Coaching, conformity, and the quiet agreement to disappear

Somebody smart once wrote down the rules most of us live by without ever admitting it. They go like this.

You must not have anything different or wrong with you.

If you do, you have to fix it.

If you can't fix it, pretend you did.

If you can't pretend, stay home.

And if you show up anyway, have the decency to be ashamed.

Written out like that, the rules look insane. Nobody would sign up for them on purpose. And yet I watch #estateagents sign up for them every single day, usually at a conference, usually for around two thousand dollars, usually with a lanyard.

The real estate coaching industry did not invent shame. Shame was here first, doing fine on its own. What the industry did was package it, put a logo on it, and sell it back to agents as a growth system.

Rule One: You must not have anything different or wrong with you.

An agent joins the business because they were good with people. Maybe they were a nurse. Maybe they raised four kids and could talk a toddler off a ledge and a seller off theirs too, same skill. Then they sit in a room with three hundred other agents and get told there is a script for everything, a system for everything, and if they are not already running it, they are already behind. The message is never spoken plainly but it lands anyway. Whoever you were before you walked in here was not enough.

Rule Two: If you do, you really have to fix that.

So they buy the fix. Tom Ferry has a fix. Tom Panos has a fix. Ricky Carruth has a fix, a friendlier one, but a fix all the same, sold with the same promise. Follow the framework and the follow-through will follow. Nobody asks the obvious question, which is why a grown adult with a functioning nervous system and forty years of lived experience needs someone else's words to say hello to a stranger. The fix is not really about skill. The fix is about obedience. An obedient agent renews their membership.

Rule Three: If you can't fix it, pretend you did.

This is the one that gets me. Because most agents can't actually become the person on stage. The stage guy has been performing confidence since he was nine, probably at his own birthday parties. Most agents are not that. So they learn to fake the tone. They memorize the objection handler. They perform enthusiasm at a listing appointment they don't feel, using language borrowed from a man who has never met their seller, their street, or their particular flavor of nervous. And it works, a little, the way a wig works. From a distance. In bad light.

Rule Four: If you can't pretend, stay home.

Here is where the real damage happens, and it happens off camera, in a car in a driveway before an open house nobody wanted to hold. The agent who can't make the script sound like their own voice starts to wonder if the problem is the voice. Not the script. Them. So they cancel the prospecting block. They stop posting. They tell themselves next quarter, when they've "got their systems down," they'll show up properly. Next quarter rarely comes. The business doesn't fail loudly. It just goes quiet, the way a person goes quiet before they leave a marriage.

Rule Five: If you show up anyway, be ashamed.

And for the ones who keep going, who do the calls in their own words and lose a deal or two to someone with better hair and a bigger script, there's a special shame reserved for them too. Not for failing. For failing without a system. As if the only respectable way to lose is to lose exactly like everyone else. As if the actual sin was ever the deal, and not the disobedience.

Here's the part nobody in that ballroom will say out loud. Competence was never the differentiator. It hasn't been for a long time, and it certainly won't be once an app can answer a buyer's question about school catchments and mortgage rates faster and more patiently than any human on a Tuesday night. What survives that is not the agent with the tightest script. It's the one a seller trusted before they understood why. Character isn't a system. You can't coach it into someone by Thursday and you can't buy a subscription to it either. It was there the whole time, underneath the rules, waiting to be allowed back in the room.

The five rules were never really about real estate. They're about what happens to any person, in any industry, who is told their unedited self is a liability. The coaching industry didn't create that fear. It just found a very profitable way to keep charging rent on it.

The agents who are doing fine without anyone noticing, and there are more of them than the stage acts would like you to know, are usually the ones who stopped paying that rent. They found this out the plain way. Nobody had to fix them. They were never actually broken.

The Brand Within

Originally published on LinkedIn.