When Motivation Runs Out

The last time you said you were going to do something for someone on your team and you didn't. Not because you forgot, because the week got away from you, because something more urgent came up. Because by Thursday, the commitment you made on Monday felt like it belonged to a different person in a karma moment at a different moment in time. You probably moved on. They probably didn't even say anything, but something shifted. Not dramatically. Something small, something quiet, something adjusted in how much they were counting on you.

And that's how it starts. Not by one big failure, one commitment at a time. And that's what most leaders never see happening because from the inside, it always looks like a reasonable exception. From the outside, it's just your pattern. This episode is about pattern and what creates it and what it costs and specifically how to change it without relying on motivation because motivation is exactly what runs out on the days that matter most. Somewhere in your organization right now, someone is quietly adjusting their expectations of you.

Not because you're a bad leader, because you showed up differently yesterday than you did last week or the day before or the week before. And they notice. They always notice. And that's what this episode is about. Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books. They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world.

This is the leadership series. Welcome back to the Jeffrey Scott podcast, the leadership series, seven episodes in. If you have been here from the beginning, something's been building. Episode one said, "Leadership is not a title, it's who you are." Episode four said, "What you tolerate becomes a culture." Episode five, we talked about trust. And trust is built in small moments that compound over time. Episode six, emotional agility is what makes consistency possible. And this episode is where all of that lands because none of it holds.

The communications, the standards, the trust, the emotional regulation, none of it holds if you cannot show up the same way on Thursday that you showed up on Monday morning. Consistency is not the conclusion of the series. It is the engine underneath it. everything we've been building so far. And for the people who are not yet in a formal leadership role, this one is for you, too. Maybe more than the others. The consistency habits you are building right now are the ones you will lead from. Every week you keep a commitment or you let one slide.

You are casting a vote for the kind of leader you are becoming and the kind of lead you are. That vote is happening whether you are paying attention to it or not. If we haven't met before, I am Jeffrey Scott Stan. I am a coach, consultant, adviser, and speaker and former executive vice president of learning development for Douglas Elman Real Estate. My work is focused on behavioral strategy, learning design, performance enablement, and leadership development in high-paced, high stakes, high stress environments. Before we go any further, I'd like to sincerely thank our founding partners, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent.

Their information is in the show notes. Please reach out to them and thank them for their support. Each episode of the series is inspired by a different book on leadership. This episode is inspired by Atomic Habits by James Clear. Most people who have read the book remember the habit framework. Q, craving, response, reward. We're not going there today. We are going to go to the three ideas underneath it that most readers of the book miss. the identity question, the compounding principle, and the valley, the period where you're doing everything right and nothing seems to be working, which is where most leaders give up, right before

things change. We're going to take the principles from a non-leership book and put them into a leadership role. We're going to take those three ideas and apply them in the real world to leadership. And those three ideas applied to leadership in real estate are what this episode is about. Not the book summary, the real application of atomic habits when you're leading in the real estate brokerage field. Why consistency fails. When when a leader falls short on consistency, the explanation is almost always the same. I wasn't focused enough.

Too many things at once. I needed to want it more. And so the solution is always more motivation, bigger goals, stronger commitments, and more willpower. And that may work for a while until it doesn't. and a leader just concludes, "I'm not a naturally consistent person." James Clear's central argument in the book turns that conclusion upside down. Consistency does not fail because of motivation. It fails because of systems. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. A leader who relies on motivation will be consistent when they feel motivated.

But that's not when it matters the most. The leader who builds a system is consistent regardless of how they feel because the system's always running. Same goal, completely different results. The difference is in character, the difference is structure. And the difference is in your structure and your systems. This matters especially in real estate because the business is specifically designed to defeat systems. There is always something more urgent. A deal in crisis, a call to return, a conflict that just surfaced between two agents. Without deliberate systems for your most important leadership behaviors, those behaviors get shot down every week in favor of what is the loudest

and what's the most important at that second in time. And the loudest thing is almost always what's never the most important overall. I watched this happen to a leader that I'll call Marcus. Marcus was genuinely talented, deeply invested in his team. When things were calm, he was the exact leader he wanted to be. But the moment the volume picked up, the business picked up, things got busy, his leadership behaviors were the first things to go, the one-on-one stopped, his feedback to his agents stopped, his check-in stopped.

