KGCI: Real Estate on Air - The 3 Pillars of Change to Double Your Real Estate Income

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Summary:In this episode of Uncommon Real Estate, host Chris Craddock addresses why real estate agents struggle to make lasting operational and income changes. Drawing parallels between fitness journeys, leadership coaching, and sports psychology, Craddock breaks down the three essential pillars of change management: continuous daily education, strict personal accountability, and surrounding oneself with a high-performing "tribe". Agents will learn how upgrading their peer group shifts mindsets from surviving to expecting high-volume success, ultimately driving sustainable income growth.

If you're a draft horse with a bunch of donkeys, you may win the race, but who cares, you beat a bunch of donkeys. But if you're running with the thoroughbreds, man, you win that race is really good. Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate, you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd. Be Uncommon.

Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor, Chris Craddock and Jeff Safright. Welcome. This Chris Craddick, your host for the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. And I am super excited to come to today to talk about one of the, one of my favorite topics of all time, change, right? Why is change so important? What brings change around?

why has changed so freaking hard is really the biggest question that we see over and over and over and over again. And what I've found is oftentimes we will see when people say they want to change, but nobody actually does anything about change. That's been one of the biggest issues over and over and over again that we tend to get into. Somebody says, all right, well, I'm tired of being the same. I'm tired of being fat. I'm tired of being poor. I'm tired of not leveling up. I'm just tired. And so how does change actually occur? I actually took a class when I was in getting my doctorate on change management.

And one of the things that you see over and over and over again is that people are often looking to create change in their life. but people make one or two steps, but they won't do anything after that. So let's talk through this. And why are we talking about this, right? This is all about our business. Everybody that is, if you are listening to this right now, you don't want to be as good as you were yesterday. You want to be a better version of yourself today.

So that's the big key. You want to be a better version. So what does that look like? What it looks like is this, you make your first step towards where you're headed and then you say okay here here we go and then what happens is that first step is so easy and you're like oh this is awesome I can go running but then you get the results from that first step and it is not exactly where you want it to be you're like okay hold on I just went running yesterday I went running today I don't have a six-pack yet I oftentimes you don't

even lose weight. Sometimes you'll put on weight because you'll tell yourself it's okay to eat a little bit more than you were eating before. And you're like, oh, man, I need to put on. I just went running for an hour. So now I can do X, Y, Z. I can have this pizza. And you actually check the scale and it gets worse. So what happens in our world when this doesn't change, right? What happens in our world when we get to that place where we are stuck over and over again in our business. So here's what I see. It usually has to do with three things. The first one is education. Education is super important. If you don't grow, if you're not thinking about things, you're not going to get better. And this is where we are right now, right? You're listening to this because you're educating

yourself. And so that is that is the biggest piece right there, right? You, you educate yourself, you get better. But the problem is not just education, because education in and of itself is just a hobby. There's no implementation. And implementation is what's super important. So you get the education, but the problem is we'll implement, but how long will we implement? And so the second piece that's so important is accountability, right? That is a massive, massive, massive piece of what needs to happen. Is somebody checking in on you, right? Like when I was doing my 75 hard, one of the reasons why it was working out well was because I posted every day online how 75 hard was going. And it worked well. So accountability is that huge piece there where somebody's asking you about it. You know that you're

going to have to talk about it and you can't just get away from it. If every day when I when I look at the scale, I know I'm held accountable for what I did yesterday. Every time I have to plug in things into what I ate, I know I'm being held accountable and it keeps me fit. It keeps me eating right. It keeps me in the right place because I know somebody is going to be looking at this. I'm going to tell them what I did because I have a trainer that looks at my app every day. So, so that's super important. Well, so you've got the accountability, the education, accountability. But then this is the third piece that's super, super, super important. It's the tribe component. The tribe component. And that is where we've got to understand that you're a part of something bigger than yourself.

So think about the tribe. I'm a big fan of their Washington football club or whatever we're called now. We change your name every year apparently. And with it, It comes with a couple different things. You talk about it, talk about being a member of this tribe. And everybody always is like, oh, man, back in the Joe Gibbs era, they talk about the lore. Back when they won the three Super Bowl, because of Joe Gid, they also talk about the pain of all of us being in this together. So there's this thing. Literally, you'll be leaving a game.

