What’s up everyone and welcome to another episode of Become A Local Leader. Today we actually have a returning guest. It’s exciting to bring him back because he’s going through the next evolution in his life, his career, where he’s still doing real estate, but he’s now adding coach. Welcome back to the show, Arnold Hickey!
He now from all his years knows that with his background, his experience, and partnership with this really well-done program, he can become a life and business coach for others to help them get from A to B. If you’re into life hacks, mindset, goal setting, living a great life, and have a great career, and how to figure out how to make it all happen at once, you’ll learn a lot from Mr. Arnold Hickey.
Meet Arnold Hickey – Our Featured Local Leader
What are some of the changes that are happening in your life and career right now?
I’ve always loved doing real estate. Helping people and that sort of thing. But one of the other parts of my real estate career as well, being a broker and owner of a couple of different brokerages and owning a mortgage lending company as well is really helping and supporting the people, the agents themselves, and helping them grow. And just seeing the success that comes from that, that’s always been the highlight.
I knew when I got to this age of my life or the stage, I would do more coaching and less real estate. And so, that’s really what’s been happening. I sourced out. We put together this great program that we have that really helps agents really do more, be more, and have more.
I guess, putting it into a nutshell, with the program that we have. And I can assure you that people will be able to gain more and have more and achieve more in 90 days, and most people can in 12 months. And that’s my commitment. I love helping the agents achieve those things.
Please outline to people what is the Mens Sana Program all about. How did you figure it out and get into it?
Mens Sana is Latin for “Healthy Mind”. One of the things that I’d really like in dealing with real estate agents, some people go out and they have great success and apply the principles and some don’t. Why is that? I found that there were a few parts that were just missing.
I came across this program, it’s actually brought up out of Australia. I bought the rights to this program and brought it up here to North America. We cover goals, commitment. We talk about self-analysis.
If we’re going to get in your car and drive across Canada or across the United States, you’re going to go to let’s say Miami or Toronto, or wherever it is, you have a point of reference in your GPS. That is where you are now, today. That’s what the Mens Sana Program and the self-analysis all about as well as finding out who you are and where you are today. So that we can build the blocks in place to be able to achieve to bring you to where you would like to go.
We can all say I have a vision. “This is what I want to achieve in the next 90 days or the next 12 months.” But it’s bringing that vision into the here and now today. Focusing on “what do I need to do today?” and “What do I need to do daily to be able to achieve my goal?”
Why that program versus making your own? Did you look at some others?
I did. It’s a great question too. When I was first looking and starting to go down this path, literally after 20 years of being in the business, not 20 years but at least eight to 10 years of being professionally coached myself. I had filing cabinets full of materials from the conferences I had attended. I could build something and put programs together, which then has to evolve. They have to be tried, tested, proven, edited. It takes many years to do that. When I came across this company, they’ve been around for 30 years. This Mens Sana Program was seven years in the making to put it together to where it is today. It landed really on the perfect time because here we are now in COVID time and everything changes.
And so, that’s what it’s really taking off and is literally helped thousands and thousands of people all over the world in these uncertain times that we’re in. I was there. Tried, proven, and true. You know what? It was just a no brainer for me. It’s a plug and play for me to be able to bring it out.
What are some of the signs of an unhealthy mind? What are some of the signs and symptoms that you see?
That’s a good point and you hit the nail as well. Most of us and I’ll include myself in this as well. We talked about saying Mens Sana means “Healthy mind”. So, if it’s going to bring you into a healthy mind and it must be an unhealthy mind. Most of us don’t know, we’re not aware. I mean, our current reality is what we have created over all of our years. I always say when we were born, we were born with two fears. Only two fears. The fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. That’s all we had. So, what happened from that day until today?
One of the things that I find with a lot of people and myself included as well, I’m not immune to any of this kind of stuff, is that we are driven by our past experiences. And so then, how do we take that which is some of it is good. Some of it is great. Some of it is not so good. We all have good and bad in our past but how do we shut that down? How do we move beyond living in that past?
I’ll give you a really quick example. I used to travel a lot when I was in the corporate world, back before real estate. I had a guy, an acquaintance of mine, I was flying home one Friday, and I was changing airplanes. We bumped into each other at the airport, he was heading home as well, and said, “Larry, how was your week? How’s everything going?” I’m just trying to have a conversation. And he said, “Oh my gosh, my week was just unbelievable. It started off Monday morning and really went downhill from there. And it just kept getting worse all week.”
