We
have a guy here in our office who always has an interesting story. He’s never told us that he stole the hat off
of Fidel Castro’s head and played “keep away” or beat the pants off Usain
Bolt in a private, closed-track race, so we tend to believe him and get a good
laugh whenever he tells us about an experience he had or about one of his
family members. One of his stories goes
like this:
He’s
the youngest of four kids, and the brother just older than he was a huge fan of
sugar and all things sweet when they were growing up together. This love for sweets went to the extreme as,
according to our office mate, his brother insisted on putting sugar on his Cap’n
Crunch cereal. Never mind that it tore
up the roof of your mouth to the point which you had to wait five to seven days
before eating another bowl of the stuff, the cereal itself isn’t much more than
processed sugar anyway! Upon hearing
this, you would think you were about to be on the receiving end of a cautionary
tale, that his brother’s teeth all fell out by the time he hit puberty, he
weighed 400 lbs. by the time he started high school, and his growth was stunted
to the point that he was the same height as he was wide – throw in a love
triangle, and this would be the ideal guest for Jerry Springer.
Alas,
this brother of his has all of his teeth (still), was a multiple-letter varsity
athlete in high school, and he hit 6’2” by the time he was a junior. Wait, there’s more. He went on to get accepted to and graduated
from West Point, received an officer’s commission in the Army, and later went
on to Harvard (the university near Boston, not the typing school in Wichita)
and got his MBA – and, according to the guy in our office, he was still eating
sugar on his Cap’n
Crunch whenever he got the chance during this time.
How
is this possible, we all asked? The
answer is simple: his mom and dad picked their battles, and they decided sugar
intake wasn’t one that needed to be pitched.
They could see how active he was, and his drive to get the grades and
amass the resume needed to get into a military academy was more than sufficient
to keep him focused on his studies. In
other words, they saw the bigger picture and knew that he saw it, too – that
was the key.
More
often than not, your success as an agent hinges upon your ability to see the
bigger picture and make sure your client sees it, too. That’s, of course, easier said than
done. When your client tells you how
much she loves a particular house (it has everything she’s looking for: big
kitchen, great school district, convenient shopping, etc.) but dismisses it as
“the right one” because she doesn’t like the pink paint in the bathroom, your
first inclination is to grab the iPhone out of her hand and make her eat
it. However, that’s frowned upon by the
NAR for some reason. What you can do,
though, is take a photo of that bathroom, and with the help of one of numerous
smartphone apps, change the wall color to a neutral white and say, “See how
much better it looks in white.” You give
her a new vision – and it’s a heck of a lot easier to do with today’s
technology than just asking her to picture it in her mind’s eye. You already knew this, of course, but it bore
repeating. With that said, though, do
you have the latest apps to help you make these on-the-fly adjustments? If not, let us help you figure out which ones
are best for you – and we promise they’ll be better for you than sugar on Cap’n
Crunch.
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