Deliberate Practice.....so it's not just luck!!!!!

(Fortune Magazine) -- What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was "wired at birth to allocate capital." It's a one-in-a-million thing. You've got it - or you don't.

Tip Sheet: Perfect Practice
1. Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it.
2. As you do the task, focus on what's happening and why you're doing it the way you are.
3. After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources. Make changes in your behavior as necessary.
4. Continually build mental models of your situation - your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the models to encompass more factors.
5. Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work.


Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets. The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant - talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great.
Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn't mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It's an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, "The evidence we have surveyed ... does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts."
To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.
The irresistible question - the "fundamental challenge" for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University - is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.
Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.



No substitute for hard work
The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It's nice to believe that if you find the field where you're naturally gifted, you'll be great from day one, but it doesn't happen. There's no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He'd had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, "The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average." In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years' experience before hitting their zenith.
So greatness isn't handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn't enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What's missing?

Practice makes perfect

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It is an activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don't get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that's deliberate practice.

Consistency is crucial.

As Ericsson notes, "Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends."
Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It's the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics

Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game?
Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude.
Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn't do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you'd expect: Ericsson notes, "Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s." The more research that's done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes.

Real-world examples

All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century's greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti.
Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he'd have been cut from his high school team.)
In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice - passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow - practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up.
Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age - 18 months - and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that's what it took to get even better.

The business side

The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements - you can practice them all.
Still, they aren't the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information - can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude.
Instead, it's all about how you do what you're already doing - you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it.
Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it - each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company's strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.
Adopting a new mindset
Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.
Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.
Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don't seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won't come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, "it's as if you're bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don't know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don't get any better, and two, you stop caring." In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren't lucky enough to get that, seek it out.


Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call "mental models of your business" - pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow.
Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft's (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.
That's a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
Why?
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That's the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn't be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from.
The authors of one study conclude, "We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice." Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, "Some people are much more motivated than others, and that's the existential question I cannot answer - why."
The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life's inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren't gifted and give up.
Maybe we can't expect most people to achieve greatness. It's just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn't reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.

Talk to your punters

It amazes me how we have adapted our lives around email, cell phones and text messaging. While I think it is wonderful that there are so many articles written teaching us how to "blast" our contacts with information on our new listing, price reductions or "e" news letters, let's want to focus for a moment on the sound of your voice.

Do you think that people like your voice? Honestly. Do you enjoy hearing your voice on your message machine or voice mail? If you are like most people, you will say "no"!

However, I am convinced more than ever, in this demanding world of technology, that your clients and customers want to hear your voice.

Certainly the internet is a way of helping us to communicate, stay organized and build our businesses much faster than years ago. Email allows us to communicate with hundreds and thousands of people across the country. However, I challenge all of you to look at the amount of time you really spend behind the key board or how much time is spent with the cell phone rather than a face to face contact.

As I drove around my neighborhood I noticed someone walking their dog, and typing on their PDA. Another day I went to the grocery store and actually missed my email. I couldn't wait to get home to see if there was anything to "do" or what if someone "needed" something. I've actually become a slave to my email and computer! Sound familiar?

Last week when speaking to several agents they expressed how they don't feel as internet savvy as some others. Their main concern is that they are being left behind. I encourage these agents to understand that yes the internet & latest technologies can help them build their business, however please continue to use their god given voice as the main communication with their customers. I explained how if they focus on what really matters, the relationship, they can simply learn the new techniques and technology to add to their profitable business. Yes, the tools are important and must be learned however their business does not need to fail just because they are not using the latest PDA. Allow the internet tools to pull or bring more business to you, but then step out and use the best communication of all—your voice.

10 years ago, we did not email our sellers a marketing report to show them the progress of their sale, we would type it out, mail it or even drop it at their door. We would discuss with them the progress of the sale, not email it.

