If you don't watch out, you can get to the point in your real
estate business where it becomes your whole life, and you forget the reason you are working - to improve your quality of life. As you try to keep from feeling extremely run down and
exhausted, sometimes you can cut corners in the wrong places, until your life is out of balance and you are no longer focusing properly on the other priorities in your life, such as family.
Jonathan, a coaching client of mine, told me this story about
something that he experienced early in his career that was so
distressing to him yet it served as an example of what he knew he
needed to watch out for in his own real estate career:
"I was working in a real estate office alongside of a man with
many more years of experience than me. One day the phone rang and
it was his mother calling him to tell him that she had been
mugged, beaten, her purse had been stolen, and she was bleeding.
This man then told his mother that she should call the police and
they would take care of everything for her. He wouldn't go to
help her, comfort her, and be with her. I simply couldn't believe it."
Real estate can be a crazy business requiring a lot of focus but
clearly when you don't think you can leave it to care of a loved one in crisis, your priorities have become confused.
Real estate is a business that provides you with great
opportunity, but you can only experience the fruits of the
opportunity when you pursue it in balance with the other
important areas of your life.
As I heard Tony Robbins once say,
"No one ever said on their deathbed, 'I wish I had spent more
time at the office.'"
While it's great to make money in real estate sales, the money and
the business itself are only a means to an end. One of the
reasons you probably got into this business was you wanted it to
provide you with a certain quality of life.
Just make sure that you continually focus on doing all of the other activities
outside of real estate sales that will bring to you the quality
of life that you are looking for.
Published: November 18, 2002
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