These PERSPECTIVES will reassure you, you are right on track.
There is a strange thing that happens when you become successful. Your best year stops being an achievement and quietly becomes the measuring stick for everything that comes after it. Eventually, if you’re not careful, it becomes a weapon. I see this constantly right now in real estate. I talk to incredibly successful agents and team leaders who are doing objectively well in an incredibly difficult market, yet they genuinely believe they’re failing. They’ll tell me, “I’m down 20%.” My first question is always the same: Down from what? Almost inevitably, they’re comparing themselves to their best year ever.
Think about how crazy that is. We don’t compare ourselves to our first year. We don’t compare ourselves to the average agent. We don’t even compare ourselves to what would constitute excellent performance in the market we’re operating in today. Top performers compare themselves to the greatest version of themselves they have ever produced. Your record year becomes your expectation. Your peak becomes your baseline. And suddenly anything below extraordinary starts to feel like failure.
An athlete would understand how ridiculous this is immediately. Imagine having the race of your life. Perfect preparation, perfect weather, perfect health, perfect course. Everything comes together and you set a personal best. Nobody would reasonably expect you to reproduce that exact performance every Saturday for the rest of your life. Yet that is exactly what we do in business. Some agents had career years during historically unusual real estate conditions. Money was cheap. Buyers were everywhere. Homes moved quickly. Consumer confidence was different. Lead conversion was different. Then the terrain changed, but our internal scoreboard didn’t.
So now you’re standing in a completely different market, looking at an old personal record and asking, What the hell happened to me? Maybe nothing happened to you. Maybe the conditions changed. And before somebody mistakes that for excuse-making, it isn’t. Top performers hate excuses. So do I. But there is a massive difference between making excuses and understanding the race you’re actually in. You cannot intelligently evaluate performance without context.
If your market is down 25% and you’re down 5%, you may not have shrunk at all. You may have taken market share. If transactions are harder to find, consumers are taking longer to make decisions and conversion requires twice the follow-up, maintaining your production may actually represent an enormous improvement in your ability. But your brain doesn’t necessarily calculate that. It sees the number from your best year, sees today’s number and says: You’re losing.
That is the mindgame of high performance. The better you become, the more impressive your reference point becomes. The first $250,000 year was unbelievable until $250,000 became unacceptable. The first 100 transactions called for champagne until 87 felt catastrophic. The stage you once dreamed about eventually becomes the stage you judge by the size of the audience. We have this incredible ability to turn our trophies into measuring sticks and then turn them on ourselves.
I don’t think the answer is lowering our standards. Fuck that. I think the answer is getting smarter about what we measure. Instead of constantly asking, “Did I beat my best year?”, maybe the better question is, “How well am I performing in the race I’m actually in?” Those are radically different questions, and right now they produce radically different answers.
The people who wining right now mentally and business wise are not the ones desperately trying to recreate whatever year is framed on their office wall. They are the ones who understand that the course changed. Maybe winning now means taking market share while competitors retreat. Maybe it means doubling database conversations because conversion has changed. Maybe it means learning AI before everyone else catches up, recruiting talent while everyone else is hiding, or finally building the systems you didn’t need when business came easily.
And maybe we need to redefine what a “best year” actually means. The greatest year of your career may not be the year you did the most transactions or made the most money. It might be the year the market got brutally difficult and you refused to become smaller with it. The year you became sharper, more disciplined, more adaptable and dramatically better at what you do.
So if you’ve been unusually hard on yourself lately, look at the scoreboard you’re using. There may be nothing wrong with your performance. You may simply be competing against a record set by a different version of you, on a completely different course, in completely different conditions.
Your best year should be evidence of what you’re capable of. It was never supposed to become evidence that you’re failing.
SOURCE, MARY ANNE GILLESPIE, FOUNDER RED APPLE COACHING
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