The journey from a newbie on Active Rain to becoming an Ambassador has been one of the most engaging and rewarding happenings of my entire life. By no means has my life been dull so don't get the wrong idea here. My life of over a half of a century has seen many things that most people will never see. I have been down roads many want to go and many would never want to embark upon as well as roads wherein I wish I had no part of. 

 Joining back in 2007 has made me one of the long time survivors on this great island where we enjoy the downpours of rain, where we embrace the rain that fills us up with the best research in the field of real estate in the world and where challenges are met with a tribe that surrounds themselves with friendship and outpouring of support. The immunity idol that we win on Active Rain shields us from being voted out of the real estate business if we choose to embrace all of its' great rewards.

I was going to write a post about how Active Rain saved my career yet this contest may just be the right place to share my journey of how it was before Active Rain. Being a veteran Realtor® for many years and going through so many ups and downs in my personal life that did have bearing on the fruits of my labors as the years in this business come and go. Being a top producer has always been easy for me because I love business competition and love to think of new ways in which to promote or expand upon business. Born an entrepreneur - always an entrepreneur. Yet there is also a danger in being at the top of your game and that is called 'burn out'. They have a saying that it is lonely at the top however, for me, it was always an embracing adventure because of my nature to teach, inspire and help others to join me at the top.

Active Rain not only saved my business but it also received my soul, healing me, raising me up. There is a saying that says if you are suffering then find someone who is worse off than you are and help them. Through this activity I have discovered being anxiously engaged in a good cause will free you from victimhood, from ills and depression. Soon your troubles will be but as a miniature nag rather than a rope around your neck.

One day after one of my BNI meetings I enjoyed lunch with a real estate agent friend of mine. 90% of my friends are Realtors® here in our town as well as online. We were discussing how perhaps it was time to reinvent myself and find a new business to get involved in. My friend looked at me and said, "You have a gift, a gift to inspire people, you would make a great coach especially since that is what you do all the time for free anyhow." Pondering upon that thought I began to do what I coach my friends to do.  I asked myself, "When you were but a small little girl, what were your dreams? What did you want to be when you grow up? What did you do in your free time?" This is an exercise in discovering wherein lies your passion. Whatever you do in life, you need to be passionate about it and the reasons you do what you do must either make you cry or make you laugh for your WHY gets you through the obstacles that certainly will find their way to you. The vehicles may change along the way but the outcome, the goal, should be as a lighthouse that shines a light to guide you through rough waters and stormy seas.

As soon as I came home from school it would be torture for my younger siblings who were forced to endure learning whatever I had learned that day in school. Consequently I taught both of my brothers how to read before they were 2 and 6 when I was 8. Then it would be off to organizing all of our family books. My mother was a student at Stanford University where she could buy the old books for pennies filling up our home library and I ran that home library! My mother would not get a television so we read and read and read. Soon my mother discovered that I had a gift for writing poetry and short stories. As I grew older this transformed into being able to explain to others what I had read and that created a passion to speak in front of audiences. There is too much to tell in one post about how I came to be who I am, that would fill a book. Suffice it to say; writing, inspiring, teaching and helping others are my gifts.

Speaking with my friend at lunch that day the burn out was not so much about not wanting to do real estate but more about my passion being submersed beneath the run of the mill errands of the business.  My journey to how I was led to Active Rain is another long story that would not be conducive to this post in particular so allow me to let you know that I found Sally Cheeseman before I joined Active Rain and through reading her blog it came to me that she as a real estate agent had found a way to pay it forward through her passion in writing through this place called Active Rain.

My passion turned into a flame, alive once again as it was when I was a child. Paying it forward with no expectation of reward enriched my life beyonds what words could ever deliver. My passion for writing burns as a flame in my heart and soul because I speak and write from the depths of my soul. Transparency is the connecting spark to meet where others are and to embrace one another's friendships. My coaching business has thrived, after all, where else can I be blessed with such a captive audience! Something I struggled to figure out how to accomplish, how to get the word out and how to run the coaching business. I was coaching some of my friends who are in other small businesses and one day Nestor said to me, "I think you found your calling. You have a gift for teaching, coaching and writing; but you also have a vast knowledge of the real estate business and practise. Put those together and you have arrived."

So before Active Rain was much different in many dimensions than after and now in Active Rain. Active Rain actually saved my real estate career; relighted my love for the parts of the business that I loved yet had lost sight of.  In fact, Active Rain saved more than that for me. We were just about to go into partnership with one of our clients in the Impact Glass business when I discovered Active Rain and thought long and hard about what path I wanted to travel down. It is my dream and always has been to write my books, ( I have about 13 of them started and unfinished) and to be a sought after speaker. It is my dream to run our real estate company 90% online and to coach agents to become the best that they can be, breaking through their self imposed income ceilings, striking through their limited beliefs and embracing life and their dreams to the fullest. I want to be retired from active real estate transactions when I am 62, that is 11 years from now and with Active Rain in my life and being a huge part of our business model I can see that dream manifesting into reality.

This does not even scratch the surface to what Active Rain has done for our real estate company and business. Now more than 60% of our real estate listings come from our Active Rain blogging. That in an of itself is enough to get you off the fence to join Active Rain and get your reward challenges.

Come on in, pay it forward, discover your dreams and find your passion and grab your immunity idol that will shield you from being voted off the real estate island.

Before Active Rain and Now... How Active Rain Saved My Real Estate Career and More...  by Coach Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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