These customers right now, they know what’s going on they read the newspapers, they have all the information that you have, it’s a snow storm. When I used to go to college, I had a little carpet store. I used to sell carpet out of this little thing that’s called the Carpeter. I was in Utah and the snow would be coming down, there would be like 3 inches of snow on the ground. It would be treacherous driving and low and behold here comes this couple driving up in a car on the pavement up to the front of my store and they’d be making the tracks in the three inches of snow and the husband and wife would get out of the car covering their heads from the snow as they’d rush into the store and all I could think about is “these folks need carpet”. What person would go out and drive in treacherous roads in the night in a snow storm to go buy carpet? Only someone who needed it, right? Right now it’s a snow storm, right now is the worse possible time to buy a home according to everybody who is not in the housing market. And so I ask you, what crazy person would do that? Who would come out in a snow storm to buy a house? All the sales people I talk to say, Traffic’s down, traffics down we only have half as many people as we had before. The company has to generate more leads. Those poor folks that are walking into the communities today, they’re walking in because they need a house; they’re walking in because they are a real customer. Only real customers would be walking in our sales centers today. Would you all agree?

So about 2 or 3 years into my work history, my company, I had a friend of mine, his name was Rich and he struck it rich on the internet. So he came over to my house and he dropped off this boat, this large 88 glastron ski/bass fishing boat with a 200 horse power engine and he dropped it off in front of my house and he said “Will, I’m giving you my boat, pay me when you can”. He wanted me to pay him $6000 for the boat and I said, Rich I don’t have $6000 and I don’t even know anything about boats so take it away, I don’t want it. And he said “Will, I’m sorry but I’m leaving it here, enjoy it use it and pay me when you can”. He did the same thing to me with a dog about 2 years before that I never forgave him for that, he just left it there with my kids before I got home from work. But as it turns out I went ahead and tried to use the boat. I remember the first time I put it in the water, I left the cap in the back off flooded the boat, the beeper was going off people were watching me, it was so embarrassing and the wind was blowing, I was trying to drag the boat back up on the trailer half full of water. And I made every mistake you can make owning that boat, every trailer mistake, every towing mistake, but little by little I learned to use the boat. And I started using it more and more and I figured out something early on, that my kids loved the boat and they loved to go boating. And if I ever wanted to get them together all I had to do is take the kids and say, I’m leaving the house at 3:00 from the driveway with the boat and we’re going to go boating and there was no more argument. I’d pull up to the driveway and there they were standing with towels, maybe a friend right there with them, but they were there, no work no games no distractions, they were sitting there. And so it became my secret weapon. This was the way I was going to get everyone together with no arguments and no problems. And so we used that boat for everything, camping, fishing, skiing, everything. A little later some of my younger boys they got good at water skiing and specifically at wakeboarding. So if you know anything about wakeboarding you have to have weight in the back of the boat. To make the wake real big and so they started adding these bag sacks at the back of the boat, 2000 pound bags of water to make the wake real big and I would tell them, you have to be careful I don’t know if the engine can take that it wasn’t designed to carry around 2000 pounds of weight. Oh dad don’t worry, nothing’s gonna happen to it, it’s gonna be fine. And low and behold last May the inevitable finally happened, it blew a cylinder in my boat and so do you guys know what an 88 glastron ski bass fishing boat is worth with no engine? So then they were like “Dad you gotta get a new boat”! So I said, I don’t know, I don’t think so. Do you guys know what a competition tow boat cost for water skiing? 60 to 70 thousand dollars, and I’m a practical person, there’s no way in the world I’m going to go out and spend 60 or 70 thousand dollars to put a boat on the side of my house that I’m going to use four weeks a year. No way in the world am I going to do that! But they worked on me, they worked on me over and over, they brought brochures home, they brought pictures home they went on the internet and came up with different color schemes and put them on the refrigerator. Every time I was watching a movie they said “hey dad, check this out” look at the size of this engine, look at this layout”. And little by little I thought, okay maybe I’ll get a used boat. So then I went around looking at used boats, but the problem was that people actually used them. One of my friends, Tom Wilson said “Why would people buy a used home when they have other peoples toe nails in the carpet”? That’s how I felt, every time I went to see a used boat it was dirty or it had a smudge or a tear in the vinyl, I couldn’t do it so finally one Saturday I went into a boat store with my son Taylor. And I did what everybody does, what every one of your customers does every time, I looked at the sales gal and I said, tell me about the boats. Now why would I do that? I already knew everything about the boat. I knew the specs as well as she did. I knew all the differences, all the models everything about them but I said, tell me about the boat. And so she started talking and she started talking and telling me about the models and about the specs and the features and about all the things about that boat. And I was polite, I nodded I said that was interesting that’s cool. Finally she said, “you know why don’t you come over here and get in the boat and see how it feels” so I said, okay I’ll do that so I started to take my shoes off to get in the boat and she said “you don’t have to take your shoes off to get in the boat”. And I thought, wait a minute, you’re having people walk on my boat with shoes on? Because you know what, no real boater gets in their boat with their shoes on. And so all of a sudden I realize, she’s not a real boater. She’s not really passionate about the sport. She doesn’t really care about boating at all. So I got in the boat and I tried to kind of get comfortable, I went on the bow, I put my arm on the bow kind of leaned back you know trying to get the feeling of what it would be like to be in the boat, but she kept talking, she kept telling me about the features about the swivel seat about the storage and the lights and the radio and the stereo. She kept telling me about things that I couldn’t get things I could get, things I’d have to pay more for if I wanted them. She was really staring to bug me, so finally I said, you know what go ahead and figure out what it costs, and she left. And then my son Taylor walked up and he’s almost as tall as I am and he puts his arm around me and he says “dad what do you think?” and I said no Taylor, no and he says “Dad, seriously, picture this Boom boom boom boom, boom boom boom boom” that’s the rap music and stuff they listen to on the boat. I hate it with a passion, I hate it but he goes boom, boom boom boom. He says “dad picture this, we’re on the boat, boom boom boom boom, there’s a warm breeze going across the bow of the boat dad, boom boom boom boom”. “We got a cold drink in our hands dad, boom boom boom boom, we just got done with a day of great skiing dad” I said “Taylor, get away from me”. At that moment I decided to buy that boat, I decided I didn’t care what it costs, I decided I didn’t care what the payments were, I didn’t care about the insurance. I didn’t care that I was going to have to widen my gate just to get the boat to the back of my house. I didn’t care about any of those things anymore; I knew I was going to buy a boat. What did Taylor sell in 15 or 20 seconds that the sales person couldn’t sell in an hour? He discovered and he sold the one thing that I really wanted, the boom boom boom! I wanted to make sure that I was able to continue to have that quiet time, that ability to visit and hang out with my family and I knew it was my secret weapon and Taylor captured that in just a few seconds.

