Happy Sunday Everyone:
I had my big talk a few weeks back. 35 minutes to 650 folks on my coaching journey over the past 10 years. I had mentioned previously preparing for this talk helped me a ton as the need to reflect was critical. I didn’t really want to spill the beans then but now that the talk is over, I figured I’d give you what I came up with as I think it’s useful to a lot of us. My goal in the talk was to give a review of 10 years of learning and how someone else might skip the 10 years and start much sooner. With that said, I’m not sure you appreciate the learn/lessons if you didn’t experience them yourself.
5 words: Clarity, Priority, Belief, Tactics, Accountability. Those 5 words are the foundation to my business. If I had to scale those words, when I started 10 years ago, I was a 1, as I’ve learned along the way, I score higher today than ever before….progress.
Clarity-Clarity is that my team is my #1 priority. I used to think it was clients, then business partners, then team, it’s the opposite. Invest in your team first, make them family, and everything else will begin to fall into place. It’s also identifying your ideal team member, your ideal business partner, and your ideal client. When you have that written out and you discuss it daily, your begin to shape what you’re attracting and identifying as quickly, what you’d like to not attract. The world is not my oyster, identify my oyster and then go attract that, it works. I also had the team, without my involvement, come up with what they consider the ideal leader. This tells me both what I am to them, and what they wish I was.
Belief:
Clients: I need my clients to believe they have a greater chance of owning a home with us as their lender or they shouldn’t work with us.
Business Partners: I need my business partners to believe they will be more successful with us as their lender or they shouldn’t work with us.
Team Members: I need my team members to believe they will have a better life being on our team or they shouldn’t be on the team.
Me: I need to believe all of these things to be true. This started off almost as a sales pitch, I now believe this to be true.
Tactics: I don’t always like the word because it can sound manipulative. The definition however “the art or skill of employing available means to accomplish an end” is what makes sense to me. Our team has tactics for our clients and business partners that allow us to accomplish what I stated above in our beliefs. I have tactics for my team that allow me to accomplish what I stated above. The tactics can be anything from a daily team meeting, to our extreme gifting to our clients, to going through monthly personal budgets with team members.
Accountability: Intentional vs. Actual
One of the more impactful coaching exercises I’ve seen was Rick (owner of Core) explaining how close or how out of alignment our actions are to our intentions by clasping his hands to show in alignment, or holding his arms far apart to show out of alignment. A word I fear being as much as anything on this planet is a fraud. When my words are in alignment with my actions, I’m the real deal, when my words are out of alignment with my actions, I’m a fraud. By explaining all of these beliefs to you, to my team, to my business partners, to my clients, I’m forcing accountability with myself to make sure my actions are in alignment to my intentions. The best part of having a team that feels more like a family is their ability to call me out whenever my hands are further apart, and yes, it happens a little more often than I’d like.
So net net-10 years. Get clarity quickly on your priority, which will always be internal before its external (i.e. team), define your oyster in writing, have commitment to your beliefs by implementing tactics to make those beliefs come to life, and honor your word through your actions as much as humanly possible and surround yourself with people who will call you out on it when you’re not.
Do that, and showing up to work each day is a lot more fun.
Have a great rest of your Sunday!!