Email Elizabethtips for Sacramento Realtors
Do Not Care So Much About What Other People Think
Elizabeth Weintraub does not really care what other people think.
You can never be freely yourself if you care too much about what other people think. Oh, sure, easy for you to say, is the standard response I get when I give people solid advice who want to pluck excuses out of their butt as supposedly logical reasons why they can’t take my advice. You can do it but I can’t because blah, blah, blah. You’re this and I’m that. And they are right. They can’t do it, because they refuse.
There is fear. They feel a need to conform. There is comfort in conformity. And they care too much about what other people think. For starters, people don’t think all that much about others anyway because people are way too busy thinking about themselves. And people all harbor different opinions, ideas. They will interpret your actions in ways you haven’t begun to imagine.
A wise person many years ago told me it’s none of my business what other people think. I’ve always tried to hold true to that statement. It is none of my business what you think of me. You are free to form your own judgments. I thought of all this when I asked by a writer for Crain’s Sacramento to share a mistake and the lesson learned. At that particular moment, under a cabana, lounging on an Hawaiian beach, I could think of nothing better to talk about than this subject:
Do not care so much about what other people think.
Real estate agents, especially, are guilty, guilty as sin. Ask any if they would be willing to put themselves out there, maybe by taking a stand on a controversy, and they fret over the possibility of alienation on the horizon. Many in sales will exchange integrity for business in a heartbeat. They don’t want to offend. So they don’t divulge anything they feel could cause a potential client to hire another agent, and it doesn’t bother them to slip into a vanilla coma.
I find myself often talking to the wall when I advise agents to be themselves. Oh sure, easy for you to say. If you are yourself, you will attract other people just like you. You probably won’t attract the people who will disagree, fight, annoy, be mean or otherwise try to cut your throat. (Unless you’re that sort of person.) Just be who you are. Your own unique self, and you’ll find plenty of birds of a feather.
Don’t care so much about what other people think, and people will gravitate toward you. You can read more about that in an interview I gave while lying on a beach last week in Hawaii to Crain’s Sacramento, If I Knew Then.
How Selling Sacramento Real Estate Means Setting Aside Judgments
Selling Sacramento real estate successfully means accomplishing client goals.
Selling Sacramento real estate is not always giggles and sunshine because there are people involved. If it was just a matter of picking up the knight, jumping over a few pawns and capturing the rook, that would be easier. It’s not like kicking back during a rainstorm to read a book from start to finish. Or navigating a deserted road in the fog without running into a ditch. Or, like a few years ago, when I snorkeled alone 3 miles toward an island in Vanuatu I never reached, ran out of steam, and realized the only person who could swim back to shore was this exhausted Sacramento Realtor. When people enter your equation, it throws everything out of whack because they might not respond the way you hope.
A Realtor cannot solely rely on her own strengths when selling Sacramento real estate. Because people are wild cards. It’s a combination of working with a plethora of personalities and meeting at times strange expectations from others. Every day can be a new fresh hell. You may snort. That’s what makes the business exciting, interesting and fun. You never really know what the day will bring your way. Even after 40+ years in real estate, I am still thrilled to meet each new day, but it’s probably because I’ve learned to be more open minded as time marches on. To try to master non-judgmental thoughts. It’s a journey, not a destination. It doesn’t mean I might not analyze a situation, but I do try to withhold judgment.
I had a conversation with a team member about this recently, asking if it’s age that calms a person or makes a person more receptive to other ideas, whether our collective years provides the background for a willingness to explore alternate scenarios, over our younger selves. It’s easy to make snap judgments about people. You can size them up, pigeon-hole, compartmentalize a person, and be done with it; but you’ve done a grave injustice to another human being with that attitude.
And you’re probably wrong about them.
You’ll also discover the types of people who erroneously believe the world revolves around them. They can be self-centered and narcissistic. Like Donald Trump, for example. Some people forgive his antics because he’s rich. Others are just like him yet they’re poor, so go figure. They might be the type who would take a selfie next to a car crash. That can make me want to grab their stupid selfie sticks and break them over my knee, because they are annoying. Or, I can let that stuff roll off my back, like water off a duck’s feathers.
It drains too much energy to be hating. We can all agree we want Nov. 8th over. We share this common ground. Like banging heads back and forth in a doorway, it feels so good to stop.
That’s why I prefer to choose the people I work with when selling Sacramento real estate. However, even though we may choose our own clients, we can’t always select the peripheral, the third-party vendors: the agents on the other side of the transaction, the mortgage lenders and home inspectors who will now spam you to death because they have your email and what better way to touch everybody in the world than to send out Happy Halloween spam since they care so friggin’ much about you. Not. We don’t know it’s Halloween? It’s not a national holiday. Nobody gets off work for Halloween. I don’t spam my clients.
Still, I don’t berate those people, even though I might initially harbor a distasteful thought, it dissipates. At the end of a day or a closing of an escrow, I want to know I did the best that I could with the circumstances at hand. It leaves my conscience at peace. I’ve been in the real estate business for enough decades to help people achieve their desired goals with relative ease. That’s my focus. Being non-judgmental of others is a tremendous attribute to develop for selling Sacramento real estate. It’s a good cornerstone to aspire to.
