Welcome everyone to the session 50 great shades of retrospective, your guide to continuous improvement. Of course, we all do this by Chris Stone. Chris is an enterprise agile coach fostering successful organizations through high performing teams. So without any further delay, I'm just handing over to Chris. Thank you, Sundari pleasure to be here at agile India. India has a very special place in the heart because I've actually been and visited the country I was fortunate enough to travel to India. In 2019, I've been to Mumbai, New Delhi and Navgarh National Park. I've never seen more people in my life because I visited during the first full season and the adjunct tree and everything everyone had on and the excitement and passion people were showing was amazing. I'm here to talk about continuous improvement. So anyone who doesn't know anything about me, I'm hugely passionate about continuous improvement and retrospectives. In particular, you may hear that in my voice and you may notice sometimes I speak quite fast. So if I do speak a little bit fast, it's just because I'm excited. But I need you to tell me so being a message in the chat and just say slow down and I will do my best slow down a bit about me. I've been involved in agile ways of working for over 10 years now working with with enterprises and teams from the smallest companies in the world to some of the largest ones so a wide range of experience there. And I'm most known for for retrospective. So I've shared some 94 retrospective templates as of today. I'm a fan believer in workplace being fun and exciting and continuous improvements as a key part of that. I don't like just talking at people. So I want you to engage with me and how you'll do that is we're going to be using mirror. Let me share my screen so that everyone can follow along. If you click on that link I've just shared in the zoom chat you will be taken to our mirror boards where you can interact with me today. There are no sign ups required so it's freely accessible. If you just click that link you'll be taken to a board and it's the way you can interact. If you prefer to do so you can interact by typing in the zoom chat or speaking aloud if you feel comfortable doing so. So I'm just going to pause for a few moments just to allow people time to get into that mirror boards. The link has just been shared Medari. In the past I will list it once more. Oh sorry I think it went to hosts and panellists. There was a filter on my chat saying hosts and panellists I've now shared with everyone. So it should come through to everyone now. Anyone who hasn't used mirror before let's make sure that on the left hand side here you've got this little filter selected that will allow you to interact. Left click on any of these little objects will allow you to move them around double clicking on a poster notes will allow you to type inside those booster notes. If you're seeing all of these curses flying around the screen collaborators curses like I'm seeing right now you can turn that off if it's a distraction so just press this button here. Now where I'd like you to start is a little bit of a little bit of an icebreaker so using these little cute post it note icons here. I would like you to drag them onto this scale there's a number of duality lines here. If you feel retrospectives are magical experiences drag a little post it note to the right hand side of the scale if you feel their thumbs down experiences. Put it on the left hand side then you feel retrospectives are light bulb moments they're they're great for ideas then again put one of these post it notes on the the scale next to the light bulb. But also if they're confusing in your eyes. Yeah this is this is all about your own perspectives and then lastly retrospectives are either powerful experience or they're they're frustrating. So starting with that will use these duality lines to gauge and temperate check the audience's experiences with retrospectives. Once you've shared your view there with these little post it's a little bit further below there's a number of white poster notes what I'd like you to do it just a single word maybe a couple of words to the tribe retrospectives mean to you. So these little poster notes here just type inside them. There we go. Of course for your awareness I'm someone who likes to interact with the audience so whilst I will allow time at the end for questions if you have a question. Don't hesitate to ask throughout what we're going to do here is cover a number of my tips and tricks and strategies and agile hacks for enabling continuous improvement in the workplace. We have around about 45 minutes so we'll cover as many as we can in the time frame. But you the audience will get to choose the direction of this talk I could deliver this talk 50 times and every time would be different because it's all down to what the audience wants to hear about. So you will imagine those those adventure books you read as a child where you would my character and you would be reading through and then at the end of that page it would say if you want to choose this direction. Turn to page 212 then you get to page 212 and find out your character had suffered an injury or died and you'd be like no I want to turn back to the previous page. This talk is a bit like that you get to choose the direction. So in general we're seeing that retrospectives are more magical. On the middle scale here there's quite a mix and the same with the bottom scale there so the audience is put perspectives or experiences here have been a mixture of frustration confusion light bulb moments powerful. And what about some of the words we're seeing so it's about improvement absolutely it's about finding pain areas. It's about inspecting and adapting course. We could discover the reason for failures we can it can be a very powerful technique if you as well it can be about helping a team discover and promote willingness to change. Finding out the 1% improvements I like that and there is a play that we're going to talk about in this this talk today about 1% improvements marginal games. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so we've got some different experiences from from the audience here. What I want you to do now is help me choose the direction of this talk. The way you can do so is coming here on the board. Again, we'll use a little post notes to vote this is a dot vote. You can hear first about the foundations for continuous improvements. Retrospective formats or finishing up and finishing up is that all important part of the end of the retro where you identify those actions the things that team are going to do differently to bring about change. So you can dot votes for those sections here by dragging them to the one you most want to hear about let me just make sure that these are all brought to the front so I think they might be hanging behind the back. You let it go now. You get two votes each. Let's see what we're going to come up with the one the section that gets the most votes is where we will start and will cover as many of these sections as we have time for. If anyone is struggling to access the link just just watch my my shared screen and you could choose to interact via the zoom chat. By the look of things at the moment we're looking at facilitation styles or facilitation approaches taking the lead followed by finishing up. So another another 15 seconds or so to get your votes in. And then we're going to start with facilitation starts by looking so it's looking close now finishing up is a is catching up here. Oh, I think finishing up sorry sedition styles first and then finishing up our looks of it. So bringing your attention to here on the board now writes first question. How does silence feel during a retrospective on the left hand side of the scale here you've got so uncomfortable on the right hand side of the scale you've got this it feels great. Again vote with these poster notes a few early votes for uncomfortable. Yeah, it looks like the majority of people here are feeling uncomfortable when we face silence and retrospectives. Now this is a play all about silence and embracing silence. I will I will admit to you folks I'll be very honest and vulnerable with you. I was exactly the same in the past I hated silence when I heard silence in retrospective and I was the facilitator. My my most immediate thought was, oh wow, I'm doing something wrong. I've asked the wrong question. Maybe people are bored, maybe they don't care what am I doing wrong. When I've since learned that actually people process information in very different ways. I personally I like to talk to think I will cork out loud and I'm a talker and that's my preferred stance. Some people need to pause to reflect take some time before responding. And that's okay. Everyone is different. There is another few things I want to share with you and silence can be your ally. It can be something you use to create great results and retrospectives and I'll tell you why the FBI famous for obviously interrogating people. They use silence to their advantage. What they do is they will ask a question and then they'll count in their head. So someone, you know, the person will respond they'll talk and then when silence hits they'll count in their head. They'll count to seven plus 10 seconds and they'll just wait and the reason for that is as you observe silence is uncomfortable and people want to fill that silence. I felt it myself when when those thoughts began going through my head about silence and I was saying I've done something wrong here. My immediate thought was I need to fill that silence. I need to add another thought in. I need to ask another question and see if it results in change. Silence is your ally. So when you're when you're facing silence in a meeting, pause a moment, allow people the time to speak. Another person will probably add more context, add more detail and we can use that silence. It can be it can be a great ally for you. There is a technique that you can know and you can read a little bit more about called silent retrospectives. It was introduced me to me by a gentleman named Dov Sal. They're in a YouTube video and you can follow the link here. It's on where we're going to show you the three little pigs image on this board. You pick that link you will be taken to the video and you can learn a little bit more about silence retrospectives. But essentially the way it works is you create a space a bit like this a mirror board a white board of some kind. And the only rules are you can't speak. And the reason that can be powerful is because when you can't speak you can't ask clarifying questions. You can't steer perhaps the direction of conversation towards your own very own view. And you have to focus on the way you interact as you add another post it with a question next to it just asking for a clarification. It's a very different way of you of doing a retrospective and it can results in the team coming together a little bit further. I'll just jump into the. There we go. The YouTube video has just been pasted into the chat there. So yes, if you haven't tried a silent retrospective, I encourage you to do so. If you feel uncomfortable during silent periods, I invite you to just pause a little bit longer than you think. Don't try and fill