Trusted Advisor: From Russia, With Love

In 2000, I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor with David Maister and Rob Galford. It has been translated into several languages, including Russian.

Yesterday, Maister received an email from Russia, which he passed along to me. The enthusiasm burst through the language barrier so charmingly that I wanted to post it. Here it is, unedited except for his name.

Dear M-r Maister!

Great interest, intellectual amusement and deep YESSS! – that’s what I’ve felt reading the Russian translation of your The Trusted Advisor".
15 years of psychotherapy and psychological consulting – dysfunctional families, drug addicts, co-dependency – have lead me to the very similar proposals; but you and your colleges formulate it (and help me to formulate my own experience) with the elegance of gathered Rubik’s cube.

You see – psychological consulting have some specific nature: client’s business there is just his personal, very and only personal area. But the question of trust, the stages and technology" of it’s establishing, danger of methodical occupation" instead of personality-oriented approach and many other aspects, underlined in your remarkable book, are quite the same (and even more important) as in other areas of consulting.

Thank you for your deep and consistent humanism. Adler can have some rest (as Russians say) – his ideas of contradiction between the neurotic behavior and cooperation finds in your book very practical actualization.

What a joy for me was to see, that the main principle of my practice – each problem of client is the challenge, opportunity for personality (not only professional!) growth of advisor, and if the last miss this opportunity and doesn’t grow – he can’t help the client – is one of the main points of your book; it is not formulated, but each line affirms that!

Once again thank you; I wish you, your friends and your families more successes, joyful opportunities, new horizons and grateful readers!
K.L., Russia.

P.S. I sincerely hope, that the remarks about my professional experience is not the trespass of demonstrating competence; that pointed parallels doesn’t look like as inadequate self-orientation; that underlined principle is not a demonstration of value-intervention"; and that the hole letter is not the trespass of compliments.

And sorry for my, may be,terrible English!

Not so terrible at all, I think.