KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to Fuel Your Motivation by Learning from Setbacks

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Summary:This episode is a powerful exploration of mindset, focusing on how real estate agents can turn failures into fuel for future success. The discussion challenges the conventional view of setbacks, reframing them as essential learning opportunities rather than reasons to quit. It provides a motivational guide on maintaining a positive attitude, building resilience, and extracting valuable lessons from every "no" or failed deal. The episode empowers listeners to embrace the challenges of the industry and use them as a springboard for growth and motivation.

Failure is a stepping stone to success. I mean Wheatley from KGCI, Real Estate on Air, and the difference between successful agents who are able to build the business that they want is simply learning from mistakes. And that's true in any business. And that's why we are bringing you this episode from Stuart Hissloff's Simple Truth with Stewart. Stewart is based over in South Africa and trains real estate professionals all around the world. And I want you to be thinking about these three things when you listen to this powerful exploration of mindset that is all about how real estate agents can turn failures into fuel for success.

Number one, reframe setbacks and failures as learning opportunities, not as the reason to give up. Number two, resilience, it's a muscle. It gets stronger the more you choose to bounce back from adversity. And number three, every no you receive is a step closer to a yes and a chance to refine that approach just a little bit more each time. We'll let Stewart explain the rest. And if you're real estate agent looking to grow your business, make sure that you like, subscribe, comment, and leave a review because this is all we do right here on KGCI Real Estate on air, and we're doing it for you. Hey there, welcome back to the simple truth with Stewart. Feeling discouraged by a recent setback, we've all been there. But what if failure wasn't the end of road, but a stepping stone to

something greater? Today, we're exploring the power of learning from setbacks and using them to fuel your motivation. This episode is your personal growth guide packed with practical strategies to turn your failures into stepping stones for success. Get ready to learn how to bounce back stronger and achieve your goals with renewed passion. Let's fail forward together. Right, so today I want to talk about something that so many people when they experience it, they just throw in the tell and they give up. And it all boils around this one word, which is failure. So too often, we actually misunderstand what failure should be doing for us. Now, I want to give you a little bit of a story. And this happened to me, it was a couple of years ago, where I decided I was going to

go out and bake a cake. Yep, me in the kitchen and throwing the ingredients together to bake a cake. I will admit it is one of those packets cakes that you can actually bake. It didn't take all the ingredients and measure it out. It was all pre-measured. However, you have to add the liquid ingredients, the egg, the water, the oil, etc. And I thought I was doing fantastic job. So I went out and I made a cake. It was a vanilla cake and very proud of it, even though it did flop.

But, you know, it's still proud of it. shared it with my family and their faces was like, taste great, but it's heavy. It's really heavy. And what I mean by heavy is when you look at the cake instead of it being about that high, it was like that high. And I thought, all right, so I did it again. I made a few of these particular cakes. And for me, I always felt like it was a success. But when I looked at the face on my family, suddenly it was like, all right, I am not a baker. And I actually went to the point of throwing in the towel and saying, that's it.

I'm never going to make a cake ever again in my life. But I sat there and I said, no, wait a minute. I can do this. So I started to do this little internal reflection of how can I improve? I started watching videos. I started learning. And then suddenly I saw this video that basically said, take the egg whites, beat them until they light and fluffy, almost like you're going to make a meringue,

and then just fold it gently into the ingredients. So I actually followed those instructions. Lo and behold, the cake, flavor, exactly the same, but it was light and it was fluffy. And my family loved it. Now, the reason why I wanted to share that story with you was, you see, sometimes failure isn't something. thing that stares at you in the face. Sometimes failure could be something that you're doing and you think you're doing it well, but you're not getting the outcome that you actually desire. And then you also have the other side of it where you actually fear doing it again because

