I had nothing to do with the design of this workbook but I absolutely LOVE the fingerprints on the cover. To me, those fingerprints set the tone right up front: We are each wonderfully unique. Our answers will be different. One size does not fit all.
Unlocking
Great word. So apropos for me. I can get so wound up in busyness and head noise that I end up just going through the motions rather than charting a course. My goal here is to wrestle these questions to the ground one by one. If it feels like we are cracking a safe – we are.
Your
This is optional. It’s your journey. It’s my journey. We need to either go down this path or don’t. But please let none of us whine about missing our mark if we are not willing to put in the work to soul search and focus.
Greatest
This journey is about progress not perfection. Life is going to show us if our answers are correct. If the are, they will survive the collision with real life and ring true. If they don’t, the collision will leave us clues as to how we need to adjust our answers. The goal is not to just survive though. The goal is to thrive. To live abundant lives invested in the things that matter most to us.
Potential
I believe most of us sell ourselves short. We all have untapped potential. In a world of abundance, we are not competing with anyone else. We are battling against our own assumptions and presumptions. My hope is that we face up to what makes us cry and get angry – those things matter to us. That we uncover dreams we forgot we had, causes that we want to support, standards that we want to hold to, boundaries we need to set and priorities we need to keep. That we invest our time well leaving the legacy we want to be known for.
Good is the Enemy of Great. Be courageous- Don’t settle.
Unlocking Your Greatest Potential has its roots in the best-selling book The ONE Thing. This workbook walks you through a soul discovery process with the end goal being to harness your natural strengths for the greatest good they can do.
Page 5 – The Quality of our Questions determines the Quality of our Answers
Page 6 – Has my life already changed? Just by making the choice to go down this path. Will I look back on this moment and get chills? I think so!! ❤️
Page 7 – What is the most important question I should be asking myself right now?
I had never been asked that question before. Clearly from my reaction, I did not even know where to start. And yet – the initial question triggered a thought process that prompted even more questions.
Looking back on this now I can see so much progress even just a couple of months down the road. I think personal growth is like that. The biggest move is the first one. After that, it gets easier.
Heart work is hard. People back away from it and get stuck. I made up my mind; Sort of like a butterfly breaking out of a cocoon. There was no going back for me.
I gave my emotions some room. Also cleared out some room in my heart for dreams. We’ll figure out how to fund them later on!
Page 9 – Why should you focus on living your best life right now?
Because deep deep joy awaits!
If you have ever been encouraged by someone to the point where tears welled up in your eyes, you KNOW the power that people can have on each other. It does’t even have to be a friend of yours. Sometimes it is a stranger that confirms something they see in you and it rings so true to your inner being that you just melt.
People are thirsty for encouragement and they can smell fake a mile away. Our individual struggles and suffering has equipped us to relate to certain people in a way that others can’t. All that junk we wish we had never gone through??! Is PRECISELY what has uniquely prepared us to encourage someone else in that very area. The chilling reality?? We have no idea how close someone is to giving up. So we underestimate our value in being able to be an encouragement.
We each have the opportunity to minister to others. That is what makes true community so vital. There is great hope in the thought that my suffering could be redeemed as it helps someone else. That won’t happen if I am wallowing in self pity, drowning in distractions and just floating along.
Focus. Everybody wins!
Page 10 – Whose Life are You Leading?
Well, my secret is out now… I email Gary Keller and he replies. I know it sounds nuts – but several years ago I decided to just start reaching out to Gary with my thoughts as one of his agents in the field. Once he replied, we were off to the races. Obviously, I am very careful not to wear out my welcome. Sometimes it is just a “Thank You” for leading us well. But let this sink in for a minute… Gary Keller, the CEO of the world’s largest real estate company, engaging with someone who may never even get close to his Top 100. Where else but KW could this even happen?!?!
Sounds all well and good until you are about to hit that “send” button. I pause every single time and think… I could very well be looking for another job by this afternoon 🙄 But I digress.
Back to Page 10. My email conversations with Gary have all been very intentional. One of them even ended up being featured in a lab I attended in Austin regarding the development of our Consumer App. It was surreal to be a part of something so big and revolutionary – even if it was for just a few minutes.
It may not look like it from the blank space on this page but I do love this question. It reminds me that there are some really exciting ways for me to contribute beyond the mechanics of doing real estate. After 25 years, I was burning out over some of what we have to do as agents. Now, I am looking forward to diving back into this page to look for more clues! There is fun out there on the horizon, and I aim to have some of it.
Page 11 – Taking Ownership of Our Choices
This page gets at the heart of The ONE Thing “Focusing Question”. We are making daily choices… are they truly the ones we want to make? Are they taking us down the path we want to go down? Heavy questions.
I work in a sales business. Relationships are crucial. Building and Maintaining relationships is the currency and it takes consistent effort. This is true for every organization. Someone HAS to bring in the revenue. That goes for businesses and non-profit organizations alike. In my world, purposeful activities involve “Contacts”. Reaching out to someone you know to intentionally connect. The more you do it, with sincerity, the more relationships you can maintain.
