Don’t sabotage your own success in commercial real estate

Commercial real estate is one of the world's most competitive and lucrative industries.

To make sure you don’t fall behind, you need to keep challenging yourself.

When it’s becoming all too easy, that’s a danger sign…

If you don’t create new challenges to conquer, you risk subconsciously sabotaging your own success to keep things interesting, or simply losing your competitive edge.

Don’t let that happen to you!

Let’s talk about creating new challenges that allow you to achieve what you’re fully capable of in episode 86 of CRE Success: The Podcast.

Episode transcript:

If the only challenges that you're facing in your life are the challenges that life is throwing at you, then you may need to find something more challenging in your life.

Hello, and welcome to episode 86 of the show. My name is Darren Krakowiak. This is CRE Success: The Podcast and I work with commercial real estate leaders to develop their people and grow their business.

Really appreciate you tuning in for today's episode, and I'm going to be talking about some things that build upon some previous episodes.

So, if you haven't heard our back catalogue, make sure you do go and download the entire back catalogue of CRE Success: The Podcast.

And specifically, today, I want to talk about some challenges in life and challenges that life sometimes throws at you. And also, the challenges that you go and seek out yourself.

And when I talked about in episode 83, the '24-month check-in', a lot of the challenges that I had faced were because I took on the challenge of starting this business.

In Episode 84, we talked about how to deal with losses and get through rough patches.

And yes, sometimes those rough patches do occur because something's going on in the external environment. But also, we can go through rough patches, and we can see our win rate impacted when we start playing a bigger game.

And I'll talk more about that in today's episode.

And just last week, we talked about market share. And I said that if you start winning the majority of the opportunities that you chase, then it's time for you to start playing a bigger game.

And I mentioned that if you're winning more than 80% of the opportunities that you want to win, then that's probably a signal that it's time for you to start looking for bigger opportunities to win.

And I want to preface what I want to talk about today with an acknowledgement that all of us have faced challenges over the past two years, or most of us anyway.

And it's been a challenging time in life. But I want you to have a think about if the challenges you've faced have been all thrust upon you by a changing world.

Or if you've actually sought out some challenges for yourself. So have these challenges being unique to you, or are many people going through these challenges, too.

And the inspiration for today's episode is from a quote that I heard by Brendon Burchard. And I kind of use a variation of it at the start of the episode.

But the exact quote, I wrote down, and it is, "If the only challenges you are facing are the challenges that life throws at you, then you are not yet living a fully conscious life, because you are just reacting."

And I thought that was really interesting because it kind of says that we can go through life reacting, and we can also live a more intentional life.

And one of the ways that we can live a more intentional life, and one of the ways that we can, I guess achieve bigger things is by setting bigger goals and continuing to conquer new challenges.

And a lot of the challenges that we've faced, or that we do face in life, particularly when we look at challenges from COVID, but also external factors when there are tragedies that occur in our personal life, that is like throwing challenges at you, as opposed to you taking on challenges in your life.

So, I think if the only challenges you're facing in life are the ones that are thrown at you, then perhaps you need to find something more challenging to do.

Because the challenges that you choose to overcome will be the challenges, I believe, that a more fulfilling to conquer.

When we talked about how to deal with a dry spell, I said that a dry spell is something which sometimes is in response to things that are going on in the external environment.

But sometimes it's also things that we need to adjust in our own internal processes in regards to lead generation, in regards to the way that we're approaching pursuing work or in terms of our ability to get deals over the line.

But also, a dry spell can be an adjustment phase, because we might start pursuing work which is more difficult, which is outside of our comfort zone.

And it can be a good thing because it's a sign that we are taking on new challenges and that we are working through the adjustment phase to ultimately do things that we haven't done before.

And I think that if life is getting too easy for you, you might want to think about if you are really living your best life.

Because if everything is coming easy to you and you aren't facing any new challenges and it might be time to go out and find some and just stop being so comfortable with being comfortable.

