THE ROOM

My clients own my Sundays.
My family does not.

Somebody asked you when you last had a whole Sunday off.

You had to think about it.

No Sundays Off Since Spring

Not a Sunday off in months.

There was a stretch in early spring, before the market picked up, when you had two Sundays in a row for yourself. You remember them. Your daughter was home, and you cooked a family meal.

Since then it's been open houses. Or a showing somebody could only do on a Sunday. Or a call about an offer that came in Saturday night. Or two hours catching up on email, since Monday was going to be brutal.

Some Sundays were only forty minutes of work. Those count too. Forty minutes in the middle of the afternoon takes the whole day with it.

Your family stopped planning things for Sundays. Nobody announced that either. Sunday just stopped being a day anybody scheduled anything.

That's how eighteen months went by without you noticing.

Count the Sundays

Count them. Not to feel bad. To know the number.

How many Sundays since spring were yours from morning to night? Write the number down.

Then count what you got from them. Not the showings. The actual business you have today that came from working a Sunday instead of a Monday.

There's some. There's less than you'd think, and a fair amount of it would have happened on Monday.

Not all of it. Sunday open houses do bring in buyers, and a Sunday showing has saved a deal or two for you. There is real business on Sundays.

The question is whether every Sunday has to go to it.

What the Industry Tells You to Do

The industry's answer is balance. And that's good. Block the day. Put family time on the calendar and protect it. Turn the phone off. Take the rest you need, since you can't serve anybody when you're worn out.

You've tried the calendar block.

It lasted until the first Sunday somebody needed something. The calendar was never your real problem. Your real problem is that nobody in your life, client or otherwise, has ever been told you don't work Sundays.

Nobody Knows Your Hours

Go through your last six clients and ask yourself which of them knows your hours. Not could guess them. Was told them.

None of them. You didn't hide it. The subject never came up, and it never came up because you never had hours to tell anybody about.

So every Sunday request is a brand new question with no set answer. A brand new question at nine on a Sunday morning always gets a yes. There's no rule to say no from.

Your clients aren't taking your Sundays on purpose. They have no idea Sunday matters to you. Sunday works for them, and nobody ever mentioned it being a problem. So they call, text, and email you on Sundays.

Meanwhile, the people at your own table don't know your hours either. They figured it out on their own over a year and a half, and they stopped asking.

You never said anything, and you lost the day anyway.

Two groups of people drew the same conclusions from the same silence. Your clients learned that Sunday works, so they keep asking. Your family learned that Sunday doesn't, so they stopped.

What Your Clients Learn From Your Sundays

There's a second cost, and it isn't at your house.

An agent who'll take any hour can come across as an agent with nothing else going on. Nobody thinks it in those words. It's just the impression people are left with.

The agent who says, "I'm out Sundays, how does Monday at nine work?" isn't being difficult. She's telling the client something useful about how to work with her, before anybody needs it. That's a service, and right now you're not providing it.

Clients also use that information to decide how much to trust her judgment. An agent with clear standards about her time usually comes across as an agent with clear views about other things too, like a price or an offer.

Right now your clients are guessing about your time, and you're paying for every guess.

And since nobody has ever seen a limit, the requests get bigger over time instead of smaller.

Why It Keeps Happening

For you, saying yes feels like how you stay safe.

Somewhere back there you learned that being available is what keeps people. You don't think about it. It shows up as your thumb hitting reply on a Sunday morning to a request that could have waited until Monday.

Naming your hours feels like risking the relationship. In your head it isn't a boundary. It's a rejection you'd be handing to somebody in the middle of a big decision.

So the day never gets named, the year goes by, and the only people living with the boundary you never set are the people who love you.

They set it for you, quietly, by no longer asking. That's the arrangement at your house right now, and nobody ever agreed to it.

It's the same belief behind the client text you answered at 9:34 at night. It's also the one that has you cutting your fee before anyone asked. A number and a day are both easier to give away than to state out loud.

Tell Three People This Week

Pick your day. Sunday or another one, whatever fits your business. Then tell three people.

Tell your two current clients this week, in one sentence, with no apology and no explanation.

"One thing about how I work: I'm off on Sundays, so anything that comes in then I pick up first thing Monday. Saturdays I'm available."

Say it the way you'd give someone your office address. Most clients answer with some version of "of course." They never wanted your Sunday. They just wanted an answer eventually.

The rare client who reacts badly is telling you something worth knowing in week one instead of month five.

Then tell one person at your own table, out loud, that this Sunday is theirs. That's the harder one. They've had eighteen months of evidence, and they'll believe it when they see it. So the only thing to do is take the Sunday.

One sentence to two clients and one to somebody at home. That's the cost. The day you get back doesn't need a dollar figure on it.

The Name for This Pattern

This pattern has a name. It's the third of the Six Mind Shifts™, Values, and the shift is from compromise to clarity.

Clarity means deciding what's yours while nothing is on the line, so there's nothing to negotiate when somebody asks. You don't have to defend a day you decided on ahead of time. It's simply a fact about you, and people work around it, the way they work around everyone else's.

I wrote about it in The Unforgettable Agent. Sunday is where most agents notice this first. It's the day the people at home are quietly keeping track of.

Every agent loses deals

Most never put a number to it.

Takes about 2 to 3 minutes to find yours.

The Mindset Tax Calculator →

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.