Fighting the holiday's hangover? If you are lacking motivation, this is how you get on track to crush your real estate goals this year!!!

So today, are you fighting the holiday hangover? You just had some time off. You just took a little bit of a break. It was the slow season, right? And some people were hitting FSBOs and expires first thing on the 1st, 8:00 AM. Other people haven't picked up the phone, and it's now the 8th, right? If you are lacking motivation, we're going over today how you can jumpstart your year, get you on track to crush your real estate goals

I started to get back into the groove right after Christmas and then, bam, another break. That was a long holiday between the two, since they both hit on a Friday, which was wonderful. 2020 was teed up to be a fantastic year. All of the holidays fell on the right day, and we all needed the R&R, I believe. But it's been difficult for me to get back in the groove.

Have Real Estate Goals

And there are only a few ways that I've ever found. And the first one, as we have discussed many times, is to have the goal. Having your real estate goals is the beginning of getting the momentum back. Be clear on what it is you need to do, because from there, even if you don't have the action steps yet, at least your mind will start to draw you to some of the things, maybe even this live or podcast, to get you back into gear, to start thinking about what it is you need to do in order to achieve your real estate goals. And it will draw you to the right people, the right information, the right resources if you keep that goal top of mind and in front of you.

Now, personally, I keep my goals right when I take my stuff out of my pockets, and I just have them written on a piece of paper. It's literally a piece of printer paper, and I chicken scratch them down, fold it in half, and thumb tacked it on there.

And part of me, whenever I do something like that, I always think like, "Well, what if somebody else sees this? What if somebody else sees my goals and thinks I'm crazy because they're big or because … What if I don't achieve them, and then they know that I failed, right?" Those are all the things that go through my mind, especially right now. I put my home on the market and I have people going through there. So I literally, because of that thought, Jake, which I think is interesting, took it down and put it behind my watch box so that people couldn't see it.

But the problem is now I can't see it. And honestly, obviously, we have goals for the company, goals for the business. I was reevaluating my goals for 2020 this morning, looking at them. I put them on a postcard and I actually had the postcard, I took it to Staples to have it laminated, which was cool. And I was looking at where I succeeded and where I fell short. And that just helps me recalibrate for this year.

It starts with the goal and getting clear on that. And I think one of my favorite things as far as setting real estate goals is to see it as it is, not worse than it is, right? That's a Tony Robbins quote. And that's what I was thinking through this morning, where I was seeing some of the places where I fell short last year, like, "Okay, here's what it is. It's not worse than that."

Have a Plan and Action Steps

I think step two is having the plan and the action steps so that you can measure your real estate goals on a regular basis and what those need to be. For us at Market Maker, it's the same as it was for me and my real estate business, right? There's the input, right? And then there's the output. The number of leads that we generate, the number of conversations that those lead to, which would be appointments for us, the amount of show rate of those appointments, the amount of close rate of the appointments that we have, exact same thing that we prescribe for our customers.

And looking at those things does tend to make you a little bit less stressed when it comes to hitting your real estate goal.

And I think that that fundamentally is part of the problem. Everybody who has the desire. It's like Reese used to always say, "Everybody wants to be a gold medalist, but nobody wants to train like one," right?

We had Chad Hedrick who won however many world championships for roller skating, and then switch to speed skating, rollerblading, and then switched to speed skating on ice in the TV Olympics and won a gold medal there, medaled like three or five times or whatever.

Go back and read the blog with him whenever you get a chance if you had not seen that one yet because that was something where he was breaking it down. And he was like, "In my sport, hundredths of a second is the difference between medaling and winning the gold medal and not winning anything at all. Hundredths of a second. So every minute of everyday training matters, because it could be the difference between a hundredth of a second or not."

Yeah. Preparation. Putting in the work, hitting the practice, measuring the goal.

And it's funny because he had a goal, right? "I want to win." And he probably had a time that he thought would be the winning thing. And then it was just reverse engineering, not based on his theory, right? He's never won a gold medal, but he had coaches that have seen what it takes and said, "This is what you need to do. Execute this plan."

And I think that that's a really, really big thing of where people fall off, is the work that has to get done every single day, because, in real estate, you're so dramatically delayed in your gratification that the work now doesn't show up on the scoreboard until two months down the road, sometimes three, five, six months down the road. And you have to plan for that in your real estate goals.

This is what makes right now such a dangerous time. Yeah. Because if you're still coasting, which it's really easy to do, you're going to pay with pain next month and March. And you got to get clear and you got to get a plan. Even if you're not sure of the plan, having action steps is planning. Failing to plan is planning to fail, right?

Habit

The success comes out of the habits. I'm having difficulty right now with my habits because I'm trying to get a rhythm of going to the gym. And because I'm a sales guy, I sell myself every night. I sell myself on going in the morning. And then in the morning, I sell myself on going in the evening. And then in the evening, I'm like, "Well, it is late. I did work really hard today. I'll just do an extra day on Saturday to put in my five days," which was my goal.

