WELCOME

Hello!! I’m writing this week’s newsletter during a quiet moment while I attend the Tom Ferry Success Summit in Anaheim.

I’ve spent the past few days surrounded by thousands of real estate agents from every corner of the country. OMS, I always leave these conferences so energized! Part of that is because I learn something new, but most of it is because I get to meet so many incredible people. Every person I meet reminds me that this business attracts the best mix of personalities. The funny thing is, after enough conversations, I start to notice a pattern. Doesn’t matter whether someone’s sold ten homes or ten thousand: almost everyone’s carrying around a story about themselves. One agent will tell me, “I’m terrible on camera.” Someone else whispers, “I’m just not cut out for luxury.” They say these things as though they’re facts, when most of the time, they’re simply old opinions they’ve repeated so often they no longer question where they came from. But they should.

This got me thinking about the stories we inherit about ourselves—the ones that are quietly handed to us and that somehow become our identity. We carry those stories for years (sometimes decades) without ever stopping to ask whether they’re actually true. I know exactly how that happens because one of the most powerful stories I ever believed about myself started in the fourth grade. And, as it turns out, my mother taught me a lesson about perception that’s shaped every part of my life ever since, so that’s what I’ll share today before I take off for vacation!

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

Don’t Let the Narrative Define You

I couldn’t have been older than ten when my mother taught me one of the biggest lessons of my life. Mommy understood something most of us never fully grasp: people don’t react to what’s actually true. They react to whatever story they’ve decided is true. Yet when you change the story, you change everything that follows.

To start, let me just say that school was never for me. Before anyone fires off an email about how important education is, understand that I agree completely. Yet the traditional classroom just wasn’t built for a kid like me. The words on a page just didn’t stick. Having to sit there quietly for long stretches felt like absolute torture. I had zero interest in memorizing something simply because an adult said it mattered. If the subject didn’t grab me, I’d stare at my textbook for twenty damn minutes and retain absolutely nothing. The good news is that these days, a kid like me would get tested and then and handed a stack of accommodations. But back then, there was exactly one fix: they walked you down the hall to a different room.

That room belonged to a teacher named Miss Cohen. It’s funny how some people plant themselves in your memory forever. I couldn’t name half my teachers if you paid me, but the names of the ones who made me feel small never fade. I can still see Miss Cohen’s classroom in my mind, still feel exactly what it was like to sit in that chair as she frowned at all of us. One day, I finally asked my mom why my reading class looked different from everybody else’s. Mommy didn’t blink. She rested her hand on my shoulder, smiled, and said, “Punkin, that’s your enrichment class.”

Take a second and really sit with that.

My mother had every opportunity to use the school’s language, having deemed me a slow learner. She could’ve told me I was falling behind, or struggling. Instead, she picked one word and built an entirely different reality around it. Enrichment. To a ten-year-old, the word sounded elite. This word felt sweet on my tongue, like a piece of candy. I assumed I’d been handpicked for something extra, so that’s exactly how I showed up. I was proud to raise my hand in the air. I did the work like I’d earned my seat. The material never felt like too much, because in my head, I was precisely where I belonged. That is, until my classmate Nicki turned to me one afternoon and said, “You know this isn’t enrichment, right? This is the slow class.”

Just like that, my little pink bubble was busted. I felt so ashamed.

Here’s the part that still gets me. Not one single thing about my actual situation had changed. I had the same desk, same scowling teacher, same assignments I’d been handling just fine the day before. I hadn’t bumped my head in the night and become any less capable. All that shifted was the name attached to it… yet somehow that was enough to change how I saw myself. I started seeing myself through Miss Cohen’s eyes, just another kid who wasn’t good enough.

I bring this up because I watch grown adults do the identical thing to themselves, every single day. Someone slaps a label on them once, and they spend the next three decades proving it right. I don’t have to tell y’all the narrative of your inner monologue, because you know it all too well:

“I’ve just never been a numbers person.”

“I’m not the creative type.”

“Public speaking isn’t for me.”

“I’m not cut out to lead.”

“I could never run my own thing.”

