Elite AgentElite Agent TVTransformTransform 2016 Coach

Becoming mindfit with Jet Xavier

National and international mindset coach, Jet Xavier, coaches our super six to "get uncomfortable" and walks through the three major mindset characteristics of high performing agents.

Thank you our Week 5 sponsor:

Agentbox provided our Super Six with access to their software for the Transform period and also provided some training to them. See the Agentbox training session here

Coaches:

Mindset coach Jet Xavier and Charmaine Keegan from Smarter Selling

Coaching Links:

  • See all articles written by Jet on Elite Agent here
  • For more information about Jet, Click here

Video Notes/Transcript:

00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean

00:55 Consistency is the biggest issue

In this industry I’ve done over two and a half thousand coaching sessions with people starting, people are running a couple of million dollars, people are running million dollar businesses, people have been in the business for 20 years. It keeps coming back to one thing, consistency. That’s it. I assume all of you have sold property. Yeah? Is there anyone who hasn’t sold a property? You get a buyer, you get a seller, you put them together, you sell a property, you look after them for life. Boom, there you go. That’s real estate in a nut shell. It’s got a whole lot of mechanics that are connected to it that are sometimes are complicated until you’re hitting, but the majority of times just get two people together and make it happen and look after them for life. That’s real estate, but the biggest issue is the consistency in that. It is the fear. It is the procrastination. It is the disorganisation. It is not being clear. It is not knowing your why.

It’s all about productivity. It’s about effectiveness. It’s about efficiency. It’s about discipline, and it’s all those inner things that are the most important thing in real estate. Something has got to be different. You’ve got to do something different. If you’re going to build great careers, you’ve got to do something different. Arm yourself with the tools that are going to make you the best skilled agent around, but understand the game is not played there. The game is played up here. It’s played in here. That’s what I want to talk about today.

02:09 Being Mind Fit

How do you get mind fit? You’re already skill fit, and that talent and ability is growing. It’s about the inner game. You look at the best in the business, and their inner game is by far different to those that are maybe struggling in that 80 percent that are making $57,000 a year. Anyone put their hand up for $57,000 a year? No. You want to get into this business and un-tap resources so you can make as much money as you want, but to do that there’s got to be an application right here, right now today that says, “Hang on. I’m going to cross the line here. I’m going to step across it. I’m going to be committed to my inner game for the rest of my career.” Have we got that? I need that from you. That’s a decision you need to make today, because trust me I can meet you in 3 years, 4 years, 6 years time and if that inner game hasn’t changed from today you might’ve got some incremental results. You might have had some changes. You might have done some good things, but you never reached the potential you had. You always would have been working on your natural ability and not your realised potential. There’s a big difference.

03:08 Pushing on to the next level

I had a good friend Steven Box, 61st Australian to climb Mount Everest. He works for Ray White. He’s a great agent. I’ve always had the conversation with him about the skills that he has to climb Mount Everest and the mental game he needs to get to the top. I always thought the most important thing in climbing Mount Everest was that skill base. You need to know how to climb the mountain through most of the rocks, get up the ice, the wind, all that sort of stuff that’s important about getting to the top of Everest. We had a discussion one day. I’d taken the Mickey out of him about how slow they walk. I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentaries. They’re just walking so slow. I said, “Mate, why do you walk so slow for? Just speed it up and you’ll get the job done. You’ll get up there, you’ll get down.” He goes, “Mate,” in his condescending, ‘Jet-you-don’t-know-anything-about-climbing-Mount-Everest’ voice. He said, “Mate, when we were at that limit on the mountain and we’re at that stage of trying to summit,” he said, “Our bodies are basically broken down.” I said, “Well, just have a V drink. Have a Red Bull. Have a protein shake.” He goes, “Mate, the body actually can’t take in any food. We’ve pushed our body beyond the human endurance limits physiologically. It won’t take anything in. We are so exhausted that’s why we’re walking so slow, but the other thing is we need to keep moving. If we stop, we’re going to die.” He’s talked about people who he’s passed on the way that have been dead, etc. But the thing that stands out is the fact that to get to the top of a mountain like Everest is everything about skill set, but at the end of the day when the crunch comes, it has nothing to do with skill set, because you just flicked a switch that’s just going, “Hang on a second. I’m beyond my physiological abilities right now. I’m just going to take this thing to another level.”

