“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung
I once sat across from an agent — let’s call him John — who had every reason to be a top performer. Good scripts. Good habits. A CRM he actually used. And yet he was stuck, quarter after quarter, wondering why agents with half his work ethic were out-earning him.
It took one blunt question from me to crack it open: “John, when was the last time you asked a client why they didn’t list with you?” He couldn’t remember. He’d never asked. He had a blind spot the size of a listing presentation, and it was costing him deals he never even knew he’d lost.
What’s the blind spot you haven’t looked at yet?
The Skill Nobody Trains For
We spend fortunes on scripts, CRMs and lead-gen funnels, and almost nothing on the one capability underneath all of them: self-awareness. Stephen Covey defined it best — self-awareness is “our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions and our habits and tendencies.”
Socrates put it in two words nearly 2,500 years ago: know thyself. The advice hasn’t aged because the problem hasn’t gone away.
Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s research found that while 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. Put another way: roughly 80% of us are lying to ourselves about ourselves. In an industry built on reading people, that’s a dangerous number to be inside of.
Feeling this one? You don’t have to figure it out alone — book a free High Performance Call and let’s talk through where you’re at.
Why the Best Get Better While Everyone Else Repeats Themselves
In Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin describes a study of figure skaters that I bring up with every agent I coach: sub-elite skaters spent most of their practice time on jumps they could already land. The skaters who went on to win Olympic medals spent their time on the jumps that made them fall down — the ones they hadn’t mastered yet.
That’s the entire gap between agents who plateau and agents who compound. It’s not talent. It’s whether you’re willing to see, clearly and without flinching, the exact spot where you keep falling down.
Michelangelo said it better than any of us could: “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.”
Three Places to Start
- Get feedback from others. Ask your last five lost clients one honest question: why didn’t you choose me? Then sit with the answer instead of explaining it away.
- Get profiled. Tools like the Enneagram, DISC, CliftonStrengths or Myers-Briggs won’t tell you who you are, but they will show you the patterns you can’t see from inside your own head.
- Journal it out. Ten minutes at the end of each day, writing down what actually happened versus what you told yourself happened, is the cheapest coaching you’ll ever get.
Take action: Run a personal SWOT this week — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — and don’t let yourself write a weakness you’ve already forgiven.
This is the starting line of what I call Radical Ownership: you cannot take ownership of a blind spot you refuse to look at. Self-awareness isn’t a soft skill. It’s the first and most expensive skill you’ll ever underinvest in.
If you’re ready to find out what you’ve been missing, book a free High Performance Call.
About Jet Xavier
Jet Xavier is a High Performance mindset and accountability coach who works with real estate agents, principals and team leaders to build sustainable, high-performing careers. Learn more about Jet.
This piece began as a column for Elite Agent — you can read the original here.
