The Brad Weisman Show
Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show, where we dive into the world of real estate, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! #TheBradWeisman #Show #RealEstateRealLife
The Brad Weisman Show
The Art of Authentic Connection: Why Experience Isn't Everything
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Trust is the invisible foundation upon which all meaningful relationships are built. But how do you establish it quickly, especially in professional settings where time is limited? This deeply personal exploration reveals why your knowledge and experience matter far less than your ability to connect authentically with others.
Drawing from 33 years in real estate and a childhood spent constantly relocating, I share the profound realization that changed my approach to business relationships: "My experience and knowledge is only as good as your trust in it." This simple truth explains why newer professionals sometimes win business over seasoned veterans—they may know less, but they've mastered the art of building trust.
The distinction between merely meeting someone and truly discovering them lies at the heart of meaningful connection. While we meet dozens of people daily—in elevators, at networking events, in grocery store aisles—discovery happens only when we approach others with spontaneous, authentic curiosity. It's not about running through a mental checklist of questions; it's about genuinely caring about the answers.
Different personality types require different trust-building approaches. An engineer might need precise data points before trusting your expertise, while an artist might connect through shared values and emotional resonance. Understanding these nuances allows you to customize your approach while remaining authentic.
The path to trust begins with consistent follow-through. Each time you deliver on a promise—whether arriving on time or completing a task by the deadline you set—you earn a "trust point." These accumulate over time, creating a foundation of reliability that's essential for deeper connection.
Have you been focusing too much on showcasing your knowledge rather than building genuine connections? Are you meeting people or truly discovering them? Let's explore how shifting your focus from experience to relationship-building might transform your personal and professional interactions.
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Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show, where we dive into the world of real estate, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! 🎙️ Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! 🏡🌟 #TheBradWeismanShow #RealEstateRealLife
Credits - The music for my podcast was written and performed by Jeff Miller.
Hi, this is Brad Wiseman. I'm gonna be doing something a little different over the next couple months. It's not the Brad Wiseman show, it's not a real estate show. It's gonna be just my thoughts and experiences collectively over the past well, pretty much all my life. There's things that I've been told that are my superpowers. There's things that I've discovered that I think are my superpowers, and I wanted to share them with you. I wanted you to see my thoughts, hear my thoughts on this type of level. This is my first time doing this. I've never done a recording like this before, but it's something that I'm excited about. I'm excited about doing stuff like this more often, where I share my feelings, my thoughts, my experiences, hoping that it's going to help other people in whatever they're dealing with in life. Maybe this will be helpful. So the first topic that I've been talking about for a while and I've been bringing this up and I'm talking about writing a book, and it hasn't happened yet. Of course, I don't have a book yet, but I wanted to share these thoughts and see what the audience thinks, or what you think, to see if it's worthwhile to put this in a book, because I'm not sure how many people are going to listen to what I'm saying right now.
Speaker 1:The main topic, or the two main topics, let's just say, and these are the things that I'm struggling with with this book is, you know, one is building relationships and one is trust, and obviously the two of those are very much related because, you know, in order to get trust, you need to build relationships. And then there's things about trust that are interesting is that you have long-term trust that are like your parents, your family, your brother, your sister or a friend that you've had since kindergarten. Those are long-term trusts, so they've been built for a very long time. If you want to look at it this way, those type of trusts you can probably either one of you could screw up or do something that maybe wasn't as integrity-based, and you'll still have them as your best friend, your mother, your father, brother, and they will forgive you for that. In any type of business or sales we don't have that type of trust. We have short-term trust or short-term relationship building, which is not the easiest to do. It's definitely not, and it's one of the things that I've been told over my life that I have kind of if you want to call it a superpower I think that word gets thrown around too often lately, but I have a way of meeting people, getting to know them or discovering them, and this is a thing that I've written about.
Speaker 1:Now, on this stuff that I'm going to be telling you is there's two different things when you meet a person. The one is meeting the person, which is basically like you're in an airport walking down through hey, how you doing, you say hi, or you meet him coming out of the bathroom, or you meet him whatever. There's no questions back and forth, there's nothing. It's just basically a meet. Or you meet somebody at a party. They say, hey, my name's Dan and you shake their hand and that's over. Then there's the other part of meeting somebody, which I call discovery and curiosity. The discovery part is when you actually become curious about that person, and that's how you build relationships.