04:53 We’ve got mountains everyday

That’s an extreme example, but you’ve got mountains every day. We talk about fear. We talk about your why. We talk about clarity. You’ve got mountains that you’re trying to climb every day. Don’t fall into the problem of thinking it’s just about the skill set game because when the crunch comes, and it does when you don’t want to make that phone call it’s not about your skill set. When you don’t want to do that extra knock, when you don’t want to get that assistant, when you don’t want to pay for that marketing, when you don’t want to invest in yourself, when you don’t want to up your cause, that’s not a skill set game. That’s a game that’s internal. That’s part of your inner game.

05:31 Be Uncomfortable, Make Change

I want to tell you two words, first of all, that I want you to write down. I want to you to write down ‘uncomfortable’, and I want you to write down ‘change’. This year you need to be prepared to get uncomfortable, and I mean awkward. I mean feeling scared, feeling fearful, worried, nervous, anxious, stressed, call it whatever you want it to. It’s an ugly place that we go to where we are just crapping ourselves and we generally turn around and we go the other way. Everyone been there? You need to get uncomfortable. That’s the first thing. The other thing is change. You need to understand that if nothing changes, as you know, nothing changes. There’s a level of change that has to happen. There’s a level of evolution that has to take place. There’s a level of growth that has to happen in your business and in your life before the success comes. There’s a level of your expanding. There’s a little bit of pain that has to happen.

You look at a lobster and how it breaks through all its shell. It’s going through pain because it’s growing out of that shell, but uncomfortable and change are not words that we throw around. They’re words that we avoid. We don’t want to embrace uncomfortable. We don’t want to embrace change because it’s too difficult. It might hurt a little bit. It might take us away from where we feel safe, but without that, I’m sorry, nothing will change.

What do you need to get uncomfortable about this year? What do you need to change this year? Have you got a list? Are you clear about it? Are you aware of what those things are? We talked about road blocks. You mentioned road blocks before. What are those road blocks? Have you got a detailed, exhaustive understanding of what you need to get uncomfortable about or where the change needs to occur? Because first we need to create awareness around those things.

07:16 An Example of Change through Confidence

Let’s look at these three things. I did some work with a guy who’s running about 800,000 a year. He was traveling about an hour or so to work each way, working about 7 days a week on anxiety medication because he had a breakdown. He’s still in the game, still having a crack. Basically, his life was falling apart, not getting to the gym, not enjoying his hobbies, etc. You know the story. He worked for about 8 months getting back into the gym, getting back into the family, getting him back off the medication, getting him stable, getting him back in love with what it was he first got involved in and fell in love with in the business. He went on to write about 1.2 million. The change wasn’t a skill change. The change was a change in his self-belief. Something switched. Something happened where he started to believe that he could do something different. He was already in a horrible situation. He knew that wasn’t working for him, and the model he was running, the stories he was telling weren’t working for him. He knew he had to get uncomfortable again to change; so, he changed.

He got into a point of stability where I said, “Well, where do we go from here? What do you really want?” He goes, “Well, I’ve always dreamed of having my own office, but I don’t think I can. That means I’m going to have to leave here. I’m writing over one million in Comms. I’m secure here. I’ve been here for a long time. This is my market. I’m too scared to.” Fear gripped him. He didn’t believe in himself. Again, we worked for about 5 or 6 months together and eventually he left one million dollar in GCI business to a new market, invested $180,000, backed himself, got six staff, moved his family there, bought a house, settled in a new area, he’s off medication, happiest he’s ever been in his life. Why? Because he made a transition between not believing in himself and what he thought was right for him to believing in himself and what he thought was right for him.

What happened was he became confident. His confidence grew from someone who thought, “Hang on a second. I can’t escape this mess, so I’m just going to keep traveling an hour forward and an hour back everyday. I’m going to stay anxious. I’m going to consistently have this pressure in my life and this stress that’s having a big impact on my family. I can’t change, because I’m not confident.”

Everything in your business that stops you from moving to that next level is around confidence. You’re either beatable or you’re unbeatable, because confidence is what drives behaviour.

If you want a behaviour, whatever that is in your business and in your office and wherever you are in whatever state in whatever market, you need confidence to drive behaviour. Because if you don’t have that confidence driving that behaviour, then what have you got? What is driving your behaviour? Well, the fear, the self-doubt. Don’t think I can. I’m not sure if I will. This is going to be too hard. Sometimes the ducks don’t line up. Things are not perfect. You can’t work it all out. Sometimes you’ve just got to jump. You’ve just got to get out there, and you’ve just got to have a go at it. Confidence is what I need you to leave with this year.

10:24 How Do I Get Confident?

