Move your feet

The Jack’s Winning Words blog that I get on a daily basis recently had this tag-line - “Do not ask the Lord to guide your footsteps, if you are not willing to move your feet.” I got to thinking that you can easily generalize that into a non-religious bit of helpful advice but just saying, “Don’t seek help, if you are unwilling to act.”

In my little world at the local Real Estate One office, I’m both a seeker of help and a giver of help. Fortunately, our office manager is very patient with me and others who need to be given the same advice over and over, in order for it to get through or in order to cause any change. Mostly it boils down to this – I hear it, I understand it, it makes sense, I just don’t do it. I’m unwilling to move my feet.

There are things that one has to learn to become a successful Realtor. Some are about the art/craft/profession (whatever you want to call it) of selling – learning how to deal with people, present properties, handle objections and all of the other things associated with selling anything. Some are about the process itself – understanding the various contract documents, the steps that a sale must go through to get to close and the role of the Realtor in each step and all of the legal nuances that the Realtor gets involved with in a sale. Then there are the systems that a Realtor must be able to use to get his/her job done – various on-line sources of information, computer-driven document systems, computer-oriented photo systems and more. It can look and feel fairly daunting to the newbie agent, so we use a mentoring program to pair new people with “experienced agents” in our office.

I experience the other side of the equation in my role as a mentor to some of the new agents in the office. Some pick things up right away and run with it, with some I have to go over the same ground many times, but they eventually get it and some just never seem to get it, or maybe it’s just that they just don’t want to do it. It may be that it is easier to have me walk them through it, yet again, than to spend the time and effort to learn how to do it themselves. I’ll have to think about that.

It may be that they (and me most times) are just seeking someone to commiserate with, rather than actually asking for help that they intend to act upon. My manager finally had to try the tough-love approach and just tell me point-blank that she is tired of telling me the same thing over-and-over about making prospecting phone calls (I hate cold-calling and have a pretty big aversion to making unexpected phone calls on anyone). We’ve discussed (over and over) the need to set aside time to just don this task and to bite off a few calls at a time, rather than sit there with a huge, daunting list. I know I have to do it. It makes sense to do it. Now, move feet!