He would tell himself, "Hey, when this settles down, I'll get back to it." We all know real estate, this industry never settles down. And the team who learned what to expect from him when things were good, how to operate without it when they needed him the most. His agents didn't quit on him all at once, either. They just did not confront him. They adjusted. They stopped expecting the one-on- ones. They stopped counting on the feedback. They stopped bringing him the real problems because they learned his presence was conditional upon the business being calm.

Marcus had been running a team for two years that no longer needed him. And he had no idea. Not because his team became stronger, because they learned not to depend on their leader, Marcus. Somebody once told me this. Nobody quits on a leader who never shows up. They quit on the leader who showed up for them and then suddenly stopped. Most leaders do not have a consistency problem. They have a systems problem and they've been trying to solve that with motivation, which is why it always comes back each and every single time.

There's an identity shift that needs to happen. And this is the most important idea in this episode and the one that most leaders are going to miss. So stay with me here. Most leaders approach consistency as an outcome goal. They want to give better feedback. They want to be more present. They want to hold that standard. Those goals describe what you want to achieve. And they're fragile. When the pressure is high and the motivation is gone, an outcome goal gives you nothing to hold on to.

The argument is that behavior change that sticks is rooted in identity, not in outcomes or not in goals. Not what you want to achieve. It's who you are. The question that unlocks this is not what do you want to do differently. The question is who do you want to be? The leader who says I am trying to give consistent feedback is working towards an outcome. A leader who says I am the kind of leader who gives honest consistent feedback is living the identity. One of these gives feedback only when they feel like it.

The other gives it because the leader is who they are. That's who the leader is. When pressure is high and Wednesdays are hard, the identity holds when the intention does not. Every action is a vote for the kind of person you are becoming as a leader. Not the person you want to be someday, the person you are becoming right now. And every time you follow through on a small commitment, you cast a vote that you're a consistent leader. Every time you let it slide, you cast a vote for an inconsistent one.

Enough votes in one direction substained over time. And that's the identity that you've established, not declared, but established through repetition. I worked with a manager that I'll call Daniel. Daniel had been telling himself and his team for two years that he is committed to developing all his agents. He talked about in meetings and he meant it genuinely. It was in his vision. It was written on his wall. But when I asked his agents how often Daniel gave them specific development feedback, the answer was almost never.

Not because Daniel was being dishonest, because developmental feedback was an outcome goal, something he wanted to do, not his identity. He was not the kind of leader who developed his agents. He was the kind of leader who wanted to be that kind of leader. The gap between those two things was quietly costing him his best people. The shift for Daniel was not a new goal. It was a new question. Not how do I give more feedback but this question turns to who am I as a leader?

When he decided the answer was a leader who develops people the feedback started happening almost immediately not because time appeared but because he stopped treating it as optional. His identity as a leader demanded it. Listen, your team is not experiencing your intentions. They're experiencing your patterns. And the patterns are what people trust, not the promises. Your pattern substained over time becomes your identity in their eyes whether you've chosen it or not. The question is whether the identity they are experienced is the one you would choose for them to experience.

Now in episode 5 we spoke about Renee the leader whose team held together when everyone around them was falling apart. Rene was being who she was. Every consistent action was a vote for her identity. It was cast hundreds of times. The trust her team gave her when the market got hard was the return on that investment. She wasn't lucky. She was consistent. And consistency sustained over time is something you cannot buy. The valley. Now, now the part nobody talks about because it's where most leaders lose the battle.

Clear describes a plateau of latent potential. The idea is simple and brutal. When you start building a new consistent behavior, those results are not immediately. You do you do the right things, keep the commitments, you show up the same way, you look around and nothing seems to be changing. The team is not more engaged. The culture is not shifting. Nothing that you can see. Now, there's the analogy about the ice. The room's at 25° and there's a block of ice in the center of the room.

