Dealing with the Difficult Day

In this episode, Garrett discusses how to deal with a difficult day in the real estate industry. He shares practical tips for managing time and attention when faced with challenges, such as putting problems in a time block and focusing on controllable tasks. From a spiritual perspective, Garrett encourages listeners to remember the truth of the gospel and the faithfulness of God. He emphasizes the importance of reaching out to a godly friend for support and encouragement.

Takeaways

When faced with a difficult day, put problems in a time block and focus on controllable tasks
Remember the truth of the gospel and the faithfulness of God
Reach out to a godly friend for support and encouragement

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Trusting God in Difficult Times
03:00 Managing a Difficult Day in Real Estate
08:14 Finding Peace and Perspective in Challenging Times
15:09 Trusting God's Faithfulness in the Midst of Difficulties
21:28 Conclusion and Encouragement

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Transcript

0:02

Because God loves you, you can show your trust in Him by taking... Let me start again. Because God loves you, you can show your trust in Him by talking about all your feelings and circumstances with Him, the good and the hard, through prayer. Don't let your emotions rule your life. Bring them to God so He can help you address them. He is not disappointed or frustrated by your struggles, doubts, or pain. He cares about you, and you can trust Him with those things. When you trust... You go to God and His Word when life is hard. You also act on obedience, doing what God says in His Word, and trust that He will ultimately take care of the rest. In trust, you do not look for security in other things. You look to God to hold you securely in difficult circumstances. You won't do this perfectly, but God is kind and patient with you while you learn to trust Him. 1 Peter 5 says, cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. What is up, faithful agents? Welcome back to another episode of the Faithful Agent Podcast. It is just me today, which has never happened before on a full -length Thursday episode ever. So the question is, can I talk by myself, to myself, if you will, for 20 minutes? And I think if you've listened to this podcast at all, that should not be a problem. Who needs Tyler, right? I'll just talk the entire time. Actually, I miss you, T. I love you, buddy, and excited to record with you soon. But I'm excited to talk with you today because something really interesting came up today during our coaching session. We have Christian Real Estate Coaching. Excuse me. You could check it out on our on our website, faithfulagent .com backslash chat. But it was a really interesting point. We had a great discussion today, but one of our amazing agents in that group, Tracy, who's out near Orlando, Florida. The question was, how do we deal with a difficult day? What a great question, right? How do we deal with a difficult day? So we're going to get into that. I'm going to share some ideas, some thoughts with you, but before I do, of course we're going to do jokes, but even before jokes as an encouragement and an ask of you, if you listen to this podcast, if it's been an encouragement to you, will you leave? Please leave wherever you listen to it. A five star rating and a review. That is one of the best ways for us to get the word out to more agents at the end of the day. This. mission in this organization exists because we want to serve Christians in real estate to help you grow your business and your faith to cultivate Christian community inside the world of real estate. The best way for us to do that is for you to rate, review, and share with a friend. We appreciate you so much. We do this for you, the audience. So thank you so much for tuning in, but let me get to the topic of the day after some jokes. Why did the Christian real estate agent always carry a Bible? Because he knew the best way to close a deal was to always have the good book on his side. OK, doesn't make any sense. So let's try this one from Lindsey Sears. Why can't skeletons play church music? Because they don't have any organs. Womp Womp. I like that one. Good job, Lindsey. You bailed out chat GPT. Thank you for that. But enough of the jokes. If Tyler were here, he'd be rolling his eyes. So he's not. I'm going to roll my eyes at myself. That doesn't make any sense. So how do we deal with a difficult day? Now here was the context, right? The context was a difficult agent. Quite honestly, they were going through, had a sale under contract. Turns out the seller owed a lot more money than they thought they did. Couldn't. continue with the sale, needed to switch to a short sale. The buyer agent, so Tracy is on the seller side, the buyer agent was threatening to sue, newer agent raising a lot of fuss and there's nothing they can do, right? But it's just her whole day, her appointment was her whole day, just became about that. She didn't get anything else done, she was consumed with just the frustration and the struggle and the dealing with that. So she asked the great question, how do you deal with a difficult day? So I'm gonna share a couple ideas with you today because we've all had it, right? Let's be honest, we're all having difficult days. This is a difficult market. Anybody tells you it isn't, it's not telling you the truth, right? Yeah, maybe your business is going well. Maybe you're still selling homes. Maybe you aren't, right? I've shared many times on this show, our own business, my personal business is down, certainly from where it normally is, relatively significantly down, right? And that's hard. And