In life we always have challenges and those challenges are not unique to us, everybody has them, but it’s our ability to overcome those challenges and really look ahead that sets us all apart. Sometimes you have to realize that all these challenges are here for your good, the things that you’re up against the things that you face, the inconveniences that step in front of you every day of your life. They’re there to help you not hurt you, they are there to help you grow, help you change help you become more. If we look at it that way then we don’t look at challenges and inconveniences as something that’s bad, but something that’s good. The one thing I recognize when training people all around the country, is sometimes people resist those changes, those challenges. Sometimes they resist them to the point where they just continually have to learn the same lesson. I think about my kids sometimes coming home late from curfew. Each time they would come home late from curfew I would be waiting and the consequences of those decisions would be waiting as well. Sometimes it was the loss of their phones driving privileges maybe a grounding or two. There were always consequences for the decision they made, they had to learn that once they made those decisions the consequences followed. The longer they resisted the curfew that was set and agreed to by them and us, the longer these challenges and this pain persisted in their life. The moment they realized that they could learn how to become more obedient and do what they were asked the moment that happened, the learning stopped. They were able to have more freedom and accomplish the things that they want and have less restrictions. In our lives, we have other types of things we need to learn and change. The industry is changing so fast customers don’t need us to know things anymore. They already know everything they need to know. The internet has taken away that need for customers to be told all about our products and our services. They can go on the internet and find out everything they need to know in just a few minutes and be more educated than us about our competition and about all the options and all the prices. Many realtors and real estate sales people in the industry today are resisting this particular topic. They are used to providing value to these folks the old way. Having all the knowledge all the information, thinking that all they really needed to do was explain and educate the customer who doesn’t want to be educated. We see it in the way our customers talk to our real estate professionals. I’ve heard of stories where they will call up a real estate professional and ask them to only charge one percent so they could just do the paper work because they’ve done everything else. Real estate professionals need to understand that in today’s market customers need to be presented with real value before they are willing to allow us to serve them and pay us the fees and the commissions that we want and deserve. To provide real value to customers we can still earn that good money but we need to do it in a different way. We need to help customers figure out not only what they want, but dig deeper, listen more closely and find out why they want it. We need to help them understand the values that are driving them to make decisions and purchases. We need to make sure those values match up with the real products and services we have to offer or that we may know about. We need to match customers up with the items that they love or want to fall in love with, not that they are merely satisfied with. You would also admit to me that anybody that would help you really find those things that you love, really listen to your heart. You would value that person and pay almost anything for their help. So would the real estate professionals and the customers that need them. So as we resist the fact that the customers are educated, as we resist the fact that talking doesn’t work anymore, that customers want listeners. As we resist the fact that to be a good listener requires skills and tactics and practice. As we resist those facts we will continue to learn the same lessons over and over and over again. Let me just suggest a different way, the other saying that I’ve used from time to time I call it “what you embrace, you erase”. Let’s take the real estate industry for example, let’s say that we were willing to change, we were willing to listen and learn to listen and learn to listen to these customers. That we were willing to learn new tactics and skills and that we might be able to guide the customers through the process from a values perspective. That we may be able to gain and earn trust like never before as we learn these tactics and skills and became more proficient at helping the customer we became more valuable, we became more successful. I want to suggest that we need to discontinue resisting the changes that are taking place. We need to persist in learning the new tactics and skills necessary to deal in the new and changing market. As we embrace this new situation, learn these new skills and practice them in the field. We erase the obstacles that the customers have for moving forward and buying homes and doing business. I feel like a lot of the slow down in the industry at this point is really almost self perpetuated by us because of the fact that we have been so unwilling to recognize the changes that are taking place. So remember, what you resist will persist. Some still will do that, in fact almost 400,000 realtors have stopped selling real estate in the last two years because they haven’t been able to figure out how to change. The remaining 4 or 5 hundred thousand realtors out there and the hundreds of thousands of real estate professionals are struggling with what they need to do right now to be able to sell homes. Let me suggest a couple of things. First, learn how to listen in the face of a customer who doesn’t necessarily want you to. Learn some skills and tactics that will allow you to take control of the conversation and ask questions about the feeling and needs and emotions of these real customers that are standing in front of you. Make sure you are prepared, every time you make a phone call every time you make a presentation. Make sure your sales presentation is tailored to the values of the customer and not about the features or products you have. Make sure you know how to ask the customer to move forward suggesting the next step and encourage them to do the right thing. These are simple but very powerful concepts I would suggest as you learn these you embrace the need for these new skills that you will become much more successful and much more happy. Hope to see you soon, take care.

