Using affirmations boosts the confidence of commercial real estate agents.

CRE Success Principle: First impressions are critical, but so are last ones. A poor offboarding or follow-up process can undo years of good service. Make every client interaction, from first call to final invoice, reflect your standards.

I’ve learned that the way you talk to yourself has a direct impact on your results.

Whether you’re leading a team, prospecting for clients, or working through a tough deal, your self-talk shapes your mindset, and your mindset influences your performance.

That’s where affirmations come in. Affirmations are short, positive statements that help you focus on the right things. They remind you that success is within your reach.

For example, one of my favourites to use before prospecting is, “My perfect future clients are just waiting to hear from me.”

When you believe that, prospecting feels less like pestering and more like serving the people who need your help.

Here’s another one: “Every call I make gets me closer to my goals.” It’s simple, true, and powerful.

Affirmations aren’t magic words, but they do influence how you show up. By choosing your words carefully, you can replace doubt with confidence and hesitation with action.

If you lead a team, encourage them to try affirmations too. They work best when used consistently: before sales calls, prior to important meetings, or whenever confidence is needed most.

Your words matter. Your mindset matters. And your success is inevitable.

Want to learn more? Listen to Episode 244 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for practical examples and ways to make affirmations part of your daily routine.

Episode transcript:

There’s an affirmation that I recommend saying before you start prospecting.

“My perfect future clients are just waiting to hear from me.”

And when you think about it, that is a true statement.

Your perfect future clients would love to hear from you.

It's a statement that is true and will give you confidence and purpose and meaning and a little bit of motivation around why it is that you should be prospecting.

So that's an affirmation.

I want to talk to you today about what affirmations are, how I use them, and how you can use them as well.

This is episode 244 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak. This is the show that's helping you to lead, better, grow faster, and stress less. Thank you so much for joining us.

And before we get into talking about affirmations, I want to share a little story about an experience that I had, which I would recommend that you don't want to have repeated in your business.

And it is quite analogous to running a commercial real estate business because it's dealing with the refund of a deposit of a security bond.

And this story is about me having been a member at a co-working space for about 2.5 years.

And I wasn't really using my dedicated desk at that co-working space very much, if at all, like, I will probably go in there once a month if that. And that was going on for over a year.

And I thought it was time just to stop the membership.

So, I gave notice and I completed the exit process, and they told me that it would take 30 to 60 days for the bond to be returned.

Now, after that period had elapsed and it hadn't been returned, I contacted the person from their customer support team and I let them know that I hadn't received it.

And they sent me a note saying, “Hey, if it hasn't happened already, someone from our finance team will be getting back to you immediately.”

And it then took 2 days for that person to get back to me and they said, “Hey, it will be sent to you shortly.”

So, I thought, great.

And then another, I think it was 2 weeks or 2.5 weeks passed, and it hadn't been sent back to me yet.

I hadn't seen the money; it's about $1000 in my bank account.

So, I followed up and said, “Hey, I'm just wondering if you can give me an idea of when I can expect the bond, the security deposit to be returned to my bank account.”

And I didn't receive a reply for 3 days, and I sent it to the financial controller who had sent me an update previously, and also the person from their customer support team.

So, after 3 days, I thought, “Hmm, this is a bit weird. I feel like I'm being ignored.”

So, I decided to escalate it, and I happen to know the owner of the business pretty well.

So, I forwarded him the email trail and I just said, “Hey, I'm not sure what's going on here, but I haven't received my security deposit refunded, and it seems to be well beyond what is the expected time frame for this to happen.”

And he was very embarrassed, and within 3 hours the money was in my account.

But I wanted to share this story because you might be a leader who's perhaps in the dark about these sorts of situations.

This is an example of something that could be going on in your business that you would be embarrassed about if you knew it was happening.

And the only way that you can find out if it's happening is if a customer alerts you to the fact.

And I think I did a good job of highlighting to the person who I knew about, “Hey, this is probably not ideal,” and I even said to him, “Hey, I don't mean to bother you about a relatively minor issue, and I'm sure your team will resolve it eventually, but here's what's happened.”

You want your customers to be telling you about those things, and more importantly, you want your team to be acting in a way so that your customers don't ever have to bring those things to your attention, right?

So, I tell you that story just to let you know that, that situation, I think, left a bit of a stain on my kind of experience in that co-working space.

Otherwise, it was relatively positive, I don't really have any complaints, but that final little bit of offboarding wasn't a positive experience.

And while onboarding and first impressions are really important, there are those final moments that can occur, which can undo all of the good work that you've done with a client over the years, if you don't manage that process well.

So, it's about managing processes, it's about knowing what's going on in your business and also, I guess it's making sure that your clients and customers feel like they can escalate something to you, if in fact it is going to help you make an improvement in your business, so I just thought I'd share that story.

Let's talk about something more positive now, because I'm in a good mood today and I want to talk to you about affirmations.

Affirmations are just short positive statements that help you stay focused, they boost your confidence and, they're really something which you can say so that you could perform at a higher level.

Now, if they're not really your thing, and I've got to say I don't walk around all day saying affirmations, they're not really my thing, and not that I'm someone who says mantras, but I use them from time to time.

And even if they're not useful for you or not really your thing, they could be really useful for your team.

As I said, at the start of prospecting, at the start of a prospecting power hour, one thing I recommend doing is an affirmation, something that we can say that's going to make us feel more positive about prospecting.