When is the last time you called your seller and said you would like to drop something off for them to look at? Perhaps an article from the paper, or your marketing report. How about the last time you called a buyer—just to tell them you were thinking of them, and want to go the extra mile to be sure that their experience with purchasing is outstanding. Simple phone calls that ensure business and build relationships. Sure you can email too, however that voice of yours is awfully powerful.

You've heard the saying that "the pen is mightier than the sword".

I believe that the sound of you voice will forever bridge the difference between being a good agent and simply getting by, or being a super agent with a successful & profitable career. One phone call at a time can still change the course of your business forever.

Increasing your customers self-esteem

Listening Builds Self-Esteem

It has been said that, "Rapt attention is the highest form of flattery." When you listen intently to another person and it is clear that you genuinely care about what that other person is saying, his or her self-esteem goes up. His or her feeling of personal value increases. He or she feels more worthwhile and important as a human being. You can actually make another person feel terrific about himself or herself by listening in a warm, genuine, caring way to everything he or she has to say.

When a man and a woman go out for the first time, they spend an inordinate amount of time talking and listening to each other. They look into each other's eyes and hang on every word. They are each fascinated by the personality of the other. The more each listens to the other, the more positive and happy each of them feel and the stronger becomes the bonds of affection between them.

The Opposite of Listening is Ignoring

You always listen to that which you most value. You always ignore that which you devalue. The fastest way to turn a person off, to hurt their feelings and make them feel slighted and angry is to simply ignore what they are saying or interrupt them in the middle of a thought. Ignoring or interrupting is the equivalent of an emotional slap in the face. Men especially have to be careful about their natural desire to make a remark or an observation in the middle of a conversation. This can often cause the sales conversation to come to a grinding halt.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, take every opportunity to make the other person feel important by listening attentively to what he or she says.

Second, avoid interrupting the other person by slowing down and pausing for a few moments after he or she has stopped speaking.

Memory Counts

Your palms begin to sweat and you avoid eye contact with someone you know you've listed, but you just can't remember his name.

Your heart sinks as you hang up the phone after a call from a potential seller; you forgot you'd made an appointment with her.

You pound your forehead in frustration as you realize, too late, what you should have told a buyer about the property that would have made the sale.

Have you ever thought, "If only I'd been born with a better memory, I'd be a better real estate agent?" The good news is that you don't have to be born with a great memory! Like almost anything related to the real estate profession, memory improvement is a learned skill that anyone can cultivate.

You can become a highly effective and well-respected real estate professional. Begin by learning how to prevent these sticky memory-related situations that you may already have experienced.

Memory Slip #1: Instantly forgetting a prospect's name.

You meet a prospect and shake his hand. He tells you his name, and no sooner does the handshake break than you have forgotten it. Socially, people find very few things more annoying than having their names forgotten or mispronounced, and in real estate, what's annoying can become deeply offensive, enough so that you can lose sales.

When you immediately forget a prospect's name, two challenges arise. First, because you know that you have forgotten the name, you become totally preoccupied with trying to remember it, so it's difficult to pay attention to what is being said about the property that the prospect wants to buy or sell. Second, if the prospect perceives that you've forgotten his or her name, it sends a very negative message about you, as if you don't care about the person or are simply not very smart. Typically, neither of these perceptions is true, but if you can't pay attention long enough to remember a name, you give that impression.

With a little practice, you'll find that this particular memory slip is the easiest to avoid. First, slow down and listen. Focus on the prospect for five seconds at the beginning of the introduction and concentrate on his or her name. Next, repeat the name back in a conversational manner. When someone says, "My name is Bob," respond with, "Bob. Nice to meet you, Bob."

Memory Slip #2: Forgetting the name of an established client.

As a real estate agent, have you ever gone to a meeting or been at the grocery store and run into someone that you sold a house to or for...and gone completely blank on a name to go with the face? Most often, this slip occurs when you meet the client outside the context of your profession: You may feel like you know that you know the person, but you can't remember how. You may even remember the details of the listing or purchase, but you can't for the life of you remember the person's name.

