The 6 Disciplines to Dominate During the Shift with Cristina Skurat (Part I)

What's up, Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinburg, founder, Real Estate B School. And we're in the midst of sharing our two day Business Growth Digital Summit. And if you're just coming into the podcast, make sure you go back. We have shared Aaron Novello, Jarrick Robbins, Wally Bressler, Christine Lee, Jess Lenove. And our speaker that we're going to get into now is Christina Edelston Skurat of Kirby and Christina in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Last year they did 777 transactions. This is a two part podcast. So two part podcast. And Christina goes into the six disciplines you must employ in your business and in your life and she splits it out into three and three. If you're going to crush the shift, there's no way around these disciplines. You know, she was the year she was pregnant, I think with their second or third child, she sold 150 homes personally, she's now completely out of production. She's running the business. And it's an amazing, amazing story. So stay tuned for part one. If you haven't grabbed a copy of the Real Estate Business Growth Navigator, that's where I detail the stages of business growth. And Kirby and Christina were early part of Real Estate B school. And I guided them. They did the work, but I guided them along this journey. So this roadmap, these six distinct stages that you need to follow to grow your business from wherever you are to wherever you want to go is@realestatebusinessgrowth.com that's realestatebusinessgrowth.com and enjoy part one of Christina talking about the six disciplines to crush the shift.

All right, so raise your hand if you like the word discipline. And I know it's probably not the favorite word I actually debated should I use the word disciplines or should I use the word habits? Because habits is so much catchier. But I think like a habit feels like something that you just like naturally do where the discipline to me is something that you choose to do. And I think that there's things that we all know we should do, but that doesn't mean that we do them or want to do them. So anyway, I mean, I think, you know, when, when Lars asked me to speak today and share a little bit about our journey, I wanted to share some of these things. And you know, I do want to just give Lars a shout out because I do remember being in his room and learning and he was sharing stuff from high performance coaching he'd learned. And Lars always just brings his 100% a game and is always learning himself and working to be able to bring things of value. So we have always appreciated that so much about him. And I think we share a lot of four values, which makes it extra fun to collaborate together. So thank you for inviting me and a little bit about me. So I've been married 13 years to Kirby, who is my wonderful husband. Random fact, he flew out to the Congo and surprised me and proposed there 14 years ago. So that's how we ended up getting engaged. And now we have four amazing children here in these pictures. Our oldest just turned 10, which makes us feel really old because all of a sudden you're like, wow, we've been parents 10 years, no wonder we're not anymore in our 20s or 30s. I actually just turned 41 a few days ago. So I grew up in Mexico and I also lived in the Congo, in Africa. And we have a real estate team with about 35 full time agents and then other support agents and staff. We have a home building company that Kirby runs and we have rental properties. So the primary focuses from a business standpoint at this time. And for fun, we love to travel, go on vacations and go to our lake home, which if you know about Minnesota, people love cabins on lakes. And we ended up doing our 10 year dream early and bought it during COVID which we would never go back. It was like the best decision. And we've had so much fun as well as fun sharing it with people. And I love food and good food. So anyway, there's a little bit about me and Lars. Do we. Do people pitch in with questions? Should I leave open for that or just toward the end?

I would say, I mean, definitely sprinkling your question as you guys have them. But I would just go through your stuff and then I'll pay attention to the questions and then we'll have time afterwards.

