Real estate educators always want us to be like them.  It makes sense.  Most of them were wildly successful in real estate by running their business in a certain way, so it’s natural that they’d try to coach you to run your business that same way.  They made money by committing to some extraordinary campaign of cold calling, so they teach you to cold call.  Or they built some extensive referral database, so they teach you how to build your sphere.

Here’s the problem: you’re not them.  You’re not like them, and the things that worked for them might not work for you.  Not because what they’re teaching isn’t valuable, but because you might have a different set of skills and motivations than they did.

That’s why most people aren’t able to follow their programs.  I mean, it seems simple when you’re sitting in the conference hall: recite your affirmations to get yourself fired up, hit the phones, read the scripts.  Then you try doing it day after day, and the words stick in your throat.  You’re just not comfortable saying them.  It’s just not you. So after a week, those scripts end up in your bottom desk drawer, never to be seen again.

That’s okay.  The problem isn’t you, it’s that you’re trying to be someone that you’re not.  You’re putting on an act, and you’re probably not that good of an actor.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t improve yourself. I wouldn’t be in the education business if I believed that. I think that you should do everything you can to get better at your job. But I also think that you need to be the best agent YOU can be, rather than trying to be someone else.

You need to be yourself, but your best self.  Your more disciplined self.  Your more organized self. Your more assertive self. You need to be the best possible version of you, which means pushing yourself out of your comfort level and trying new things.

How do you get there?  By constantly looking for ways to grow.  You can’t be afraid to try new things that might help develop your business.  By all means, go to all the training events you can.  Every one of them has something that you can learn, something you can incorporate into your business.  You might not memorize their scripts, but you can learn from them and find a way to put them in your own words. You might not commit to their lead generation system, but you might find a nugget in the system that you can incorporate into your own. You’re never going to know whether something will work unless you actually try it.

The key is this: we can all be better versions of who we are right now.  And the better version of you is far preferable to a mediocre copy of someone else.

This post is part of a series of what I call the “36-1/2 Rules for Client-Oriented Real Estate Agents,” a collection of short takes on the CORE concept that I’ve developed over the years of discussing and teaching the system.  We’ll count up to the 36th rule over the next few months, and then the 1/2 rule.  You can get the full list of rules by clicking on the “36-1/2 Rules for CORE Agents” category on the blog – scroll from the bottom if you want to read them in order.