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Matthew Ferrara, the philosopher, writer and real estate speaker, believes there are three main components to achieving consistent meaningful growth: Having vision, strength and influence.
During a recent Inman Connect session, Ferrara compared those three components to the wings of an airplane, all of which perform essential duties to get a jet into the air.
“To get something big to take off you need to have a vision, you need to have strength and you need to have influence,” Ferrara said during the session.
Identify your destination
A plane can’t take off without a flight path, and a person can’t achieve their goals without a clear vision, according to Ferrara.
Ferrara advises his clients to keep a journal, and to start their entries with the prompt “I am becoming the kind of person who …”
“By thinking about the kind of person you want to be a few weeks, months or years from now, you’re actually setting your vision, you’re setting the destination for where you want to go,” he said. “Not only does this create some clarity of what you’re trying to achieve, but this also activates the law of attraction. It will attract to you opportunities.”
Focus on your strengths
When people are asked to think about their strengths, Ferrara finds they often can’t help but spend time thinking about their weaknesses as well. He advises they avoid this, and instead try to focus solely on their strengths.
“Suspend any thoughts of weaknesses, just focus on your strengths,” he said. “In most cases, great growth will come by focusing your strengths on your destination.”
“In reality, you might be best served by simply outsourcing your weaknesses to someone who does them really well as a strength,” he added.
For real estate professionals, finding your strengths should be easy: You succeed at finding opportunities in all kinds of markets, Ferrara said.
“One of the greatest strengths we have as real estate professionals is looking at the marketplace and finding opportunities,” Ferrara said. “Where others are finding problems, challenges, and difficulty we can look at the same set of data or circumstances and we can turn all those prohibitions into permissions.”
That ability — to find a fresh perspective on any set of circumstances — is an essential skill for any real estate professional to get ahead, Ferrara said.
The power of influence
As a real estate pro, your sphere of influence can sometimes be your most valuable asset, especially when it comes to drumming up new business through word of mouth.
While you may be able to see opportunity in any market, your clients likely cannot, Ferrara said. What they’re more likely to be faced with is confusing data, mixed signals and, often, pessimism.
With this backdrop, it’s important to remember that your role is to aid someone in taking a calculated risk, Ferrara said. You can influence them in a way that helps them make their decision in a number of ways, including through your presence on social media.
“You don’t have to give things out on social media, you don’t have to give things away in order to influence people,” Ferrara said. “Just showing up and being a positive presence may be enough for them.”
