If you ask top real estate coach and mindset specialist Tanja Lee the secret to success, her answer is surprisingly simple – self-belief.
Just as Henry Ford once wrote, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” Tanja believes agents’ inner thoughts are the element that most controls their success in the industry.
“Strategies and resources will never work or last on top of what is known as a disempowered belief system,” she says.
“So if you believe you’re overweight, if you believe you’re broke, if you believe you don’t have time and money or the resources to make a difference to what you’re doing, then it’s unlikely you will take action to fulfil it.”
Speaking as part of Elite Agent’s 33-hour, continuous Zoomathon training session, Tanja invited agents to consider two distinct groups of people.
Those who are unsuccessful, unhappy and unfulfilled, and those who are the opposite.
Tanja says the unsuccessful group has a list of reasons they fail, such as not having enough time, energy or resources, and they are disempowered.
“The successful folks, they have results,” Tanja explains.
“The reason they have results is that they’re more resourceful with the things that other people aren’t, and therefore they have access to being empowered.”
Knowing versus doing
Tanja says agents that are not successful know what they should be doing to reach their goals, but their disempowered belief system stops them from taking action to reach them.
“A disempowered belief system around prospecting could mean having thoughts like, ‘I’m an interruption, I’m an annoyance, and they don’t want to hear from me’,” she says.
“So you’re not going to be inspired to pick up the phone, make a call and connect.
“You know you should be connecting with 25 people a day, five days a week, to get that momentum, to get the opportunity to appraise or do a listing consultation… but the reason you don’t do it is because your belief system is not empowered.”
Flipping the script
Tanja says every time something happens in life we, as humans, create a story around it.
So agents who are not successful will see a potential client telling them ‘no’ as them not being good enough, or turn a minor failure into meaning they are a failure.
“As soon as you collapse what happened, and the negative belief or story you tell yourself, you start to access your own greatness and you access your own personal empowerment,” Tanja says.
The key to turning things around is to turn your internal dialogue around in a realistic fashion.
Tanja says while she’s a big fan of auto-suggesting, positive affirmations don’t work because they are not sustainable.
Instead, she recommends you change your thoughts incrementally.
“If you’re broke or struggling financially, and you’re walking around and saying I’m rich and successful, your subconscious mind knows it’s not the truth,” Tanja says.
“I’d rather you use your language to build a bridge to where you want to get to. For example, you could start saying things like, ‘I’m becoming more masterful with my money’.
“So you need an empowered definition, definition is decisive, your perception is your reality, if you’ve got a negative definition of yourself or a task you have to do to succeed in real estate, you’re unlikely to utilise all the learnings, the strategies or the insight that you’re learning.”
The final piece of the puzzle
Tanja says the last thing agents need to do to turn things around is combine their empowered beliefs with a development plan to build the skills they don’t have and couple that with a hardy attitude.
“Couple that with the willingness to rise – the willingness to rise resiliently even in the face of rejection, even when times are tough and even when the market shifts,” she says.