the silence with with noise will now people the space to think and respond. Obviously, if every time you facilitate something, it's always quiet. That might be a sign of something wrong that silence is not always a bad thing. Okay, moving on to the next play, fixing the formats. Okay, now this is probably going to be a surprise to some of you given that I share and well almost 100 retro templates and I encourage creating new ones all the time. Fixing the format and staying with the same one over and over would be exactly what the team needs. The key outcome from a retrospective is improvements actionable improvements. And if the team is using a consistent format, either starts or continue or sad, mad, glad or whatever format resonates with the team. And the end of the retro there are actionable improvements then the format doesn't matter the format can actually be a distraction. Okay, so what I tend to recommend here is if you're working with a team and the retro works with them stick with it. If we start to struggle we start to see actions aren't coming out of it. People are disengaged. We invite the teams to experiment with something different a different format. Working with a consistent format can help new teams establish the habits behind retrospections. So start stop continue can be great for just being simple and getting a team started. But the all important thing is the actions always ask the team how they prefer to proceed. Okay, the opposite of that is flexing the format. And this is the one that I'm most a fan of. So by flexing the format what we do is we change it we don't keep it the same every every iteration every sprint we don't just do start stop continue or sad mad glad.  So I have created lastly 94 retro templates all of which are freely accessible on my website there are links to my websites later on in the talk. But here's just a few examples so I created the Diwali theme retrospective a retro for good over evil I worked with the grandmaster who is who is from Indian descent and we created this. It's Diwali themed retrospective I've also done a Diwali themed agile game to introduce agility to a team. There's the dog mean retrospective there's squid games which was a very popular TV show there was the ticket retrospective I shared recently so rather than asking your team. And went well in the last sprint you could say hey what do we hit the six or what what bold us out for a duck or how's that what do we need an extra pair of eyes on where do we need some additional support. There are so many ways of asking questions that provoke different answers. So if a team is being asked start stop continue every sprint. What I have observed is that often the same things come up over and over because it's the same question. Whereas if you ask the question slightly differently. If you build a format that resonates with team that aligns to what they enjoy doing. You can get very different answers. So something I encourage you do is flex the formats. What you might do is rotate it every iteration. You might choose a format and use it for four iterations in a row and then try a new one. There's lots of ways of doing it but by changing the format periodically what we do is we create an environment where new insights can be gained. Of course, as I mentioned last questions throughout this if you prefer to do so, you can do so by speaking the zoom chat typing I know some diaries keeping an eye on the chat for me. All right, another another play I'm going to recommend to you the dealers choice so and again another question for you. We are now here on the board. How does it feel when you are in a meeting and one person calls out one by one. It's a chair progress of something how does how does that feel. You can share your view by typing in these post-it notes. Oh my God, uneasy. Yeah, something is wrong. You can feel like a blame game. Yeah. So what I'm seeing here a lot of negative responses forced interaction you're being held on the spot. Okay. No, not me. Don't choose me. Yes, absolutely. The thing is this happens all the time. This is the status report syndrome. So what happens is a meeting is being scheduled. The facilitator is trying to be inclusive. They're trying to make sure everyone has the opportunity to share. The way they do so, they call out, they will say, hey, Sundari, can you share your update or hey, Mike, your turn now. And it can feel very one way because what happens is the person who shares that passes back to the facilitator, the facilitator then calls out the next person so it can feel very much like a states report. The conversation doesn't feel like a shared meeting. So I call this status report syndrome. It happens in daily stand-ups. It happens in retrospectives. The intent is often good. We want to be inclusive. But at the same time, it can be uneasy, forced. It can feel less like a conversation. So something I recommend whenever I facilitate meetings is what once I call the dealer's choice. So the last to speak, the next person to speak. So let's say we're in a daily stand-up right now and I have been called out by the scum or I volunteered to speak first and I've shared my plan for the day. What I would then do is choose the next person to speak. And what we do by doing this is we make it more like a conversation and we create a shared responsibility for the team, ensuring everyone speaks rather than one person ensuring everyone speaks. So we do diversity, inclusivity becomes a collective responsibility rather than just the responsibility of the facilitator, but also can make it feel more conversational. Now, if I were in a physical room doing a stand-up with a team, one way I might have got around this in the past would be we have an object. I've got a mouse here like you'd just grab a random object and you'd throw that to the next person to say, hey, it's your turn now. We're often working digitally now. So the dealer's choice is a way around that. Nominate the next person to speak. You build a shared responsibility for facilitating group involvement and you can make it feel more conversational rather than just a one-way interaction. Give that a go. Right. Another thing to the format style, the facilitation styles. We've talked about fixing the format. We've talked about flexing the format. Another one here is excuse my language, the format. Sometimes you don't need a format. Sometimes you don't need a template. You don't need something that's going to distract people. All that's needed is an open and honest conversation with the people involved. What's the most important thing we need to improve? I'll share a bit of feedback with you here. I once shared a Home Alone themed retrospective. This is based on obviously the famous Christmas movie. And a Scrum Master used that retrospective with a few of their teams. One of them loved it. However, one person in another team said they didn't like it. It wasn't working for them. One of the prompts in that retro was keep the change of filthy animal. And they responded this retro board. So what I'm trying to highlight here is that sometimes a format isn't needed. Maybe it's been a very tense few weeks. Maybe all this needed is an open and honest conversation. And you can abandon the format and you can just say, hey, team, where do we most need to improve right now? What is causing us the most pain? And just have that conversation. Create the space where people can share their thoughts. You're still trying to identify improvements. Format could be distracting in that respect. Okay. Another option you have is to block the facilitator. So rotate the facilitator. I've got an image here of musical chairs. I'm interested. Has anyone tried this before? Obviously, what tends to happen is that retrospectives are facilitated by a Scrum Master or an agile coach. Has anyone tried rotating who facilitates a retrospective? Absolutely not a silent thing. Possibly not. Possibly not. That's okay. So what I recommend this is that each facilitator brings their own style, energy, stance of doing, of doing meetings. And by rotating who facilitates a meeting, what we actually do is we begin to build a capability, a skill for facilitation into the team. So what this means is that a Scrum Master or agile coach is less relied upon. If they're on holiday, if they're unwell for a day, the team can still facilitate the meeting successfully. So how you can do this? Yeah, and I can see Appay has shared that they've tried it, but they saw a few takers. How you can do this is you can ask volunteers. You can try and try and try the experiment and say, hey, what we'd like to do here is rotate who's doing the facilitator and everyone will get a go. And I, the traditional facilitator, provide you coaching and supporting how to do so. Even that there are so many freely accessible templates around there nowadays. It's not like that person has a lot of work and practice to do to create something. So their starting point might be grabbing a template and trying it. So again, the reason I encourage this is to build a collective responsibility for facilitation, to build the skill for facilitation into the team and reduce the reliance. But also it can refresh a team. And that new person brings their own starts and energy. When I've done this in the past, I'll tell you a story. I was working with the team in South Africa and they used this technique. They rotated and we had a Pokemon retrospective from one of the younger developers. We had a retrospective that was centered around the technical lead Christopher Murray. So someone created a tech lead Christopher Murray theme retrospective with some of his mannerisms and quotes and it was just a very funny, enjoyable experience for those involved. So again, something you could try is rotating the tater. Here's a question for you folks. How much does a polar bear weigh? This is very much a dad joke, but enough to break the ice is the answer. How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice. It's a dad joke. It's a dad joke to be an ice breaker. Now ice breakers are used to learn more about people, your teams may provoke a fun and enjoyment in the workplace. I'm a big fan of ice breakers because I think the problem is so often we work with teams and it's all work, work, work, work. Now work is important, but if it's all work, work, work, then it can be very easy to forget that the people, the people of our teams, our colleagues are actually beating hearts behind their laptops. They are individuals of passions and interests. They enjoy different things. I have found that using ice breakers, I have learned more about my teams and the people I work with. And it's built a sense of community. It's built a, it's engendered trust. It's helped our relationship grow. There are so many ways you can do ice breakers. And again, I'll tell you a story. I once worked with a team in Mexico and they were very, it was a very work, work focused culture. And I began introducing ice breakers. And one of the questions asked one day was, what was your favorite childhood video game? Now from that question, what we learned was that two people from that same team who had worked together for over a year actually enjoyed the same type of video games. And the consequence of that question was that they both arranged