Why You LOSE MONEY When You Worry

Growth / Carla Thompson
Why You LOSE MONEY When You Worry

Why You LOSE MONEY When You Worry

by Carla Thompson

 

What?

 

What do you mean I lose money if I worry?

 

Often in coaching, I have asked real estate agents how “worrying” helps them. Now that might seem odd because we would likely guess that worrying creates a lot of negativity. AND IT DOES! And yet, people worry all the time.

 

After the agents think about it a bit, they usually give answers like this:

“It helps me stay on top of things.”

“It helps me think through how to keep deals together if I am thinking about how the buyers/sellers will react.”

“I won’t forget things.”

“I stay in control.”

 

To some extent, their answers are true. Worrying can get us to focus and think. The problem is that worrying has negative emotions tied to the thinking process. We all know that the word “worry” has negative connotations. So why is this bad? Or is it good?

 

It is BAD.

 

“Negative thinking is self-perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop. But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision-making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person’s propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words—like poverty, illness, and death—also stimulate the brain in negative ways.  And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world.

 

Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry—perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival, “ reports Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman.

 

This seems crazy! We are hard-wired to worry. Well, then what do we do?

 

One thing is for sure—worry decreases our actual productivity. Negative emotional states keep us from best utilizing the powerful thinking that occurs in the executive functioning part of our brain—the prefrontal cortex.

 

In other words, it’s hard to think clearly and be creative in problem-solving when our negative emotions are driving our mental processing.

 

Occasionally if agents do not quite understand what worrying is “costing” them in the business, I will have them work through a simple activity of tracking their time usage during the week. An agent once noted that he had to leave the office three times in a week to “go blow off some steam” as clients were difficult and deals were complicated. What that meant was that he left the office at 3:00 to “call it a day.” Does that example seem normal to you? (Hope not!)

 

Another agent who was juggling three times the volume of this agent was happy on the coaching the call that week—telling me that she had five million in sales go south and yet she wasn’t seemingly down about it. I asked her how she dealt with the losses. She said, “It’s all in a week of real estate. Most deals stick. Some don’t. Lose one—go get two more. I focus each week on the success of driving new leads. As long as I am doing that, I am feeding my business. And when deals simply cannot stay together no matter how well we are leading the clients through complexity, I just know—I did my best and it wasn’t the right outcome for all. We move on quickly and more toward the goals of helping our clients find the best properties for them.”

 

The second agent has a practice of not allowing the challenges of the real estate career to linger such that she gets stuck in negative emotions. She certainly feels the momentary sting when things are not working out however, she recognizes her feelings and taps into her logical thinking to put things in a perspective quickly—a perspective, I might add, that allows her to see that she needs to keep herself on point with doing the right activities daily in business and keeping her clients’ best interests in the forefront at all times. These perspectives are stabilizing.

 

If you would like to work on practices that also allow you to put worry at bay, we would love to coach you and support you in learning new approaches. Every now and then an agent will ask, “How do I measure the ROI on coaching?” Great question! I simply say, “It easily correlates to the new practices/approaches you will learn; we have years of concrete data to substantiate the changes and the increases in income.”

Stop worrying. Start increasing your income!

Raise your game.

 

 

Reference

One thought on “Why You LOSE MONEY When You Worry”

  1. Tami Raines - August 15, 2019 at 4:26 pm

    This is all so true! Also, worry creates certain hormones in the brain in which the body becomes addicted to. When we make a deliberate decision to stop worrying, change our behavior our bodies can actually have withdrawal symptoms. Our cells continue to call out for that particular chemical our brain was creating. Our brain says “so the thought that created the hormone was worry. I need to worry.” Nasty cycle but it can be broken by different actions and different thoughts.

    Love your articles Carla! Hope all is well

    Reply ↓

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