My professional purpose is to help you, the broker, maximize your production and help you become the best version of yourself. Why? Because happy brokers sell more real estate. I do that by helping you solve problems that you face every day. If you can effectively solve your problems, you'll be happier in your business and in life.
Today, the problem I want to help you solve is how to start creating some momentum once you've gained some clarity.
Over the last couple of MMPTs, we've discussed how important it is to create a vision for your life and business and why you need to create clarity by crafting your vision. Last week, I gave you 5 steps to create that vision/clarity. As a reminder, this can take time to develop. It can take a day, a week and in some cases several months; but the key is to hone in on it until you hit that perfect chord, that perfect vision that gets you excited. I mentioned that the Type A personality people feel this part of the process is fluff, want to jump straight into action and in most cases are not patient enough to stick with the "visioneering" process. So, I am going to give everyone some concrete action steps on what should come next. Hopefully, some action steps added to the mix will satisfy all personality types.
Note/Reminder: Your vision will continue to change and evolve over the course of your life and business.
I want you to get really familiar with a term called "reverse engineering.” Reverse engineering is where you take an idea, a vision, a goal, a dream and create a framework of steps to get there. In future MMPTs, I will go into much further detail into that framework. Hint: I referred to it as my "Ultimate Productivity Hack" which has been further validated after reading "The 12 Week Year" by Brian Moran (required reading in my opinion).
But for the masses who have not fully engaged with "How you want to live and who you want to become?" (vision/clarity), you can start by addressing some key areas of your life and business where I see most brokers struggle. High performance starts with "elimination.” Elimination is what "clearing the weeds" is to a garden. Let me explain what I mean using the garden metaphor.
Let's say that your vision is create a garden on your property that produces potatoes, cucumbers, corn, peppers and tomatoes. You know exactly how much of each you want to grow to meet all of your seasonal needs. The garden is the perfect size for what you need. This is the dream garden you want, but when you walk out to your garden, it's full of weeds, it's dry and there are vegetable plants that you don't need or want. You've let your garden go un-tended for way too long and now it is a mess and needs serious attention. As you look at that garden, your initial thought would be to clear out the weeds and that's the logical first step, correct? You know what you need to do. You've got to get in that garden for the difficult process of "elimination" before you can grow that healthy, productive garden that you envisioned.
High performance is exactly the same. You need to take a long hard look at your life and business and figure out what are the "weeds.” You can do this while you decide what it is you want to plant to create your perfect garden. In fact, some of your best ideas, thoughts, dreams and goals happen during the elimination phase. So, as you take a deep look at your life and business, some of you will have lots of weeds, for others not so much. This all depends on how "evolved" you are in the process. The good news is that I've some of the most drastic, positive improvements in the high performance process occur during the "elimination" phase. These are the areas where I see most struggle:
- There are no defined habits, routines and rituals developed to optimize the time spent on their business. (You are always winging it.)
- They have no self-improvement strategies in place.
- Health and wellness are not a priority. They don't factor in self-care as a high performance strategy.
- Their physical environment is a cluttered mess.
- There is no database in place to track and sustain relationships over the life of their business.
- Lack of boundaries. They've let too many people steal their time.
- Lack of consistent effort. They come in and out of important initiatives needed to grow their business.
- An unwillingness to invest in and train a team to support the needs of their current business.
- They have a lack of understanding about where their business originates.
- Lack of commitment to the hard work needed to build a business, not a hobby. They are always chasing the "shiny penny.”
Team, these are examples of weeds in your business, just to name a few. Even if you are an ELP, you will always need to keep an eye on your business and make sure you are pulling weeds that start to grow. It's a never ending battle. This process could take years to "clean up.” So you may be saying to yourself: "Ugh, I've got a lot of work to do". In some cases, yes you do. High performance is not easy and that's why only 3% operate at an elite level.
We'll spend a lot of time on "elimination" in future calls. Next week, I'll cover the framework you'll need to make this process possible over the long term.