I'm having trouble creating this habit through all these stories in my head that are inaccurate thinking. And a lot of them are centered around all the irons I have in the fire, all the projects that I'm working on. And I'm like, "Well, once I get these things completed, then I'll get myself a good habit."

But the problem is its none of this external crap. It's just me not actually doing what I set out to do, which can pertain to business, it could pertain to a personal goal like hitting the gym, it could pertain to a relationship goal.

We work in the company. There are 20 people or so, that work in our company. We have certain things that are just habitual like the marketing huddles we have, the sales huddles that I have. And they're all based around metrics. Every single one is based around someone manually having to be responsible for a number and enter it in every single day and have other people have to see the result that they have to put in that they're responsible for.

So, to elaborate, I'm responsible for the overall sales. The sales guys are obviously responsible for their sales numbers. Our SCR is responsible for his numbers of calls and whatever to set up appointments that turn into sales. From the marketing perspective, Chance is responsible for all of the spend and lead numbers that he's got to enter in manually every single day. Maddy's responsible for the numbers that she enters in from the appointments and where we're tracking.

But every single one is broken out based on what we need to hit for the month and what percentage pacing we're at right now. So this month right now, early in the month, right, we're 60% over the pace in terms of sales as of this morning. My blood pressure right now is not any less than what it normally is. But when it gets to the middle of the month and we're 60% of pace, so we're 40% behind pace, my blood starts rising a little bit. And there are different actions that that causes me to take.

Don't Focus on External Excuses

We all come to our own defense. There was a book I read and they talk about coming to your own defense and appealing to this court in the universe in the sky.

"Here's why this is not fair," right? And everybody has these things that they do. And you can see them a lot of times in disagreements with people. If you have a disagreement with someone and they don't take the time to listen to your side, they just constantly rush to their own defense, rush to their own offense.

And I think that more than having a disagreement with somebody else, we do that with ourselves and, "Here's why I didn't get to this," or, "Here's why I didn't get to that. It's not my fault. It's this external thing or it's that extra thing."

And we're all guilty. But step one of changing it is really awareness. And the awareness comes tied to your real estate goals. If you're really going to have real estate goals and you're really going to actually pursue those goals, you have to pursue it to the best of your ability at all costs. And even if you fail, it's okay, because you tried your hardest, you tested your metal, you know what you were able to do, what you weren't able to do, and you've learned something. Now, you can either adjust the goal, you can adjust the action steps.

One of the things that I think it was Reese told me, he's like, "When there's too much tension between the goal and the outcome," he was like, "people tend to just shrink back and just lower the goal instead." And that's okay, too. Sometimes the juice is not worth the squeeze. I think that a lot of times, like with New Year's resolutions, for example, 90% of New Year's resolutions are never kept.

We're so used to doing that, and what that causes is distrust within ourselves, like we've discussed previously. That distrust is something that is a habit, unfortunately.

Start Small

Start small. I tell people all the time, "You don't go to the gym and lift 50-pound dumbbells. You go and you lift whatever you can lift five-pound dumbbells. You got to work that muscle." And even if it's something as small as making your bed every day, start there. Make a commitment. These are just little micro-commitments that you make to yourself on a regular basis. And as you do those, you build that trust within yourself and you'll build that muscle of, "I can accomplish the things that I set out to accomplish.

For me, one of those exercises is making a list. Every week, I make a list and I take what I didn't accomplish and I put it on the new list. But I'll tell you what. There's a tremendous amount of satisfaction for me in checking things off. I've checked off already, today's Wednesday, a week's worth of work by Wednesday morning, because I feel so far behind.

It's just all a battle between the ears.

So it's like watching … In the book, I forgot what book it is, but in the book, they talk about a basketball game, right? If you walk by two different basketball courts outside and one of them was keeping score and the other one's just shooting around, not keeping score, can you tell? Hell yeah, you can tell.

There's blood and sweat and some arguing and high intensity. Someone's winning, someone's losing. The other one's just, "I'm just having fun," right? You can tell the difference.

Get Around Like-Minded People

So if you are by yourself, one thing that I would do is get a group of people that are like-minded wanting to grow, wanting to get better, that I can become a little bit of an accountability group with, to where it's like, "Okay, this is what my real estate goals are. And based on what I know and what I did research on, these are the action steps that I need to do, right? And this is the activity that I need to do every day."

If someone in your family got into real estate, what would you tell them to do? It's the same every single time.

If you do not have a buyer to put in your car today, find a buyer to put in your car, right? Don't think about anything else. Just make it that simple.

Every day, because the rest works itself out. We always talk about the commission rollercoaster, where someone gets a few deals piled up, and then they spend their time spit polishing these deals, making sure everything goes smooth, making sure they close. And is that really necessary, or is that something that you're doing that is maybe a little self-sabotage unintentionally? Because you're artificially throttling your success because that's all you feel like you're worthy of.

It's like in sales, why certain salespeople perform better with the same opportunity. A real estate team is an excellent example. You give everybody the same amount of leads. Some people just run and make a bunch of money. The other people, they're mediocre. And then the other people just fail.