This phenomenon is not only frustrating and embarrassing; it can also cost you a lot of money. Learning to avoid such a situation takes a commitment to work on improving your memory. You can improve your chances of remembering a forgotten client's name by learning to manage your stress. When you know that you know something, but you can't pull it up in your mind, it's usually because you are stressing yourself out about it. The stress blocks your brain's ability to retrieve the information. So try taking a deep breath and doing a little positive self-talk. Tell yourself, "You know that you know this. Just hang in there and be a little patient." Oftentimes, the name or other necessary information will then come to you.

Memory Slip #3: Forgetting an appointment or showing up late.

Any real estate professional knows that showing up late is terrible, but forgetting an appointment altogether is even worse. The solution is simple but requires a commitment on your part to be better organized and to take the time you need to plan. Many common memory challenges arise when people have too much going on and try to rush to get everything done. The key here is to be systematic. Take an hour once a week to review what you have coming up and to plan, in detail, what you need to do and when.

Memory Slip #4: "I should have said..."

If you've ever thought of the perfect thing to say to someone ten minutes after you needed to say it...you're just like every other human in the world. But for a real estate agent, this can easily cost you a sale. Have you ever thought of the perfect answer to someone's question or objection right after the prospect walked out the door? Or closed the door on you? Wondering what went wrong, your brain suddenly turns up again and you think, "Oh, no! I'm so stupid! I should've said that!" (Or shown them that property or demonstrated that unique feature of the home or answered their objection with that response in my sales manual.)

You can overcome this challenge by memorizing information systematically. Systematic learning is not rote memorization - the way you learned your multiplication tables - but developing a system to help you store and retrieve information easily.

To recall information and train your memory, you must learn to speak the language of your memory, which means creating pictures. When you must recall information, if you can see something, it becomes much easier to recall it, even with a great deal of detail. Creating mental images and an organizational system in your brain will make the information easier to find; if it's in a big pile, you may know it's there somewhere, but who knows how long it will take you to find it!

Learning leads to confidence, the key to real estate success

Real estate professionals need to take their business seriously enough to put effort into learning. Many "wing it," and don't make nearly as much money as they want to as a result. No one gets rich in selling by accident. Those who dedicate themselves to learning and growing are always the most successful.

The good news is that you can learn to overcome memory slips and will grow as an effective real estate professional as you do, because you will gain greater confidence. All other things being equal, the agent with more confidence will always get the listings and sales - and the hefty commissions, too - over someone who has less confidence or none at all. The formula for real estate success is the same as the formula for improving your memory: preparation, listening, and proper learning.

Prospecting...Just do it!!

When we begin our careers as real estate agents, prospecting is often the activity that occupies most of our time. We don't have any transactions we're working on and we may not know of anyone who's looking to close a real estate transaction, so the majority of our time often revolves around finding some people we can do business with.

The problem, though, is that oftentimes once we've achieved a certain degree of success in our industry, prospecting becomes something we do when we feel we have the time. And we all know how easy it is to find enough things to do to consume our day and not allow any time for prospecting. In summary here, it's easy to feel that as long as we're busy working on activity, prospecting is not really the most urgent matter we need to deal with.

And in mentioning this, how is your level of business activity right now? Are you happy with the number of transactions you're currently working on? How about the size of the transactions and you're average anticipated commissions from them?

If you're happy with your answers to these questions then what I'm about to say may not be relevant for you. But if you find yourself wanting more transactions or higher quality transactions for you to work on, the fastest way to elevate yourself to this new level of activity will probably be through prospecting.

With this in mind, how much prospecting are you doing on a weekly basis these days? I find that most veterans are probably doing no more than two hours of prospecting a week once they've established themselves in the business, and some of them are even doing less than this. But when I normally talk with agents who are doing this low level of prospecting, most every single time they're disappointed with the results they're currently producing in their businesses, too.