What I knew about Larry was that 25 years ago, he had had a failure in business. It was catastrophic in his life. He lost pretty much everything he had. But that experience that he had gone through unbeknownst to him is still driving him today. It’s still affecting him today. That’s a catastrophic business failure, but even things that pile up over the years we’re not aware of is how do we take all of those experiences, become more aware of them, and say, “Okay. Now, what can I do to move on from that? And what can I do today to really develop the vision that I want to bring it into the now and put the building blocks and the steps in place to go on and achieve the things that I want to achieve?” And that’s really the biggest part of it all.
A lot of people, we don’t know that we have an unhealthy mind. We are what we are. Everything we thought, did, and said, and didn’t do from our past made up to where we are today.
Some people are not really open-minded and is not coachable. They may deny it a lot of times and that make things even worst. What are some things that you’d be able to say that?
I’ve probably been one of those people. Maybe I am today too. Who knows? We all are. What we need to do is get a clear understanding, a clear goal, as to really what it is we want to achieve. That’s the big thing is we have to create that vision. We’ve all read and heard the books, whatever the mind can see and believe it can achieve. Shakespeare said that the world is a play. And we are the players in the world. So, the world is really a scene, our world that we’re working in. We are the players in the scene. If we don’t like the results we’re getting we have to make a change.
I was like that at one point in my life. I didn’t like the results that I was getting wasn’t achieving. The income didn’t have the family life, didn’t have the things that I wanted in my life. We have the ability to rewrite the script. We all have the ability to write the script so that we can achieve whatever it is that we want to achieve in our lives. That’s what we can do.
Here’s one point I’ll bring out is that 95% of the people that attend a conference, they go there motivated, they’re excited and they leave there. They have a new lease on life. And then, 30 days later, they’re carrying on the same way.
Now, why is that? There’s five or maybe even 10% that really go and make changes and say, “I come to this conference. I invested this time. Here are the things that I’m going to do differently.” They put these plans in place and the steps in place to go on and do that. That’s what we all should be doing. It’s easy to go and listen to some speaker or read a book and get excited. But what changes am I prepared to make? It has to come from the inside out. Not from the outside in.
It’s Q4 right now and everyone is goal setting and business planning. How do you go about goal setting? Everyone’s got their own little spin on it. From your experience, what do you find is the best practice for goal setting? What’s a great way for them to be goal setting right now?
Although we’ll say we’re in the perfect time of year, in my real estate career, we’re already 30 days late.
I’ll start with this. Here’s what I always did in my real estate business. My year always started on December 1st and end on November 30th. Any business that I write in December is going to close in 2021. Probably a slim chance it will close in 2020. So that’s why I always made my business plan there. So, now I had 12 full months to achieve what I want to achieve. Not 11.
I was guilty of this when I first got into real estate as well. I’m coming back from a conference. First time I had been to one. I’ve seen the big picture as to really what I could achieve. So, now it is the second week of February. Six weeks are gone. December is anything I close there. I have nine and a half months to achieve what I want to achieve in that year. So anyway, I set my goals, did my things.
But in goal setting, here’s what I believe first off that everybody should identify as a little self-analysis first. They teach this at Harvard. Do the SWOT analysis. What are my strengths? You need to know those. What are my weaknesses? What are my opportunities? And what are my threats? Okay, that’s the SWOT analysis. Everybody should do a SWOT analysis on themselves and their business every year. You need to know what your strengths are, you need to know what your weaknesses are.
If I’m weak in this area, am I going to try and bolt through it and do it myself, or is it something that I can arm out, hire out, and do what I am good at? Or is my weakness that I have that I’ve identified now? Or is that something that I need to put some energy into and maybe become stronger? It could be any of the above. There’s no right or wrong. It’s whatever it is for you. What are my opportunities out there?
Here’s one. I heard Tony Robbins say this just a few days ago. He says, “You know what? The center for disease control did not call me up and asked me my opinion as to what we should do for this COVID pandemic we’re in right now. That’s not in my wheelhouse. So, don’t go there. Don’t worry about the pandemic.”
We got a big election happening in the US right now. It’s November 5th right now and my phone’s not ringing asking my opinion. That’s not in my wheelhouse to fix. The threat is both of those things are for me to get mentally tied up into them. That’s an example of one. What I need to do is identify that and then I have to have some steps in place to make sure that my mind doesn’t go there. Threats can be just market conditions. It can be a lot of things but in identifying all of those.
Now, you can still come back and say, ”Okay. These are our threats but what are my opportunities?” That’s what I love. I’m so proud to be a part of Parkbench. What are my opportunities that are really easy right now? I’d say, in a shut down if we had one, which we don’t, but if we did, we can build all our relationships. We have a tool that we can do all this right from home. We don’t have to leave home. And the people we’re talking to, they don’t have to leave home either. We can do it all right there. We can continue to build relationships.
