Start With A Win - Get By Or Make Your Dreams Come True - Interview With Richard Robbins

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

On this episode of the Start with a Win podcast, Adam talks with Richard Robbins, the acclaimed business coach who has been helping RE/MAX agents and brokers and professionals from many other industries for more than 20 years. Richard describes being coachable as “crazy curious”, meaning that the person knows that they don’t know it all and they consistently ask questions and desire to learn.Many people are held back from future personal or professional success because of their fear of uncertainty or change. The coachable person, on the other hand, recognizes the benefit of knowing their blind spots and working to improve despite any fear they may feel.The real estate agents that Richard has worked with over the years tend to have one main issue: complacency. They have figured out a good system for “getting by” every day and they don’t see any need to change their ways to make their dreams come true, potentially because they haven’t allowed themselves to dream. Many agents and brokers get too focused on the money and they fill their days up with busy work that is not truly productive just to earn the paycheck. Their main motivators, in fact, should be much deeper: their “why”, their purpose, their desires, and the greater cause within them.Richard finds that when working with people who are complacent, they have renewed vigor when he adjusts their plan to get them to the goal they had been neglecting. Research has shown that 95% of the over 60,000 thoughts you think every day are habitual, so what you think becomes what you feel, which becomes how you act, which leads to your results. Richard is a believer in programming your mental state at the beginning of every day with a focus on gratitude and continuous improvement, which will overflow into all other areas of your life. Links:“Trillion Dollar Coach” book: https://www.amazon.com/Trillion-Dollar-Coach-Leadership-Playbook/dp/0062839268 Richard Robbins International: https://www.richardrobbins.com/ Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ 

Producer Mark, how you doing, buddy? I am awesome. Adam, how are you doing? I'm good. Hey, are you coachable? I am coachable. You are coachable? Yeah. Right on. I think that's a key to success is being coachable.

I love it. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. Atop of the 12th floor of the REMAX World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With A Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And top of the 12-4 REMAX World Headquarters here in beautiful Denver, Colorado. Adam Cantos, CEO of REMAX with Start With A Win. Looking out of the weather window here at gorgeous downtown Denver with producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? Oh, so good. So good.

I'm going to get a cam. I'm going, buddy? Oh, so good. So good. I'm going to get a cam. I'm going to get another cam that we can show the outside. I like it. Yeah. It's our weather window and our traffic window. That's right. I get all these phone calls, people going, hey, how's the traffic today?

I'm like, well, right here, it's kind of... Take feeder roads. Exactly, yeah. There's a saying, you check the Google. That's right. Well, hey, who do we got in the studio today? I'm excited. We have a very special guest, a longtime friend of the industry, but somebody who's so progressive, continues to educate himself and other people in the industry. We have Richard Robbins from Canada. How are you, buddy? I'm very, very good and very happy to be here. And by the way, you should see the glasses under the producer here.

I love it. Hey, are you on camera at all? Yeah, I am. Oh, good. This guy right here. They get to see it. I just want to make sure because they're very special there. I mean, he brings so much personality to the show.

He does show He does He does I can tell I can tell He'd be a fun guy To go out with right here Oh totally I think I just gotta

Follow him around It's gonna be a good time Yeah and he can sing too Right buddy I dabble I dabble in the voice arts I love it I love it

So Hey By the way Richard My producer here Producer Mark Says he's coachable Oh okay

What do you think about that? Give me about 15 minutes with him. I'll find out. Oh, there you go. There you go. So, Richard, you have been one of the predominant coaches in our industry for decades, helping business leaders, agents, and brokers, as well as people in other industries as well, excel beyond what they thought their capabilities were through

coaching. So welcome to the show. It's awesome to have an amazing coach here, somebody who I've learned quite a bit from in my tenure at Remax in the industry. So I'm honored to have you on here. Listen, it's my pleasure. I'm very thankful to be here. I told you earlier, I said that Remax has done a lot for me. So I'm very, very, very thankful. It was 21 years ago we started this business and I was in about a year and I had the Good Fortune Doodle breakout session at the annual convention. And that was sort of the beginning. And after that, Remax has been a very good friend of mine. And so I owe a lot to Remax. Well, thank you. And we owe a lot to you. You've helped a lot

