We had a guest speaker in front of our entire staff this week. Good session, a lot of tidbits, but one idea stuck with me long after he sat down.
He said purpose without investment is just a speech. You can sit through the training, take the notes, nod at all the right moments, and then drive home and do nothing with any of it.
We are creatures of comfort. That stack of notes from a great class ends up in a drawer, and nothing changes.
That line stuck with me because it describes the single biggest difference I have seen between agents who last in this business and agents who do not.
It is not talent. It is not their lead source. It is whether they are coachable.
Coachable is not a phase
And here is the part most people get wrong about that word. They think coachable is a phase, something you are when you are brand new and do not know anything yet. They think you graduate out of it once you have some deals under your belt.
I do not see it that way at all. Being coachable is not a beginner setting. It is the whole career. Absorbing as much as I possibly can is how I have operated from my first year to right now, and it is the reason I am still here.
Let me tell you how it started for me
When I got my license, I had no transactions. What I did have was time and a little bit of knowledge nobody else in my office had.
I taught myself how to build Facebook ads for my open houses. I learned social inside and out. My office was full of experienced agents who could run circles around me on a contract, but a lot of them were not tech-focused, so I made myself useful.
I helped them with the thing I knew, and in return I got connections, open house opportunities and the chance to cover for agents when they were on vacation.
But here is what actually mattered, and it is easy to miss. The social skills got me in the door. Being coachable is what kept me in the room.
Because while I was helping them with ads, I was learning everything they knew. When someone sat me down to teach me something, I shut up and listened. And when I didn’t understand something, I was not too proud to ask. I used every resource I could get my hands on until I actually knew the tools and the systems.
Somewhere in there, the thing flipped. I went from being the new agent asking everyone for help to being the agent other people came to for help. That reputation was not handed to me. I built it by being teachable first.
You are responsible for you
That is the part you control. Our guest speaker had another line I liked. He was walking through his son’s school for orientation, and he saw a sign posted around a mirror. It said, “Look in the mirror to see who is responsible for your grades.”
Your growth works the same way. It is not your manager’s job. It is not your brokerage’s job. Those people can hand you every opportunity in the world, but they cannot make you pick it up.
Growth is a choice. When you decide something actually matters, you find a way to do it. When you decide it does not, you find an excuse.
So what does being coachable actually look like, day to day? It’s not just letting someone teach you. It is going and finding the learning yourself.
For me, that has never stopped. Early on, it was hours of YouTube teaching myself new tools, one video after another, until something clicked. It was reading every real estate article I could find.
Two years ago, it was me sitting down and learning AI, figuring out how to actually use it before half the industry was talking about it. Today AI is woven into my day as a genuine time-saver, but only because I put in the hours to learn it when it was new and a little intimidating.
Next year it will be something else, and I will go learn that, too.
That is the whole habit. Nobody assigned me those YouTube videos. Nobody made me read those articles or wrestle with AI on a slow afternoon. I went and got it, because being coachable is not something that only happens when a teacher is in the room. It is something you do on your own time, over and over, for your entire career.
The agents who make it are not the ones who showed up already knowing everything. They are the ones who never decided they were done learning.
Stay new. It is the whole secret.