You’re thinking, “That sounds great, but how do I get confident?” I love what the military do with confidence. What the military do in S.A.S. training and Navy Seals training is they basically put you in horrific situations so that you become confident. So that when you are dropped in a live situation in the middle of Afghanistan you’re not thinking about, “Can I do this? I’m not sure.” You’ve already been through it for 12 weeks in hell back in America or wherever it is learning to be confident.

That’s not how we’re brought up. It’s not how we’re wired to actually put ourselves in situations that are going to bring confidence, but I’m telling you if you want to get confident this year and you want that confidence to drive a behaviour that’s going to make you unbreakable and unstoppable, you need to find the things that you’re not confident in right now and you need to start doing them. You have to. It’s just the way it is. Like I can’t go out onto a football field, and expect not to be tackled, that’s crazy isn’t it? I go out there expecting I’m going to get hit. I could get hit hard. I might even get an injury out of this, but half the time I get used to the game and I go out and I’m all passionate about it and I start playing harder. My confidence builds.

This is what people want. People want a magic pill. They want, “Jet, tell me how to do the course easiest on confident.” But it, just ain’t going to happen. It’s like saying, you’re going to Afghanistan and you’re not going to get shot. No, you’re going to Afghanistan. You might get shot. It’s going to hurt. You’re going to not eat for days. You’re not going to shower for days. You could see your brothers get killed, all that sort of stuff. I mean, real estate is not war, but it is in a sense. You signed up for things that are difficult, complicated, that are painful, that aren’t good, that normal human beings don’t like because they can’t cut it. That’s why the attrition rate in real estate is really high because only those that have the ability to step up and go, “hang on a second, this isn’t ideal. I’m shit scared here. I’m not sure how I can handle this. I don’t even know if I can, but I’m going to have a go anyway.” They’re the ones that make it in this business. The sooner you get over that noise in your head, the quicker you’re going to accelerate the results that you want.

12:31 Saying ‘No’ to the Brain’s Built-In Habit

The game, same thing. You know how to pick up the phone. You know how to get a list. You know who to call. You know the scripts to use. You know what to say. You know how to soft close. You know everything. You’ve got it all there. I wouldn’t be doing anything else in my business but that. That’s all I’d be doing, because if this hurdle isn’t jumped over, if you don’t get this done now, it’s never going to get done. It’s a muscle in your brain that needs to be overcome. You know in the brain it works like this.

There’s a part of the brain that builds habit, and it loves habit because it keeps us lazy. When we ask the brain to do something else and something different it freaks out because it goes, “No, no. I’m happy the way things are. I’m happy the way it is. It’s easy doing it like this.” What you need to do, you need to go, “No.”

If this is the most important thing in my business, if that’s the most important thing in your own business, I’m creating a personal revolution right now. I’m creating a war. If I need to get someone to handcuff me to a phone and watch over me for 3 hours a day, I’d be paying someone to do that.

13:30 Firstly, Build Confidence

Confidence is the first thing, and that’s how you build confidence. It’s definitely how you build confidence. There are many ways we can break it down. We can go back into your past if you want. We can look at what fear is and why it’s happening, but actions speaks louder than words. If you put yourself in that situation more often than not, the muscle in your brain is going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. I don’t know what it is for you that you need to do to do that, but whatever it is do it. Okay, it all comes to sit next to you every day.

13:59 Secondly, Be Resilient

Let’s get onto the second thing. There’s a great study in the States at West Point Academy, by a lady called Duckworth and she studied two and a half thousand cadets. The theory was that the people that go into these academies as Navy Seals and the SAS that survive what they call ‘hell week’ or ‘beasting’ and all this horrible stuff. They do Chinese water torture, they drown them, and then they bring them back to life and put them out in the ocean 18kms out. The theory was that the ones that survived this were the biggest, strongest, the ones that were most talented, had the most ability, the ones that had the best genetics, came from the best families, were the richest, wealthiest, best looking, all that type of stuff. What she found out after two and a half thousand people that she studied was that wasn’t the case at all. It was just an old local or woman who had what she called grit. That was pretty simply it.

What we understand to be resilience, that ability to push through towards your goal, which you all have. Despite of what is going on around you, despite of what comes against you, despite of the roadblocks, despite of the obstacles that you’re facing. Grit, or resilience, is that ability to just keep going regardless. You go back and you’re not going to pick up the phones right away. I know. You might do it the next day, but resilience is that ability to keep going back to the phone. I understand what resilience is. You know what it is. It’s not giving all the stuff that comes against you anytime. What we do is we take our focus off of where we want to go, and we give this stuff out here that’s just noise, we give it time. We give it energy. We give it emotion. We give it our intellect. What we need to do when it comes to resilience is this. We need to not take any notice of what’s going to happen.

