Well hey there and welcome back to the Women Rocking Real Estate Podcast, I’m your host Jen Percival and you’re listening to episode number 20.

Today I want to give a quick shout out to TamG and KylaOV for your sweet reviews on iTunes. I so appreciate you so thank you!

Ok before we dive into todays episode, I have to tell you what happened to me this past weekend. It was the biggest blunder I have ever made in my entire real estate career, probably my entire career in general. I literally wanted to die. Now that it’s been a few days I can laugh about it, but at the time. OMG

Anyway I’m sharing this in the hopes that it will prevent it from happening to any of you. So when I work with clients, I usually bring in someone from the team and we work together with them. So we started working with these new buyers and I had to bail on our first meeting for something, so I’ve never even met them in person. Anyway we started a group text to coordinate communication between Leah and I and them. On Sat night they texted to let us know they’d gone to a few open houses that day and to give us their feedback. Well when they mentioned one of the houses it immediately caught my attention, because I had been helping the owner of that house for quite awhile. I had invested a lot of my time into her and she didn’t have the common courtesy to even say thank you for my time and that really pisses me off when people do that. If you’re going to take advantage of agents and use them to get advice and information, at least have the decency to say thank you. Like really that just makes you a decent human being. When we invest our time into people, we’re taking that time away from our own lives and our families, so be respectful of that time. Anyway, anyone who knows me well knows that I don’t let shit like that go, so I sent her a text saying that I thought it was disrespectful. Which is fine, no regrets about doing that. It was a professional message that just called her out on her poor behaviour.

One of the things I love about being part of a team is that you can commiserate with each other and vent to one another. Well this is where I went horribly wrong. I took a screenshot of the text I sent this woman and forwarded it to Leah on my team, along with some choice words, that weren’t so professional. Well when forwarded it, I accidentally sent it to Leah AND the two new clients. I’m sure you can imagine the horror when I realized what I’d done. I was frantically pushing buttons on my phone hoping to retract the message. But there’s no such thing. So I texted the group again and just said Wow, that was a really big mistake, I’m really sorry. Then I immediately started pacing the room, hyperventilating and called Leah in a complete panic. We spent the next 20 minutes on the phone, terrified to read their response, but Fortunately the couple had a sense of humour about it and we were all able to have a good laugh, but that could have gone so so wrong. Lesson learned….don’t ever vent by text or email. Just don’t do it. Call instead.

Alright moving along to today’s podcast. If there’s one thing I want you to understand this year, it’s this. The number one thing that stands between you and reaching your full potential is your brain. Despite what you may or may not believe, it’s the way you think, the beliefs you have and the actions that you take or don’t take as a result that has the biggest impact on your success.

As I talked about a few episodes ago about the key to a successful real estate career is to make sure you spend as much time working in your zone of genius. I talked about how my personal zone of genius is not actually real estate and that my real passion lies in helping people build their real estate businesses.

When I was exploring how to structure this new business of mine, my thinking was that I would create programs teaching realtors my methodology and approach. My mentors were like, well aren’t you going to offer coaching as well? And I was like hell no. I’m a terrible coach. You see I’ve had lots of realtors work on my team and at my brokerage over the years and time and time again, I discovered that most don’t do what I tell them to do. I would give them a roadmap of what they needed to do and they would be all enthusiastic and committed and they’d do it for awhile and then…nothing. They’d give me excuse after excuse of why they weren’t consistently taking action. And then I would get super frustrated and think ‘why won’t they do what I’m telling them to do? Do they not believe me? Do they not trust me? It was so frustrating and frankly painful for me to watch people who just couldn’t get out of their own way. So I said no more, I can’t invest in trying to help people and sit on the side lines watching them go in circles. So I made a conscious decision to not offer coaching. Well guess what happened, as the universe typically works, I started getting asked regularly if I would coach people. The more I said no, the more people reached out to me. So I eventually realized that maybe this was a sign that I should explore a coaching program.

Now I could go out this weekend and take a random course to call myself a certified coach, but that is just not my style. I would never provide coaching, unless I was qualified to do so. Yes I’ve got a degree in Psychology, yes I’ve got 25 years of sales and marketing experience and yes I’ve built a successful real estate business. However I feel very strongly about creating value for people. Value that they can’t get easily anywhere else and my personal experience with real estate coaching left a very sour taste in my mouth.