You'll be walking out somewhere. And if you're wearing a jersey and they're wearing a jersey, you'll high-firm. five each other. So there's this tribe component. The reason why that's so important is it's the identity that you associate yourself with. And so I'll tell you, I'm talking a lot about fitness right now. And we're going to transition into real estate. But with my fitness journey, it was all these other CEOs. And I was able to tell myself, oh, well, I run a big business. I have multiple businesses. I'm so stressed. I'm not like the 25 year old guy that doesn't have a job that is as as demanding as mine. I've got kids. I've got all these different things that are just so,

so, so important and so stressful that this is just where I'm at. But then I joined this group of CEOs and they're all like, yeah, we're stressed too. Yeah, we travel too. Yeah, we've got meetings every day too. And we're still doing it. And so then you can't sell yourself on the BS anymore. You have to get over that. And so that's what the tribe component really, works. So how do real estate agents double their income? They've got to understand how change management works. So if the first thing is education, well, great, you're in the right place right now. You're learning from other people. You're listening to people that are doing probably more than than you're doing or different things than you're doing. There's people that do less business than me

that I listen to because they're very good at certain things. Like the SOI piece, I've got a friend who does less deals than I do, but he crushes it on SOI and sphere of influence. And so I hit him up and I'm like, tell me how to think better on this. Tell me how to think better on this. And so it really helps. I'm listening to podcasts. I'm listening to people that are doing better. But what I just say is like definitely a minimum half an hour a day, every day on a podcast or on a book, audio book or a book that you're reading where you're leveling up, you're getting education. And then the next piece, though, is so we've got the education, then we've got to get the accountability, right?

Who is asking you about how you're doing? And I'll tell you, I had a business coach, first time I ever hired a business coach. It was $1,000 a month. And this was a decade ago. It's a long time. I cannot believe I'm saying it's a decade ago because it feels like yesterday. I want to tell you how that felt that first time I hired a coach. I came from a ministry background.

We were making money, but I was like, oh, my gosh. And if you know my story, I owed money to people at this point because I got into some development stuff where I owed people money and I was trying to get out of that debt. But I also saw the importance of hiring a coach. And every single person I talked to said, you've got to hire a coach. You've got to hire a coach. You've got to do this. So I did. I hired a coach. When I hired that coach, it was it was so interesting because almost immediately, well, first, My wife and I got into a big fight about it, like a big fight because she's just, you're going to spend a thousand dollars a month. We're trying to get out of debt here.

Like, why are you spending this money? This is a bad idea. And it was so interesting because the first thing that I listened to, right, I had my weekly coaching, but then I had a set of videos every single month that I was listening to. And the first one, I still remember we were in our old house. And I was, I had this little alcove in the master bedroom where I was, the computer was, and I was on the computer listening to the video. And the first thing the guy said was, does your business run you? Or do you run your business? Do you, when you go on vacation, are you on vacation? Or do you just work remotely? And my wife was there by me, she's like,

yeah, maybe this folding laundry, like on the master, like, you know, in our bed, she's folding laundry, putting it on the bed. And she overheard what it was saying. And she's a man, maybe this coaching thing isn't so bad after all because that was it. I never went on vacation. I just worked remotely. This was the deal. And the awesome thing was I wasn't paying them for education. I was paying them for insight into my business.

You can learn everything you want to learn on YouTube University, like everything. But to have insight into what you're doing, to have accountability, to have them say, hey, I want you to time block these activities this week and we're going to talk about it next week. And you have to either man up or woman up and say, said a thing, woman up. And have to say, I did it or I didn't do it. I was a person of my word or I wasn't a person of my word. I had integrity or I didn't have integrity. And just always understand. It is an integrity issue. If you say you're going to do something, you don't do it, you're lacking integrity at the time. Understand that. And the reason I equate so much back to the fitness world is because I was like so many people that I've coached for so many years in the fitness world where I just wasn't doing what I needed to do.

I knew I needed to do things, but I wasn't getting there. And it wasn't until I met the right person and I got into the right relationship that everything changed. So, but I had the same struggles where as somebody that got into the business world and I, I, I, did well right from the get-go. Well, I say that, right? I ended up screwing up some development deals, but I did in my agent business, I started off and I started making good money from day one. So that was like super helpful, but I wasn't helping other agents because I'm like, well, just make your calls. That's all you got to do is just make your calls. And it's so funny because I talked to so many of my fitness friends, there's so many of my friends that were fit. One of my buddies, he was just like,

He's, well, stop eating so much bread. Like, why are you eating so many carbs? Just stop doing it. And I'm like, well, it's easy for you to say. And I realized it was the same talk that I was having to the agents on my team and the agents I was coaching. I'm like, well, just do the right thing. Make your calls. Talk to people.