that evening to play games together. So their relationship immediately strengthened based on asking a question that took less than five minutes of their day to answer. There are so many ways of building ice breakers into your meetings. I try to do them as many as I can, but I always build them into my retrospective templates. A few examples here. I had people building tacos, images of creating what a taco would be for them. I've had, what meme represents the last iteration. What's your favorite thing about Halloween? You can make it topical. You can make it about, again, the Diwali theme retrospective had something you know about Diwali. There are so many ways of building ice breakers into the workplace, into how you work with your teams. There's a consequence learning about them which strengthens the relationship. If you do that at the beginning of a retrospective, you've enlightened the moves and again, creates the space, the environment for interaction, speaking up a safe environment where people feel more comfortable sharing things. Now, I'm conscious of time. We've got 15 minutes left. I know there were lots of votes for the other section which was finishing up. I'm going to bring you into there and we'll share a few things around finishing up. Okay. So what I'm showing here is a concept called retroception. If anyone has seen the film inception, that was all about a dream within a dream within a dream. What I'm suggesting here is build a retro within your retro. So we should be continuously improving how we continuously improve. We should be retrospecting on whether our retrospectives add value at all. So there's ways you can do this, and I've shared a few examples here. This was the Matrix movie retrospective. And at the bottom, what you've got is these little sentinel images, and it's simply a fista 5 system. At the end of the retro, take a few minutes and ask the team, how was that retro for you on a scale of one to five? And if it was a one, a retro took place. Maybe some of the team was missing. We identified some improvements, but maybe we ran long of the time box all the way to five, where everyone contributed without fear of judgment. So psychological safety was in place. We respected the time box. We identified actions with owners, and we celebrated success as well as reflected on our challenges. So if we've done that at the end of a retro, and we've seen that, well, actually, the average score is a three, we could then be saying, okay, what should we try differently in the next retrospective to try and make it better? And that might be, well, something we spotted here was not everyone was speaking up, and we could ask the question, what is holding people back from speaking up? So we should be continuously improving the way we retro ourselves. There are so many ways you can do it. I've shared an image here of a gent called Steve Samson-Jones. He had an image, he was using a Harry Potter themed retrospective, and he had some nice images that he drew to what happened to rates on a scale of one to five ones. What I'm trying to reinforce here is that every meeting should be subject to continuous improvement, particularly retrospectives. So try and retrospect within your retrospectives. Someone mentioned marginal gains earlier, those 1% improvements. Is anyone familiar with the story of sky cycling, the team in the UK and what they did in 2003? Let me know in the chat if you are familiar with the story. Yes, okay. So basically what sky did is they were one of the worst performing cycling teams. A British cyclist had never won the Tour de France, one of the most famous cycling events throughout the world. So they were relatively unknown on the international scale for success. Now, they had a new technical director come in, and what he did was say, right, we need to make improvements here, but we're not going to try and make huge improvements on certain areas. What we're looking for is a 1% improvement in lots of different areas. So they made a 1% improvement in the sleep quality the team got. They made a 1% improvement in the weight of a certain part of the bike. They made a 1% improvement in the way the team recovered in the sports therapy they received after their events. They had a 1% improvement in a certain training technique, and all of those 1% improvements aggregated to make great results. A consequence of all of these small changes was that within, I think, five years, we had a British Tour de France winner. We had the British cycling team being one of the most successful at the time. So those small changes made great results. The reason this is in the finishing up section, because at the end of the retro, it can be difficult to get people to commit to actions. So one of the things I recommend you do at the end of retro is just ask, okay, what would a 1% improvement in that look like? It's easier to commit to smaller changes than it is large. It's easier to complete smaller changes than it is large. There's a reason why agile splits things into smaller pieces, because we deliver smaller pieces more frequently, more iteratively. We get to learn from them just accordingly. So the question I have for you here is just have a reflection point, how to think about how you could help your teams commit to smaller actions in your retrospectives. Add your thoughts on these post-it notes. Again, what I tend to do is ask that question, what would a 1% improvement look like? See someone's typing in, it looks like they're saying, show how previous things have added value or how I've improved things. Absolutely. Let's show the successes of the past of getting the team to commit to smaller actions. Appreciate the small improvements, yeah? Completely. Make them visible. If we don't make our improvements visible, they'll be forgotten about. So the absolute key thing people should do at the end of a retro is take those actions that agreed and put them somewhere visible. Add them to your backlog. Make them be prioritized alongside other things. Someone said Kaizen here. Kaizen here is the Japanese term, not for continuous improvement. Mis-translation. The actual translation is make change for the better. Make change for the better I've been told. So Kaizen is about make change for the better. Small improvements. And the thing about Kaizen is it happens everywhere with everybody and all the time. So it doesn't matter what it is, you can make small improvements to everything and everyone is responsible for it. Yes, you can share success stories. You can show metrics of previous things. And if you see an action that's big, break it down completely. One qualifying question I'd like to ask is if you've got an action on retrospective, you could ask is that achievable in the next few weeks? And if it's not, can we make it smaller? Can we reduce the scope of it? Can we make it a bit more incremental? Okay. Here's a question for you. Has anyone recognized this behavior? Action avoidance. You ask a question, who wants to change and everyone puts their hand up. And then who wants to change? Science.  No one volunteers. Has anyone recognized that? Have we seen this before? Can you still hear me, folks? Yeah. So I saw someone say lost audio. So who wants to change? Everyone wants it, but nobody wants to do it. One of the questions I ask all the time when I see this, when I'm working with teams and I see a reluctance to do retrospectives or I see a reluctance to take on actions is I remind them that taking no action is a decision. So if a team is aware that something isn't right, something needs improvement and they do nothing about it, that is a decision. You are deciding not to do anything about it and you are aware that in the future, same thing will happen. So taking no action is in itself a decision. Einstein's definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and executing different results. So if a team is reluctant to commit to action, odds are they'll be frustrated about the same things next time you do a retrospective. So if you've got a team that are reluctant to commit to actions, obviously there's lots of approaches you can try. We've talked about making things smaller. It's easy to commit to things smaller doesn't feel as dangerous and scary, but also just remind them that if you're taking no action, that's a decision. We are collectively aware that that is a decision and that nothing will change. Let's give that a go. Use that as a response. Now, we've seen dot voting in this session today. I've had you using a lot of post-it notes to vote on the most important areas to you. When it comes to the end of a retrospective and in fact during retrospectives that I facilitate, the way I do it is I use creative consensus. I build the team's responsibility to vote on the most important thing to them. So let's imagine a retrospective. In fact, I'll take you back to the Diwali theme retrospective because I think that one may well resonate with you folks. So if I was facilitating this retrospective right now, I would ask the team which prompt would you like to start with? So let's say the team started with lights or DS. What's guiding our path? What's our vision for the next iteration? People would then respond on these post-it notes. We'd focus on just this one. People would respond on the post-it notes and then once the time has run out and I tend to allow three to five minutes for this, I would ask the team to vote on the most important thing for them. What is most guiding our path? What is most like our vision for the next iteration? So I get a consensus for you and from that single thing, I would ask the team to create an action. Now by doing this, what I avoid is a situation where you do a retrospective and you talk about all the possible things that you can improve upon and you wait right till the end to capture retrospective actions and you run out of time. By doing it in this way, what we're doing is we are collecting actions iteratively, but we are allowing the team, the team that are affected by these changes to decide on the most important thing to them first and from that we pull an action. Now the beauty of modern tools we have available to us, whiteboards and otherwise, if you don't just have to use dots to vote, you could use tiny Freddie Mercury's to vote, you could use little images of poster notes, you could choose whatever you want, whatever you want, and you could allow and trust the team to decide on the most important area to address in their eyes. So try creative dot voting. Okay, we're going to cover one more tip and then I'm just going to do a sense check and I'm sure I think we're running out of time. Do a quick temperature check. I'm going to get a bit of feedback from you from yourselves and I'm going to point you to some more resources that you might find useful in your quest for continuous improvements. So what makes an action actionable? Any thoughts here? How do you make sure that something is in a ready state for it to be worked on? Add your thoughts in these poster notes. And owner, yes, absolutely. We need to know who is working on it. We need to know when it's going to be done by. Yeah, creating stories and tasks or adding things to your backlog. So making it visible. When, what, when, how, yeah, a verb. So we know it's something being