Let me ask you a simple but very important question? “Do you find yourself consistently inconsistent in your real estate business and personal life?” How do we hold ourselves accountable and stop procrastinating? How do we break that consistently inconsistency trend in business and life?
One simple answer is to get an accountability buddy. Think back to school. What motivated you to finally finish a paper? Was it a love of learning? Knowing how valuable this skill was going to be in the future? No. It was probably a looming deadline and the threat of a failing grade for turning it in late.
During school, we have built-in accountability. For grown-up goals like starting a business, losing weight, or writing a book, there’s typically no accountability for us to get it done. Accountability buddies can help us make meaningful progress. Surrounding ourselves with people invested in our success is the best way to make progress on our goals. Follow these steps to set up an accountability buddy.
Accountability helps you stay focused on your goals. As a real estate agent, you have a lot of competing priorities. You need to find new clients, nurture existing relationships, manage your listings, and close deals. It's easy to get distracted or overwhelmed by all the demands on your time and attention. But when you hold yourself accountable for your goals, you stay focused on what's most important. You set clear objectives, create a plan to achieve them, and track your progress along the way. This helps you stay motivated and on track, even when the going gets tough.
- Create a schedule and commit - Decide how frequently you’ll meet. Once a week is a good starting point. You’ll have time to get things done in between your meetups (either in person or on the phone), but not so long that you start procrastinating or forgetting what you agreed to. Then set a time and commit. Put it on your calendar and don’t let anything get in the way.
- Help your buddy (and yourself) set better goals - Then we have a broad goal like “get healthy,” the failure comes in not knowing where to start. What do we do this month, this week, today, to make that happen? If we can’t answer that simply, how are we supposed to act on it? Create SMART objectives that follow these guidelines:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-oriented
- Be honest with each other - My friend recently told me about an event he attended. A group of women were brought in to give direct feedback about how they perceived a group of men’s clothing and demeanor. Try to imagine what happened. “The guys were crying,” my friend said. “Nobody had ever given us this kind of brutal feedback.” My friend realized he’d never received brutally honest feedback on how he interacted with women. We should subject ourselves to uncomfortable situations where we take on the “beginner’s mind” and force ourselves to grow. An accountability buddy gives us the rare opportunity for brutal honesty.
- Ask great questions - Smart people ask questions because they know it’s the best way to get to the true heart of a matter. When you say you were too busy to work out this week, what are you really saying? Chances are you had time to watch Netflix or go out for drinks, so what really held you back? Maybe you were nervous about walking into a new gym. By asking great questions, you and your accountability buddy can break through invisible barriers.
- Gamify accountability with your friends - I love bets. There are myriad psychological studies about public commitment, which is highly persuasive. If you tell a group of people, you’re going to stop smoking, you’re highly motivated to hit that goal. You can do this with your accountability buddy, too. If you each set a goal, bet who will hit it first. Or you can keep score of who completes more of their weekly tasks. Make it fun!
Accountability helps you build trust with your clients. Real estate is a relationship business. Your clients are trusting you to help them buy or sell one of the biggest assets they'll ever own. They want to work with someone they can trust, someone who is honest, reliable, and committed to their success. When you hold yourself accountable for your actions and decisions, you demonstrate that you take that trust seriously. You show that you are willing to do whatever it takes to help your clients achieve their goals, even if it means admitting when you've made a mistake.
Accountability helps you learn and grow. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes from time to time. But when you hold yourself accountable for your results, you turn those mistakes into opportunities for learning and growth. You ask yourself what you could have done differently, what you can learn from the experience, and how you can improve in the future. This helps you become a better agent, a better business owner, and a better person.
If this was so easy, we wouldn’t need to be held accountable and we all need to find that accountability. That consistently being inconsistent happens to us all. I challenge you to take one step towards accountability this coming week and in a few weeks email me wade@agentsboost.com what changes you have noticed from those steps you have taken!!
Strength and courage,
Wade
