ALWAYS BE THE BUYER!

THE MINDSET THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING!

Welcome back, my friends, I’m excited to talk with all of you about today’s topic. As the title indicates, we’re talking about something that everyone listening should have some frame of reference about. I’m going to make an assumption that everyone listening has bought something before. I’m going to make an assumption that you have, at some point in your life, been the buyer to somebody else’s selling position. You’ve bought something at a gas station, you’ve bought something at a clothing store, you’ve made big purchases like a house or a car, and you know what it feels like to be the buyer in some way, shape, or form. 

Why are we talking about being the buyer and what does this have to do with anything? Great question! The reason we’re talking about it is because it’s one of the mindsets I learned from one of my coaches many years ago that had a profound effect on almost every aspect of my life and business. All credit to the Strategic Coach, Mr. Dan Sullivan, for this one, although I will happily take credit for simplifying the concept for you in this episode. If any of you are familiar with the Strategic Coach, you’ll know that his thinking is very high level, and some of the things he teaches can take a while to really sink in and grasp at a deeper level. I’m not saying this is a difficult to understand idea, just that hearing it from Dan can be a bit confusing until you know and understand how he thinks and how he adds lots of context from other parts of his coaching concepts to everything else. If you’re not familiar with the rest of his ideas and coaching principles, some things won’t make sense right away. 

So, to just lay it all out right from the get go, always being the buyer is a mindset that says, instead of always trying to sell yourself to other people, instead of letting other people set the standards for you, instead of always stepping into another person’s frame and letting them dictate how things will go, always be the one who needs nothing from anybody else, but knows exactly what you want, why you want it, how much you’re willing to pay for it, and always be 100% willing to walk away if it doesn’t fit what you’re looking for. Of course, I’m not really speaking about buying something like a car, a handbag, or a sweater, although this absolutely works great when doing those things too. No, what we’re talking about is an attitude, a mindset, and a way of being in the world whereby you are always the one making the choice because you’re always the buyer. If you don’t like or accept what is being offered, you simply walk away. 

It sounds simple, I know, but to really understand this idea, it helps to know the deeper parts that it stems from because, quite often, we don’t know why we choose what we choose, why we do what we do, and why we act the way we act. Having a deeper understanding of those things will help us understand better where we might start applying this mindset of always being the buyer. 

The root of this idea comes from the understanding that, at some level, everyone is in competition with someone else for status, for resources, for success, for things, and for recognition. The need for validation is often what drives many of our choices whether we know it or not. We have needs in our personal relationships for validation, we have needs in our professional lives for validation in some way, and we seek out opportunities, even if unconsciously, to have those needs and desires validated by others. 

When you buy a Louis Vuitton handbag, for example, you’re not doing so because it’s so awesome at holding all your shit, you’re doing so to signal to the world that you are somebody. You’re secretly seeking validation from the world that you’re someone important, you’re somebody who can afford this kind of thing, you’re somebody high class, you’re worth expensive things, you want to be like others who have that thing, and a whole host of other hidden needs and desires. In essence, even though you’re the buyer of the handbag, you’re really selling to the world that you can compete with everyone else who has similar things. You’re selling yourself to the world for validation and competing in that marketplace. Being the buyer, in this instance, would be to not need validation in any way and not need the Louis Vuitton handbag as a prop.

In essence, always being the buyer means, instead of always taking our cues from the external and needing validation from others, we are always working on ourselves from the inside out. The buyer never compares him or herself to others, but instead only to who they were yesterday. Always being the buyer means taking 100% responsibility for all of your faults and failings, learning from them and getting better every day in some way. When you’re the seller, you can get rejected and it’s the buyer who gets to reject you. When you want something from somebody else, although you might think yourself the buyer in that scenario, you’re not, you’re the seller in that you have an internal desire, so you are selling yourself to get something, you’re giving away your options for walking away. It’s only when you get to the point where you really have no need for any kind of social validation because you’re always working on you from the inside out, that you can say that you’ve reach buyer-hood. Remember, the buyer is the one who gets to say yes or no, the seller is the one needing and hoping for somebody to buy what they’re selling and can get rejected. When you’re mindset is that of the buyer, you can never get rejected because even a rejection is simply fuel for growth. 