So I started an exhaustive search of programs out there. I was looking for something that resonated deeply with me and as the universe works, one fell in my lap. I was listening to a podcast on Facebook Advertising of all things and he had this woman who has her PhD in neuropsychology on the show. I was sitting in a parking lot captivated by everything she was talking about, so naturally I reached out to her and applied for her year long NeuroCoaching certification program. I am super excited to be getting trained under Dr. Shannon Irvine and the reason I’m so excited about it, is because it is a type of unique coaching for success that is brain-based and backed by science and it is fascinating shit! Not only is it fascinating, but I know it works and it literally changed my life. This will all make more sense after you hear this story.

You see about 12 years ago, I was driving one morning on the highway up to the cottage with my two little kids and husband in the car. We had left really early in the morning and my youngest daughter was only about 9 months old and wasn’t sleeping through the night yet so we were still pretty sleep deprived and everyone was asleep accept me of course. Well all of the sudden I started not feeling well. I got all clammy and lightheaded and before I knew what was happening, I started to get tunnel vision. I was driving 100km an hour with my family in the car and I started to lose consciousness. I screamed as best I could to my husband who was asleep and he managed to grab the wheel and the next thing I knew I was coming to and realized we were still driving and I tried to get us over to the shoulder and then started fainting again. Fortunately we were able to pull over safely and nothing happened, but it was one of the scariest moments I had ever experienced. Well I spent the next week replaying the incident over and over in my head. I thought about how it felt physically to lose consciousness and then I ruminated about what could have happened and had the most horrid visualizations. I couldn’t control it, it was all I thought about. Little did I know with all that replaying of the incident in my mind, that I was creating a neural pathway in my brain and one that would debilitate me for the next 11 years.

About a month after the incident a friend invited me up to her cottage so I decided to just take my 9 month old with me. Without thinking about it I packed us in the car and got on the same highway, only this time I was alone. Well right when we got to the same spot on the highway where the incident happened, I of course started thinking about it and within seconds I started feeling faint again. It took every ounce of strength I had to hang onto consciousness trying to get myself and my baby safely to the side of the highway and that was the beginning of a 11 year period where I could not drive on highways without fainting.

We take simple things like driving for granted and I’m a pretty strong person, so I was determined to just get over it. But every time I tried, I literally started to faint.

So I decided to give cognitive behavioural therapy and try and went regularly for almost a year. Didn’t work. Eventually I gave up and just resigned myself that I would never be able to drive on highways again. Do you know as a realtor how debilitating that is? I couldn’t take on clients that were looking anywhere outside of my little farming area. It even dictated where we bought our cottage because I had to be able to take back roads. But eventually even they started becoming an issue and I got trapped a couple times and couldn’t drive at all.

That is how powerful the brain is. My brain had created a neural pathway that believed when you drive on highways, you faint. My brain would actually make my body faint. It was kind of fascinating in one way if you had a sense of humour about it, which I did not.

Long story short I suffered for 11 years and felt completely trapped in my own body. It was the most frustrating experience to not have control over my brain. Well back in 2018 I had a chance meeting with a psychologist at a woman’s retreat and she mentioned a type of therapy I should try called EMDR. I don’t know how it had never been suggested to me before, but it saved me. After only about 10 treatments, I was able to drive on highways by myself and have been fine ever since. I am free.

When you experience a traumatic incident and you think about it over and over again it creates a neural pathway in your brain and it becomes a belief and that belief gets stored in the subconscious part of your brain. That part of your brain, doesn’t have any logical reasoning ability. It doesn’t know the difference between a belief that is true or untrue. As far as it’s concerned, it’s a fact and just like it unconsciously controls things like your heart rate and breathing and blinking, it can control so much more and it all happens subconsciously, without your awareness.

If any of you have any illogical fears – of things like spiders, of needles, of throwing up, etc. you’ll get this. It’s a very real fear for you and a you experience a very real response – one that you likely don’t have control over. You have a neural connection in your brain and EMDR therapy essentially erases that neural pathway and reprocesses the thought or memory in a more healthy way. It stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. So if any of you have suffered any sort of trauma in your life and you haven’t explored EMDR, I highly recommend you look into it.