of our agents and brokers, like I said before, exceed their potential or find their potential, if you will, through your coaching. So I want to dig into this coaching philosophy, if that's cool with you. Sure. I just read a book recently. I talked about it at the Remax Broker on our conference. It's called The Trillion Dollar Coach. It's about a coach named Bill Campbell, and you're very, very familiar with this, I'm sure. He was a Silicon Valley coach to some of the top technology leaders out there. He's since passed, but he was interviewing a gentleman for an executive position at Google one day. And of all the questions you could ask somebody, you could go into their pedigree, you could go into their experience, their education, things like that. But ultimately you asked them one

question and that's, are you coachable? Now, Richard, you have to make that decision as to, is somebody coachable a lot? So what does that mean to you? Are you coachable? Well, when I see coachable people, well, here's an example. I remember Wayne Gretzky, we all know, very, very good hockey player, probably the greatest hockey player ever played the game. And there was an interview done about Wayne Gretzky, and they said one of the reasons he became so great, yes, he was talented, but there's many talented people that don't make the NHL.

Why would that be? And they said because they're not coachable. And they said Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan, by the way, in this particular interview, said we're two of the most coachable people in sports. Now here, they got to the very, they got to the very pinnacle. And somebody that's coachable to me is somebody that is crazy curious. Oh, I like that. They know they don't know at all.

You can say in the world we live in, there's what I know, there's what I don't know, right? And there's what I don't know I don't know. And the power of crazy curious people want to know what it is they don't know they don't know. They know that there's a huge blind spot in their life. They don't even know what it is. And those people are the people that I find that are very, very coachable. They tend to ask a lot of questions.

They tend to be learners, of course. But then there's some people that aren't coachable that are learners because they want to do it on their own. So to me, it's just people that are crazy curious. So do you think a lot of people ignore that blind spot in their life? Sure. I think it scares some people, right? Maybe they don't want to know, hey, things are okay. I might have to work a little bit harder. Not so sure I want to work a little bit harder. Well, I might have to do something I really don't want to do. You know, it's easy just to, you know, as we all know, it's the easiest thing in the world is to keep doing what it is that you're doing. Think about this. Adam, if you want to go somewhere in the world that you're not right now, you want to create a bigger, better future. Well, that's a conflict with the status

quo. Okay. So in other words, you're going somewhere you've never been before. Yes. Well, when we tend to go on're going somewhere you've never been before. Yes. Well, when we tend to go on adventure to somewhere we've never been before, there's an emotion that comes with that and it's fear because you're, you're, you're going into uncharted territory. You're, you're going to have to do some things that you don't want to do, uh, or you've never done before. You think, well, I don't know how to do that. Well, yeah, maybe you don't know how to do that, but how are you gonna learn how to do it? You do it. So I think for a lot of people that I think maybe they don't want to see the blind spot because of fear. Here's a great

example. I have an executive doctor, right? It's called Executive Health Center. And I pay her a certain amount of money every year. And I see her every quarter. And she checks me over with blood work, 22 vials of blood. And she can tell anything that's not running well in my body. The healthcare system should really be called the sick care system because they only see you when you're sick. Right. Well, why not work with people and keep them healthy so that they don't have to go into the hospital? I got a friend that has, he can afford this service.

And I said to him, I said, you need, her name's Dr. Elaine Chin. I said, you need to go see Dr. Elaine Chin. And you know what he said to me? I'm afraid of what you'll find. There's a warning sign. That's uncoachable because she's my health coach. Yes. So he's uncoachable.

I'm afraid of what she might find. And he's not that old. He's probably 45 years old, very successful in the construction industry. Well, that's an uncoachable person. That's interesting. So we have to basically confront that fear and be willing to do it anyway.

