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My friends, I’ve had an epiphany this week. Something hit me. When you’re running a business or you’re doing business like all of you do, every once in a while, it’s like, boom, and you realize, “I’m not doing this the right way. I should be doing it this way. I should be implementing what I learned over here over here.” That happened to me this week and I wanted to share it with you guys on my ride home. What it is is the need for all of us humans to listen and hear things over and over and over so that we actually grasp it and learn. Super, super important.
Now, I want to tell you how this came about. We’re doing this training course. I’ve mentioned it to you guys with Bob Proctor is like the ultimate guru, Yoda, trainer, with a local gentleman, Brian Dalmaso, who’s taking us through it. Part of the requirements of the course is every day we have to listen to a video or watch a video twice a day. Confession, I usually listen to it, and I listened to it twice.
Last week, we got to our eighth week but our fourth video. I said, “I don’t really like this one that much. It’s all right.” This week, the second week of listening to it, I said, “Wow, that makes total sense. I understand what he’s saying.” Second week, 14, 15, 16 times. It’s like, “Hello? Anything going on up there? It took me 15 times.”
This week, I’m in training. I’m doing a whole training on buyer conversion, we’re talking about scripts, and I’m showing everybody the paper and we’re practicing. I said, “Guys, you know what, I’m going to put this on audio for you so that you can listen to this repeatedly.” Everyone on the call, “Oh, my God, that’d be great.” We had a ton of agents, more senior-level agents that have been around a long time say, “That’s how I learned this.”
I’m sitting there and I’m like, “This is great. We’ve got an online training center, we do live trainings, we sell our trainings nationally.” It takes me, what, 10 years to say, “Hey, record the script on audio so that everyone can listen to it.” Hello? Now, I’m doing it. I’m going to look it over over the weekend, plan the whole thing out. We’re going to have it in our training system by next week.
Then it reminded me of something else that I learned from listening years ago. I was on a listing appointment several years ago. Well, I was doing listing appointments all the time. A friend of mine in Arizona, Mr. Jeff Williams, awesome guy, dear friend to this day. I’m going to tag him so he hears this, if he’s not already watching. Jeff said, “If you want to get really good at listing appointments, go out and buy an Olympus 300 recorder and record yourself when you’re on a listing appointment.”
I did it. I went on a listing appointment in Lancaster, Massachusetts, drove home down route two that afternoon listening to myself and I was like, “Wow, I suck. I can’t believe anyone is signing up with me at all. Absolutely fascinating that anyone is signing up because I sound so awful, I interrupt people.” I didn’t realize how bad I sounded. All of this has hit me this week. We were talking about scripts with our business development team that focuses a lot on recruiting and retention and things like that. A couple of them are struggling with the script. I realized, “Why aren’t we just putting on audio and listening repeatedly?”
My message here– I guess I could say my biggest takeaway for the week is, guys, us humans don’t learn things when we listen once. We have to listen multiple times over and over and over. It’s just the way we are. We’re in an ADD society. I’m driving right now, I’m looking at someone walking across the street, I’m looking at this brick building, I’m looking at the construction going on over here. We’ve got our phones. Our phones have taken all of us to a whole other level of distraction. We’re an ADD society as it is. Us realtors naturally have a higher level of ADD, it’s a requirement to be a good realtor.
We have to listen to things multiple times. Repetition is the mother of skill. We have to listen multiple times. We have to take things in multiple times to really be good at it. One of the things that I’m going to make happen over the next four weeks at our company, and I already committed to everyone this morning on our internal group, but I’m going to say it in front of everyone, we’re going to take a lot of different scripts and things that take a long time to sink in, and we’re going to get them on audio, and we are going to make them easier for people to take in to help them.
That’s just the way it is. Don’t fight nature, don’t fight human nature, don’t fight the way us humans learn. Just embrace it. Repetition is the mother of skill. Doing things over and over and over is what makes you better, is what makes you truly learn something. That’s my biggest takeaway for the week. I’d love to hear what yours was. Hopefully, you guys all had a good week. Share what your big takeaway was, audio recording and how you do learning. Our podcast. Lindsay, our Director of Marketing, said, “Anthony, our podcasts, you’ve done 10, we have thousands of followers, we need to do more.”
That hit me, too. I said, “I could put a lot of this stuff on audio.” I’m just so used to video because it’s in my hand with the phone. We’re going to do more things with audio. That was my takeaway for the week. That’s an action item that I’m going to tackle in the weeks to come. I hope that helps you guys. I hope that’s something that you can implement into your business. I hope you all had a great week. Have a great weekend. Talk to you all soon.