Stop Chasing Algorithms and Start Creating Massive Opportunity with Michelle Mikel

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. I am here with Michelle Mikel. Michelle, thanks so much for joining us.

[Michelle Mikel]
Oh my gosh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[Mattias]
Now, Michelle, this is gonna be a little bit of a different conversation than the one we usually have, but it’s gonna be one that I think everybody’s gonna really find useful and interesting. So you did have your license at one point, but can you explain why and what you actually do in the real estate space?

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, I love this question because I think most people just assume that I’m an agent because I pretty much could be tomorrow if I really decided to put all my effort and energy into that. But I got my license actually in 2020 because I was living in Fort Polk, Louisiana. My husband is retired special forces and his first duty station as a civilian contractor was just outside of Fort Polk.

He was one of the H2F strength coaches for Ranger Regiment and a battalion there of guys with the intention of trying to get Fort Polk to BRC, which is called Best Ranger Competition, essentially the Olympics for the Army. So we were living in this really cool, I should say not the coolest town, but we were living in this really cool scenario that led us to a military town that was very small. And what happened was as my career grew, I started realizing I have friends in like all of these military towns all across the country.

And a lot of my clients are in all of these cities that people are PCSing to. So I would have girlfriends that were moving or PCSing to Fort Collins or Fort Knox or Fort Bragg or wherever. And I’m like, oh my gosh, well, I have literally clients in those cities.

So why would I not have my licensing and get the referral fee for doing so? So that’s why I got my license. It was active for about four years, a little under four years.

And then I actually let it lapse. I’m just frankly too busy, honestly. And it’s not a high time out or like the time output isn’t as valuable for me versus putting my energy in other places.

But what do I do for a living? I teach mortgage, real estate and sales professionals how to outbound prospect using social. So I sort of debunk the vast majority of social media myths and ideologies of virality and the algorithm and how many followers do we need?

Do we need to do more video? What gadgets do we need? We don’t have those conversations in my world because at the end of the day, if you’re sick of spending time and energy and money on social and you’re wondering why it’s not making you money, you’re probably living in a reactive, not a proactive space.

So usually the people that call me are the ones who say, Michelle, I’ve literally spent thousands of dollars on this and I haven’t gotten a single lead. I know why, right? And I can fix it.

And so that’s where my love of real estate has really been born. I work almost exclusively in the real estate and mortgage space, but have had the luxury and just pure joy of working with a lot of entrepreneur organizations over the last couple of years and speaking on a lot of stages there. And it’s really exciting and empowering when you see light bulbs go off for people when they realize, wow, I can see why I’ve been not able to produce anything off of all of this.

And this is such a simple thing. And you’re telling me I can actually do less? No way, really?

And it’s a very freeing feeling for a lot of our clientele. So it’s exciting.

[Mattias]
Man, I know a lot of people listening here have just perked up and are excited to hear you unpack some of these gems. My first question is, is what are people typically spending thousands of dollars on? Are they doing like video editing, video production in general?

Is that usually where the men’s suck comes from?

[Michelle Mikel]
Not like- Gosh, it’s a whole, there’s a whole lots of buckets, right? I mean, I had a call just a couple of days ago with somebody who spent $5,000 on branding by itself, right? So you’re talking mood board logo, the overall vibe, aesthetic, color palette, all of that, which that alone is just crazy to me that that’s what we’re paying for those things because I don’t think it’s necessary in any capacity.

Another big one is videography, paying for people to do video shoots. You’re sitting in an office with a camera in your face. Photography is another big one.

Like I got, they feel like they have to do branding photoshoots all the time. Another big one is social media output, meaning like actually posting on social for them. Lots of people spending money there thinking that, oh, I have a social media person and she’s posting all my content.

Great, but you haven’t made any money from it. So, and your content from what I’m looking at isn’t personalized to you and just this isn’t gonna work, right? So they’re outsourcing without putting themselves into it and that creates a huge problem.

So, you know, I’ve talked to some people who are spending $1,500 to $2,000 a month or more on having someone just post on social for them and they haven’t gotten a single leap from it. And to me, it’s a waste of energy and frankly, a waste of money. So it’s kind of sad.

Honestly, if you add that all up, I mean, it’s like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a month that people are paying.

[Mattias]
Yeah, well, and so you broke it down. I mean, the basic thing you said was that they’re being reactive instead of proactive, right? So can you dive into that a little bit more?

What do you mean by that?

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I’ve been doing this for almost 11 years. I’ve been in business since 2014.

