Yesterday my day began at 5 a.m. when I woke up with a better idea for our social media strategy. (Does anyone else do their best thinking at unreasonable hours?) By 6 am, I had a fresh outline drafted – a pivot from what we’d planned but, I think, a much stronger approach. By 7am the structure was in place. Tick. ✅
Feeling rather pleased with myself, I headed out for an early power walk along our seafront promenade. It should have been a sunrise walk, but this is winter in the UK… so not today. But at least it wasn’t raining, and 7km of beauty, sanity and thinking time is priceless.
Back home, coffee in hand, I jumped straight onto the phone to be the first call an agent received that day. In our everyday evening searches the night before, we came across a property online that looks ideal for our title split strategy: a smaller, manageable project to get started with with the potential for a big uplift. (It’s early days for us in this niche, but with great advice and support around us, we’re ready to get started.)
Straight on the back of this came the first curveball – an urgent request. Could I fill an unexpected gap in a team coach training business simulation, role-playing a tough CEO in a tricky leadership scenario? The session started in just 20 minutes, and I was still in my exercise gear, flushed and windswept.
Changing the canvas with a quick application of makeup, a masterful fluff of the hair, a smart jacket over my base-layer top and a quick adjustment to my Zoom background, and, boom, I was ready to go, right on time. It was fun, and it’s always good to help out – staying connected with the coaching world keeps my skills sharp!
Just as I left the Zoom room, my builder colleague from BNI called. He’s just finished a job for someone whose elderly mother’s dated house needs to sell – superfast, and he recommended his client speak to me. Twenty minutes later, I knew a lot more about the house and the situation and scheduled a viewing for the weekend. (With two other deals in the pipeline, this isn’t in the budget – but hey, it’s a great opportunity and we can figure that detail out later!)
By lunchtime, I finally got to shower. By then, I still hadn’t touched the first item on my to-do list for the day. By evening, I’d made it through about 75% of the list, attended two live property course sessions, and rescued a dropped ball from the day before (I’ll get to that in a moment).
Let’s pause here.
Isn’t this how we’re all operating right now? We make plans, but in reality, all we can reliably plan for is that plans will be disrupted, and we need to welcome that. Resilience is not a nice to have in today’s world. It’s an essential inner power that applies to property investing as much as anything else.
What does resilience look like in action? It goes beyond riding it out when things go sideways. Resilience is adaptability, curiosity, and the ability to pivot quickly when opportunities or challenges arise. It’s also about recognizing which balls to keep in the air and which can bounce.
The Art of Chameleoning
“Chameleoning” is a term I coined because I’m visual and I like metaphors. It’s the ability to adapt – to change colour (or state or perspective) or hold multiple colours and adjust to the world as it shifts around us. When the business simulation request landed on my plate, I could have said no. But stepping into situations like this keeps me connected to the coaching world and helps keep current skills that are invaluable to property investing. For example, the ability to quickly sense another person’s perspective and adjust my approach to meet them in their world is invaluable when negotiating deals or working with tradespeople.
In property investing, it also means seeing beyond the obvious and finding potential where others see problems. That urgent sale? It’s a challenge for the seller right now, but for us, it’s a potential win-win opportunity. Adaptability allows us to move quickly, helping others while creating value for our business.
Curiosity – the catalyst for opportunity
Curiosity keeps us learning and looking for what might be next, what is unusual and where the hidden gaps are. It’s the spark that has us scanning property listings late at night and the excitement that had me pick up the phone at 8:30 am the next morning to discover more. In property, curiosity is what helps us spot trends, find latent opportunities, and learn from every deal.
Curiosity is more than asking questions to understand. It’s also about being open to unexpected answers and listening for what is not being said. It’s why we’re always exploring new strategies and surrounding ourselves with experts who can guide us as we learn and become involved with bigger things. It keeps us growing.
Flexibility – pivoting on the spot
Flexibility is the practical application of adaptability and curiosity. It’s the step from “I didn’t see this coming” to “How do we make this work?” Remember the ball I dropped yesterday? I had arranged for the staging furniture in a property we’ve sold to be collected by our storage facility… inadvertently a week too late. That could have presented a tricky problem, but kudos to the guys at our amazingly flexible storage company who went out of their way to make a plan. The furniture was in their van just three hours from my SOS call and on its way to their facility.
Flexibility allows us to shift schedules, adjust priorities, and respond to the unexpected without losing momentum. It’s how we manage to keep the glass balls in the air and let the rubber ones bounce until they’re needed again.
Juggling balls and building resilience
Speaking of balls… some are glass, and some are rubber, and we need to keep tabs on which are which. The glass ones cannot be dropped without consequence. The rubber ones will bounce back up.
Resilience is juggling between them. It’s recognizing that sometimes you have to prioritize the unexpected CEO roleplay or the urgent phone call about a property, even if it means other plans take a hit. Sometimes, a glass ball will drop; resilience is about how we pick it up. That’s often where relationships come in. The trust and goodwill you build with others can make all the difference in turning a near-miss into a win.
Where are we headed?
As professionals, whether in property or any other field, and with more unknowns than knowns in the world at present, resilience is key to staying sane. It’s the ability to adapt, stay curious, and pivot quickly. It’s juggling the balls that matter most at any point in time and letting others bounce for as long as they can.
It’s about embracing the daily unexpected, trusting, as Douglas Adams puts it, that:
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
We welcome you to join us in chameleoning; changing colours with dexterity, juggling balls with agility, as we dig a bit deeper to recognise how unpredictable situations can be exactly the momentum needed to move us forward!