Ok but what does all this have to do with real estate success and coaching?

Well neural pathways aren’t just formed after traumatic events, they’re are also formed in our brains from a bunch of other stuff – namely self-limiting beliefs that were formed in childhood. Our brains are literally hardwired to have a success and achievement mindset or not. If you have neural pathways formed in your brain that unbeknownst to you consciously, believe you are not enough or don’t deserve success. If you subconsciously believe that wanting money makes you greedy or that it’s not easy to make, your brain will literally not allow you to find the success you’re looking for. You will sabotage your own efforts with procrastination, distractions, overwhelm, perfectionism and lack of productivity just to name a few. You’ll never put yourself out there and you won’t take the action needed to see the results desired.

The NeuroCoaching model that I’ll be teaching is science backed and source based and that means that it actually removes the neural networks in your brain that are holding you back. Your subconscious brain needs to go through a process of transformation. It automates 80 – 90% of your decisions, your actions and your results. Is that not mind blowing – 80 90% of your decisions and actions are automated outside of your conscious awareness. That’s nuts.

This model works for every problem, every situation, every goal because it taps into how your brain is wired so that you no longer get temporary symptom-based shifts, but source-based transformation.

If what you want, is not aligned with what is literally programmed into your subconscious, that results in what’s called cognitive dissonance. So no matter what you say you want, if you’ve got an underlying subconscious belief that you don’t deserve it, you either A) won’t let yourself have it or B) you’ll get it, but you’ll screw it up subconsciously and lose it anyway. That’s why most people who win the lottery, go on to lose the money and return to the exact financial state they started with.

So how do we go about erasing those neural pathways that are not serving us? Well in a nutshell, that requires neuro-hacking. Once you know how it all works, you can re-engineer it. That process takes about 67 days. At 21 days, the old neural network and the new one are about equal, but the strength is still in the old one, which is way so many people give up new habits around the 21 day mark. We can do almost anything for 3 weeks on willpower alone, but relax and you’ll revert back. You haven’t yet created a habit that is stored in your subconcious and that you no longer have to think about to do. You haven’t created the neural network.

This NeuroCoaching model works with any situation, problem, habit or behaviour that you want to start or stop doing. But here’s the kicker. 97% of people will never tap into it. It’ll sound great to them and they’ll give the instagram quote a heart but won’t even bother looking into it more or as soon as it seems like too much work, the brain will say “that’s too hard, come back over here where it’s safe and familiar and procrastinate instead.”

Top level athletes use these methods in their day to day life and the results speak for themselves. But only a fraction of the rest of the population does. So if being a top 1% realtor is one of your goals, then do not underestimate the power of your brain. As a part of my certification, I am going through this coaching model myself because Transformed people, transform people and it has been such an interesting process.

I have always believed that I will be successful. I never had to try and convince myself of that, I just knew it. It was an expectation. But what I didn’t realize is that I also had a deep seated belief that I’d have to work hard, like really hard to get there. I’ve said this before in the podcast, that I was raised by a single dad and he was a very successful entrepreneur and he was a workaholic. That created a belief in my childhood that to be successful you have to be a workaholic. That neural pathway is so deeply connected in my brain that I can’t ever shut work off. Any moment of free time that I have, I always turn to work. It’s like I don’t know how to occupy myself without working. I’ve made working a habit and although it has served me well in my career, it doesn’t serve me well in relationships, in my family and in my health. It’s really hard to be present and in the moment with my kids, when all I’m thinking about is the ideas I have for work. So that is the big neuro-hack I’m personally working on. Stay tuned.

Alright ladies, that’s it. I hope this episode has got you thinking about your own subconscious beliefs that might be holding you back. I will be having Dr. Shannon on the show in a few weeks and she’s going to share more of her brilliant, science based information on this stuff.
Also if you are suffering from any type of trauma, fear or phobia that is affecting your life, I highly recommend you explore EMDR therapy. Maybe it will help you too.

Remember the more you learn, the more you’ll earn. Until next time.