And the number one thing that I see still to this day here is I’m posting and I’m outsourcing having someone do this for me so that I don’t have to worry about it so that I can go focus on the things that make me money, which is, you know, helping buyers buy or getting a house ready or prepped to sell and, or, you know, prospecting new opportunities or farming, whatever, insert word, right? Sure. So they think that they can just outsource this and take themselves out of it. And a keynote I did recently, I described it as like the big red staples easy button. That’s what they’re hiring a social media person for.

They’re like, here, let me just push the button and I can take myself out of it. The problem there is that they are living in a very reactive space. So if we think of the difference between reactive and proactive, reactive means you’re sitting back and you’re waiting for something to come to you, right?

So you’re paying this person or you yourself are doing it. You’re producing the content and you sit back and you wait and say, somebody’s gonna message me and wanna buy a house today, right? And you’re like, you post a piece of video content and you’re just expecting that that’s what’s gonna happen because look how good my video is, right?

So you post it and you wait and you say, well, how come I haven’t gotten any messages? Why is nobody reaching out to me? So you’re reacting.

Another great example is if someone comments on your post, you then respond as opposed to you initiating the comment in the first place, right? That’s another difference between reactive and proactive. And that gets into the prospecting piece specifically, I call it breadcrumbing versus ROI prospecting.

But I would say 99% of the agents that I talk to you on a weekly basis are telling me they post content, they’re commenting on people’s content, but they’re not intentionally reaching out to someone with the intent of getting an opportunity booked on their calendar in any capacity. So that’s when I ask them the question to cue it up. I’ll say, how many of you guys are getting messages in your inbox?

Like, are you receiving inboxes on a daily, bi-weekly basis from people that want to do business with you? 99% of them say no, right? So what’s the problem?

The problem is that they’re again, reactive waiting. They’re not proactively sending those messages out. So proactive in my world is we take the bull by the horns and we create our success, right?

We don’t wait for it to come to us. And I think social media in general, we’re living in what I would kind of consider the most dopamine driven world ever today. So people are assuming post and you’re gonna get this hit of this is gonna happen.

That’s not reality, especially because the world we also live in is very inundated with noise and we have to sift through it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, interesting. So one of the, what you’re saying reminds me of somebody that came on here once and talked about some outreach suggestions or how they see some social media success. And one of their thoughts was, so if you’re doing kind of prospecting, if you’re reaching out to your, you’re going through your database, that kind of thing, as opposed to calling or texting or whatever, that person that they will then DM them through whatever platform they’re really trying to push.

So if it’s Instagram, let’s say it’s Instagram, they message them there so that then the algorithm, their theory was the algorithm would then show them their content more because they have interacted with them through social media. Is that an example of what you’re talking about?

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, that’s a great example. And that’s 100% truth. What the person said to you, that’s without a doubt what we want, right?

If I send you a message on Instagram and you respond and we have a good back and forth, I’m now gonna see your content more just because Instagram says we’ve interacted before, right? So proactive outbound prospecting for an agent specifically is the way I describe prospecting and I’m getting ahead of myself, but I wanna back up for just a moment and describe the framework here. So outbound prospecting, the things you need to think about are really trifecta or trifold, right?

Number one, what do you need in your business on a monthly basis? We call them drivers. So what drives inbound opportunity for you?

Notice I didn’t say the word leads, right? Because I don’t use that word in my world because the opportunity or the driver that we need is what creates the opportunity for leads to happen in the first place. So what we need to get from our prospecting is the opportunity to get in front of the lead, not the lead itself, right?

So I’m a keynote speaker. I travel the country getting to do a lot of speaking. And one of the things for me that drives inbound opportunity into my business is speaking, right?

So when I’m trying to source something, I’m not sourcing an individual lead, I’m sourcing the opportunity or the stage that’s gonna get me in front of the lead. And so we have to understand sort of the difference in that in our minds. So we have to, for my agents, I want you guys to identify what are the things you need to do on a monthly basis that drive inbound opportunity into your business, right?

A great example, I have an agent that lives in Lake Hartwell, Georgia. She’s one of my number one clients. She’s been with me for two plus years.

Actually heard me on a random webinar and she said I was the only person she logged in for. And she was like, well, I guess that’s God telling me I found the right person. But it was a really cool female real estate summit that I was on.

But her name is Stephanie Hartwell. She lives in Lake Hartwell, I’m sorry, Stephanie. And she lives in Lake Hartwell, Georgia, right on the border of Georgia and South Carolina.

And one of the things that Stephanie and I developed for her as a driver is this Popeye thing. So Popeye’s is very popular, right? Everybody’s doing it.

But what she did is her little tag, she would have her Instagram and her TikTok and LinkedIn, YouTube, all of the little handles right on it. But she had a whole box of them in her car with her everywhere she went, right? So if she was going and dropping off something at the wrapping paper place during Christmas, right?

