Getting Into the Right Frame of Mind to Buy Real Estate
To go into real estate, most of us need to freshen up our minds and change our way of thinking. We need to lose some of our unrealistic attitudes and incorrect beliefs. We need to brush away the mental cobwebs and let some daylight in. In my profession, I help people to do just that. My years of training U.S. Air Force personnel, and my ongoing career as a motivational speaker and real estate consultant, have enabled me to counsel everyone from raw recruits to longtime company CEOs. Their personal challenges are varied and often not what you might expect. However, in general, their problems tend to have less to do with the workplace and more to do with their personalities.
Take the USAF as an example. It has a competitive entry system, and its recruits are bright and above average. However, they are young and their personalities are often not yet fully formed. Their emotional parts are usually available and in good working order, but the parts haven’t meshed together as a smoothly running whole unit. This is when USAF training takes hold. The air force knows exactly what it wants from you. It doesn’t need an opera singer or bull rider, regardless of your talents. It needs a pilot, mechanic, weather expert, or marksman. To get what it wants, the air force makes you maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. You may not agree with how the air force goes about it, but no one asks for your opinion. You simply have to shape up. This is the reason why so many Americans look back on a youthful stay in the armed forces as the most formative period in their lives.
Although I have a CD titled First-Time Home Buyers’ Boot Camp, I never intend to use any drill sergeant techniques. (I didn’t use any in that CD either.) In camp, the drill sergeant
makes decisions for you. In real life, you need to make your own decisions. Sometimes you must be your own drill sergeant. From
time to time, you may need to shout at yourself, “Move it!”
Some people are surprised to hear that this is now the approach of many psychologists. In the first half of the twentieth century,
psychiatrists and psychologists concentrated on finding out why people had emotional difficulties in their lives. One of their discoveries was that finding the cause of a problem, does not solve it. You still have to do something about it. The drill sergeant doesn’t want to hear about your mom and dad, and neither do many modern psychologists. They want you to identify your behavior patterns and do something about the negative ones. For most of us, the weaknesses that are easy to identify (negative behavior patterns) are a good place to start.
I am emphasizing the importance of personal attitude and motivation by discussing this area before we go into the details of buying
property. If you enter into anything with a negative attitude, the results are likely to be less than optimal. On the other hand, you
can’t afford to be unrealistically optimistic. To be realistic, you must start with yourself.
