THE ROOM

I have the list.
I still don't call.

It's Tuesday, a little after nine, and the list is open.

You blocked the time. Nine to eleven, no showings, no email.

Forty Names

A few expired listings. Some past clients you haven't talked to since their closing. A handful of portal leads who were warm a month ago. The couple from the open house who said to call them in the fall.

The coffee is next to the keyboard. Your mobile phone is next to the coffee.

At 9:40 you still haven't dialed.

What You Did Instead

You put on a playlist to get your energy up. You watched a short video from a coach you like, and it helped for about four minutes. You sorted the list by last contact date, then by neighborhood, then back again. You told yourself you'd start at the top of the hour, then at the quarter hour. Then you answered an email that could have waited until noon.

You know exactly what this is. You've named it to yourself before. You just don't know why it's still here after all these years, when you're good on the phone once you're on it.

And you are. Once someone picks up, the conversation goes fine. You know the market, you're easy to talk to, and more than one of those calls turned into a listing or a buyer who closed.

The call was never the hard part. The forty minutes before it are. Those forty minutes have been there since your first year, through every program that promised to fix them.

What the Industry Tells You to Do

The industry calls this call reluctance, and treats it as a discipline problem. And that's good. Set a dial target and don't get up until you hit it. Get an accountability partner who texts you at nine. Use a dialer so the next number rings before you can think. Put on the music, do the pushups, get yourself in the right frame of mind.

It gets a lot of agents to forty dials on a good day.

What it doesn't tell you is where the reluctance comes from. You've probably noticed that you have to rebuild the fix every morning, from scratch.

What a No Means to You

The phone isn't the problem. The problem is what a no does to you, and you decided long ago what a no says about you.

Listen to the question running underneath that hour. Not the one you said out loud. The one you feel as the number rings.

Do they want to hear from me?

That question comes with an answer already built in, and the answer is probably not. Once you believe that, the call has to feel like an intrusion. So you apologize before you've said why you called. "Hi, I know you're busy, this'll only take a second."

The person on the other end hears an intrusion and responds the way anyone does. The no comes exactly where you expected it. It confirms what you already believed about yourself. Every no does.

That's why a list of forty names feels like forty chances to be rejected. And that's why you spend forty minutes getting ready to call the first one.

A Different Question to Ask

Now picture a different agent with the same list. She isn't asking whether they want to hear from her. She's asking whether they need what she's about to tell them.

"I'm calling because your listing expired last week, and I have a read on what happened and what I'd do differently in the next thirty days."

She doesn't have a cleverer opening line. She starts from a different place. One agent is asking permission to take up space in someone's day. The other has already decided the call has a reason, and the reason is about the person being called.

A no to that call doesn't say anything about her. It just tells her something useful. Wrong week, wrong person, on to the next name.

Why It Keeps Happening

The belief underneath that hour isn't your own judgment. You learned it a long time ago. Somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that asking for someone's attention is an imposition, and that if they say no, it's because of something about you.

You have real expertise, and you know your market. That old belief still shows up every Tuesday at nine.

It's the same belief that has you lowering the fee before anyone asks. It's the same one that has you answering a client text at 9:34 at night. In all three, you let the other person's reaction decide what you do.

The playlist and the pushups were never preparation. They were a way to cover the belief for one morning. You were trying to feel confident enough to make calls you didn't believe you had a right to make. People on the other end can hear forced energy.

You can get yourself motivated, and it'll carry you through forty dials. Tomorrow you have to do it all over again.

Five Names and One Sentence Each

Before you dial, take the first five names on the list and write one sentence next to each. Not a script. The reason this call is for them.

Her listing expired, and I have a specific read on the pricing. They closed in the spring, their daughter was nervous about the new school, and I want to know how it went. He asked me to call in the fall, and it's the fall.

If you can't write the sentence, skip the name. It isn't a call yet.

Then dial the five in order, reason first. When someone says no, write down what actually happened. Not what you felt. What happened. Most of the time, nothing happened, and seeing that on paper five times is worth more than any playlist.

A no, written down, looks like this. She said she's staying put for now and thanked me for calling. He signed with someone last month. Voicemail.

Nobody hung up on you. Nobody said the thing you were afraid they'd say. That's the old belief checked against the facts, five times, in your own handwriting. That kind of checking is what works on a belief this old.

It takes ten minutes. And it works on the thing that was actually wrong, which was never the phone.

The Name for This Pattern

This pattern has a name. It's the second of the Six Mind Shifts™, Beliefs, and the shift is from doubt to conviction.

That doesn't mean feeling good about yourself in general. It means being sure about the specific thing you're calling to say. Then you trace the doubt back to where it came from and check it against what's true. For most agents, the doubt is old and the expertise is real.

I wrote about it in The Unforgettable Agent. When the belief changes, nothing dramatic happens. You pick up the phone at 9:05, since 9:05 is when you make calls. No music, no warm-up. You have a reason for the call, and you dial.

Every agent loses deals

Most never put a number to it.

Takes about 2 to 3 minutes to find yours.

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Larry Heathcote is an identity coach for real estate agents, creator of the Six Mind Shifts™ and the Six Decision Drivers™, and author of The Unforgettable Agent. He works on the one thing in every room an agent can actually control: who you are when you sit across from a client.