Back to Page 10. Real estate sales fuel my dreams. So, the one thing I can do each week to maintain relationships that could produce home sales is to contact people. Stay in touch!
It is almost impossible for me to have the bandwidth to contribute to others if I am gasping for air financially. I need to enough closings to cover our basic needs so that I can look beyond my needs to help others. Zig Ziglar was right! “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.
That is the core question here. How can we apply ourselves and govern our living expenses in such a way that we have margin to contribute to others. I believe that is at the core of living life more fully.
If we are focused just on consumption, I think it is eventually going to come up short. What is one thing YOU can do to live your life more fully? Just one baby step.
Page 12 – Small Decisions Add Up!
I am in too much of a hurry to slow down for this nonsense… And, THAT, my friends explains the difference in my career and Gary Keller’s. No need to compound that mistake by continuing to ignore his advice though…
2020 for me is going to be about making peace with the monotonous. That is my choice. Simple – Not Easy. This is the concept of Mastery and very few people pursue it intentionally. We have all mastered things. I have mastered eating. In my mind, I have mastered driving. I may have even mastered the basics of selling houses. But I have not mastered generating new business….
What is something that you want to master? Something that would change your life if you mastered it?
Page 13 – Get Better at Choosing
After 25 years of selling homes, I want to conquer one of the most intimidating sectors of the business – Luxury Home Sales. Competition among agents is fierce, pricing properties is complicated, personalities are strong, egos are big. Who knows how this will go? I sell luxury homes every year so the terrain is not totally foreign. But, where to start… Well the failure rate for listed luxury properties is really high – so that would be one place 👍
I believe it boils down to getting VERY specific about 1. what I believe is broken with the way business is being done, 2. What solutions I think will help, 3. What I am going to do about it. 4. Getting the word out to the right people.
Everything is a choice. I need to get better at filtering through the myriad of options. That takes courage because selling out to specific goals means purposefully ignoring a LOT. Like 80%. Really, like 90%. Actually, it’s more than that.
This is coming back to the ONE Thing. Figure out the 20% that will yield the 80% of the results. Then, 80/20 the 20% again. – Then, 80/20 that 20%!
100 becomes 20, 20 becomes 4. 4 becomes 1 (.8 rounded up). ONE Thing.
What is some big challenge you would like to take on? Start by writing that out and then peel back the layers. Get more and more specific. Rank the options. Treat it like a game. Where would you start?
Page 14 – Thoughts… 🤯
Thoughts are where everything begins. That is why our Mindset is SO critical. It has been said that we should “Take every thought captive”. *Think about that for a moment * Just the concept of that… If we were in a movie and someone was being taken “captive” there would be a struggle. Effort would be expended, wrestling, emotions, sweat, fighting, perhaps even screaming.
Training our mind to filter thoughts, to initiate better thoughts, to ignore thoughts – takes work. We are where we are today to some extent because we have done what came naturally. Changing the way we think will be unnatural. It might even be supernatural. One thing is for sure: It is not going to happen by accident.
So here’s to transformation 🙌 May we all be a bit more purposeful with our thoughts and our actions. Even small changes in the right direction make us proud and give us hope!
Page 15 – More Thoughts 🤯
Question them. Change them. Ponder the Possibilites!
Page 16 – the Concept of Extraordinary
I am not sure how I feel about the word “extraordinary” really. I admire it in others – but I am not convinced that is God’s plan for me. Or, at least I don’t know what that would look like. Honestly, it feels risky even writing about this. There are so many silent accusations and criticisms swirling around in my head. If you are reading this and thinking “dude, get over yourself!”… don’t worry, I have already heard that from myself.
HOWEVER, I believe in God. And the God I believe in is beyond extraordinary. The Bible says we were all created in God’s image. Not physically but at the soul level. That means that striving to be less than extraordinary is exactly that… “less than” what I was created to be. That presents a quandary.
Live what I believe or change what I believe. #boom
Time to do some more wrestling with “how” God created me to be extraordinary. Rather that questioning whether he did or not. Oh, and Balance? It’s Bunk.
Page 17 – Some of the balls are Glass
We are all juggling balls in life. “Keeping all of the balls in the air” is a phrase we hear often. I heard someone say once that some of our balls are rubber and some of them are glass. You drop a rubber ball? No big deal; just pick it back up. You drop a glass ball? Shattered – perhaps forever 😳😢
It may be easy to list the “right” answers on page 17. But, our actions can betray us. Where do we spend our money? Where do we spend our time? That is where our true reality shows up. This page turned into multiple pages for me. Offline, on a legal pad. Facing the truth, not knowing exactly how to change, realizing I had let real estate lure me into trashing healthy boundaries between business and relationships. Being on call 24/7 is no life. Many jobs can be this way.
