Emotional Hijacking: How mindset affects commercial agents’ performance.

CRE Success Principle: An agent's performance depends not only on what they know, but on how quickly they can regain clear judgement after a setback.

In commercial real estate, rejection is part of the job. Deals fall over, listings go elsewhere, and prospects often say no.

But what happens after a setback can have just as much impact on your performance as the setback itself.

What Is Emotional Hijacking?

Emotional hijacking occurs when your emotional state, rather than your professional judgment, drives your decisions.

Imagine losing a deal, then sending a curt email to an unrelated client because you're still frustrated. Or discounting a listing because you're desperate for a win after a dry patch.

These aren't necessarily skills or knowledge problems. You probably know what the right move looks like. The challenge is making that move when you're not in the right headspace.

Why Clear Thinking Is a Competitive Advantage

In commercial real estate, many good agents have similar market knowledge and sales skills. The difference can be their ability to think clearly when everyone else is reacting.

That matters when negotiating a major listing, following up with a prospect or protecting an important client relationship.

Your emotional state can influence decisions that directly affect revenue. Developing greater emotional awareness and learning to manage your reactions can help you avoid costly mistakes.

Build Resilience by Recovering Faster

Resilience isn't about avoiding rejection. It's about reducing how long it affects you.

If a setback once took a week to recover from, but now takes a day, you've regained valuable productive time. If you can get that to under an hour, the improvement is even greater.

Mindset coaching can help agents recognise these patterns and practice responding more effectively. As a principal, you don't need to be the expert in every development area. Bringing in a specialist can help your team build skills you may not be equipped to coach yourself.

Want to improve your team's mindset, accountability and performance? Get in touch with CRE Success to learn more about Agent Accelerator, and listen to episode 291 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for more on emotional hijacking and better decision-making.

Episode transcript:

All right, I want to start today's episode with a short story.

It's about a commercial real estate agent who gets a knockback on a deal that they were sure was in the bag.

10 minutes later, they're replying to an email which is completely unrelated to that lost deal to another client.

And the email read as curt, dismissive, and really nothing like how they would normally write.

They didn't review the email as they usually would, and they hit send before they should have.

You see, they weren't thinking about the client on the other end of the email. They were still stewing over the deal that just fell over.

Now, that's not a skills problem. The agent already knew how to write an appropriate email.

And it's not a knowledge problem because the agent would be able to tell you that they shouldn't have been writing an email while they were in that state.

It's something completely different, and it's what today's episode is all about.

Welcome to episode 291 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak. I help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

On last week's episode, we took a look inside Agent Accelerator, specifically at the performance tracking call that happens on the first Tuesday of each month.

Well, there's also a monthly mindset coaching call, and this one happens on the third Tuesday of the month.

And I want to be upfront about something: I don't even run this session. Mindset is its own specific skill set. It's different from prospecting, it's not about sales techniques, and it's distinct from market knowledge.

I know a lot about driving performance in a commercial real estate business.

Maybe I could be more humble when I say that. But I don't pretend (here's the humble bit) to be a trained mindset coach.

And while I could possibly fumble my way through a mindset coaching session, I don't think a generalist take from me would serve our members as well as bringing in someone who specializes in this area.

So, for the past year, the mindset calls have been run by Chris Jackson, who is a professionally trained mindset coach.

And I want to mention something else here because I think it reflects how we think about this topic.

Chris has just wrapped up a year with us, and this month we'll be bringing in a new mindset coach, so our members get a fresh voice and a different perspective rather than the same voice every month indefinitely.

I think that's the right way to run a specialist topic, to bring in the right specialist for the specific skill and not being too precious about the fact that it's not being delivered by you.

Mindset as a discipline and as a practice is very commonplace in residential real estate. People in sport are all over it, and in a wide range of industries and sectors where performance matters.

It's just not that common in commercial real estate.

So, I think having a commercial real estate spend just one hour a month working on their mindset is a great use of their time and a nice little differentiator for the business in which they operate.

Now, on today's episode, I want to share one of the ideas from a recent session that has stuck with me, and I think it's useful for anyone in this industry, not just the agents who were in the Zoom session on that day.

And the concept is called emotional hijacking. The idea is simple to state, but it's harder to notice in the moment.

Emotional hijacking is what happens when your emotional state, not your professional judgment, is the thing that's making the decision.

Now, there was an exercise on the call that brought this idea to life. Everyone was asked to close their eyes and to remember the biggest rejection they had had in the past year.

To really sit with it, to notice what happens in the body. Maybe a tight chest, maybe something in the stomach, perhaps a change in breathing.

Then everyone was asked, "In this current state, would you want to negotiate the biggest listing of your career?"

The answer unanimously, of course, was, "No, of course not."

Compressed thinking, desperation creeping in, judgment clouded. That's not the state you want to be in when you're making a significant decision.

And here's the reframe that I think matters most. Your competitive advantage in this industry isn't necessarily knowing more than the other person across the negotiating table or the agent that you're competing against for the listing.

Plenty of good agents know roughly the same things. Your real advantage is being able to think clearly at the exact moment everyone else is reacting.

And look, that's not a personality trait that some people have and others don't. It's a skill. And like any skill, it can be noticed, practiced, and improved.

Now, I want to make this concrete because it's easy for a concept like this to kind of stay in the abstract.

So, think about the decisions that get made from a hijacked state. The email that goes out too fast without thinking right after a knock back, like I talked about at the top of the episode.

The listing that gets discounted a bit because, well, the agent was desperate for a win after a dry patch.

The follow-up call that didn't happen because someone's still stewing on something that went wrong yesterday.

None of these are knowledge problems. The agent almost certainly knows the smarter move. They're just not in the right state to make it.

And the cost of that isn't abstract. It's a listing that goes to someone else, a client relationship that takes a hit, a deal that could have been saved with a clearer head and some patience before acting.

When you start looking for it, this pattern shows up in revenue terms, not just in somebody who's having a bad day.

There was also a mindset session we had a couple of months earlier that connects directly to this on the theme of resilience.

And the framing there was useful, too. The goal was never to avoid getting knocked down. Rejections, deals falling over, they're all part of the role in commercial real estate. The goal is reducing how long you're affected by it.

If a setback used to take you a week to recover from, to shake off, and you can get that down to a day, then that's a real measurable improvement.

If you can get it down to an hour, then you've just given yourself a huge amount of productive, clear-headed time that you previously didn't have.

Emotional hijacking and slow recovery are really the same problem when looked at from two angles.

One is about the decision that you make while you're still under the wave, and the other is about how long you stay under it.

Both are trainable to improve through mindset sessions.

So, this is a different type of development to what we talked about in last week's episode, where I was focusing on accountability and performance in terms of, like, pipeline and prospecting activity.

This is about the state that agents are in when they're making decisions, which, as I've just run through, has a real tangible effect on the listings they win and lose and the deals that get done.

It's also, I think, honestly, something most principals aren't equipped to coach themselves.

Not because they're not good leaders, but because it is a specialist skill, which is exactly why I don't try to wing it.

We've invested in bringing in someone who does this professionally, and that's why we also deliberately rotate that voice over time.

If you'd like to find out more about what Agent Accelerator delivers, both the accountability and the mindset sessions, and a lot more, including monthly masterclasses and prospecting power hours and sessions with industry leaders who come in and mentor the group, send me a message on LinkedIn. My name is Darren Krakowiak.

Just tell me how many agents you have, and I will get back to you personally.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.