Okay, that sounds great. So what are the six things that we'll talk about today? The disciplines that have, that have really transformed my personal life and business, I think, you know, to take care of, there's. There's kind of two categories, which is you as a person, take care of your physical body, mindset and soul, and leverage your home to be life giving. And the three that have been part of my business success, specifically with real estate is master the sales process, get really good at the phone and loving it. And relationships are the key. So you guys ready for this? Let's get rolling. So first, take care of your physical body, I think is one of the things. And you know, actually this morning I was thinking about it and I'm going to start actually with number two is number one. Because I think that that's really like where, where I start or where I would recommend starting as a platform for the rest. It was actually kind of fun to see you guys in the chat. I, I wasn't able to participate in the earlier sessions, but hearing you talk about some of you guys, at least from that spiritual side, it's pretty cool. And I think, you know, what I, what I observe it well and what I, what I know to be true is we are spiritual means are more to us than just our physical body. And when we develop and nurture the deeper side in us, everything in our outlook changes our priorities and the way that we live. And that's been a huge part for my life. We need an anchor, something that we go to when the going gets tough. Also something that we go to when the going is great. So we don't get proud because pride comes before the fall usually. And so that's really been a huge thing for me. You know, I think that if most of us look around, we've heard at some point and some of you guys might even know people, right, who've had huge levels of success and yet end up committing suicide. Right. I think there was a big realtor in California not that long ago, very successful. And so really I think what it comes down to is financial success and success in life. It does not have that true lasting meaning. All of us look for meaning. And so that's, that's really huge that I would encourage each of you to, to find a deeper sense of purpose. So for me that invented what anchors me consistently and I go back to and that's what the framework that, by which I live my life. And it's huge for me and there's a lot of resources out there that are not necessarily Christian that can help you. Like I've learned a lot from Tony Robbins and several of his events that have really helped me process and put through the time of defining who I am. And that's, that's the, one of the points I really want to talk about today is the more clear you are on who you are as a person and where you're going, then, then what you're doing is going to align and you're going to have that integrity with yourself about all the other disciplines that we're going to talk about today. Just a little plug in date with destiny for me was my favorite event of his. And I we're kind of junkies who went to all of them. But one of the things you have to do there is write out your destiny board. And there's, there's a couple things in there. One you're writing like, hey, the mission of my life is X. I know Lars is huge on that. He had us work on stuff like that when we went and we've gone to these events. And one of the things that I appreciated a lot is you had, he had to work through your toward values and your away from values. Meaning because we're not even aware of the things that we live by sometimes value wise. Right. Like so for example, one of the ones that I learned of was everything's going to go badly. And so even for example this week some things happened and I caught myself realizing, wow, I'm responding like everything's going to be going badly instead of looking at it from the values that I. That I want to have that are. That are true of who I am. And so being able to acknowledge that has helped me completely transform the way that I approach things versus just that incentive gut reaction that we have from our childhood based on whatever experiences we had. So anyway, the more you can figure out who you are, that's. And put the time towards that and do it regularly. So every year I spend some time by myself which doesn't happen easily when you're a parent and I'm sure you all know and I said since I'm really thinking and praying through hey, what is, what is my focus going to be this year based on my circumstances or the opportunities we want to grow, or my family's needs or my team's needs or my own needs. And then I put the energies towards that. And I usually try to live with no more than four to six that are areas that I'm focusing on developing. I usually try to have at least one or two that are personal, one or two that are business related that I'm really focusing on as things really encourage you to read books or listen as realtors and as busy people if you work out or you're driving listening to books. Audible is my best friend. But it is a game changer for growing and changing the weight of your approaching life. Whether. And I actually switch it up a lot. I read like a personal book, not, not novels or anything, although fun things. I'm trying to bring it into my life from a reading standpoint and I have over the last year a little. But I usually say what is something that's going to develop me as a person? And then I switch it Off. And the next time I'm reading, typically something that's going to develop me from a business standpoint or as a leader. Previously I had a lot to do with sales skills and things like that. And I still sometimes sprinkle sales stuff and how can I develop in my coaching of my team and think bigger and then always I would highly, highly encourage you. Find a mentor, find counselors. If you know you got issues, just go get help. And it's so awesome. It's so awesome in your marriage and whatever category it is, because that will catapult you to the next levels in every way. So that's my encouragement. I'm going to go back to number one. So with that as a framework, right? Like who I want to be, who you want to be, and having that clarity, when you've got the clarity, it's true to you. You can't make it up right now, in my opinion, if you have, you really spend the time doing it and identify who