On August 3rd in Fort Worth Texas, JP & Associates conducted its “Growth Acceleration Summit.” #GASUP
The summit was attended by 300 of its top producers, teams and agents and live streamed to locations in Austin and San Antonio,Texas. During the afternoon break the group built snack bags for children that will be distributed through it’s “Better Future Foundation.”
CEO and Founder JP Piccinini said, “Productivity and Service are two words that our culture revolves around… and the #GASUP event reflects this. Our agents and franchisees heard from leading experts and also took time to give back to our community.”
Today JP & Associates REALTORS® launched it’s unique B.O.S.S.S.℠ Hub to the entire brokerage and franchise stores. The B.O.S.S.S.℠ hub is a one-stop shop for all communication, calendaring, scheduling, training, documents, onboarding and more.
Founder and CEO, JP Piccinini said, “the acronym – B.O.S.S.S.℠ – was selected as our vision to truly be a broker one-stop shop for our agents and franchisees.”
In this week’s episode of “Success From Scratch” Amber Harper, from JPAR San Antonio shares how her career in real estate started at 20 years old. Amber shares how her initial feeling of fear held her back and what she learned to build “trust” with her customers by conquering both her business is growing and a success.
According to Harvard professor Dr. John Paul Kotter – and confirmed by my experience in coaching – efforts to change fail due to a lack of a STRONG sense of URGENCY. In his book, “A Sense Of Urgency” Kotter states:
Change efforts most often fail when those desiring to change do not create a high enough sense of urgency for making a challenging leap in a new direction. Urgency, urgency is key. Urgency is the state of mind that creates IMMEDIATE action in your new direction.
Once you have determined your desire, take action. Any action. A small steps, a medium step or a large step. Taking action and taking more action is the ONE THING we must all learn to cultivate in order to achieve higher levels of success.
If you believe what you have in mind will make a difference, then I just have two questions. What are you waiting for? What’s holding you back? Whatever it is, push through it today and TAKE ACTION.
Share with someone right now, the action step you are committed to taking… and ask them to help hold you accountable.
In this week’s episode of “Success From Scratch,” Measha Montoya shares her secret from creating 5 transactions on her first year and now going for 50 transactions in a year.
“Faith is taking the first step even without seeing the whole staircase.”
This week I had requests to write about, “how to have more joy and fun in my business” and “how to avoid procrastination in my business.” Both excellent topics. I’ll write more about fun and joy in business on another post until then I’m reminded of that famous Abraham Lincoln quote: “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
Do you prefer the pain of discipline OR the pain of regret? Research shows that we regret those things we have not done MORE than we do the things we have done. Can you relate?
What I’ve experienced personally and observed in others is, procrastination blocks us from creating to the fullest the business and life we want. You already know, the main reason we procrastinate is that taking action will cause us a certain amount of pain, a certain amount of discomfort.
Coaching clients have shared with me, “I’m avoiding undertaking certain tasks because of the risk of shame, vulnerability or failure. Taking action means we might be making a mistake or we might fail. Let’s face it, it’s easier to not take action and avoid the pain of looking less than perfect. Thus, many of us instinctively retreat to our comfort zone and miss creating our ideal business. Basically, in trying to protect ourselves from failure it’s easier to erect our own barriers to success. Can you relate? If you’ve ever been in this place – as I have – how do you
get out?
Psychologist calls this a strategy of self-sabotaging. Research shows, that by creating impediments that make success less likely, we protect our sense of self-competence. And believe it or not, we as humans tend to do this more when the stakes are the highest.
So how do we procrastinate less and take action more? Practice, get an accountability partner or join a mastermind group. By taking more small steps that lead to bigger steps you’ll build the “take action muscle.” By creating an accountability partner or mastermind group you’ll have others who can help you discern what is an excuse and what’s not. And consider these 5 action steps:
1. Remember a goal is NOT a system. A system will produce what a system will produce nothing less nothing more. Example, losing 10 pounds by September 1st is a GOAL. Learning how to change your eating habits is a SYSTEM. See the difference?
2. Make your goal tangible and specific. “Grow my business” sounds great but is also meaningless.”Land five new clients a month” allows you to determine exactly what you need to do to land those clients. Always set a goal that allows you to work backward and create a process designed to achieve it. It’s impossible to know exactly what to do every day when you don’t know exactly what you want to achieve.
3. Make it matter to you! If you want to get in better shape so other people will think you look better at the pool this summer, you’re unlikely to follow through. Ultimately, who cares what other people think?
