There are two ways to make it in this business, the hard way and the smart way. Most agent’s think if they just work hard enough and pay their dues they’ll make it. Yet the statistics prove that’s far from the truth. Working yourself to death doesn’t get you wealth. It just burns you out and destroys your self-confidence and leaves you broken with little to show for all your hard work. Doing “what everyone else does” isn’t how you work smarter and it isn’t how you build your own personal wealth.
Working smarter means your focus has to be on results and productivity not activity. Activity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with results. Review your activity this week. How many appointments were you able to hold? Of those appointments how many have a realistic chance of turning into business within the next three months? If you find that getting appointments is a struggle and that few of the people you meet with are real prospects accept that you’re working harder not smarter.
Productivity is directly proportional to the quality of the appointments you hold. If you want to increase the quality of your appointments you have to change who you’re focusing on and why. If you don’t know why someone should want to meet with you how do you expect them to? Because we are very self-centered and always looking out for something that benefits me you can’t expect us to guess or extrapolate why we should want to meet with you.
You need to know your prospects better than they know themselves. That’s impossible when you’re trying to meet with anyone and everyone. You must be able to clearly articulate an emotionally powerful benefit that the people you want to meet with really want.
If wealth building were directly proportional to effort there would be a ton of success in the industry, but we both know that isn’t the case. Doing what everyone else is doing just doesn’t help you. When you do that you’re nothing more than a commodity and that’s a very unattractive position to be in. As a commodity you don’t build a relationship. You don’t build loyalty and you don’t build a business that will enhance your personal wealth.
There are two ways to make it in this business, the hard way and the smart way. Most agent’s think if they just work hard enough and pay their dues they’ll make it. Yet the statistics prove that’s far from the truth. Working yourself to death doesn’t get you wealth. It just burns you out and destroys your self-confidence and leaves you broken with little to show for all your hard work. Doing “what everyone else does” isn’t how you work smarter and it isn’t how you build your own personal wealth.
Working smarter means your focus has to be on results and productivity not activity. Activity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with results. Review your activity this week. How many appointments were you able to hold? Of those appointments how many have a realistic chance of turning into business within the next three months? If you find that getting appointments is a struggle and that few of the people you meet with are real prospects accept that you’re working harder not smarter.
Productivity is directly proportional to the quality of the appointments you hold. If you want to increase the quality of your appointments you have to change who you’re focusing on and why. If you don’t know why someone should want to meet with you how do you expect them to? Because we are very self-centered and always looking out for something that benefits me you can’t expect us to guess or extrapolate why we should want to meet with you.
You need to know your prospects better than they know themselves. That’s impossible when you’re trying to meet with anyone and everyone. You must be able to clearly articulate an emotionally powerful benefit that the people you want to meet with really want.
If wealth building were directly proportional to effort there would be a ton of success in the industry, but we both know that isn’t the case. Doing what everyone else is doing just doesn’t help you. When you do that you’re nothing more than a commodity and that’s a very unattractive position to be in. As a commodity you don’t build a relationship. You don’t build loyalty and you don’t build a business that will enhance your personal wealth.
Both your success and your failures are largely due to your habits as expressed through your attitudes. You can choose to control and change your attitudes. When you change your underlying attitudes you will change your level of success.
Attitudes are just habits of thoughts. You outwardly express those habits of thought, attitudes, through the actions you either take or don’t take. You developed your habits and attitudes very early in life. In fact, scientific research indicates that we develop most of our attitudes before the age of five. So if you’re very old at all you have a long history of practicing those attitudes. They are so natural to you because of all that practice that you respond automatically without even thinking. If I were to say the word “kitchen” to you you’d automatically have a reaction to that word. You wouldn’t see the word “kitchen” you’d see a particular kitchen and that thought would evoke an emotional response tied to your attitudes about kitchens. A kitchen might evoke a warm and loving reaction in you or you might feel negatively about kitchens because to you they just mean a lot of work. The same word will have a very different reaction depending on your underlying attitudes. Have you ever noticed how someone can mention one word and you automatically feel angry? Why do you feel that way? Does it even make sense in the current situation? Sometimes when you ask yourself you realize it doesn’t.
Some attitudes serve you well and others keep holding you down. The key is to begin to question and challenge your attitudes. Some attitudes keep you from achieving success because they’re counterproductive to what you’re trying to achieve. When you were little, the adults around you probably told you not to talk to strangers. As a little person you don’t question what you were told you accepted it as fact. So, now as an adult if you need to talk to people because you’re in sales that little person within you is reluctant to do so. You’re not supposed to talk to strangers so approaching strangers is a very hard thing for you to do. Does it still make sense? When you were little is sure did. But now that attitude is keeping you from being a warm and open person who finds it easy to meet new people.
Attitudes and habits usually take time to change. There are instances when something strikes you so dramatically or traumatically that you instantly change your attitudes and habits, but usually it takes time and practice. You can’t change what you don’t realize so thinking about and identifying the attitudes you hold is important. When you have a “can’t” attitude it’s nearly impossible to achieve success in anything. How often do you hear yourself saying, “I can’t”? Just for the heck of it keep track for one week.
If you want to change attitudes and habits they have to be replaced. Trying to just eliminate the old habits and attitudes without replacing them with new ones is self-defeating. You’ll just go back to them after a short while because even though you don’t like the results you’re attitudes and habits are getting you, they are rewarding to you on some level. So your new attitudes and habits need to be more rewarding to you than the old ones, and you need to be consciously aware of those rewards.
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