It was October 2019 and I was sitting in my cardiologist’s office when I heard him say, “we won’t need to operate for a few more years.” That statement hit me like a punch in the face. It was the first time the gravity of my heart issue sank in. Until then it had been “hereditary issue,” “we’ll monitor,” “keep doing heart healthy activities.”
Surprisingly, that wasn’t the hardest part of the meeting. It was my follow up questions that led to me learning I could no longer do my CrossFit workouts. No more indoor rowing contests. No more road racing. Just like that, gone.
I spent the next 18 months feeling sorry for myself. Woe is me for all the things I was passionate about, taken away, how unfair it was that a young, otherwise healthy guy had to slowly decline.
Then one afternoon in the spring of 2021, the pandemic still in full swing, I was in my home gym doing a light workout on my rower. And yes, it was light. Something unexpected happened. I had a heart attack.
It was my third day in the hospital. No contact with family, visitors weren’t permitted and there was no cell signal. Then an alarm went off. A voice on the speaker began repeating, “all staff, Code Blue, 3 West, Room X.” I was on 3 West. I wasn’t the room in question, but the impact was profound. Someone else on my floor, the cardiac unit, was having a Code Blue after surgery.
That was the moment I realized not all surgeries work out. Not all interventions are guaranteed to “fix” things. And I realized I’d been so focused on everything I couldn’t do, everything I’d lost, that I’d lost complete sight of everything I still had influence over. Yes, I was going to have surgery at some distant point. But I was letting it take something from every single day, and not in a good way.
I learned about control. I learned to recognize, focus on, and execute on the things I could control.
Could I do CrossFit? No. But I could still work out. Could I race? No. But I could jog or walk. There were limitless things I could still do that I enjoyed. I just needed to get out of my own way.
That heart attack, unpleasant as it was, had a lasting and positive effect on me.
So what does a heart attack have to do with your business?
I’m talking to a lot of coaching members right now who don’t understand what’s going on with the market. They don’t know what’s going to happen south of the border, or with the broader economy. They don’t know if someone is going to buy or sell. And you know what? It’s always been like that.
We’ve never known what the market was going to do. We’ve never had certainty about the economy. Buyers and sellers have always called the shots. What’s different is that we didn’t used to have 24/7 news and social media pulling our eyes and our focus away. We couldn’t, on a whim, turn our attention away from what matters.
Right now a lot of agents are staring at what they feel they have lost. The easy market. The buyers who moved without hesitating. Deals that used to just come together. The same way I stared at CrossFit, rowing, and running.
What matters is what you control. Your goals. Your actions. Your effort.
You don’t need a heart attack to learn this lesson. You have always been in control of your outcomes. Every day you get to decide what to focus on, what actions to take, what outcomes to influence. What narrative are you listening to? One that gives you permission to pause, or one that pushes you to move forward?
I know which one I’m listening to, how about you?
Scott
Scott Mills Coaching
P.S. If someone you know would find value in this, feel free to pass it along.