Chris Helder will be speaking at Prop20 in March and April. To register for this event visit proprea.com.au.
What is your background?
My background is in real estate. I was an agent. I have been a speaker and training real estate agents for 18 years. My life has been working and helping develop Australian salespeople and property managers and leaders within Australia.
What will you be talking about at Prop20?
The angle I’m going to take is that we all have a reality, and we have challenging times, but it is identifying that positive thinking doesn’t work and negative thinking doesn’t work.
Instead, make a move away from emotional thinking and move onto useful thinking.
Making a very simple shift that takes you to a place where there’s the most useful activity and useful actions. It’s also about getting ourselves to take action on an everyday, consistent basis to execute a process.
Useful belief is all about putting together a belief system that supports your business. One of the greatest things about it is there are so many different ways to be successful in real estate.
You can be old, you can be young, you can be female, you can be male, you can be tall, you can be short and I think what you have to be is consistent. You have to have a process that works. So coming up with useful actions and a belief system that supports you every day is critical.
What’s the difference between useful belief and positive thinking?
The studies show positive thinking doesn’t work. They show that when you lay in bed in the morning and go “come on, be positive today. You can do it. Just try to be positive”. Then at 10am, when something bad happens, you can’t sustain that level of positivity, and now you feel worse about yourself than when you started.
Real estate is a win-lose business. You’re going to have victories and you’re going to have defeats. Useful belief is completely different to positive thinking because you’re waking up every morning and thinking, “what are the most useful actions for me to do?”
What’s a useful belief? “This is the best time ever in the history of the world to be in real estate.” Or it might be “This is the best time to be alive.”
There are two things that stop growth for agents. One is that they focus on things they can’t control, and the second is that they focus on things that are not going to change. If you can’t change it, or you won’t change it, then you might as well come up with a useful belief about it.
With real estate, if you don’t like it, don’t do it. But if you’re going to do it, then let’s put together a process and a useful mindset that’s going to help you be successful.
Is there one trap you see real estate agents constantly falling into?
One of the things I’ll be talking about is all the noise that’s out there today. There’s so much information, and I always say we don’t have an information problem in real estate, we have an implementation problem and in real estate.
The trap we fall into is that we don’t recognise the things that are useful in the course of our day. What is an income-producing activity, and how can we maximise that? What’s not an income-producing activity or not useful, and how can we minimise that?
