THE SEVEN MINDSETS OF SUCCESS

If somebody had told me when I first got into business that success leaves clues, others have done this before you and you can learn from them, and your mindset will determine your success or failure, I would have said, ‘tell me everything you know, because I want to be successful!’ Unfortunately, I wasn’t that mature, I wasn’t that wise, and I made some mistakes along the way. In this episode, I’m going to share with you the seven key mindsets that I learned along the way that made all the difference…let’s get into it!

Starting off the new year talking about mindset, and why not? After all, if you’re in any of the real estate related industries like appraisal, sales, lending, title, inspections and so on, you probably have a little more time on your hands today than you did this same time last year. There are a variety of things I believe you should be doing with the time, and we’ve been talking about those things in the last few episodes. One of those things is getting your thinking on track and getting your mindset primed for success.

Let’s talk about the 7 mindsets I think you need to adopt in order to thrive when everyone else is franticly running about because of market changes and things outside of their control. We’re always talking to our coaching students about controlling the controllables and leaving the other stuff alone. One of things that you can control is your mindset and how you think, so, let’s get after it/

The first mindset I recommend sitting with and becoming part of your DNA is to see yourself as the CEO of You, Inc. One of the most important self-image characteristics and traits from which all others flow is the mindset and attitude of self-employment and radical responsibility. This becomes especially critical if you work for somebody else because the attitude of being absolutely 100% responsible for, and in charge of your destiny, is a vital distinction between consistent high achievers and those who don’t achieve or perform at high levels at all.

When you always see yourself as the CEO of You, Inc., you start to take responsibility for everything that goes on in your world and you take advantage of opportunities that the employee mindset in you may not have identified previously. The job of the CEO is to have a vision for the company, to live the core values and guiding principles, to inspire others to do the same, and to make the company profitable.

As CEO of You, Inc., you must have a clearly defined set of core values, a mission statement for yourself, a vision of where you’re going, and what profitability looks like for you as a person. If we tie this to the 5 forms of wealth that we coach on: time wealth, financial wealth, health wealth, social wealth, and spiritual wealth, it becomes easier to think of profitability in greater terms than just what a P&L statement might track and measure. How profitable are you in the time wealth category? How profitable are you in the health category? How about the relationship and spiritual wealth categories.

The way you approach your work, your business, your clients, your staff, your co-workers, and your colleagues should be from a position of the Chief Executive Officer in Charge of everything! You’re not just an appraiser or an agent or a loan officer, you are in the process of developing one of the most successful brands and versions of you that the world has ever seen. The attitude of being in charge of your own destiny is the critical distinction between success and mediocrity, or high achievement and outright failure.

The other distinction that comes from having this CEO mindset is that you take responsibility for always looking for ways to add value to your company and for your clients. The CEO’s job is to oversee all areas of the company and is ultimately responsible for the health of the company and the people within it. This means taking responsibility regardless of position, title, power, authority, or outlook, and always looking for ways to add value. After all, one of the CEO’s jobs is to increase the value of the stock of the organization.

Nobody is coming to save you as the CEO of You, inc. in all of the categories we mentioned a minute ago. As the CEO, it is up to you to have a vision and a plan for the increase or decrease in the metrics in any those areas. If you’re unhappy with the direction of any one of those areas, it’s up to the CEO to develop a plan for increase. If you were an employee at You, Inc., instead of the CEO, how would you rate you as a boss, a leader, a good steward of the gifts and talents you’ve been given? If it’s not where you want it to be, you have the power to make the change, after all, you’re the CEO of You!

The second vital mindset of success, now that you’ve become the CEO of You, is seeing and believing yourself to be a value consultant. This one requires a mindset shift in most cases from seeing yourself as just an appraiser, just a Realtor, or just a loan originator, to somebody who solves the biggest challenges and problems for a variety of clients.

When you make the mindset switch from, say, being an appraiser to being a value consultant for your clients, you become a market winning problem solver because the word value has multiple meanings. The definition of value that I am using when I call myself a value consultant is the broader definition of value that refers to the importance, the worth, and the usefulness that something has for somebody else. When I suggest you adopt the mindset of a Value Consultant, I am suggesting you shift your mind from thinking about the technical work that you do each day to earn a living, to thinking about how you can add value to the whole process for everybody involved with you.

Value Consultants see themselves as problem solvers in the larger sense of the term and aren’t merely thinking about getting paid on this one transaction. Value consultants are relation focused, not transaction focused. A Value Consultant is always looking at the big picture and thinking long term. Each client and each problem is pregnant with possibilities for future business, better business, networking opportunities, for helping to level up our clients and customers and all experience bigger paydays if you have eyes and congruent behavior to create those opportunities.

A typical appraiser looks at the fee paid to them and the value problem to be solved in that specific transaction. That means that the relationship is transactional and is only as valuable as the last transaction. The Value Consultant sees themselves as an advisor, a mentor, a trusted professional, and a valued friend. They differentiate themselves by being more concerned with helping their client in the long run than with being transactional and completing one appraisal or one transaction.

