Experiment

Once upon a time, I ran an experiment with the universe.

.

Early in my real estate career, the movie ‘The Secret’ came out. The ideas resonated with me immediately, and I decided to put them to the test.

The experiment was vibrantly specific.

A buyer would appear out of the blue. This person would find me, we’d connect at our first meeting, and there would be an immediate sense of trust. We’d jump straight into finding a home around $700,000, identify the right one on our first day out, write an offer, get it accepted and pull off a fast closing.

Most importantly, everyone involved would have a great experience.

Getting juicy with the details was fun. For a while, the experience existed vividly enough in my imagination that I could know what having it would feel like.

Then came the part that mattered just as much.

I let it go.

No beating the visualization to death with logistics, explanations or attempts to force reality to comply.

All right, universe. Dazzle me.

Soon after, the phone rang.

The call came from a first-time buyer eager to find a home, who had discovered my tiny advertisement among a block of sixteen Realtors in a local publication.

We met on a Friday and connected immediately. He trusted me, was ready to move and wanted to get started.

His home loan preapproval was $700,000.

Well, this was interesting.

Saturday we went looking for his house. Before the day was over, we’d found one he liked and written an offer, but the seller accepted another buyer’s offer.

So much for following the visualization exactly.

Sunday morning, we went back out and found a house he liked even better. We wrote an offer that afternoon, and this one was accepted.

Ten days later, the deal closed.

The process went smoothly, and everyone was happy, especially my client, who had gotten the house he really wanted.

Even the rejected offer turned out to be a gift. I knew the listing agent, and she later told me the deal with the buyer who got that first house had become an absolute nightmare.

What looked like the one thing that had gone wrong had spared my client and me from the whole mess.

At the end of those ten days, I had this wonderful sense of, “Wow. This really works!”

In hindsight, though, another part of the story seems far more important: the conditions for that experiment had been taking shape long before ‘The Secret’ ever entered my world.

Real estate in the San Jose area was crowded and intensely competitive, and as a newer Realtor working primarily with first-time buyers, I had a front-row seat to how other agents operated.

Some Realtors practically frothed at the mouth when a potential client appeared.

A prospect would walk through the door and suddenly they were predators circling prey, already calculating the commission before they knew anything about the human being standing in front of them.

Commission breath oozed off them, and I found the whole thing repulsive.

I wanted no part of it.

My job was to help people get what they wanted—to understand their dreams and goals, then do everything in my power to help make them happen.

That outcome got my focus and attention, and people could feel it.

My new business took off quickly.

Fairly early in my career, I had seven escrows closing in a single month. Other Realtors in the office were calculating the transaction amounts and commission percentages before I had even calculated my own income.

While they were adding up my commissions, my attention was on getting seven clients successfully through their transactions.

Commission breath isn’t limited to real estate.

It’s the energy of focusing on what you can get from someone instead of what you can help them create.

And that’s where this old experiment gets far more interesting to me now.

By the time that $700,000 buyer appeared, I was already being the kind of Realtor I had imagined would meet him. The visualization didn’t create that version of me. I was already doing the work.

Then ‘The Secret’ gave me another variable to play with: What happens when you experience the desired outcome internally before there’s any physical evidence of it?

That part was delicious.

Get juicy with the vision. Feel what having it feels like. Enjoy it before there’s any evidence that it exists.

Then let it go and allow the universe to dazzle you.

I couldn’t control how the buyer would find me, when the phone would ring or what route we would take to the closing table. Even the rejected offer—the one apparent deviation from my grand little experiment—ended up working in our favor.

That was never my part to control.

My part was to ‘be it’ first.

Do the work. Become the person. Bring the energy.

Then get out of the way long enough for life to do something you never could have scripted.

That’s the experiment I’m playing with again now.

 

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