To get something wrapped, she would give the lady something. If she was picking her kids up from school, she would give it to the teachers, right? Her son plays basketball, so she would go.

And whenever her son would play basketball with a coach or a game, she would give one to the coach and one to the coaches on the other team, right? So she was just spreading her web, if you will, everywhere. But all of it drove back to social with the intent of she wasn’t asking them for business.

She just wanted them to go find her on social, right? Because her content was super, super good. Obviously, that’s something that we had worked on.

But what the point there is is that’s a one-to-many opportunity. A one-to-one is different. A one-to-one is I’m sending you a message with the intention of I wanna meet with you directly, right?

So an agent needs to have a one-to-many opportunity like something like what Stephanie does. I have a lot of agents that sponsor running races or their kids, whatever it is, right? So that is what a one-to-many opportunity looks like.

But one-to-one is very different because one-to-one is I’m sending you a message on Instagram or I’m sending you a message on LinkedIn or Facebook, wherever, and I want you booked on my calendar so I can talk to you, right? So what does that driver look like for everybody? It’s different.

Some agents want to meet with title people. Some agents wanna meet with consumers directly, right? Meaning direct to the person that can actually buy or sell.

Some people only wanna meet with small business owners or that’s one of their core drivers is meeting intentionally with as many small business owners in their city as they can. So every agent has sort of different drivers for them. It’s based off that conversation that I need to have with them.

But the point is one-to-many, two-one-to-ones, those are the drivers. Those are the things that we know if I do those things on a monthly basis, the leads will come.

[Mattias]
Okay, so then there’s obviously the piece here as well of having good content, right? I mean, like kind of that’s an important bit here too, right?

[Michelle Mikel]
It is.

[Mattias]
What are your thoughts before we get into what that looks like? What are your thoughts about some of the viral video trends and that kind of stuff? And maybe things being a little bit silly that we see a lot of that kind of stuff in marketing.

There’s people that have gotten huge followings from being like kind of off the wall. I don’t know how much real estate- The taco guy. The word, the Tampa Bree.

I don’t know if you’ve seen her, but she’s hilarious. Like she’s like one of the funniest people I’ve ever followed. But yeah, I’m just curious how people receive her because she’s pretty crude in a lot of what she says.

Yeah, yeah.

[Michelle Mikel]
I’m not a trend person. I really don’t follow them. I purposely don’t engage with them because I think one of the biggest things is social anxiety is such a real thing, right?

Where we feel like the white picket fence next door, I wanna be that. I think the grass is greener over there if we try to do those things. That just creates an enormous amount of anxiety and stress and panic.

And as I mentioned earlier, I just think we’re living in such a distracted sort of dopamine-driven business environment, if not the most in history. So I think salespeople, and in this case realtors, they’re overwhelmed by the constant noise of AI or the algorithm or content or economic uncertainty, right? Of like, and also frankly, the comparison culture of, hey, so-and-so did that video and they did well.

So does that mean I have to in order to not feel like I’m behind? So I think trend chasing creates so many other things that we can certainly talk about. But the most important one that I wanna share from a personal standpoint is burnout.

We have so much burnout happening when it comes to social, especially, because we’re just tired, right? We’re like, I’m doing all the things and I’m just like, it’s not working. So my sort of nugget here that I’ll tell you is burnout in my world or my definition of it, if you will, is that burnout isn’t doing too much.

Burnout is actually doing too much of the wrong thing. And I’ve had several personal experiences with burnout as a very high-performing female. I burn out, I was burning out a lot and I couldn’t figure out why.

And there was an afternoon, it was like a midday Wednesday and I went downstairs and I sat in my husband’s office. He works from home now. And I just started crying on a Wednesday afternoon and he just looked at me and he was like, what’s wrong?

Like, it’s Wednesday, right? And I just was like, I’m having such a long week. And he looked at me again and he’s like, but babe, it’s Wednesday, right?

And I was like, I just feel like I need a break. I’m just tapped out. And he was like, well, two weeks ago, we just got back from a vacation.

So, again, it was like, what is wrong here? And I really had to slow down. And this was about a year and a half, almost two years ago.

And I remember it vividly, like it was yesterday because I slowed down for a second and I realized I was genuinely trying to do all the things that everybody else was doing. I was a younger, as far as being on the speaking circuit, I was a younger female speaker trying to keep up with what everybody else was doing. And is my speaker kit good enough?

Am I reaching out to enough people? Why haven’t I been booked as much? And I’m looking at all these other people and I was exhausted, just purely wholeheartedly exhausted.

And I just had to let that go, right? So, I think trend chasing, the algorithm, AI, what’s going on with ChachiBT, what’s going on with Gemini, what’s going on with all this stuff. It’s just so much for one human to really tolerate.