You apply heat to the room. 25 26 27 28 29 It's still a block of ice. 31 degrees still ice. 32 it starts melting. One degree made all the visible difference, but the heat was working the entire time. The threshold had just not been reached. That gap between where the work starts and where the results appear is what's called the valley. Most leaders just quit in the valley. 6 8 10 weeks of doing the right things with no visible results, they conclude, eh, it's just not working.

What is actually happening is that the compounding is accumulating underneath the surface. You know, I know this from my own experience. Early on in my career, I made a commitment about how I would start every oneonone. The first five minutes were always going to be about the agent, no matter what. Not work, not numbers, not what I needed, just about them. What was happening with them? What was hard? It felt awkward. Honestly, it felt like a technique more than a real conversation. For the first several weeks, I could not point to anything that actually was changing.

I almost quit doing it. The only reason I did not is I decided that this was who I wanted to be. This was going to be my identity. A leader who actually knows the people he leads. because there's nothing worse than a leader who has no idea who his people are. And I wasn't going to let a few uncomfortable weeks change who I wanted to be, who my identity was. About 2 months in, something shifted. People started coming to me earlier with their problems. Not because I had done anything dramatic, because they had slowly formed a different impression of me through dozens of small, consistent

interactions. The threshold had been crossed. It was above 32°. I just couldn't see it from inside the valley. The hardest part about the valley is that it looks identical to failure. Most leaders don't quit because they're incapable. They quit because they misread the silence of the room. The same behaviors that produce no visible results in week 1, 2, or three produce significant results in week eight. The only difference is time. And that time is the one thing motivation cannot manufacture. Which is why systems matter in the valley because the system keeps going when the motivation cannot see the point of doing it anymore.

Maybe you're in the valley right now doing things right and seeing nothing right now. The absence of visible results is not evidence the work is not counting. It's evidence you have not reached your threshold yet. That 32° stay in it. That degree, the ice melt is coming. But only if you do not stop applying the heat to the ice. Now I was told by a old coach of mine, systems over goals every time. So what do you actually do? Not in general, specifically. Right now your office, your team this week.

What's the system? Well, a leadership system has three qualities. It is specific. Not I want to give more feedback. That's not specific. How about this? Every one-on-one meeting ends with one specific positive feedback before that door closes. It's time bound. It happens at a definitive moment, not oh, whenever I get a chance to it. And it's built into the environment. The conditions that trigger it is structural, not dependent upon your memory or not dependent upon your motivation. Three systems that work in real estate, not concepts, and you can start these tomorrow.

The first one is the commitment rule. Every significant interaction ends with one explicit commitment stated out loud and written down in the moment. Not I will follow up. A specific commitment. I will send you the analysis by Thursday at noon. Written in a physical notebook on your desk, not on your phone. And I know some people are going to say, "Oh, I only use my phone for apps." Use a notebook. Your phone disappears. You start scrolling on your phone when you pick it up. The notebook sits there, sits there as a reminder.

You see it every morning. It removes the decision about whether to make a commitment. The commitment always gets made. And because it's written and visible, the chance of forgetting it drops to nearly zero. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffree Scott Stan podcast where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world in real time. I want to take a moment to recognize and thank one of our founding partners, Subi. One of the biggest leadership lessons I've learned is that the best operators don't do everything themselves.

They build systems that handle the details so they can focus on what matters. And that's exactly what Subi does for real estate professionals. Is an AI transaction genie that keeps everything organized. From contacts to closing to timelines to details, nothing falls through the cracks. Your work is my command is their promise and they deliver on it. Please vote. Link is in the show notes. Tell them Jqued Podcast Productions sent you. What most leaders are going to discover when they start the system is that they've been making far more commitments than they can keep.

And listen, this isn't just for leaders. This is for every day of your life. But having that notebook there on your desk, that notebook reveals it immediately, which is hugely useful. Because a leader who knows that they are overcommitting can start making fewer, more deliberate commitments. And the leader who keeps the commitments they make is building trust with every single one. The second is a weekly leadership audit. One question you ask every Friday, no matter what. Where was I inconsistent this week? And what does that tell me?

