Persistence

By Dirk Zeller

I was asked recently what the one skill is that a REALTOR® needs in order to be successful. That was a tough question. The one skill…I thought about it over and over. There are so many skills Agents need to be successful. We have to have good presentation skills, marketing skills, negotiating skills, objection handling skills, technology skills. Then it hit me. All those skills pale in contrast to this one: Persistence. It is the one skill that will make up for our deficiencies in all the other areas. It will allow us to win in life no matter what obstacles that are placed in front of us.

Calvin Coolidge our 30th president said it very well. “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Geniuses will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

It truly is a noble skill to have the ability to move forward when everything around you is collapsing, meeting the challenge head on and grinding through the competition. We are all professionals or we aspire to be a professional. The definition of a professional is someone who does something even when he doesn’t feel like doing it. Many of us know what we need to do; yet we don’t do it. We spend our time looking for the one step that will change our life, rather than using the path of persistence to win. We look around for the magic answer that will solve all our problems. Do you realize that over 80% of the late night infomercials are centered on “get rich quick or lose weight instantly”? We live in a liposuction society where we want abundance-yesterday. We don’t want to do the diligent, persistent work to achieve success. My friend Zig Ziglar has a great line. That is: “Life is like a cafeteria. First you pay then you get to eat.” It’s not a restaurant where you sit down, get served and get your fill. When you are full and satisfied, then the bill arrives. You have to pay before you receive the reward.

Persistence is crucial to ultimate success in life. To learn the skill of persistence you must first learn to persist in the little things. The first step for mastery of persistence is the ability to decide, and have the clarity of decision that you will do it or else. Start with persistence in your eating habits or workout habits. You could even just select one thing or task you need to do today. Then make sure you complete it before the end of the day. Don’t ever end your day before you get it done.

We often select too many things or set the bar too high too early. This will cause us to fall short, and the negative self-talk will begin. The journey to run a marathon begins with a walk around the block. Start with the walk around the block, and in a few days go twice around. Then in a week you can do 4 times around. By the end of the month you will be able to walk a mile. The process in business is the same. Start with calling a few past clients or sphere of influence. Call 5 people a day. You don’t need to do 4 hours of prospecting. That’s like running a marathon without training. If you managed to actually do it, which would be rare, you would be so sore and tired and spent. You would be worthless for a week. Build the skill of persistence.

The best technique to learn persistence is to just start. The truth is, it’s the start that stops most people. Just beginning is the biggest barrier for everyone. Getting your sneakers on and stepping on the treadmill or picking up the phone the first time is never as bad as our mind makes it out to be. Once you begin, you pick up momentum and that positive self-talk of accomplishment. My father taught me a saying many years ago. It is a saying about persistence. It’s a saying that exemplifies his life.

Once a task has begun
Never leave until it’s done
Though the task be great or small
Do it well or not at all.

Persistence is by far and away the skill that we need to master. It is the one skill that guarantees success in both your personal and professional life. There is no substitute. Remember it is the start that stops most people.

BY Dirk Zeller

Real Estate Champions

http://www.realestatechampions.com/

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How to Stay Motivated!

By Gleb Reys

It is hardly a secret that the key to successfully accomplishing one goal after another is staying motivated. There are, of course, tasks that you may not like at all, yet you find motivation to complete even them because you recognize how each particular task serves a greater goal.

How exactly do some of us manage to stay motivated most of the time? Here are just a few ideas you can try:

1) Find the Good Reasons

Anything you do, no matter how simple, has a number of good reasons behind it. Not all the tasks have the good reasons to do them seen at first sight, but if you take just a few moments to analyze them, you will easily spot something good. We also have many tasks which don’t need any reasoning at all – we’ve been doing them for so long that they feel natural.

But if you’re ever stuck with some task you hate and there seems to be no motivation to complete it whatsoever, here’s what you need to do: find your good reasons. They may not be obvious, but stay at it until you see some, as this will bring your motivation back and will help you finish the task.

Some ideas for what a good reason can be:

• a material reward – quite often, you will get paid for doing something you normally don’t like doing at all
• personal gain – you will learn something new or will perhaps improve yourself in a certain way
• a feeling of accomplishment – at least you’ll be able to walk away feeling great about finding the motivation and courage to complete such a tedious task
• a step closer to your bigger goal – even the biggest accomplishments in history have started small and relied on simple and far less pleasant tasks than you might be working on. Every task you complete brings you closer to the ultimate goal, and acknowledging this always feels good.

2) Make it fun

When it comes to motivation, attitude is everything. Different people may have completely opposite feelings towards the same task: some will hate it, others will love it. Why do you think this happens? It’s simple: some of us find ways to make any task interesting and fun to do!

Take sports for example. Visiting your local gym daily for a half-an-hour workout sounds rather boring to many of us. Yet many others love the idea! They like exercising not only because they recognize the good reasons behind it, but simply because it’s fun!  

At certain time of their daily schedule, they find going to gym to be the best thing to do, simply because nothing else will fit their time and lifestyle so perfectly.

Depending on how you look at it, you can have fun doing just about anything! Just look for ways of having fun, and you’ll find them!

