Rest & Recovery in the Real Estate Business?!
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Working in the real estate business can be relentless to say the least. If we’ve got a full pipeline of leads, we’re busy trying to close our transactions. And if we’ve been working hard at lead-gen, but are coming up short, we feel guilty – even panicked – when we think about taking a timeout. Now that Q1 and the Blitz: Launch Your Year productivity sprint are over, you may find yourself in one of these camps. You’ve gone all-out, but now what??
Now… it’s time to rest. “But how do I rest, when… see the above reasons!?” you might wonder. Here’s the thing, by “rest” we don’t mean sitting in a hammock sipping a Mai Tai – though it can certainly include time for that! Rest, in this case, is more “active-recovery” style: the yoga class or moderate walk after a race. Believe it or not, this is critical to boosting your productivity.
The most successful people realize that in order to work more effectively, they’ve got to schedule in time to decompress. In fact, scheduling in periods of rest is a powerful sign you seek to become a better agent, a true real estate professional – rather than just any other agent.
Three powerful reasons to rest:
- Boosts your brainpower. Cognitive scientists have proven that rest is essential to a highly functioning brain. When your body’s at rest, your brain can work to catalog and categorize everything you’ve learned throughout the day. This is when your brain stores short-term memories and processes information. Without rest, your brain is unable to complete these tasks, which may be why you feel forgetful or spacey when you’re overworked and stressed out.
- Fully recharges your body. Rest is also necessary for recharging your energy and physically restoring your body. Chronic stress has a huge impact on the body. The tension it creates in the muscles forces the body to be in a constant state of guardedness, which then leads to headaches as well as pain in the shoulders, neck and back. It also changes the way you breathe, taxes the cardiovascular system and increases the risk for hypertension, heart attack or stroke, and has been shown to negatively impact the digestive, nervous and endocrine systems (among others).
Professional athletes understand that constantly using their muscles causes the muscles to fatigue, not work better. The same is true when we’re in a constant state of strain. The longer your body is under stress, the more it’ll negatively impact your health. Rest allows your body to release the tension you feel and heal any damage incurred. When you rest and let go of stress, you’ll likely sleep better, eat better and exercise more. This is fuel for your body; a way to recharge your internal batteries. Once you’ve rested, you’ll find you not only have more energy, you’ll also become more effective.
- Helps you solve problems quickly and more creatively. Have you ever dealt with a problem that consumed all of your thoughts, but you just couldn’t think of a solution? The best thing to do is to walk away. While you may not actively be thinking of a solution, your brain is still hard at work trying to find an answer. By focusing your attention elsewhere, you allow yourself to reach a solution from another perspective.
Three “right” kinds of rest…
Resting isn’t as simple as it might seem. While it’s tempting to stop doing everything, in reality, it’s more about slowing down than stopping completely.
- Keep one oar in the water. It’s still important to keep up your lead-generating activities – making calls, writing notes and delivering Pop-Bys. The difference is you’ll do fewer and the focus will be on maintaining relationships, rather than on generating a large number of leads.
- Make it an active recovery. This is your time to maintain contact with the leads you generated during your surge of productivity. You’ll still give 100 percent of your energy to your clients, but you’ll work at a slower pace and take more breaks throughout your day.
- Schedule your day. Now, more than ever, is when you’ll want to schedule your day. Plan to take a vacation, long weekend or work one less day a week. Resist the urge to throw out the calendar during your recovery time – doing so will leave you vulnerable to work drama and emergencies that arise.
The rest-run cycle will not only help you win your year, it’ll also help you get more out of each day, even during a “productivity surge.” Building breaks into your day will ensure your mind and body are in an optimal state to succeed.
Buffini & Company