done, it's finds. So many people will be familiar with the concept of smart goals. So smart goals are specific. So we know exactly what it is and measurable. We know how we'll know when it's done. They're achievable. It's realistic. It's actually something within our power to do something about. It's realistic. So we can achieve it. It's something that can be done. And lastly, there's a time element to it. We know when we want to accomplish it by. So again, something that I see a lot of teams struggle with is turning those discussions, those insights and retrospectives into actionable goal, actionable things. So a few points I tried to recommend here. Looking through all that at the end of a retro, the items you discuss are on the backlog and they're visible. They're ideally prioritized alongside other work. They are owned by someone or you've got a concept of who's going to be working on it. We know that it's something that the team can actually do something about. And it's got a time element to it. We know when we want to achieve it by. So yes, give that a go. Okay. Once the time folks, it would be very poor form of me. We'll be talking about retrospectives without building in a retrospective into this workshop. So what I'd like you to do is using these post-it notes here, drag a post-it note onto the scale to the right here. Left hand corner says this was the worst ever use of my time. In the top right hand corner, this was the best ever use of my time and three is somewhere in the middle. If you can drag a post-it note there and add any comments, any words that would help me with continuously improving how I run this workshop, it would be really helpful. I am very thick skin, so if there's anything you didn't like, do share with me. It will help me to continuously improve how I deliver workshops myself. All feedback is welcome and appreciated. And then once we've taken just a few moments to add your thoughts, I will open the floor to any questions. I will be going into the Hangouts area afterwards so you can have a chat with me if you have any further questions, by the way. So do jump onto there. And once you've finished adding any more thoughts, I will point you towards some more resources you might find useful on the continuous improvement side of things. The common thing I do, on a bit of feedback, I do receive about this particular workshop is that people would like more time. And it can feel a bit compressed. So my intent is always to cover as much as we can in the timeframe, but it's such a broad topic. And of course there are time boxes. So I do give these talks on a regular basis. So look out for more of them from me. If you follow me on LinkedIn or go to my website, you'll be able to see when I'm receiving these talks. And then all of my information, all of my templates are freely accessible. All my information I share is not behind a paywall. Thank you for your feedback, folks. I'm just going to bring your attention down to here. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just click this link here on the left-hand side. You can connect me, I share all my retros, all my advice and guidance around continuous improvement there. I do have a book that's coming out in a few months time. It's all about retrospectives and continuous improvements. If you'd like to pre-order a copy, feel free to do so. I'll have a YouTube channel. There's another 1,800 people on there. Again, I share tips and advice and guidance on a podcast that goes on there as well with some huge names in the agile space. And my website here as well, where you can explore all my retro templates, download them, access them for free. If you have a tool like Miro, Mural, Google Jamboards, Lucid Spark, you can use my templates free of charge. It isn't required for you to sign up or provide an email when using my website, but obviously if you'd like to do so, you are welcome. So all freely accessible information. And I think we are out of time. So if there are any final questions, do feel free to ask. And I will be jumping into the hangout space in a moment to chat further. Let me share a few links with you. So you can see them. Just a couple of more minutes. Chris, like I think there is a question, can we use your template in Trello? In Trello. So what you can't do is use the image side of things in Trello. But what you could do is you could open one of my templates. You could create columns in Trello. It's aligned with some of the prompts that I use and you could do it in that way. Trello restricts unfortunately certain things. I think people can use the YouTube also to understand what are the different maybe. I'm just sharing my links in the chat. So you can see the link, the LinkedIn, that's how I approach the code. You can use my websites, my YouTube and my podcast. Thanks Chris. It was a wonderful session. I think many of us will be having an interesting retro going forward with our teams.


Hey y'all, welcome to what Chelsea eats. Thank you so much for joining me today. In this video I'm going to show you how to make a salt replacement called celery salt. As you know, I have been on a quest to remove salt from my diet, so I am going to share this video just in case it will help someone else who is on a journey to remove salt from their diet as well. Okay, so for this recipe you need one ingredient and that is one bunch of celery and you cut it in bite size pieces. You want to be sure not to use any of the leaves of the celery because if you use them you're going to get a bitter result. You need a dehydrator for this recipe. I have used one dehydrator sheet for my celery and I'm going to put it in the dehydrator on 113 degrees. We'll post a link to the dehydrator that I have down in the description box below this video. You may need to dehydrate your celery up to 24 hours and when it's finished you will get these tiny little bits of celery. You see the difference between what it looked like when it had water in it versus how it looks now that it's completely dried. Next what you're going to do is take your dried celery bits and transfer them to your blender. I used my Nutra Bullet but you can use whatever kind of blender you have on hand and depending on your blender will determine how long you have to blend to get this celery salt into a powdered consistency. So I blended my celery until it was a fine powder. I want to say it took about 30 seconds in my Nutra Bullet. So I have an empty spice container. I believe I got these from World Market but I think you can get them on Amazon easily or really you can just use an old spice container from one of your old spices that you used in the past just clean it and dry it. I took a funnel and I poured my celery salt into the bottle. My spice container has a lid so that you can sprinkle it on to your food. Just remember that when you are using celery salt it is very very strong so a little bit goes a long way and you can put this on anything on in soups on your salad and your salad dressings. You can put it on anything that you feel needs a salty flavor. I hope this video has been a help to you. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up and definitely share it with a friend. I'd love to hear your comments below and if no one told you they love you today Chelsea in North Carolina loves you very much. Take care.


What's up everybody? Yes, what is happening? Good day, good day, hello. Good morning, good evening, good night. Wherever you are in the world, good to see everybody. I see there's already a lot of people online here. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today. I hope I bring you a ton of value. There's not a whole lot of training for experienced agents, right? You know, there's a lot of stuff for new agents. There's not a lot of stuff for experienced agents. So that's why I wanted to do this today.  They just don't know quite how to, you know, get out of their rut because they've just gotten into these routines where they're doing the same thing over and over and over again. And they're just not really taken to another level. And you have to get out of that. You have to get out of that rut. You have to get out of that same routine there in order to take it to the next level. A lot of us get comfortable, right? We get comfortable. And then we feel like, you know, we're in a place where, you know, we feel like that we're putting in the work. We just need to be patient. And so we get into these routines and we just keep doing the same stuff, creating the same results, just thinking, you know, if I just keep going and just keep being patient, now that is part of it, right? That is a huge part of it. But we have to break out of our routines if we want to really take things to another level. So I wanted to do this training for experienced agents. This is a great training session for not only experienced agents, but also new agents, right, because new agents are, new agents go through the same exact thing just on a lower level. And, you know, later on in their careers as a new agent, when you hit that second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year, eighth year, 10th year, 15th year, you may hit this same exact brick wall that a lot of the experienced agents are having. So I wanted to do this just to get my thoughts out there to you about this so that hopefully you can maybe learn from my experiences and I can maybe shake it up a little bit. Maybe I can shake a little something into you today and change your perspective and change your actions on the daily so that you can change your results, okay? So I'm gonna give it a couple more minutes for people to come on really quickly before it gets started. I'm gonna be in Salt Lake, right? I'm leaving tomorrow to go to Salt Lake. If you guys can make it to Salt Lake, if anybody's close to Salt Lake, I would love to see you in Salt Lake, all right? There's a link in the description here in YouTube or you can go to zero2diamond.com backslash events, okay? That's where I post all the free tickets to my events. Guys, this is free, right? This is free. I don't charge for my events for the zero to diamond tour and actually in Salt Lake, I don't even have a sponsor. I'm the sponsor, right? I'm paying for the event myself and I'm still not charging the agents, okay? So from there, I'm going to be in Nashville, that's August 4th. I'm gonna be in Charleston, August 12th. I'm gonna be in Orlando speaking at the Florida Association of Realtors, August 26th. That's in Orlando. Then I'm gonna be in Dallas, September 8th. And I'm putting together Connecticut. I'm putting together Philly. I'm putting together Charlotte. I'm also looking at Vegas. So a lot of stuff going on in terms of me traveling. I feel so good to get back on the road. It's what I really love to do, like travel, see you guys, shake your hand and get on stage and hopefully inspire you guys to take your business to the next level. Guys, it's all about just taking what you have and then taking it to the next level. I don't care where you are right now. I just want you to take where you are and take it up a notch. That's it. You don't have to do a million dollars this year, okay? And if you're doing a million dollars this year, you don't have to do 10 million next year, right? It's not about the money. It's not about the number of transactions or it's not about any of that at all. It's about taking where you are and just adding a little bit to it, learning, becoming more efficient. Maybe you're adjusting or tweaking a little something to become more efficient, more scalable, right? Producing more and less time. I think you guys realize that I am a one-man production crew like I've got. I'm on four different platforms right now, okay? I'm recording this on another camera and I don't have a crew to do this. This is just me. I've set all this stuff up. I'm shooting videos. I'm selling 100 properties a year. I'm coaching, I'm traveling, I'm speaking. I'm posting on all platforms every day. So you guys can probably sit back and realize that I've become really good at learning how to produce more and less time. And so then I don't take that extra time and just do nothing. No, I'm learning how to do more and less time so that I can take this extra time and do even more where you multiply production. And not everybody's that ambitious, right? Seattle, yes. I'm gonna do a West Coast tour next summer. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Hawaii, that's what I'm planning on. So we'll see how it all plays out. All right, I think everybody is tuned in and ready to roll. Next week at this same time, let me make sure I'm telling you guys right, yes. Next week at the same time, I'm gonna do a training session on NFTs. So and the reason I'm doing that is because what I can tell, nobody even knows what one is. Nobody knows what an NFT is or how to buy one. So I'm gonna do a training session next Tuesday at the same time, one PM central. And I'm gonna go through NFTs, crypto wallets, cryptocurrency, stuff like that. Just to bring you guys up to speed on my level of education, which isn't much by the way, but it's a lot more than a lot of you because a lot of you don't even know what an NFT is. So I want you to know what an NFT is, how to buy an NFT, right? So that you can be ready for my NFT project coming up soon, which a lot of you guys are gonna capitalize on and it's really gonna help a lot of people. So I'm excited about that. If you're not part of the free coaching program, right? At 02diamond.com, I have a completely free coaching program. Go there, 02diamond.com, download the 90 day action plan and get to work. Right, it's just that simple. Download, get to work. Download, get to work. All right, cool. Let's dive in here. And if you guys have questions, feel free to shout it out in the comments. I'm watching all the comments come through. I definitely wanna take some questions today, but I'm speaking to the experienced agents who have hit a brick wall in their career. Okay, you've hit that point where, okay, you have this routine, you've been building your business and you've got it to a point, but maybe you're at, let's say, 250 a year or 350 a year, right? You're making 350,000 a year, but you've made that same amount every year, okay, for like the last four years and you just can't quite seem to break out of this $350,000 a year income. So that's what I wanna talk to you guys about today and this is great again for any agents. It's not just experienced agents. This is good stuff to hear for anyone, okay? And I'm gonna really speak to you from my personal experiences of hitting these brick walls because everyone hits the brick wall. So that's the first thing you need to know about this is that everyone hits these walls. This is completely common. This is part of the process. This is something that everyone's gonna go through.  It's kind of like making cold calls. A lot of people say, I'm scared to make calls. I'm not gonna make calls. Yeah, everyone is scared to make calls the first time they do it, but the real winners, they move forward with it. They just break through that fear and they say, you know what, I'm gonna do this because this is what's gonna cause my family to live their best life.  So I'm gonna do this. So, it's totally common to be scared to make calls in the beginning. It's totally common to run into frustrations in the business. It's totally common to hit these walls and to become frustrated and disappointed. So I wanna talk to you guys about my experiences with this and then I wanna talk about what I think it's gonna take for you guys to break through these brick walls. They're not really walls. They're just little road bumps. Realize that. These are not walls. They're road bumps and they're very easily driven over. If you have the right perspective, if you're thinking more on a long-term basis, if you are doing the right things to try to get just a little better every day, 1% better every day, guys, all right? So listen, before I dive into it, I just want you guys to know, and you probably can tell, I just want you guys to succeed so bad, so bad. I just wanna see you guys win. I just want to see you win. And when I say win, I'm talking about having a smile on your face.  I don't, we didn't get into real estate to be stressed out and have high anxiety and worry about deals and worry about inspections and this, that and the other. Don't quit worrying about that stuff. I want you to be happy. Two things, I want you to be satisfied with where you are and I want you to get better every day. I want you to work on getting better every day, just a little bit better, learn something new, tweak something you're doing, get a little better, all right? So listen, there's been plenty of times I've hit brick walls, okay? And listen, when I hit the brick wall, when I lost everything back in 2005, when I sold my last condo in January of 2005, before I got back into roofing mid-2005, eventually landed a job on an oil rig in 2007, the entire year of 2007. Now that was a, that wasn't a brick wall because I got back in the business, but that was a heck of a road bump, right? And a lot of people would have threw in the towel right then. A lot of people would have threw in the towel right then, but I didn't. I didn't know that I was gonna get back in real estate. I'll be honest with you. On that, I'll be dead honest. I didn't know I was gonna get back into real estate, but the good Lord and fate and destiny and everything just kind of led me right back into the business. And I just think I had a lot of unfinished business, right? I just, a lot of unfinished business. I wasn't gonna let this business take me out like that. So I'll tell you about one specific little hurdle that I had, and I've talked about this before, but, you know, I mean, well, there's too hard. Let's go back, okay? Whenever I got back in the business, okay? On the oil rig, I'm making $44,000 a year. $44,000 a year and risking my life, right?  I come out of that and I make 100,000, 100,000 and 2008, right? Is that right? 80,000, 80,000 and 2008. So I made almost double what I made on the oil rig the year before, which was, I was a static. $80,000 as a real estate agent and I was a static. I was like, beside myself, if that tells you anything.  Your goal was 150 and you're very deeply depressed. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I sold four properties my first year. I made like $20,000, something like that. You made 30, you made more than me in my first year and you're depressed because your goal was 150,000 when really you're set up now to actually make that 150 your second year. It's crazy. The expectations that you guys are setting and the pressure you're putting on yourself and the anxiety that you're instilling is unreal and completely unnecessary, completely unnecessary. Stop doing this guys. Stop focusing on the results and how much money you make and what the transaction number is and start focusing on giving it all you have every day to contact as many people as you can and get just a little better, get a little better at communication, get a little better at efficiencies with processes of going through the transaction, what you're delegating, get better at delegation, right? Giving, handing off certain tasks to open your time up to be more efficient. I've become a master at that and this is something that is really hard for me, delegation because like being a single agent, I mean, I guess you guys can realize I'm not a good delegator and I'm still selling properties like I'm still showing properties. I'm still going to listing appointments even right now at this time. So I'm a horrible delegator. However, I have managed to figure out a way to, and everybody's different. I've figured out a way to delegate what I need to delegate to make my life easy and that's what you gotta figure out. What do you have to delegate to make your life easier? And this is part of taking your business to the next level because a lot of you may be holding on to every last little detail when you should be delegating so much, so much. And this is something that, I have to look at on a one-on-one basis. I have to look at this on a one-on-one basis and really talk to you about your specific situation to really go deeper with that subject in terms of what to delegate, how to delegate because everybody's different. A lot of people, a lot of agents, they want to delegate the showing of the properties. They want to get a showing agent, delegate the showings. I'm still showing my buyers. So everybody's different. You can't really judge the entire situation on or just give a blanket, okay, here. And that's one thing I really disagree with on a lot of the mainstream coaches is they give these general blanket trainings like here's exactly what you do every time. Here's what everyone should do. It's not, that's not the case. Everybody's different and has a different situations to deal with. So, you know, but just know that part of the process of taking it to the next level, especially if you're a single agent, right, is to find that level of delegation that you need to cross. And part of that, I'll tell you this before I move on, part of that is being okay with whoever you delegate some of the tasks to, you have to be okay with those tasks, not being perfect. You have to be okay with there being some mistakes.  If my assistant costs me $1,000 or $2,000 on a mistake she made, I'm fine with it. I talk to her, I'm like, what happened? She's like this, I'm like, listen, good job because she made an executive decision without me. She makes so many executive decisions without me that it makes my life so easy. I can afford to pay for that $1,000 mistake because of all the time that she allowed me to have and gave back to me that I invested back into my businesses that made me, I can't even count the number. It's not a thousand, it's more like millions. So, you know, listen, yes, we're gonna sit down and talk about the mistake and we're gonna make sure things like that don't happen again and we're gonna get better but I'm not gonna chastise her. I'm not gonna make her feel bad about making an executive decision. Everybody makes mistakes. I don't care if everything's perfect. I'm gonna stand up for her before I stand up for anybody else. I'll tell you that right now. I got her back over everybody's when it comes to business.  I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna take that.  