And when you're not doing your prospecting, you can become like a scavenger in your real estate business, working on the deals that just fall into your lap or have been passed over by other agents. You can feel like a boat at sea with no engine, no oars, and no sails...being moved in a direction that's completely outside of your control. In short, you can feel like a victim, but at the same time one who feels very busy doing a lot of activities everyday!

All the business you've ever wanted for yourself is constantly out there for you everyday. Just look at all the deals your competitors are closing that you're not involved in and you'll understand what I mean. If you had been prospecting these same people six months to a year ago, it could have been you successfully representing them and closing these transactions instead of your competitors. Maybe you wouldn't be closing all of these transactions, but you'd certainly be closing a good number of them.

The top agents I know personally prospect 10-12 hours a week. And what's even more important, they continually prospect like this every week even when they're busy. Because they know in doing this they'll continually find better leads for more lucrative transactions that they'd otherwise miss if they stopped prospecting.

So if you really want to kick your real estate career into high gear, here's my challenge to you:

For the next three months block out 10-12 hours a week on your calendar and prospect during this time. Don't make any excuses and just get this prospecting done no matter what happens. And if you do this for just the next three months I can almost guarantee your biggest problem will be deciding how to handle all the solid new business you're constantly working on.

Making Change Work

Changing our behavior to achieve better results is the most important challenge we face in trying to compete in this chaotic world. Maybe you are in a slump or know deep down you have accepted an average performance when a great one is possible. When you're ready to change - to increase your sales, to take some calculated risks, to improve any and all aspects of your life - you may not know how to begin beyond crossing your fingers and hoping for a lucky break. What can you do differently to create more positive results in your work and personal life?

First, accept the fact that if you are not getting the results you want in any aspect of your life, it just might be you ! It's not somebody else's fault. To achieve real change in your results, decide that this is your year. You must believe in yourself and your ability to make change happen. When you do, you'll find that your belief naturally leads you to take action, and action is the only thing that brings results.

True change requires you to develop clear reasons why you will not fail yourself and your family. So when you know what drives you, write it down. The process requires introspection, which you may not be used to, but in order for it to work, you need to take the time to quietly consider every aspect of your life (past, present, and future) and commit it to paper.

To embark on this process, consider the following:

1. Where have you been?

If you feel as if disappointing results are your destiny, they will be until you are able to see the behaviors that lead to those results. So take ten minutes to reflect on your accomplishments and your disappointments, big and small, and then write everything down. Consider and answer these questions for your career, family, health, faith, self education, finances, and recreation/fun.

What accomplishments am I most proud of?
What specific results have I achieved?
Have I been willing to do what I know it takes to do better?
What have been my biggest disappointments?
What did I learn from my disappointments?
2. Where are you now?

To change, you need to know where you are in the present moment, as well as where you've been. Make an honest written assessment of where you are in your life right now in the areas listed above. Where have you lowered the bar and accepted it? Think in terms of keeping score and getting clear on the actual numbers you have right now. Look at the truth! Getting disgusted with your current situation is a heck of a motivator.

Health and energy level is the Achilles heel for most people. The number one killer in the nation is heart disease, and almost half those who have a heart attack die from their first one. So you can see the necessity of getting honest with yourself right now about your heath, as well as other aspects of your life. To draw a detailed health picture, go to a professional and find out:

What is my current weight compared to where I want to be?
What are my blood pressure, cholesterol levels, triglyceride level, and EKG readings?
What is my standing heart rate? Can I run a mile? How quickly do I recover after exercise?
How often do I work out a month? Am I too tired at the end of the day to enjoy myself?
Is fifty-percent of what I am eating water-rich live foods - fruits and vegetables?
Repeat this process in the other key areas suggested, considering every aspect of your life as it really is, right now.

3. Where do you want to go?

Allow yourself to fantasize about what specifically you want most in your life. First consider what you'd like to do immediately, then in the near future. What are the top specific, measurable outcomes you'd like to achieve within those time frames? Look to clarify and raise your personal standards of conduct. Make sure you have each of the key areas represented. It is not the quantity, but the quality of the goals you set!

