Facebook Live Video 1 Personal Sharing Motivation for Career

Good morning for those of you on Eastern Standard Time. It's 8:00 in the morning here in not quite yet sunny Naples, Florida, and I decided to do a FaceTime Live on my personal web page versus my business page. For those of you that don't know, my name is Renee Hahn and I do real estate here in Naples, Florida. Florida, and I've decided not to put this on my real estate business page, Facebook page, but rather my personal one. Why is that? Because I don't want to have to make this a professional video. What I wanted to do was to use it as an opportunity to share some of my experiences, you know, with others. And I just realized, by the way, that I did not start my timer, so give me one moment here. I want to make sure— I've been known to go on and on and on. There's never a lack of things to say, so I'm going to put my timer so I'm sensitive to how much time I'm taking on Facebook Live, even though you can shut me off at any time. So going back, you know, I put my— in the title that this is me sharing a little vulnerability, and I'll get more into that, but let me just start on the surface, you know, why, why do I say vulnerability? You know, as I sit here and my palms are sweaty and I've got butterflies in my stomach, and those of you that know me are saying, well, how can that be? Renee is outwardly one of the more courageous people we know. There's not much she isn't willing to try, say, or do. And although that's true, I tend to keep the personal side more of, you know, the safe zone. And so coming out here on Facebook Live with friends, some of which have known me since my childhood, others that, you know, I may have only met once, a few that perhaps I haven't met at all. And so coming out and sharing anything that might be personal in nature is a little bit vulnerable, at least for me. I don't know for you. But also, I chose to do it on Facebook Live, and so there is a high likelihood that no one will come into this Facebook Live at all, you know, which is a vulnerable place to be as well. That was my husband calling. Perhaps he saw me on Facebook Live and is thinking, what in the world are you doing, Renee? You didn't tell me you were going on Facebook Live to be vulnerable. I didn't tell him. But anyways, there's Max, my dog. What I wanted to do today, and I'm gonna go ahead and launch, and even though nobody is necessarily up at 8 in the morning and interested in jumping into FaceTime Live with me, hopefully there will be some of you that perhaps watch this at a later time. And so what I wanted to do, I'm hoping this is kind of the first of, I don't know how many, we'll see, it depends how comfortable I get with this. But I thought to myself, I am always inspired by the things I hear from others, the things I see people do. And, you know, one of the things in my core that motivates a majority of what I do is this innate need to help others. It's why I went into the career I went into. It's why I do what I do now. It's a little bit of where I, right or wrong, where I define my own value is the ability to help others, sometimes unsolicited and unwanted. I recognize that. But what inspired me is if that's at my core and I've got this strong, deep-rooted desire to help people and there are life experiences that I have that could, and yet I selfishly keep those to myself, whether it's for pride, and it often is, or other reasons, you know, watching day in and day out as I've gotten more integrated with social media because of my profession, I see people putting themselves in places of vulnerability and being willing to share with others their experiences. And I thought, shame on you, Renee, that your stupid pride keeps you from doing that. Perhaps there's a nugget that can help others. So don't worry, I'm not gonna share any deep-rooted family dark secret today. That's not what today is, although if we stick around long enough when I do these, perhaps we'll get to that too. But really what I wanted to talk about today was, you know, sort of what drives and motivates our decisions. And I go back, I'd be remiss if I didn't share a little bit about when I talked about people inspire me, some of my inspiration. And I'll keep last names out of it to protect, excuse me, protect the innocent. But there's a woman that I've met in the last couple of years, her name is Melissa. Melissa, you'll know who you are. Who motivates me every day. She's an incredible woman. She has the most giving heart. In fact, I used to think I was generous until I met Melissa, and I— she redefined generous for me. But she is always putting herself out there and taking chances and sharing things with the world. So that was one source of inspiration. Another source of inspiration— I woke up to this this morning, and I had already been toying with doing a video and I happened to wake up and watch a TED Talk video of 100 Days of Rejection and if you haven't seen it, you have to. It's a really short, easy listen and the gentleman's name is Jai. In fact, later today I will post on my Facebook page his TED Talk but I listened to this gentleman who has a great story, much more impressive than mine. And I heard him talking about the fear of rejection and sort of what he did and how he's overcome that. Again, I highly recommend it. So a lot of different motivation points for me, but again, that's kind of out of place for where I was going, but I thought I'd be remiss if I didn't share where does some of my inspiration come from. It also comes from my mother, who is a wonderful, wonderful woman and has overcome major obstacles in life, not my stories to tell, so I won't. I have an amazing supportive husband who inspires me