Life as a full-time real estate agent can definitely be stressful. So in order to maximize your success, you need to learn how to master your mental and emotional mood swings throughout your career.

One day you're on top of the world with a great number of transactions that all look great. Then, maybe one week later, a good number of these transactions have fallen apart, and you feel like a heavyweight boxer has just punched you right in the stomach. It's times like these that definitely test your character as a real estate agent.

When you've been in this business for many years there is one certainty that you learn - some deals are going to close, and some are not. Keeping this in mind, the more you get attached to your deals closing along the way, the more you can get mentally and emotionally taken to the cleaners when they don't. At best all you can really do is everything you can to keep your deals alive while you're working on them.

When you start counting on the money landing in your bank account from all the deals you're currently working on, you can also count on experiencing major disappointments in your real estate career. But if you continually do your footwork along the way and locate great prospects for you to work with each and every year, you're going to make great money in this business each and every year also.

To illustrate my point, Dennis, a coaching client of mine and a veteran real estate agent, just lost an $18,000,000.00 transaction. And everything was moving so fast towards consummating this transaction over the two-week period that he was negotiating on it, too. The sellers said that they desperately needed the money as the recession had been constantly hammering away at their business. But just before signing the final purchase agreement, the sellers changed their minds and took their property off the market, despite Dennis' clients verbally agreeing to pay them the exact price they wanted for the property. So for two weeks, the sellers were moving full speed ahead to sell their property to Dennis' clients, then they suddenly decided on "Plan B" to raise the cash they needed instead.

In this situation, Dennis had done everything right with the exception of fully and continually imagining all the wonderful things he was going to bring into his life with the $450,000.00 in commission he was counting on earning from the deal. And right now Dennis is doing everything he can to put this experience behind him and focus on all the great opportunities that are awaiting him right now in his marketplace.

When things like this happen to you in your real estate business you have to learn how to "get right back on the horse" and start riding again. If you can't put experiences like these behind you as quickly as possible in your real estate career, you are guaranteed to cost yourself countless weeks, months, and years of great productivity in your business. And there are a lot of agents out there who continually allow this to happen to them throughout their real estate careers, too.

But interestingly, nobody continually has more deals blowing-up in their faces than the top-earning real estate agents in our industry. And the difference between them and everyone else is they don't let it suck the life out of their productivity like so many other agents do. They recognize that this is all part of being in this business---a business that enables them to earn a great amount of income every single year.

So the next time one or more of your deals falls apart remember that you have two choices. You can choose to allow this to sap your energy and kill your productivity in the weeks and months ahead. Or you can recognize that this is just a normal part of the business you've chosen, get focused and back on track again, and be absolutely certain that you're about to uncover some great new opportunities to capitalize on in your real estate business.

One of these choices will continually make you much more money than the other one.

Published: May 10, 2004

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Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.