Assume you got some advice from a family member, in-law, or close friend. Sometimes it is easier to follow that bad advice than to disappoint them by not following their advice. I have seen many people unintentionally sabotage their business because of their desire to make a friend or family member happy.

There are very few sources of good business advice out there from professionals who have experienced success. Find one or two of these mentors and ignore the rest. Overcome your resistance to this advice, stop following bad advice, and you should see the results in your business. In a few years, you may be the successful mentor and leader that other professionals want to follow.

Since the early 1990s, Steve Lawson has been training professionals to generate prospects. As the CEO of The Prospection Network, he now shows you how to generate a non-stop flow of referrals from other professionals. Learn more at http://www.ProspectionNetwork.com

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