Real Estate: Let’s Look For The Silver Lining in Rejection

Discipline is a large part in your development as a real estate professional.

As is true with any competitive industry, rejection is going to happen to all real estate agents.

This is true at every stage in the game, from the most green real estate agent just to a 35 year industry veteran like me. There are many, many ways you can experience what, at the time, might feel like failure. A real estate client you thought was loyal to you can abruptly end your business relationship.

Office politics may cause people you used to call friends to distance themselves from you or your very first sale (or any sale you have been diligently working on) could fall through at the last minute. You may not want to hear it, but pitfalls and disappointments like these are unavoidable. Trying to avoid rejection, rather than reacting appropriately to it, is massively counter-intuitive. Hardship will come your way, and always looking over your shoulder for it is about as productive as waiting for a train that is never going to arrive.

Instead, it would behoove stressed out Realtors like ourselves to take a page from Hellenistic philosopher Epictetus.

He believed and emphasized that “virtue is sufficient for happiness” and that being so, we could be immune to misfortune. In other words, he argued that if we know bad things will happen to us, we can dictate our response to them from logic rather than emotion. Epictetus did not think one should “extinguish” emotion, and neither do I, but rather that we deal with them rationally.

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