What a For Sale Sign Taught Me About Patience

My husband and I listed our home for sale last Thursday.

As we did, our agent reminded us that the current housing market was slowing wayyyy down because of fall and that she didn’t know what to really expect for our house because we were considered a unique property.

I grew up the daughter of a real estate agent so I know how this works:

1. You list the house.

2. You let strangers walk through it for showings. (I don’t like this part.)

3. You wait and wait and wait. (I really don’t like this part.)

4. You (hopefully) get an offer (eventually).

   
   

My husband and I worked hard to get this house ready. We knew its value. We knew that our potential buyer was out there. Now it was just a matter of getting our listing into the hands of that buyer so they can see it, tour it, fall in love with it, and buy it.

But I am not known for my patience, so I knew this was going to be a challenge. I like control and selling a house was definitely requiring me to give up a lot of it and put faith in our belief that our buyer was out there.

We experience a similar thing in business.

We put our offer out there. We know its value and how it can help someone. We know that buyer exists, and yet, we have to wait for people to find it, check it out, and buy it.

The loss of control can be maddening, especially when people don’t respond the way we had hoped.

When they check your offer out and then ghost you. When it takes way longer to gain traction than you thought it would. When you get feedback that they don’t love the price or the time the group meets.

All of this is an opportunity for doubt to sneak in and squash any hopes we had that we’d get to that last step, the purchase.

And it’s what we do in those times that matters the most.

Because we can’t lose our faith that our perfect buyer IS out there.

Sure, we can make revisions and updates if necessary. But there’s a real difference between responding to a fair piece of feedback and pulling the house off the market because one showing or piece of feedback didn’t go the way we hoped.

That’s the part many people get wrong once they put their own business offer out into the world.

You launch your offer and put it in front of the people who need it. When the first few conversations don’t turn into a yes right away, doubt starts making its case, telling you the offer is wrong, the price is wrong, maybe even you are wrong.

So you pull the offer down, rewrite it, and second-guess the thing you were sure of three days earlier, before anyone had even had the chance to say no. You just decided for them.

Meanwhile your buyer might still be a week out, a referral away, or one conversation from ready. Or maybe it’s a budget cycle you know nothing about. But you’ll never find out, because you talked yourself out of the wait before it had the chance to work.

That doesn’t mean ignore every signal that comes up.

If someone tells you the price doesn’t match the value, or the offer isn’t solving the problem you think it is, that’s worth revisiting with clear eyes because they may be onto something.

What derails people is treating ordinary discomfort, the silence, the slow traction, the nitpicky feedback, as proof the offer itself is wrong, when half the time it has nothing to do with you or the offer at all.

Getting the house ready, pricing it, and putting it in front of buyers took real work, and that was probably the easier part.

Standing in the space between doing the work and someone else deciding it’s worth it, without unraveling everything you built because of impatience, is something completely different.

Sometimes, those results come quickly, but sometimes, they do not.

But whatever you do, keep your faith that your result is coming. Sometimes, it just takes longer to get here, but it will never get here if you keep hiding it away.

If you’re standing in that space right now with an offer, a launch, or a price you haven’t said out loud yet, or if you have said it out loud but the crickets are killing you, that’s exactly what we can work on in The Momentum Partnership, my private partnership for women solopreneurs.