When a dog is hunting, he is focused on one thing. Whatever it is he is chasing. When that same dog is laying up on the porch of the hunting cabin, he yawns, sleeps and scratches at his fleas. The difference is when he is at idle, he is focused on his problems. The dog that is hunting never stops to scratch his fleas because he is fully engaged in the hunt. In fact, if he is chasing something, he doesn’t even know he has fleas.

Hopefully, you see this story as the metaphor it is intended to be. I am talking about life, jobs, businesses, relationships, finances, church etc. etc. I am talking about how we are in life.

I have hired and trained many hotel brokers over the years. Many of them could have been great, but they never could figure out how to get off the porch. They were always complaining about something that wasn’t going the way they thought it should or they would come up with a 12-step program and form a committee to begin exploring how to fix the problem, all while they were still on the porch scratching and licking themselves. ha

You can see this porch mentality in every office environment that has ever existed. There are doers and then there are whiners. Don’t get me wrong. Some meetings are very important like when the Army wants to meet and go over the strategy before an attack. If you on the front lines, you need to be at that meeting! What I am talking about is the need to meet for meeting sake. John Galbraith said it so well when he said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Put yourself in the hound dog’s mind. He is the happiest when he is doing the thing he does best which is hunting and looking for birds or squirrels. He is the unhappiest when he is at idle and laying up on the porch with nothing to do. We as humans are a lot like dogs in that we need to be doing something to be happy and something we can feel a part of. It can be a job or volunteer work but we all need to be involved and to be in action mode versus porch mode. KT

Disappointments happen to everyone. No one is exempt. The real question is how you move forward when disappointments happen. I don’t have the answer, but I do have some thoughts on the matter.

I remember years ago I was selling a 17-property portfolio of hotels in the Midwest. I was so excited about it that I made a mistake in allowing myself to envision what it will be like closing that transaction and (at the time) the impact the income would make for my family. Well you guessed it, the deal didn’t happen, and I was faced with how to handle the disappointment. I could have rolled around in the muck for days but instead I did the only thing I knew to do. I got on the phone and started going after new business and in doing so, it lessened the pain of the disappointment.

That answer is good for a selling example, but what if the disappointment is about health, life, relationships, financial stress, death, marriage etc. There is a different solution for every situation and in some cases, there is no solution. That said, I believe in all the examples mentioned, you must move forward. There is something about moving forward (as best you can) that emboldens your faith, hope and drive. Hope is a very misunderstood and often mis-underestimated emotion.

This is important… Hope, for the future could be (in my humble opinion) the most cherished, most valuable and most sought-after emotion we can have. See, it is the thing that keeps us going when disappointments come our way. It is what enables us to feel joy, peace and love and allows us to see the world through a lens that offers meaning to our life.

Therefore, we all have disappointments that come our way but the very act, of moving forward, does something inside our soul (hope) that helps restore us. KT

We were interviewing this gentleman recently for a broker slot and we discussed what it meant in our business to be a hunter. It basically means the person that goes out and gets business as compared to the one who wants business to be given to them.

I have been a broker for 29 years and continue to be amazed at how simple the main things are. In our business the most important factor a person can have is the ability to gain the trust of a client and get hired. That’s it. It is that simple. We refer to that person as a hunter. It doesn’t matter what college you went to, where you live, who you married, how well you dress or how fancy your car is. In the most basis terms possible, can you hunt? See, it is the hunters that make it long term in the sales world. Without this one skill in the world of sales. all the rest doesn’t matter.

I have a good friend, actually, several of them that have every single quality they need to be successful in our business, except one. They can’t hunt. They are incredible organizers, writers, speakers, leaders, communicators and they can’t sell their way out of a wet paper bag. The reason is they never learned how to hunt.

When I started I didn’t have any option other than learning how to hunt. Sometimes I believe we coddle (hold their hand) people in hopes that they can learn it, when the best lesson is the one i got on my first day. My boss at the time opened a two-door metal cabinet in which were the books (offering memorandums) for the eight listings the company had at the time. He looked at me and said, and I quote “ok, there it is. If you can learn it, have at it. If you can’t, no hard feelings” and he walked away. You may think I am making this up, but I am not. That was literally my training in about 20 seconds. I got all those offerings memorandums and read them from cover to cover so I would know some basis terms and three days later, I got in my car and stopped at 132 hotels on I-75 until I got some people to talk to.

We may not refer to it as being a hunter, but every line of work from sales, consultant, stock boy, full time parent, pastor to a cashier, all have one thing in common. There are people that learn what needs to be done and then take action and then there are people who always need someone to help them.  Sometimes, getting thrown off the high dive (like I was) can be the best teacher you could possibly have.

A hunter is a person who sees a problem and understands how to fix it and then does his/her best to get it resolved. We all have a hunter living inside of us, but some people never realize it and never act on it. KT