Goldwasser Institute

Differentiation is Key.

From Wikipedia: Differentiation is a source of competitive advantage.

What makes you different? If we are just like everyone else and there is no difference between us and the guy down the street then we have no competitive advantage. We must start using the language of differentiation within our company and within our lives to distinguish ourselves from the competition and create such a wide gap that we take massive market share. We must also create differentiation in our actions, the way that we do things, if we want to have a competitive advantage. This is not just for our company; this is for your life.

If you want to earn more in your role, I ask you, why? Why should you be paid more? What makes you different? If you have been wondering why you are not making more money, having better relationships, or doing better in life, you may need to take a close look in the mirror and ask yourself that question, why should I make more money. What makes me different from the person down the street?

Some of the things that make a person different and more successful than another:

1.       They are not a clock watcher-A lot of people in life just watch the clock and cannot wait to walk out the door from their office or their work. They waste time while they are working, they are not focused and they end up doing sloppy work. Truly valuable people get things done and then some. What I mean by that is this, if you look at the most highly paid, truly successful people in this world, they not only get their job done, they do more. They ask, “What else can I do for you?” They are servant hearted and they just get more accomplished than the average worker. They tend to stay up late and get up early.

2.       They have a different lingo-At our company we need to make sure we are using our differentiated language to let people know, we are not just any old real estate brokerage. We are transforming the industry with our Maximum Value Home Selling System, Our speed of response marketing department, our proactive vs. reactive negotiation strategy. Are you learning and sharing what makes us and you different? We have to not only be different, we have to speak different. What are the word you use to differentiate yourself?

3.       They deliver a beyond expected service and attitude-Your attitude will determine how far you get in life. How good is yours? Are you cranky and negative? Do you use the language of a loser? Your words are so important to your overall attitude and that in turn will affect your service. When you are talking right, you are thinking better. When you are thinking better you act better. People should be blown away by your professionalism, your skills, your knowledge, your service and you over the top positive attitude.

 We all have to start differentiating yourself. You are not average, so if you are acting like you are, stop now and start looking for ways to constantly differentiate yourself and create a new way. I could go on and on about this topic, I will spare you for now, but keep the question in mind, “What makes me different?” Have an awesome day!

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This past weekend I had the great pleasure and privilege to be part of the opening retreat for the 2010 Leadership Austin Essentials class. It was an amazing experience.

Leadership Austin has been around since 1979, and each year a group of 55 Austin leaders is hand-picked to go through a process of learning together over a 10-month period about issues in government that affect the people of Austin. This year I was honored to be one of the 55 picked. Here is a brief description from their Web site explaining what it is all about:

For 30 years, Leadership Austin has developed and created community among leaders from all walks of life. Tailored to leaders of every experience level - they explore critical community issues, develop the leadership skills to address those issues, and foster relationships to work collaboratively for positive change. Members of the Leadership Austin family influence the community in measurable, meaningful ways to improve the quality of life for all in our region.Leadership Austin is committed to the following core values:

• Community trusteeship
• Inclusiveness
• Collaborative decision-making
• Personal responsibility

At the retreat we went through a lot of leadership exercises that were excellent. Not only were we in the classroom, but we were involved in experiences that tested our leadership abilities. We also learned a great deal about all of our classmates. It is a greatly diverse group from the non-profit sector, government sector, and the private sector, all mixed and matched together.

What I really want to share with you though is the Leadership Austin Operating Agreement, because I think it plays a lot into what makes a great leader. Here it is:

Operating Agreement

• Active Listening
• Ask Questions
• Be Open (To new ideas)
• Respect Differences
• Honor Time
• Speak Your Truth
• Stay Above the Line (Integrity)

So, why does this matter? Because it is these things that can make an absolute difference in your life as a leader, as a business person, as a community servant, and as a great human being. Here is how:

• Active Listening—How often do you find yourself thinking about something else as someone is talking to you? All of the sudden they get done speaking and you realize that you haven’t heard a word the person has said. They may have been telling you something that was a big deal in their lives and your only response is, “Uh huh.” We all do this at times. Our job as a great leader is to start listening actively; turn off everything else in your world when someone is talking to you, and find what they are saying fascinating, even if it isn’t. Be focused, pay attention, and see your relationships grow deeper.

• Ask Questions—This falls right in line with active listening. Great leaders not only listen to people with energy and focus; they also ask questions. When you are listening, and you are really hearing what someone is saying, you find yourself wondering more about people and their stories. Asking questions is also about setting aside your ego and realizing that if you do not know how to do something, ask for help. People that ask great questions learn more.• Be Open (To new ideas)—Do you know people who are very close-minded and set in their old ways? They will not accept anything new? How do you feel about people like that? Not great probably, so start opening your mind more. Leaders are very open to other people’s ideas and strategies. Remember that your mind is like a parachute: it works best when it is open, and a team of people has more ideas than just one person.

