By Dr. Maya Bailey 
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It is more important than ever that we find ways to stay positive, especially as we continue to make our way through today’s real estate market. Your success depends on your mindset, not on the economy or the marketplace. How do I know this to be a fact? I’ve interviewed hundreds of top producing sales people all over the U.S. and Canada, and when I asked them the secret to their success, unquestionably and without a doubt and independent of each other, they all said the same thing, “my mindset.”
These are top producing sales people that have been in the business for 10, 20, or even 30 years. They’ve been through up times, down times, and all kinds of different markets, and they said, without a doubt, it was their mindset. When times get tough, people start to look outside of themselves for answers and what they really need to do is look inside themselves and ask themselves the question, “How can I stay positive, how can I stay hopeful, how can I stay optimistic?”
Here are a few tools that will make it easier to create a positive mindset, no matter what the real estate industry throws at you.
The first tool is to really stop watching, or listening, or reading the news as the news is based on negativity. The news amplifies fear and negativity in order to capture more listeners, more readers, and more viewers. The media is a business like anything else and there’s a popular saying in the media industry that describes their approach: “If it bleeds, it reads.” So the more fear the media can instill in people, the more people will turn to newspapers or the television to find out what’s going to happen, or in some way stay fixated because they’re in fear. In order to create a positive mindset, it is crucial to not become fixated on what the media is reporting.
The second tool is to stop being around negative people. Your colleagues are going to want to constantly come and talk to you and tell you how bad things are. Maybe your clients or prospective clients are going to tell you how bad things are during phone conversations, and even your friends will do the same thing. You will go through a day and everybody will want to tell you how negative everything is. If you are looking to create a positive mindset, the first step is to avoid the negative people who surround you. If you are stuck talking to someone who is speaking negatively, simply tune them out and say: “Well that may be true for you, but that’s not true for me.” This is like an inner mantra which will help you create your own inner environment.
The third tool is a technique that I’ve used with my clients throughout the past 12 years as a successful business coach. It’s a very powerful tool called The Stop Technique, and there are three steps to it. The first step is just called Stop. If you start to notice your mind going in a negative direction such as, “I can’t succeed in today’s economy,” “I just don’t have what it takes to be successful or to make money,” “I have to work really hard and struggle and sacrifice,” your job is to simply catch these negative thoughts as soon as they pop into your head and say, “Stop.” Take a deep breath, and then put in a positive new thought.
You can put in your choice of however many positive new thoughts you have ready in your arsenal. If some of your negative statements are about yourself like, “I’m not good enough, or I’m not smart enough, or I’m not experienced enough,” an empowered belief that you can substitute in its place may be: “I love and approve of myself unconditionally.” Another kind of self-limiting belief is something that you continually tell yourself, such as: “To succeed, I’m going to have to really struggle, and sacrifice, and stress out, and work hard, and then I won’t have a life.” If this has been your primary belief, it is important to put a stop to it when you hear it coming. Instead, take a deep breath and replace this negative thought with a positive one such as: “I’m committed to working smarter, not harder.”
One of the things that is great about this technique is that it really forces you to become aware of what you’re thinking from moment to moment, and it’s what you’re thinking from moment to moment that will create a negative or positive mindset. If you’re continually thinking negative thoughts either about yourself, or the market, or about money, then you’re setting yourself up for a negative mindset. Then what happens is what you believe tends to come true, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. For example, if you tell yourself, “I don’t have what it takes to succeed in today’s market,” and you tell yourself that over, and over, and over again, your thoughts will create your reality and then you’ll find that you don’t have what it takes.
Henry Ford once said, “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, either way you’re right.” The way to create a positive mindset is to continue to bring your thoughts back to, “I can do it.” You need to have unwavering faith in your ability to be successful. The way you do this is to retrain your mind. The stop technique is the most powerful technique for retraining your mind, but you may have to use it a few hundred times a day at the beginning. Your mind has been going down that negative track in an undisciplined way for a long time, and now you have to reign your thoughts in, which is going to require a lot of vigilance at the beginning.
Dr. Maya Bailey, Master Business Coach for Real Estate Professionals, integrates her 20 years of experience as a psychologist with 14 years of expertise in marketing. Her powerful transformational work creates a Success Formula for Real Estate Professionals ready to double and triple their incomes.
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