Hello, my name is Claire Austin. I work for Ray White – Toowong. I’ve been in as a real estate salesperson. I’ve been selling real estate for three years now. Prior to meeting Sandra, I’d had a lot of issues, probably not all of them identified whilst both personally and professionally. I had a great boss who was giving us mentors on a monthly basis that were just talking about their story and I very much identified with some of those, and one of those people, Christine Rudolph, referred me to Sandra to help me with my issues.
Real estate is a very different sort of industry to what I had been used to in my previous career. I was finding it tough and getting advice from all over the place as to what I should do and how I should go back to my old career, but inside I knew that wasn’t for me. I knew that real estate is where I wanted to be and wanted to succeed at, and I knew I had the skills to do it.
One of the issues for me in terms of all of this was cost. Financially I was in a pretty bad place. I had basically exhausted most of my funds and I also have a child that’s at high school, so I had private school fees and all of that sort of thing to come up with and the bills were piling up and I really didn’t think I could afford the time with Sandra, although I really needed it, and so ultimately, I had to take that leap of faith and say, “Well the outcome from this is going to be beneficial to me” and I just have to swallow my pride and speak to Sandra about how I can pace this out so that it fit with my budget, which was pretty small.
I guess initially my expectations with Sandra was that she would lead me to a place of greater confidence and make me feel like I could make the decision as to whether to stay or go, in terms of real estate. At that point, when I met Sandra, I didn’t have the confidence to make that decision and as is I said to, I was getting a lot of input from other people. People that were well meaning, of course, but in my heart I knew I had more to give to real estate and I knew that it suited me in many ways, and so I wanted to stay within the industry.
In the process, Sandra and I discovered that there was a lot of personal stuff that was getting in the way as well. It started as an issue of just being overwhelmed. We looked at things like giving me, me time and giving me time to make sure that I had a household that was decluttered and could help me to get to where I needed to be and have a clear thought pattern of what I needed to achieve.
What really needed to change and what I found it possible to change on my own without support and that was the clutter in my life, and I think it made me realise that it was both at work and at home and that I was blaming time as the issue and that I needed to take responsibility for that, and also harness the support that I had both from my son and friends and so forth to give me that time to do those things and get on top of it.
I think it’s been enormous, the changes that I’ve seen. I still got a way to go I believe and that’s all part of the process of getting you on the right track to realise your dreams, but initially it was about that clutter. We needed to fix that first and then a lot of other issues came out. I realised that I was spending no time on myself and that obviously had it’s downside and that was leading to a lot of the clutter as well.
Making time for things was fantastic. It made me clean up my desk at work. It made me follow processes better, so that by following processes, I could then streamline the organisation of my day. Having time for fun as well, there was just no time for fun, so suddenly, I’ve got fun, I’ve got friends that I’m spending time with and things are coming together for me from a work perspective as well. I’m sticking to the process. I’m having fantastic results. Listings are coming to me. I feel confident in myself. I can speak to anyone. I’ve always known that, but I just didn’t have the self belief, I think, the self belief that Sandra gave me, that I could achieve anything if I wanted.
