Living more fully in the moment…

“Yesterday is a cancelled check; Tomorrow is a Promissory Note; Today is the only cash you have—so spend it wisely,” from the Jack’s Winning Words Blog. That is a phrase that Jack remembers his mom using when he was a child. It speaks to the wise use of time and of focusing upon the time you have each day, instead of agonizing over the past or fretting about the future. Certainly we all need to remember and learn from the past and plan for the future; however, becoming obsessed with either leaves us little time for energy to live for today.

I find this to be a daily struggle – not so much worrying about the past or future, but the part about using my time wisely today, each day. In real estate there are a thousand things that you could be doing, a few hundred things that you should be doing and a few things that you must do consistently to be successful. I read somewhere recently that as we get older we are more easily distracted and that may be a contributing factor to my penchant for letting too many of the things that I could be doing get in the way of the few things that I should be doing.

I spend way too much time on this Blog, for instance, and not nearly enough time making calls to prospects. Why? Because I enjoy this and I have a natural aversion to making calls, especially cold calls or unexpected calls to people. If they call me I usually do very well and I enjoy the conversations, it’s just the act of picking up the phone and calling someone that I know isn’t sitting there just waiting for me to call that somehow is a daunting task for me.

So, am I going to stop Blogging and become a phone cold-calling machine – not likely. I have resolved to start making calls to my prospects, a few initially and hopefully many more as I gain confidence; however, that is not ever likely to become as natural a part of my makeup as it is for me to sit here Blogging away about a great variety of topics. I enjoy working on my Web sites too, because they represent a similar, passive and disconnected method of communicating, as are the newsletters and postcards that I send out.

However, as I opined in entries in this Blog earlier this week, real estate transactions are not impersonal and disconnected (except for investor transactions). They are usually highly emotional events that invite and require very personal involvement on the part of the Realtor. I enjoy that part, too. Somehow I’ve got to figure out how to better bridge the gaps between those two aspects of the business more often and more consistently. Perhaps the secret lies in those unmade phone calls. We shall see.