Happy Sunday Everyone:
Finishing my final day of spring break with our family as well as a few friends. I’ve been thinking about how to put this one together for a bit, hopefully I can but forewarning there a few different thoughts combined into one.
I mentioned a few weeks ago about getting the long version of Covid, is what it is, taste/smell still gone, but more importantly, energy is down a bit too. I’ve been lifting a few days a week but no cardio, which is something I truly enjoy i.e. running. What I’m realizing 3 months in, is although I truly do feel this way, I’ve also allowed it to become an excuse to treat my body less than it’s deserving. I chose to run 2.5 miles on the treadmill yesterday to work my way out of it and although it was painful, it felt great. I’ll be doing another one after I get these out today. My point here is with everything going on in our worlds, I might not be alone in creating excuses for a host of things happening around us. One of my favorite stories is the cow and the buffalo. Many of you have heard this story before but the simplicity of a cow running away from the storm, getting trapped in it for a longer period of time, where the buffalo runs directly into the storm, getting through it much faster. I’m embarrassed to say, I might have been acting as the cow for longer than I’d like to admit, cruising in the storm, vs. focused on getting out of it.
Separate topic but similar concept is work. Anyone in the mortgage business, and real estate, (as it relates to inventory) would be less than honest if they said their cheese hasn’t been moved. Rates are up 2% (in most cases), prices are up 20% year over year, less clients to help, refis are down 60-70%, covid has created a different work environment for a lot of us. Although I wouldn’t say I’ve been acting like a cow, I would say I’ve accepted our world as it was handed to us vs. deciding to take a stand in determining what our world looked like. A couple of months ago Erica (my business partner), her husband, David, Kim, and I, started talking about what we wanted our worlds to look like long term. We decided to blow up our business, which is something we’re both interested in doing, we needed to be back together vs. her being remote. We decided as a team long term this gave us the greatest odds of success. We also talked about 2 simple terms to stand by. To the outside world “we do the right thing”, to our internal team “everyone earns their keep”. Whatever the world throws at us, if our internal team goes to work every day with the mindset of earning our keep by doing the right thing for each other, our clients, and our business partners, that’s a foundation worth fighting for. There are details behind this, process, structure, roles/responsibilities, comp etc….and I’d like to say we’ve always had this mindset but to put it into words, to have clarity in this thought process as a guiding light for everything we do moving forward, makes us feel like the buffalo right now. You’re more apt to act like a buffalo when you know what you’re fighting for.
So hopefully this made a bit of sense. Net net-I want to be a buffalo in everything I do. None of us are perfect and it’s easy to slip into a cow mentality in all of our lives but the sooner we can say “I’m going down the wrong path”, or, “I have no path”, that’s when we need to take a moment and switch directions.
Have a great rest of your Sunday! If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for taking the time to read this!