that just makes it difficult. And so on top of that, when you have a difficult transaction, it just makes it that much more challenging. You know, I've got a deal right now that I'm working. We went under contract. I'm in Virginia for anybody that's listening. I'm in Virginia. I'm helping this amazing couple in North Dakota. Didn't know people live there, but apparently they do. They flew in from North Dakota for the past few, few days. And we got them under contract. Awesome. Well, their house is for sale. in North Dakota and when we wrote our offer we made a contingent on the closing of their home, right, as one would. Well, when I spoke to their agent in North Dakota, I don't know why, but she didn't tell me that their sale in North Dakota was also, the buyer was also contingent on the sale of their home and the home wasn't even listed. I didn't know that. So when I made the offer for them here in Virginia, we made a contingent on a sale and when the agent asked me, about the contract they had, I said, hey, the agent in North Dakota told me it's a really strong buyer. They're in a really great position. Excuse me. They're going to be able to move forward, right? This is no problem. We can move forward. It's going to be OK. And so the agent here in Virginia says, great, because my sellers want to buy this house, but they need to be able to remove their home sale contingency. They have first right of refusal. They need to remove their home sale contingency. so they can move forward on this house. And if they don't do it by Tuesday, today is Monday as I'm recording, if they don't do it by Tuesday, then the whole thing falls apart. They can't move. We're going to cancel the contract with you and they can't get this new house. I'm like, hey, that's okay. I was told it was a great buyer in North Dakota all the way up the chain. Well, then I find out later from the... So there's five agents involved, right? Five agents involved, four houses that need to get sold. I'm smack dab in the middle, literally number three of five. And I find out because when the last agent at the end of this cycle called the agent in North Dakota, which good for her and said, hey, tell me what's going on with the house. She told her it's contingent. The buyer is contingent on selling their home. Why did I not know that? So guess what happened to me on Mother's Day when I was recording that or when when all of this found out. So Mother's Day is yesterday as I'm recording this. Guess what happened? I got stuck in the middle. with stuff I didn't even know, right? And so as much as I tried to push my phone away and leave it away in total transparency, tried to still ignore a lot of what was happening, because I had stuff planned for my wife. I had to deal with that, right? And Monday is today. I'm still dealing with that. And so as Tracy said, way too much of my head space is going to this problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place for lots of reasons that I don't have time to go into, right? But we've all been in a situation. where there's way too many people involved. There's way too many parties involved. And we feel like we're the only level headed people in the middle trying to get this thing done. But then we, we, in the day we hit our hit the put our head down on the pillow at the end of the day. And we think all I did today was deal with that one problem. So how do we deal with a difficult day? Not only from a tactical work perspective, how do we deal with a difficult day from a faith perspective? So let's dive into. both of those and I'm going to share some thoughts with you. First, how do we deal with it from a tactical perspective? Now, number one, I am all about excellent customer service and there are absolutely times where we just got to put everything aside and we got to engage with our clients. That is absolutely true. However, we need to sit down when we know that's coming in, when you've got an offer you're negotiating, when something difficult is coming through and about to cause a significant challenge in your day. What I want you to do is first stop, you recognize, okay, this is about to take my entire day away. I want you to pause. I want you to stop, find something to write on and just write out what are the most important things that I must get done today, right? Whatever that might look like. Maybe that's your lead generation. Maybe that is planning for the week. Maybe that is reaching out to some of your clients or your pipeline. For me that today, that was coaching. Maybe that was, I've got a board meeting later. There are things that can't be moved that must still get done today. You need to write those out. And then if you know, put them in a time block, right? So I knew coaching 1045 to 1215. I know the board meeting is 330 to six. Okay. So now they're time blocked. Those must happen and they will happen in that amount of time. And then in an ideal world, you put your problem inside a time block. Okay, now hear me out on this. Here's what that could mean. Let's say you find out in the morning or I knew coming into this day that I was gonna have to deal with this problem. I always meet my agent Jesse from 8 .30 to 9 .30 and then I had 10 .45 to 12 .15 coaching. So here's what I did from 9 .30 to 10 in a time block, deal with the problem, right? I'm gonna gather information. I'm gonna update all the parties. I'm gonna talk to my clients. I'm gonna do everything that I can do within that timeframe, right? I'm gonna really seek to solve. the problem. Well, that didn't work, right? We didn't solve the problem. We weren't able to get all the information that we needed. Excuse me. So what happened? Of course, the text, the