every day by encouraging me and then supporting me when I make mistakes, even when he knew I was about to make a mistake. But back to the topic, which is, you know, what kind of motivates you to make the decisions you make? And I thought I'd start with this topic because it's one that's kind of current. I get asked A lot of times, because people sort of look at my career and they scratch their head because they just don't get it, you know, what, why do I make the decisions I make and why have I chosen to do what I've chosen to do now? And, you know, and sometimes maybe I don't even necessarily always get it, but it usually comes from inside and works its way out until I can't. Deny it anymore. But this comes from a place, um, for those of you that know me professionally, I worked for a very large company for just under 15 years and was able to accomplish amazing, amazing things in my career, things that I didn't even know were possible, whether it's the places I got to go or the people I got to meet or the kind of experiences I've got or quite simply, most people that think I'm crazy for making the decisions I've made look at it from a financial perspective because I had the good fortune of, you know, making hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in my last career. And then they look at me now as a relatively new realtor and they think, what are you doing? So I do want to talk a little bit about what motivates the decisions we make because it's not You know, it's not a case of Renee having a midlife crisis. You know, there's nothing that I'm running away from. Well, perhaps that's not true. But, you know, you step back into— so here I was, kind of against the odds. I was a young, unwed, pregnant mother at the age of 21 in college at Michigan State. You know, and life could have turned out very, very differently for me because I did find myself in a situation that was not planned and not necessarily the best of situations. And yet I went on to, excuse me, have a really successful career with the company that I did. And as I mentioned, you know, there were a lot of benefits financially and otherwise for that. And so here I had built up this, you know, amazing career, and then I turned it in. I voluntarily turned it in, and people often said, Renee, what is it? You're looking for something that doesn't exist. So let me start with, you know, why did I turn it in? I talked earlier about my innate desire to help others, and it's why I chose to get into the field I did at the time, human resources, because I wanted in a corporate environment to help others. I, I genuinely enjoyed problem solving and business strategy and knowing I could do something to help others. But what I failed at in that period of time as I aggressively climbed the career ladder is I wasn't helping my family. Now, I don't blame that on the corporation. A lot of that is how I'm wired. Yes, I own it. But I found that in that environment, I wasn't as good at controlling my own tendencies to give so much to my job. I traveled all the time. We moved pretty frequently as I was changing jobs, which, you know, required my husband, who was also had managing his career, to continue to restart. And we just had a reflection moment that said, you know, this isn't exactly what we thought we were signing up for. I was, you know, so enamored with the success that I had had. And the sense of truly being successful, helping others, accomplishing things. And I wasn't successful at home. Again, I own that. It was my inability to manage the balance, but I knew myself well enough that I knew I needed to pull out of that and switch gears if I was gonna give myself the space, you know, to invest more in my family. So I left the corporate environment I actually had started a business endeavor up in South Carolina that I was enjoying quite a bit. I had some obstacles, and then my husband found that he was going to be losing his job because he's in sales and his territory was being eliminated. We'd just gotten done building this beautiful lake home that both of us had aspired to retiring in, and yet here we were finding that we needed to make a different choice. So I, I did the practical thing and I decided, well, I'm really good in corporate America. I'll go back to corporate America. It's safe. I know it. There's good money there. And we came to Naples, Florida. It also presented an opportunity to get closer to family. And I went back to corporate America. So I hadn't gotten quite back to the place that I was in my 15-year career, but I was back in corporate America and What I found and learned about myself is it was this innate interest in helping people wasn't necessarily being fed anymore. I had done it, you know, and there are many great things about working in corporate America, but there is also a lot of, I'll just say, headwind around what you think is doing the right thing and yet the confines of the business environment. And so after a couple of years, I realized that wasn't feeding my innate desire to help people. And having been an executive, executive and living in multiple places— Michigan, Florida at one time, Cincinnati two different times in Ohio, Virginia, a couple places in South Carolina, and then ultimately Naples— I had been through, you know, a lot of relocations myself and had the opportunity to work with a wide array of realtors, some that were absolutely fantastic, and if I had the opportunity to do business with them again, I do it in a heartbeat and others not so much. So, you know, going back to the question I get, people say, Renee, what in the world were you thinking? You went from doing well in the business environment where you had a steady paycheck, you