you really are and are comfortable with that and decisions you're choosing to make from there, then some of these other decisions you make, these other disciplines will be far easier to follow through on. So I think taking care of our physical body is huge. There's a quote that my dad told me of once that I will never forget. But he said, you know, there's this guy that just worked and was amazing and did a lot of amazing things in his life, and I can't remember what his name is, but the point is he never rested and ended up dying in his 30s. And one of his dying quotes was, man, God gave me one horse to run with, and I beat the horse to death. So we don't want to do that with our body. We've got one body, one life. We want to take good care of it, because when we do that, we're able to make such a more powerful impact for the rest of our lives, Right? And we want those lives to belong in a way that are meaningful to ourselves, our family, and waters. So I think exercising is huge. And one of the things that I really recommend is be realistic. You know, I see a lot of people that are like, oh, I never work out. Okay, now my goal, and I'm going to work out seven days a week for an hour every single day. And it's just like, that's not going to happen. It's not sustainable for most people. Some people do it, I realize, but it's very few people that do that. So it's far better to make a commitment that's far smaller once a week, once you hit once a week for several months, go to twice a week or whatever. But like don't, don't make the jump so big. So I have for years and years and years. I just do three times a week. I do 30 minutes, but I just wrote 15. If that's something that helps you to kind of conceptualize if it's small enough to do it consistently. But it is a game changer when I have hard days, even when I was pregnant, all four pregnancies, or when I'm tired or sick. Like I do everything I can to stay consistent. And you know you're going to have a little zegs there, right? If you get really sick or something. But generally try to stay consistent and the energy level that it causes in you start your day, you go strong and your whole life long term is going to go better. My, you know, I think we stopped building true muscle after the 40s, I think it is. And so you want to build as much and maintain as much food as you can and not let it dwindle down. So keep it easy. I think that one of the things for me that you'll see kind of a sense of pattern in a lot of the disciplines that I talk about, I try to make everything literally as easy as possible so that I actually can follow through on it because it requires very little thinking on my part once I've done the initial decision making about what I want to do. So there's pews in my life where I did a lot of running and biking. Then I did P25, 25 minute hardcore workouts after I had kids. If you know anything about that, you know it's pretty rough on a woman's body. So I got into a workout program called Every Mother, which was really very transformational and helpful and I highly encourage it for any woman who's had children. And now my husband and I do the mirror. So like literally a physical mirror that has a workout program, live coaching on end, live classes and thousands of workout classes of every type from yoga and dance to strength building and kickboxing and all of that. But we actually work out together now, which has made it really fun and challenges both of us to do harder workouts than we would typically on our own. But what I really like about it when I think about Easy Again is we don't drive anywhere. I don't have to get in my cold car in the middle of winter in Minnesota. I'm not losing, you know, 15 minutes driving here back and forth to the gym. I'm not stuck talking to people when I don't have time. And when you have kids, that's, that's a real, real issue. That morning time and evening very, very, very difficult to ever actually work out. So we get up, the kids don't bother us, they know what we're doing. We get our workout in, in and out, done 30 minutes. So again, easy, easy, easy, easy, totally recommended. So. And really the more you do whatever you decide with your physical body, I know we could go in and talking about eating healthy and all that. And I'm not going to go into that today. For me, this is one of the biggest things is just do it consistently. Start small, stay consistent and then you can build from there. But I don't feel a need to work out five or seven times a week. I mean sometimes I am doing activities five or seven times a week or full walk or things like that. But my commitment of exercise is three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, just doesn't change. Just like I'm spending time personally journaling and reading my Bible, spending time with God every Tuesday, Thursday and then on the weekends. So just very, very like simple and structured first thing in the morning. So I'm going to go then to number three of the personal ones. So leverage your home to be life giving. I think that's huge when we're entrepreneurs and we're hustling and we're working hard. And when you work in real estate, which doesn't end, it's not 9 to 5, right. It's starting to finish. And we all know we've had those calls at 10 or 11pm get that deal done or save it from dying. We need our home environment to be as supportive and life giving as possible. Because the worst thing that can happen is you have all these responsibilities. You come home, you raise your hand, right? If you experience this and then you're like, oh my gosh, the bathrooms haven't been clean or oh my goodness, I have no idea what we're going to eat and I'm starving and now I'm hangry and I got to open the fridge and come up with something. And all those decisions just. And that pressure we feel, they weigh it down and it really, if we start feeling that guilt or that, that pulling us back, it doesn't allow us to live in our best space for our home life as well as for our business. Right. And for our clients and all that. So some of the ways that I found that really the disciplines that help us is Prioritize. We prioritize our marriage since before we had kids. Just made the commitment on literally Thursday nights, since the day we got married to even now that's when we've got our date night. And, you know, our newborns