3 Reasons you can’t follow through
We are five weeks into the new decade. How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions and your business plans?
February is typically the month people give up on the promises they made to themselves in the excitement of the New Year. The gym gets less busy, the requests for coaching consultations settles down and I’m sure that the diet industry is slowing considerably.
So why is it that humans can set goals that mean a lot to them, feel inspired and motivated to obtain those goals and then……….. nothing?
I have coached more than 300 REALTORS® over the past 12 years – many to extremely high levels of production. Here’s what I’ve learned about human nature:
- Humans have a built-in psychological mechanism that is designed to keep us safe. This mechanism is often called the internal critic or the gremlin. It’s that voice in our head that tells us not to do something that could hurt us. This is a valuable thing when it comes to walking along the edge of a cliff or confronting a sabre tooth tiger. The problem is, that this internal critic doesn’t differentiate between physical risk and emotional risk. Calling a past client will never kill us but our belief that we could be judged, rejected or shamed activates the inner critic who in turn keeps us from making the calls.
- Pushing against our resistance increases it. 99% of REALTORS® that I have talked to over the years feel significant resistance to prospecting. When they try to push through that resistance as most main stream coaching companies insist on, the resistance increases dramatically and people develop really complicated reasons to avoid any sort of prospecting at all.
- Most business plans that insist that REALTORS® push through their resistance to find new leads set up a conflict between the REALTOR® and their values. Human beings cannot operate if their actions are not aligned with their values.
Together, these three things work to ensure that you avoid your business plan if at all possible. Moving it out of sight helps relieve the guilt of not doing the work. It sits peacefully on your book shelf gathering dust.
If you want this decade to rock, you need a more natural approach.