So, let's take it back now. When I got in the business, back in the business in 2008, I did $80,000, a static. The next year I do $100,000. I'm like, mind blown, okay? The very next year was the year of the BP oil spill, which was a serious, serious moment for us down here on the beach. I'm right on the Gulf of Mexico, on the beach selling primarily golf front, beach front condos. And it was a very scary moment. People, real estate agents were leaving here and going to Birmingham and going to Huntsville and going to Atlanta thinking that it's over down here. Honestly, sellers were dumping their properties. Buyers were throwing their hands up and saying, I don't want nothing to do with this. And in that year, I applied everything I learned through the crash and I made 150,000. I increased my income from 100,000 in 2009 to 150 in a very strange year where basically we had a mini crash. It was a local, it was a more localized crash. It was a crash, honestly. And I made 50% more money that year. Why? Because I applied everything I learned and everything that I teach you guys, every single video to that moment. And everybody was freaking out in the office and I stood back and my dad was there. And I said, listen guys, stay calm, call your clients, tell them what's going on, right? Get through your entire list and say, listen, here's what's going on. I'm gonna keep you informed. What can I do to help you, right? People are dumping properties.   Let me know what I can do to help you. When I run through my clients, boom, then the next step is people I don't know. I'm reaching out to people I don't know and I'm saying, how you doing? Is there anything I can do to help you with the oil spill? I mean, do you need information? Do you want updates? Do you wanna buy one of these cheap properties? Do you wanna sell? It's the same thing. It's the same thing when the market crashes. There's gonna be a three month delay, okay? There's gonna be a scary moment that nobody's expecting, right? It's gonna make everybody put the brakes on. Everybody's gonna step back. There's gonna be a three month little period there and during that moment, we gotta call our past clients. I mean, we gotta go hard and call our past clients and say, hey, did you see that thing that just happened, the interest rates went up or something? Who knows what happened? What's going on with you with this? What do you think about it? Because there's one of three things they're gonna have to do, okay? They're either gonna be getting ready to buy as prices come down. They're gonna sell because they're in trouble or they're gonna hold on and write it out. There's only one of three things that they're possibly going to do, right? So when the market takes a huge turn, a massive turn, okay? We, everyone that follows me, everybody that's part of Zero to Diamond, everybody that's on my team, every agent that I can possibly get to, we need to be ready to go all in in that moment, all in, okay? And I want you guys to be ready. Let's take it back to the 2010 when I made 150. That next year I made about 250. Then I got into a rut. Then I got into a rut. I got into a rut. I was sitting around 250 to 300 for a couple of years, right? There was, I was like at 250 to 300 for a couple of years. And I said, you know what, this ain't doing it. I was making my calls. I was doing my thing. I was sending out handwritten letters. I was spending back then. I was spending a good 60,000 plus a year on postcards and mail outs. Something that, to be honest with you, I don't suggest nowadays. The results I got out of that was not 60,000 worth compared to where I can put that 60,000 in today's world is not a comparison. But that's what I was doing because that was all I had, right? That was, I mean, there was only a couple of different things that I could actually do back then, okay? So what did I do during that time, right? What did I do? And everything stair steps for me, right? So one year, one year, because this is what happens, the cycle, the cycle of the year, everybody has cycles in their year, okay? There's a busy season and there's a slow season. There's a season where a lot of people are buying, everything's busy, and then there's this slow season where it's slower. For us down here, it's normally summertime, spring and summer are the busier, and in the winter, it's slower. Some places are the complete opposite, okay? So I don't know you guys' individual markets, but the fact is that there's a slow period and a busy season. And what I was doing, this is what I was doing up to the point that I decided to make a change. This is the first thing I want you to realize. If you wanna take your business to another level, let's play the seasons. Write that down, okay? This is one massive point I wanna make to you that I think you can use to take your business to the next level, okay? Let's play the seasons. What I think a lot of you are doing is doing the same activities all year long, but the seasons, all right, the buying season and the slow season are changing throughout the year, but you are doing the same exact activities regardless of what season it is. What you need to do, what I would love for you to do, what I wanna help you do is realize that there are different seasons and we need to recognize when these seasons are and we need to adjust what we're doing on a daily and weekly basis during the seasons, okay? What I started doing was this. When I realized that this could be something that could stair step my production every year, I started doing this. What I did was in the busy season, I didn't really make that many calls because I'm so busy selling, you know? Now, before I realized this, before I realized this, I was just calling, calling, calling all year long. I was making time to call when it was busy and then I was calling when it was slow. Yeah, I was just calling when I could, but I kinda had the same strategy all year long. I changed it up and in like 2012 or so, I switched it up.  So what I realized is that in the slow season, I could actually make more calls during the slow season than I did all year long doing it the other way because the other way, I was just allotting a certain amount of time, you know, and I was just kinda hitting here or there. What I did differently when I wanted to take my business to the next level is I realized, I gotta play the seasons. And so by playing the seasons in the slow season, I made it a point that I was gonna make more calls in the slow season than I did all year using my other strategy. And then what happens is during the slow season, I build my database up, okay? I build my database up to a certain point whereas when the busy season comes, now my business explodes because I've created all these new relationships in the market during the slow season, okay? So what happens is is I make more calls in the slow season than I was before. I build my database up to the point where now I feel this busy season coming, I quit doing the calls and now I'm just riding the wave of this explosion of business. And then as that wave crashes and starts to flatten out and we get back into the slow season, now I'm right back on the phone and I wanna do the whole process over again. And what happens is as you make these relationships, you're accumulating.  And so as you're accumulating clients, those clients aren't going anywhere. Yes, some people may unsubscribe. Yes, you may have people use a different agent or whatever, okay? That's just part of it as well.  So as you accumulate more clients in the off season, okay? That creates a really big buying season, right? Whenever everything's exploding. And then when the slow season comes again, you do it again, but now your business is still the same size as it was as you grew it to the last slow season. Now you're just adding to that, right? Now it's growing again. And now what happens? You make more money the next year. You make more money the next year.  This is what I use when I realized that I was in a, in a, in a, just a funk. I was like, what can I do here? Okay, let me play the season thing. Let me see if this thing works. Okay, and so I look at it as the off season, okay? Football players, baseball players, anybody in sports, you know that in the off season, that's when you get better. Not during the season, you get better in the off season. The people that are working the hardest in the off season, that's the people who are growing their business and getting better every year. You see these NFL players, they come in and they get better every year. Okay, they're not just getting better every year because they're having great seasons and that's what they're getting better because they're working harder in the off season every year to add to what they have already and continue to accumulate those skills, right? I hope that makes sense to you guys. Play the season. So I played the seasons and I took my 350 up to 600. I took my 350 up to 600. 2014, I had a hundred deals. I had a hundred deals. That was the first year I had a hundred deals and I made 600,000. And I'm like, thank you. I was the number one rematch agent in Alabama and I had a hundred deals and it felt good to get there. However, that wasn't where I wanted to be at the end of the day. I wanted to be at a million dollars GCI. I wanted to be at a million dollars gross commissions. That was the goal from day one. The entire time is to figure out how to get to the million dollars. So I wasn't completely satisfied yet, even though I was very happy with where I was, I wasn't completely satisfied. So what I did, what I did was I created this plan. I created a plan. I made 600,000 the next year. I said, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna make that million dollars. I'm gonna make that million dollars this year. This is gonna be 2015. I'm gonna make that million dollars. So here comes November, here comes December of 2014 and I make this plan and I really, you know, I create a simple math. It was simple math, okay? It was, this is what you have to do. These are how many calls you have to make. This is how many listing appointments. This is how many listings you need per week, per month in order to get to the million dollars that you wanna get to. I had it all planned out. And so here comes January and I'm off to the races. First of the year, I'm like, this is gonna be my year, 2015, I'm gonna make a million dollars this year. I mean, listen guys, I 100% believed it. It wasn't like I didn't, it didn't happen because I didn't think it was gonna happen, right? I believed it was gonna happen 100%. There was nothing that was gonna stop me from making that million dollars. So here comes January and I'm crushing, I'm crushing, I'm crushing. And I can't quite hit the numbers that I'm wanting but I'm not freaking out yet. It's just January, right? Here comes February, not quite hitting the numbers. Here comes March. Not quite hitting the numbers. And what I realized was that I was on track to hit 600,000 again. Now, this is the moment that I became, I wasn't depressed. I was more deeply frustrated, right? Deeply disappointed in myself. I just wanted it so bad.  