Trusted Advisor
By Peter Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 22, 2010
I'm a business consultant, and as a consultant, it is my job to influence the decisions that my clients make. The whole point of practicing at being a good consultant is to gain that "trusted advisor" status.
My Catholic upbringing and education has had a very beneficial effect on my ability to gain that status. A few reflections on that line of thinking...
The first is that, for me, there can be no such thing as an arrangement that benefits me at the client's expense—meaning that if there is unblanaced benefit, it will be in the client's favor.
The second is that I don't have any trouble delicately approaching the 800 pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Most people dislike change, and many people feel threatened by it. This is where putting apologetics training into practice has given me some valuable experience. There are few things more personal than religious beliefs, and if you learn to "go there", then you have less reticence about going other places.
The third is that I've seen some weird, wacky, and inexplicable stuff and heard about a lot more of it. God is like that. When you think about it, if you truly believe your Catholic faith, you already believe a lot of stuff that is seemingly nuts to many other people. A growing recognition of this helps me to be flexibly minded when approaching business solutions. Christ did some serious "outside the box" thinking and speaking, but he tied it together for those that were willing to listen. I've learned to be a bit more bold in answering a specific question with an apparent paradigm shift, and then explaining things afterwards.
Of course, there are many more reasons than that... perhaps some more reflections for a future post.
Peter Mirus is a business, marketing, and technology consultant with more than 20 years of experience working with companies and nonprofits, ranging from start-ups to large international organizations. From 2004-2014 he contributed articles on the Catholic Faith, culture, and business to the CatholicCulture.org website.
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