Or as a cat o’ nine tails! GCI is a metric we hear a lot in real estate. Everybody in an MLS can see how much everybody else is selling. For some of us, that means the pressure is on.

The tendency to measure oneself against one’s competitors is strong, I would imagine, in any competitive person. The ability to do that in an objective way by using statistical analysis is somewhat unusual in business, though less in sales.

But we real estate professionals have this ability at our fingertips! The different ways in which this is useful are numerous, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about the ways it’s not useful.

For a guy like me, having a yardstick to measure myself against my peers is not something I enjoy. My tendency is not towards feeling satisfied, but towards feeling as though I could be/should be doing more.

Maybe I’m unique in this way.

This aspect of measuring myself against others doesn’t feel particularly healthy or wholesome, and it’s not a good index of success. When I’m up, I enjoy thinking of all the agents that have sold less than me. When I’m down, I’m filled, at times, with envy and resentment towards my peers for being ahead of me.

The same phenomenon occurs when we see the highlight reel of people’s lives and we think, “Why isn’t my life so grand?”

The reality is that everyone has to deal with life. But we can get a distorted perspective of it due to only seeing one version of the life that those people want us to see.

The lesson for me is that sales volume isn’t the only way I should measure myself. I’m at a point this year where I’m at half of my annual GCI for last year, only it’s September 11th.

Ouch.

Granted, I have some plausible excuses, but what it really comes down to for me, is that it didn’t happen. I had several opportunities with buyers, who are real buyers, but they didn’t buy. Likewise with sellers. I’ve had several listing opportunities but the people didn’t end up listing. To be fair, I’ve also lost two or three to competitors. The market has become more competitive and more saturated, both in the sense of new agents as well as larger agents and teams gaining more market share.

Part of the trouble is that there aren’t many homes for sale here. We’re in a low-inventory/high-demand part of the country right now. I wasn’t able to put several of those people where they wanted to be, at least not yet.

Additionally, I could say that I worked the backend of building a real estate team with my business partner, and the focus on that this spring took precedence over production. I also had my fourth child in April. But more than anything, the first thing is the reason.

Unlike some, I work almost exclusively by personal referrals and direct clients that I know personally. Other than that, I have people that find me online and contact me. I do some intermittent advertising, but not really enough to talk about.¹ Because of that, I get what I get to a large degree, and being 33 in an otherwise older community, sometimes that’s not million-dollar listings. Sometimes it’s piece of shit tear-downs where the guy needs someone to help him navigate the short sale process.

Now, in light of those things, it’s more reasonable that I’m at where I’m at. Furthermore, I have existing deals and will likely bring more to the closing table other than those between now and the end of the year.

Irrespective, it brings me back to the idea that I’m measuring my self-worth against other people’s sales volume. That’s the problem for me.

This is mostly a spiritual problem. I’m putting all my eggs in this basket (work) and consequently, I’m deeply disturbed in this situation because what does this mean about me?

So, if my identity is all wrapped up in my work, and I don’t feel like I’m making progress in other areas of my life, I’m going to be all fucked up when I’m not producing at work—even when it’s outside of my control. I have to diversify. Work is still work, and I still need to do it and do it well. But when I’m balanced in other areas of my life, I’m better able to endure difficulty when one area isn’t going how I think it should.

So, I blew the dust off of a novel that I wrote and began taking it through the fourth round of edits a couple days ago. I began making time to spend with my friends over coffee for a couple of days a week before work. I’m talking about the way I feel and the emotions I’m experiencing around this with my wife and my close friends. I just began a big reading project that I’m excited about. I’m considering how I can be of greater service in my life to the different people and organizations that I touch, especially my family at home.

I’m counterbalancing the other roles in my life. Ironically, I’ve been putting the majority of my focus on work this entire year. Between that and exercise and my family, little attention above what’s expected or required has gone into the other areas. A bigger conversation is my tendency to “work” more in terms of showing up, but not working effectively and efficiently while I am at “work”. So I could benefit from some practical remediation as well as spiritual, and that’s going to become a focus as I begin my business planning for next year.

1. I’ll be doing more now. ↩︎