joined us for about the first month and a half or so or whatever, but once they started getting, you know, whatever, stay with the babysitter with the rest. So, and that's great because having that dedicated time away, it's not the exhaustive 9pm time after you've gotten the kids to bed and or whatever. I mean, it's just huge. So it's fun. I think being able to do that is very important. And then we've also invested in times of growth. So sometimes it's been participating in certain coaching programs together. Sometimes it's been, hey, let's go to counseling and grow in this area individually and in our marriage and whatever it is. And sometimes it's just like, hey, let's have a little more fun in this particular area. And so that's been really great for us as two strong personalities and with a lot going on, that's extremely helpful. Again, going to the easy thing. Delegate or find easy system that makes the weight of the home life easier. Right. So cleaning just get a cleaner. I mean, I think Lars might have been one of the first people that really was like, dude, you got to get cleaners. But it's a game changer. And we've been doing that for several years. And it's not that we're not physically able to clean. We clean all the time. Like the maintenance cleaning, but the deep cleaning, awesome. Not having to worry about that at all. It's huge. So groceries and menu planning, that was like our witching hour when we come home from work. Anybody else experience that or otherwise you're eating out too much. And that's not great for you either or your budget sometimes. So we did a lot of research and found an app called Paprika. Okay. Which I highly, highly recommend you menu plan. You add all the recipes super easily from the Internet or manually add it to the weekly. To the weekly menu. And then you add all your groceries from there. Compile them different news, you can share an account. So keeping a shop. Well, now we're nanny shop, so we order online most of the time so that, you know, ordering online makes groceries easy. So when you don't have to think about it and then you end up with your go to recipes, the ones that work, and you have a variety. Again, less decision making makes it so much better. And then for us, we ended up going to getting a nanny by the time we had a third kid. So that also we made cooking dinners part of her job description. So the day that she works for us, that's what she does. And it makes a total game changer. We come home, he's already hard enough to detach from work, but at least now we don't have to like work cooking and we can show from eat dinner as a family. And that's been something so wonderful for us as a parent. One of the leverage things I would encourage is spend one on one time with each kid, as it's often even every day, at least 5 to 10, 15 minutes of attention on them. It makes a huge difference. So Kirby's been really good about doing like daddy daughter or daddy Sundays. They love that I do my times with them differently, but I think investing in that is huge. And again, speaking to moms mostly that like, the mom guilt thing is a real thing when you work. And so being able to do that and make sure that your kids feel loved gives you so much more peace. Like, it's okay, they love the nanny, they're loved at school or whatever. I'm still showing up for them when I'm showing up. So being intentional and not accidental really helps a lot to make sure that you're living according to the values you want here. And then for us personally, I don't want to be all work and no play. We love vacations, building memories and fun experiences. And personally, giving the charity is a huge part of our lives. And so we plan for that. Like, hey, how much do we want to give? Hey, what vacations do we want to go on? This? What? Okay. All right. So now I'm going to transition to the business side of things. Okay. So the, the fourth thing, the fourth discipline that has really, I guess, transformed our success is mastering the sales process. Now, I'm imagining most of you, or if not all of you, have at least personally been selling homes for whatever period, and you're probably still selling homes or now starting to manage or managing your team selling homes. And again, going to the easy part, right? Like creating systems around everything that you can possibly control that is repetitive or repetitive enough is a complete game changer. You've done it, you know. You know, we created a lot of our systems around what are the things that wake us up at night, the buyer send the earnest money, right? Well, let's just create a system around all those things. Take the thinking out of it. Because taking that the thinking out of it, reduce the stress and then we just follow the process. And people are always like, wow, how do you remember everything? Why I don't my sister remember reminds me for it. I just follow it. So anything that causes you stress, that can be proactively managed, I would always encourage you to create a system around it. Now I'm sure you know, there's a talk about getting an assistant or showing agents that will be a whole part of the systems that I could go into as well. But that's what I would really encourage. Everything that can elevate you to being your highest mess and the leader you want to become for whatever kind of business you want to be building is huge. And then here's another one. Now I'm imagining most of you because you're here with coaching, you are doing this. But if you're leading a team as well, I think it's one of the things I really coach my agents. But real estate agents love to think they work and they don't always work, right? So I'm like, if you treat your job like a full time, real job, you will always make a lot of money, right? Like how many people in the world make like 100K6 figures when they're not working at least around 40 hours a week. I mean, maybe once you have your successful business, right? Or millionaires don't count, but like normal people, nobody gets paid that to just show up 15 hours a week. And then we have agents that sit there wondering why they make the salary 15 hours a week, right? So I just like show up, get up every single day, treat it like a real job, right? Who's read the bookied that frog money, right? So do the hardest, most important work every day. Who knows what the hardest, most