the failure has been brought up and it's been almost addressed to you directly. And really, what I want to show you today is how you can learn from that. And using the example, where I actually just did the research, had that growth mindset, to be able to make a Latin fluffy cake. And that is really the journey that I'm going to take you through. So one of the first things that I really want you to start to internalize is when a failure is in front of you and you can clearly see it. I want you to, and we call this an NLP, I want you to reframe the failure. words, we don't call it a failure. What we actually call it is a stepping stone. I want you to look at anything that you've had in your life and I want you to look at as a stepping stone. And the reason

for that is when you have that word failure, oh, I'm such a failure, oh, I failed at this, oh, I felt it is a negative. And that negative really starts to grow inside of you. I can't do this. I can never do this. Fear starts to come over you and when you go out to do something because of that internal fear, you're not seeing it as something that you can do. It starts to knock you down. And then ultimately, you refuse to go out and do it. So anything that you've experienced, I want you to reframe that word failure to a stepping stone. Because a stepping stone is something that is in front of you. You see, ultimately, we're going to be talking about failing forward, and we're going to use these stepping stones to go forward.

We don't want you to fail backwards. And once you've got the reframing, hey, I've got a stepping stone in front of me, you're going to start to have this growth mindset. Well, how do I move from where I am now to that stepping stone without falling off? And that's that growth mindset that's going to start to come into you. And once you start looking at that, it's going to start changing your perspective. And by changing your perspective, you're going to be looking at this path going ahead as a journey of excitement, as a journey of exploration, which I think is an absolutely amazing journey.

And it's a journey that everybody wants to go on. We don't want to be sitting exactly where we are all the time. So the very first one is to reframe that word, failure, change it to something positive. I always use that word stepping stone because that is something that's going to move you forward. Then the second step that you need to look at is it's a self-discovery. It's that reflection of, hey, I need to go forward. What didn't work? Now, when I reflect back on baking the cake, the one step that I didn't know about was to make that egg white light and flake.

fluffy and I learned that I went back, I implement and the outcome was totally different. So do a self-reflection when you've experienced something where you need to go forward with the stepping stone, start reflecting back and saying what were the actions, what were the activities that I did that resulted in that particular outcome? And once you can see the clarity of what you've done, you can actually. she start to identify it and say, hey, oh my gosh, this is what I can do. Now, there are times where you can't identify it. Hey, I'm doing, what is going wrong? I'm doing a status presentation, but I'm not getting the mandates. What am I doing wrong? And what you can do is you can employ

somebody to give you feedback. Get someone to join you, get somebody to go through this process and at the end say, hey, what am I doing wrong? This typically work. for somebody like a mentor or a coach or family friends, somebody that knows you and they can go through that particular journey and go, hey, wait a minute, did you know that you're doing this? And ultimately, it makes it makes you more aware to say, hey, all right, let me relook at that. Let me see how I can change that so that I can make a positive experience continually going into the future. So the second step is basically it's that reflection, identifying,

where you take in the wrong steps. Now, the third one is something that, oh, great, I found it. I could have, when I identified, hey, I need to beat those eggs until they become light and fluffy, which takes an extra three to five minutes in the mixer, and by hand, by the way, it took nearly 15 to 20 minutes with a really sore arm. I could have said, that's just too much work and kind of just left it out. Now, if I'd left that out, it meant that the cake that I bake, well, it's going to be really, really heavy.

And it gives a new meaning to a pound cake because it means it's going to really weigh something heavy when you eat it. It means that once you've identified, you need to put it into action. And ultimately, taking something and put it. Putting it into action is one of the hard things because it means that you need to step outside of your comfort zone. Because you might be having to do something that you've never done before. And that is another stepping stone, by the way, because that is fear. It's the fear of unknown. Well, make a stepping stone call the unknown and explore it.

because once you explore it, you're going to say, hey, when I did this, I did this action, this action and this action and gave me this particular outcome. Can you do it? Absolutely, you can do it. So now you've got these actions. One thing is that can start to become overwhelming. Hey, I need to do this. I need to do this. I need to do this. And you start seeing all these different activities. That creates another thing. fear in you. So what do we do? Well, as a coach, what we typically do is we create a plan. A plan of what's the most important action or priority that we need to do now. Well, that's the first one. So let's do that one first, then the second, then the third. So we do them in a sequence. And that's going to help us to slowly get there. Instant gratification to resolve something that didn't work is a misconception. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't. take time for you to go through. So, got to create that plan, get that action. And ultimately, a plan, well, a plan without direction is just a dream. So what do we need? We need a goal.