Speaker 1:So there's a quote I have, and the quote is my experience and or knowledge is only as good as your trust in it. That's a quote that I wrote down May 8th 2019. Don't know why, it just kind of hit me and I think, from being in business over the past 33 years as a realtor, what I noticed I have a lot of experience now in real estate and what I've noticed is people don't always really care about those 33 years. And John Maxwell has a great quote. He said people will care what you know when they know that you care. And that's kind of where I'm going with this a little bit is that you know people won't really care about your experience or trust there's that word again trust your experience until they you have a relationship with them or you have, they have a reason to trust you, to trust you. This is why we need to, as salespeople or in any situation, is to build those relationships as fast as we can so that we can have them trust us as fast as we can. So here's more about that quote. So my experience and end-world knowledge is only as good as your trust in it. So here's where this goes.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about that quote, coming up with more realizations about that quote, and what I'm finding is it's really interesting because it's about building rapport with your clients in order for your knowledge and experience to actually mean something to them, which comes back to the word trust in that quote. So what you're saying doesn't mean anything to them. Your experience doesn't mean anything to them because they don't trust you okay. So if you want your clients or customers to take in your experience and your knowledge, you need to build that bond. Connect with them and then share what you know. Connect with them and then share what you know. Show them you care and they'll care what you know. Back to the John Maxwell.
Speaker 1:What's interesting about this is your experience and knowledge is not measured by how long you've been in business. It's measured by how much you're trusted by those that receive it. With that being said, this is the reason that you could find a new person in business. A new person, a new realtor, a new salesperson, a new, whatever it is that may have very little knowledge but will win the business of somebody before a more experienced person, because the new person may be better at building relationships, therefore winning over that customer's trust. So right there, you could actually be losing business, losing customers, losing clients, because you never got good at building relationships and trust in a short period of time.
Speaker 1:To keep going on this, the new person may have less to share, but they've gained more trust. They only have a little bit of knowledge, but the client trusts them. So that's the reason they pick them, because that means relationships mean more to them in many situations than your experience. So if you have a ton more experience but no one trusts you, what are you sharing? It means nothing. So if you think only learning something, only being book smart, only being the most experienced and having the most wisdom, you think that's everything that's going to get you further in life, I think you should question yourself on that, because I don't think that's exactly true.
Speaker 1:So, furthermore, the realization that my experience and knowledge doesn't change from client to client, but what does change is the level of trust the client has in my experience. So my experience is always the same. My knowledge is pretty much the same. Yes, it's growing, I'm learning more, all those things but the thing that changes is the trust that the current client has in me, and that means certain people need to be treated differently in order to gain the trust. Okay, and that's because certain people approve your trust or approve your information differently. An engineer is going to be different than an artist. You know, an artist is going to be more of the warm and fuzzy person. They're probably going to be a little bit easier for my personality to warm up to or for them to trust me. The engineer is not going to be maybe as warm and fuzzy. So you got to be a little bit more about details, things like that. And then once they see that your numbers and your details were correct, then that engineer will start trusting you. Okay, back to that again, the realization that my experience and knowledge does not change from client to client. But what does change is the level of trust the client has. In my experience, that makes the difference.
Speaker 1:Trust is absolutely the most important part of any relationship the skill. The skill is in building it. Trying to rush trust can come across as fake or salesy. So be careful with that, be very careful with that. So how do we gain trust from another? How do we gain it? What do we do? We don't have the time that our parents and our brothers and sisters and friends from kindergarten had to build that trust. We don't have that time, so we have to get really good, really good at fine-tuning our relationship building. That's the part that gets to be fun. So one of the first things you can do and these are the easy things set expectations and then follow through. If you say you're going to be somewhere at 9 am, be there, be early, be there, bam. That gives you a trust point. Okay, but people want to see you do what you say you will do. Repetition of this is what builds more and more trust. So keep setting those expectations, following through, and that will give you trust points. Show that you've had challenges in life and share what worked for you. People want to know that you failed. People want to know that you are not perfect. People want to know that you've been through certain things before. Be vulnerable, open and caring, and that'll move you closer to trust.
Speaker 1:So you're going to ask me why do we trust? Why do we trust, or how do we trust? Who do we trust? Where does it come from? Well, it starts with our parents. They're the first people we trust in most cases. Starts with our parents. They're the first people we trust in most cases. Not speaking for everybody, not everybody has a relationship or has, you know, been on the on the good side of maybe parenting their whole life or being parented, but you know, for 99% of the time, okay. So the since the first day, our parents have guided us. What'd they say? Don't touch the stove, it's hot. We touch the stove because that's what we do, and they were right. It was hot, it hurt. You may want to walk around instead of jumping off that landscape wall because you're going to get hurt. You jump because that's what we do and you get hurt.