Yet, if you want to get in better shape because you want to feel better, and feel better about yourself, or to set an example for your kids, or to prove something to yourself…then you’re much more likely to stick with it. Now your goal has meaning–not to your doctor, not to strangers at the pool, but to you.
4. Make it positive. “Stop criticizing other people in meetings” is a great goal, but it’s a negative goal. It’s a lot harder to give up or stop doing something than it is to embrace a new and positive challenge. Example, setting a goal like”stop eating sweets” means you constantly have to choose to avoid temptation and since willpower is often a finite resource, why put yourself in a position of constantly needing to choose?
When you pick positive goals, you’ll be working to become something new rather than avoid being something you no longer wish to be.
5. Focus on the process, the DAILY process. All incredibly successful people I’ve worked with have one thing in common… they set a goal and then focus all their attention on the process necessary to achieve that goal. Sure, the goal is still out there. But what they care about most is what they need to do today–and when they accomplish that, they feel happy about today.
So, I’ll ask again, do you prefer the pain of discipline OR the pain of regret? The choice is yours.
Do you have a question, theme or topic you’d like to see in a future blog? Let me know, until then #WinTheDay and remember what Abraham Lincoln said: “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
In this week’s episode of “Success From Scratch,” Meghan Pelley from the San Antonio market shares how she applies the art of “stop selling and start listening” to create a business she loves, by design.
Happy Monday. Last week I wrote about sharpening the saw… continuing with that theme today. As we learned together from the Stephen Covey video, to become a master of your time, you need to first be aware of your priorities in the larger context. The framework that I will be sharing with you in this blog is — the Time Management Matrix — it is designed to help you structure your daily activities and deal with them based on priority. Take a look:
Time Management Matrix
Think of each square as a quadrant. The top left, urgent and important is Q1; important and non-urgent is Q2; non-important and urgent is Q3 and Q4 is non-important and the non-urgent. Take a look at this summary of dealing with each quadrant:
Q-1 Tasks: Manage immediately to get them out of the way. Spend the required effort such that they do not blow out of portion.
Q-2 Tasks: Focus disproportionately due to the high payoff from the investment.
In this week’s episode of “Success From Scratch,” the team leaders of The Star Group, Felicia and Greg Johnson shares how JP and Associates REALTORS® has inspired them to give back to the community and their secret to their success as a team.
We make sure that our clients feel that they are #1!
– Felicia and Greg Johnson, JP and Associates REALTORS®
Happy Monday. Have you ever been too busy to stop and get gas? How did that work out for you?
As we start the week, can you relate to this story:
Once upon a time, there was a strong, ambitious young woodcutter who needed work. She traveled to the nearest timber merchant and asked if she could secure a job. The timber merchant could sense the woman was a hard worker and decided to give her an opportunity. “Meet me here tomorrow at daybreak,” the merchant said.
The young woman arrived the next morning where the merchant led her to a dense patch of trees in the nearby forest. “Chop down as many trees as you can today and meet me just before sunset.” The young woman chopped down 18 trees that day. The merchant was impressed. “Well done!” he said, “You are the best woodcutter we have!”
The next day the young woman returned, feeling even more motivated. Her muscles were sore but her ambition was strong. She chopped down 15 trees the second day. On the third day, the young woman arrived before daybreak and stayed until she could barely see the tree she was chopping down. She cut down only 9 trees that day. This pattern continued over the coming week.
“I must be losing my strength,” the young woman thought to herself.
The next week her boss met her in the early morning hours and told her she was fired. The young woman was upset and scared about her future. But she knew she worked as hard as she could and just didn’t have enough time to chop more trees. Her head hanging low, she handed her axe back to the timber merchant. The merchant took one look at the axe and said, “When was the last time you sharpened your axe?” “Sharpen my axe?” the young woman replied, “I’ve been too busy trying to cut down enough trees to sharpen my axe.”
I’m curious… can you relate? If so, how can you sharpen your axe this week? Consider this:
Abe Lincoln’s productivity secret was to use sharper tools to get the job done more efficiently. He said: “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” Lincoln, who was a skilled woodcutter before becoming one of the most important presidents in US history, probably meant this both literally and figuratively. Inefficient tools waste your energy. It’s better to spend the majority of your time finding and cultivating the best tools for any task.
If you have 10 minutes, you might consider investing in watching this classic video from Stephen Covey on big rocks and little rocks… no endorsement of the YouTube channel here, it’s just the only one we could find that still has this classic video. It’s worth your time, watch it!