Now, I’m not saying don’t use those things. I use ChachiBT literally every single day. And it’s actually my macro coach now, which is kind of funny.

But the truth is, is it’s so hard for somebody to try to keep up with all of that. So, when I see these trends and these people trying to do the trendy things, what I want them to understand is that there are ways to do it in a more sustainable way. And I wanna say that again, right?

So, there are trends and there are things that we should be doing, or we feel like we should be doing that instead of feeling exhausted, we can do it in a more sustainable way. And here’s a great example. So, one of the four pillars of content I teach my clients is what I call value series.

So, value series, it’s a trademarked form of content I built back in 2019 when I launched Beyond the Method. And what it is, is where you combine your passions with your pain points. So, who are you as a human outside of work?

And you combine it with a pain point of your ideal client. Great example, I have a client right now who built his first value series. He loves poker, hosts guys night once a month.

They play poker, they do all the fun things related to the card game. I personally don’t play poker. I’m a big rummy fan, but not poker.

But all the whole video series, it’s a five part series where we use Chachabitty to create an analogy between his love of poker, which required him to write 46 sentences about why he loves poker so much. And then we make an analogy between that and a pain point that his ideal client is currently dealing with. So, in order for me to help him arrive at that, we dissect his last 10 transactions and we have him really break all of them down.

If you look at all of the last 10, what are the things that people are struggling with? What are buyers coming to you with? What are sellers coming to you with?

What are some of the questions? You’ve heard all of this stuff, so it’s not new information. But when we dissect a pain point, we really, really don’t want it to be white noisy.

So, if you say a pain point for someone buying real estate right now might be the down payment. We’ll just use that as an example. This is a good one.

Down payment is the issue. Okay, well, great. So, let’s dissect that more.

And what really the pain point is is that I can afford the monthly mortgage payment, but the down payment, I just don’t have. So, I can afford the $500,000 house for the, call it 3,000 a month payment, but I can’t afford the $50,000 that it’s gonna require of me to get there, right? So, that’s the actual pain point, not the down payment being the word, right?

So, when I work with my clients, I really, really need them to dig in and put a microscope on what’s the actual problem, what’s the actual issue. And then we get in ChachiBT and we say, hey, ChachiBT, can you create an analogy between my client’s love of poker and their pain point being X? And you copy and paste those three to four sentences attached to passion, attached to pain point.

And then at the end of it, you say, can we make a five part series out of this? That’s your value series. And the thing about this is, he gets to record all five videos playing poker, right?

In the element of playing poker. And so, it’s really fun for him. His first video, I remember getting the text message from him when his first one went live.

And he was like, okay, that was so scary, but that was like really fun. And for this guy who is not tech savvy, hardly ever on social, he was like, that was fun. And I’m like, good, right?

That means we’re doing something right. That means you’re excited about your content. That means you feel connected and aligned.

It’s not just a Canva graphic that you threw on Instagram saying, oh, I did it today, right? So value series is how we become humans and we enjoy the process and we create a brand for ourselves without being trendy chasing.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I mean, that’s authentic. Yeah, I like that a lot. One of the follow-up questions I had from what you were saying earlier, and I don’t wanna jump ahead if you’re gonna talk about the rest of the pillars or something, but I did wanna get your opinion on AI as far as like, I mean, image generation, if people are using AI images and in their social media content, what do you think about that?

[Michelle Mikel]
I’m a proponent against, or in the sense of I’m against it. I’m also, and I’ll tell you why transparently, right? I go to a lot of events, I speak at a lot of places and one of my absolute favorite things that has ever happened to me in the history of my speaking career was actually last October.

So I spoke at this big event called Sales Mastery, very popular event on the circuit. And I was honored to be a speaker. I went like most women would and bought a new dress for the occasion and was very excited about it.

And I got tons of compliments on my dress and the next morning I showed up in yoga pants and like my company’s swag jacket that I had made. I’m a big fitness person, I work out a lot, even though I’m incredibly pregnant as we record this, I still try to work out every day. But I was wearing an Athleta hoodie with a zip up in the front and yoga pants.

And it had my Burma Media logo on it, like I was trying to still be cute, but I had multiple people come up to me and they’re just like, Michelle, we just wanted to tell you, and mind you, they were all women, which I thought was interesting, but they all came up to me, not all at the same time either, which was also cool. But they’re like, Michelle, we just want to let you know you looked beautiful yesterday, but seeing you in this, like this is the Michelle we know and we just want to honor that this is who we know. And in that moment, that was the only affirmation I needed, right?

Of the best version of me is me. And I do really love that dress and I will for sure be wearing that dress again. But the truth is that AI is such a scary thing when we think about it in a lot of ways.