If you check your stats in any real estate boards, I promise you, this week there have been sales. This week there has been new listings come on the market. If your name’s not on it, you need to say, “Where’s my opportunity?” Parkbench is a phenomenal opportunity to do that.
In business planning, that’s really important, to spend the most amount of time just on that and work through all of those things. So, now we know. We’re setting the mark. We have a foundation and we can clearly see what direction we’re going to go in. And then, I go on and say, “Okay. From that point, what is my income goal? What do I want to earn this year? What’s my average transaction sale? What’s my commission on each transaction?”
I will drill it right down to how many contacts I need to make today to hit that goal in 12 months. And when I make those contacts today at the end of the week, okay, did I hit my mark? Did I hit my mark yesterday? If I said that I had to do 10 or 15 calls yesterday, did I do 15 or did I do 10? If I do 10, I need to do 20 tomorrow because I missed the mark. So, you always have to hit your numbers. That is your non-negotiable. If you really want to grow and have a phenomenal 2021, you must always hit your daily mark. And then, relook at those. Every two weeks you want to be redoing your numbers and making sure you’re hitting your targets.
I always say “What is your matrix? What are your contacts you make to actual appointments you go on to actually getting contracts signed?” You need to get all of those all laid out. You need to go through all of those steps, have all of that, and then look at it every month. “Did I make the sales I said I would make based on the contacts I did?” And if you’re not, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that the world is falling.”
Here’s the biggest mistake that everybody makes. They set all this plan, then they take a look at it 2, 3, 4 weeks into it and say, “Oh my gosh, I’m not hitting it anyway so I’ll just throw it up.” Don’t do that. Just read it. It’s like, “Okay. I said, I was going to do five sales this month. And I was going to make this many contacts a day.” Maybe you’re making those contacts. Here’s the beauty of this. Maybe you’re making the contacts but you’re not getting the results you should be getting. So, now in the next month, you’re going to say I need to go back and take a look and say, how can I build this back up?
My average when I was going on my listing appointment to actually get a contract signed was 3.8 times at a buy, which was a really good average. If you’re going five out of five, you are cherry-picking your appointments. I was stretching on every single one. And when I was watching my numbers and making sure I was there, I was hitting those numbers.
Let’s say someone sets their goals and they start making their plan. And then, as soon as they start, they start having those resistance blockers. How do you help realtors get over that?
We fall back. I’ve been guilty of it as well. We fall back. Even though we have the plans and we want to make the change and want to do it, we even start out to do it… And then, we find out it’s a little more difficult than we thought. I mean, we’re walking into a new area. Especially with Parkbench. Somebody joins Parkbench, and it’s a new area for them. It all looks good, sounds good. And it is. It is good! But there are steps you need to take. There’s work that you need to do. There’s no magic pill. You put the steps in place and do it.
Now, I find what holds people back is uncertainty. They’re going off into an area that they’re not aware of, and they haven’t been here before. Everybody likes certainty in their life. They all like certitude. When they’re not, then we tend to go in a different direction and fall back. What we need to do is set the goals. I find that we set the goals but the goals are the wrong goals. They don’t have our clearly defined action step to achieve the things that they want to achieve.
That’s the biggest thing right there. So, this is my goal – I’m joining Parkbench. This is my goal – this is the revenue that I want to get in 2021 off of my Parkbench efforts. Now, what does that really mean that I need to do today? If that goal says, I have to do this many interviews a week and that’s achievable, then we do that and we build those relationships.
As we go along, maybe in the first month, you may have a lot of business come from it, you may not have any. But there are things that you have to take a look at and say, “Okay. I’ve made these 40 some contacts, 50 some contacts here in the last 30 days. I haven’t gotten any business out of it.” So maybe we want to call up our coach and say, what am I doing wrong? How can I do better? And we always want to be striving with how we can do better. You can turn those activities around and make sure that you are getting results from them.
Let’s say they don’t get results quickly. They then start having the thoughts of, “I don’t think building relationships over zoom work.” “I don’t think people even want to talk right now because of COVID.” “I can’t blog. I can’t do this.” What are some of the things that you do to correct that?
One of the things that I remember when I first got into Parkbench, I went through exactly what you were saying. “Who wants to talk to me anyway? I mean, gosh. I’m not getting business from this.” It’s all that negative thinking. It starts to go through our heads. It’s there. It’s alive and well.