Not a long review, just one question. Five minutes out of your day on a Friday. The leader who asked this weekly will see their own pattern more clearly than any 360 review or 360 audit will ever do. The data is fresh. The moments are still accessible. The pattern looked at week after week becomes impossible to rationalize away like most leaders will do. It's there in front of you. The third is environment design. Most leaders never think about this deliberately. Research shows behavior is shaped heavily by environment.

What's around you determines what feels easy and what feels hard. Most leaders design their environment for operational efficiency, which means leadership behaviors get designed out. The always accessible office creates reactive leadership. The packed calendar creates inconsistent presence. The phone in the desk during one-on- ones creates divided attention. That cell phone you're looking out of the corner of your eye divide your attention. You cannot always control what happens. You can almost always control the condition and the environments you put yourself in. Marcus eventually solved this problem not through more motivation, but through one environmental change.

He moved his one-on- ones to Monday morning, non-negotiable, first thing before the week's operational demands had a chance to crowd out those one-on- ons. That one structural decision did more for his consistency than two years of wanting to be better had ever done. It removed the decision about whether the one-on- ones actually happened. They happened. The only question was what he said in them. Yep. The common thread in all three of these systems is they reduce the number of decisions you have to make about your leadership behavior.

Cuz every decision, every decision is a potential failure point. Systems eliminate those moments. Systems eliminate those points. They make the consistent behavior the default. And the default is what your team experiences as you as their leader. You know people always say consistency and brokerage environment is just a difficult thing to do. A managing broker runs an excellent Monday morning meeting. Energy, clarity, investment. The team leaves feeling led, feeling purpose. Thursday meeting start 20 minutes late. The agenda gets abandoned. The broker takes two phone calls and apologizes once.

Same people. what they experience across the week is not a great leader. Sometimes they experience an unpredictable one. Hability does exactly one thing over time. People stop counting on any version of you. The mental energy your team spends adapting to your inconsistency is mental energy not spent on their clients, not spent on their business, or the culture you're trying to build. It's an energy drain. The team leader gives exceptional feedback in quarterly reviews, thoughtful, specific, genuine development. And nothing in those months between them. What the agent experience is not a leader gives excellent feedback.

They experience a leader who doesn't give feedback. It's one exception four times a year that doesn't compound. It doesn't change behavior. It does not build the relationship. The agent is making career decisions about their business, their commitments to his team, the commitment to the organization without the input of the person who's supposed to be developing them. You, but you're only giving them feedback three or four times a year. The leader who is fully present in one-on- ones until their phone vibrates, then they're somewhere else. Not completely, not rudely, just someplace else.

The agent in that chair across from you, they notice. Not because they're demanding, because they're human. The message they receive are not the words being spoken. The message is you're not important enough for all of my attention. The agent who feels that enough times stops bringing conversation that requires someone's full attention. They bring safe conversations. The real ones they take somewhere else to somebody else, maybe to a different company eventually. Listen, none of these leaders are bad people. They are leaders without a system in place.

And the cost of operating without a system is not paid all at once. It's paid in small amounts continuously across hundreds of interactions until your culture has drifted so far from where the leader intended recovery feels almost impossible. It's not impossible. It is always more expensive to try to rebuild that culture than it would have been if you put a system in place in the first place. People around you cannot trust somebody. People around you cannot trust someone they cannot predict it. This isn't about liking the leader or agreeing with them.

It's about being able to build something around them. Count on them when something matters. Predictability in the leader. Predictability in you is one of the most underrated forms of trust. It's built through nothing more or less than consistent behavior repeated over time until the people around you stop hoping that you'll show up and simply know that you will show up the same time every single time because you will. And the tragedy is most inconsistent leaders never intend to become unreliable, but they do. They became unreliable one broken commitment at a time.

I want to tell you about a leader that we'll call Christine. She led a mid-size brokerage in a very competitive market. She was sharp, well-liked, three years of genuine relationships built with her agents, but she had a pattern that was quietly costing her everything she had built. She was excellent in the moment but totally unreliable after it. Christine was fully present, genuine, invested, insightful. The kind of conversation that made you feel seen, made you feel heard. And she ended every one of them with a clear commitment.

