Keeping it Real

I hope that the year has started well for you. 

I received a large number of (positive!) responses to last week’s email newsletter and I know that for every one response there are a number who were thinking something similar.

I can tell you that I was certainly in two minds whether to send it or not. I WAS in a grumpy mood (mostly with myself) when I wrote it. Once I had calmed down and read it in a more serene frame of mind, I thought that it was a bit harsh. However with a little bit of a prompt and a tidy up from Leese, she decided it was ok to send and so I went with it. 

The common thread in the messages back was ‘thanks for the raw honesty’ – I want to take a moment to talk about that. 

I have decided that trying to separate who I really am, and who I present to the world is not what I want. It is one of the reasons I started my own agency and is why this company is the way it is.

Real Estate. Real People. 

To put it plainly, I can’t be bothered with the bullsh*t.
This does make it easier in some respects, I can just be me. But it gives me nowhere to hide. 

It means that everything I say and do needs to be true. I might not always be right and I have discovered the hard way that you can’t “please all of the people, all of the time”. But ‘what I say’ needs to be true and ‘what I do’ needs to align. 

We sell real estate. But sometimes there is a whole infrastructure that keeps us from being real. We are sometimes encouraged to be a caricature of a salesperson, rather than find our own path to our own success.

People I know in this business who have found the way to success have found it in their own way. They have not made themselves into a carbon copy of someone else. Allowing yourself to conform to someone else’s way of doing business is likely to yield results and certainly a good way to start out. But unless you allow yourself to develop your own unique skills that suit your unique personality the lack of congruence might weigh you down in the end. 

Business growth is personal growth and personal growth is a difficult, even a spiritual journey. Well the way I think about it is anyway. We have limited time here to grow and have an impact. A limited time to create a legacy. I for one don’t want to gain the world and lose my soul. Ideally, I would like to grow both in my world and in my soul. 

So I guess the only thing to do is just keep on keeping it real the best I can.