A simple approach is to start working on any task from asking yourself a few questions:

• How can I enjoy this task?
• What can I do to make this task fun for myself and possibly for others?
• How can I make this work the best part of my day?

The answers will pop up momentarily, as long as you learn to have the definite expectation of any task being potentially enjoyable.

Some of you will probably think of a thing or two which are valid exceptions from this statement, like something you always hate doing, no matter how hard you try making it fun. I don’t want to argue – you’re probably right, and that’s why I don’t claim everything to be fun. However, most tasks have a great potential of being enjoyable, and so looking for ways to have fun while working is definitely a good habit to acquire.

3) Take a different approach

When something doesn’t feel right, it’s always a good time to take a moment and look at the whole task looking for a different approach.

You may be doing everything correctly and most efficiently, but such an approach isn’t necessarily the most motivating one. Quite often you can find a number of obvious tweaks to your current approach that will both change your experience and open up new possibilities.

That’s why saying “one way or another” is so common: if you really want to accomplish your goal, there is always a away. And most likely, there’s more than one way. If a certain approach doesn’t work for you, find another one, and keep trying until you find the one which will both keep you motivated and get you the desired results.

Some people think that trying a different approach means giving up. They take pride in being really stubborn and refusing to try any other options on their way towards the goal. My opinion on this is that the power of focus is great, but you should be focusing on your goal, and not limiting your options by focusing on just one way to accomplish it it.

4) Recognize your progress

Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress.

We track our progress automatically with most activities. But to stay motivated, you need to recognize your progress, not merely track it.

Here’s how tracking and recognizing your progress is different: tracking is merely taking a note of having reached a certain stage in your process.

Recognizing is taking time to look at a bigger picture and realize where exactly you are, and how much more you have left to do.

For example, if you’re going to read a book, always start by going through the contents table. Getting familiar with chapter titles and memorizing their total number will make it easier for you to recognize your progress as you read. Confirming how many pages your book has before starting it is also a good idea.

You see, reading any book you will be automatically looking at page numbers and chapter titles, but without knowing the total number of pages this information will have little meaning.

Somehow, it is in a human nature to always want things to happen at once. Even though we split complex tasks into simpler actions, we don’t quite feel the satisfaction until all is done and the task is fully complete. For many scenarios though, the task is so vast that such an approach will drain all the motivation out of you long before you have a chance to reach your goal. That’s why it is important to always take small steps and recognize the positive different and progress made.

5) Reward Yourself

This is a trick everyone likes: rewarding yourself is always pleasant. I’m happy to confirm that this is also one of the easiest and at the same time most powerful ways to stay motivated!

Feeling down about doing something? Dread the idea of working on some task? Hate the whole idea of working? You’re not alone in that, I’m telling you!

Right from the beginning, agree on some deliverables which will justify yourself getting rewarded. As soon as you get one of the agreed results, take time to reward yourself in some way.

For some tasks, just taking a break and relaxing for a few minutes will do. For others, you may want to get a fresh cup of coffee and even treat yourself to a dessert. For even bigger and more demanding tasks, you may want to reward yourself by doing something even more enjoyable, like going to a cinema or taking a trip to some place nice, or even buying yourself something.

Your progress may not seem to others like anything worth celebrating – but take time and do it anyway! It is your task and your reward, so any ways to stay motivated are good. The more you reward yourself for the honestly made progress, the more motivated you will feel about reaching new milestones, thus finally accomplishing your goal.

Mix and match

Now that you have these five ways of staying motivated, it is a good moment to give you the key to them all: mix and match! Pick one of the advices and apply it to your situation. If it doesn’t work, or if you simply want to get even more motivation, try another advice right way. Mix different approaches and match them to your task for best results.

Just think about it: finding good reasons to work on your task is bound to help you feel a bit better. Identifying ways to make it fun will help you enjoy the task even more. Finally, if you then plan a few points for easier tracking of your progress and on top of that agree on rewarding yourself as you go – this will make you feel most motivated about anything you have to work through.

Gleb Reys is a creator and maintainer of the Personal Development portal, where he regularly writes about successfully setting and reaching your goals through becoming more organized, productive and motivated person. Subscribe to his Personal Development blog feed.

4 Simple Steps To Building Your Network and Getting Booked Solid

by Michael Port, NY Times Bestselling Author, Book Yourself Solid

When most people think of networking, they think of it as something you do to meet new people. However, might I suggest defining networking as ‘developing deeper relationships with people you already know’ and using the term direct outreach to mean ‘meeting people that you don’t yet know but would like to know’?

Of course, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter which words you use but, rather, that you make a distinction between meeting new people and staying connected with the people you already know.

If you make this important distinction, it can help you stay focused on each area specifically and deliberately. To that end, there are four simple but meaningful daily action steps that will build your network and get you booked solid.

Let’s start with DIRECT OUTREACH.

Again, this is about meeting the people you do not yet know but would like to know. I am not talking about the Oprah’s of the world, although hanging out with Oprah would certainly be good for business. No, I am talking about the people that are immediately relevant to you. People in your industry who can open doors for you, people that you can actually, and relatively easily, get to.