Where do they come from? They come out of our past. It’s like when we get up in the morning, somebody pressed a metaphorical tape player that plays a 15-minute endless tape over and over in our head as to what we can achieve and what we can’t do. What we can and can’t do. So, what I did was when those thoughts come into my head, boom, I replaced them with “I can do this”. I pick up the phone and start calling people or send out emails. Do the things that are required. Look at the process as to how we gain business.
Just look at Parkbench, as an example. How do we gain business? How do we gain people to do interviews with? That’s where it all starts. Look at those steps. I say, “I can do one.” And I send one out and I’m like, “Okay. That message turned out okay. That wasn’t too difficult. You know what, I think I’m going to send out 15 more.” And I would send out 15 more. And then, guess what happened the next day. I checked my email and I’ve got all these responses. I guess I’m doing some interviews. But when the thoughts start to come into our head, we have to stop it. And that’s what we talk about a lot in our Mens Sana Program. We’re talking about coming back to a healthy mind again when those negative thoughts start to come into our heads.
It’s like this here. You’re going to picture this. You’re going down the highway and you come to a construction zone. What do you see? A flag person out there. The flag person has a sign up that says stop. When that stinking thinking, I call it that negative thinking starts to come into our head, you got to think about that red flag person standing out there. You don’t put your foot to the floor and plow through them. You stop because there’s danger ahead. So, you need to recognize that in your own mind that there’s danger ahead if I’m thinking this way.
I’ve just made this investment. I’ve got to get the return out of it. I know that it is going to work. I got a picture of this here as a red flag moment and stop. What am I going to put back in my mind that is going to be productive and creative and be able to go out and achieve the things that I need to achieve? We have to be aware of those things that are going on in our minds. That’s what we would do.
What are some of the substance and the detail that comes with the Mens Sana Program if they were to work with you through it?
The first thing that we do, this is kind of new into this program as well, we start off with what we call the “Ikigai”. It’s a Japanese term for inner strength. We need to build our inner strength. We talk about inner strength and kind of learn a little bit about that right off the bat. You can’t do anything unless you have goals. We set our goals right off the bat. and that’s a bonus session that we do. It’s really not a part of the program but everybody has to set goals. They have to have goals. Then we go into commitment.
What does it mean to be committed to something? I think about a brain surgeon. When he goes to work, is he committed? I would hope he is! A cardiologist, is he committed? He’s going to go and do open-heart surgery. I hope he’s committed! Is an airline pilot committed? You better make sure that they had a good night’s rest and they are on their A-Game today! Our clients want that from us. Our families want that from us.
I told a lot of people when they come to me and they are thinking about getting their real estate license. I said, “This is really what it means. And this is what you need to be committed to doing. If you’re not committed to do this right now or make this step, don’t get into the business. It’s not for you. Don’t put your families through that misery.” Most of them would join. I would put them through the training programs that I had and they would be super successful but they had to do the steps. They had to do the things that were required to get the result that they wanted. You have to do it now. You have to be committed. We talk about those things. We go through in-depth what it means to be committed.
And then, we look at the other side. On the other side, what does a non-committed person do? What’s the thought process if it’s in a non-committed. Indecisiveness, indecision, all of those things. We go through all of those kinds of things.
And then, we go into procrastination. The thing about procrastination is we can be procrastinators and we don’t even know we’re procrastinators. With the majority of us, myself included. We need to understand procrastination and where it comes from. What is behind that? There are four causes of procrastination. We go through them all in-depth to make sure that there’s no procrastination going on throughout the program.
And then we go into mental barriers. What are the mental barriers? What’s going on in our minds? We’re not talking about somebody that has a really unhealthy mind. I have been married for a good number of years. We go to marriage counseling. It’s not necessarily to help a bad marriage get better. It can be to help a good marriage get gooder. (If I can say it that way.) It’s going to help a good mind get even better, right? No matter what level you’re at, we can all grow because we use such a really small part of our mind anyway. I mean, it helps all those things. Attitude, assertiveness.
How can people get in touch with you if they want to talk to you, learn more about this?
I’ll give you my email address and my phone number. My email address is Arnold@AccordCSI.com. My phone number is (602) 777-1020. I’m on my phone. Text and email all day long. I’ll get back to you fairly quickly. Check out my Parkbench site here.
If you want to get good at business, mindset, and living a good life where you feel at peace, the stuff like what our Local Leader Arnold Hickey is doing can be super helpful. If you want to learn more from experts who have built great businesses in their communities just like Arnold, don’t forget to subscribe to the show and podcast.