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Act Your Way Through Uncomfortable Situations
By, Corey Wells

One of the best ways to overcome any uncomfortable situation and improve your mindset is to become a great actor. This doesn’t mean trying to be the next Paul Newman. But rather, visualize the person you would like to be and act like that person would.

Whenever you are giving a listing presentation you’ll be considered an expert. The potential client is looking to you as the agent who knows how to sell their house. As such, you must present yourself with the appearance of an expert. The primary way you do this is to project self-confidence.

Of course, the more prepared you are, the more self-confident you’ll appear. However, it’s not unusual for unprepared agents to project extreme self-confidence, while highly prepared agents project a clear lack of self-confidence. The objective is to get prepared and project self-confidence. But even if you’re thoroughly prepared, you can still feel insecure. This could be due to the pressure of getting the listing, a general fear of speaking, the attitude of the prospect, or some other reason. Irrespective of the reason, you must be capable of putting it aside and make the potential client believe that you are very self-confident.

So if this is your first presentation and you’re not feeling very self-confident, what do you do? How can you project self-confidence when you have none? The answer revolves around one important fact; you don’t have to be self-confident; you only have to act self-confident. While your eventual goal is to actually be self-confident, in the short-term you only need to take command of the presentation in a way that makes the client believe you are very confident in your abilities.

Let’s look at this closer. You are in a listing presentation and you really want to get the deal, but you’re feeling uncomfortable about the situation. Immediately ask yourself what you would do if you were the self-confident person you desire to be. Quickly change your body posture to match that of a self-confident person, change the tone and pace of your voice to talk like a self-confident person. The easiest way to do this if you can control your body actions. Try the following:

Stand up straight – Nothing communicates insecurity better than a person with a slouched posture. Imagine there is a string attached to the top of your head gently pulling your body upward. Now imagine the string being released and let your body relax, but don’t fall back into the slouched position. Hold your head upright and maintain a tall upright posture.

Open your body – A subtle way people communicate insecurity is by closing their bodies. This involves crossing their arms, putting their hands in their pockets, turning slightly away from the client, or hiding behind something. Stand up straight and make a self-conscious effort to keep your body open.

Project your voice – This takes a little practice. The most self-confident person in the world will still sound less confident if they can’t be heard. In addition to sounding insecure, the message you are trying to send will be lost if no one can hear what you say. You need to practice until you can comfortably project your voice so that you can be clearly heard in the back of a room. A quite voice projects insecurity and a powerful voice communicates self-confidence, even if you’re scared out of your wits!

Slow down – Speaking and moving quickly creates the appearance of a lack of confidence. Most people speed things up when they’re afraid. It looks like they are trying to finish their presentation as quick as possible so they can just get through it. Try to slow down both your movements and delivery in order to project a self-confident image.

The above techniques, while they permit you to “fake-it” and appear self-confident when you’re not, will also tend to make you actually feel self-confident. In fact, when using the above techniques to act self-confident, you will find your actual self-confidence increase. You’ll in affect start developing self-confidence from the “outside-in.”

(c) 2008 Leading Example Enterprises Inc.

Corey Wells, is the founder of Leading Example Coaching which offers Real Estate Agent Coaching, Books, Audio, Scripts, Packages, Software & More.
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This article was originally posted on LeadingExample.com/Blog

Tags:   Listing Presentation · Real Estate Agent · REALTOR · Role Play · Self-Confidence · Uncomforatable SituationsNo Comments