It’s so valuable. And like I said, I use Chats with BT every single day. So I’m not discounting the value, but when we go and we meet people in real life, are we who we say we are?

You know what I mean? And are we the people who we’re connected to on social, right? Like when I meet people in person and they’re like, Michelle, how was Knox’s birthday?

And I’m like, I don’t even know your name. I’m looking at their name tag. Like, who are you, right?

But like, they know me, right? They know who I am as a human outside. So I think we just have to be careful when we bring AI into that.

I have a client who came to me from another event and what she was doing, all of her videos were actually AI of her. They were not her, right? So like, it looked like her, it sounded like her, but all she had to do was voice record it and then she put it into the software and it made a video of her look and it looks super legit, right?

But she was like, yeah, it’s so much easier because I don’t have to be involved in it. And I think you’re just losing the authenticity piece in my opinion.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, I have a very similar opinion. And I think I’ve been thinking about this and chewing on this a little bit. I think to kind of play off of something you said earlier is like, you know, we are just bombarded constantly with like just things are thrown at us all the time.

Like we have so much information coming at us all the time. Everything’s fighting for our attention, especially on social media. And we’re also in a political climate where things have been weaponized so much that we don’t even know it’s true anymore.

It’s like not a fundamental truth that anybody can agree on. And I think that as soon as you get the sense that it’s AI, and I think the image is gonna be the first easiest indication that it’s AI. Like you’re gonna see it, you’re gonna feel it, whatever.

Like to me, I’m like just discrediting everything that’s happening now. Like even if like somebody wrote the post organically and it’s all them or AI, whatever. If I see an AI image, I’m probably just gonna move on.

I’m gonna go on with it. I’m gonna move on to the next thing that’s fighting for my attention because I’m like, I don’t even know if this is true. I don’t even know if this is accurate or is this just a bot?

Like I think to me that’s something to be aware of. And it is trendy. There’s a lot of use cases for it.

It’s a great tool, but I think it also is easy to then discredit what the content is if it seems like it’s AI generated.

[Michelle Mikel]
Well, I mean, there’s data around that, right? Like there’s literal data and studies done by all kinds of different platforms. And we can certainly Google them and find them.

But the most recent study I’ve read very recently was around AI use in the way people perceive brands, right? So the value that someone has or the respect, if you will, in another way of putting that towards a brand that’s using or almost exclusively using AI and how they produce content. I mean, it’s hurting reputations, like truthfully.

And I’m not saying that, that’s the math saying that, right? So that’s the population that they’re pulling from a data standpoint. People are struggling with, is this real or is it not?

And again, I think the way we win over a long sustained period of time and create momentum in our businesses is by being wildly authentic to a point where I may not get there as fast, but once I get there, I’m gonna last there a lot longer than someone else. So trend chasing, I think, is we wanna get there quick. And I think that’s scary.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, and I think one of the frameworks I’ve heard of using AI, which I think makes a ton of sense, and it’s not 100% true, it’s not 100% the way I use it, but I think the way it was described is like treating it like you were training an employee. Like if you don’t know how to do the thing that you are asking AI to do, then you have no way of knowing if it’s actually doing it right. And so you have to kind of train, if you know how to make content or if you know exactly what you’re trying to express in an email, in whatever, a post, you can have AI clean it up, and then you’re like, yeah, that’s what I was trying to say.

But if you don’t know what to say, or maybe another example of that would be like, if you’re asking AI to create a market analysis and you don’t know how to do market analysis, like for a specific house or whatever, it’s gonna give you something. It’s probably not gonna be accurate at all, but if you don’t know how to do it yourself, you don’t know really how to vet whether it’s accurate. And I think that’s maybe a lens of which you can use AI as a tool, but if you’re, yeah, it just has to be like you’re training an employee to do it and you identify that it’s accurate.

[Michelle Mikel]
That’s, I mean, gosh, that’s so good, right? Think about that for just a moment, because when you think of AI, it’s a springboard. It’s designed to be a assistant to what we are already trying to do, I don’t know how to do it, so I’m just gonna have ChatGPT do it and then make it look like I did it so that it makes me feel good, right?

And I got this question because I wrote my first book in 2025, really at the end of 2024, and then it came out in August of 2025, but I had like a lot of friends are like, well, did you use AI? And I was like, hold on, let me like dissect this for a second. Did I use ChatGPT?

Yeah, but here’s what I did with ChatGPT, right? And I put, oh my gosh, hours and hours and hours of content into ChatGPT before I even came up with a table of contents for the book, right? So did I use ChatGPT to write the book?

No, right? I used my hours and my time and my energy and frankly my brain, right, into ChatGPT. I then created its own chat, right?

