Get Fired Up!
What Today's Hot Motivational Trainers Are Saying
Some of the industry's top motivational and personal growth speakers are going to pump you up with new insights and ideas at the National Association of REALTORS® Annual Convention & Trade Exposition, Nov. 13-17, in New Orleans. Here's what three of them have to say.
Stephen R. Covey
Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey will discuss "Personal and Professional Effectiveness."
In First Things First, a book I coauthored with Roger and Rebecca Merrill, we suggest that the path to personal leadership follows the stepping-stones of vision, mission, balance, roles, goals, perspective, and integrity in the moment of choice. It's an ecological balancing process.
We invite you to think very carefully through this process and ask, What are my responsibilities in life? Who are the people I care about? The answers become the basis for thinking through your roles. Your goals are then set by asking, What is the important future state for each relationship or responsibility?
Setting up win-win agreements with people and maintaining positive relationships is not an efficient process; in fact, the process is usually slow. But once a win-win agreement is in place, the work will go fast. If you're efficient up front, you might be taking the slowest approach. Yes, you might drum your decision down someone's throat, but whether or not that person is committed to live by that decision and to carry it out is a different matter. Slow is fast; fast is slow.
Peter Drucker makes the distinction between a quality decision and an effective decision. You can make a quality decision, but if there isn't commitment to it, it won't be effective. There has to be commitment to make a quality decision effective. An executive may be highly efficient working with things but highly ineffective working with people.
Efficiency is different in kind from effectiveness: Effectiveness is a results word; efficiency is a methods word. Some people can climb the "ladder of success" very efficiently, but if it's leaning against the wrong wall, they won't be effective.
Efficiency is the value you learn when you work with things. You can move things around fast: you can move money, manage resources, and rearrange your furniture quickly. But if you try to be efficient with people on jugular issues, you'll most likely be ineffective. You can't deal with people as if you were dealing with things. You can be efficient with things, but you need to be effective with people, particularly on jugular issues. Have you ever tried to be efficient with your spouse on a tough issue? How did it go?
If you go fast, you'll make very slow progress. If you go slow and get deep involvement--doing what is necessary through synergistic communication based on a win-win spirit--you'll find that in the long run it's fast because then you have total commitment to it. You also have a quality decision simply because you have the benefit of different creative ideas interacting, providing a new solution that is better and more bonding.
Covey, who is cochairman of the Franklin Covey Co., Salt Lake City, will be the keynote speaker at the NAR general assembly, Nov. 17. More information about the Franklin Covey Co. is available on the Internet at http://www.franklincovey.com.
Christine Z. Doyle
An expert on balancing career and home life, Christine Z. Doyle, CRB,CRS®, GRI, will present an education session called "Steps to a Happier, Healthier Life."
When I ask students to write down their peak life experience, they come up with moments such as the birth of a child, their marriage, a favorite trip, or some special experience in their life unrelated to real estate.
No one has ever replied that a listing presentation is the peak life experience! So what is real estate all about? It's about creating a quality of life that will allow you to have peak moments. What can you do to improve the management of your time, how you feel each day, or how you mentally approach your career? A lot!
My grandmother used to get after me about eating my breakfast, saying, "You don't fill up a gas tank at the end of a trip; you do it at the beginning, Christine!" This seminar is about filling your tanks and maintaining your engines. You can't sell real estate unless you are feeling good, have plenty of energy, and are ready to hit the road every day.
Jerry Rossi
In an education session titled "The Honeymoon Is Never Over," Jerry Rossi, CRS®, an authority on communication, will discuss the importance of building strong relationships.
When you first meet with a buyer or a seller, it's like going on a date. You're eyeing each other, asking yourselves questions. Can these people help me accomplish my goals? Or are they more concerned with themselves than with me? When you decide that you like each other, you make a commitment--sort of like getting engaged.
Then there's a brief period of fun, promises, communications, happiness, and laughs in which you try to make each other happy. But after a while, if you don’t find a house, for example, the relationship starts to get tiresome.
The buyer or seller starts complaining. You each start distancing yourself from the other.
Does that have to happen? Do all relationships end up going sour? No. The reason I call this presentation "The Honeymoon Is Never Over" is that it's possible to develop wonderful relationships that literally never end.
Success in real estate today is all about building relationships. All top producers operate this way, even if they're not aware of it. How do you build a relationship? You read the clients, and on the basis of that reading, you talk to them and relate to them in a way that makes them feel comfortable.
Although many top producers have this natural ability to read people, it's actually a skill that can be taught.
For online information about the NAR Annual Convention & Trade Exposition, including online registration, access the Meetings/Calendar of Events portion of One Realtor Place® at http://www.REALTOR.COM.