If you look at it, you say, if we want to produce bigger results in the world, there's going to be fear involved for all of us, for you, Adam, for me. That's the deal. That's the price to be paid to go somewhere we've never been before. But the beauty is fear is just an unknown future.

Nothing's happened, right? Nothing. He could be perfectly healthy. Right. And I'm sure he probably is. I look at him, and he sure looks healthy to me. Right. You know, mid-40s, you know, works out all the time.

You know, I'm going, you know, that's what I said to him. I said, first of all, there's probably going to be nothing. He goes, yeah, but what if there was? I said, wouldn't you rather know now than a year from now? Right. You know, the earlier you find something, the more you can fix it. Same with your business. Interesting. Well, let's dig into that then. You've been coaching, let's specifically carve off the real estate industry here. You've been working with agents and brokers for decades. I

mean, 21 years, in fact, that you just talked about. They all have common challenges, I would say, in growing their business that create these fears that stop them from growing their business because they just, they won't push through that. What do you think is the most common challenge facing a real estate agent today? Complacency. So in other words, think about this. You'll never find a million dollar idea unless you have a million dollar goal, right? A lot of people, you know what they do? They wake up in the morning and I say this fully respectfully, don't take this the wrong way,

but they figure out how to earn a living because they're making their mortgage payments, they're making their car payments, right? So they figured that out, right? Because that's what is necessary for them. Well, if all of a sudden you decided you wanted to double your business, if you make it a necessity, you'll figure that one out too.

But what happens is we quite often get to a point that we're going, you know, have a pretty good months. Okay. Then I have two bad months, right? Or, you know, I have a really good spring and then I cruise through July and August and can't get it going back in September. They've made enough to get by, but have they made enough to make their dreams come true? Getting by versus making your dreams come true. So is that really that big of a spread when it comes to your effort? Or is it something that is, I mean, because everybody goes, I can't do that, or they never really confront the fact as to whether they can or

can't do something. And I think can't is just an excuse for won't. Ultimately, we're not talking about this massive pivot in effort, are we? No, quite honestly. Hey, you've seen real estate sales professionals, and I've been in the industry since I was 24 years old. It's the only thing I've ever done. It's the only thing I'm qualified to do, to be honest. But so 24 years old, I've been in the real estate industry.

And if you really think about it, there's many agents that you and I both know that are probably putting in 60, 70 hours a week. And maybe, maybe they're grinding at a hundred, $125,000 a year in gross income. Right. And then you and I both know many that, you know, they might, they might have a larger business and yes, they've got expenses, but let's say in of 125, maybe you're netting 80, right? And all of a sudden, you know, you get the one that's making 500 and they're netting 300 or 250, which is more than 80, and they're working 40 hours a week with weekends off. Well, so it's not about the amount of hours we put in.

And the challenge I find today for all of us, me included, is this whole concept of being busy. Like everybody's busy. You're talking, how are you doing? Oh, I'm busy. Somebody else, how are you doing? Oh, I'm busy. Everybody's busy, right? I'm going like, no, no, I don't care if you're busy. Are you productive? Is what you're doing today going to move you closer to your dreams and goals? Right. There's the deal. So it's safe to say that nobody that talks to Richard Robin should use the word busy. No, busy is not really good. Not in my office either.

We sort of joke about the word busy because busyness is a problem for us all. Actually, I think, just my opinion, I think busyness is a form of laziness. I agree. I think busy is an excuse. Yeah, we can wake up and be busy all day long. Yeah, because, I mean, all you're doing is you're kind of preloading your excuses there of, hey, how's it going?

Oh, I'm super busy. Yeah. So the next thing that I ask you, you're going to go, I didn't have time to get to, right? Right. That's exactly. And it's funny because as people grow in business, what I find is they need to spend more time doing fewer things. Right. So as a brand new agent, you know, there's 75 things they've got to do.

