We are just back from Crystal Lake in the Chilcotin mountains. Deep wilderness, spectacular vistas, monumental conversations.

We’ll share more next week, but as we sit here waiting for the float plane to pick us up and take us to the Bridge Glacier, we are thinking about how our habits help and hinder our performance.

Being in an environment where our habits don’t fit into the days, we found we could see our habits, in real estate or otherwise, with a lot of clarity, and see how they’re impacting our business in the big picture. For habits that are helpful, this gives us the chance to capitalize on them. For habits that hinder, we now have the insight to manage them.

It’s amazing how many good habits we have that we don’t see when we’re immersed in them. For example, we might have incredible patience to listen to clients who tell stories that go on forever. However, we may not realize what a gift patience is and that it gives us the chance to learn a lot about our client. Or maybe a habit of keeping in touch with other agents on Facebook is actually leading to a lot of referral business.

Seeing our bad habits is just as important if we’re going to stop them from getting in our way. An example is realizing how much energy we put into showing houses to clients who will never buy because we don’t qualify our clients first.

Another great example is seeing that we are so committed to being available for our clients, that we actually check our phone while we are with other clients, agents or prospects and miss opportunities (we found that while on our trip, phones only became useful for telling the time, and this was a huge shift away from the habit of being on them!)

The trick to seeing our habits, and using them to our advantage, is to get into an environment where we shift out of our habits naturally. This works way better than trying to force ourselves into new habits that don’t feel natural.

Finding an environment away from your habits can look like an adventure in the bush, or getting lost in a passion, or going to a neighbourhood you don’t know, or being immersed in somebody else’s life for a while.

What else can we do to create a distance between ourselves and our habits- allowing us to see them clearly and use them to our advantage?