• Respect Differences—Everyone is different, and everyone has an opinion. Whether you agree or disagree, respect people and where they are coming from. One of the really great things about Leadership Austin is the diversity of people with different experiences. Makes for great conversation.

• Honor Time—Everyone’s time is important. Enough said.

• Speak Your Truth—This is in line with respecting differences. You have your opinions and ideas; SPEAK THEM! Be willing to share your mind with others, especially if it can help them. I believe that all things are possible, and I believe we can manage our minds to make things happen. If I do not share what I know about this, then people may not live their best life. You have great things you can teach people as well. Speak your truth.

• Stay Above the Line—This simply means to act with integrity. The greatest leaders do the right thing, even when it hurts. No matter what, do what is right, treat people right, act right, be right, and you will see great benefits.

• Work Hard, Have Fun!—Hard work is essential to success, but it does not have to be hard! You can have fun while you work. Learn to fall in love with the hard work. The daily grind can be joyful if you make it so. IT IS YOUR CHOICE! 

You have it in you to be a great leader. Follow these simple rules and you will start reaching for your maximum potential. We all have greatness within us; start sharing your leadership.

And check out Leadership Austin. I will keep you up to date on our progress. Have an amazing day!

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Fourth quarter is key to victory!

If you did not have the pleasure of seeing the Miami-Florida State football game last night, you missed one heck of an ending. It came down to the last play of the game. The #18 ranked Florida State Seminoles had the ball on the unranked Miami Hurricanes 2 yard line with 14 seconds left in the 4^th quarter, down 38-34. They had 4 plays to score a touchdown and win the game! Seemed to be a simple task, but the Miami team would not be overcome, they stopped them and pulled off the upset! WOW!

It takes guts, persistence, conditioning, and heart to pull something like that off. I do not believe that there was one person watching that game that did not think Florida State would win, except Miami’s defense. They had it inside themselves. Do you?

We are coming up on the fourth quarter of our sales year, and I have to ask DO YOU HAVE IT IN YOU TO WIN? To make the end of this year incredible! We tend to see a lot of peoples businesses fall off in the fourth quarter as they think that the business will just not be there. They start gearing down to ramp up for next year.

I have to tell you, the business is there, but will you be? I think you will. This is not the time to pull the foot off the gas. Start asking yourself what you will do to make this the best quarter of your life and cause momentum for the first quarter of next year. Start looking for others that want to be there with you and team up with them to make this an incredible ending to the best year of your business so far. Here are a few suggestions about what I will be doing to make this the best 4^th quarter of my life:

1.       Prospect more-The next four months I am going to get busy. I am amped up about writing my book and going out on some speaking gigs, but I am going to make sure to be in my office for as many prospecting events as possible. I will also continue to hold open houses, network, connect with my SOI and get the word out more than I ever have.

2.       Build my mindset more-As always I will be continuing to drive positive energy into my system through my daily mindset exercises. If you have not bought into this yet, maybe it is time. There is nothing more important than a healthy attitude and mindset. If you are not filling your head with great thoughts constantly, you may be missing out on a life of opportunity.

3.       Be more focused with my time-As we move into this fourth quarter, I want to be more stringent and focused with my time. Making the transition from salesman of real estate to salesman of company and ideas has been interesting, I must prioritize my time as it should be used to the maximum benefit. What are you doing to maximize the time you have? As salespeople it is imperative that you are doing the most dollar productive activities, prospecting, showing and negotiating. As an operations team we must focus on serving the clients and the agents to the highest level. What will you do to become more efficient? Cut down on the wasted minutes and they will turn into productive hours.

 Just a few tips here. Hope this helps. When the game is on the line, when we are down to the final seconds, when it means everything to give our best, how will things end up? Will we win? I think so. Keep it up superstars!

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Enjoy.

cg

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YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS IS A GARDEN

This is one of the best analogies I have ever seen to help you to start to figure out the power of your mind and how to make it work for you:

  “A wonderful way to begin getting to know the 2 functions of your mind is to think of it as a garden. You are the gardener. You are planting seeds of thought in your subconscious mind all day long. Much of the time you are not even aware of doing so, because the seeds are based on your habitual thinking. As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment. 

Imagine your subconscious mind as a bed of rich soil that will help all kinds of seeds to sprout and flourish, whether good or bad. If you sow thorns, will you gather grapes? If you sow thistles, will you harvest figs? Every thought is a cause, and every condition is an effect. This is the reason it is so essential that you take charge of your thoughts. In that way you can bring forth only desirable conditions.

