There are a number of skills and qualities that a highly successful real estate agent will utilize. But one of these qualities, and one that I rarely hear discussed by people, is the quality of resiliency.

Resiliency, though, can at times be the most important quality for a good agent to possess. This is because real estate sales and leasing is a business where agents normally experience extreme emotional highs and lows. One day you have eight transactions that all look like they're going to close, then the next week four of them completely fall apart. Then two weeks later, two of the four transactions that fell apart appear to now be coming alive again, and in addition you now have two new deals that didn't even exist on your radar screen three weeks ago. This is often the very nature of what an agent goes through on an ongoing basis mentally and emotionally.

But in the midst of all this, one of the most important qualities I've found that any agent can have is resiliency. With so many occasions throughout the year when you see your transactions falling apart, you have to have the mind, emotions, and stomach to not let this all get to you. You need to recognize that this is all a normal, ongoing part of the business, and stay focused on where your best opportunities are for success right now.

Mediocre agents, though, often let the disappointments of this business really get to them and suck the life out of them. They can spend weeks or months in a state of disappointment after they've had major setbacks in their business and have seen some good transactions completely fall apart on them. You may have even worked around some of these agents throughout your career in the business, too.

Sometimes they'll be idly hanging around the water cooler just waiting for someone to come along who they can then tell their tales of woe and disappointment to.

When walking in their vicinity in the office you might hear them say something like, "Do you remember those four transactions that fell apart on me last month?"

And then you may respond to them by saying something like, "Yes."

Only to then be met with, "Well pull up a chair and sit down. You're not going to believe what just happened to me on this other transaction this week."

So what that agent is in effect doing is wasting his time, the time of other agents in his office, and trying to convince himself and others that his lack of success in the business is not his own fault. It's just a lot of bad luck that's come his way unfortunately. And if you don't watch out you can find yourself indulging him, listening to his stories, and feeling some productive energy getting sucked right out of you in the process, too.

The truth of the matter about this business is that some deals are going to close, and some deals are going to fall apart. And if you allow yourself to begin feeling great sadness and disappointment every time a deal doesn't close, it's going to hurt your productivity. So why then would you ever want to consciously do something that would hurt your productivity?

Oftentimes the answer to this question is something similar to, "Because I'm normally not consciously aware of what I'm doing and how much it's costing me." And this is a very normal situation for many real estate agents in our industry to experience.

The underlying problem, though, comes from getting attached to wanting the individual deals that we're working on to close. Sometimes we've already counted the commission from a transaction before it's even in our bank account, and sometimes we've already decided how we're going to spend the commission, too.

And this is oftentimes the very heart of the problem. When the deal doesn't close, we feel that something has been taken away from us that was already rightly ours -- that we feel we've worked very hard for, too. But in reality, no commission is ever really ours until we've received the check and have deposited it into our bank account.

So one of the best attitudes to continually have in your business is to master your mind and emotional states so you feel positive and confident in the results you're always producing. Yes, transactions are going to fall apart on you throughout the year. This is a normal, ongoing part of being a real estate agent. But by mastering your mind and your emotional states, and being convinced that you're always in the middle of developing great new opportunities for yourself, you'll close a much higher percentage of the transactions you work on, and you'll continually uncover new opportunities that will make you more money throughout your real estate year.