How you manage your mind pretty much determines how well you manage your life.
In this article, I want to address key questions around the development of mental skills beyond popular themes of positive thinking and resilience.
What is the immediate cost if you don’t do this well?
Why do most people miss how important it is to develop strong mental skills when it comes to developing high-performance skills, be it in sales or sports?
Some of the areas where people lack emotional control are:
- Dealing with rejection
- Dealing with cut-price competition
- Dealing with delays in decisions from clients
- Dealing with problems with partners and children
- Dealing with staff or their leaders and managers
- Dealing with not meeting their expectations of success
- Accepting that they may not have the ability to be that million-dollar agent that is
propagated by leaders as the only thing to aspire to.
In real estate sales, many salespeople have good months, hit their targets, and then the next month suddenly find themselves in a negative frame of mind, lacking motivation, just down in the dumps, and they’re not sure how it happened.
That state of mind snuck up and pervaded their thoughts, and suddenly they find themselves questioning their abilities and, to some extent, if they should be doing what they are doing and if they’re cut out for it.
Commonly, this can lead to imposter syndrome.
So, what happened?
As the pursuit of professional excellence continues, it becomes increasingly evident that our mental skills play a pivotal role in shaping our success journey, especially as competition increases not in skills but in volume, which invariably will lead to fee pressure for agents and property managers.
What most people struggle with is understanding the nature of emotions.
Yes, they are real when you are experiencing them, but no one spends time figuring out what caused that emotion.
Was it a fact or a feeling?
Did other people influence your thinking?
What was the event or stimulus that caused you to experience that emotion?
Was the emotion triggered by a past event from your childhood?
When a person is experiencing a range of emotions, telling that person to man up, get tough, or speaking to them like a badly behaved child and berated is not going to help.
These overwhelming emotions prevent people from thinking rationally.
So being positive in the moment is not always possible.
Your mental skills take centre stage as a salesperson facing a challenging month when you are not meeting targets, you’re struggling to stay positive, and everything seems to be a struggle.
The real key is developing an understanding of emotions and questioning how they were generated within you…what stimulated that emotion?
In fact, when we run this workshop on mental skills, the mental frameworks provide the one thing that people in challenging situations want the most: the choice of experiencing a constructive emotion in the moment.
There are four areas of causes that can stimulate diverse types of emotions that you need to understand and that are being created in your mind.
Once you use this checklist, it’s a basis for reviewing the emotion and making a choice.
- In the situation – Is the emotion you are feeling the right one for that situation? Y/N?
- How are you expressing that emotion? Will it get you to the goal that you want? Y/N?
- How and can you stop yourself from expressing unpleasant emotions and instead turn them into emotions that will lead to better actions by you? Y/N?
- Can you develop the awareness to stop these emotions from repeating and shutting down your ability to think rationally? Y/N
If you think about the areas where you lack emotional control, they have a profound impact on your success in life.
The economic and personal costs are huge.
Unfortunately, many people feel overwhelmed, which generates unhelpful emotions, which often result in hopelessness.
The inability to make a choice and therefore a helpful decision.
Imagine the same event, and instead, you feel challenged in a positive way, respond well to pressure, and in fact thrive, leading to excitement and embracing uncertainty.
This is the feeling of being alive and being in the moment.
Thoughts that are constructive are created, leading to helpful emotions, feelings, and actions.
Same event, different emotional choice.
Different result.
The key here is to have more than one view of the situation—a unique perspective.
The major benefit for everyone in developing different perspectives is that it does give us more choice in how we respond, and importantly, change becomes easier as a normal part of our behaviours.
Think about it this way.
One month, everything works.
The next month you’re off, and everything is hard.
It’s not like your skills have suddenly disappeared in one month, but your mindset has.
The difference to your bottom line…almost immediate.
Sharpen your mental skills and learn that there are always other options to respond to challenges.