But then as your business grows, what happens is you spend longer periods of time every day doing fewer things. You might only have three or four priorities a day that you're going to spend your whole day on. And that's something as a company, that's what we coach them all. And then the minute you spend, say, more time on fewer things, you squeeze out all of those busy activities you can't be doing because you don't have time for them anymore. And that's at the end of the day, we all got the same 24 hours. We've heard this a million times. So it's just what we do with our days, right? Yeah. So talking to a real estate agent, coaching a real estate agent who comes in and says, Richard, I'm busy. I can't make it over 15 deals a year. Let's make it easy. A deal a month, 12 deals a year. Having trouble getting

that done. How can I do more business? That's the first thing you point to is let's take a look at your schedule. Well, no, the first thing I do, our company would do is we help companies build businesses that fully support the life they want to live. Okay, I like that. So the first thing we want to know is what do you want, right? So you want to build a team. Do you want to work five days a week? How many weeks off a year do you want to take?

So our whole goal is to say, let's see what it is you want to build first. So your why. Yeah, it's your why. Because think about this. We don't work for money. We work for lifestyle. We work for freedom. Correct. Like real estate agents get into the real estate business, I think, for two freedoms, money freedom and time freedom. Bingo.

And they get in, they say, okay, I'm going to get in, I'm going to make lots of money, I'm going to have all kinds of time off. And then the reverse happens. And Walter Snyder said to me one day, he said that real estate, you don't try real estate. Real estate tries you. So true. So what happens is they want those two freedoms, and then quite often they don't end up with either. And I'm a believer that you should have both of those freedoms.

And by the way, what buys us freedom is money. Correct. So we have to decide what do you want the money for? Because the money is just a vehicle to give you a lifestyle. Okay. Money will either buy you time or more leverage into your business. More leverage into your business. So the first thing we always do is say, okay, what are we creating here?

And how can we create this vision for you that is so compelling for you that it becomes a must? Because see, the person doing 12 deals a year, that is a must for them because those 12 deals a year are sustaining their lifestyle. Correct. So that is a must, right? Right. Because otherwise they're not making the car payments, mortgage payments, all those sort of things. So how do we turn it around that we can create something that you look at that and go, oh man, you know, that's, that's what I want. And then we say, okay, now that we know what the lifestyle is and we back it out, right, and say, okay, re-engineer the whole process. What do we need to do?

And of course, the other thing too, is you really have, you have to help people build a business that are in their wheelhouse, right? There's, there's so many ways to generate leads. Well, you have to find that person's personality, introvert, extrovert, and help them build a business sort of that fits their personality or chances are they'll never be successful anyway. It's interesting. You, you took, I asked a mechanical question here. How do I do more deals? And you took and said, that's not the, that's not the question here. The question is, what am I trying to achieve through my why, my purpose in this business?

And then you kind of unpacked a greater cause here. And then, I mean, really, you made it more simple than just me going, how can I have one more? You moved it from the mind to the heart, this desire to become more as a human being. We talk about some of the great speakers and coaches like Jim Rohns, Zig Ziglar, things like that. When you look at what those guys unpack, they unpack your heart and your true desire. That's the question of, do you have it

in there as opposed to, are you going to say I'm busy or I have enough time? It's interesting that you take it from that perspective. You've taken a real estate agent, you've unpacked their why, and we continue to revisit the why on a regular basis, which I think is one of the key problems as people look at their business plan, maybe once a year, maybe if they have a business plan, but ultimately a coach looks at the playbook every time you're coaching. Every time. And you continue to revisit, how do I score the points? How do I run the plays? How do I create this consistency? A word that you really deeply dive into in order to achieve these goals.

We talk about that biggest challenge of real estate agents, complacency. How do they end up there? Obviously, complacency is the cause of mediocr they end up there? I mean, obviously complacency is the cause of mediocrity, killer of dreams, starts you moving backwards. How do people end up in complacency, you think? Well, they've got just enough and they forgot what they're building. So think about this, Adam. Yesterday, I got on a plane and I left Toronto and I flew to Denver. The pilot, he had a flight plan and his flight plan was to leave Toronto and land in Denver. So he takes off.

