What Do You Do on the Days You Do Not Feel Like It?

Every agent has a version of the same day. The work is in the diary, the list has not changed, and the willingness to do any of it is simply not there. Nothing has gone wrong. It is just one of those mornings.

What happens next is rarely decided on the morning itself. It is decided by whatever rule you have been working to, written or not, for months.

The problem is not the mood

Low days are not unusual and they are not a character flaw. They arrive in every kind of work, and they are not evidence that you have chosen the wrong career or that something needs fixing.

The difficulty is that most agents have no rule for them. The decision about what to do gets made at eight in the morning by the person least equipped to make it, which is the version of you who does not want to do any of it. Left there, the decision goes the same way most times.

What your record actually shows

This is worth checking rather than assuming. Look back over the last month and find the days where your planned prospecting or follow up did not happen. Not the days you were ill or away. The ordinary ones.

How many were there, and what happened on each of them instead? Some agents discover there were two. Others find there were nine, which is a different business entirely, and no amount of planning on the good days will compensate for it.

Look as well at what the pattern is attached to. Some agents find their flat days cluster after a disappointment, a lost listing or a sale that fell through. Others find they follow a run of long days. From the inside, on the morning itself, the two feel identical, and they are not the same thing at all. One is a reaction worth examining and the other is simply the bill for a week that was badly built.

The useful idea is a minimum, not a push

Trying harder on a flat day is advice that sounds reasonable and works poorly, because it depends on the one resource that is currently missing.

A minimum works differently. It is a version of the day that is small enough to be done without enthusiasm and still counts as having shown up. Half the calls rather than none. Thirty minutes rather than two hours. One conversation rather than a full session. The number matters less than the fact that it was decided in advance, by somebody in a better state than the person who has to carry it out.

Deciding in advance is the whole of it

A rule agreed with yourself on a good Tuesday is a different thing from a judgement made on a bad Thursday. It removes the negotiation, and the negotiation is where most of these days are lost.

It also changes what a bad day costs. If the minimum is honoured, the week survives a flat day without a story attached to it, and there is nothing to make up for and nothing to feel guilty about on Friday. If there is no minimum, every low day becomes a small debt, and the debts are what eventually turn into a quiet quarter.

A question to sit with this week

What is your current rule for a day when you do not feel like it, stated plainly? And if you cannot state one, what does the last month suggest your rule has actually been?

Taking this further

If you would like to set a minimum you would genuinely keep, and be held to it, you can book a discovery call and we will work through it together.