We caught up this past month with Nick and Joan Murray, who are launching their jointly written new book, Talking It Over Just the Two of Us: A Guide for the Financial Advisor's Life Partner. (It was published just after Labor Day, and is available only on Nick's Web site.) One of the many intriguing aspects of the book-in addition to its novel subject matter-is the fact that it's written in their alternating voices. And two very different voices they are. The first thing we wanted to know was how the book came about.

Nick: I had a conversation with Joe Jordan and some of his senior colleagues late in 2011, and they picked me up on something I'd said in my prospecting book The Game 0f Numbers to the effect that I might have flunked out of the business in the very difficult early years of my career had it not been for Joan's faith and courage. When I expanded on this, they asked if we could turn it into a talk for their advisors' significant others.

Joan: I could never see how that was going to work, but we started to make some notes, and pretty soon we had a whole lot of notes. At some point we realized: This isn't a talk. It's a book of the most fundamental lessons nobody taught me, when Nick was starting out.

FA: How did you hit on the idea of writing it in your two voices?

Joan: It was the only way. I had a very different menu of things I wanted to say, and I don't talk at all the way he does. One voice wouldn't have sounded like either of us, and it would have felt very inauthentic.

FA: How about the "why" of it? Why did you write this book?

Nick: I think we realized right away that the advisor's life partner is the most underutilized resource in the industry, and that there was no book or other training method that addresses how they might become as helpful to their advisor partner as they would wish to be, if only they knew how.

Joan: Plus, we had worked out a pretty effective way of working together in those early years-if only out of desperation-and we'd continued to refine that method over the years. So we thought we had a useful system to communicate. But really, in the end, I just thought that if I could help other life partners not get as completely blindsided by the realities of the business as I had been, it would be worth doing.

FA: What was your writing method?

Joan: We sat down together at 6:00 every morning, and read aloud what we'd done the previous day, editing as we went. Then we asked each other what the next major points were, and which of us would make them. We'd outline that day's points, and then Nick would wordsmith them, because that's his thing, not mine. And I knew I'd get to change what I needed to the next morning.

FA: How long did it take?

Nick: About 70 days, working each morning. It's something we needed to work on every day, or we might have lost our momentum

FA: That figures, because you both stress the practice of meeting every day to plan the advisor's day, and then reviewing what he or she had learned at night. You also insist that your partnership agreement-a statement of what each of you is going to bring to the advisor's business building effort-be written down. Who wants to expand on that?

Nick:  I'm guessing we both will, so I'll confine myself to observing that our key discovery was that when two people meet in harmony for a common purpose, a sort of third mind shows up, and it's smarter than both people put together. More courageous, too.

Joan: And as far as writing everything down, I think we both felt, right from the outset of Nick's career, that if it wasn't written, it wasn't real. The writing was part of the discipline. It kept us focused on the behaviors that lead to success, one day at a time.

FA: Let me follow up that thought, because you make a big issue in your book about measuring success by the number of appropriate prospecting behaviors Nick had made in a given day, rather than the outcome of those behaviors. And I know this ends up being the spine of Nick's prospecting book. But what did it mean to you, Joan?

Joan: Nick had brought home very early on a tape program by the sales psychologist Aaron Hemsley, who thought traditional prospecting training was all wrong, because it scored "yes" as the only success and "no" as a failure. Maybe not in so many words, that's the way Nick had been trained, and the "rejection" was grinding him down. Aaron said every prospecting attempt was a success simply because you made it, and you just had to keep building up your capacity to make more and more attempts. I just flipped over that. I think it was probably the turning point. If I can just get that one idea across to the advisor's partner, I'll think this book was a success.

FA: You both talk a lot in the book about faith and fear. Can you expand on that?

Nick: I guess what we both figured out, talking it through every morning and every night, was that faith and fear weren't spontaneous emotions-that we always had a choice. And we found that when we were together it was relatively easy for us to banish fear and just concentrate on what I was going to work on that day. But it helped, too, that for some time Joan had more faith in me than I had in myself.
Joan: I think that given half a chance, most advisors' life partners can summon that faith, and share it with their advisor-that's another of my goals for the book.

FA: I start to get the impression that perhaps this is somewhat more your book than Nick's, Joan. Is that accurate?

Joan: Not at all, if for no other reason than that I'm not a writer. But by definition, I'm a member of the book's audience, and he's not. So maybe it was a little easier for me to speak to them simply and directly, from the heart. But he has a lot to say to them regarding the essential simplicity of the business, and I think that comes across very clearly.

FA: Nick, what has been the greatest reward of working with Joan in the ways you talk about in the book?

Nick: Well, on the most basic level, the greatest reward was not flunking out of the business, not giving up. But again, the practice of working in harmony, such that together we summon a more creative intelligence than either of us has individually, is probably the greatest gift. 

Joan: If we can just communicate to advisors' life partners the critical lessons that we had to learn the hard way, I think we'll have succeeded. In that sense, doing this book was really a labor of love. I wouldn't want to have to do it again, but I really think we accomplished what we set out to do: to give back. And maybe, in the process, we found that we still had things to learn about each other.   

FA: That sounds like the perfect note to end on. Thanks, guys.

Joan and Nick: No; thank you, Evan.