Back in June of 1985 I attended a two-day seminar that I was hoping would give me some great ideas and new direction in my real estate career. This was the first personal development seminar I had ever attended and it definitely exceeded my expectations while launching me into a completely new way of thinking about myself and my real estate career.

Within the first few hours of sitting in my chair in the seminar the instructor who was leading all of us said something that made my head completely spin around a few times. While addressing the entire audience he said, "The only difference between you and the person who has everything that you say you want in your life is the other person hasn't accepted the reasons that you have for not having those things." He then followed this by saying, "So you either have what you want in your life or you have the reasons why you don't."

These were very profound statements for me to hear. The bad news was that this meant that all of my reasons were no longer valid. Ouch! That was a rude awakening! The good news was that I immediately recognized that I had 100% control over the level of success that I would achieve in my real estate career. Now this was exciting.

When you look at the agents in your territory who are extremely successful there is no mistake about why they are so successful. They are highly motivated to be successful and the day-to-day activities that they focus on are the ones that maximize their annual income year-after-year.

Luck, as we know it, is not a component here. If I were to ask you who the top-producing agents were in your territory in 2000, 2001, and 2002, the chances are very high that a good number of the same names would be on your top ten list. This isn't luck. This is the result of skill, drive, focus, and determination.

Looking at the other side of the coin you probably know agents who say they would like to produce better results in their real estate businesses, but they never really seem to get there. Sometimes you've even heard them talk about the reasons why they're not as successful as they'd like to be. And almost unilaterally across the board these reasons have probably dealt with things that the agents claim were completely outside of their own control.

As an example of this, imagine if a struggling agent tried to plead his or her case on how difficult it is to make $150,000.00 a year to an agent who continually makes more than $500,000.00 a year. This would be a highly entertaining conversation to watch! Making $150,000.00 a year is very easy for an agent who makes over $500,000.00 a year and clearly any of the reasons that the struggling agent would give around how difficult it is to achieve the $150,000.00 milestone would not hold water with the more successful agent. However, every day in his or her real estate business the struggling agent continues to believe that these reasons are real. And if you believe that these reasons are real....they are!

When I began full-time real estate coaching between four and five years ago I thought it would be the mediocre agents who would come to me for coaching. To my surprise, it's been the top-producing agents instead. And then I finally realized that it's the top-producing agents who are always willing to learn and try new ideas, new systems, and new approaches to become more successful than they already are. This is what has had them become top-producing agents.

The agents who have reasons for why they are not as successful as they would like to be are more attached to having those reasons than they are to having the success that they say they want. Some people call this fear of success, and some call it fear of failure. But anyway you look at it what we are talking about here is a fear of making change.Top-producing agents are more afraid of having reasons why they are not successful than they are of doing what will have them be successful.

Published: June 11, 2003

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.