Speaker 1:Okay, so those two things our parents told us at a young age both of those things they told us came true. Those are trust points. Now this happens 16, 17, 18 years in a row. Of course, there's a point in your teenage years where you know more than your parents, but that's a different story there. So this happens many, many times a day. We learn to trust what they said until they became we become teenagers and then they, like I said, we don't believe anything, so we want to build relationships. Now I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I think I'm good at building relationships would then ends up turning into trust, and I think the main reason I think I've been good at building relationships and people say, oh my God, I feel like I've known you forever. And these are not things I'm saying to pat myself on the back, it's just things you know. There's things that we all have something we're good at. Okay, these are the things that I've learned over the years, that I've heard from other people because they've told me that these are things that I'm, that I'm good at, and one of the reasons I think I'm good at it is because of this I moved many times as a kid.
Speaker 1:Many, many times we moved around. Oh man, we moved around a lot. Let me just say we had let's just put it this way Kindergarten I was at. Our first school was at one place Okay, from there we moved, and the next place was we moved back, I think with my grandparents Okay, so actually no Grandparents. I think with my grandparents Okay. So actually no grandparents, just born. That's where we lived.
Speaker 1:We moved to Moton, another town, doesn't really matter what the town is. It's the first house my parents owned. It was in government-owned schools. That's where we were Okay. So from there we moved to Twin Valley schools, another school district, another home. It was in, yeah, twin Valley. It was in Plowville, actually, not to say this was a good time, but I ended up we called it back then flunking first grade. I couldn't read at a good level, so I had to watch all my friends go to the next grade as I stayed behind.
Speaker 1:Huge education in building relationships. If you want to build relationships or learn how to build relationships, be held back a grade when you're a kid. So we then moved from there to Conard Weiser, another school. Okay, we at one point, before we moved there, we moved back to my grandparents, which was another school, and then we ended up at another house. So I think it was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times we moved, plus I flunked first grade. I'll tell you what happens when you do that, when you move that many times and, by the way, this is nothing against my parents. These were all reasons that we moved. We're good, we were building new houses, found new homes, my parents were improving our lives and our lifestyle, things like that, and it was all good. But we moved and I think what happened all this moving around to different houses and different schools and different neighborhoods?
Speaker 1:It cultivated my skills at discovering new people, not just meeting them, discovering them. Curiosity is what happens when we discover people. The curiosity is what helps us discover people, but it's genuine curiosity. It's not just asking a question or how are you doing. It's really kind of, you know, without being nosy, digging in finding who they are, what makes them tick, what makes them who they are, laughing with them, asking them about their family, you know.
Speaker 1:So it forced me to put my hand out first, introduce myself and naturally interact with people. The first time I met them as though I've known them forever because I knew, after moving seven times, I was good at that. But I wasn't good at it right away. You know, when I flunked first grade I remember bawling my eyes out to my parents saying don't, don't, don't do this to me. You know, all of your friends go ahead and you stay there and it's not like you'll never see those friends again. They're moving one grade ahead, maybe one classroom different. You know, moving to a school is different, but moving, having your friends move ahead of you, that was definitely some character building, but to the good. I think it's what it really is the foundation of me building relationships and learning how to get along with people.
Speaker 1:So there's a big difference between meeting somebody in comparison to actually discovering somebody. We meet people all the time, like I said before, on a plane, a mall, a grocery store. That's not what we do when we discover people. We just want to be able to know the difference of that. There's no depth in just meeting somebody. It goes no further than a hello. But be careful not to treat all people that way In business, in life. It's good to know the difference between meeting and discovering. Now, we can't discover everybody, we wouldn't have time. But as discovering goes so much deeper, it shows you care, it shows you're interested in them. Now, of course, a major part of discovering a person is listening, not just hearing. Listening Also, don't ask the question just to ask the question.
Speaker 1:Sincerity in discovering of people comes from authentic curiosity. That's something that I feel that you know. I have a podcast called the Brad Wiseman Show and I think you know I call it spontaneous curiosity, but I love authentic curiosity. How about spontaneous, authentic curiosity? We do that too, and I think you know the reason. What that means is you don't want to just ask questions like you're sitting there going through a checklist. Be curious. It's so important to be curious. Don't worry, curiosity only killed the cat. It did not kill people, okay, so I think sometimes you know we hear that curiosity killed the cat. No, I, you know, I don't. I'm not down with that. That's a cat, it's not people. Now, some people, yes, maybe will be tough to get to know, and then you got to know when to back off. Don't forget about eye contact, body language, sometimes repeating back when they when they say something. So that's about all I have for right now.
Speaker 1:I wanted to just give this a shot to see if it's something that people like. Do you want to hear more about trust? Do you want to hear more about building relationships? Do you want to know more about why it's important to be able to build relationships? Would you want to know about discovering your talents and your gifts and what that means? Those are other topics that I have. I have topics about failure, all kinds of different things. So let me know if this is something that you enjoyed, and if it is, I'll do more of it. All right, thanks a lot.