Now, when that pilot takes off, and the goal is Denver, no different than a goal is in real estate to X number of deals, help X number of families, whatever, the way you position it. Now, we get up there yesterday, and there was a lot of turbulence, for whatever reason he called it. There was up air, whatever that means. But he said there was a lot of up air, and there was a lot of turbulence. So he had to keep changing the altitude of the plane to try to find a smoother ride.

Now, when he took off, he didn't know what his challenges were going to be. He just had a goal in mind. That is to land the plane in Denver. Now, what he could have done was he could have said, well, you know, we just got to follow our flight path. We can't change the path. We can't change the plan. We're just going to stay with the path.

However, we got to tell the passengers, we're not going to end up in Denver, unfortunately. We're probably going to end up in, I don't know, Phoenix. Or we're going to end up in Los Angeles, California. Because that's where the weather's taking us. Right. But that's not what the pilot does, right? What's the pilot do? He says, okay, we got to keep readjusting.

Hey, we're getting a wind from this side, a wind from that side. And they keep adjusting the degrees so that the path can never stay the same. Well, it's the same in business. So once I know what it is you really want, like with clarity, so you can see it, then every day when you get up, I would hope that you'd revisit where it is you want to go, what you're building, what your dream life is, and then make sure that everything you're doing that day, it's constantly moving you in that direction. Because if you just start, you create a plan and you just keep doing the same thing, it's not producing the results, well, guess what?

You're not landing in Denver. Right. I don't know where you're going to land. Okay. So that's why with a coaching process with calls every two weeks, every two weeks we're back on, let's revisit the plan. Okay. Are we on track? Are we off track? Oh, we're a little off track. Maybe we're a deal behind. We're two deals behind where we should be. Then what we've got to do is say, okay, well,

you know, we got, we got some turbulence going. We got to adjust this plan a little bit. And so what we'll try to help people do is readjust their plan, which believe it or not, invigorates them because sometimes people get bored, right? Same old, same old, same old. It's not working. I'm not going to hit my goal anyway. We go, no, you're going to hit your goal, right? We have to keep adjusting no different than the pilot adjusts. And if you keep adjusting them along the way, you're going to stand a much better chance of landing in Denver. I love this. That pilot was honest with himself. Right. He was honest with everybody. I'm off track. Yeah, exactly. In order to be coachable, you got to was honest with everybody. I'm off track. Yeah, exactly. In order to be

coachable, you got to be honest with yourself. Truth is the discovery of reality, period. Right. Huge. This is amazing. I mean, that coaching wisdom makes you look at your business, your life from an entirely different perspective. So that's really what we talk about here on Start With A Win is looking at your life and being honest with yourself. And a lot of that happens to kind of bring you to the point of how do you start with a win? How do you get your day going? How do you get to where you want to go? Richard, you're a very successful businessman, an amazing coach, amazing leader. But people look at someone like yourself and they go, he must have the secret sauce or maybe he's lucky,

which I hate to hear. But you do operate with consistency, with honesty, with transparency in your own life to yourself and you're honest to yourself and you're honest to those around you. And that means you work hard too. How do you take and build in a win in that? How do you start your day with a win in order to achieve the things that you achieve? Well, I don't know if my day, you know, necessarily is what everybody needs to do, but, and I learned this. And again, Jim Rowan was one of my great mentors, you know, and he passed many, many years ago. And I went to a lot of his seminars and he just taught me so much. And then I started reading about, you know, our thoughts and I think our thoughts have such a great impact. So they say the average human being has 60,000 thoughts a day, and 95% of our thinking is habitual. So we tend to think the

same way day in and day out. The challenge with that is that we all have good days, bad days. We have things happen in our life that are struggles and aren't struggles. And if we're not thinking properly, we're not going to be in the right space because the way we think causes the way we feel. The way we feel generally causes the way we act because most people act on their feelings, not despite their feelings. And the way we act every day is the results we get in our life. So the way I look at it is that, and we've all heard about the three or four inches between our ears, right? Makes all the difference in the world. So my belief is that our brain, our mind is our software that runs a hardware, right? And it's interesting how so many of us get up in the morning and we get the hardware ready. You know,

