KW Coaching Corner: How to Stay Determined and Dedicated to Your Long-Term Vision

With the current instability of everyday life, agents might be struggling to find the motivation to keep their short-term and long-term goals front and center. “There’s a lot going on out there; it’s easy to get caught up in things we have no control of,” says KW MAPS Coaching executive director of strategy Sajag Patel. “Some agents are naturally discouraged and losing sight of where they want to be.” 

For those struggling, Patel encourages a focused and determined mindset. When faced with the decision of altering a goal or dropping it altogether, he advises agents to ask themselves important questions to reveal their true motivations. Here, Patel shares the major mindset conversations he’s having with his clients – many of them top agents. 

Understand Your Long-Term Vision

In planning your future, Patel says, the focusing question should be: “Where do I want to be in five years?” “If we’re clear about that, everything happening now is just a slight detour,” he reasons. “Goals don’t change; we just make adjustments to the strategy.” 

As personal and professional challenges increase, it can be tempting to shift gears or drop your long-term vision, Patel shares, but it’s important you stay the path. 

“If you’ve focused on the right goals to begin with, shifting gears and leaving them behind should be painful,” he says. Like Patel, you should be a fierce advocate for your long-term vision and ask yourself a set of questions to put into perspective what you’d be giving up in leaving behind your goals:

• What things are you OK to part with? 
• Who else is being impacted by your decision to part with this goal? 
• If you have a team: What will your team be taking away from their own families because of this decision?

“What I tell coaching clients is that when we sign up to have a partnership together and you tell me your goals, you better be ready to be challenged the day you decide to give up,” Patel says. “Be ready for it, because we’re going to have some fierce conversations, and that’s OK. That’s what true partnership is.”

Get Clear About Your ONE Thing

In order to fulfill your long-term vision, it’s important to break down your goal into manageable bits. Taking after Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s book, The ONE Thing, Patel poses the question: ‘What’s the ONE Thing that if I did every single day consistently for the next five years, everything else is unnecessary?’ 

“Challenge yourself to see what is actually important to you,” Patel says. “When you play by the process of elimination, you will get down to the one or two things that you really need to do, and you will bend over backward to ensure that you have that in your life. Everything else is noise.” 

In real estate, when you hit your lead generation goals, the rest of the business takes care of itself. “Does working on a listing presentation really matter if we don’t have a client to present it to?” Patel urges agents to treat their lead generation efforts as if they are children that constantly need to be fed.

Patel also advises implementing the 80/20 Principle, which states that 20 percent of the effort produces 80 percent of the results, but the last 20 percent of the results consume 80 percent of the effort. 

In The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Gary Keller states: “When we are focused on the 80 percent that doesn’t matter, we tend to get 20 percent of the results we want. The truth is that when our actions are not focused on the 20 percent that matters, the results we want usually don’t show up. Doing a lot of things is never a substitute for doing the right things.” 

Patel uses this in his own coaching. “People get stuck because they are not really clear on the 20 percent that help them achieve their goal, so they get distracted by the 80 percent and veer off track and they are allowing these distractions to throw them off,” he says. 

Stay True to Yourself 

During the shift, Patel lauds agents and teams that have stayed true to their goals, mission, and people. “These leaders haven’t missed a beat and their businesses did not take a step back,” he says. “In fact, they’re having the best months that they’ve had because they put people first. When you show people you care and that their lives and their families’ lives matter, they show up for you.” 

Ultimately, staying true to yourself will translate into your business and bank account. Patel says, “It’s easy to get caught up in the number of units, transactions, and journey to be number one, but at the end of the day if you’re broke or have lost relationships, what good did it do you?”

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