Understand that through all this. Yes, I was trying to close the deals and make the money but I wish it was all focused on people, right? And every plan that I put in place was around how can I help more people? Okay, so don't get it twisted with how I'm talking about money right here. That wasn't, you know, that was a personal goal. That had nothing to do with my goals to help as many people as possible. The money part showed me that I was helping more people, right? So if I made a million dollars, I know I helped a lot of people. That was what it was for me. So here I go, looks like I'm gonna make 600 again, became deeply, deeply, deeply frustrated. Okay, incredibly frustrated. You know, I'm working the seasons. I did my calls in the off season. I made my database bigger. So theoretically, with creating a bigger database in the off season, I should make more income this year. But no, it looks like I'm gonna make 600 again. What's going on here? So then I went into a deep dive personal development stage where I researched all the top agents. I was researching agents that were, you know, selling a billion dollars a year, selling 500 million a year, selling 200 million a year. I was reading about them. I was reading books. I was watching videos. I was listening to podcasts. I was trying to figure out every little thing I could possibly figure out about why I can't do this. And through all that research, it finally landed me to hire a coach. Okay, and that was the one and only coach I ever hired because I was that desperate to really get to the next level. When I hired the coach, I had the coach for four months and it was more of like a counselor kind of thing. Like he went through the same process of call expires, do pre-listing packages, close the deal, all the stuff that I'm kind of, you know, coach against basically coach the exact opposite of, but there were so many positives to the experience for me because, you know, listen guys, there's three reasons why somebody would need a coach. They either need to learn the fundamentals, like there's something going on fundamentally. They don't understand the process. They need to know how to generate leads, close deals, whatever the case may be. So they either need to know the fundamentals, they either need accountability, okay, or their perspective is wrong and they need help mentally to view the situations correctly so that you can make the right moves, okay? And I walked into the coaching scenario thinking that my fundamentals are off.  I definitely don't need to be held accountable. I definitely don't need to be held accountable. So what's next? Fundamentals. I have to be doing something fundamentally wrong. So I walked into the coaching scenario, walked into the program with the once a week call thinking my fundamentals are off. So I followed the program to a T. I followed it to a T. I'm calling expires. I'm doing pre-listing packages.  And what I realized after a four month run is that I didn't need fundamentals. I didn't need accountability. What I, where I was going wrong was my mentality, my mentality, my perspective, and it comes down to my four keys to success, right? You gotta believe, adapt, work hard and be patient. And I felt like I was those things, but I wasn't. I was missing the last one. This was the last piece for me. This was the last piece of the puzzle for me. I needed to learn how to be patient. I was working hard and I believed. I was adapting. I was adapting big time. I mean, I was shaking and moving. I mean, I adapted what I did through the year. I'm learning how to communicate better. I'm using better words. My tone is better. I'm making people feel like they're family. Connecting. I'm not even trying to close people. I'm just trying to be their friends and help them through whatever it is they're trying to do. And I'm getting better and better and better that along the way. And what I realized through my coaching sessions that four month period of time and getting to the point where, and I did end up the year with 600,000 again, at the end of the year, I didn't care that it was 600,000 again. That was the point right there. That was the huge, huge, huge turning point for me when I realized that I was gonna make 600 again and I didn't care that I was happy with the 600. I was happy with the 600. Because I knew that the 600 was my full potential because I was giving complete 100% effort. I was giving everything that I had to make that 600. And because I knew that that was all I had, I was gonna yield the highest results possible for me and at that point, you have to be happy with whatever those results are because you can't control the results. So I had to understand that you can't control the results. You can only control your actions and your efforts. And that was a huge, huge, huge thing for me. The very next year, I made 750. That was 2016. I didn't even make a million the next year. It was a 750 year, but it was better. It was better than the 600. And then the next year, 2017, was the first year I hit the million and I've hit a million every year since. So I wanna explain this process to you guys. I wanna explain this process to you guys of how this happened, how I got to the million and how I've continued to do the million every year since. I want you guys to understand the philosophy behind the entire process from a bird's eye view so that you understand that way you can look at your own business. You can look at your own business and you can say, okay, this is where I am, okay? And then over time, this many years, this is where I'm gonna be. I'm gonna stair step up to this level and then this is how I'm gonna maintain that level. Whatever that level is for you. I've got agents that wanna make 100,000 a year. That's all they wanna make. I've got agents that wanna do 200, 500, a million, two million, whatever level of ambition you have, it doesn't matter to me. I just wanna help you get to that level and stay at that level. And I wanna go through that process with you right now. So basically it goes like this, right? Your database, okay? Think about this. The size of your database, okay? The size of your database that is full of people that you are friends with, people that you have talked to, people that think of you as family, people that are getting weekly emails from you and see you on social media. And you guys feel like you're close. You guys feel that closeness. When I came back in the business in 2008 after I realized that it was relationships over transactions, not the other way around, I started having different kind of conversations with my clients. I was having conversations with my clients where they felt that I cared about them and I felt like we were there. It was like such a connection whereas before I was in the business, I was having these cold conversations. I could tell we had no connection. They didn't really care about me. We're just doing the deal and I didn't really even care about them to be honest with you. We're just doing the deal. I mean, I was kind of giving them what they're giving me but when I got back in the business 2008 after I realized that that's where I went wrong, my conversations were completely different. I'm not trying to sell people anything. I'm not trying to get you to buy or sell anything. I just wanna get to know you. I want you to know what I do and that I'm here to help you when you decide to do something whether it be today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, 10 years from now and I wanna help anybody you know buy or sell real estate. So these conversations were completely different. So when you understand that concept, that people decide who their real estate agent is by who their friend is in the business and the object is to create as many friends in the market as possible. When you get past that now, it's about how many friends you can create and the size of your income is gonna be dictated by the size of that database.  No, it's gonna be dictated by the amount of real friends in your database that are getting original content from you consistently and your names in front of them. Here's something to think about as you're building your database. Making a great first impression on people and they get that feeling. When people get that first impression from you and they feel like, man, this person really cares. This person really, you know, it seems like a hard worker and it seems dependable and honest and professional, you know, this is a great, this is a good guy. This is a good guy or good girl. When they get that feeling from you after that first conversation, and then you can take their data and you can start to hit them on a consistent basis. I love the weekly email and they see your name. What happens every time they see that email, they get that feeling again. They get that feeling again that they had the first time. They're like, oh, there's that Ricky. There's Ricky again. There's that great guy. There's that great guy. I'm gonna use him. I'm gonna use him as a real estate agent when I get ready to buy or sell. I'm sure it's gonna be a great experience. He's just a good person, right? He works hard, he cares about people. He does what he says he's gonna do. He's consistent, okay? You wanna create these great first impressions.  The size of your database is gonna dictate the size of your income, okay? So what we have to understand is that a lot of agents who come into the business and they reach this level of 150,000 a year and they kinda plateau there and they just start hitting 150 everywhere. 150, 150, 150, 150, 150. And you kinda wonder why? I can tell you why. They came in the business. They were guns ablazing. They were talking to everybody. They built their database up to the point where they made the 150 and then they quit, they put their guns away. And now they're just living off their database. Understand this concept. Understand this concept, my friends. When you quit building your database and you just rely on your database for past clients and referrals, you just rely on your database. You're not really adding anyone to your database at all. You're not growing your database. Your number stays the same. Your income will plateau. Your income will plateau. It will level out. So I want you to understand that. If you're in a place right now where your income is leveled out at 50,000 a year, 100,000 a year, 150, whatever it is. And you've been hitting that number every year since. I can tell you, you're not talking to new people in the market you never talked to to give those great first impressions to collect their data, to add them to your database. That's not happening. So every year, if you take the slow season to grow the database, the busy season to close the database, the next slow season to grow your database even more, the busy season to close, the next slow season to grow it even more, the next season to close, the next season to grow it even more, you can create a skyscraper of a database, ladies and gentlemen, slowly but surely. Slowly but surely. It's just a matter of time. And I don't care if it takes you 10 years, 15 years. Keep building your database. The moment you stop building your database, your income plateaus. And listen, I'm speaking from experience. When I hit the million dollars in 2017, I quit making cold calls. I quit sending postcards. I quit doing, I was never doing social media for my real estate business. I quit doing everything I was doing except the weekly email to stay in touch with my database. That's the only activity that I did from 2017 to today. And what has happened? Every year a million dollars, million dollars, million dollars. Why? Because I took 15 years to build my database up to the point where I'm making a million dollars and now I can live off my database to maintain that million dollars. If you're at 250 and you wanna make 500, then you need to take the next couple years to build that database up to the point where you know how you've got your database up to the point where you can make the desired income every year? Because as you're building the database, you hit that desired income. You can't stop building the database until you hit the income you wanna hit, right? It wasn't like the beginning of 2017 I quit doing everything. No, it was the end of 2017 that I quit doing everything after I actually hit the million dollars. Then I'm like, okay, now I can let my database make me that million dollars every year. So I've made some really good points in my opinion here about working through the slow seasons, working the seasons, building the database. I've made some really good points about how to stair step your income every year. If you're in a rut, I can tell you right now chances are you're not adding anyone to your database on a consistent basis. And these are just facts, right?  