How To Get Back on Track with your Real Estate Goals
Tips For New Real Estate Agent Habit Formation
Success in real estate is closely tied to consistency and sticking to your routines. We need to build positive habits that reflect our long terms goals and continue to do the daily activities required to reach our goals, but what happens when we get off track with our daily routines? How do we quickly get back on the right path to success?
In this new real estate agent training post, you will learn how you can get back on track with your real estate goals.
One of the main problems when getting back on track with routines is not the fact that you aren’t perfect. Everyone will slip up when it comes to their goals and habits from time to time. Instead, it’s that we can come down on ourselves too hard. We can throw our hands in the air and say we give up even when we miss a few days of prospecting. This is known as black and white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking. Have you failed by missing a few days of prospecting? No. You just need to get back on track with your real estate goals.
Success is not about being perfect all the time. This is just not realistic. It is about getting back up and getting back on the path to success quickly. Habit formation hinges on our ability to bounce back and not on being perfect all the time.
Tom Bilyeu, co-founder of Quest Nutrition and host of the very successful podcast Impact Theory, talks about spending a certain percentage of his time on “the dark side” and the rest on the positive side. He says if he slips up, he comes down on himself for a short period of time then returns to normal thinking. He says this “dark side” thinking is essential in letting himself know that he dropped the ball, but he doesn’t want to stay here and continue to beat himself up. Instead, after he has had his time on the “dark side” he quickly flips a switch and gets back after it.
An effective tip to getting back on track is setting a time that you plan on starting again. This hack makes sure you get back to your routine quickly and don’t let the slip up spiral out of control.
Tomorrow starts today
To stay true to your goals, make sure you let people in on your goals. We don’t want to let others down, nor do we want to feel let down in the eyes of others. Use this to your advantage and let people know about your goals. However, do this strategically. You don’t have to announce on social media, but a simply letting some people in your close network know can go a long way.
When we fall off our path, it usually comes down to being tired or bored. Ask yourself why you fell off track. Were you tired, bored, or was there another reason? Regardless of why, don’t let yourself fall off track in the same way again. Draw a bright line for yourself and say, “I won’t let myself give up on prospecting, even if I become bored.”
Whatever you do, don’t downgrade your goal. In real estate, it can be tempting to change our goal if we fall off track. We can start to make excuses and put blame on outside forces like the market. Don’t adjust your goal downward, just come back to the reason why you are striving for success and get right back on track.
Conclusion
Falling off track with your goals is just part of habit formation. It is natural for us slip up from time to time. It’s not about falling off; it’s all about getting started again. Remember that “tomorrow starts today” and make sure you let people in your life know that you are starting your goal back up. Finally, make sure you don’t downgrade your goal. Just get back on track and keep moving forward.
Sources and Links: Beeminder, Alex Vermeer, Impact Theory
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to another episode of Rev Real Estate School. My name is Michael Montgomery. Today we are talking about what to do if we get off track with our goals.
[00:00:22] Now if you're listening to this when it airs we're about one month into 2019 if not no worries we can always talk about goals and getting back on track. So what do we do if there have been some recent slip ups. Don't worry we're going to chat about it today and we will get you right back on track.
[00:00:42] So first off I don't know about you but there are challenges when it comes to goals and dropping the ball for me can turn into this black or white thinking. So either I have accomplished the goal or I completely have failed. Now we know that's not the case but this does come up for me and I have caught myself many times where if there is a little bit of a slip up I feel like man I had the goal just as done. It's completely done and that is not the case. It's super hard for me but when I do pull back and I realize OK it's not completely done let's just get back on track and make a plan here. You start to feel better but that's also not to say you should let yourself off the hook. If you listen to the podcast Impact Theory. The host, Tom Bilyeu brings up that he spends 90 percent of his time. I think he says 90 percent in the positive side of things and then 10 percent and what he calls the dark side. So what he means by this is if there's a slip up or if there's something going on he also needs to be very honest with himself. And if he's dropped the ball he will look at himself and he will let himself know that he dropped the ball. It's not just positive thinking but then he'll turn that back around after he's had a chance to experience that to get back on track. So I think this is really important. If we dropped the ball with our goal that doesn't mean that everything's over it's not black and white like I was bringing up but we should analyze what's happened so that we can avoid having that happen again in the future.
[00:02:12] If you do want some help setting up your goals head down into the show notes download our habit formation cheat sheet it is super handy to help keep you on track. So what's one of the main concepts habit formation hinges on our ability to bounce back. We're human. We're going to fall off at some point. So we need to come back to the fact that the habit is not just 100 percent always hitting out of the park. It also hinges on our ability to bounce back when we have gotten off track. So understand that and then do a thing about it is we have to understand that tomorrow starts today. So don't end up putting it off and putting it off just because we've fallen off track get up dust yourself off and get started yet again. A great tip here is to set a time to start again. So let's say that you had a couple of days where you did not get your prospecting done then have a time the next day at 9 a.m. I'm going to start prospecting and I am not going to stop until noon. So make sure you have a time that you set for yourself. And then once you start again it starts all over again. So don't worry about where you've dropped the ball. Just get back up and get started yet again.
[00:03:21] The next tip is make sure you let people know that you're starting again. Let people know OK here I go I'm starting again. If you don't have somebody that you want to share it with you can use different services out there there are some services where you can allocate a certain amount of money that will go to a charity you don't like. There's one that I have linked up this show and it's called Beeminder where you end up putting a certain amount of money in there and it keeps you on track and if you fall off of that then your money is gone. I once had a real estate coach that made me write him a five hundred dollar check that was made out to one of my competitors and he said if you miss a day of prospecting between now and when I talk to you next I am going to mail this to your competitor. So very harsh but very effective. You can probably imagine I did not miss prospecting that week.
[00:04:12] Next we really want to identify the why behind the goal that we have when we end up falling off. There's usually two reasons we're tired or we're bored. We're tired of just doing this over and over and over again or we're just plain bored. So we have to come back to the reason why we started it in the first place and draw a bright line through the sand as to why we are doing something by reconnecting with the reason that we have the real estate goal and if it is a real estate go off its production or something like that we do have to come back to the reason why we want to be successful in real estate by thinking about that we can then reverse engineer it down to the exact habit that we need to have understand we can drop the ball that is totally fine but come right back and you should also tell yourself. Why did you drop the ball? Was it because you retired or bored and if it was then don't let it happen again.
[00:05:05] Moving right along don't downgrade your goal so often times if we do far off track. We want to downgrade our goal and say oh OK well we set too high of a goal for yourself. Don't do that. Just jump right back on track. Dust yourself off. Don't change your goal and get started again. So there are a few tips for you if you do want to get back on track with your goals. It happens. These things happen it is not the end of the world but do make sure that you understand the reason why. Were you tired. Were you bored. And make sure that you're also you're not hard on yourself but you are honest. That will be motivation that will keep you going and get you back on track. Thank you very much for listening to this episode. If you have a couple of minutes run on over rate review the podcast that is hugely helpful. I really appreciate it. Thank you again and we will catch you in the next lesson.
[00:06:08] This episode of Rev real estate school has come to a close. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you back here for the next lesson.
Follow Up Reading:
4 Ways To Stick To Habits in Real Estate
Top 10 Habits of Successful Real Estate Agents
Prospecting Ideas for New Real Estate Agents
Question: What are your favorite tips for sticking to your real estate habits? Let me know in the comments below.
-Michael Montgomery