By Lori Muller, Vice President, US Division, EXIT Realty Corp. International
It doesn’t matter where you are in your business or personal life, these three words can impact every decision you make, every door you decide to open or close, and every path you take. When you sit back and look at these words – character, courage and confidence – you see them always fitting together almost like the three magical ingredients of your success. If you try to separate them, you will always fall back on the other two.
No matter where you are in your career, the foundation to your personal and professional growth is your character. Your character is who you are, but your reputation is who people think you are. The trust that others have in you is the core of your character. Now, you need to ask yourself…. Do they trust me? When you have a great reputation and an authentic, trustworthy character on the inside, this is when you start attracting others to you from the outside. You start building your referral business, you start having agents call you to join your brokerage, your phone rings because someone wants to join your region!
Now, let’s just take a minute and think about courage. We have all had courageous moments in our lives – those moments when one decision we made had such a monumental change in the trajectory of our personal or professional lives.
One of the biggest character-building courageous moments of my life happened when I was struggling with who or what I wanted to be at the young age of twenty. While I had felt courageous many times before, this time was different. I made the decision to quit my life in Wisconsin when I answered an ad in the local newspaper with the headline, “Travel the USA- Fun in the Sun.” That was on a Wednesday. By Saturday, I had put all my belongings in storage, quit my job and school, said goodbye to family and friends and my life as I knew it, and hopped on a Greyhound bus bound for Minneapolis, Minnesota to start my new adventure. From that point, I traveled the country for almost 10 years selling concentrated cleaner door-to-door. It was a game changer for me because I had the courage to just do it! Every day from that moment forward I never lacked courage. I didn’t let anything or anyone hold me back from where I wanted to go or who I wanted to be.
Don’t let anyone or anything stop you from being courageous. It builds your character! It builds your trust in not only yourself, but in others also, and it creates a shield of self-confidence that no one can ever take away from you. When you are courageous you inspire others to be courageous and this is how we multiply. This is how you build a referral business, your residual income, your brokerage, and your team.
The exciting part of being a person with a strong, authentic, trustworthy character is that your confidence grows! Because you take the time to invest in yourself and then pay it forward and invest in others, you build their confidence as well. Confidence now comes with empathy, not ego. This is when you take the confidence you have and use it to develop others. This is how we surpass EXIT Realty’s Founder and Chairman, Steve Morris’, “Sponsor 3” Initiative across the entire North American continent.
I want to leave you with this quote: Fear is temporary, but regret is forever. Be courageous, be fearless! We trust you. We believe in you. And we are confident in the trajectory that EXIT Realty is on. As CEO, Tami Bonnell, says, “This is our time!”