We need to have an outcome. So if I reflect back on baking the cake, I wanted a light and fluffy cake that my family devoured in one sitting. That was my outcome. That was my goal. what did I do? I started to break it down and one of the action steps was to beat the egg until it was light and fluffy, fold it in gently and then go through that particular process. So that outcome, it needs to be clear. That goal of where you're going to head towards. You see, in real estate, we look at the outcome of, I need to get a mandate. Well, let's take it a bit further. That mandate will lead to that listing. That listing will lead to appointments with buyers. Those appointments with buyers will lead to a closed deal or an offer. That closed deal will lead to a payout of commission.

That commission payout that will actually allow me to take my family on holiday or pay for the renovations or sort out debt or credit cards or anything like that. Can you see how this journey it's not just getting a mandate. In fact, the goal is is right at the end. When I've got that clarity of what that goal is, I case you bring it all the way back to where I'm standing right now. Then it gives meaning, hey, I really need to take the stepping stone. I need to learn how to do it so that I can move forward.

There's nothing better than seeing a family, eating a cake, and saying, can I have another piece? Because that, for me, was amazing. So make sure that you have clarity in the goal. And we use that simple acronym, the smart acronym. Make sure that it's specific. It's measurable. It's attainable.

It's realistic and relevant to what you do. And you have a time bound of when you want to do it by. So having that together gives you that outcome of, hey, that's where I'm going. These are the actions that I'm going to take. And make sure that in this journey there's going to be things that's going to be outside of your comfort zone. So if it's way outside of your comfort zone, you need to take some form of calculated risk. Is it something attainable? That's why we have the smart goals, because if it's not attainable, it's going to be outside of that calculated risk, which means you could actually have more of a negative outcome than you wanted.

So that's why that smart goal is so, so important. So the third one is really it's taking the lessons, creating the lessons, creating those actions, having the vision of that particular goal, and that's going to allow you to then start to move forward. Now, the fourth one is once you've got all of this, and it is so nice to have that feeling where you've done the reflection back, you've identified, hey, this is where I make the error, I can actually go ahead and I can start to build this action plan to move forward. But then what happens is it's that motivation to keep you going. because day one is easy, day two is easy, day three becomes a bit of a struggle, day four, well, I'm going to skip day four, day five, well I totally forgot about it. Day six, somebody reminds me about it. Day seven, I'm sitting there going, what do I have to do? So we need to create this motivation. And really, to get this motivation to continue on an ongoing basis is actually quite a straightforward and simple step. And really what we have to do is we have to celebrate the small wins. Now, celebrating small wins is so, so important.

You see, when you do a particular action and an activity, you need to come back and say, hey, that was great. I've actually sat with clients that are wanting to lose weight. And one of the plans that they've desired to do to lose weight is to eat less. And in the process of eating less, I say, well, don't eat nothing. You still have to eat something. But you've also got to add in the exercise and the whole plan together. But one thing that they forget to do is when they've had a good day of eating,

they don't reflect and say that was a good day. That is actually success. That is actually celebrating that success. I had a good day. When they've done a day where they've done activities, for instance, and some running or something at the gym or something like that, celebrate it. Because that is so important. So make sure that you're celebrating the small activities as small wins as you're going through.

You can also look for inspiration. There are so many people around that have actually done what you have done. They've actually succeeded in achieving everything. So you need to start to identify these individuals and use them as inspiration. If you've seen somebody that has achieved a huge success, and that's what one of your goals is, you can actually then reflect on that individual and go, hey, wait a minute, if they've done it, I can do it. What do they do?

