One of the struggles anyone who works in a customer service role has (which includes real estate agents) is the consistent need to be nice to everyone you meet while you are at work. To work in these roles successfully it really helps if you are a “people person” by default but there are days that, despite your natural niceness, the reality of life just gets in the way.

You have a sick child, financial worries, you had an argument with your partner, or you have a difficult client you need to deal with. Whatever it is, it sits in the back of your brain and is making you cranky. Often the worst situations to deal with are the ones that haven’t even happened yet. You are projecting in your mind how badly things could turn out and all the possible ramifications of that situation going wrong. It is very often the case that your imagination will hurt you more than your reality, but this doesn’t stop us from thinking the worst. Mark Twain famously wrote “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

After working for 27 years in real estate, I’ve had to come up with a few strategies to help me survive in a field where my main role as a middle-man and employer is to keep everyone happy. The main one I use I call “priming my day”. I find that when I have a lot going on, some difficult conversations I need to have or a problematic personality I need to deal with, I am most vulnerable when I first wake up in the morning. My mind projects ahead at all the things I need to deal with and don’t really want to. I’m distracted and cranky and haven’t even had breakfast!

How I deal with this is that I have a set of dot points (15 of them!) written in my phone notes that primes my mind to focus on what is really important to me and give perspective to the reality of the issues I need to deal with.  Mostly when we get off track mentally, we are stuck in the detail and lose sight of the bigger picture. If I prime my mind with the right perspective first thing in the morning, I find that the issues are much smaller and that I am quite capable of dealing with them. It’s so simple but it is also really effective.