Re-direct energy into controllable actions

One of the biggest keys to success for any business professional, but particularly for loan officers, is how to effectively manage your mental bandwidth. Spend less time and energy worrying or contemplating items that are out of your control, and divert that energy into the top, most-influential, items that will allow you to grow your mortgage business.

Employing the Low-Information Diet

A low-information diet consists of only the information that you must consume in order to be successful and staying away from additional news that occupies your time and mind. For loan officers and mortgage professionals, the current political environment has filled the news stream with a plethora of time-consuming articles and stories, all of which likely have little to no effect on your ability to grow your mortgage business.

Examples of questions you should NOT be spending time contemplating:

• Will Freddie and Fannie be privatized?
• Will the next administration reverse the FHA MIP reduction?
• What in the world is going to happen to interest rates?

Ask yourself, “what can I really do about this?” If the answer is “nothing”, you would very likely be best served to put your time and energy somewhere else.

Put Your Focus Where It Can Have the Most Impact

When it comes to organizing and running your mortgage business, there are a number of factors that you do have complete control over. Depending on your business goals, perhaps your mental bandwidth could be best used to improve upon lead generation. Maybe leads aren’t the issue right now, but you could stand to focus on tightening processes or implementing technologies that would cut days off your loan turn time.

These focus questions could be related to any number of business functions, such as:

• How can I find new channels or improve my lead generation?
• How do I differentiate myself from the competition?
• Is there more I can do to nurture my referral sources?
• Should I be integrating any technologies that allow my team to stay lean?

The main point here is that you can only have a max of 100% mental bandwidth. As soon as you give some of that away to social media or news, there is less energy available to spend on the things that will allow you to grow your mortgage business.