Real Life Real Estate – Watch out for the Disneyland mindset

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Real Life Real Estate. My name is Dan Smith, and I’m here to help you become more powerful, more productive, and, most importantly, more profitable. This week, what I want to talk about is mindset, and it’s the mindset of working. This is a very interesting topic to me, because as independent contractors, which most real estate agents are, we have to make ourselves go to work. There’s no one holding us accountable to going to work and doing, and then when we’re at work, most importantly, to doing what we’re supposed to do. Have you ever found yourself leaving the office, stopping your work day at the end of the day, and wondering to yourself, “what the heck did I do all day?” Does that ever happen to you? You should be nodding your head “yes” right now, a lot, probably. Most people have experienced that. Some of you experience it every day, unfortunately. Some of you experience it only every once in a while. I want to give you a little tip, or little trick that might help you when you’re having those type of days, to have the right mindset. A lot of times we go to work and we say to ourselves, “You know what, I did the best I could today. I tried my hardest, I gave it my all, but just, nothing came out of it.”
But if we look at what you did that day, did you actually give it your all? Did you actually try your hardest, or did you just put in your time, were you just there? Winston Churchill said it best, he has this quote, it’s one of my favorite quotes, and he says, “Sometimes doing our best is simply not enough. We must do what is required.” And so, when I hear that, I think to myself, and I’m thinking about mindset, of making myself show up and go to work, I’m thinking about what I call the Disneyland mindset.

So let’s pretend you go to work on a Monday, and you go to work at 8:30 in the morning, and you spend all day there working on inputting things into the MLS, and making some fliers, and chit-chatting with some people in the office, and checking a bazillion and two emails and text messages and voice mails from people, and you read a couple of real estate magazines. Somewhere in between of all that stuff you have lunch, and probably a little bit more chit chat, coffee or talk with some other people in your office. And then you go home some time between 4 and 5 in the afternoon.

Here’s my question to you. Couldn’t you have gone to Disneyland that day and accomplished the exact same thing? Do you have any more money? Do you have any more leads? Do you have any more escrows? Do you have any more closings? Do you have any more income? Are you any closer to achieving your goals? Probably not. You could have literally gone to Disneyland, gone to the beach, gone to Vegas. You could have done just about anything that wasn’t spending time in the office, and you would have had the exact same results. So why did you go there all day and waste the entire day?

That’s the mindset you need to have. You need to catch yourself in the morning, in the afternoon, midday, end of day, all the time, whenever you’re not doing what you should be doing, whenever you are not actively trying to get more income, trying to get more clients, trying to get more deals, and you are just doing stuff. You’re just doing, you know, things to keep busy. You need to think to yourself, “you know what, why am I even here? I could be at the beach right now. At the end of the day, my life would look no different. I need to get to work, I need to be doing the things I need to do, I need to accomplish the things that actually need to be accomplished, not just keeping busy.” Does that make sense? Nod your head right now. Good.

Here’s what I want you to do. Every time you catch yourself doing those things, think to yourself “Oh, this is that Disneyland mindset. This is that going-to-the-beach mindset, going-to-Las-Vegas mindset. I need to get busy. I need to get focused. I need to be doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I need to be taking active steps, making active progress towards achieving the things I want to achieve, and I’ve got to do the things that have got to be done in order to do them.”

Does that make sense? So that’s what I want you thinking for the rest of this week. Any time you catch yourself off track.

Thanks for tuning in this week. Remember – to get what you’ve never had, you must do what you’ve never done. I’ll see you next week.