calls, everything kept coming in. But here's what I honestly did. I ignored them. Why? I was coaching. I had something I needed to get done and I needed to be present there. So I ignored it. Then after that, from 1230 to one, another time block deal with the problem. Right. And so I reached out to all the agents involved. I checked in with everybody. I said, this is what's going on again. I updated my clients and tried to figure out what was happening for everybody to play this literal middleman for everyone in this situation so that I still had time to do this, sit down and record a podcast. And then I have time to go to the board meeting. Now it doesn't mean, hear me on this. It doesn't mean there's not going to be some text that I need to respond to in the middle of the board meeting because it actually is urgent. What I mean is you've got to control the controllables. As Tyler says that all the time, one of the things that made him successful to be a professional baseball player, control the controllables. So what can you control in a given day? You can't control. I certainly couldn't control. Tracy couldn't control that the other agent was going to go crazy. I can't control the fact that the information wasn't shared with me and now this whole chain exists and I'm smack dab in the middle. I can't control that. What can I control? I can control where my attention goes. So I'm not going to allow it to take my attention for the whole day. Right? Too often we find ourselves, I've got a problem, I better sit here with my phone. And as soon as something comes in, I need to react to it. I'll respond to it. I'll deal with it. Right. Again, I'm not saying there's not a time where you need to be really responsive very quickly, but I am saying most of the time, not everything needs an immediate response. It's okay for you to still go achieve what you need to achieve that day. and still do this response, still work through these challenges. I think that's absolutely normal. We cannot let someone else's goal keep us from achieving our own goal. So, so -and -so might say, I really got to get this figured out today. Maybe they just want to figure it out, which I get that. I respect that. I want to help them. I don't want to be stuck, the piece that's stuck in the machine, but I've got other things that I've got to do. Now I had to let go of some of these other items that I wanted to do today, right? Like schedule my client coffees or send out an email to this Christian business owner group that I'm starting. I had to let those things go because they didn't have to get done today. And I did need to create space to focus in on. trying to solve this problem, right? That's where we get paid. But my point is this, when you know a problem is coming in, do not allow all of your attention to go to the problem or the people causing the problem. Maybe you cause the problem. Don't allow your attention to go only to that problem for the entire day. Put it in a box, try to solve it. If you don't set up another box later in the day, try to solve it. Right? I'm not saying it's perfect like that. I'm not saying it's the easiest thing in the world. I am saying you put it in a box, you create and choose where your attention goes. The question you need to ask is what is the intention of your attention? What is the intention of your attention? Right? So if the intention is I'm trying to solve this problem and I'm going to give it my attention for the next 30 minutes. Awesome. If your intention is. my gosh, it's just all over the place. I don't know what to do. And it's super frustrating. I just need to figure this out. All right. You don't have a very good intention, right? That's the point. Put it in a box, try to solve the problem, get back to what you need to get back to work on. Put it in a box again later, work on something else, then put it in a box if you need to try to solve that problem, right? Do not allow your day to be stolen from you because of someone else's problem. That happens all the time in this industry, right? At the end of the day, I also want to say, show yourself grace. This is a hard industry, client centric, agent centric, lots of moving parts, lots of people. This is difficult. So you're going to lose some days and that's okay. And there's grace for that. There's the Lord's kindness in that, right? But get back and try to schedule your day around recognizing I can still solve the problem. yeah. And do these things too, to get them done. All right. That's the practical. Now, from a spiritual perspective, how do we deal with defeat, the discouragement that comes with a difficult day? Here's my answer to you. I don't know. Podcast over. No, that's a hard question. Right. How do we deal with the discouragement and challenge of a difficult day? Here's what I want to say to you. And don't hear me say this as if I'm someone who does this really well. This is very difficult for me to write very difficult for me to. But I want to remind us who it is that we serve. We serve a God who not only provides for our family, who not only knows the future, who not only has written the future out for us, but we serve a God who not only did those things, but He sent His own Son to die on the cross for our sins and rise again from the dead to not only write the future, but secure our future for us. So first and foremost, when you're dealing with a difficult day, you remind yourself, what is the truth of the gospel that I have a God who loves me so much that he would send his own son to secure an eternal relationship with me? That's great news. That is the best news. And everything else that is difficult should pale in comparison to that. So first I would say, remind yourself