As you know, you guys all know this, right? You can create your own individual chats. So in my BlackLine chat, which is the name of my book, I have, I mean, probably 50 hours worth of data inputted into it, audio recordings of me going on podcasts.

I was on stage at an event and I brought up the title, the BlackLine for the first time, copy and put the audio transcript into ChatGPT. I mean, I am feeding the crap out of this chat, the BlackLine, the BlackLine, all the stuff, all the thoughts. I mean, I even remember some times where it was two or three in the morning and I was like, oh, that is such a good idea and I need to go put that in.

So I’d write it down in my notes, in my phone and then I’d go put it in chat in the morning. So did ChatGPT help me write the book? Absolutely.

Did it write the book for me? No freaking way, right?

[Mattias]
Yeah, like I mean, like managing what was coming out. I mean, so yeah, I just, I have a book on the fourth round of editing right now. And like the, you know, like just coming up with the brainstorming of the table of contents, for example, that’s, you know, so incredibly valuable just to be able to like, for me, I’m like a verbal processor.

So I’m just going to be talking to my phone, to ChatGPT or whatever for a long time about what I want to talk about, what I want to cover. And then we could kind of dive into each thing. So it’s kind of like a mind map, but just, you know, structured through ChatGPT to begin with.

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, and that’s what it’s so good for, right? It’s so good for, hey, I’m, I have all these ideas, just help me like streamline it and compartmentalize it. Or, hey, I have this thing, but I’m really stuck on like how to go from this to this.

And you know, I, when I apply for things, which that’s a big one, right? Like whether you’re applying for podcasts or speaking things or whatever, a lot of the applications are very similar, right? So if I’ve inputted all the data into ChatGPT, I can then say, this is a different application with, this is the sort of theme of the event.

Can you help me adjust this to match this? Done, right? Takes me five seconds.

So in that case, it becomes an assistant to me, not the, this just did it for me. And I think that people really need to understand the dichotomy between those two things. Because when it’s used as, this is just doing it for me, that’s to your point when we just tune you out.

We just can totally tell if that wasn’t you, didn’t match you, I’m done.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I love that. And we could probably talk about that for a long time and other use cases, but do you want to give us another one of the pillars?

Like, I’m curious what else, you know, content wise is something that you teach.

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, you know, content’s not my signature sauce, if you will. Like, yes, I teach it and yes, we work through it with our clients, but you know, the prospecting piece being my superpower. But on the content side, value series is the most important, the other one, one of the other pillars is what I call lifestyle reels, which a lot of people are doing similar things.

But what I’ll just dissect it for you from a business standpoint. And for those of you guys listening, these are designed to be personal videos with a subliminal business play on them. So these are not your traditional, just like general reels, right?

These are, you’re doing something personal to you and the quote on it or the text on it is alluding to the fact that you’re a busy, available-for-hire agent that someone should reach out to. So it’s a play off of, hey, we’re being funny, but also I’m subliminally marketing as opposed to, you know, the traditional, I hate to say this on an agent podcast, but hopefully I strike a chord in a good way. If all you’re posting is real estate, real estate, real estate listing, listing, listing, open house, open house, open house, this is how many units I’ve done this month, congratulations, here’s the market average or, you know, market price average in my city for Gilbert, Arizona, like, come on guys, right?

Like find something better to do. Cause that, not that that’s not good information, but I, as the consumer of, am I going to buy a house with you or have you helped me sell a house? I don’t care about any of that.

[Mattias]
Yeah. One of my pet peeves is like just content. Like I’m not saying it doesn’t have a place at all, but like just like posting somebody at the closing table, like they don’t want that.

They don’t really want that shared. And like, and nobody really cares either. That’s consuming that.

I think like a Google review sharing your, you know, like a client experience, you know, I think that that’s, you know, another way of saying you had a transaction or whatever, but it’s, it’s, you know, that’s a little bit different. But yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I mean, I think it’s, it’s not really, even that’s not, I mean, people might see that you had, they had a good experience with you.

It’s more than just, you know, at the closing table, forcing them to like, I wouldn’t want to be there. I wouldn’t want to be in that picture right now. But yeah, like it’s not really giving people what they really want.

[Michelle Mikel]
No, what people want is do I like you? And do I want to hang out with you long enough to go through this transaction where you’re going to intimately know my family and I, and I’m going to obviously to some capacity have that experience with you. And when you think about, you know, this is a quintessential statement I’m about to make, but when you think about families with kids and dogs, right, like I’m inviting you into my home to help me buy or sell, hopefully you like dogs, right?

