I hope you're staying home and staying safe. It's day 27 in isolation for me and I'm very fortunate.
I don't have kids to organize and entertain or their meals to plan. I'm not on a health professional on the front line helping virus sufferers like a number of friends and family who are doing an amazing job saving lives. I've worked remotely from a home office, coffee shop and often my car for the last 15 years so there's no major shift in work habits and so far, and touch wood, I don't have a sore throat or dry cough.
And if I bring the virus back home to Christine who suffers severe asthma... well, I don't even want to think about that.
In times like this, I believe it's important to focus on what we can influence.
For a start, we have the power to influence our own thinking. We can wallow in the cancer that is self-doubt and choose to take the low road of despair, pending doom and negative, destructive thinking which, as we all know, never ends well... or we can choose to remain optimistic and hopeful and reach out to others and either ask for support or offer it. Nobody is immune and we've all reached this fork in the road at some point. The important question is when you do?
When you think about it, we're all born with the same two options... we can choose to be a tower of strength or a swamp of suffering and if I've learned one thing in life, it's that you will move towards what you think about.
You naturally gravitate to where your head's at. In fact, it's virtually impossible not to. For so many, success begins when we make the decision to hack into our optimism and achievement tools with things like exercise, meditation, a solid routine, focussing on the right business actions for these times and tuning our radar to actively scan for opportunities.
Since this thing started I've had the chance to connect with agents in many different places. Sometimes we email, sometimes we talk on the phone or face to face it with a Zoom call.
I'm honored and humbled that many real estate contacts (including quite a few I don't know) have reached out to me for help and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share any ideas, suggest solutions and workshop options at a time like this and I'd like to extend the offer here and now. If I can help, let me know. Reach out and say hello and tell me what's going on. I'm ready to welcome your message and looking forward to helping out wherever I can.
I can tell you I don't have all the answers for what's happening right now but I don't believe anyone does. I do have some solid ideas and strategies I learned in the early 90s and 2008 that are working well for my private client group,
This morning we woke up to a very cold cottage because the fire went out during the night and there's no other heating. I needed some kindling to get things underway but it had rained overnight and the kindling was wet. I cursed myself for being unprepared.
If you've ever tried to light a fire with wet wood you'll know it's a challenge but it's the perfect metaphor for what's happening in real estate at the moment. So many agents are trying to light a fire with wet wood. The things they were doing in February are not working in April. Adaption is key.
There's no doubt this global health crisis will trigger an economic downturn and probably the most severe we will see in our lives.
Last week I checked in on my 87-year-old mother in law to see how she was doing. She lived through the blitz in London during the second world war and I was interested to know if she noticed any parallels. "Not really" she said. "During the blitz we honestly didn't know if that day would be our last. Bombs were falling out of the sky and killing our neighbors. With this pandemic, all we need to do is stay inside and keep ourselves busy."
In my view, this event is dramatically different from the early 90s recession...
