Everywhere you look nowadays, you’re drilled with ads, products, and services promising quick fixes and instant gratification.
From personal injury settlement billboards littered every five miles of the 405 to instant rush energy drinks stocked to the brim at every gas station, supermarket, and vending machine.
The commoditization of instant pain relief and dopamine rush has become a cultural norm in the United States. However, from cigarettes to soft drinks to fast food, the adverse effects caused by each of these industries has been widely publicized and assimilated into mainstream culture. So, the consumption of their quick hit, often corrosive, products could hardly be considered a dangerous, predatorial threat (although many Diabetes doctors may contest this) as there’s already a collective consciousness of the risk.
On the other hand, however, such palliative, quick fix pain relief has recently entered into a new arena where there’s less awareness ─ in the emerging life coaching space where such quick fixes are more and more becoming cloaked as life solutions, perpetuated by a wave of new, largely unqualified life and business mentors.
Why? Well for one reason, as opposed to many market sectors, the life coaching industry does not require any degrees, certifications, or accreditations. The virtual absence of any barrier for entry, as well as the prospects of virtual work and high subscription turnover has propelled the life-coaching job position to become 1 of the 15 fastest growing career categories on Linkedin with hiring for these roles increasing by more than 51% since 2019.
Secondly, in this unregulated industry, usually the loudest voice with the most click-baity marketing attracts the most attention and converts the most consumers. And to be click-baity, one often has to promote offers that seem too good to be true.
The problem here, however, is that within the receiving audience of this clickbait are many people in compromised life situations who do direly need qualified and trustworthy advice from a true professional. Therefore, the wrong type of advice ─ and certainly outlandish claims to attract clients promising quick fixes to personal, health, relationship, and financial troubles ─ has already started to damage and even implode the lives of many.
One can see this phenomenon clearly, for instance, in the real estate market where new as well as struggling agents are bombarded with click bait ads promising client growth, sales growth, and long-term success within just weeks of following such and such program. Most of these programs don’t delve into actual essential fundamentals, but rather suggest that just by either deploying strategies of simply being nice to people until they hopefully hire you or the opposite extreme ─ of chasing deals hard and being intractable about seeing them through, will be the key to finding success in today’s complex and challenging market.
Jere Metcalf of Breakthrough Luxury and host of Jere Metcalf Podcast (aka Top Real Estate Agents Tell How They Do It), one of the few qualified and trusted business coaches in luxury real estate today ─ says that while it’s not that complicated, the solutions that are most prevalent are leaving out the most powerful resources for a real estate agent’s untapped success, especially for those in the luxury space.
Most of Jere’s clients come to her after being disillusioned by one life coach after the other and having gone down numerous rabbit holes that led nowhere. “The feeling they often come away with is that they have no underlying value, and it’s only by projecting some newfangled way of being that they will succeed.”
Jere’s coaching program eradicates this false belief and instead turns the agent’s attention to what their natural, underlying skillset is, and also ─ and perhaps most importantly ─ to what the end client needs.
Oftentimes, according to Jere, what holds agents back is not even their internal capabilities, but the fact that they’re not identifying and acting on the nuanced needs of their clients.
To illustrate, Jere brings up the anecdote of how her client, Lucia Fernandez in Northeast Florida and on Northeast Florida’s Book of Lists for Top Real Estate Agents had moved to a new brokerage resulting in a key client of hers questioning the transition and notifying Lucia that he was withdrawing his decision to list with or refer any future business to Lucia. Needless to mention, this put Lucia in somewhat of a state of panic.
Everyone had advice for Lucia on how to ‘convince’ her client to stay on with her, what statistics to send, what to say, what ‘scripts’ to use; all advice was about what the client ‘has to’ understand.
Nobody asked about what the client was actually experiencing beneath his unsettling behavior that threatened the end goal. No one paused to consider what the client wasn’t saying (and was unaware of himself) but was really needing from a real estate agent.
Through a series of key questions, Jere helped Lucia identify that what she thought was the situation was actually symptoms of a situation. Lucia, through thoughtful questions and a focused strategic exercise in Breakthrough Luxury Coaching, within minutes, identified the situation versus the underlying the symptoms along with the source of her client’s pain and concerns. This led Lucia to what became suddenly clear and obvious actions to address the problem. As a result, Lucia secured the business she thought she had lost and three more listings that month from that one action alone.
Jere reminds us that the keys to success are as nuanced as the life scenario. To create success, along with honing our craft as we cultivate market knowledge and understanding, it is essential that we develop the skills to clear the lens we look through for the right action that creates powerful transformation and results.
Members of the editorial and news staff of the Los Angeles magazine and the Engine Vision Media Network were not involved in the creation of this content.