Like, I mean, cause that’s one of those things where we’re so business mind-sensed all the time. And we’re so like professional, professional, professional that we forget that a transaction doesn’t even happen if I don’t like you. So the lifestyle real aspect of things, why I really sort of honed this in was, you know, for example, I’ll use, throw myself into this mix here because I had had that moment in many years ago where I was like, maybe I should just sell real estate full-time cause I love it, right?

And I talk to you guys every single day. And, you know, on the mortgage side too, I can’t even tell you how many mortgage companies have been like, will you come work for us? You know, cause which is very flattering.

And I, and I don’t say that to be silly about it. I’m genuinely very grateful for the opportunities that have been thrown at me. But back when I was initially thinking very heavily about, should I do real estate full-time?

One of the things I always say is like, if I had made that decision, who would my people be? Right, and I’m a very fit individual. My husband and I both run a lot.

I was a competitive swimmer for 20 plus years all through college. Swim division one for Rutgers was a high level, very competitive CrossFitter for almost seven years. Just shy of qualifying for the CrossFit games in 2018.

[Mattias]
Oh wow, awesome.

[Michelle Mikel]
So 2018 was the year that they took regionals away, which you obviously remember that I’m sure.

[Mattias]
I wasn’t an adult then, I’m newer.

[Michelle Mikel]
Okay, so in 2018, they changed the rules of how you qualify for the CrossFit games. And initially had been the CrossFit open. You get to go to a regionals if you qualify as a team or as an individual out of the open.

And then regionals is how you then qualified for the CrossFit games. They did away with regionals, which really, really threw the whole country in an uproar because these regionals were throughout the United States. And at the time I was living in Phoenix.

So I was in the Southwest region. So it was the very bottom half of Southern California, like CrossFit Invictus, which is very popular in San Diego, Arizona, New Mexico, these kind of three tri-states. And then parts of Texas.

So the first regionals that I ever went to was in San Antonio. So it was all these regionals throughout the United States. And then the countries like, for example, like South America would be a regional for the whole country of South America.

Or like, you know, Iceland Annie, when she popped on in the scene or, you know, any of the Icelandic ladies who we all love. Those girls would come to the States for a regional in the States because Iceland was so small, they’d be part of another region. Those regions were all done, regionals were all done away with.

And now it’s like this big sanctionals thing. So long story short, I don’t even know how I got onto that. What was I even talking about when I said- I think here your demographic would be if you were- Oh, yes, thank you.

I needed you to bring me back. So thank you. The demographic, if I was gonna be a realtor, right?

I’m like, well, I’m a really fit individual. I love working out. I love CrossFit.

I am also a military wife. I live in a military town. My husband is now medically retired, but serves that population.

And so I’m like, okay, well, if I’m gonna sell real estate, who are my people, right? And I got to speak to the military wife community, which is a very unique world. And having lived in it now for almost seven years, they are different.

They think different. We operate different. A lot of women, especially, are very tentative towards creating long-term friendships with people because it sucks when your friends move, right?

So you have some other interesting plays there. From a running standpoint, my husband is a hybrid athlete. So he does a lot of fitness on the strength side, but he also is trying to qualify for Boston and hopefully qualify this year to run there next year.

So he’s a long distance endurance athlete. So we live in the running world a lot. We’re at a ton of races all the time.

So in my mind, I’m thinking, if I’m a real estate agent and I want to attract my ideal client and my ideal person that wants to buy or sell, I got to authentically show up as one of those people that I already spend a lot of time with, right? So the lifestyle reels, that’s where the concept was really born there because lifestyle reels is I’m putting myself in my element and I’m putting a subliminal business play on it with the intention of I’m attracting someone who’s going to like me because they’re like me, right? So, and they’re fun.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I love that. And one of the things that one of the, I had a conversation about, kind of getting used to being in front of the camera, getting used to talking, which is like not something people are born with or some are, but like a lot of people, it’s very difficult and very painful for a long time. And I had talked about having some sort of goal of just, I’m not going to post anything.

I’m going to start off with, and ChatGPT could super easily help with this. Come up with a 30 day plan where you’re doing just a five minute talking to your phone or something, a clip, whatever. So you’re just used to talking into your phone or to a camera or whatever.

You’re just used to just getting those reps in, right? And then you might, at the end of that time, find that one of those pieces you could use, or you’ll just probably be a lot more comfortable. I mean, hearing your voice, seeing yourself talking, being able to say something when the camera turns on.

I know that doesn’t come naturally to people. Does that ring true to you? Do you have any advice for that, getting over that stage?

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, yes and no, right? Like, does it come naturally? Yes.

Does it come naturally? No. And it’s kind of like a combination of the two.

So what I discovered was scripts were very difficult for me in the sense of the more and more I listened to myself repeating a script, it was really difficult for me to be me, right? So I’m on this call with you. There’s no notes.