Why is that? Well, there's a tremendous amount of between the ears of what we have told ourselves we're worth and what we have told ourselves we are allowed to make. And I'll tell you, it's really interesting to watch a lot of salespeople only make what they feel like they are worth.

Why? Why is that? You have unlimited opportunity for unlimited income. Well, a lot of it is a limiting belief. And the only way I know to change that is to get around people who are doing better than you on a regular basis, to get around people who will elevate you and hold you accountable, and to have some real estate goals that you feel like you should accomplish.

Make Your Real Estate Goals a Must

I've always wanted to have a private plane. Not a little prop plane, a jet.

And let me tell you, I could go get one. But the thing about it is this. When I think about it, even though it's a little ridiculous, I think, "Well, other people have it. Why not me?"

That's one of the ways that I'm able to justify reaching and striving and pushing myself further. Why not? Like the saying in the movie, "What one man can do another can do,".

And if you ever, ever put yourself in a situation where you're setting real estate goals and you think, "Oh, that would be nice," and not "this is a must", you're just teeing yourself up to be in that perpetual cycle of missing a goal.

Because it's not that important. It's not really a goal yet. It is not set out, "I'm going to make this happen."

If it happened, it would be nice to have, which I don't think is a bad thing to have those things on the list, but it's just like, "What are you saying you are going to do equivocally? If you don't the blood, sweats, and tears or everything that you got is going to be laying behind you at the end of the year, like, 'I didn't do it this year, but I'm very clear on how I can do it again next year because I know where I've missed.'"

The difference between a should and a must.

My must as far as personal income is a lot different than probably others. And the irony of that is no matter what I do, I always find a way to get my must, as far as income is concerned. And I see this in salespeople all the time. I see this in real estate agents. I see this in people that we hire, right? If their must is X, you better believe they get X.

But the problem is they generally don't get more than X. One of the things that we know to be true is that people will do more for others than they do for themselves. And these days, most of my thinking is around my kids and honestly the people here in our company, in the customers that we serve, right? That's a lot of what drives me personally. How can I help them achieve more? How can I help with this? How can I help that? We have a collective goal for the business. How can we get to that? Right? That's what drives me the most nuts, thinking about that on a regular basis, like, "Got to do it. Got to do it. Got to get up."

And it's cool because it gives you a reason to jump out of bed in the morning. I don't think there's anything better in life than that personally.

My paradigm completely changed when I was a single dude with no real tie down anywhere and whatever because I learned about the beauty of being able to stockpile a bunch of cash and just be able to live off of interest and investment and stuff. So ever since I was 19, my goal was $5.5 million in accumulated cash and live off of it.

And then I met Brittany, and then we had a kid. And it completely changed when he was old enough and I started including them into what the goals were.

Having to tell them no is the worst feeling I have internally, is like, "If I have to say something is not possible or we can't do it or we have to push it off, it is literally the thing that eats at me the most inside."

And I think, too, just to put a bow on it, it's once that becomes crystal and that's really your goal, then you have to, you have to, you have to reverse engineer how you're going to get there and then track and make sure you're on pace. And it'll be the best thing that you've ever done.

Be hard on yourself, but don't be too hard on yourself.

If you don't make it, just realize you're learning along the way. You're getting experience that is invaluable. And you're investing into yourself in a way that nobody can ever take it away from you.

If you're like me and this whole political area have driven you nuts and COVID has driven you nuts and just the PTSD flashbacks from the recession starting to get to you for a minute, just remember you're learning things that, again, nobody can ever tell you that you can't. It's yours and you can do it anytime, anywhere. And guess what? If there's some new curveball, you get to learn some more.

It's all part of the process. And the activity of doing it will create a better version of you 100% of the time.

That's the goal. You're not who you need to be in order to achieve what you want to achieve. And you're going to become that person. And that's the journey. That's the process. That's the spice of life as far as business is concerned. And I'm ready for 2021.

Wrapping Up

So today, if you haven't, write your real estate goals down, put what you need to do every single day or working day.

Write it down and then force yourself to enter it every single day onto a spreadsheet. Start a Google sheet, daily tracker, the most important metric. You can start with one. You should have more than one, but start with one and be like, "How many conversations am I going to have today? How many people am I going to talk to?" If it's three, get you three leads. Get you some leads and people coming to you so that when you call them, you can just say, "Hey, I'm just calling you back. You reached out to me. Are you looking to buy a house in the near future?"

Life is much better when you eliminate rejection and they're coming to. Puts you in a position of empowerment. It changes the game. Get you some leads so you can do this.

And if you have the wherewithal, get Market Maker, because we'll go and get you those leads. We're going to nurture those leads in a way that elevates your status of authority in the mind of those leads, and then ultimately deliver them to your calendar, which is what you would track, how many appointments you had, how many of those you actually kept, how many of those you actually met with, how many of those you actually turn into a customer and sold a house with. That's the goal.

MarketMakerCall.com. Go check it out. Take us away, Jake.

As we always say here at Market Maker, your only one preposition appointment away.

Every day.