Hi everybody, Cheryl Knowlton coming at you with your dynamite idea of the day.
Today’s idea is a story. Once upon a time when I was the branch broker for a thriving, growing office, I recruited 40 agents in nine months, which was a huge, wonderful part of my career that I look back on with fondness and will need to be highly medicated to ever do that ever again. I digress.
I need to leave real estate
One day I got a call from one of my agents. I loved my team. Every single one of them were like family to me and we called ourselves Team Awesome. I literally had jackets made that said Team Awesome. She was the first one, we’ll call her Carrie, she called me one day and she said, “I need to leave the team. Actually, I need to leave real estate.”
You could have pushed me over with a feather. I was sitting in my car. I still remember where. “What in the world is going on?” She was relatively newly married. She was working real estate as a second job. This agent was just really having a hard time. “I just can’t make this work and I think I’m going to need to put my license on inactive status.” “What is going on?”, I said.
Wow, I’m getting emotional telling you this story because it made me feel so, so sad that she genuinely felt this way. She said, “When I work my other job, my husband gets it. He knows that when I’m scheduled I have to go in and I’m going to be at work and I’m not available, but,” and this is where my stomach did some kind of Cirque de Solei activity, she said, “He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that even if we’ve had something planned for weeks or months with family or with friends, when my clients call, if I have a buyer that comes into town or a buyer calls me, they come first.”
Keep those appointments with your family
I thought, oh, my gosh, timeout. There’s your problem. You never ever treat your family like they are second class citizens. If you have something planned with yourself, whether that is an appointment to go see the doctor or the dentist, or to have a health screening that you desperately need to have done, or an appointment to work out, or an appointment to take a nap, you need to handle that and you need to take care of you. Second of all, you’ve got to take care of those precious relationships in your life, your significant other, your children above all things. If you get a buyer-client that calls you and wants to go see property, that’s fantastic. Have the boundaries in your life and your business and the discipline to set those times and stick to it. When they call those relationships do not come first.
I just was so, so sad for Carrie, we will call her and the way that she was approaching this. You cannot be successful in real estate and build a life and a career that you love if you are putting yourself and/or the most precious relationships in your life second. Do not ever treat your family as second class citizens.
That is my dynamite tip of the day.