With all of that said, let me give you the 5 things you must be working on in order to always be the buyer. 

The first thing you must always be working on to have the ‘buyer’ mindset is where you’re going. If you don’t know where you’re going, any direction is ok, and you’ll always be looking for validation from others on whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. Goals are a vision of yourself in the future. In the episode I did recently called ‘Goal Setting is For Suckers’, I expressed my feelings about how most people get goal setting wrong. Goal setting is essentially good for giving you direction and giving you a vision of yourself in some future state. However, getting there is more an act of figuring out who you have to become as a person, and what daily habits need to be adopted to reach that future state. In essence, you have to adopt the mindset of the buyer in that you set the direction, you set the standards for achievement, you set the KPIs and metrics, and you set the path. You’re doing the choosing, which is what a buyer does. You make the choices, but only if you know where you’re going. Somebody can come along and try to sell you on why that’s not doable but, as the buyer, you get to choose whether or not the input is valid given your vision. You must know where you’re going if you want to always be the buyer. 

The second thing you must have is a very strong sense of what matters most. If you want to be truly in control of your future and who you’re becoming, you have to develop very strong filters and standards for what are acceptable experiences, people, standards, opportunities, things, and relationships. In essence, if you don’t know what matters most to you and your future, you can’t have the mindset of the buyer. The buyer knows what she wants, the sellers is always pandering in some way to sell what they have. If you don’t have a strong sense of what matters most given your path, your goals, and your vision of the future you, you’ll always be at the mercy of the seller mindset and will be easily swayed by those who may not be headed in the same direction as you. You’ve got to know what matters most if you want to be in the position of always being the buyer. 

The third thing you must be solid on if you want to have the mindset of always being the buyer is knowing what doesn’t matter. ‘Blaine, didn’t you just tell me that I have to know what matters most?’, Yes! And now I am telling you that the other side of knowing what matters most is knowing what doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had and how many people and companies we’ve coached that have never given any thought to either of these things. They don’t know what matters most, and maybe even more importantly, what doesn’t matter. 

As we grow and have experiences in life and business, if we’re contemplative and thoughtful about our experiences, and if we take full responsibility for all of those experiences, we learn from all of them and we start to gather mental and emotional lists of things we don’t like, people we don’t want to associate with anymore, and hopefully an even longer list of just what doesn’t matter. I really can’t express enough just how important this list of ‘doesn’t matters’ is for leading a life of productivity, happiness, prosperity, and peace. The sooner and clearer you become on what doesn’t matter any longer, the closer you are to knowing what does matter for you. The quicker you get clear on what doesn’t matter, the quicker you learn what to say no to. You can identify it when it’s walking toward you. You know it when you hear it or see it. It becomes very identifiable in a variety of ways, and you get very good at saying, ‘Nope! That’s not for me, move along!’

Remember, the mindset we’re talking about is to always be the buyer. The buyer mindset is one who knows what she wants, why she wants it, what matters most, what doesn’t matter most, and what your standards are for everything in life. When you are always thinking like the buyer, you don’t let in people who aren’t for your highest and best future. When you’re always thinking like the buyer, you don’t accept all clients just because they’re waving an order in your face. When you think like the buyer, you put everyone and everything through a filter to decide if it’s something you want, something you need, something that serves you, something that serves others, and something that matches with your goals, aspirations, and vision for your best future. 

I’ll share with you some examples of the buyer mindset from a couple of my businesses. The first, and probably the easiest one to share, would be from my coaching business. After coaching thousands of individuals and dozens of companies over the last 25 years, I can think back on a whole slew of experiences with people that I would never choose again. I made decisions to accept them into my life and circle for whatever reason or need I had at the time and ended up regretting it immensely. If I just blamed the other person for being the one with the issues, I would never learn from the experience and would likely continue to attract similar scenarios into my life and business, which I did many times. 