of what is true. the overarching truth of the Lord's love and kindness towards you that He showed us in Christ. That's number one. Remember that. Number two, also remembering, we saw all throughout the Old Testament when the Israelites would whine and complain or they would say, I'm tired of this manna. I'm tired of this food that is falling from heaven. You know, why did you bring us out to the desert so that we would be killed? You're like, first of all, bro, do you remember that? The Lord literally opened the Red Sea for you and dude, the bread is literally falling from heaven. And you're like, yeah, but what have you done for me lately? Right? I remember reading that and looking at like, how in the world can they be that way? But that's exactly who we are. We have to constantly remind ourselves. I know this is tough, but remember Garrett, what the Lord has done to prove his faithfulness to me, whether it's through provision in my business, whether it's through my family. Whether it's through, you know, I look at my kids so often and just say, Lord, what a kindness that I am undeserving of. But in your mercy, you said, Garrett, here are these incredible kiddos you can shepherd. What a gift that that is to me. Lord, remind me of your faithfulness. So remember the Lord's faithfulness in your life. Because it's difficult today doesn't mean He's abandoned you. In fact, it means... Hebrews tells us that he disciplines, a father disciplines his son whom he loves. It means that the Lord is making us more like Christ. He is sanctifying us in this process. But two things, remember the truth of the gospel, right? That in the Lord's kindness, He sent His own Son to save you, to secure an eternal relationship in heaven with you. That is amazing. That is the greatest news ever. And number two, remember the faithfulness that the Lord has shown you all throughout your life. And then finally, reach out to a friend. That's my final piece of advice. Reach out to a godly friend who you can just be honest with. One of the best things that happens honestly in group coaching is it's a group of Christians having a conversation. It's a place where you feel like we can be honest and vulnerable and say, one of the guys today said, you know, I've just been struggling and wrestling with whether I should just quit. and I'm not supposed to be in this industry, right? He was being very honest and real. And I said to him, brother, I thought that two weeks ago. I've been wondering that myself. I love the faithful agent. I love the team. I love this industry. I love Christian agents. But yet I got to the point where I was like, man, maybe I should just quit. I kind of want to do this anymore. This is hard. This is really, really difficult. But those seasons make us stop and really ask the Lord, what is it that you desire of me, Lord? and then get re -motivated to move in the direction he's calling us to move. What's one of the best ways to do that? Talk to a godly friend. Reach out to them and say, man, for me, a lot of times it's Tyler, right? Of course I talk to my wife or I'll talk to some other friends, but you guys know Tyler. So I'll reach out to Tyler and be like, bro, I'm just having a hard day, right? I'm struggling with this or this has been difficult. Or I just question, you know, what am I doing in this industry? Why am I here? Right? These things are difficult. Nothing seems to be working, right? Just being real with y 'all. And I just ask those, questions and it's a time for a brother in Christ or for depending on who you are maybe you call your sister in Christ and just say and I just need encouragement and for them to be able to speak truth to you right to say look you're not always going to have a win this side of heaven that's not the point but you have the ultimate victory in Christ and he has promised that he will provide for you so you no longer have to hold on to the anxiety that you're going to be provided for because he said he was going to do it now therefore. As Jesus tells us, release that burden for His yoke is easy, His burden is light. And we can say, okay, Lord, whatever it is that you're doing with this, not in an apathetic way, but whatever you're doing with this, Lord, I trust you. Give me the peace and the confidence to walk through this, right? Reach out to a friend. Remember the truth of the gospel. Remember the faithfulness the Lord has shown you in your life. And talk to a godly friend to be encouraged and hear truth. again, because we are people that look like we've never heard truth before, because we forget, we don't live by it. We want to be people who live in truth and remind our souls, soul, trust in the Lord. Even though today is difficult, trust in the Lord. Even though this life is difficult, trust in the Lord. Even though this deal might fall through and I feel like if I don't have this deal, there's no way I'm going to pay my mortgage this month. Trust in the Lord. He is good. He will. provide and we need to be reminded of that brother and sister. I hope that's somewhat helpful and an encouragement to you. I know you're tired just like I am of hearing me talk for that long. Tyler probably skipped this entire episode. That was a terrible ending. I love you, faithful agents genuinely. Reach out to me, reach out to other faithful agents. If you're dealing with a difficult day, it is a difficult season. It is hard. do we get through it? We must be reminded of the truth of the gospel, the truth that God's Word provides to us. We need those reminders. He is faithful. He has always been faithful, and He always will be faithful. That's our hope in the difficulty of the day. I love you, faithful agents, and I will see you next week.