The first requirement in learning from anyone is to carefully listen to them. It’s exactly the same for the self taught! To learn you must listen! Carefully listen. Redundantly listen.
Art Fettig says "Everything I ever learned I learned from a tape recorder." I won’t go that far, but I wouldn’t be the same with out my tape recorders.
My first real estate tool was a cassette recorder purchased the day before I had my first "Floor time." That recorder a phone tap and a case of blank cassettes cost me about $100 early in 1974, I got my moneys worth!
From day one I recorded my sales calls (It was legal in Michigan, in Nevada I could only recorded my side.) Then as soon as possible I replayed them! I listened to what I did right and maybe more importantly to my mistakes! (In those early days Brenda had yet to put me on a two mistakes a month restriction.) I had learned the lessons I knew what to do what to say, but only practice and self correction would make it me. Those tape recordings let me learn from my own mistakes! I was as we all are my own best teacher!
A trained banker I took great notes about what my clients said, but all I could tell you about what I said was what I intended. What I meant to say. What I couldn’t tell you was what I really said or most importantly what the caller heard! Those tapes repeatedly told me what I’d done right and more often what I did wrong.
We all learn by redundancy. Some of it painfully. I got my horse when I was 10 for the first six to nine months she threw me 100 times a week! She didn’t change I did and we had twenty wonderful years together. When Brenda brought me an airplane I spent hours doing circuits and bumps! On those early "landings" I could do half a dozen bumps per circuit, when the instructor started calling them "touch and goes" I soloed. When we started using PC’s it was redundancy that taught me. I’d try and try study what I was doing wrong then try some more.
When I started speaking publicly about thirty-eight years ago I brought a mini-cassette recorder I’d take it out and put it on the podium in front of me, as soon as possible I listen for what I’d said right or wrong. I was learning on the drive home. For the record I just had to replace that little Sony recorder last week. My new Sony digital recorder is 1/4 the size and one fifth the cost of my old teacher.
The first motivational /sales speaker I met was Cavett Robert I’ve been listening to his tapes over and over again for 38 years. Shortly after Robert I spent a week with Earl Nightingale. I bought a personalize version of his "Lead The Field" tapes called "Lead the Field with Westdale" I still play them.
In real estate it’s "Location, Location, Location!" In education it’s redundancy, redundancy, redundancy! In self education it’s learn, learn, learn! You excepted me to say practice, practice, practice? Yes you must practice, but you must listen and learn! Practicing is necessary, but without listening and learning I might have spent twenty years bouncing off that horse and never soloed my Cessna. I was very good at bouncing, but like every thing you have to keep praticing! There was that the one time in the spring of ‘85 when I didn’t bounce.
The best thing you can do to prefect your phone calls is to record them and listen to your self, it isn’t even and in some states not legal to record your caller! It’s listening to yourself and learning from your mistakes! Yes, we all make mistakes, I can’t forget ‘85!
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