One thing that I've noticed is that if you're not being challenged, (or at least my competitive spirit, and maybe yours. And I think that in commercial real estate, a lot of us are naturally more competitive people.

When you're not being challenged, your competitive spirit can subconsciously go out and find challenges for you.

And that can manifest itself in self destructive ways. You might sabotage your own success in order to create some challenges for you to deal with if you're not being intellectually stimulated and challenged by what it is that you're giving yourself, professionally to do every day.

And you've heard the expression that idle hands do the devil's work.

And I think that's really where it comes from that if life is too easy, or if you don't have enough to do, then you may find yourself doing things that aren't the best for you.

So, the best way I think, to stay on track into continue to be a top performer is to continue to give yourself challenging things to do.

And, yeah, look, if you don't have anything good to do, then you might find yourself getting in more trouble.

Or if things come too easily, I think another way of thinking about this is a movie, Jurassic Park, when the T-Rex is in the cage, and they feed the T-Rex.

I think it was the sheep gets lowered in and then the T-Rex, the very vicious dinosaur comes in and kills the sheep.

Well, the dinosaur didn't like that, because it didn't get to go through the thrill of the chase.

So, if you're a competitive person you like to win. If winning is coming too easily for you, then you're going to probably enjoy winning less, because it's not as challenging for you to win.

The message I'm looking to give you today is to continue to look for bigger challenges.

And that's how you grow. And that's how you improve. And that's how you'll stay focused and motivated to keep doing what it is that you do.

Now, I wanted to address a little bit of a counter argument to this, which might be well, why would you want to bite off more than you can chew? Or why would you want to give up what is already a good thing?

And I think one of the reasons for that is, you will know when it's time to take on bigger opportunities, because as long as you are open to them, life will start presenting them to you.

And you'll feel the motivation and the satisfaction that comes from taking on those opportunities and ultimately winning them and conquering them.

And if you have any doubt about if you're ready to take on bigger opportunities, bigger challenges, my message to you is that, the challenges that you're presented in life are the ones that you're ready for.

Even if you don't feel 100% confident that you're likely to be able to be as good or be as successful at those challenges as you are at what you're already doing, then that's a good sign because that's a challenge which you can rise to, and it requires something more from you.

And if you think about a bigger job that you're offered, you may not be 100% ready for it.

But the fact that somebody has put it in front of you, and given you the opportunity to go for that whether it is a transaction a deal, or it is a position or with more responsibility, then there's a reason for that, because you've indicated to them, or they believe that you have the potential to take on more responsibility.

And I think as long as you are not misrepresenting yourself, and misrepresenting your capabilities, then the challenges that you're presented with often reflect the next logical step for you to take.

And as long as you're open to them, and that you're ready to accept them, those bigger challenges there to help you prove yourself and it will show that you're more capable, then perhaps you've been given the opportunity to prove that you were in the in the past.

So, demonstrating the capacity for bigger challenges means that you've got the opportunity to achieve more.

And as long as you're not misrepresenting yourself, to gain an advantage that perhaps you don't deserve, you haven't earned or you're not ready for, then the challenges that you that you see put in front of you are often the challenges that you're ready to take.

Now if you believe that you're ready to take on bigger challenges, but you're just looking for a little bit more motivation, you want to increase your scope to take on new challenges and to rise to the next big thing in your life.

I put together a collection of books that I recommend that can help open your mind to take on that bigger responsibility.

And I'm sharing those books with you at cresuccess.co/books

Go and have a look at that. And there are six books there that I really recommend reading that. If you're ready to play at a bigger level, you'll find useful.

There's also an e-book that I wrote called 'The 5 Ps of Commercial Real Estate Success', which you can download for free.

It's a list of five attributes that I've noticed in the most successful people in our industry, that competitive industry, which is commercial real estate.

As always, really appreciate you listening to this episode. Thank you so much for being there. And I will speak to you soon.