For someone in sales, good questions to establish immediate, short and long-term goals would be:

What am I committed to earning this year?
What percentage of my sales is from referrals?
How many new prospects will I contact a day?
How many current clients will I contact?
How can I better document my successes with testimonial letters, quotes, and pictures?
What company award and/or incentive trip am I committed to winning?
What will I do each day to enhance my expert status and give more value to my clients?
Have I been doing what it takes to be great or have I been making excuses and fighting to be average?
4. What is my action plan and tracking method?

Break your bigger goals into monthly and even weekly achievable steps. But keep in mind that the time-worn old advice to take gradual ?baby steps? is seldom effective; you'll get frustrated and discouraged if your new results don't come quickly enough. Be bold! Making more radical changes will simply yield quicker results and establish forward momentum.

Next, create a goal sheet and action plan in any format that suits you: a time line, a monthly calendar with target dates and notes, pictures of the outcome you want with a simple list of the steps it will take to get there, or any other creative format that works for you. Make it easy to review your goals and higher personal standards daily by laminating your action plan and putting it in your shower, on your bathroom mirror, or in your briefcase for easy daily review.

Radical changes you can make for better results include:

Get up thirty minutes earlier at least four days a week for aerobic exercise.
Make ten prospecting calls for new business every day by noon.
Contact three past customers every day and ask questions to uncover new opportunities.
Send one hand written card a day keeping in touch with clients or praising an employee.
Limit fast food intake to once a week. Bring a small cooler of healthy food to work/in your car.
Eliminate soda from your diet. Eat seven to nine servings of fruits and vegetables each day.
Focus only on positive things your family is doing or has done the first thirty minutes at home.
Write a written outcome before you make every sales presentation. Tape it and review.
Take the time to write down why you are committed to stick with these radical changes. Focus on the joy of when you make the change not the fear of failing. Write at least a paragraph to yourself. What kind of person do you want to be? How will you behave to become that person?

The Rewards of Change are Many

Whether you make change happen or not, it's going to happen; that's the way life is. And the results of passively waiting to see what happens next - of letting life decide for you - can be completely opposite from what you'd choose for yourself. Do not wait for a crisis!

While making a radical change can be an intimidating prospect at first, the rewards are many and will come quicker than might imagine. When you're in control of your destiny, achieving your optimal results and beyond, you'll look back on that decision and realize it was the moment everything began to change. Mastering the ability to confront reality and make a change isn't just a key strategy for business. It is a necessity for life and perhaps the one skill most worth learning.