One of my favorite activities when my kids were growing up was waking them up out of bed to go to school I used to tell them they needed to make sure that their mind was tougher than their mattress, our saying at home was “mind over mattress”. Sometimes we would joke around and I would make sure that I aided the battle between mind over mattress with what I called an in bed shower. That meant that we would get a glass of water with a little bit of water in it and do the drip torture on their forehead until they jumped out of bed. But really the principal behind the mind over mattress was that they had power to overcome the comfort of that bed and that they also needed to have a purpose before they could get out of that bed, I like to call this; the power, the purpose and the pain. We all have pain associated with the goals and the things we want to accomplish. In school that pain might mean staying a little later on during the day to do our studies, missing a practice to get our work done, maybe doing some extra homework when it’s not needed just so we can get that extra A. In work that pain might mean making extra phone calls going the extra mile trying to be upbeat during the day when you have already done the same presentation 10 times. That pain might be even changing and doing things a little differently when the company decides they want to do things differently and maybe you’ve done it the same way for a long time. Whatever that pain is, that pain is only as strong as your purpose, what this means is that we all have to have a purpose we need to know why we’re there, we need to know why we’re changing or doing or going and we as special human beings always have the ability and the ability to overcome the pain that might be associated with any worth while project or purpose. In fact a while back I was recovering from a serious injury but had an opportunity to do a special presentation in Las Vegas for 60 people from all over the country. Looking at me you might think that there was no way physically that I could get up and do 2 ½ days of sales training with that number of people in Las Vegas I just wasn’t strong enough but as I thought about it, I thought, you know what, why would I have the opportunity to do this if I didn’t have the strength why would I have been given that opportunity if I didn’t have the strength and then I realized that I did have the strength but I had to find a purpose, that wasn’t hard. The purpose for me was the same as it’s always been to make sure that I would help the people who had entrusted me with their time and money, to make sure that I gave them all that I had in terms of information and experience and energy and enthusiasm so they could walk away from that training session better able to earn an income, earn a living, serve their companies and serve their customers. By taking that purpose which was outside of myself I was able to overcome the initial lingering pain and weakness that I was still settled with after my injury that important meeting led to other important contacts and really stirred our business in a needed time. I’m sure all of you who have purposes in your lives, dreams, goals, aspirations, sometimes you’ve let the pain or the fear of the pain or the effort slow you down from pursuing those goals or dreams discourage you from doing what you need to do or just being too tired to go on. You need to understand that the only reason that you let those temporary inconveniences slow you down from your goals and your dreams is because you don’t have enough faith in those dreams and maybe you haven’t really articulated that purpose for which you need to be pursuing. I have found that the only real purpose it serves me is serving others. When we are in the service of others, we can forget about ourselves and do what’s needed. When we are serving others, we can listen to other people, find out what their needs are and respond to them accordingly. We can be creative, we can be inventive, we can be spontaneous in our responses. I personally believe that as we have purpose and we can overcome the pain, that we will have power. And that power grows as we continue to stretch that muscle and stretch that confidence and faith in our purpose and in our goals and dreams and aspirations. I want you to think about that old saying “Mind Over Mattress”. I’m smarter than that old mattress; I’m smarter than that old pillow and take it to the next step. When there’s pain there’s got to be purpose. When there’s purpose and it overcomes the pain there’s power. Power is the confidence to know that you do have the ability to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals and dreams you’ve been blessed with that as a human being living on this earth. You are not presented with any challenges or any items that you can’t overcome with enough effort and imagination and focus. These days with selling, specially selling homes or any other kind of housing, it takes a special person to forget about themselves, forget about the market forget about all the negative things that may be said and focus on their purpose. Helping people achieve their own dream of owning their own home. Or helping people achieve a dream of changing their home from one type to another to better suite their lifestyle and their current situation. I want to wish you all luck in pursuing your dreams by remembering what your purpose is, by overcoming the temporary inconveniences and gaining more and more power through confidence. Take care and have a good day.