First, you have to stop living outside your core values, right? These are the things that are important to you as a person and as an estate agent. You've got to stick to your values. You've got to hold those boundaries. It's so, so, so, important.

When we step outside of those values, we try our best to compromise on the things that we believe in, the things that are important to us. You’ll know you’ve done this because all of a sudden you’ll feel unhappiness, uncertainty, all of the things that make you feel really shit.

These feelings get in the way of you feeling really:

- good,

- aligned,

- clear,

- passionate, and

- connected

That's why your values matter. If you can’t live inside your core values where you are, change where you are.

There's a great saying about people and change, right? If you can't change the people, change the people.

If you're in a people industry and you're working with people that you don't want to work with, change them. Get away from the people that make you unhappy. If you can’t be the kind of estate agent you want to be where you are, go somewhere else.

Be Inspired. You're allowed – no one said you have to do that shit, right? Be you. Be your values. Stop compromising on them.

I'm telling you now, you've got to understand this principle first, because the rest is a damn sight easier to do if you do.

The second thing you need to quit is people pleasing. Why do we do this? It doesn’t work. You can’t people please your way to success as an estate agent because you know the people you're trying to please will never be fucking happy. True, right?

When you sit there and you think, ‘Should I post this? Should I share that? Should I have this conversation?’, you’re people pleasing.

The fact that you're asking those questions means you're around the wrong person. It means you're thinking about the wrong things. You know, how many of those people are going to want to use you anyway?

Especially in real estate, believe me some of your best customers will be people that you've never met before, not the ones you’re trying to please.

Pleasing people is subjective. When you’re people pleasing, you put their needs before yours. You've got to please yourself. You've got to help yourself. You've got to give yourself room to grow.

The fact that you're going to try things, do things, give advice, help people, advance conversations, and be direct means you're going to have to not please people. You’ll get better results as an estate agent when you learn that what people respect is honesty, education, and relevant information. These are the things that are going to help them to make the right decision.

You know in a market where prices have come down, imagine if you just stuck with a people pleasing methodology. You wouldn’t sell anything because no sellers are getting really what they want to achieve in the current climate, anyway. So you can see that people pleasing is a dysfunctional operation.

It's normally something that's only adopted by people that are quite weak-minded, and I don't mean to be horrible here, right? Just hear me out for a second. The fact that you want to please other people by bullshitting them, means you don't want to have an honest, truthful conversation which will benefit them.

You can be nice and be constructive. You can be nice and be honest. As long as you’ve got the right intentions you'll get the right outcome. So for me, people pleasing is something you must, must, must stop!

The third thing you have to quit is undervaluing yourself. So here’s an example in our industry: fees. We go out there, we try and win the business, and I've heard time and time again people say to me, “But the other agents charge less than I do. The other agents are doing it for X.”

I don't care because I don't want to use the cheapest idiot in town. I don't want to go after someone that doesn't believe in themselves because they want to just win the business by absolutely cutting down their own income for their own family, for their own needs.

I mean who in their right mind would want to choose someone on just their fee alone, right? Well, there are customers that will think like that if you don't educate them. So educate them.

Teach them what your value is. Where is your value? It’s in your success ratio, like how much have you achieved for people over the years.

One method of demonstrating your value is looking at how much you've negotiated for your clients in the past 12 months from first offer to the last offer that got accepted. One of my clients today just shared with me that that figure was £1.35 million. On average, he and his team negotiate £18,000 of value for their clients. On average throughout the year.

On average, their fee is just under £5,000. That means they've already paid for their fee three times over. How much do you value that? How much would a client value that?

But the real question is how much do you value yourself right now, because that's the premise of being a successful estate agent. In real estate agency it is all about your confidence, not your desperation. So if you value yourself first, people will be attracted to you.

You’ve got to feel that confidence first, so what I want to know is how are you going to go away and figure out what your true value is? Look at the impact that you've had on clients. Look at the last reviews that you've had.

Go back through your customers and think about the best experiences that you gave people, write those stories up. Have them as part of your resume to share with clients on appointments. Then get your statistics, statistics that demonstrate the difference that you make in your market. Put those together, that's your value. Got it?

Fourth, you have to stop caring about what other people think.