Begin now to sow thoughts of peace, happiness, right action, goodwill, and prosperity. Think quietly and with conviction on these qualities. Accept them fully in your conscious reasoning mind. Continue to plant these wonderful seeds of thought in the garden of your mind and you will reap a glorious harvest.

When your mind thinks correctly, when you understand the truth, when the thoughts deposited in your subconscious mind are constructive, harmonious, and peaceful, the magic working power of your subconscious mind will respond. It will bring about harmonious conditions, agreeable surroundings and the best of everything. Once you begin to control your thought processes, you can apply the powers of your subconscious to any problem or difficulty. You will actually be consciously cooperating with the infinite power and omnipotent law that governs all things.”

Dr. Joseph Murphy-The Power of Your Subconscious Mind-Bantam Books, pg. 8, Copyright 2000 Reward Books.

We are gardeners and in order to be a great gardener, what do we have to do? First we will till the Earth and that would be like getting rid of our old thought habits. We must turn things up and start making available the good soil of our minds. Get rid of that old crusty thinking and mix things up. Get back into that rich soil that may have gotten buried away as life started to get you down.

Then plant the seeds that you want to grow. Take ideas of positivity, energy, focus, success, happiness, peace, harmony, balance and start watering those thoughts daily with habitual thinking that lifts you up. Push yourself, become your own best friend, your own motivational speaker, start pumping yourself up and growing those thoughts. You can do it. when you start using the Billionaire Mindset workout, you will be doing this.

Then you have to use some fertilizer and that would be your visualization of a greater future, you want those thoughts to have excellent nutrients for your main goals. Put your main goals in your mind and start growing them. I will share the techniques in your workout that will act as the fertilizer. You cannot just plant a seed and hope that just by planting it that it will blossom into a great plant, you must tend to your garden daily.

  If we want to reap a big beautiful harvest, we have got to become amazing gardeners, we have to work on our skills daily and learn, grow and change as people so that we can have whatever it is we want to have. Just as big, beautiful tomatoes are not grown overnight, this type of thinking and these types of results will not happen immediately, you have got to commit. You will reap what you sow and you will start sowing great thoughts into your mind by following the Billionaire Mindset workout. We have an amazing capacity within us; we just have to open ourselves up to it. Open our minds and be willing to take the steps necessary. You can do it!The main goal of all of this is to get your conscious mind and your subconscious mind moving in the same direction toward the life you know that you can have.

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A whole lot of this workout is psychological. As I said before you will have to do some soul searching, and dig deep for reasons that you are driven. I had a great friend Ron Thorne, read through this book before I published it and he offered me some very wise insight. He said, “Where does all this drive come from?” I started to think more deeply and reflect on my life to answer this question. I started to think about my father’s failures and his successes. What did I learn from watching his life? Well I learned that you can be super successful and make a lot of money. When I saw him running his business well, when I saw him donate pieces of aluminum to my pre-school for our slides, when I saw that he was able to give us a life that was fun and full, I was learning about success and generosity. I also learned from his failures. I learned that you have to be careful in business, that you have to be totally honest in every aspect of what you do. I learned from his sickness that you have to take great care of your body and eat well.

I thought about the role my mom played and the example she set of having great positive energy, even though she had gone through so much. After the divorce she was raising four kids pretty much alone. She was working a full time job, and yet she still found time to take me to hockey and cart all the rest of my brothers around too. I saw and learned about hard work and persistence from her, she never gave up no matter what we were doing to her or what life through at her. I learned about unconditional love from her as she would not give up on me, even when she wanted to kill me. I was a crazy teenager and I am so thankful to my mom that she would not give up on me even when I seemed destined to ruin my entire life. She showed me unconditional love and I will never be able to thank her enough. I just hope that I do not get payback from my own children!!!???  

I also think about the other major influences from my life. I think about the time that I sat in the locker room crying like a baby after losing a football game to Elk River my senior year in high school. We were two games away from the state championship, and as I sat there alone, deflated, my coach, Paul Miller, came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me and said, “You have nothing to be upset about, you are the greatest leader I have seen come through this program.”  What a lesson I learned from that about the power to lift someone up when they are down. I still think about that moment and it gives me goose bumps. That moment has made an impact on my life that I can never thank him enough for. I think about that statement every time I am going through something tough, I think I am a great leader, what does a great leader

I also thought about the dark times, when I heard my father screaming at my mother on the phone after the divorce. The day that my father was indicted and the newspaper headlines splattered across the front page and the embarrassment I felt. The time that I walked into the cold, dark, grey jail to visit my father and what must have been going through my mind and his. That day watching the paramedics pull the sheet back from my father’s face and looking into his eyes for the last time. The time two years later when I was sixteen years old sitting in my closet with a razor blade to my wrist, confused, sad and lonely. I thought about the times when I was addicted to drugs, low and depressed. I thought about the situations I have had with my wife, when I act in the wrong way and cause stress in my marriage. I thought about the many failures that I have had and continue to have on a daily basis. Situations and people shape us. Our thoughts, our history, and our experiences are all reasons Why we are who we are and Why we will become who we want to become.  