 The third mindset of success is that of being a strategic thinking. The top professionals in every category are strategic thinkers and doers. What does this mean? It means they are deliberate about almost everything they do. Strategic thinkers set clear goals for what they want to be, do, and have and then they work those goals backwards into monthly, weekly, or daily activities that can be tracked and measured for progress.  

 The average service professional throws him or herself into the market asking for work and they consume a lot of time and energy doing busy work because they aren’t strategic about what they want. They know they want appraisal work, for example, but that’s typically all they know. The set off into the world with that as their only goal and plan and, as you well know, that’s not a real plan. If that’s your only plan, then the only thing you have to track and measure is if you were busy doing something that day or not. Being busy is not a good metric of success. There are lots of busy people in the world not accomplishing much of anything. Not the strategic thinker. The Strategic thinker thinks ahead about what they want to achieve, what things will look like, how things will grow, and most importantly, how they will know when they’ve achieved it so they can set new plans and activities.

 The strategic thinker knows what they are going to earn in a given period, how much they will spend to do it, how much they will save for the future, and how much they will give away in the direction they are most inspired to do so. A professional value consultant with a clear blueprint for success is much more relaxed and at peace than the appraiser who is too busy to plan for their own success. When you’ve taken the vital time to plan out your path and chart your course, you have a track to run on and you know when you are getting off track.

 One of the critical aspects of being a strategic thinker is that, when you have a plan and a roadmap; small setbacks, roadblocks, and externalities will have little effect on your path because you are simply following your plan. If you must pivot or alter the plan, it’s a quick ramp back up and continue on your path. Without strategic thinking, setbacks, roadblocks, and externalities will throw all kinds of monkey wrenches onto your path and getting off course when you have no plan means you could end up in the extreme opposite direction of where you thought you wanted to be. If an airplane leaves LAX flying direct to Rome, Italy and is flying in a direct and straight line, it will take about 12 hours or so and you’ll land in Rome as planned. However, if the nose of the airplane is pointed a mere 1 degree off course to the south, after 12 hours the plane will land somewhere in Africa! You must be strategic with your thinking if you want to land where you plan to land.

The fourth mindset of success is having a ‘results only’ mindset. Another way I tend to think of this mindset is that of a transformation mindset. What I mean by that is that we see our mission in life and business as getting results, or some kind of transformation for those we work with. People who are results oriented don’t fear rejection, they don’t fear dealing with people, they don’t fear telling the truth if they think it will lead to better results, and they don’t fear doing things outside of their comfort zone because they know that fear limits results more than anything else. Fear has killed more dreams than anything else and fear is what keeps most people from realizing their true potential and their wildest dreams. When you become extremely results oriented you realize that the only thing that matters is getting result and focusing on the transformation for your clients and customers is one of the best ways to do this. Results that can be tracked and measured on your dashboard, results for your clients and customers, results for your family and friends, and results for you based on your blueprint for success.

 The fifth mindset of success is that of abundance. I’m sure you’ve heard this one before and that’s because it’s nearly impossible to be successful at anything with a lack mentality. An abundance mindset is one that believes there is always enough to go around and more than enough for everybody. We don’t see others in our industry as competition because there is enough for everybody. That doesn’t mean not to go after business in your market or rest while everybody else is trying to get the business, it simply means not to worry or fear losing out to a competitor because there is always enough for everybody, especially as you begin to separate yourself from the pack by being, as Jay Abrahams calls it, the preeminent provider of value consulting services in your market. Having an abundance mentality tunes your mind and body into the magnetic impulses and frequency of the thing you believe exists in abundance. Whatever comes to you is not taking away from somebody else!

 A lack mindset is one that focuses on scarcity and when you think in terms of scarcity you believe there is not enough to go around, which tunes your mind and body into the frequency of lack. Your brain will do everything in its power to find evidence of scarcity and lack all around you so that it can be right! You will see evidence all around you that fees are going down, AMCs are ruining the business, there’s too much competition in your market, and your profits are being eaten up by technology fees, software costs, gas prices, the cost of bread, and every other thing you can find to prove the false reality that there is not enough. There is enough, my friends, and the interesting thing is that when you make the mindset shift from scarcity to abundance, from lack to more than enough, your brain will begin to see the evidence of abundance all around, you just have to tune into that frequency.

 The great author and teacher, Wayne Dyer, has a great book out there titled, You’ll See it When You Believe It’. You see, almost everyone has heard or said the phrase, “I’ll believe it when I see it!”, as if seeing something with our own eyes first is the only way something could possibly exist. What Dr. Dyer posited is that, since the reticular activating system in our brains often has us seeing certain things in abundance while other things aren’t seen at all, much of this based on our beliefs about the world, we won’t be able to experience some of the things we might say we want if we don’t believe deep down that it’s even possible.