I'm going to connect with you on that referral source this week. I'm going to connect with you on this. I'll look into that for you. And I'll get back to you on Friday. I'll be at your open house on Sunday. I'll go with you to that development. She meant every one of those promises, every one of those commitments in the moment, but her week would fill up. The operational demands would take over and the commitments, not all of them, but enough of them would not be kept.

No confrontation, no drama. Just a slow accumulation of moments where what Christine said would happen just didn't happen. Her agent started making quiet adjustments. And they'll always do this. They stopped counting on the things she said in the one-on- ones. They started treating her commitments as intentions, nice to hear, eh, not worth playing my day around. And they stopped bringing her the real problems in all these in all these issues. They always stop bringing you the problems. If the follow through from Christine was uncertain, what was the point of opening about something that was never going to get resolved?

No. Christine had no idea. From the inside, she was working incredibly hard, genuinely investing in her people, doing everything she could in an environment that demanded more than any one person could handle. She was not wrong about any of that. What she could not say was the people she was investing in were no longer receiving any of that investment. The gap between what she was experiencing as genuine care and what her agents experienced as unreliable was significant. Two completely different realities running. one hers, the others her teams, and Christine had no access to the reality that they were running.

What changed? It was one conversation. Someone trusted her enough to say something difficult. What they told was, "Christine, you make a lot of commitments in one-on- ones, and people have totally stopped expecting you to follow through with them." It landed hard with Christine, not as criticism, but as as her recognizing what was happening. She had known something was off, but she had not known specifically what it was. Hearing it name directly was the beginning of her being able to do something about it. What she built afterwards was not a promise to do better.

It was a system. At the end of every oneonone, before the conversation ended, she wrote down one commitment she had just made to that person. physical notebook on her desk every single time, visible to her every single morning. She reviewed it every Monday before the week started. And if she was going to miss a commitment, because sometimes you're going to miss one, she contacted the person before the deadline, not after to apologize. And it wasn't an elaborate apology, just, hey, I'm not going to have that for you by this Friday.

I will have it you Tuesday and Sunday. I'm not going to have that for you by this Friday. I will have it to you by Tuesday at the latest. That single practice, a proactive notification changed how her agents experienced her because I told them she knows she made a commitment to me. I exist in her world. The change in her team did not happen immediately. Trust once eroded does not restore the moment behavior changes. It restores when the new behavior has been substained long enough to become what was expected and what was expected of Christine.

Christine was in the valley. She was doing things differently, but she could not yet see it registering. Some days she wondered if it was working at all. About six weeks into it, one of her agents said something simple to her. I've noticed that you and following through on everything you say you do. I appreciate it and want to say it matters to me. That one sentence, no fanfare, no rah rah rah. Christine knew what it meant. The threshold had been crossed. The compounding effect had been working the whole time.

She just needed to stand up long enough to find out it was working. What Christine built was not extraordinary. A notebook, a weekly review, and a practice of proactively communicating. Simple, repeatable, and environmental. And it rebuilt in 6 weeks of that constant behavior, a trust that had taken 3 years to quietly erode. And that's the power of systems. Not because it's clever, because it's consistent. Nope. Where are you inconsistent? Every leader has a gap between the leader they intend to be and the leader who actually shows up when the pressure is high.

The question is whether you know specifically where that gap lives. Most do not. Not because they're not paying attention, but because the gap is invisible from the inside. The pattern defends itself. The leader who is inconsistent in follow-th through tends to remember the commitments they kept and they forget the ones they did not. The leader who's inconsistent in their presence tends to experience their divided attention as productivity rather than absence. The story we tell ourselves about our own consistency is almost always more flattering than the story that our team and our organization is living.

Your team is not experiencing your attentions. They are experiencing your patterns. And I will say that over and over and over again. The gap between those two things is the most important information you have access to as a leader. Almost no one is going to give that to you unsolicited. People adapt to your inconsistent leadership rather than naming it, rather than telling you about it. They will work around you. They'll lower their expectations of you. They'll manage their disappointments quietly. And you watching a team that appears to be fully functioning have no idea that team is managing themselves around you.

