2020 was a magnified learning experience! Therefore, let’s look at ways to leverage everything you learned while working your way through 2020 so you can build a better you for the new year.

 

 

1. Amplify the positives: Take a few days to have a heart-to-heart with yourself. Start by recalling and reflecting on the greatest professional and personal triumphs you have experienced in the past two years.

 

List each in order of importance or value to you, weaving the personal with the professional into a single comprehensive list of positive things since 2018. Avoid the temptation to place dates on your list of positives. Simply determine which had the greatest impact on your life and your profession. 

 

Ruminate on the positives for a day or two. Journal about them or video yourself speaking about them. Use them as fuel for thought and change.

 

 

2. Refine or create your business plan. Put to work the list of positives you created in the previous step. If you haven't already, see how you can refine, redefine or even create from scratch a business plan for 2021 that focuses on doing the kinds of things that earned you success in 2019 and 2020.

 

 

It may turn out that, in the challenges of one time period, you learned more about yourself and your local market than you did in comparatively easier years. Would teaming with another agent or brokerage help you recreate or redefine your success? Would expanding your list of referral partners help your outreach within the community?

 

Using the list of positives you created, discover which are new over the past two years. For example, did you find joy in representing more buyers? Can you leverage that success to enhance relationships and service so you can better represent a balance of buyers and sellers? 

 

Whatever you begin with, remind yourself that every business operates better with a plan. For that matter, every person also functions better with a plan. And in real estate, business and personal are closely linked.

 

3. Nurture your sphere: Relationships are everything, even when maintained at a six-foot distance without shaking hands. Your clients, dependable referral partners, friends and community supporters are your “sphere” for a reason. You revolve and evolve together.

 

Your sphere has helped you reach success just as you’ve helped deliver them results and growth over time. Some ways to nurture your sphere are to reach out by phone, patronizing businesses you appreciate, send direct messages and snail mail regularly and show gratitude when appropriate.  

 

 

Even more impactful is to purchase gift cards good at local businesses such as restaurants, coffee shops, indie book stores, the wine shop, etc., and mail them with “Happy New Year” cards to members of your sphere with a handwritten note and your business card.

 

4. Become a mentor or seek a mentor: There’s no better way to learn than to teach. And successful people share with others how they earned their success through the ups and downs of doing business. 

 

Perhaps there’s a new agent in town or at your brokerage. That person may be a seasoned professional who switched careers entirely in 2020. They also might be someone who recently earned a college degree and started out in real estate on a lark.

 

Think of how, in nurturing someone’s success, you can help yourself. Ultimately by engaging with new people in the business, you’ll expand your network and find new teachers, role models, friends and opportunities.

 

5. Create five, specific goals: With this exercise, the challenge may be in creating only five and ensuring that none of them is a compound goal. For example, “Increase listings and list-to-sale price” are two separate goals. Each also is rather vague.

 

 

Instead, turn goals outward to benefit yourself as well as others. 

 

For example, a specific goal that replaces the “expand my network” goal is to develop one or two meaningful relationships each month. 

 

Of course, everyone you meet all year still will be added and appropriately categorized in your database; this goal doesn’t suggest you meet only two people a month. On the contrary, it asks that you think selectively about the people with whom you share your time and energy.

 

This goal may take a couple of months to develop its rhythm. And that’s OK. It may be March before you realize that you and someone you met in January have a lot to offer each other that can enhance your lives professionally or personally.

 

Stay tuned to this space for more helpful tips on goal setting, personal branding, marketing and more.

 

Happy New Year!