YOU need to look inside your life to discover your WHY. What is it in your story that will give you the undying desire to make things happen, to act with courage and boldness in all of your endeavors. What has been holding you back from living your best life? Look back at your history at the people that have shaped you. What sort of impact the situations of your life have had on you. Look at your present life, what are the thoughts, feelings and situations that you have been holding you back from becoming a rich person?

It is not easy to do this, to really analyze ourselves and be honest about who we are. It is good work though. Man as I sit here now analyzing my own life and writing this book I am learning so much that is useful to me. This process can be gut wrenching. Like me you may have to hire yourself a life coach (what most people call a therapist!). Even as I write these words, I can feel the emotions of my life welling up, and I grow stronger from them.

Some of you may have grown up with a perfect childhood, great parents, comfortable surroundings and healthy feelings. Do not let yourself off the hook from this exercise, take some time to think and contemplate. If you are not where you want to be, there is something that is holding you back that you will uncover. Becoming a billionaire, and building a billion dollar mindset takes work. I have had many sessions, where I have broke down, gotten uncomfortable, had to really let some words out that needed to be released. It can be difficult to reveal our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, but the truth is we all have them, and when you talk about them and start self discovering, you have the ability to work through those setbacks and become a new you. As they say, the truth will set you FREE! When you start getting these stories out in the open you start to feel a freedom you have not felt before, a weight is lifted off your shoulders when you start airing out your past and learning from it.

You have got to have a big reason “Why?” you want success, why you want happiness, why you want money, balance, fame. Whatever it is you are striving for you must know your motivation for wanting it. All billionaires have a big why, and they have articulated it, and they put it in front of themselves every day. Your why comes from inside and it will light the way to a better tomorrow.

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What can we do?

Saturday was a great day for me. I got to spend the entire day with my beautiful wife and children. At the Goldwasser home Saturday is family fun day. It is tradition that we all hang out and have a great time playing, swimming, and goofing around. NO WORK!

This past Saturday we spent the morning at soccer, made lunch and then had friends over to go swimming. By 6:30pm all of our friends had left and we decided to get some dinner and then snuggle up in bed and have family movie night.

I left my home with the Wendy’s order in hand, 2 Cheeseburgers and 1 order of chicken tenders (for Mason, it is all he will eat!!!). The restaurant is about 10-15 minutes from my house, which gave me some time to crank up the music and have some fun. It was a beautiful Austin Texas evening.

I got to the pickup window and placed my order to the pleasant sounding order taker. As I pulled around the corner up to the first window, I thought to myself, “Where’s my wallet? “ Oh no! It was at that very second I realized that I had no money with me! What a nincompoop (sp?) I am!

The choices of my situation flashed before my eyes in that split second, pull out and not say anything for fear of embarrassment, drive home and make the kids something there (they would have hated me for that), or drive home get money and come back (at least a 30 minute delay in the rest of the evening! NO!!!!).

I decided to pull up to the window, “My wife is going to kill me, I forgot my money at home!” I said with a laugh, a big smile on my face, and my hands on the side of my head signaling my stupidity. The sweet 18 year old girl at the window just looked at me with a big smile on her face and said, “Pull ahead to the food window sir.” What I thought, she is going to let me have the food? “You are so awesome!” I said. In one second that girl changed the entire course of my evening and my thoughts; Wendy’s also gained a customer for life.

It was such a testament to doing something great for someone and the way it can change their life, and you expecting nothing in return. That moment changed my life, and I think it probably changed hers as well. It feels good when you do the right thing for others. It feels good when you make someone’s day, by being generous, being kind, being understanding.  

God really wanted me to learn a lesson there on Saturday night; I will tell you how I know that. The next morning as I finished my run at 7am, I grabbed my bag of books out of the passenger floorboard of my car to head into Starbucks and do some writing. As I pulled my bag out, there on the floor sat my black wallet, blending into the interior of my car.

What can we do today, as people, to change others lives, to give of our selves more, to make a positive impact on someone today? What can we do to serve each other and our clients and the world? What can we do…

Love you all, have an amazingly positive and energized week.

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