 I coach people every week who write out all the things they want to do, to be, and to have in the next 1, 3, and 10 years. What I often find when we start digging deep into their goals and aspirations is that sometimes they have deep seated beliefs that contradict some of those goals and aspirations. On the surface they say they want to do, be, or have this thing, but deep inside they have a belief that tells them they’re not good enough, they’re not worthy, they’re stupid, there’s not enough for everybody, I’m not deserving of more, and one of the worst ones I encounter, having more money makes me a bad person. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you will find it almost impossible to experience it in your reality. In essence, you’ll experience abundance when you believe it first.

 The sixth vital mindset of success is that of time as your most valuable currency and resource. When you begin to recognize that time is our most valuable currency, the decisions you make, from very small to the big ones, start to change. Time is one of the forms of wealth we’ve all been granted and how we use it determines what comes to us and what we experience. When you fail to recognize that time is a valuable currency and resource, you fail to make better decisions about how to spend it and how to invest it.

 One of the things that makes time so valuable is the same thing that makes gold valuable, for example: scarcity. When a resource is scarce, meaning it’s in short supply, it tends to increase in value. While we tend to believe we have all the time in the world, the reality is that time is a non-renewable resource, meaning once it’s been spent, it can never be recovered. You can’t renew or get back the minutes you spent listening to this podcast. The best you can do is take the return on the investment of your time and do something great with it.

 The other aspect of time that makes it so valuable is that we never know when the last moment will be. If you check your bank account today, you can see how much money you have in your bank account and get a sense of when the last dollar will run out based on a few simple calculations relative to your spending habits. When it comes to time, we may think we have another 10, 25, or 50 years left, but none of those years are guaranteed. We likely all know someone for whom we all believed had another day, only to be crushed by the news that they’re gone.

 This is not intended to be a depressing podcast, but until you recognize that time is your most valuable resource and currency, you may never wake up to the reality that time is scarce, fleeting, non-renewable, and also one of the most important mindsets to adopt for a better today and tomorrow.

 What so many fail to realize when it comes to time is the irony that we are all always trading our valuable time for something else, usually money. Most people spend a large portion of their valuable life energy working for income. Why do we work for income? So that we can live and move in society and experience the things we wish to experience in life. Another way to think about this tradeoff is to realize that we trade our most valuable resource for money, only to use that money to buy back our time with experiences. We use our money to go out to eat, to take vacations, to pay for our hobbies, to spend time with family, to invest in our futures, which we hope will be better than our past. We’re trading our time today to buy it back at some later date.

Start to grasp this mindset that time is our most valuable currency and resource, and you begin to make different decisions about how to spend it. My encouragement to you is start making better decisions with how you invest your time. Studies have shown that the average person wastes around 1300 hours scrolling social media. That’s around 25 hours per week, or an average of 3 and half hours per day. If you knew that tomorrow might be your last day on earth, how would you spend it? Would you scroll Facebook or Instagram for 3 or 4 hours? Use your time wisely friends.

The seventh mindset of success is one that was expressed the most effectively, in my opinion, by author, Stephen Covey, in his groundbreaking leadership book called, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, Dr. Covey talks about one particular mindset of highly effective and successful people and he referred to it as ‘sharpening the saw’. He said, “we must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” The saw in this metaphor is, of course, you!  We must always seek continuous improvement, growth, and renewal both personally and professionally.

To be truly successful you have to be healthy and happy. You have to have time to enjoy life and that entails spending time with loved ones, friends, family, and with yourself. It means taking some time to spend in nature, eating healthy foods that give you energy, vitality, and more life. It means making meaningful connections with other human beings, it means feeding your mind with good books, podcasts, healthy conversation, and programs like this one. And it means spending time nourishing your spirit through meditation, music, art, prayer, travel, giving, and in service to others.

We can’t possibly talk about the first six mindsets without wrapping them all up with this all-encompassing mindset of considering the whole you in this process. Sharpen your saw my friends. If you don’t take time regularly to renew, reinvigorate, refresh, and revitalize yourself in all of the areas that we all exist in, eventually things begin to break down. Your personal life suffers, your mental health and well-being suffers, your relationships suffer, your business suffers, and your physical being suffers, and eventually you hit rock bottom. Sharpening the saw means taking required time, not optional time, to sharpen your saw so that you can continue to use it to earn a living and live a prosperous life.

Those are the seven mindsets of success my friends and I recommend listening to this one a few times. As you listen, ask yourself where you sit on the mindsets spectrum. How many of these seven mindsets do we share? Do any of these resonate with you and, if so, what would it take for you to begin to change your current mindset and replace it with a more empowering one. Remember, how we think and what we believe affects what we see and experience. We all have the power to create a life and lifestyle of our choosing, but only with the proper mindsets. Adopt some form of these seven to do more, be more, live more, and give more.

Until next week, my friends, I’m out…