Do you want to have more success? How about feeling more relaxed and joyful during each workday? Want to sleep better and stay healthy? Did you know that you could have all of these things just by practicing “gratitude” in your daily life? Sounds great, right?!
We’re all moving as fast as we can to keep up with and handle what each day brings. The most successful leaders of real estate teams build a routine that supports them. Those routines often include exercise, meditation, eating well, reading, and – you guessed it – gratitude. Gratitude is the secret sauce because it allows you to cultivate a positive attitude day-after-day. That way, you truly want to take good care of yourself, your family, and your real estate business.
WHY IS GRATITUDE SUCH A BIG DEAL?
Practicing gratitude has both scientific and psychological benefits. For decades, American psychologist Robert Emmons has studied and written about how gratitude can impact our lives. His most recent book, Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity provides a step-by-step guide for cultivating gratitude in our lives.
Through coaching real estate teams all over North America, we see the trends, challenges, and solutions that people experience every day. We know that the most successful teams have adopted an attitude of gratitude, which allows them to weather any storm.
5 WAYS TO PRACTICE MORE GRATITUDE IN YOUR OWN REAL ESTATE BUSINESS:
- Clients – It’s because of people who want to buy and sell properties that each of us even has a business! Let’s be grateful for the privilege it is to help them reach their goals. Let’s even be grateful for the really difficult people, the ones who are suffering, frustrated, angry, and demanding. These clients really test our limits! What can we be grateful for in these situations? Growth. We learn more from challenges than we do from the easy status-quo. You might consider that “everything comes to you as either a gift or a teacher.” What can you learn from each difficult client? How can this be fodder for your own growth? How can your business benefit from this experience?
- Team – On real estate teams, diversity equals strength. Yet diversity can also be grounds for conflict sometimes. Being grateful for what each person on the team brings takes practice. It’s easy to notice mistakes and what’s missing; what you want more of, what’s next. Don’t just take the easy way out. Making notes to yourself, and perhaps also to your team members, on what you appreciate about them is fertile ground for inspiring more devotion and effective productivity.
- Habit – We all have habits; some are productive and others destructive. We read James Clear’s book Atomic Habits recently in our Admin Mastermind for real estate teams. He teaches the practice of “habit stacking”, in which you take a habit that you already have, like making coffee in the morning, and “stack” on another habit that you want to cultivate before, during, or after it. To cultivate the “habit of gratitude”, then, you could stack a new habit of making a mental list of three things you are grateful for each day as you take your first three sips of coffee.
- Joy – Life will bring all the challenges we need to us; we don’t have to go into the day with dread, anxiety, fear, and resistance. It’s a choice. We can practice gratitude for the fact that things aren’t like they used to be, maybe they’re not where we want to be, but we are on our way to achieving our goals, dreams, and ambitions. Trust that as you are being the best person you can be, and doing your best with action and intention, that you will learn and succeed. With gratitude, you will have joy on the journey!
- Lessons – Even Marie Kondo – Japanese Organizing Consultant teaches people that they have to make a mess and sort out what they don’t want before they can neatly fold everything into alignment. The same goes for our lives and our businesses. We are going to make mistakes and things are going to get messy sometimes. So let’s choose to learn the lessons, apply those principles to what’s next, and grow! Stop being so frustrated when it’s not perfect. Put systems in place and practice discipline for consistency. Transformation isn’t linear; it’s experiential and it’s messy. Decide to enjoy it. Practicing gratitude will be your friend all along the way!
We’d love to hear what transformations and successes you have experienced through practicing gratitude on your real estate teams! Contact us at kathleen@kathleenmetcalf.com and we’ll feature your team in our next newsletter.
RESOURCES
10 Ways to Become More Grateful
3 Ways to Learn from difficult people
Photo by Mgg Vitchakorn on Unsplash