It's completely on an individual basis, okay? But what I wanted to do today was just tell you guys my story and everything that I went through with hitting these road bumps and everything that I did to get over these road bumps and everything I did to build my business up to the point that I wanted my desired income and then the process and the mentality behind getting there and staying there. Now I'm selling 100 properties a year, making a million dollars a year, working five hours a week in my real estate business. I'm working five hours a week in my real estate business, guys.  You don't know what I went through for 15 years to get where I'm at. Nobody wants to talk about that.  Yeah, go make 100,000 calls with your finger, with your hand, look up the numbers on Spokio and Bigfoot and whitepages.com and do handwritten letters, spend 60 grand a year on postcards. You guys go do all that for 15 years and then come talk to me. You guys don't wanna do that and you're not gonna do that. And the cool thing about it is you don't have to do that. With today's technology, with companies like Redx, you can literally click a mouse, get thousands of numbers, another button, dial them at 100 dials an hour. You can make the same 100,000 calls that took me 15 years and a matter of two or three years. You guys could be exactly where I am right now within two to three years. From being brand new, you can be exactly where I am within two, three, four, five years, however long it takes you to build the database up to the point that I have mine because you guys, you guys have the technology. You guys have the resources that I didn't have. You guys can do things so much faster than it took me, but hardly any of you are taking advantage of it. Just give me two to three to four hard years. Create five new relationships with property owners every day for four years and tell me you're not the number one agent in your market. You create five new relationships with property owners every day, voice to voice, followed by a weekly email on the same day of the week forever for four years and tell me you're not the number one realtor in your market. I would love for you to go through that process and tell me you're not number one. It's not gonna happen. You're gonna be number one. All right, so I hope you guys go back. If you just tune in and watch this entire video, let me know what, I'll take a couple of questions. If you guys have any questions, I'm gonna put those in the comments. I'll be here for another couple of minutes and I just wanted to say thank you guys. I hope you guys can tell how much I really want you guys to win so bad and I'll do anything to help you do that. While I'm waiting on a couple of questions here, I just wanna reiterate that next week at the same time, I'm gonna do training on NFTs. What are NFTs? How do you buy NFTs? All that good stuff because a lot of people have no idea. They're completely oblivious. I'm gonna be in Salt Lake the day after tomorrow, Thursday. Cannot wait to see you guys there. If you're anywhere close to Salt Lake, I would love to see you, zero-to-diamond.com back slash events or link in the YouTube description. It's gonna be a lot of fun. I'll also be in many other cities so just go there and check it out. And if you're not part of the free coaching program, okay, at zero-to-diamond.com, click the button, credit an account, download the 90-day action plan and get to work guys, it's completely free. And if you guys need anything, DM me on Instagram and also the Discord. If you guys aren't on the Discord yet, the Discord is at around 2,000 agents already. So I'm gonna put a link for that. We're making live calls in the Discord every day so you guys can go there and make live calls with us and with many other agents in the Discord. Let's see, let me add that right here so you guys can connect there. Discord is better than the Facebook group. I gotta be honest with you. Join the ZTD Discord. It is much better. Total transparency. Let's see, I'll put it right here too in the comments. Boom. You guys can connect there, ask me questions, post your daily results on Discord. I actually will see them as opposed to Facebook. Not, I can't, I mean, I only see certain ones on Facebook because there's an algorithm in place. There's not an algorithm with Discord. I see everything in real time. I can scroll back, chronological order. So definitely connect with me and all the rest of the agents there and let's hold each other accountable. Let's make our live calls there and let's post our daily results there and so on and so forth. Let's see, is the link not working? Let's see, it should work. Let me check real quick, boom. Yes, it's working. It's working, yes, and there's 2,000 members. That's exciting. The link is working. So just try it on a different browser or something. All right, I'm gonna take a couple of questions real quick before I roll here and also I'm gonna be doing live calls pretty soon. Here in the next two hours, I'll be right back here live, doing live calls with an agent. So I'm looking forward to doing that as well. How big's my database? Right now it's 15,000 people. All right, let's see. Here's a good one. Hey, Ricky, if an agent has never made a call and wants to ease into making calls, what's the best type of call to make? Geo Leads or just calling around an area of an active listing. Sebastian, that is exactly the same thing, okay? Geo Leads is calling around an area of an active listing. But to answer your question, I would start out with Geo Leads and Expires, even do for sell by owners if you're new to it, just to kinda get your feet wet, you're gonna wanna settle into Geo Leads and Expires.  Mix it up, diversify who you're calling in your market. Thanks for the question, my man. Let's see. Okay, here's one, success after 50 possible. Absolutely, you have a great, listen, do you know how much you can accomplish in five years, not to mention 10 or 15 years? It's ungodfell, like in today's world, where you can literally do things 10 times faster than it took me when I started, you can literally set yourself up within a good five years. I mean, I just kinda went through that and said that if you guys gave me three to five hard years, you could be the number one agent in your market, without a doubt. All right, looking for another question, looking for another question, guys. Ooh, I love this one. How would you say that you anticipate the market shifting itself as the Fed eventually begins to stop buying bonds? It seems listing prices are highly inflated with rates keeping volume high. Absolutely, my guy, that's a really good point, a really good question. So basically, man, listen, here's the bottom line, okay, and here's the real bottom line.  But as a real estate agent, we don't really care about that. Yes, we care because then we have to consult our clients through and navigate that, but we don't need to be predicting what the market's gonna do. We never need to predict what the market is gonna do. We always tell clients that the market has done what it's doing now and then let them make a decision. Would I ever try to predict what the market is gonna do? That will get you in trouble every single time. No one knows what is gonna happen, but listen, the market is gonna turn around at some point and I'll link a video in the under YouTube about this euphoric shift that's fixing to happen for real estate agents. We're gonna be in a complete state of euphoria when every seller, this is the largest bubble of pent-up seller demand that we've ever seen. I've never seen a bubble of so big of sellers who want to sell, but can't, okay? They can't because they're scared to leave money on the table. They can't because there's nowhere to go. That is going to change at some point. When it does, they're gonna realize it on the same day. They're all gonna call their real estate agent that if you guys are making calls and finding these sellers who don't have anywhere to go, that's the perfect client you want right now.  I don't know what to do. I sure wouldn't move. I'd love to sell if I could find a place. Cool.  They all call you on the same day and say sell, sell, sell before it goes down because they're gonna realize we've hit a top at some point and they're all gonna realize it at the same time. Feds go, you know, fed, they raise the interest rate, stop buying bonds, whatever the case may be, they're gonna realize it and they're gonna want to sell all at the same time. When the market slows down, that means buyers went away but we're not gonna lose all the buyers. There's still gonna be some there and we're gonna have those buyers on a pocket that just lost on three deals. Now all of a sudden you're gonna have a lot of listings to sell those buyers.  This is if you're putting in the work to create five new friends or property owners every day and building that database. And the cool thing is it doesn't matter if what I'm saying doesn't happen. You win either way. Guys, I'm trying to put you in position to win regardless if you guys will just listen to me. I'm trying to help you guys win no matter what happens. And put you in a position, William, where what you're saying as a real estate agent doesn't matter. As a human being, sure. As an investor, sure. But as a real estate agent, closings are gonna continue to happen every single day for the rest of your life, no matter what the market does. Cool guys, if you guys have any more questions just hit me up on Instagram or on Discord. Discord is a really good place to get me now. I've got a lot of attention right there. You can DM me there on Discord or ask me questions in the Ask Ricky channel on Discord. And I hope you guys got a lot of value out of this. It was very therapeutic for me to get all this off my chest and kind of just get it out there for you. And again, I hope it helped a lot. And I'll see you guys at Salt Lake or sitting near you real soon. And again, please let me know what I could do to help you. Talk to you guys soon.