Here’s the problem. We spend more time trying to control this in getting rid of it and eliminating it when the fact is it’s never going anywhere. All the clutter, all the obstacles, the challenges, all the fights, all the difficulties in real estate, the deals falling over, building and pest falling over, everything can be in our face on a daily basis. It’s going to be there until the day you die as a real estate agent, so why give it any time? Because if you’re not giving time to the things that are happening around you, the challenges are too hard, the obstacles, all the effort you have to put in. If you’re not giving it time, what are you giving time to? Well, you’re giving time to the stuff that’s important. You’re pushing through the stuff that’s important. You’re focusing on the stuff that’s important.

Focus is an important element of success, because as you know, where your focus goes, your energy goes. That’s an old saying, but it’s true. Where your eyes are looking that’s where all your intent is. You’re going to get challenges in real estate. It’s going to happen. You’re going to have the worst days in the world. Guarantee it. Everybody does, but what you’re focusing on within those days is so important, and what you’re focusing on determines your resilience factor or the level of resilience you have.

16:44 Lastly, Embrace Optimism

The last thing I want to talk to you about is this, number three. There’s a great study done, and it’s in a book called The Happiness Advantage. If you’re into reading, get a hold of this book. It was two groups of people. One group of people felt that life just was ‘ho hum’ and didn’t do a lot of great stuff, and the other group thought it was pretty cool, that things went their way. The challenge was that the groups had to go through a newspaper and count how many photos were in the newspaper. The first group that did that won a prize. Off they went. The group that felt life was pretty cool and things went well won. They won because on page two in the newspaper it said, “Stop. There are 46 photos in this newspaper.” Halfway through the newspaper it said, “Stop. There are 46 photos in this newspaper. Go to the experimenter, and you’ll get a 500 dollar prize.” Why do you think that was the case? Why do you think they were able to see those signs and the other team weren’t able to see those signs? They were looking for the sign. They were looking for the patterns.

There is another great study called the Tetris Effect. The Tetris Effect is they put people in a room for a couple of days to play Tetris, and they ended up going away for weeks on end just thinking everything was trying to join up. It pretty much drove them crazy. They realised that everyone has a Tetris Effect. It’s a way that they see the world. People in the group that thought life was good saw the world in a positive way. They’re optimistic, so they can see the signs a lot more than the people that were pessimistic.

Your business is going to be built on the fact of your optimism. We know optimistic people outsell pessimistic people by at least 30% more. Who’s up for some of that? I’d begin the optimism school if I was a sales agent and I knew that. How do I get more optimistic? We know the brain performs 30% better when it’s in a positive state. When it’s up, when it’s vibrant, when it’s full of life and not negativity, anxiety, stress or nervousness or worry, because if you put yourself in that situation, it’s a game changer.

You’re already working office. You already work with other agents. How many agents do you know that are just upbeat, bright, have a positive outlook about everything around them? Very few. Optimism drives behaviour, and it’s a behaviour that sets you apart because your outlook is different. I had an outlook when I was on the streets. My outlook now is different. It’s like why the great Wayne Dyer said, “Don’t be paranoid that everyone’s out to get you, but an inverse paranoid. Everyone’s out to help you.” When I heard that it was life changing, because I thought everyone was trying to get me, get something from me, and then I realised everyone is trying to help me and just revolutionised my life.

It’s the same thing with you guys. You need to go back to your work, back to your marketing, and you need to look at the things that you have the wrong perspective about. You need to switch it. Reality is the market might be crap, but your response to that is important in how it plays out over time. Makes sense? Because if your response isn’t an positive optimistic response, then there’s going to be impact on your physiologically. There’s going to be impact on you mentally. There’s going to be impact on your numbers. There’s going to be impact on your attitude, on your motivation levels, on your energy. It impacts everything, but if you try and put yourself in a more optimistic state and go, “Okay, this might be ideal. This might be a bit tough, but Jet said to get on the phone, just keep doing it until I can do it. I’m a bit scared, but I know that this is going to break. I know it’s going to work. I know it’s going to give me an edge. I know it’s going to put me ahead.”

You know what? At the end of the day it’s going to make you a better person because people want to be around optimistic people. They don’t want to be around doubtful, needy people who are anxious, worried, pressured and under stress all the time. They want to be around people who are vibrant, full of life and have vitality. Optimism gives you that each time.

Questions?

If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform

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Jet Xavier

Jet Xavier is one of Australia’s leading Mindset Coaches for real estate sales professionals. For more information visit jetxavier.com.