I'm on the WatkinSofa in Grantham, and Chris Watkin gets straight to it.
"Is there an unconscious terrorist in your estate agency? Talk to me."
We start by pulling it apart. Unconscious means you're not aware of it. A terrorist is someone causing problems. Then I put it back to him.
"And guess who the unconscious terrorist normally is?"
"Well, yourself, isn't it?" Chris says.
"You," I say.
It's the part of you that quietly undoes good work while you're looking the other way. And if things in your agency keep slipping back just as they start going well, you could be sabotaging your own estate agency without having a clue you're doing it.
220 times a day
I told Chris about some research I'd written about in Done Beats Perfect, which says about 95% of our decisions are unconscious. Then I asked him how many times a day he reckoned someone thinks about food.
He guessed 10 or 20. In the study, most people said somewhere between 10 and 15. "When they actually followed people and studied them, they found it was more like 220."
So if all that is going on with food and you barely notice, what about everything else? I said to Chris that most of what we do doesn't come from a place of what we really want to do. "We're doing it from the unconscious programming of who we think we are."
Procrastination, self-doubt, imposter syndrome, comparing yourself to someone and deciding they're better. That's where it shows up. People tell me they're scared of getting it wrong. "A lot of people are afraid of success too, because they don't know what it looks like."
Back down to the right temperature
The way I explained it was a thermostat. You've got a comfort zone and you intend to stay in it. When the business starts going too well, the unconscious terrorist steps in. "I'm bringing you back down to the right temperature, mate."
For agency owners it can sound like this: "What do you mean I can now take two days a week out of my business because my team are working so well? I've got to do something to sabotage that team so they need me." Chris said he sees that a lot. Owners finally make themselves redundant in the day to day, then start poking the bear.
I gave him an exercise I use a lot, whether I'm coaching or speaking at an event. "I want you to picture for a minute two newborn babies in hospital, okay?" You know nothing about them. Then I bring in the parents, the clothes they'll go home in, the car, the house, the school. Chris admitted he was judging all the way.
The same thing's happened to every one of us. Where you grew up, what industry you're in, which part of the country you work in. People carry a story about all of it, something I call a legend, because it gets handed down. I'd rather treat it like a scientific experiment. "You form a hypothesis and it's true until you've proved it false."
How, or are you doing it
Chris asked if this was an estate agent thing. I said it's all humans, but I'd seen it plenty in agencies, especially small and medium owner-operator ones. A good sign it's happening is staff churn. Another is how little you trust your people, and how much you feel you need to be in the detail of what they do.
What I saw in a lot of agencies was owners asking "How do you do this?" rather than "Are you doing this?" It's almost like they're trying to clone themselves, instead of letting someone else play to their strengths. Put that next to high staff churn and you're probably getting in the way of the people you hired to do the job.
Watch the full chat
Ten minutes before bed
The fix is getting conscious about it, and that takes a little time each day. Chris asked for a quick win, so I asked if he kept a to-do list. Most of us do, and most of us shift whatever's left onto tomorrow. A friend of mine in America calls that a to-die list, "as in it's going to stay on your list until you die because you're never going to do it."
What I do instead happens just before bed, sometimes sat in bed. "I think about my day and I think about what I've actually done, and I think about why did I do some of those things, and here's the important bit, what am I grateful for from that day?" I write it down. It takes 10 or 15 minutes. (There's more on that last bit in Gratitude is more than an attitude.)
It's enough to catch the moments I felt uncomfortable, or had a reaction that made no sense at the time. That's when I can stop and ask why something someone said hit me the way it did. We try to be logical, but "most of us are actually feeling beings before we're logical beings."
First published September 2022 on Christopher Watkin's Letting Agent Podcast.
