Unlimiting beliefs. Keep the temperature turned up!

Firstly, I have to laugh. I got more responses from a typo (or two…) in my last email to you all than I normally get from anything in the content.

Compliant and Complaint are tricky little words and I will look out for them in the future.

And any time I need to get some feedback I will be sure to throw in some mistakes!

Last week my colleague Rosalind (check out her beautiful website here) sent me a Tony Robbins podcast which had the effect of switching off music in the car, and turning my car back into the mobile ‘Landrover University’. I found myself being pleasantly challenged!

In 2014 I started a business that became a bit of a monster. I had just been made redundant, as Paul Reid, my boss and friend, was stepping out of the ‘apartment trading’ market. I was going to step right into the void. As I was his operations manager, understood the business, and had the right connections and industry experience there was no real risk of failure, to the point that Paul funded me in.

Within a short time, things were humming, and the trading business had multiple banks, non-banks and private investors as funding partners.

Things were going really very well, however, the apartment market is volatile and highly subject to change at the stroke of a pen. Think foreign buyer bans, think LVR restrictions. Two massive changes that were a struggle to adapt to.

In the past I have told people that I get bored easily, and this is the reason I chop and change around. However, this is only partly true. The truth is as soon as I get good at something I button off. I pull back.

As I said, I turned my car back into a university, and a podcast about limiting beliefs started up. Tony Robbins will do this better than me I am sure, but here we go.

Here is the temperature Analogy – the centigrade, Kiwi version….

We all have a ‘temperature’ that we are happy to operate at. Let’s say you are pretty content at 22 degrees.

Suddenly, you find some success. Your temperature is rising!

24 degrees. You find a bit more success. 26, 28 degrees!

Time to get a new car. A bit more success, some investments,… 29 degrees!

One deal leads to the next, you are getting well known, 30 degrees!

You are on fire. 34 Degrees….

At some point though, you start to feel a bit hot under the collar. This is not really me, you say. You find some reason to button off. I gotta cool down, you tell yourself. But you are not sure why.

Well, maybe it is because you see yourself as more of a 22 degrees kind of a person. And so, you return to that baseline of 22 Degrees. You let yourself go, you allow your standards to slip.

I did this in a big way with my apartment trading business. It got to the point where I set myself some really low-bar goals that I am pretty embarrassed about now. Things like, a measure of success would be to go through the purchase, renovation, and sale of a property and never set foot in the place. Another goal would be that I would be happy with a deal as long as I wasn’t making a loss, no matter how small the margin.

These low-bar goals were not even goals really. Because I didn’t find this business engaging any more I was just playing with ideas to keep me interested.

I did the same in my real estate career when I was selling. I got myself into some success and even ended up on stage at the national award do. Managed to get into the top 20 for the year (12th I think). And then, for no apparent reason, I just backed away.

I have had years (generations?) of conditioning to keep my head down, don’t draw attention, don’t try too hard, and don’t succeed too much. It’s a pretty shitty pattern to be in to be honest, and I have some answers as to why it won’t happen again.

So why won’t this happen again?

There are three reasons.

I am aware of these limiting beliefs now. I have stuck a reminder up on my whiteboard: UNLIMITING BELIEFS. That’s a note to keep my beliefs unlimited!

It’s a reminder to not accept cop-outs or mediocrity.

In both of the businesses above, as a property trader and a real estate agent, I was working someone else’s method. The things I was doing weren’t actually my thing. In both situations I was trying to fit myself into someone else’s model or idea. Independent Agent is not like that. This is how we want the business to be for you as our clients.

And so, while there is nothing new under the sun, and certainly there are other businesses similar to Independent Agent, I like to think that I dreamed up this particular way of doing real estate on my own. You won’t get a highly compliant and supportive business model, with your own branding and identity freedom and a great pay rate anywhere else.

I see this as a response to a need in the market combined with a particular skill set, risk appetite and drive in me. I am doing it because I want to work with people and put something out into the world that helps others realise their dreams.

I am more passionate about this business than I have been about ANYTHING to do with work EVER.

Can I just say here that there are many aspects of my life that I have stuck with as well! I have been playing music since I was in primary school, surfing since my teens – albeit with breaks in between. I have stuck to real estate as my main thing for almost 20 years. I am not going anywhere.

One of the reasons I write is to show you who I am – if you are thinking about partnering with us you want to know who you are dealing with. And so, this last bit gets a bit personal.

So, lastly, I have a secret superpower that I didn’t have before.

It’s called sobriety.

I know many of you reading this have this already, or are able to drink in moderation. Whether you know it or not, you have an advantage right there! I don’t tend to do moderation all that well, and so these last 5 years of my adult life are the first time that I have had this superpower. It is a game changer for me.

Any disappointment was an opportunity to drink. Any win, ditto. Bored? Have a drink. Stressed and busy. Better have a drink.

Get the picture?

And when you are on a roll of any one of these – disappointment, success, boredom, stress, the opportunities for a drink are constant. And so, in the words of Brene Brown (in her talk with Tim Ferriss) I have a super-power called sobriety. It simply means I can maintain constant waves of disappointment, success, boredom (I don’t have a lot of that these days) and/or busy stress in a healthy manner that doesn’t involve drunkenness, hangovers, or withdrawals. It allows for considered and clear-headed reflection, thought and decision making.

And to me, that sounds like a great way to be running a business.