GAINING OBJECTIVITY THROUGH COACHING
Our job as the CEO of our own multi-million dollar sales business is objective evaluation. Can we objectively evaluate our business and our personal performance? Are you capable of seeing reality as it is, not how you wish it to be? Can you pull back the camera like in the movies and see the whole battlefield like a general, rather than just this one soldier that you are waging war against in front of you? The soldier represents one big problem in your face. Do you have the ability to adjust your game plan and execution as a player without periodical time outs and direction from a coach who sees the whole playing field?
Coaching is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The real estate industry is inundated with coaches, and many Champion Agents have used the services of a coach to get there. One of the valuable benefits of a coach is objectivity. It’s their experience of a personal track record of success. You might now, or in the future, be considering a coach. I would like to share with you a few areas to think about before you make a large investment, so you select the right coach or mentor for you.
I am a firm believer in coaching; which should be obvious because I founded Real Estate Champions as a coaching company in 1998 . . . years before coaching was en vogue. I founded Real Estate Champions to impact people’s lives through coaching. The speaking, audio training, books, and webinars were never part of the original vision. There is a difference between a coaching company that is built on the framework of coaching and a speaker or trainer who saw coaching as another revenue opportunity.
In personal improvement, there are three options for growth. There is education, training, and coaching. All three of these serve a valuable purpose in one’s continuum to achieve the Champion Agent level.
Education is fundamentally the acquiring of knowledge. It’s what you are doing by reading this article. It’s what you do when you attend a seminar or listen to audio training. Education plays a vital role in our success. Most of us spend at least twelve years in school educating ourselves to achieve a high school diploma. The challenge with education is once you know it, what do you do with it? It’s still up to you to use the education. To create the strategy and tactics to implement yourself and hold yourself to a high enough personal standard to do what you know you need to do. To know and not to do is not to know.
Training is different from education. We are raising our skill level to a specified area of our business or life. We recognize a deficiency, and we receive training to improve our deficiency. It’s more action oriented and practice oriented than education. Most training happens live in real time. It’s where you learn the skill and the practice of the skill. Again, the use of the skill is up to you.
Coaching is personal process of performance improvement. Effective coaching analyzes who you are, where you are going, your skills, your business, your goals, your values, and your envisioned future and connects that with a plan and skill development in a customized format of execution and accountability to raise the odds of your success dramatically.
There are a lot of people “coaching” who are merely providing education and training with the outside wrapper of coaching because of the raised public awareness for coaching. I guarantee if you select a coach that operates this way, you will be disappointed. This happens most frequently through companies that transition into coaching from the speaker or training medium. They take training material, spin it, and call it coaching.
Coaching for peak performers has been around for years. The most successful athletes, for many decades, have been coached to win the big event. Tiger Woods would not be the golfer he is without his golf coaches. In fact, Tiger did not have a coach during a period when he didn’t win a major championship for over twenty-four months. Once he started to work with a coach again, he won a major championship within six months. The only difference was the coach. Michael Jordan, John Elway, and Michael Johnson all had coaches. Leaders in the business world, with some of the most successful companies, have coaches. Behind each great milestone, or accomplishment, stands two people – the one who executes the task or carries out the game plan and the one who helps create the game plan and teaches and coaches his goals and objectives. Maybe it is time to evaluate and consider the benefits of a coach.
A good coach has five basic traits. When these traits are used to help you move forward in your life, the results are amazing. A coach can help you increase your production and enjoyment in life and help you craft a life of long-term success.
The first trait of a great coach is the ability to listen and help you clarify your goals and vision in all areas of your life. Earl Nightingale, the famous speaker, stated, “We are goal-seeking organisms.” Our purpose is to set and achieve goals in life. The difficulty for people is not in achieving their goals but setting them in the first place. We can truly accomplish anything in life provided we truly decide to do it.
The second trait of a successful coach is guiding you to understand that all goals must have deadlines. Deadlines get one’s juices and thoughts flowing to create the desired result. Have you ever planned to go away for a vacation, and two days before you are to go, you get a flurry of activity in your business? It is because of the deadline that the activity increases and things begin to happen. How would you like to have that kind of production ongoing? Determine effective deadlines for all areas of your business.
A Champion coach will take the goals and vision you set for yourself and teach you to achieve them. He will help you create the step-by-step game plan to achieve the envisioned future. Even the big projects that seem like mountains can be broken down into bite size pieces – a coach has the objectivity to help.
For example, I had a client in 1998 who wanted to earn over $250,000 for the year, when the year before he had only earned $130,000. We worked diligently to break what he needed to accomplish in order to achieve his goal down into bite-size pieces. Once the bite-size pieces were determined, we were able to determine the daily disciplines for him to undertake. Because he had to just focus on his daily disciplines, the task was not paralyzing. When he got behind in achieving his goal, it was always caused by him not doing his daily disciplines. As his coach, I helped him create the game plan and targeted him to execute it daily. He achieved and broke his goal by earning over $265,000 for 1998, which was over a 100% increase in his business. Coaching really works in real estate sales, as in other fields.
A Champion coach will show clients the consequences of not following through on their goals and commitments. The coach will provide ongoing motivation and inspiration during the storms of life. The storms of life will come. We will experience all the storms in this world. We cannot avoid them. Since we cannot avoid them, we must prepare for them. It is not the storm that causes the problem; it is how we react to the storm. A Champion coach will help you brace for the storm that otherwise might overwhelm you. Coaching provides the motivation and inspiration for our lives to overcome those storms.
Lastly, a Champion coach provides accountability and is available for you. A Champion coach will help you evaluate your progress against your goals and vision. He will hold you to the standard that you have set for yourself.
Many agents today are working longer hours to keep on the treadmill of life. They are delaying (or scrapping) long-range focus in the marketing and prospecting business system arenas. They often are neglecting their time investments for their health, families, and self-development areas of their life. They are spending a tremendous amount of time working on their business. They are truly an employee of their real estate business, rather than the owner, CEO, and visionary of their multi-million dollar sales company. To be an owner means you can walk away for a vacation with your family, and the business continues to turn out your product. Your business continues to earn an income for you while you are lying on the beach. Is the huge price being paid worth the results? Can one grow with balance?
We live in a time when there is an abundance of information. We can attend seminars, listen to CDs, and read books. We have more resources for growth than any other time in history. There is one crucial barrier to utilization of the knowledge you have even now. It is action or an implementation strategy. It is someone to hold you accountable for the implementation of the new idea or development of the new skill needed. It is the guidance for creation of the new streamlined system.
A coach has one other important focus. Coach, Tom Landry, put it best, “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear and has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you can be.” A Champion coach will shrink the gap between where you are and the true potential that is inside you. If you are not achieving your full potential, you are a prime candidate for coaching. To be successful, a coach must be passionate about your success in life.
If you have a strong desire to improve your income & quality of life, I urge you to take the first step and get a free coaching consultation to see if it’s the right fit for you: www.RealEstateChampions.com/realestatecoaching
