A short motivational talk about "the gap": the tendency of entrepreneurs to measure themselves against moving, often unattainable ideals, which causes chronic dissatisfaction. The speaker (referring to Justin and Cherie) argues for measuring progress relative to where you or your team started, celebrating gains, and using a daily "positive focus" practice (including a 20-day exercise and the Windstreak app from Strategic Coach) to reinforce gratitude and project positive outcomes.
I want to cover real quick a concept called the gap. It's the sickness that is entrepreneurship. And I'm looking at Justin as I say this because we've gone through this. We tend to measure ourselves as entrepreneurs. And this is not normal. Most people don't do this. We have an ideal out there and consider that the horizon. So it's this ideal that I want to sell this many homes next year or this year, I want to achieve this. I want to weigh this. I want to be able to run whatever your ideal is and where you are. We tend to measure ourselves against the ideal. You know, I'll have a conversation with. I didn't ask Justin that I could do this, but I'll do it anyway. You know, has more money in his bank accounts than he probably ever thought he might even have. Money is not an issue. Completely off the table. You know, he's home at reasonable hours now and getting way better. Not in production, out of production. So he's doing all these things, but he's disappointed he didn't hit his goal this year. Right. It was something around the conversation that I'm like, dude, are you kidding me? Like, just look back to where you were, you know, when he was one of the 12 that was in the room, the first intensive workshop we had. There you go, the original notebook. And like, from where you were, I mean, that's the progress. We've got to look back. So whenever you find yourself a little frustrated and what's. You feel satisfied when you're. You're dissatisfied when you're in the gap, like, but I really wanted to sell 300 homes this year, and we only hit 220. It's like, dude, but like, think of all this other stuff. I mean, your children now see you more often. You're connected and your wife trusts that. You know, when you're going to be home at 6, you're home at 6 and you've got more money than you thought. You're impacting in so many ways. So you've got to look back when you. When you measure your progress. It's sort of a quirky topic, but the horizon's always moving. That's the thing. You're ideal. You're never going to reach it. Right. You're never going to. I may never sell 4,200 homes. And if that was. I was measuring my progress by that. The cool thing is with this, I'll go through how to stay out of the gap here in a second. You still need to have those ideals, but here's the cool thing is that this is good for your team as well. So if you can apply this same sort of being measuring your team's progress based on where they started. You have ideals for your team too. And they're probably our frustration in our teams comes from them not achieving to our ideals. In our ideals we want them to be in five days a week, 8 to 11, set two appointments a day. Like all these ideals that we just have and it should magically be done instead of just honoring them for what they've achieved and just celebrating their progress and then they're going to want to do more for you. So it's this self fulfilling prophecy. And with Cherie, she basically ran my company while I was building real estate B school. She's real frustrated because we didn't hit our goal this year. We had turnover with agents that weren't a fit with our core values once we leaned into them. There's all these things you could look at and be like, oh, you know, we didn't reach there. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like if you look back at January, I'm like, we are a totally different company. Like we are different in every way possible in how we run it functionally, how we're data driven, how our core values, how everyone's in their box living out their roles. I mean we are a drastically different company. So it helps. And then she just, she feels more calm, you know, because when you measure against where we were, the progress is phenomenal. So don't get caught up on one thing, you know, and one thing only and positive focus. If you don't use positive focus in all of these situations that are in your notes, when you meet with an agent, when you have a team meeting with your kids, at the dinner table with your spouse, my kids won't let me leave the room. My daughter will call me back into the room yelling like we didn't do our top three. And it's like they go to bed at 8 o' clock and it's like 9:45 she'll wake up and remember that we didn't do our top three. So like what are the top three things that you're grateful for today? What are you proud of? Everything. If you do, there's a 20 day positive focus that you can get an actual book. It's required for new agents on our team. And there's an app, Windstreak app, which is from Strategic Coach that you do your positive focus for the day and then you project your positive focus for tomorrow. So you already have a psychology of good things that are gonna happen over the next day.
