How to L E A P in Business and at Home

Hey, what's up, Business Freedom podcast listeners? So I want to dig into something that's really been working well for me, especially in the times that we're in currently. The last podcast episode, if you missed it, was called why Business and Marriage are Freaking Hard. And this podcast episode actually recorded that one before all of the craziness that's going on in the world was going on. And this episode I'm recording after all of this craziness is going on. As of this recording, I'm recording on April Fools. And the topic I want to go through today is it was advice given to me not by a marriage counselor, but it's used in marriage counseling. And I don't know if it was in my men's group or where it was given to me, but it's an acronym that it's used in marriage counseling. And the acronym is leap. And so this is communicating with your spouse. A lot of times where things get off track, especially with men and I think probably with most business owners, male or female, is that we tend to give perspective, which is the P in leap before we listen, empathize, and affirm. And so I want to take you back to. And I am feeling this right now, especially in times where, like, we feel this need. We are business builders. We are ready to go out and hunt something and just kill something as a reaction to uncertainty. And, you know, we can take the world on our shoulders. And with that sort of energy in business, even in our teams and in our families and with our spouses, we tend to bring that. It's not even bravado as much as it is like a kick ass and take names mentality. And when you have that ability to kind of gather resources and to get folks to get up and follow you and build a business together, we tend to give perspective a lot. And when things intensify and there's craziness going on and there's chaos, we tend to do it even more. And. And so this is just me being completely real. We are spring break, we were in Hawaii. And as I'm recording this, we're in week three, the middle of week three that we've been back and our kids have been home. This is the third full week they've all been in the home. And it's going okay, they call it. They're doing school at home and it feels like homeschooling. Like we're doing all the work and Julie's doing most of the work. All the work, actually, I'm not doing any of it. There are times where I sort of come in and I step in and I coach or I get them through a difficult situation or I help with technology. What I find now during these times where, you know, we've got a couple businesses that are, you know, going through what y' all are going through. And in that I feel myself with this, this like sense of I'm the commander in chief and I'm going to give direction. And on the one hand it's serving the businesses really well. On the other hand, we tend to shut down the listening, empathizing and affirming. And I feel myself doing that. I'm bringing that energy into my family. Not so much in the businesses. My family's kind of getting it. I'm just saying the way things are supposed to happen. I've got a fourth grader and a sixth grader and a wife and the fourth and sixth grader are even old enough where, you know, you don't really want to just bark at them and tell them what to do. You need to listen to those around you. And I'm saying, you like me. And so the equation is that. And this is the sort of lesson. And then I want to talk about how it was in the early days of my business. The equation is that you only get to give perspective once you've listened, you've empathized, you've affirmed, and then you can give perspective. So you need to lea before you pee. You cannot pee all over everyone all the time. As hard charging business builders, we tend to do that. We tend to go to perspective all the time, like this is what I would do or do it this way. And the bad part of that in business is that you're never going to build a sustainable business. The business is always going to turn to you to tell it what to do. That goes if you have a single administrator, or if you have one or two buyer agents, or if you're running a 20, 30 person team or business, if you're always giving perspective, you're never going to have a sustainable business. You're never going to run that like a true business asset. And so that this is just good business practice as well. So take a challenge. Actually, let me talk a little bit about, you know, in the early days of business, I was sort of the same way. I was newly married to Julie. In October 2006, we had Anders. In November 2007, I got into real estate that year. The market went to crap. The Great recession hit in 2008, 9, 10, 11. Even into 2012, we went from 15,000 agents to 5,000 agents in our market. And it took me a lot of lessons around just giving perspective in the business. And this is how things had to go if we were going to be successful and we were going to grow. We did grow. We went from 58 sides in three, four years. We went over 300 sides, then over 400 sides in all of those crazy years. It's almost been harder to do real estate in the last three or four years than it was in those crazy times, a great recession, because everyone get out of real estate. And there wasn't, you know, as many people to compete with. And so, you know, looking back at that time, I brought that energy into, from the business, into the marriage, and I just gave a lot of perspective. And maybe this is a guy thing. Maybe it's universal. If you have that energy of like, I can handle it. I know how to do this. I can control situations. You know, just check yourself and take a challenge to really think about. You know, are you giving perspective everywhere? Are you listening to respond or are you listening to understand? And I am the worst at this. So I'm a recovering, you know, peeing all over everybody person. I am constantly checking myself on listening to respond. Like I have the thing to say before you're even finished talking. And especially if with my spouse, she doesn't need me to give perspective. She doesn't need me to pounce on what she's saying. And your team members don't need that as well. If you want to have a good relationship with somebody, it's going to come with slowing down and listening to understand, empathizing, affirming. So if your agent is struggling, you need to listen to why they're struggling instead of telling them they need to prospect for three to four hours a day. Here are your scripts, here's the login for your, you know, your CRM and go at it. Here's a motivational video. You need to listen to why they're struggling. You need to empathize and say and affirm and say, you know, I totally get it, this is not an easy path. And to affirm that these are valid. Like, everyone getting into real estate has these same concerns and, you know, just sort of be with them in that moment, hear them out, and then you sort of get into this relationship with the person where you're able to offer them perspective because you've opened up a conversation versus just boom, boom, boom. You're always just giving perspective, giving perspective in the home. It just doesn't work. And so you're going to fall out of relationship, you're going to fall out of intimacy with your children and your spouse if you're always giving perspective. So I hope that's helpful. For me, this has been something I have leaned on. I've had this for the last. I've been working on this for the last five or six years, probably is when I first heard the acronym. And it's really served me really, really well. And it's helped me in all of my relationships. And I still mess up. I still go to perspective. I think my factory wiring, my mo, my modus operandi has been to just give perspective. Like, I know how to do it. I know how to do it the best, do it my way. And it's hard to grow something real that's going to have real impact in the world if you're the one that's always making every decision and you're the one that's always telling everyone to do, and you always have the answer. You can't have any leverage in your life, any sustainability, any time or money. Freedom, really. If you run and operate that way, you will not become a business owner if you're giving perspective all the time, or at least you won't have a healthy business be surrounded by a whole bunch of dysfunction, a whole bunch of people that just say yes and they're not in charge of outcomes. They're just, you know, it's a transactional relationship where, like, you give them one thing at a time. They. It's like a dog. You throw the dog a bone or a ball, the dog goes and gets it and then it brings it back. You don't want a whole bunch of relationships and a transaction basis where you do this one thing. You come back. Any questions? You come back. Come back to me with all the questions because I have all the answers. That's not going to lead you to owning anything that's worth anything. And so leap. I haven't looked it up in the Internet recently. I wonder who originally came. Leap marriage. Leap marriage. Wow. I got a bunch of. Leap year, leap day. So anyway, if you're at the point in your business where you know, you're struggling in any way, you know, where you've, you've reached that top producer status, or you're running a small team or a large team, you know, we work with folks from anywhere from 3 to 500,000 in GCI, all the way up to 5 million GCI plus. And we have fundamentals that we use in your business even just to analyze the business in an initial conversation. So all we can offer you is a conversation about your business. That is it. And go to realestate bschool.com Click on apply now or go to a strategy session under Resources. You'll figure your way around the website. There's a bunch of cool stuff there on the website as well. And yeah, wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe to this podcast and share it with everybody. Everyone you know that could benefit from it. We love you and appreciate you for doing that. And until next time, we'll talk soon.