However, over time and as I learned about taking full responsibility for all my experiences, instead of blaming the other person, I started to ask myself what it was about me that attracted that experience, what was there for me to learn, how can I gain from the experience, and what material is here for me to grow from. Over time, I got much better at internalizing those painful situations and recognizing similar ones heading my way. Once I started reminding myself that I am the buyer and I get to choose what I accept and what I won’t, everything changed. I started turning away potential Aikido students and coaching students. If they didn’t fit what I knew I wanted to surround myself with, I simply said ‘no, I’m not buying’. It didn’t matter how much pleading they would do after being refused, I stood firm because I knew at that point what mattered to me and what didn’t. I knew who would take too much of my life energy and who would add to it in a positive way. 

Back in 2010, we started applying the same buyer mindset to our lender clients in my appraisal business. We started acting like the buyer instead of always trying to sell our services hoping they’d buy what we were selling. We created a client application that we made potential new clients fill out if they wanted to work with us. Did they all fill it out? Absolutely not! Many laughed at us. Why? Because they had yet to run into an appraiser that wasn’t selling and was, instead, only buying. We were turning the tables a bit in that most of them had never met an appraiser who told them ‘no, we’re not interested in doing business that way, thanks anyway’. It was painful and a bit scary, to be completely transparent with you. The good thing about that time was that we were going out of business anyways because of the downturn in 08’ and 09’, and the almost complete gutting of appraisal fees with the rise of AMCs. I simply said, ‘if this is the way the business is going to be, which sucks!, why not try to do it the way we would do it if it was up to us?’

What I learned from that experience is that it is always up to us! It’s always up to you because you’re always the buyer, as long as you know what it means and how to hold firm to that conviction. We remodeled our business as the buyer of services instead of being the seller. We chose you; you didn’t choose us. If you chose us, we interviewed you because we get to decide, not you. It was a complete mindset shift, a little bit of a behavior shift, and it motivated us to shift some activities as well. The net result 12 years later is a completely different business that seems to survive ups and downs completely differently than other similar businesses. 

Another example I’ll share with you is from Jolene’s business. Jolene is a well-known and respected stylist and salon business coach in our area. About 5 years ago Jolene began her journey into the mindset of always being the buyer. She became much more discerning about who she’d accept as a client, who gets her time, who she coaches, and what mattered most to her. Five years later and her business looks completely different. She’s more than doubled her income in half the time she used to work, she only works with clients that lift her up emotionally, instead of draining her, and life looks vastly different. She chose to always be the buyer and set the standards for her life and business, and everything shifted for her. 

So, those are the first 3 things you must be very clear on to evolve into always being the buyer. There are two more key things you’ll have to get clear on to make this work for you. The first of those two is knowing who your team is, the second is knowing what the best in every area of life and business are looking for. Let me explain.

When I say know who your team is, I am referring to you knowing who’s in and who’s not. As you develop clarity about how to always be the buyer, you’ll start to identify people who are not for you, but you’ll always get clear on people who are like you in that way, even if they don’t know they ‘always be the buyer’ mindset. These are people who have the motivation, the charisma, the mindset, and the attitude of growth, positivity, inspiration, and never-ending development of themselves and others. Once your mindset shifts, you become tuned in to a different frequency and that frequency attracts others just like you. 

The second part of that is knowing what those people and businesses want. We’ve talked about this before in a different and more practical way. I’ve said many times on this show that, to be really good in business, you have to know what’s important and valuable to your clients and customers. We know from working and coaching in the appraisal industry that 99.9% of appraisers never ask their clients what is important to them or how they can help their clients be more successful. Why do they not seek this information out? Ego, attitude, lack of business training, failure to understand the fundamentals of business, primarily. It’s really just simple ignorance, maybe a little laziness mixed with a touch of fear. The fear coming from the concern that the client may tell them they want something the appraiser can’t or is unwilling to deliver. 

When you are always the buyer, you are looking for people and businesses who think and act like you. You need to know what the best are looking for, which is to always be evolving and getting better. If that’s what you want to attract, doesn’t it make sense that there are others out there who think and feel the same? Of course! They’re out there, but you won’t be in business or fellowship with those type of people if you can’t think as big as they do. 

Know where you’re going, know what matters most, know what doesn’t matter, know who’s in and who’s not, and know what the best want. My friends, raise your standards, raise your level of service, raise your vibration and mindset, and always be the buyer!

Until next week, I’m out…