It’s ok to be afraid in business or concerned about what’s going to happen next. Fear and Concern have a way of self-fulfilling the prophecy because we push it in the back of our mind, we go about our day or our job and hope that just by not thinking about it or by chance it’s going to go away and all workout.
In some cases, I guess it does work like that but that’s just pure luck. It’s been my experience that your fears or concerns are either warranted or totally silly and something that you just made up in your own head. This is why one of the final and most important pieces of setting a 2019 business plan is to figure out what scares you and gives you concern. If you can identify those fears before they come true you can figure out what you need to do to stop them.
Here is an example of a silly fear but it’s still a valid fear: A friend of mine knows that he needs to do a video for his business, he’s just scared to death to do it and he doesn’t think he’s good on it. His coach challenged him to do a video on being afraid of doing video and he had over a thousand views, He did a video with me and he got over 3,000 views.
If he wasn’t good at video he wouldn’t have this type of response. That doesn’t take away the fear and I probably don’t have the answer to that, but it does put in perspective that you’re usually better at something than you initially think and that this fear isn’t something that you can’t push through.
An example of a real fear: One of my loan officers told me that they keep hearing about compression and 2019 being a down year and that they are newer to the business and they don’t have a ton of leads so they are concerned that they are going to be able to generate enough business to feed their family. This is a really valid concern but now that it’s identified you can put a plan together to beat it. When you get to the heart of it the fear is income and being able to take care of your family. The 2nd fear is enough leads and enough business to do that. The comment on compression and a down year that is just what they’ve heard.
So we went back through and figured out how much they need to make in order to have a good year. We then figured out how many loans that means the need to close, we then figured out how many leads they need to generate to close that many loans. We looked at what they have currently from referral partners and how many referral partners needed to get added. Then we built out a plan to add that many referral partners. All of a sudden it wasn’t so scary because they felt like it was doable. It went from a person with fear and doubt to a person with energy and a plan.