Start by creating your List of 20. This list includes 20 people that you’d like to know but do not yet know. For example:

• If you want to get booked to speak, you might include specific meeting planners.
• If you want to get booked to write articles, you might include specific editors.
• If you want to meet well-known bloggers or authors, you might include them.
• Or, maybe, if there are specific potential referral partners that you’d like to meet, you might include them.

(Notice the use of the world “specific.”)

Put these people on your List of 20. Of course, if you don’t have 20 people who come to mind right now, just start with three. But eventually you’ll grow it and keep it at 20. Why? Keeping your list at 20 ensures that it’s a large enough so as to keep your focus expansive, yet small enough that you’re able to focus on each person specifically.

What do you do with this list? Simple. Reach out to one person on this list each day. NOT to ask for a favor or to meet for coffee but to express appreciation for them and their work.

• Write a blog post about them or comment on a blog post that they wrote.
• Retweet a few of their Tweets in one day or Tweet about them or to them.
• Even better, write a short (under 5 lines) email or handwritten note to them telling them why they rock.

The key is not asking anything of them.

One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill. He said, “It’s a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.” I believe building relationships is the same way.

So, if there is someone you’d like to get to know and they have a higher professional status then you, don’t call them up and ask to meet them for a cup of coffee. You’re probably not (yet) relevant to them unless they have some prior connection to you. Remember, “Only one link in the chain of destiny at a time.”

After you reach out to the person on the top of the list, put them on the bottom. So, the person that you reached out today goes from number one to number twenty. The person who was number twenty becomes number nineteen and the person who was number two advances to the number one spot.

Then, tomorrow, reach out to the next person at the top of that list. Do this every single business day. This way, each day you are connecting with, at least, one person on your List of 20. And, over the course of one month, you’ll have connected with every person on your List of 20.

How long should this take you? About 5 minutes a day.

Of course, if you develop a strong connection right away and your relationship starts to build quickly then you take them off your List of 20 and add them to what I call your Network of 90.

This is where your NETWORKING comes into play (developing deeper relationships with the people you already know).

The reason I suggest you keep a Network of 90 is because it will help you focus on a specific, managable, number of relavant contacts. Again, these are people you already know (or have met) that you’d like to stay in touch with and continue to build stronger relationships. If you focus on the most relevant ninety people in your network along with the twenty people on your List of 20, then you stay below Dunbar’s number of 150 which is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

You don’t need to know a million people, just the right people who can put business opportunities in front of you. Your job is to earn that business.

Now you’ve got your Network of 90. And, as you might remember from the beginning of this article, I suggested that you do four things each day to build your network and get booked solid.

The first was to reach out to one person on your List of 20 each day. The second, third, and fourth daily action steps will bring you closer to the people in your Network of 90.

Introduce two people in your network who do not yet know each other but might find each other relvant (personally or professionally) and appreciate the introduction.

You might have two people in your Network of 90 who are scratch golfers and they live close to each other. Golfers are always looking for a 4th but they want somebody at their own level. So you might introduce them.

If you are nervous about whether or not you should make the introduction, you might ask each one individually, “I would love to introduce you to a good friend of mine who is also a scratch golfer, would you like me to?”

Or, maybe you know two people that are in the publishing industry or two people in the real estate industry. Both would present excellent opportunities for making an introduction.

Generally, business owners and executives want to continue to move forward in their careers and, to do so, they know it’s essential for them to meet new people. As a result, 9.9 times out of 10 they are going to say “Oh, yes, please do introduce me. Thank you!”

Note: when you make the introduction, share only professional, public contact information unless it’s requested that you share private contact information instead.

Next, each day, share some useful or helpful information with at least one person in your Network of 90. The easiest way to do this is by reading articles in online magazines, journals, and blogs every day, the ones that are most relevant to your network.

When you see an article that is relevant to one of the people in your network, send it to them via email and say, “Hey, Jennifer, I just read this article and I immediately thought of you. It was about ‘this’ and I know you’re very interested in ‘that’ so I thought you might find it valuable. Have you read it? What do you think?” And, now you can get into a conversation with her about the subject matter and, as a result, develop your relationship.

Let’s recap quickly on what we’ve learned thus far. Each day:

1. Reach out to one person you do not yet know on your List of 20.
2. Introduce two people in your Network of 90.
3. Share some information that is useful to one person in your Network of 90.

And, finally, fourth, share compassion with somebody in your network every day by calling or writing them. If you get their voicemail simply say, “I was thinking about you and I know that you are really working hard on your business right now. I just wanted to say if you ever need any support I am here because I just have so much respect for what you are doing.” Or, if you know somebody is going through a tough time, sometimes the most relevant thing to do is to just go and sit with them.

We make the assumption that networking is quid pro quo and that our reputation is based only on the work we do, but it’s not. It’s based on who we are and how we take care of the people around us.

In conclusion, if you do these four things every single day, and if you are relevant to the people that you want to build better relationships with, then you are going to be top of mind when they think of someone who provides the kind of products and services that you do.

This is pretty simple to do, isn’t it?

 See Michael’s Best seller “Book Yourself Solid” at Amazon: