RMG Agent Podcast

Episode 69 - Turning Your Identity Shift Into Real Results

• Reed Moore • Season 3 • Episode 69

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Are you feeling stuck despite your best efforts to grow? The uncomfortable truth is that breakthrough happens outside your comfort zone. In this eye-opening episode, we explore how three critical factors—your habits, relationships, and education—are either propelling you forward or holding you back on your journey to success. 💥

Growth is uncomfortable precisely because it pushes us to operate in unfamiliar territory. If you're experiencing stress, consider it a gift—an early warning system signaling the need for personal evolution. The path to transformation begins with awareness and identity shift, but sustainable change only happens through strategic action in these three domains. 🎯

Your habits create your results. As Reed and Jake discuss, success isn't tied to motivation (which inevitably wanes) but to consistent habits that reinforce your new identity. We share personal stories of habit transformation and why targeting just one crucial habit can create a cascade of positive changes. 🌟

Your relationships determine your ceiling. If you're the smartest, most successful person in your circle, you've outgrown your environment. Growth-oriented relationships should stretch you, creating what we call an "updraft" that elevates your thinking and expectations. We explore the balance of surrounding yourself with mentors, peers, and those you can guide. 🤝

Your education opens doors to your future. Lifelong learners consistently seek knowledge before they need it, preparing themselves for opportunities they haven't yet encountered. We discuss why investing in yourself—through formal education, mentorship, books, or specialized training—creates a massive competitive advantage. 📚

Listen as we break down the focus-options-model-systems-accountability framework that turns knowledge into action. Whether you're a real estate professional or anyone committed to personal growth, this episode provides the blueprint for breaking through barriers and becoming the person you were created to be. 🎙️

Here’s a new habit you can implement and see results NOW: head over to areapro.com/rmg today and watch your identity as a professional flourish! 

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Speaker 1:

Growth is usually in an area that is uncomfortable for us, right? If it was comfortable, we might already be operating there. One or more of these three things are also the things that are holding you back your current habits versus your future habits, or your success habits. Your current relationships versus who you should be surrounding yourself with, and what you currently know versus what you need to know to be able to move forward. Real estate professionals, you're back here with Jake and I on the RMG Agent Podcast. We are so excited to have you here. We're here to impact, empower and encourage you in all things real estate and, this season, personal growth. As always. Go to rmgagentpodcastcom. You can find all kinds of our action guides and goodie bags and different things, webinars that we've posted there just to be able to help you out. And if you're looking for an amazing tool to help you level up your professionalism, areaprocom forward. Slash rmg for an incredible discount on what we think is an awesome product that all professional agents should use. So, jake, what?

Speaker 2:

are we talking about this season? We are talking about personal growth, but I'm going to do a plug. We did a episode on Areapro. Oh yeah, it's been a little bit. So go back and watch that and check out the demo on uh youtube on our youtube channel and it will show you how to use it. Yes, and it's great, and we use it pretty much every day in our office. So, uh, all right, stopping with the plugging of the awesome tool. Uh, we are doing uh, the part three of warning breakthroughs may cause discomfort. Go back and watch part one and two. Yes, before you watch this one, it'll make a whole lot more sense. And today we're talking about strategic action turning identity shift into real results.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so when we're talking about this idea of personal growth, right, the reason we're talking about breakthrough may cause discomfort is is growth? Is is usually in an area that is uncomfortable for us, right? If it was comfortable, we might already be operating there, and for some of us, we've actually grown into something and over the years, we've let it degrade, right. And then it's still really uncomfortable, right? So it's the, it's the person who is the professional athlete, and then, you know, 10, 15, 20 years later, they're super overweight and all of that, and they look back and they think back about what they were, what they used to be able to do, and there's so much shame that comes along with that that it just creates this massive barrier, right. The other barrier, of course, is just the fact that I can maybe see these glimpses of who I could become, and there's there's just like feeling of, oh my gosh, that's a lot of work or it's overwhelming even thinking about it. So we want to break down this idea of growth into a model that's simple, actionable and and logical, and so that's that's what we're doing. So we started out with this idea of awareness and self awareness. We want to be able to baseline where we are and be able to be in reality around it and be aware how other people experience us, be aware of you know, the, the different negative mindsets and things that we're bringing to the table, so that way we can pinpoint them and actually see an area for for growth.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times, the lack of awareness around this and the the prodding for growth can show up like stress. So one of the things that I've learned over the years is stress actually can be a really good friend. Stress can be a killer, but one of the great gifts of stress is that stress happens to be an early warning sign that you need to grow. When you come up to the end of yourself, you come up to this area of you know I comfortably operate here. And now to go to this other level, there's this level of discomfort. That's where stress sets in.

Speaker 1:

And when stress starts setting in, it's really life saying, hey, you need to grow, you need to grow, and if I listen to that voice, now I need to grow by looking at this and saying, ok, so, so I need to become aware. What is it that I'm experiencing? Right, and then the next thing that I want to do once I go through this, this kind of understanding of self-awareness. I need to do what we talked about in our last episode, which is have an identity shift, and we talked about, you know, things that are maybe behaviors of ours or a part of kind of how we currently identify. They become, like solidified and concrete and then, if we allow that to happen, these, these things that are impacting our future, really become hard to break up. So we talked about shifting from this idea of this is my identity to this is a current behavior that I have, changing our story, changing our language around it, and then that brings us to this, this top level of our model, nice.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So we're going to talk about habits, but I think I'm going to give you a sports analogy that um, or a person that has done this kind of all of this throughout the process Do you know the Tom Brady story very well? Uh, for it. So in college he was a highly recruited college football player, but Michigan recruited a guy that was like the number one quarterback in the country coming out of high school. So Tom gets benched throughout the season and they do this weird shift and ultimately what it leads to is Tom's identity is slightly shaken. He gets drafted super late in the seventh round by the Patriots. He's a backup quarterback again, right. He gets thrust into the starting role and he ends up winning the Super Bowl right. So he is thrust in when Bledsoe gets hurt, wins the Super Bowl.

Speaker 2:

Well, we fast forward 10 years from that. You know he's one of the best quarterbacks in the league, but he has this identity that he wants to play for like 20. I think it was like 22 years or 20 years. And so he goes through this identity change and shift where he starts to have a personal coach who trains him, because just practicing with the team isn't going to get him to the goal that he's looking to get to. He changes his diet I believe he became a vegan and he did all of these different uh exercises that we're going to allow him to play for a really long time. So, as we move into the first point we're going to talk about, which is building new, new habits building new habits and your systems, shaping your success, this is somebody that is the greatest quarterback of pretty much all time, who went through identity crisis in in college and in pros and then ultimately had to change his habits from a super bowl winning quarterback to now the greatest quarterback of all time yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So we're talking about habits as the first of this, this, uh, this layer which is, uh, taking strategic action. So on the last episode, we talk about identity shift. It's like, okay, cool, so maybe you buy this idea that I need to change my story. And here's this first layer of of the way that I talk and the way that I communicate, being um, towards who I intend on becoming, not who I have been. But then we say, okay, so how do we actually make this really practical? And practically, there's three things that I found that lead to breakthrough when it comes to growing, growing yourself, and that's going to be your habits, right, first, and we'll come back around to that, it's going to be your habits, it's going to be your relationships and it's going to be your education. So, if you're looking for a very simple formula to break through so I've identified, like I'm now aware that there's something in my life that's holding me back and I have decided that I'm going to start talking and acting like I have a new identity which aligns with my future, not my past then I need to actually walk that out. And walking that out is more than just saying I'm choosing to do it, although that's a great place to start, and so these are the three things that you have to be able to do to be able to do it. By the way, one or more of these three things are also the things that are holding you back your current habits versus your future habits, or your success habits, your current relationships versus who you should be surrounding yourself with, and what you currently know versus what you need to know to be able to move forward, right? Okay, so if we take a look at this and we take a look at this idea of new habits, success is not about motivation. It's about consistent habits that reinforce our new identity. Right? So I'll read that again Success is not about motivation. It's about consistent habits that reinforce our new identity.

Speaker 1:

If your success is tied to just being, purely like, excited and motivated all the time, motivation and willpower, they wane, they come and they go, and so what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to take a look and say, okay, this version of this person that I want to become or intend on becoming, what does that person do? When do they wake up? How often do they work out? What's their spiritual life look like what are their habits in business? And now I want to start modeling that.

Speaker 1:

Of course, there's been a lot of great books probably the best one is atomic habits, of how to start building habits but there's a period of time when you start into changing the trajectory of your life. That means that new habits are going to be really, really hard because they require an exceptional amount of discipline for a short period of time we'll call it, you know, three months to a year, something like that. The one thing talks about. That's not 21 days, I want to say on average, just like 60 days, and then it can extend out based off of how, um, how ingrained an old habit is yeah, I think it's 60 is 66 days is is the number that I've heard.

Speaker 2:

yeah, and that's for like an easy habit to create right, like it's the the bigger the habit that you need to and that's for like an easy habit to create right, like it's the bigger the habit that you need to create, the longer you need to do it for it to become ingrained.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So for me, I have never in my life up until the beginning of last year had a healthy relationship with food, and it took me 137 days to actually get into a place where now I have a healthy relationship with food, and it wouldn't have happened in 60 days, it didn't happen in 100 days and a little bit over 130 days I started to realize I've actually rewired myself around this and so now I don't have a propensity to overeat and I don't have this propensity to see something that I really like and just think like this is going to be great if I have a bite of this, so I should eat like you know, instead of one bite of cheesecake I should eat like a whole cheesecake, right? So it took a long time to rewire those habits because I have not had a healthy relationship with food right. But who I intend on becoming is somebody who has to have a healthy relationship with food, because if not, it holds back so many other areas of my life yeah, it's interesting you talk about.

Speaker 2:

The food is where you know, as I've seen you go through this transition, I wouldn't say that I have a um, an unhealthy relationship with food, but as I'm going through some of this personal growth stuff, I have came to the realization that I use food as a release to stress. Yeah, and so my weight and my health goes up and down based on the stress level of my life. If I'm not in stress and I lose weight pretty easily, and if I am stressed, I start to overeat or I buy the candy bar on the way home from work or whatever, opposed to choosing not to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that goes back to like that first step is awareness. It's like, oh, this is how I act when X happens, right, so cool. So. So now we're on this, now we're on this growth journey. So if I'm looking at building new habits, if I look at a new habit and I look at it maybe in an unhelpful way, I'm going to look at somebody. I'm going to say, look at that person. They have discipline across every area of their life. They have all of this stuff together, but what you're actually observing is one, two, three or four key habits that that you're observing, and then you're assuming that every, everything else is, is great and's.

Speaker 1:

That's not necessarily a good assumption and the problem with that, I think, is that it makes the, it makes access to personal growth so overwhelming.

Speaker 1:

Right, if you see somebody who has healthy eating habits, uh, they may have fought a battle for years to get there right. Or, for me, when I look at my calendaring habits and how just absolutely rhythmatic that I am now, if you would have met me 10 years ago, you would have found somebody who was completely out of control with their use of time, somebody who you know had this really unhealthy desire to have freedom. That actually created lots of problems which resulted in not having freedom, especially financial freedom. And so if you see me now and you think, oh my gosh, like he's so organized and he's so, nobody says that about me. But you know, like when it comes to your calendar, like that was a decade of absolute knock down, you know, drag out fights with myself to be able to grow, grow in that area yeah, and I think the first time I met you was probably seven years ago and it was when you taught basically a calendaring class.

Speaker 2:

I think you called it like the three day work week, yep, and, and you had gone through this long term journey to get to that point. And I never knew any of that. I just assumed you came out of the womb like perfect a calendaring, yeah, yeah, so yeah, ok, perfect.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so personal growth is really accessible to you, because it's about what is the? What is the, the one habit, um, that will make success inevitable, right? Or what is the one thing that I can do right now by way of a new habit that's going to unlock this series of habits that are just going to stack on each other over the course of time and maybe five years from now, I'm going to be a totally different person. The challenge is is that you know, if you're, if you're not, a very, very old person, like in your 80s or 90s, there's a good chance. You have a lot of life left. And so if you look at this and you say, oh, my gosh, are you telling me that me, becoming this new person and having this level of success is going to cost me five years, and then, instantly, you're short sighted enough to think well, I'm just not going to do that Now. It's going to cost you 20 years or never.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to have a hot take here, that if you choose not to change your habits, that you are going to be a different person in five years than you are today, but in the wrong direction, yeah yeah, Because just because you've gotten to this place doesn't mean you're guaranteed it right.

Speaker 1:

You can slough, and most likely you will slough backwards. And the other thing is is, as the world moves on and as as maybe your competition makes a different choice than you, you might find that you're farther and farther away from not just who you wanted to be, but from even the current results that you're getting. Right.

Speaker 2:

Yep, okay, so we've talked about building new habits. The second topic for this is going to be upgrading your relationships.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so upgrading your relationships. We see this in parenting. We say this in parenting, I would say, with a pretty absolute conviction, and that is be careful who your friends hang out with, right, and you tell your kids, be careful of your friend group, and then of course, they don't listen right, or then you know sometimes they listen, or like we happen to be in this season of life where all of our kids have really fantastic friends and the ease of them building new habits, the ease of their growth, the ease of them doing so many things is just magical. We've also had the opposite experience where even one friend that was that was really challenging, cause our son this is hard to say caused him to actually be come that friend for other people. That was a scary season of life. Right, we are no difference, different as adults.

Speaker 1:

If you are the smartest, most successful, most successful, um, maybe even best parent in your friend group, you have a problem with your friend group. You have a problem with the people that you're spending your time in your relationships with, because they don't have the ability to model for you what the next level looks like. Right, you, you, actually, I, ideally you, you are in a friend group that there's even a level of, maybe, insecurity that it, that it induces in you, or there's a level of, you know, you having to fight this feeling of not feeling good enough to be with that group, because that means that you're in a group that's going to create kind of an updraft for you, kind of an updraft for you right now. The way that you get invited and stay in a group like that is, of course, you don't continue to model the old behaviors like we talked about.

Speaker 1:

You know the old identities. You start modeling the new things, even if you don't feel like it's authentic yet. Right, because people, uh, great people that I've been around, I've been invited into some people's lives that honestly I just felt like I have no business being in this person's life because they are so far beyond me. But I think what they saw in me wasn't even a whole lot of talent or anything like that, but a desire to take what they gave me and take that relationship and do something with it to continue my growth. And maybe even the ones that were really wise, they maybe saw in me this desire to not just take it and use it, but take it and pass it on.

Speaker 2:

I like to think of being kind of in the middle of that friendship group of like I learn best from other people and then I learn the most by taking that and passing it on to the next person. Right, If you want to learn something really well, you teach it to somebody else.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. So if you look at you know, like the concept of 360 degree leadership or any of that you have to have, you know it's, it's healthy to have people that you're helping grow, people that are peers, that are running alongside of you, where you're challenging and encouraging each other and maybe have a lot of context with each other, and then mentors and coaches, right, people that are ahead of you and they're helping you move forward, right?

Speaker 2:

Your relationships really, really matter if you want to sustain growth. Yeah, yeah, we use the model, the question triangle, yeah, and the who you want to become and the who you surround yourself with massive are the most important questions you can ask yourself. So, okay, uh, last is, invest in your education. Learn what your future self already knows.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So if you're Jake Incorporated and I'm Reed Incorporated, right Like I'm the person who's responsible for investing in myself and making myself a more valuable asset whether that's a family or a church or in business then there's really no substitute for learning, for education, and so one of the conversations that we have with our kids is you know, some of them are going to go to college. Some of them might go really really far down, you know an academic pathway, and some of them might choose alternative paths, no-transcript. Regardless of what you do there, we want you to choose to be a lifelong learner, right, and this, this idea of consistently choosing to learn and grow, is a massive competitive advantage, and one of the things I found, too, is areas of breakthrough in my life that I've gotten stuck around and haven't been able to break through.

Speaker 1:

A lot of times. I lack the relationships, a lot of times, that have the knowledge and then subsequently the knowledge to be able to break through. The ability for me to go get knowledge before I need it is a huge, huge advantage, and so if your mindset towards education is unless I can currently see my need for it, I'm going to ignore it then you're going to ignore everything that might apply to what's next. And so, if there are things that apply to who you're not yet you know, you haven't become yet, those are areas of knowledge to be able to seek out, and that's formal education, it's informal education. So, over the years, one of the things I've seen is the amount of money that I spend on an annual basis for education. I could have, you know, a Harvard education, probably 10 times over, because there's just this consistent I'm. I'm my best asset. I need to go, continue to invest in myself, especially if I'm wanting to grow into somebody that I'm not yet.

Speaker 2:

Well, and this is one of those habits that you know you're doing such a great job of building for your kids, of of building that wanting to be learning based and continuing to grow and gathering education and all of those things, and it's something that I've seen you do, that now our kids, my kids, are modeling and getting to see that. But what, what I missed in that is sometimes in the past I may have chose not to focus on my education. Yeah, and it's really hard to tell your kids to do something. But I did see on a podcast and I think I know which podcast is, but I don't.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to say it wrong but the person said that the currency in their household was 21 pages a night, and what they meant by that was that their kids could do what they wanted after they read 21 pages. Yeah, didn't matter the book, they just had to read 21 pages in any book every single day to be able to do the things that they wanted, which you know. That's a. That's a habit that the parent is building in a natural way for them, and even if the kid doesn't like to read to start with, they will learn to like to read as they read more and more and more yeah Well it makes me think of all of the times that our parents either did or didn't but let's just say your parents did force you to do something like stick with the piano or stick with this sport that you didn't like.

Speaker 1:

And how many adults look back and they have these skills and they can look back to the times that they hated it and they wanted to quit and then they were pushed into that and then they did it and now it's the skill that they get to use for the rest of their life. Right, we have a uh, we have a real disadvantage as adults, and that is that there's nobody in our life that has the right to say you will do this, right, yeah, and so now we have to actually embrace that ourselves and we have to go after ourselves. And it's a, it's a big challenge. Right, it's a big problem, because I'm my biggest problem, right. So so if we look at this and we look at this, there's uh, there's habits, there's relationships in their education.

Speaker 1:

If you're looking at your current situation and you're feeling stuck, take a look and say do my habits currently reflect who I intend on becoming or who I have been? If it's not who you're becoming, then focus in on your habits. If you look at your relationships and they are not, you know, projecting into who you're becoming. Focus on relationships. If you look at your education, you find yourself always saying, oh my gosh, like I'm feeling behind, I don't know what to do. I know what to do, then it's education, right? So, uh, and and and. So it can be, and it can be multiples of those. So probably the last thing I would say with this is, from a, from a coaching perspective uh, this isn't you. Being at your best is not something that you go alone and you really are successful, uh, at, or else you wouldn't even be listening to this, because you would already be leveling up and leveling up, and leveling up, because you're coaching yourself at a high level. It doesn't work that way, right? So there's a conversation that's worth having with somebody who's a professional coach, somebody who's a mentor or somebody who's a good friend. That's maybe a little bit ahead of you, and you can literally just give them this and be like walk me through this. If they're skilled, it's going to be more helpful.

Speaker 1:

But there's a pattern and that is that, if I need to break through, the very first place to start is focus and the focusing questions are you know, if you're in a place right now where you're actively doing business and life is busy and there's all kinds of things going on, focus sounds simple or focus sounds unattainable. And unattainable is if we need to focus down to one thing that seems like it's one out of 30 things that are all equal priority. It takes some work to be able to get to focus and it takes a lot of work to be able to choose to say no to other things that are just yelling at you Like no, no, I'm more important, I'm more important. So you have to. You have to be be able to focus. Then you need to be able to look for strategic options.

Speaker 1:

Once you've identified the very first as gary keller would say domino to knock over, then I need to be able to figure out what are my strategic options? What can I do about this? Once I get a strategic option that works for me, now I'm looking for a model right in my mind. Now I'm looking for a model right In my mind. When I'm looking for a model, the first thing I'm looking for is who has done this before, who has modeled this?

Speaker 1:

If I can find somebody who's modeled it, then I'm going to move from there and I'm going to look to systemize it. Have they systemized it or is there a system to be able to do this? This is the reason that you know different things like CrossFit have been so successful is somebody shows up, there's people there that model it like here's how to do it, and then there's a system that I don't have to try to recreate the wheel all the time. Right, once I have all those things now the last thing that growth really doesn't happen without is accountability. Who am I going to have in my life that's going to continually encourage me to be at my best or to rise up or to get to the next level If I do those things, you know? So I go through awareness, I go through challenging and changing my identity, and then I take strategic action. I'm going to have breakthrough and I'm going to grow into the person that I was created to become, all right.

Speaker 2:

So sneak peek. We're going to plug something that is going to be another resource for you, in that you started another podcast with another one of our friends.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I had the opportunity with a friend, chase Williams, to be able to merge our coaching companies and it's called Sherpa Consulting Group. The idea is this you know, we we are people who are going to continue to help you climb higher in life and leadership and help you get up the mountain, and so we're launching that, and we're also launching a leadership podcast to go side by side with our RMG agent podcast to really help people that are on this leadership journey as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so if you're nailing this personal growth uh mission but you but you haven't exactly figured out how to pass it along to those people in your life that's going to be a great resource for you and I'm super excited for that. And you know, Chase has been on this podcast as one of the master series and he's awesome. He's one of the best people I know and I'm super excited for you guys to do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you guys can go to Sherpa Consulting Group dot com to get more information about that, and it's just another thing that we're going to do to be able to help empower leaders as well as continue to come alongside you guys as real estate professionals.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, as always, guys, we're here to impact, empower and encourage you and all things you do, and specifically yourself this year.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, guys, thanks again, take care.