Get a brief on your side

One of the biggest decisions any individual, or every family will ever make, is probably the purchase of their main residence or place of fixed address. Some might have a few around the world - depending on their situation and means.
Now think. How do lawyers and realtors fit into this picture? Normally, they are seen as necessarily part of the process and not really adding any real value. They get paid, (handsomely from outside perspectives), at times for doing very little but transact and follow regulations. They execute realty related business and activity. That is the scope of their role, involvement and responsibility.
There are lots of forces that influence, affect and work on these and other related realty transactions. For example: buying a business, second home, speculation or income property, retirement residence, summer home, vacation residence, cottage or country property, farm, land or commercial-industrial property, buy to let, off-plan purchases and many others all quality.
We study, we work, we move, we change, we relocate, we marry, we get sued, we wrong, we stumble, we fall, we have kids (or not), move around. We get promoted, change jobs, get divorced, have a partner, OR parents die, get in debt, re-mortgage, retire, get involved in a serious work or car accident. We even borrow against our equity assets, lose our homes and so on—that in short, is LIFE.
Now, you may ask how that affects what you do everyday as a choice realtor, or realty niche specialist? The answer: A LOT and EVERYTHING!
We suggest, that utilizing the legal practitioners, who work in these and other related fields, assisting others dealing with these conditions, events and life occurrences, might be great sources of leads.
They give access to pre-qualified, targeted leads and potential transactions, referrals, connections and even client relationships, that last a lifetime. They provide opportunity for referral and business partners for life. If we but took the time and trouble, spending some effort of exploring these channels, more pro-actively and hands-on, with purpose and intent, our businesses will grow and we outperform even our wildest expectations.
Normally, these and similar opportunities, pass us right by. We just do not know, what we do not know. We miss out on an immense wealth of openings, referrals and even business, by simply ignoring the obvious!
Without us getting into the topic much further, just think for a minute, how any of the following attorneys could help you generate leads, grow your business, or even be a business opportunity in the making:
Tax, Insurance, Liability And Medical Malpractice Attorneys
Personal Injury Attorneys
Family Law Practitioners
Commercial, Real Estate, Land-Transfer Attorneys
Brokerage Houses With Residential Expertise Under One Roof ? Bankers, Lawyers And Realtors, Mortgage And Land Transfer Lawyers
Anything? Any ideas? Our lives are indeed complex and interwoven. Home life and business assets are co-mingled and managed. Some by us, some by third parties or contracted helpers, some of which come from the legal profession. They help with process, procedure, paperwork and protocol. Qualified, equally dedicated professionals in their respective industries, niche specialties and doing what they are best at.
How does that help you, or us as realtors, at all?
The answer is simple. Whenever there is a major incident, occasion or impetus, that bring people into the market for
a new purchase or a resale home; or maybe
a condominium, farm or leasehold property; secondary homes or work/corporate residences; even
cottages, vacation, leisure or recreational properties;
multi-unit properties, offices and apartment complexes,
income property, investment options and real estate holdings and portfolios or strategies, or
family trusts and legacies, inherited properties, old deeds and the like,
WHERE DO THEY TURN TO?
Are we prepared to answer the call, even before they know they need an industry professional on their team, on their side and representing their interest?
First, let us take a look at lawyers 2 and 3 in our line-up here.
Family Law and Personal Injury Lawyers
Any accident is a traumatic experience. Whether it happened on the job or on the road, while on vacation, it does not matter. It respects and spares no-one on the grounds of who they are or what they have—it just happens.
We are often left dealing with the aftermath and at times, refer or defer to personal injury lawyers, that help get compensation. From these involved parties and misfortune, could come, a helping hand.
A realtor with experience and expertise can help clients who just got their claims either rejected/accepted/ paid out, adjust their lifestyles accordingly. Even handling relocation, involving property sale and/or re-purchase, refinancing. Perhaps short-term rental or long-term retirement residential solutions, will and testaments, trusts, sale of businesses or vacation homes.
Bankruptcy lawyers are another source of leads where your expertise could/would be welcomed.
Mortgage lawyers and other financial legal practitioners can also call upon your expertise and services, informally, through networking, referrals, and even full-fledged partnership and collaboration, to assist their clients with all realty-related matters.
Family law practitioners, normally involves, pre-nuptial agreements, divorce-settlements, estates, will and testaments, trusts, inheritances and other family related matters, that could easily involve the buying and selling of property, both residential and commercial.
Go where the business is or most likely to be. The logic here, is that you will in all probability, find some there, at the very least. We propose actively and purposefully going to seek them out, building and growing your business, not leaving it up to random chance and business to find you, somehow, magically.
Now let us look at lawyers 1, 4 and 5 in our line-up of legal practitioners.
Even though these resonate even better with us, as industry-related somehow, we still do not actively utilize what they could hold for us, in term of leads, contacts, referrals and/or partnering, opportunities.
When life and circumstances change, the flip-side of that coin and intricate part, is almost always also realty-related in some way, shape or form.
It is up to us to hunt for, identify, target, unearth and optimize these to benefit all, our interest and pocketbooks included. Happy hunting. It is open season on lawyers again!