3 Things

What the hell am I supposed to do when this happens?

When we’re out there inspecting, running our business, we’re going to be asking the “what do I do now” question a lot. There are always going to be unusual situations popping up, and we’re the one left trying to figure out what to do next. Things happen to us like accidentally breaking something at the most inopportune time, witnessing a living room knock-down, drag-out between the buyers and sellers, and walking into a bedroom and seeing a “mobster-sized” pile of money sitting on the dresser (and yes, all these have happened to me.) A they always happen at the worst moment possible, when we’re already putting out a fire somewhere else. Unusual situations come up; it’s just another part of the job that we’ve got to navigate.

But what the hell are we supposed to do when these things pop up?

I certainly don’t remember learning about this in the online course…

A lot of the time, it can be difficult to be the one running a business.

It’s a lot like flying an airplane.

At night.

With one hand tied behind your back.

While wearing a blindfold.

With an agent and a seller shouting in your ear for you to do it faster…

I think that about covers it.

So really, what are we supposed to do when we find ourselves in one of these “unusual” situations? We find that quite often we become stressed by our circumstances, and that is certainly adds little to our efforts to put things back to normal.

If we stop for a second and think about it, we really don’t have that many options. There are only a few things that we can do. In reality, it comes down to three things: react, respond, or initiate. Those are our options, and it’s up to us to figure out which one is the best choice for each particular setting. (Remember to always play to your audience.)

In most situations, we react. It’s convenient for us to tell ourselves that we’ve been forced to react: I’m so busy, it’s all I have time to do… But, we choose to make that our default reaction. It’s easier. No thinking required, really. When a problem appears in front of us, we just do the first thing that comes into our mind. Maybe it’s the same thing we always do. Maybe it’s our natural reaction. Maybe it’s the easiest and quickest way for us to move past whatever new obstacle we find in our path.

Regardless of our reasons, we react. It gets us past that next problem, and all we like getting past a problem. Sometimes this option works, but quite often it works for a short time and we end up dealing with that same problem again, somewhere down the line.

But at least it’s not in my face anymore.

A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Tim Ferriss

Responding is another option, but it’s harder to do. It requires thought; it requires planning; it requires time. Time to examine the situation. Time to think about how we got here, what we can do to best deal with this problem, and what effect our response is going to have on us in the future.

It’s much better than just reacting, but we’re still left waiting for things to happen. We’re playing defense, waiting for something to happen before we make our move.

And the last choice, initiating? What’s that all about?

It’s about doing. It’s about planning ahead. It’s about going on the offensive; making things happen instead of waiting for them to happen to us. It’s about taking the situation into our own hands and doing something now instead of later; making changes before we’re forced to make them. Making changes because it’s the smart thing to do, not the thing we need to do.

Initiating is a hard thing to do. It takes more planning. It takes more time. It takes more discipline. All the things that (we think) we don’t have time to do. And we can come up with a million excuses why we should be doing something else.

I’m too busy.

I don’t have the money.

I have to finish this other thing first.

The timing’s not right.

It’s too hard.

I just don’t have the energy.

It’s too bad that coming up with excuses doesn’t help our business, because then we’d be onto something…

The funny thing is that it’s never been easier for us to initiate. We’ve never had more information available to us, it’s never been simpler to access that information, and we’ve never had more options to choose from than we have right now. The accumulated knowledge of mankind is right there, within our reach, just waiting for us to take advantage of it.

It’s easier to just react — to let someone else decide how things will go. It feels less stressful to simply sit back and wait for something to happen. The problem is that once we’ve “fixed” that thing, we’re left waiting for the next thing to happen.

Why should we just wait? Why should we only react? Is our best option to simply play defense? We didn’t start our business by just reacting. We didn’t wait around for someone else to plan our future. We initiated. We actually got off our butt and made something happen.

We’re the one who became a home inspector.

Yes, we may have had some help. We might have had a mentor, a guide, or we followed instructions provided by someone else. The point is that we did something ourselves.

We made it happen.

We initiated.

So why should we stop now? Shouldn’t we be doing something to make ourselves better?

There’s got to be something that we’ve always wanted to do, something that we know won’t be easy to finish. Something that, despite the effort needed (or maybe because of the effort needed), will make us better.

Make our business better. Make our life better.

So why don’t we do it? Really, we’ve got the time.

We’ve just got to decide to do what needs to be done.

We’ve just got to initiate.

This post was inspired by a blog post from Seth Godin. You can find his work everywhere; just Google Seth.

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Thanks, Joe