My hope and prayer for all of us is that we will work this page hard and create two lists. Do’s and Don’ts. There is power in writing it down. Reality becomes more obvious. Change becomes more possible.
Page 18 – Looking for CluesNo one is creating a highlight reel for most of us. So we are going to have to build it ourselves. I want to encourage you to slow down and think of moments when you are at your best. Write those moments down! They are going to be the lighthouses you need in the storms of life. If you are anything like me, these moments get buried under piles of tedious functional practical achievements. After my initial irritation, finding these buried treasures meant a lot to me. I know that because of the emotions that came rushing back when I replayed my moments in my head. Forget about making money just for a few minutes… Envision your future – if you could invest your life in any way possible over the next year, what would you do?
Page 19 – “I wish I’d had the courage…”
This quote stopped me in my tracks. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought this to the forefront again. There are limits to what we can do. If we never make the time to identify what matters, chances are we will never actually spend much time on what matters most.
It takes courage to see aside the tyranny of the urgent to sort through what matters. I have to pull myself out of soldier mode to reflect and dig. To remember. I have to use tricks and come at myself sideways sometimes to identify what touches my heart. What brings tears to my eyes? What injustices make me mad? What causes pull me into action and want to donate?
What matters to you? I hope you find the courage to pursue it!
Pages 20 and 21: Life Mission
We have two pages on this post because they go together. And, one has no writing.
As you can see, I have lots of notes here. I am proud of myself for leaning into the exercises more as I got deeper into the workbook. These questions were revealing though – which felt both vulnerable and empowering at the same time.
What if people really know what I care about? What if they don’t agree? What if they don’t like it? Will that change our relationship? All fear based questions…
Gosh I hope this fretting and fear is not normal. I want to be the exception. I would rather you read this and think “Wow, this is messed up. I am glad I don’t struggle like this!” Nothing would thrill me more. But just in case… I am letting my guard down. I wish I did not struggle with this either. It makes me tired. It won’t beat me, that I can promise you.
What do you feel connected to?
What are your unique gifts?
Use these exercises to brainstorm. Gain a bit more clarity. Weave them into a draft mission statement. And then, see how it checks with real life over the next few weeks and months. Life will let you know.
Pages 22 & 23 – Start Somewhere
Time brings clarity. I LOVE that statement. But inherent in that statement is the process of experimenting – trying and testing. Thoughts and knowledge without action get squandered.
“A ship in harbor is safe — but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd.
The pages allow us room to begin weaving the common threads. Mine are strong but still fuzzy. They include a lifelong ache for small motions that create large effects. Maximum output from minimum input. I keep using the word scaleable to describe that.
The irony is that it took a pandemic for me to dive into the Zoom Call technology. That thought did not occur to me prior to the COVID-19 crisis. And yet, Zoom is an ideal medium for how I teach and how I think. Logistics are stressful for me. They zap crucial strength I need to be able to focus on content. With Zoom calls there are no geographical boundaries. For now, an audience limit of 100 is plenty. There are no expensive facility logistics. No wasted printing for handouts trying to guess how many people will show up. No refreshments. No strange technology equipment. Sorry… I just realized I got swept up in my dream!
I believe that is the goal of these pages. To bring it all together and boil it down. What are your common threads? Let’s get them down on paper so they can go to work. My guess is that you will get swept up in one of your dreams too. Just get started. Start somewhere. And then, see where it goes.
Pages 24 and 25: The Rubber needs to meet the Road
That’s not a bad thing; tire were made for this! Now that you have summoned the courage to start somewhere, you have traced the clues from your past, you have found some common threads, and woven them into a draft mission statement – It’s time to see how your mission informs your choices going forward.
Think through who you are going to impact and don’t keep them waiting 😁 Progress not perfection. I love the way the statement on Page 25 is phrased… It does not say What can you do right now to start living your life “fully”? That could feel like a slap in the face. It says what could you do right now to live your life even more fully that you already are? That begins with a compliment and offers us the chance to make some small improvement. I like that approach!
As I got started this morning, a huge reality struck me – Bills have to be paid while Dreams are chased. For me that means I would love to spend all day on this topic!! However… The ONE Thing “focusing question” drives me towards making sure I handle my real estate business priorities first.
People need to think of me when it comes time for them to buy or sell a home. That starts with contacting the people I already know (who are NOT real estate agents) and maintaining healthy relationships. Some of those relationships need to be mended. Some need to be deepened.
True Confession: For 25 years I have struggled with contacting people I know because it always felt like I was reaching out to milk them for business. If felt selfish and icky. I HATE getting those calls myself so I just couldn’t do it. I finally had to detach the two. Delight existing clients and just be a great friend to the rest. Every interaction does not have to involve real estate!!!!! Trust God that living a life of contribution will result in enough personal business to provide for my family. Then, be so good at what I do that it actually makes me nervous if a friend of mine uses someone else to buy or sell.
Stay out of Scarcity and camp out in Abundance.