So the uncomfortable question, if you asked the people right now, honestly, directly, what is the one thing I do inconsistently that makes your work harder? What would they say? Not what do you think they would say? What do they actually experience? Those two answers are often not the same. The gap between them is where leadership work truly begins. And if you don't know, that's the first system to build. Ask not in a group where it's social dynamics produce safe answers. One person, someone you trust, someone that trusts you and you trust enough to say something real.

Ask them, "What's the one thing I do inconsistently that creates friction for you?" Then listen. Listen not to respond, not to explain. Just listen. Their answer received with genuine openness and no defensiveness is more valuable than any leadership book or any leadership podcast you'll ever listen to. It's specific to you. They just told you. They told you your actual pattern. And that's the beginning of the system is knowing your pattern. Once you have the answer, the next move is not a new commitment. It's a specific system.

What environmental changes make the consistent behavior easier than the inconsistent ones? What can I build into my calendar? What gets written down? What gets removed? That question is what turns awareness into change. And that's what you truly need. That change behavior once you have that awareness. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffrey Scott Stan podcast where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world in real time. I want to take a moment to recognize and thank one of our founding partners.

One of the biggest leadership lessons I've learned is that the best operators don't do everything themselves. They build systems that handle the details so they can focus on what matters. And that's exactly what Subi does for real estate professionals. Is an AI transaction genie that keeps everything organized from conting to timelines to details. Nothing falls through the cracks. Your work is my command is their promise and they deliver on it. Please visit link is in the show notes podcast productions specific thing the person did well and one specific thing worth developing for them specific behavioral repeatable.

Then just build one environmental condition that makes that behavior easier. Put your one-on- ones in the calendar Monday morning before anything takes up the week. Keep the notebook open to this week's commitments. put the phone face down or close it in a drawer when you're sitting in a one-on-one. One structural change that removes the decision about whether that behavior of looking at your phone and checking on something else actually happens when you're in oneonone. If you're paying attention to the person and giving them your attention that you're sitting across from instead of your attention to your phone, put it away.

turn it upside down and stay with it through Wednesday when it's going to get hard through the weeks when nothing seems to be changing but something is through that valley. The leaders who crossed the threshold are not the ones with the most motivation. They are the ones who build systems and stayed in those systems long enough, stayed in the valley long enough to find out what it's actually going to produce for them. Consistency is not a character trait. It's a practice built one repeated action at a time.

In the moments when your motivations run out, the only thing left is the system you built. And the system you built is when you had more energy than you do right now. Your team needs a leader that's not excellent sometimes. They need a leader who's reliable all the time. Not perfect, reliable, predictable in the best sense. The kind of leader people can plan around, build around, count on when they're going through what actually matters. That reliability is not a gift. It is built vote by vote, commitment by commitment, one notebook entry on your desk at a time, one five-minute conversation at a time, one Monday

morning calendar block at a time, one-on-one where you give that feedback. You will not feel it compounding while it's happening. You will not see it in a day or a week, maybe not even a month, but the people around you will begin to feel it slowly then suddenly. The same way trust is built, the same way culture is built, the same way every important thing in leadership is built slowly at first and then suddenly takes off. Eventually, the people around you stop hoping you're going to show up and they simply know you will based upon your consistency.

In episode 8, we're going to talk about decision-m. What gets in the way of good decisions under pressure? And what leaders who make consistently good calls actually do differently? It's not because they're smarter. It's because the habits we talked about building today, the habits of the mind that create clarity. The consistency is the foundation. The decisions are what makes that possible. Thank you for joining me today. If you'd like to stay connected, please follow me on social media for updates, future episodes, and additional leadership insights.

If you found this episode of value, please leave a review or share it with someone who's trying to be more consistent and cannot figure out why wanting to be more consistent is just not enough because your answer is almost always going to be a system. And systems are something you can build. Now, thank you to our founding partners, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes and there are leaders in their own respective fields. I am Jeffrey Scott Stan. Lead with intention.

I'll see you on the next one. Leadership isn't learned in pages. It's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard. And what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the leadership series hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by Jqued Podcast Productions.