You're going to win. Why aren't you doing that? And that whole accountability piece was there. But the problem was that third part, that try. that identity. That was the issue that I had fitness-wise. And that's the issue that I think a lot of agents have is that they're not part, they don't see themselves as part of the tribe. They don't see their identity as the top producer, the person that is going to crush it in whatever they're doing. And so why when agents change brokerages or change teams will they do so much more? Because they get

into business with people that are doing more. Think about that four-minute mile. What happened? So many people said the four-minute mile could not be broken. They said it was not doable. And then somebody did it and then everybody else did it right afterwards. So the whole key there is they then began to believe. And that's part of, you think about the tribe, the community, culture. There's a TV show that shows what the tribe can do for people really well. It's the show Ted Lassow. And he came in to this dysfunctional band of misfits, right? And there was one good player, but he was a total douchebag. And all the other ones were just okay players. Well, his whole idea was like get them to love each other, get them to play for each other, get them to believe. And

and be a part of a bigger organization. Well, that's one of the whole keys there, is getting people to believe is massive. How do you get them to believe? Well, they start to look around and see other people are doing well. I think about my brother-in-law, he played for Messiah College in soccer,

and he ended up going from a team here in Virginia that was just terrible. They always, they found a way to lose, but he was the best player by far on this team. And then he goes to Messiah where he was probably the worst player on the team. He was not one of the better players by any stretch of the imagination when he started. He became a captain by the end. And the cool thing was what he learned was when he played for his Vienna team,

he said oftentimes in the last two minutes, he was expecting that they were going to find a way to lose. he was expecting to lose. When he played for his college team, like at the very end, he was looking around and everybody was like expecting to win. They were just expecting to find a way to win. And I was like, dang,

that's freaking awesome. That's super, super, super cool. Because they all just believed, the Ted Lassow believed. Well, part of that is just the tribe that you're around. Are they expecting you to do well? Are you expecting you to do well? is everybody saying is this what's going to happen?

I think about one of the leveling ups that we had in Redux. There was a handful of them, but I had just gotten a new coach. And this coach, I'll tell you, like one of the first things that she said to me was, she was like, so how many deals a week does your average team member do? And I was like, a week? What are we talking about here?

And I was doing close to about a deal a week at the time. But it was me. I was the team leader, but nobody else was doing anywhere near that. We were happy if people were doing like 10 to 12 deals a year. And we had a couple people that were doing more than that, but not many. And so I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, Chris, you need to have a goal that the top producers on your team are doing at least a deal a week. And I'm like, oh, my gosh.

And I kind of smiled and nodded. And then my heart started, started beating really fast, thinking, how the hell? heck is that going to happen? So then I was like, all right, well, that is interesting. But then I was like, well, I can do it. And it was so funny because she imparted that belief into me. You can do this. My thought was like, oh, this can happen in a place like Indiana with like where my buddy was that had a $200,000 price point, but not like at the time we were at like a $400,000 price point. And I was like, that that doesn't work here. Right. We're like, not. not at all. And a higher price point area, which wasn't even that higher price point. Now,

I look back on it. But I was like, that just does not happen locally. And then I started to believe, the Ted Lassau believe. And then I started seeing, I saw one team member do it. And then I saw two, three, four. And a bunch of our team members just started doing that. And it was amazing because the people that you're around started to absolutely impact you. So how do you change. There's the two different pieces. There's education, accountability, and in your tribe. The other piece is, if you want to think about it like that, so that's really the key there. And then what are the things you can work on personally to change? I heard somebody say this a long time ago and this has been there. The education, right, make sure every day, half hour a day,

the accountability, who do you have that you have to speak to? You have to be. You have to be. accountable to for your actions and your tribe. Who are you with where you're looking right? You're looking left and people are pulling you faster. My son was in the state track meet last week, weekend. And it's so interesting because if you want to get a PR and absolutely do better than you've ever done in the past, you want to run in the fastest heat. If you're running in a slow heat, even if you're faster than everybody else, you're not going to run a PR, right? If you're a, if you you're a draft horse with a bunch of donkeys. You may win the race, but who cares, you beat a bunch of donkeys.

But if you're running with the thoroughbreds, man, you win that race is really good. And even if you don't win, if you're like up there with them, that's where it's super, super powerful. So, yeah, that is the deal. How do you win? Why do people double their business? It's because they get around different people. They make sure they're educating themselves, themselves, and they get people that are going to hold them accountable to that being that better version of them. So if this has been helpful to you,

please give us that old five-star review. If it hasn't, give us an honest review. I just want to know what's working and what's not. And if you want to hit me up at Crowd Rock on Instagram, terrible cheesy nickname, I'll change it one of these days. I personally reply to everything that is sent to me. So maybe not right away, but I will reply eventually. So yeah, hit me up. But Let me know how I can help. But until next time, go get yourself in that situation that's going to help you kill it. Boom. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Uncommon Real Estate.

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