And saying, “My perfect future clients are just waiting to hear from me” is one such affirmation, because when you believe that, then you put yourself in the frame of, “I'm not interrupting people, I'm not being a pest. We're here to offer something of value to the people who need us.”

And when we encounter people who don't need us, who don't want to hear from us, that's just part of the process of finding the people who do.

Another affirmation that you might use at the start of a prospecting power hour is, “Every call that I make gets me closer to my goals.”

If you want to know the process for a prospecting power hour, by the way, we've got a whole guide on it, it's available at cresuccess.co/powerhour, we'll put that in the show notes as well.

So, I want to share with you a couple of other affirmations that I use and maybe one or two of them will be appealing and you can start using them, and I think all of them are kind of true.

One of my favorite ones is, “Everything is always working out for me.”

That sounds a little bit braggadocious, doesn't it?

And let me give you a couple of examples of things that perhaps didn't seem ideal, but then ended up working out for me.

So, this podcast is being released on the 29th of October, and on this very day, I am in Sydney, speaking at a Real Estate Institute of New South Wales event.

Now, I was also scheduled to be speaking at the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia event on the 29th of October.

But a few months ago, they contacted me after that engagement.

They said, would you mind if we switch the date to the 28th?

And I said, yeah, it's fine.

I'll probably have to change my flight.

And they said, “Yeah, we'll cover the change fee.”

I'm like, “Great.” So, I changed it.

And if they hadn't changed the date, then I wouldn't have been able to commit to this event with the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales.

So, what turned out to be a minor inconvenience actually turned out to be a major advantage, because I'm now able to fly over to Perth, do the event with the WA Real Estate Institute, and then after that one, fly over to Sydney and then do the Sydney event the following day.

You see, everything is always working out for me.

I'll give you another example.

I would usually fly Virgin when I am flying any route which has a Virgin flight.

But I decided for an event that I am attending or planning to attend in Bali in February next year to fly Jetstar.

And I was doing that for a couple of reasons.

One, Jetstar has more direct flights from Melbourne to Bali than Virgin has, so there's more convenient times.

And also, I could see that Jetstar was slightly cheaper than Virgin was.

And usually I wouldn't think about that, but because I'm pretty loyal to Virgin, but I thought, “Oh, you know, now with Jetstar, I've got this Qantas frequent flyer credit card so I can get the points.”

And because I wanted the points, I thought, “Oh, I'll pay the top tier ticket price for Jetstar, which also had full flexibility.”

Well, as it turns out, I'm scheduled to have some surgery in February, and my surgeon told me that I will not be able to travel for 6 weeks.

And if I hadn't gotten the fully flexible fare, I wouldn't have been able to cancel that flight because you know that with those cheapy airlines, sometimes they make it difficult to change, or maybe you can even book non-refundable ones if you are looking to save a dollar.

But I didn't do that because I wanted to get the points.

And also, the conference that I was going to is also going to be happening again in May, so I've just rescheduled it because everything is always working out for me.

Another affirmation that I want to share with you is, “My success is inevitable.”

Think about that.

“My success is inevitable.”

That's one that you can use for your long-term vision, but also for making daily progress.

I'll give you a couple of others that I have put into training that I do on personal excellence and mindset.

One is that, “I readily find solutions to problems and I easily move past roadblocks.”

So, when you're facing challenges with clients or maybe some bottlenecks in the business, that can be a nice one to say.

Another one is, “I am becoming better and better at what I do every single day.”

And that is true, right?

Maybe I'm not getting better at these podcasts, I don't know.

But you should be growing and improving every single day.

Now, if you want to get your team to be thinking about affirmations that will help them improve, but they're not quite ready to latch onto the concept, and you've got some golfers in your team, I'll tell you this one because every golfer that I tell this to, and I'm not even a golfer, but every golfer that I tell this to says, “Wow, I really like that. I'm going to start using it.”

And the affirmation is this, “The direction of the ball is not going to determine the direction of my mood.”

Profound if you're a golfer apparently.

“The direction of the ball is not going to determine the direction of my mood.”

I've got a couple more to share with you.

When you get to work, you might want to say to yourself that, “I am showing up as the leader that I am becoming.”

When you get home from a hard day, you might like to say to yourself before you walk through the door, “When I walk through this door, I will leave the stress of the day behind and be the present partner and parent that my family deserves.”

So that's just a few examples of affirmations.

Maybe the ones that I've shared with you are not quite relevant for you, but hopefully you can see the benefit of starting to use affirmations, you might call them mantras, to just help you in certain situations.

You can say them loud and with conviction, you can say them to yourself, you might like to write them down.

You might use them before key tasks, so before calls or meetings or before you're likely to do something like create content, you need a bit of a confidence boost.

You can keep them visible by putting them on Post-it notes, they can pop up as calendar reminders or you can write them down in a journal.

And the reason why I think this is important is because the way that you talk to yourself matters.

Affirmations are a ritual that can lead to big results.

So, whether you're booking meetings, leading a team, or growing your personal brand, the words that you say to yourself matter.

They will influence your performance.

And we've talked before on the podcast about negative self-talk.

So, choose your words wisely and maybe find an affirmation that can help pick you up when you just need a bit of a boost.

And remember, your success is inevitable.

That's our episode for today. Thanks so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.