Most successful Mortgage Loan Professionals and Entrepreneurs are obsessed with freedom but the really savvy ones figure out that routine is what actually sets them free. To achieve this freedom, we must first put ourselves into a state of ultra focus and effectiveness. 

Winning the kind of “escape velocity” that allows you to do anything with your life only happens by producing significant business wins. Massive value creation – no matter what your industry – requires you to make it happen. And to do that? You’ve got to push yourself to focus and execute. 

This is where routines help…

1. Routines create focus and turn you into a high leverage Loan Officer / Entrepreneur. 
2. High leverage Loan Officers / Entrepreneurs create massive value. 
3. Massive value creates a lot of options (aka “freedom”). 

The tremendous power of optimized routines is precisely why mega-successful business professionals are obsessed with their morning rituals, their day-to-day meta work structure and all manner of productivity frameworks. 

As a successful Mortgage Loan Professional / Entrepreneur, you should experiment with routines to find the rituals and cadence that suit your personality and that also suit the outcomes you’re pursuing. 

Once you’ve found a ritual that reliably and repeatedly makes you the best version of yourself, the next step is to institutionalize it. What makes a routine a routine is you sticking to it. 

The obvious, well known routine tactics are mandatory: 

• Use some kind of physical reminder to start the routine off, like leaving your running shoes on top of the toilet seat as the first thing you see in the morning. 
• Reward yourself for sticking to the routine. 
• Start small. 
• One routine at a time. 
• etc etc etc

Those are the fundamental basics, but here are three lesser known – that can be even more powerful – tactics for making your routine stick:

1. Tie a new routine to one you’ve already mastered

Once a new behavior is ritualized and made into a true habit in your life, it’s vastly easier to augment and add to that habit than it is to forge a brand new one. 

The reason for this lies in the structure of your neurology; the way the human brain links up thoughts and experiences. You can think of any routine you’ve genuinely made a habit of as a “well worn pathway” in your brain. It’s easier, faster and more reliable to add a few steps to a pathway that already exists than to do the mental equivalent of striking out into the jungle without a path at all. 

At the simplest level, this means that attempting to develop a routine like “daily stretching exercises” is best added to – and on top of – an existing workout routine or gym habit. 

Less obviously, you can tie a new optimized entrepreneurial routine to your existing normal-life habits. A terrific hack: Add reading twenty five pages of high quality non-fiction to your morning coffee or breakfast routine. 

If you’re the kind of person who has a good email management routine and regularly hits the coveted “inbox zero”, you can use doing exactly that as your cue to send out a proactive new connection email, or to cross-introduce valuable people within your network. Tie working through your email itself to a new proactive routine of building out your sphere of influence!

If you have an existing journaling habit, it can be morphed and extended to a content-creating habit: Just switch from writing for you after you’ve done a few hundred words, and start drafting with your customer in mind. 

Even bad habits can be high jacked and re-directed: Every time you catch yourself flipping over to social media feeds and consuming random internet content or news, don’t beat yourself up about it! Instead, try keeping a valuable business book handy and flip it open instead. Turn your distraction seeking habit into one that actually serves you!  

2. Cultivate self awareness (and learn why your past routines failed) 

Routine building is one of the areas I see Mortgage Loan Professionals / Entrepreneurs make the “Insanity Mistake” more often than anywhere else. 

The Insanity Mistake is the old chestnut: 

The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting to get a different result. 

Otherwise hyper-intelligent professionals will bang their head against the same wall, over and over, like crazy. They’ll try to build a routine, fall off the bandwagon and beat themselves up. Then they’ll re-commit, and just keep pushing away at it. 

Routine building requires grit and determination. But it also demands the self awareness to figure out that if it’s not working out, there may be something deeper going on. 

Psychologists have specific frameworks for increasing self awareness by asking precise, probing questions. You should know these questions and apply them – with radical self honesty – when your initial efforts (and perhaps secondary attempts!) to install a routine in your life have failed. 

• What will this routine ultimately gain for you? 
• What secondary consequences or side effects could building this routine have in your life? 
• How will you know when the routine is “paying off” for you? (Are you clear on the outcome the routine is intended to create?) 
• What will this outcome get for you or allow you to do? 
• What parts of your life help in supporting this routine? 
• What parts of your life unintentionally undermine your routine? 
• How empowered are you to change those dynamics? (from the question above)
• How motivated are you to change those dynamics? (ditto)

Answering these questions often make Professional Loan Originators / Entrepreneurs realize they’re chasing the wrong routines or trying to improve an area of their life that isn’t the real problem. 

One of the most common realizations I see is professionals who are pursuing a routine – like a certain morning ritual – that they’ve read about or heard as a good idea, but haven’t really thought through. 

This highlights the problem of gurus in the self-help space dispensing life advice to professionals like you, without any appreciation for the specifics and nuances of your specific business model and unique life dynamics. 

Often, professionals will also realize that different agendas, values and priorities in their lives are in deep conflict with each other… in a way that it isn’t immediately visible on the surface.

For example, a business professional committed to high level networking – leveraging their social life for business opportunity – will often struggle to build routines around things like health and “deep work” because they have a conflicting priority to stop whatever they’re doing to grab a drink with a valuable contact whenever the opportunity presents itself. 

This is okay and not even an unsolvable problem… but if the routines you’re building aren’t working out, it’s worth digging a little deeper with these questions to find out if any such conflicts exist. It’s too easy to compartmentalize your thinking and fail to be aware of inner conflict!

3. Don’t attempt to systemize your late afternoon or evenings 

This one is so straight forward and yet so many people ignore it or simply don’t know the truth: Our ability to “self regulate” – to control our thinking and push ourselves to execute on important things – is an ability we start the day with more of and deplete/diminish over time, throughout the day. 

Whatever you call it – conscientiousness, willpower, self control – pushing yourself to act on a routine or really anything… is something that takes mental energy and the human brain appears to have a finite daily supply. This is an assertion supported by considerable research and if you’re a professional building powerful routines, you’re crazy not to factor this into your planning. 

The golden rule is that you’re simply more likely to have an easier time being disciplined the earlier in the day it is. After you’ve properly woken up – which is easier for some than others – your best chance of implementing bold new routines and making them stick starts to gradually drain away. 

If you want to commit to a daily practice, start it as close to first thing in the morning as you possibly can. 

Accept and acknowledge that new routines are likely to fail if you’re trying to build them in the late afternoon and evening. 

Now, all you need to do is commit…