Take a moment, right now, to write down all the results you’ve created for your real estate team. And if you don’t have time to do that, just write down the first 20 that come to mind.
Here are some of the items from my own list:
- Switched CRMs and created a more efficient workflow for listings and transactions
- Helped my mega write a book
- Wrote drip email campaigns for incoming leads
- Wrote a post-close follow up plan for our buyer and seller clients
- Wrote a listing and buyer presentation book for the agents
- Printed 20 copies of a listing presentation book which included the wrong information costing my mega $250
- Hired and trained six team members
- Three of those six quit or were let go because they weren’t the right fit which was all or at least partly my fault
- Created a farming plan which fizzled out
- Organized many successful client events which have resulted in referrals
- Wrote a weekly e-newsletter that has been distributed to leads, COI, and past clients for over three years without fail
When you look back through my list, you can see I’ve included both the desired results and the undesired results.
Truth is, we’re always creating some sort of result. That’s the nature of our job as executive assistants. We’re always working on something.
Most of the time, we get the results we desire:
- The contract gets sent to the lender.
- The seller client gets a phone call to inform him of the inspection time.
- The buyers receive the keys to their new home.
- Our mega gets cool new business cards.
And sometimes, we get undesired results:
- The contract got sent to the lender’s spam folder and she calls your mega to ask for it.
- The seller client doesn’t check voicemail and is surprised when there are people in his house when he comes home from work.
- There’s a mix-up with the keys and the sellers left town with them. Now the buyers are upset.
- Our mega gets cool new business cards with the wrong phone number on them.
These are just some very simple examples. Let’s talk about something more complex.
What results are you getting in your relationships with clients, vendors, team members, and your mega? Do you have positive relationships with them, or are you experiencing some undesired results?
Here’s an example. One of the tasks of my job is to prepare listing documents in DotLoop for our sellers to sign. There’s a lot of information I need to know before I can prepare those documents. So when I wasn’t getting the information I needed from the listing agent, I would get frustrated. The listing agent knows I need an email address for each seller, and yet when I would look up the email address in our CRM, it wouldn’t be there. Frustrating, right?
I wasn’t getting the desired result, and being frustrated with our listing agent is not at all how I wanted feel at work!
When we don’t get our desired result, it simply means we need to take a different action. It doesn’t mean that we’re stupid, or don’t know how to do our jobs. It doesn’t mean that other people are stupid, or don’t know what they’re doing either. It just means we need to take another approach.
In my example with the listing agent, I solved the undesired outcome by creating a Google Form with blanks for all the information I need to prepare listing documents. The listing agent bookmarked the link in his favorites, and filled it out whenever his sellers were ready for docs. Worked like a charm!
The new action created the desired outcome. I was no longer frustrated with our listing agent for failing to give me all the necessary information.
I want to take this one step further because I know some of you are creating undesired results in other areas of your life that you want to change.
When I read this excerpt from Tony Robbins’s book Unlimited Power, it really hit home with me:
…many people get down on themselves because they’re overweight. Their attitude about being overweight doesn’t change anything. Instead, they could embrace the fact that they’ve been successful in producing a result called excess fat and that now they’re going to produce a new result called being thin. They would produce this new result by producing new actions.
Have you ever thought of weight loss like this? I know I haven’t. Really, this concept is sort of mind blowing, because it allows us to take back our power. We are indeed powerful beings. We created every single result we have in our lives, and we have control over creating a new result.
I want to be clear about something though. A circumstance is not a result. No one wants cancer, disease, a car accident, a death in the family, etc. These are all circumstances beyond our control. What we do control is how we think, feel, and act in regards to those circumstances.
What results have you produced that you’re not happy with? Like Tony says, being unhappy about that result doesn’t change anything. You have to take new actions to get a new result. What actions are you committed to taking to produce the new result? Are you committed to doing whatever it takes? What’s just ONE thing you can do to take a step towards creating the new result?
Let’s look at another example. If you’ve been successful at creating a work day in which you react to everyone else’s needs first (such as responding to email, phone calls, and people dropping by your desk), what’s the ONE thing you can do to get control of your day? Perhaps you simply start with blocking one hour of your work day to accomplish your most important priority. If you spent just one hour a day, uninterrupted, how far could you move the ball forward on your most important work?
Would this new action create a better result for you? Of course it would! And are you committed to protecting that time block no matter what? That would mean shutting off your phone, turning off all notifications, shutting down your email, putting up a Do Not Disturb sign at your desk, and informing your teammates that you are not available for that one hour, and that you won’t be responding to them at that time.
Can you do all of that consistently? Yes, of course you can! You are in control of your actions!