know, life was good and easy. You had kind of found your way of balancing the work and family a little bit better than you had in your past company, why would you push, you know, change that in and go into real estate of all things? And it really came down to one, my interest. I love shopping for houses. I guess that's sort of the equivalent of people saying they went into HR because they love working with people, but it's true. I love shopping for houses. It never gets old with me. And I love helping people, and I had done some work with a couple builders, helping them with their marketing, and I just found that further fueled my interest in being in the real estate arena. I think the hardest hurdle I had to get over, and I don't think I even fully appreciated how big this hurdle was, there are a couple of them, but the biggest one is realtors have awful, awful reputations. The things that have been said to me as I've reached out to people to help them, you know, one that comes to mind is this, you know, I've been associated with being a bottom feeder and it really takes a hit on your pride because you're thinking, wait a minute, I'm here to help, you know, why do you dislike me so without even knowing me? So that's one hurdle and that's probably a tough one. The other hurdle is, and no exaggeration, there are over 6,000 realtors in the Naples area, just the Naples area. It's absolutely insane. I think everybody that likes houses decides they're going to sell them. So the other one is just how do you, how do you distinguish yourself and stand out and actually find business amongst such a big pool? And so those are two big hurdles. But I keep going back to on the bad days when I'm discouraged because I've been told no 15 times. I'm discouraged because everybody I meet has 6 good friends that are already realtors. I get a couple and I help them, and, you know, without mentioning names, there's this couple I'm working with right now that I absolutely adore. They're from Ohio. They've worked so hard their whole lives, and they're at a point now where they're looking to retire and they wanna do that in Naples and they've saved up for so long and they're gonna buy their final home here in Naples. And I've enjoyed, I've been working with them for, gosh, it's probably going on 6 or 7 months now and we probably won't even close a deal because they're thinking about building until 2018. But that doesn't matter. So I'll have worked with them for almost 2 years by the time I ever get paid for any of my help, I am getting so much satisfaction from helping them. I enjoy it. So again, I know I am rounding out 15 minutes here. I have actually passed that and I want to close up. But my whole point in today's FaceTime Live was just talking about motivation. So I will close with saying, you know, it took me, I am 45 years old, at least I think I am, yeah, I am 45 years old. Yes, that happens when you hit your 40s, your eyes go and you forget how old you are. It took me this long to get past measuring success the way other people do, getting okay with going from making a lot of money to not very much because I know myself enough that there has to be something internal that is driving my motivation for me to be satisfied. For more than a week, more than a month, more than a year. So again, this was very vulnerable for me. And Wendy Timmons, I so appreciate you being the one person that showed up and gave me a thumbs up today. So thank you. I hope others get the chance to watch this. Again, I'll come back and try to do some future segments. We'll get into some more racy areas. But my whole point is So many people help me by sharing their vulnerabilities, by sharing their stories, and I hope today by, you know, putting myself out there into a place of vulnerability and sharing a little bit about, you know, a sensitive topic, which is people looking at my career and wondering what in the world I'm doing because it looks like every time I turn around I'm taking a step backwards, but I can only tell you that I am in a such a great place with my family, with my job satisfaction, with my ability to connect with others that I wouldn't change it for the world. I see Tina, thank you, I love you girl, it's so good to hear from you. I'm actually getting ready to wrap up. You're probably one of the ones that would say, Renee, how in the world do you call yourself vulnerable because you're a gutsy gal. And outwardly I am. Hi Shirley, good to see you. It was so wonderful having dinner with you last night. So again, I'm now seeing posts, so I guess there are people out there. This shows how little I know about Facebook Live. I'll wrap up by just saying, you know, those of you that are finding yourself in careers and wondering what you're gonna do next, it's okay to take a risk. It's okay, you're never too old. To start again, and it's okay if people think you're crazy for doing something that seems backwards. You know, one day I will actually write that book I said I was going to write, the Managing Your Career in Reverse. You know, but although the dollar signs go down, the satisfaction goes up, and at the end of the day, you know, I think about what's going to be on my gravestone when I pass one day. That's one thing we will all do. I hope you know that. And that is, it's not going to say wonderful employee. But I hope it says beloved wife, mother, neighbor, and friend. So on this Saturday morning, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend, whether you're in sunny Naples— and the sun is actually coming up— or you're in the colder weather. Don't forget, Naples is a great place to come and visit, and if you want to buy something, call me. Have a wonderful day, and I love