Now, you could argue, ‘Oh, well, you should care you should care about what other people think.’ Okay, if you're a complete prick, in the nicest possible way, and you're out there trying to be a narcissist or destroy other people, then you ought to care. But if that’s the case, you won't, will you? So it doesn't really make any difference.

When I say you need to stop caring what other people think, I'm talking to genuine, honest, decent people. I’m sharring this post for people that absolutely care about their customers. 100%. But caring about your customers and caring about what others think aren’t the same thing.

Caring about what other people think is a dangerous place to be. It's on the cusp of pleasing others, so you're trying to be someone you're not to suit the narrative, to suit the audience. But if instead of that, you just be who you are, you'll attract the right people.

Care about what you can control

If you're strong in your mind, strong in your values, strong in what you deliver, you should only care about the things that you can control. So focus on those things and care deeply about the experience that you can give to your customer. Care deeply about their feedback, for sure. But don't care about what other people think.

Why not? Because when you do, you aren't focusing on the people that you're going to end up working with anyway. So care about what the right people think about you, and forget about the wrong ones. There's plenty of wrong ones out there, believe me.

They're normally the ones that sit on the outside or behind closed doors, talking about you to their friends, right? We all know what those people are like. They're just jealous, so move them on. Stick to your mission, your vision, your values. Be the best version of who you are and try not to care about what other people think.

The fifth thing you need to quit is showing up without a purpose or a goal. Stop showing up every day and just being in the day, being run by the day, being managed by the day, being a victim of the activity of what goes on in your day.

I want you to come in with a purpose. You've got to have your goal and stop being oriented around reactionary activities. If you don’t have a goal, it’s time to get one. To help you set a real goal – one you can actually reach – check out a post I wrote recently: ‘How to become a successful real estate agent in five simple steps’.

You've got to be focused on what you're there to do every day. If you're an estate agent, you're there to sell a house. So you need to come in and ask yourself these questions:

- How am I going to sell a house today?

- Which house am I going to sell?

- What am I going to do to sell that house?

You need to come in with a purpose. It's the same with anything that you want to achieve.

We are in a performance industry. We are not in an industry where you clock in and clock out. I know all of these influencers that are out there at the minute, and they'll show you that you can drink two cups of coffee, tap away on a laptop, lay back on your sun bed, and earn £100,000 a year.

They're full of shit.

I'm here to dash your dreams. You can be successful and earn well in excess of that, but you're going to have to work really hard. And by the way, if you want to achieve things without having goals, without having a purpose, without having a plan, I'm sorry you're just a dreamer, right?

Turn your dreams into reality by having a goal and a plan. Stop showing up every day without knowing what you're looking to achieve. Your days are precious ladies and gentlemen. You're going to be here looking back over the year, asking whether it was good or not. Don't be going down that road. You should know what the next year is going to be like right now. You should know that from the way you show up every single day.

If you don’t, it’s time to get clear. Let me help you create your one-year plan. I explain how in this post: ‘5 steps to success: Your 1-year plan’. Do it now, because if you’re not clear about your year, you can’t be clear about your day. If you're not clear about your day, you're not going to achieve what you could achieve. Be clear on your goal.

You absolutely must stop:

- Letting people push you away from your values

- Trying to please others

- Undercutting your value

- Focusing on what the wrong people think

- Reacting; instead, start focusing on your goal.

These are the things you must quit, not should quit, must quit to have the best year ever as an estate agent.

I hope you've enjoyed this post as much as I've loved sharing it. So why should you listen to me? Well I've got 28 years in this industry, man and boy. Believe me I've gone from being a dreamer as a little trainee without a car to owning a group of estate agents, to training across the UK, to teaching thousands of people how to be better estate agents in this country. I love it, having sold over a billion pounds worth of property and helped people to scale their businesses.

I'm here to share free content with you, but the deal is if you're reading, you need to go and implement what I'm teaching. If you want more training or have questions head over to the video version of this post on my YouTube channel to share messages with me.

I get loads of great messages from people asking for training and advice on certain topics, which I promise you won't be ignored. So go and implement, look at the comments, make your own comments, and subscribe to the channel. Don’t forget to ring the notifications bell so you can be a part of my community moving forward. We're going to create some magic in the UK real estate agency scene together, and I really look forward to seeing you soon.