You hear this term all the time -- “You need to think outside of the box,” but few know what it really means. Maybe this will help.

Most people adopt pet routines for doing stuff. For example, you always tie your shoes or knot your scarf the same way. This is advantageous because as tasks become habitual, they require less thought. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. In essence, you put habitual tasks in a box and forget about them. You could even say that you KNOW how to do those tasks. That is all right for things that you do with yourself alone.

But if you want to get ahead in your career, you have to think and perform quite differently than your competitors. Yet you won’t so long as you think you have all the answers. Am I talking about you? Your manager? That person a few desks away?

Doesn’t it just disgust you when a Realtor(R), or anyone, pretends to know something that they don’t? Where did we go wrong that we would rather die than simply say that we do not know something? Especially to clients or prospective ones. Or to other agents. There’s a better way.

If you want to start showing up as special or even extraordinary in your business and personal relationships, quit being a know-it-all. Instead, know less. Question more. But to understand that, you first have to understand the box you’re in.

The box that they talk about is the one that you create around yourself every time you think or announce “I know.” When you are in that box, you never learn anything new from others nor have breakthroughs, which are, of course, things UN-known. When you are in a conversation and you are coming from the box called “I know,” you are not listening to others; you are merely tolerating what they are saying until you can demonstrate your superiority by “knowing” something that they don’t and then saying it.

When you don’t know something, do you sometimes fake it? Like when someone says, “Hey, did you ever meet Fred? And like a dummy, you lie and say that you did meet him, because you don’t want to seem inferior. You are so stupid when you do stuff like that. What if Fred happened to walk in the door right then?

See, you can never have a breakthrough in your personal or business career so long as you stay in the tiny box called “I know.” Why? Because breakthroughs, which are things previously UN-known, just could not exist inside a little box called “I know.” If they did live in your little box called “I know,” then you would have more of them.

But notice how you don’t?

Therefore, breakthroughs must live OUTSIDE of the little box called “I know.” And that is where you NEED to be thinking in order to find breakthroughs in your career and life.

How do you start? Well, first by admitting that in many cases you are a know-it-all. Or better, start viewing yourself as one who “has so much more to learn.” Once you do that, you INSTANTLY move yourself outside of the box called “I know.” And then you just might learn something new. Because outside of “I know” is the only place where new ideas exist. Happily for you, it is a very big place.

The box called “I know” is the smallest box you can put yourself into. Immediately surrounding that tiniest and most hidden box called, “I know,” is the far bigger box called “What I don’t know.” And surrounding that box is another even larger one called, “What I don’t know that I don’t know,” and around that is, “What I don’t know that I don’t know that I don’t know,” and so on.

It is only in these outer boxes where breakthroughs live. Finding and using breakthroughs is what will set you apart from your competitors in real estate.

Did you know that many of the world’s greatest scientific, medical and technological breakthroughs made in a given field were made by people who were NOT specialists per se in that given field? Why? Likely because they lacked the huge body of knowledge called “I know” which had blinded the indigenous specialists from making the breakthroughs themselves. The specialists “knew” the subject so well that they had forgotten to think perversely which is a sharp tool for thinking outside of the box.

Next time that a junior REALTOR(R) brings up a subject, don’t shut him off by saying, “Yes, yes, I already know all that stuff.” Instead, pretend that you don’t. Listen profoundly to what he says for new possibilities, better directions, tactics, variations on themes, improvements over what you are doing, oblique tangents, etc., You might just learn something. Learning new stuff is always outside of the box. Just don’t turn new stuff into something that you so righteously “know.”

To summarize, “thinking outside of the box” means that you are willing to seek and accept alternatives to habitual ways that you and other people do things. But first you have to give up your mistaken notion that you already “know” it all.

Another hint? You are outside the box called “I know” when you are listening; not when you are speaking. There is one exception.

When you are asking an honest question (one that’s not merely a set-up), by necessity, is also in the box called “What I don’t know.”

Published: April 25, 2000

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .