“People need to understand that success at the top level is 80% mindset and 20% skill set.” — Stephen Bock, Australia’s 61st Everest summiteer
John had every certification, every script, every piece of technical training the industry offers. He still wasn’t converting. When I finally sat down with him, it took about ten minutes to figure out why: his internal dialogue was working against every skill he’d paid to learn.
If mindset really does account for four times as much of your results as skill, how much of your training budget has actually gone toward it?
Stinking Thinking Is Real
Zig Ziglar had a name for it decades ago: “stinkin’ thinkin'” — the negative self-talk that quietly produces a bad attitude, procrastination, and low motivation, all while looking, from the outside, like a skills problem. Most agents try to fix a mindset issue with more scripts. It rarely works, because the scripts were never the bottleneck.
Stephen Bock’s line has stayed with me since I first heard it, because he wasn’t talking about sales at all — he was talking about climbing Everest. The ratio holds anywhere the margin for error is thin and the conditions are outside your control.
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.
Two Mindsets Worth Building On Purpose
The first is solution-focused thinking: instead of dwelling on what went wrong, ask “what’s the best I can do in this situation right now?” It’s a small linguistic shift that changes your entire nervous system’s response to a setback.
The second is abundance over scarcity. Scarcity thinking sees a shrinking pie and gets reactive and defensive. Abundance thinking sees more opportunity than you currently have the capacity to chase — and it’s simply a more accurate read of most real estate markets, most of the time.
Take action:
- Catch one piece of “stinkin’ thinkin'” today and rewrite it as a solution-focused question.
- Notice where you default to scarcity language — “there’s nothing on the market,” “no one’s buying” — and replace it with what’s actually still possible.
- Treat your mindset like a muscle: train it daily, not just when a deal falls through.
This is the exact ratio we work from inside High Performance coaching — building the 80% most agents never train. If you’re ready to close the gap, 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.
