“How did you get into real estate?” While the stories may vary, often times its a profession in which you find yourself saying…”and I love it!”. If that’s you, Congratulations! Whether you landed in real estate by luck, timing, sheer will, or design, you are in the minority…only one third of working people even “like” what they do let alone love it, according to recent polls by Gallup, the Conference Board, a New York based research non-profit, Forbes Magazine, etc.
However, even “lucky” ones who love their work occasionally feel unmotivated or dissatisfied or just plain stuck in a rut. Right Management’s recent report on people who love their jobs indicates that 80% of them feel dissatisfied at work.
If this resonates with your feelings about real estate right now, here are some strategies that may help render you a stand out to buyers, sellers and colleagues alike.
- Stop being over confident. Confidence is an asset; over-confidence is not. Even though you’ve consistently hit your sales, listings and price numbers over a period of time, be careful that you don’t let your winning streak send you into complacency. Consciously try to keep your confidence in check. The old adage, “what goes up must come down,” still applies today and it still applies to you.
- Stop waiting for a career miracle to happen. Create your own opportunities, your own miracles yourself. Every day, do the things that are known to lead to success…mining for prospects, lead follow-up, going out on listing presentations, etc. Those are the opportunities in real estate…those are the miracles…pursue them. Miracles only happen to agents who are totally engaged, not to those waiting.
- Stop hiding your mistakes. Rather, own them. None of us likes to make mistakes but all of us do, even the most accomplished and capable among us. Think for a moment how some of those most accomplished and capable agents became that way despite their making a mistake or two or twenty…they admitted their mistakes and they did everything in their powers to rectify them. They did not try to hide in hopes the mistakes would simply disappear, they didn’t blame someone else, they didn’t become defensive. They simply owned their mistakes and went the extra mile to fix them.
- Stop allowing yourself to be distracted at work. All of us have a minimum of 25,000 things that can, if we let them, distract us. Try to limit those distractions as much as possible otherwise your productivity and performance will suffer. And besides, who wants to work with a distracted, seemingly frazzled agent when they’re attempting to execute one of the most important financial decisions of their life when buying a home?
- Stop having a scarcity mindset with people in your office and your market. Rather, build positive relations with every agent, whether they are new to the business or a grizzled veteran. Be courteous and remember that someday you may be in the position of needing a helping hand from them!