we have a shower, you know, we brush our teeth, we comb our hair, but how many people get the software ready? And I think very few people spend a lot of time getting the software. So what I've done is say that I need to program me so that I'm in the right mental state. I got the software program, so it's going to run the hardware that day. So generally, I'm up at, say, 5 or 5.30, and I always have a coffee, and I sort of read a little bit to start my day. That's what I start. And then the next thing I do is I always like to go sweat somehow. I like to exercise a little bit like I did this morning here. I went for a little run around. This is called the tech

center, right? I think we're in the tech center with a little run around the tech center and, you know, get a little exercise. And then what I do is then I'll actually open up my iPad and I have a journal section, my iPad, and I write down, first of all, what went right yesterday, the day before. And because I don't want to focus on what went wrong. I want to focus on what went right, because believe me, some things didn't go so good yesterday, right? Exactly, yeah. That's business.

Always happens. Right. Always happens. So what went right yesterday? Well, you know, I had a really cool flight in. I got to relax a little bit. You know, that's right. It can be anything.

It could be, hey, my coffee was hot. I don't care what it is. Don't make a big deal about it, but start programming the software. And then I always write down three things I'm grateful for every day. And this has been taught now forever, right? Yeah. And again, I can't repeat the same thing in a

month. Oh, that's an interesting perspective. Yeah. So for one month, they have to be different. And I'll tell you, when you get to the end of the month, sometimes I can go back, did I already say that? And I go back and look and say, oh yeah, I said

that in the fifth. And sometimes I'm, hey, I'm just, you know, I'm sitting in this beautiful chair right here in my house, you know, or whatever. It can be a simple, crazy little thing. And then what I do is I sort of, I look at what I call my vision. And my vision is just, you know,

really the way I want to live, what I want to do with my life and refocus. And my vision is, to me, it motivates me, right? It's no different than the anticipation of the holiday sometimes is better than the holiday. And you're going, well, how could it be better than a holiday? Well, it's because it's what you're thinking about causes the way you feel. You're anticipating a holiday. You're all excited, right? When I look at that, I go, that's really cool. And I remind myself of all the things that I, you know, my family, the way,

like I try to take a month off a week now. I'm getting a little bit older. You probably noticed that. I get to take a week off a month. That excites me, right? And get to do what I want that week. Spend some time, you know, get a place in Toronto, a place down in Florida. I like to spend, you know, I look forward to that. So I look at all the things I look forward to. And then when I'm finished all that, I'm in, I'm in a pretty good space, right? So I'm going, okay. You're ready to attack the day. Then I just look every day and say, what are my big three today? What are the big three things I got to get done today? If my day comes apart, what are the three things that'll move the needle today? And I just, and they're

not always big things. Sometimes they only take me 45 minutes, but I get those done and then go on with my day. And that's what I do every morning. And it, I've done that for probably, well, it's gotta be 20 years. I adjusted a little bit here and there. And I'm not saying that I work out every day, but I try to get five days a week. Nobody's perfect. But I think there's something to be said for getting the software programmed in the morning. So then all of a sudden the hardware starts to maybe operate a little bit better. You get your destination before everybody else is really getting their day. It's interesting. You go through this and we hear the statement, success leaves clues.

I see a lot of clues here in how you start with a win. And the clues really work their way into how you have coached people over the decades in this business that we're in, Real Estate, and other businesses. So not just creating amazing businesses, but creating amazing people. So Richard, we really thank you for being on the show today. I took a lot away. I have a bunch of notes here that I wrote down and I'm going to go put these in my iPad. So this has been a win for me and I hope it's been a win for you. It has. We appreciate you being on Start With A Win.

Thanks, Adam. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, Start With A Win. Hey, Adam.

Yeah, buddy. I loved this episode. That was amazing. There was so much good stuff. It was like gold, but it made me think of a quote. What's that? I texted this to you the other day. It says, win more than you did yesterday and then start all over again today.

I love that. That should be a meme. Anyways, hey, see you guys later.