Any of this sound familiar? Every time I hear a line like that, my first instinct is to shake that person and demand, “Says who?” Because I guarantee that somebody, somewhere, planted that thought in your head. Maybe it was a teacher (probably Miss Cohen), or maybe it could have been a parent. Could have been your trifling ex, or a boss who wouldn’t know potential if it slapped him square in the jowls. The worst of it is that maybe it wasn’t even a person so much as it was one bad moment that quietly became what you consider a permanent personality trait. The real damage isn’t that someone said it once. The danger is when we keep saying it to ourselves for years after they’ve completely forgotten the conversation.

Real estate has shown me just how much perception runs the show. I can take two buyers down the same block and they’ll describe two different neighborhoods entirely. One sees big shade trees, solid homes, kids on bikes. The other sees aging houses and decides the whole area’s past its prime. One seller looks around their kitchen and sees two decades of birthdays and holidays, just pure magic. Another looks at the same countertops and starts apologizing before a single buyer has walked through the door. Nothing about the house changed. Only the story they tell themselves about it did.

I’ve seen buyers dismiss a gorgeous reno as overpriced because someone mentioned a slowing market. I’ve seen sellers walk away from real cash money because they’d convinced themselves their home was nothing special. I’ve watched brand-new agents quit before they started because they’d already decided they weren’t outgoing enough, or well-connected enough, or whatever enough to make it.

Most of the time, the biggest thing standing in our way isn’t reality. The issue is the story we’ve agreed to believe about that reality. These days, I don’t even think I was a slow learner. I suspect I just learned differently and needed context. When someone talks something through with me, it clicks. If I get to ask questions, I’ll promise y’all I’ll never forget the answer. Show me how a thing works and I’ll figure out the rest. The disconnect came when I was told to read something that I had no interest in and didn’t seem to matter, because that was how to lose me. To this day, I’m mad that Miss Cohen looked at us as misfits, as group who was going to pull down her standardized test scores instead of as kids with potential just waiting to be unlocked. Maybe we weren’t bad learners so much as she was a disconnected teacher.

What’s ironic now is that I spend my days listening to people, reading rooms, solving problems, negotiating, telling stories, and walking families through some of the biggest decisions they’ll ever make. Having these abilities has carried me a lot further than sentence diagramming ever could have. Here’s the twist: I read constantly now. Hand me a good book and I’ll vanish into it for an entire weekend. (Looking at you, Adriana Locke.) Turns out, I was never actually bad at reading. I was bad at having someone put the right story in my hands.

I think about Mommy often when I tell this story, because she guarded my sense of self before I knew enough to guard it myself. She was convinced that moment a kid starts believing they’re broken, they’ll start collecting evidence to back it up. She decided to hand me a story where I was capable, and until Nicki dispelled that myth, that’s the story I got to live in. Eventually life taught me the second half of that lesson: at some point, the responsibility shifts to us. We don’t get to keep blaming Miss Cohen, or the boss who never saw our worth, or whomever told us we’d never amount to much. They might have written the opening chapter, but they don’t get to write the ending.

Miss Cohen knew a little girl who struggled in the fourth grade. She never met the woman who’d build a business from nothing, sell thousands of homes and speak to millions of people. She wasn’t wrong about the challenges I faced at ten, yet she also didn’t have the vision or interest to see where I might head. That’s why I’m careful with labels now, whether it’s a house, a neighborhood, or another person. Left unchecked, labels have a way of turning into prophecies. The stories we carry about ourselves shape the risks we take, and eventually, the whole shape of the life we build.

So if you’re still hauling around a label somebody carelessly slapped on you twenty or thirty years ago, stop and ask yourself one question:

Is the label accurate, or is it just an old story that’s overstayed its welcome?

Because perception really does run everything, but the only version of it that gets a say in your future is your own.

@glenndabaker

Sometimes growth means goodbye… #GlenndaBaker #M#MotivationG#GrowthG#GoogleGlenndaGlenndaTok

GLENNDAISM

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

This Is for Miss Cohen

I normally showcase a new listing here, but today I’m inspired to share a home I sold… because I suspect Miss Cohen would never have seen this coming from someone like me. But this is what can happen when you finally refuse to allow yourself to be limited by the parameters someone else set.

I guess my final piece of advice for today is to not be bitter and to use those wrong perceptions to be better.