important work in real estate is, right? Make those calls. We'll talk about that in the next discipline. And I believe that if you treat everything that you do in real estate and in your work kind of like pink on, then you're, you're going to do really well. So. So the ball should never be in your court. Just pass it back, pass it back. If you read an email, touch it once, respond, file it, delete it. People always ask me now, wow, where do you start getting successful? Like, oh, just answer the phone. We call everybody back every time. And it is a game changer. So just the less the balls in your fort, the more things move forward. And you also train yourself to have higher capacity that way. So the touch it once concept is huge. With just about every Task you can do again, it makes it easier. You're going to have some emails, subtle tasks that are going to require more time than that, but they should be minimal in the majority of your activities that bond people down, like email or text, just touch it once and take care of it. So that's a huge one. So number five, get really good at the phone. Raise your hand if you like calling people and being on the phone. I have some people shaking their heads and a couple people raising their hands. Thanks for the honesty, everybody. Well, I'm one of those weird people that became a lover of the phone. But I remember the absolute terror the first time we got a pay per click read on our new home search website and I looked at Kirby and I was like, what do I do? Well, call it. I don't know what to say. But I just started doing it right and then we eventually got coaches and people that help us be better at it. But what, what I've gotten from it, right, is that the only way to grow to love and get better is just by doing it. And the more you do it, the better you. You are in it. And I think that's really what happened with me. You know, I single handedly was the one that managed all of our home search website leads for a couple years. I set all the appointments, worked all the leads, sold about 60 homes by the next year out of that website. So and so I learned a lot and you have to talk to a lot of people to, to do that. And this is, this was like a, you know, tight relief which was based on became commissions they ever got bought out by them. So just, just the testimony there that it can work for everybody, for you, for your agents, just doing it and learning. One of the. Here's a strategy that helped me to get really good on the phone. Okay. There's a book called go for no. The premise of the book is exactly the title, but it really makes a difference because if you want to be liked, sell ice cream, right? That's just. We're not going to be liked by everybody when we're calling people about real estate. So most people get discouraged calling people on the phone because they're. They're wanting a yes. We all want a yes. And when you instead are realistic and say, hey, I'm going to get rejected and you almost make it like a game, it completely changes your game, right? So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to go for setting five appointments today, I would go, I want to see if I can just get 10 people to say FM by the end of the day. Not intentionally. Right. But we're going to do it. We've all gotten hung up on and I'm just going to see how many friends I can make along the way. And instead of checking, instead of feeling bad about all the hang ups and you know, nice things people sometimes say when they do that, you start checking it off like in your brain. It's like I achieved another goal, you know. And in the process of that it, it's actually very rare you're going to have hit 10 of those in a day. If you're learning and getting better at scripts and conversations. Right. And by the end of it you're probably going to have your goals of what you wanted set and achieved. But the mindset of it is different in that you're, you're very realistic with that. So understanding the math with numbers, with phone call to me has always helped me. Again, I keep going back to I like it easy. I like to know where I'm going because then I can function within that. So you buy a hundred leads online, likely is 30% of them are going to be bad numbers. The other some people might have realtors, whatever. If you make a hundred calls, you're probably at bets going to get 10 life conversations of those. If you're good at the end of the day you're going to set about 1. So there's a math and you're basically going for 99 not set appointments out of 100 call but you should end up with 1 by the end of the day. So that helps me. And if you can understand your math or start to track it, it really helps you to be able to approach it with that kind of eye wide open thing and train your team with that as well. So I'd encourage you to learn scripts, get good coaching with that. There's a lot of line, but getting an actual coach, we're doing real role playing. A lot of teams in a lot of groups will do role playing and that is huge. We do that every week on our team and give feedback and get the feedback. One of the first script coaches I had, he was really directing. What made me cry, however, he did make me cry, however, what I will say is that he really taught me like that if I hadn't gotten that coaching, I wouldn't have gotten better. And so I'm really grateful for that and I think that has enabled me to be a better coach with my agents now with more sensitivity possibly. But you need to get and give real feedback to get better. And in regards to being able to get good at the phone listen, if you ask really good questions, you're going to get really good answers. And if you ask kind of lousy questions like yes or no questions, most of the time especially at the onset of a conversation aren't good, right? So you're going to get yes or no answers. That doesn't give the conversation going very far.

Thanks for listening. Would you please take a minute to share the show with other agents who may be struggling? And if you love the podcast, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and make sure you visit Scale or to get a free copy of my book. It's a nuts and bolts guide to building a real estate business that gives you true time and money freedom so that you can live your life without regrets. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.