You can use them as that inspiration. And this inspiration really could be things by listening to podcasts, listening to podcasts, listening or watching any of their training or motivational videos, reading books and articles and things like that. Or it can even be someone in your office, friends and family, at the same time. Use them to inspire you because inspiration gives you long-term energy. Motivation gives you a short burst to start moving forward. And start building the resilience that you can start going forward and forward and forward. And that's with positive self-talk. Hey, I'm doing a great day. Today, I am going to win. Having all of that and making sure that that goal is always clear. Write it down,

put it on a wall, put it on the mirror in the bathroom, put it on the fridge. Every time you open it, you can actually see what that outcome is. And the last step in this is something that maintains because we don't only have one setback in our life. We have multiple setbacks. This is the journey that we go on. The journey of life is to overcome setbacks so that we can fail forward, so we can move forward in our life. And in order to do that, we need to embrace this continual learning. Whenever we see these setbacks coming in our way, we are refaes. We are reframing that failure to be a stepping stone. This is giving us that opportunity for us to start moving forward.

And when you start embracing that, you become a lifelong learner. You start doing things that maybe you never used to do. I never used to be a very big reader or a person listening to podcasts or getting any form of inspiration from anybody that I saw as a mentor until I'm. I embraced, hey, I can learn from them. And I learn every single day something new. And that's why I shared with you baking a cake. I'm a coach and a trainer.

What I know about baking a cake? And one of the things that I must share this with you, I remember going into a bakery and saying, hey, I created a cake that's light and fluffy. And we had the person behind the counter just look at me saying, what would you like to order? So look for the inspiration. Embrace these challenges that start coming towards you.

Because when you start embracing these challenges, the world becomes exciting. And that's what you want. And understand, as I've said, you're going to experience lots of setbacks. You're going to experience lots of negative things that happen in your path. There's life. It almost feels like life is trying to hold you back when you start embracing what I've shared with you today. It's almost like the chains get released. And when you start taking those steps going forward, what you find is life becomes simpler. And you start to breathe. You start to wake up in the morning and have that excitement. In fact, you're going to start waking up.

up earlier so that you can experience more of the day. And these are the little signs that is really going to help you is when you wake up with that inspiration with a smile on your face and you see everyone in a positive light. It really helps you to start going forward. So really today was just a summary to overlook this negativity word called failure. And refraud, it and reframe it into a word called stepping stones and allows you to fail forward. So first one is reframing any of those negative words. Reframing them into a positive word. The second is reflection on what you've done when you've experienced one of these setbacks

to identify where is it that you can improve on. The third is put it into action to learn how to overcome it and put that into a goal where you're actually got this focus. The fourth one is just maintaining that motivation to keep it going because I tell you now, when you maintain that motivation, it's going to turn into a habit. And then when I bake a cake now, I'll whisk that egg until it is light and fluffy as natural.

I don't even think about any shortcuts. I go straight and do that. that as a natural action in going forward. And the fifth one is building this momentum to know and understand that when you've built this and it's a muscle, you'll be able to face any challenge that comes in your path going forward. And it is so, so important. You know, I spend a lot of time talking about this because people live in this negative space. And you've got to say, Hey, how do I get out of it? Well, today is what I've just shared with you.

A couple of strategies to help you to get out of that negative space. If you've lived in it for so many years or weeks, days, maybe even hours or minutes, get yourself out of it. You'll start seeing something new. You're going to actually have this excitement in the days. And guess what? You could also bake cakes that are light and fluffy that everybody wants to flock towards you. So remember, it's not about failure. It's about failing forward and looking for that stepping stone into your future.

Remember, every setback is an opportunity to learn and grow. Implement these strategies and watch your failures become fuel for your future success. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories and tips to help you embrace failing forward on The Simple Truth with Stuart.