A motivational talk on measuring progress against where you started, not against an ever-moving horizon. The speaker draws from Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach workshop to explain why comparing yourself to an ideal you'll never reach kills satisfaction in business and real estate.
There's one thing I want to go through with all of you and it's along the same lines of what we're talking about and we're going to take, we're going to coach you guys, live here in a minute, answer questions. But this is something I learned in Strategic Coach. It's a workshop I go to. It's one day a quarter, it's $5,000 to spend eight hours with Dan Sullivan and with a hundred other business owners. So it's an expensive workshop. But the, the cool thing that he does is give high level concepts that can profoundly shift. And I'll give you guys an access to this document. But there's this thing that he calls the Gap and he actually wrote a book on it and it comes with an audio CD as well. And they're really, for the most part I can say there isn't anyone on this call that has it tough. You know, by sort of even just world measures like we are part of the 1% on our worst day. It's better than, you know, 90% of the world's best day. And as business owners, when we, when we are frustrated or we get down about our progress, it's only because we're looking at this ideal that we have in our head about where we should be. And this is any area of your life, there's an ideal and we're measuring ourself against that ideal, not against our progress. So that's where, and I'm just going to read this because I really want everyone to get this because once you get this one thing, it doesn't mean that we're going to stop working on your business and stop hard charging and achieve greatness in your business. But it's going to make the ride way more enjoyable. And you've got to trust me on this. And there's a tangible tool that I'm going to give you guys here to, you know, when you look back six months from now, it's going to be this thing that you start today and you make a make a habit of. So some people who are enormously successful and have great lives are extremely happy and satisfied while others in similar circumstances are extremely unhappy. Why is that? The key difference is in how they look at life. The brain has a great ability to see a vision of how things could be in the future. The trick is to use that ideal as inspiration and not to measure your progress against it because it will always continue to change and evolve as you do so. Dan likens the ideal to horizon. So if you're on the ocean, you're looking out and you're looking at the horizon. You're never going to reach the horizon because it's always moving. And that's the same thing with being in the gap. You're always going to be measuring yourself against something that's changing. In order to feel happy about your achievements, you need to measure them against where you started from. This will keep you out of the gap and constantly living in the positive zone. That's why anytime you get on the call with your business coach, Stacy Cliff, or in boardroom with myself, we always open up every call with, give me some good news. You know, we're going to tackle this tough stuff. But anytime you start a team meeting or you do a one on one, you always start that meeting with some good news. Especially if you know it's going to be a difficult meeting. Your happiness is directly tied to the way you perform this act of measurement. When you measure your progress against your starting point, you will always have a sense of success, satisfaction, capability and confidence. So especially in real estate B school where we, what we do is different. What was the quote, you know, to an industry that wants rock concerts and french fries? We are personal training and salad, you know, we are the stuff that is real and it gives you long term sustainable results that will lead you to have a healthy business, but it's not going to be the instant fix. And so a lot of times you go through a period, you know, if you were on last week's call, you heard Dave Hook talk about he went through a year where he didn't grow. He did a hundred deals, you know, before we started working together, and three 12 months in that 12 months, he did 100 deals. But he was focusing on the not so sexy side of real estate. And he did 150. And this year he'll do 200. And he's in boardroom now. So it's really focusing on your progress, not the ideal.