I don’t have a script of, oh, if he asked me this question, I got to answer it this way. And I think the authenticity of that is valuable. And then I think the only way to get better at it is to just do it more, right?

It’s a rep thing. I have a degree in broadcast journalism. That was my undergrad degree.

I used to think I was going to be Aaron Andrews back in the day. Realized one, I wasn’t tall enough and two, I wasn’t pretty enough. And three, I didn’t want to get paid $4 an hour.

So I didn’t want to do that. But the long story short, there is video in general. The best video I have seen is what I call, I call them God moments in my world.

And I actually teach these to my clients. But God moments are where we just turn the camera around and we just share what’s on our heart, right? So great example.

You know, I do business every single day, all day. But I have a four-year-old who, when he was almost three, I had heard all of these horror stories. You’re a dad, you know, right?

You’ve heard all these horror stories of, oh my gosh, my kid just threw his poop all over the room. It was all over the walls, like all this stuff. And you hear these stories and you’re like, that’s not going to happen to me, right?

And three plus years in, hadn’t happened to us. My son was totally out of diapers. He was just in overnights.

Hadn’t had an accident in forever, right? So we were like, oh, we can switch him probably to regular underwear. Well, one morning, I shit you not, literally, no pun intended.

I walked in to my son’s room. My husband had already left to go to work. He had taken his overnight pull-up off, full of poop, thrown it across the room.

It was all over our brand new carpet in our brand new custom farmhouse that we had just built in Clarksville, Tennessee. It was all over the walls. It was all over the crib.

I called my husband and I was like, babe, there is shit everywhere, like literally. And he said to me, he’s like, the only thing you can do is pick them up, put them in the bathtub and just leave them there for a minute until you can figure out how to clean the room, right? So I did that and then I got off or I got done cleaning all of that up and now how many parents can relate to that, right?

But I got done with all of that and I get on Instagram and I go live. I just do a live video and I start talking about this. And as I’m talking about it, I start to see all these subliminal, how does this relate to business?

And so that’s where the God Moments concept was born, right? Because again, the number one form of storytelling is done through analogy. Analogies are the easiest way for people to process and understand information and to honestly see themselves in this scenario.

Analogies are super powerful for that. So I’m describing this poop situation on Instagram live in front of all of the people that are now on this live with me. And as I’m talking, I’m seeing all of these business parallels to running my business.

And so I just started talking about it. And the amount of people that came out of the woodwork that ended up either wanting to be clients or wanting to talk to me about work too, all stems from me to my poop. My son does poop and did do that one thing that nobody said would ever happen to me scenario.

So it’s wild, man. It’s wild.

[Mattias]
I love that. Yeah, and I’ve heard there’s something too about live versus I think there’s something extra about live which maybe is after you’ve gotten a lot of reps and doing videos and such, you might feel more comfortable doing lives. I think that can also be extra nerve wracking for people.

But yeah, I love that.

[Michelle Mikel]
The scripting was way more nerve wracking. I don’t know about you, but the scripting was way more nerve wracking for me because it was just so difficult the more and more I tried it. It was just so difficult to be authentically who I was because you get this script from Chachabitty or you get the script that you’ve written yourself or whatever and you try to read it and you don’t have inflection points in your voice.

You don’t know where to pause or put your own spin on things. And as I did more and more of them, I just started to feel less and less like me. So I just said, I know what the framework is.

I know it’s hook. I know it’s objection. I know it’s problem definition and solution.

So I know the framework and just let it go, right? Just make sure you start with the cool hook, hit an objection, hit a pain point problem, AKA problem definition and have a solution at the end. And the first couple you do are gonna suck and you’ll just get better and better at them as you go.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, I think having a bullet points, having an outline of sorts, I can see being helpful to keep me on track. But yeah, otherwise same. I mean, I can see why I would want to or why I would have wanted to starting off.

Now that I’ve done this podcast forever, it’s not an issue for me to get on and just speak. Not that I am the best speaker in the world. I just am more comfortable with it.

So, but yeah, I think reps, I mean, that answers so many, like, you know, if you wanna get better at something, you just gotta put in more reps. I know that’s coming from two CrossFitters, but- No, no CrossFit pun intended guys, okay? But anyway, we would have hours to talk.

I know your time’s valuable. So I do wanna transition into the golden nugget section. But do you have any other golden nuggets that you haven’t already shared?

Cause you’ve shared a lot.

[Michelle Mikel]
I was gonna say, I mean, let’s go back to through the episode. I think I’ve said a couple of my favorite ones, but burnout isn’t doing too much. It’s doing too much of the wrong thing is probably one of the number ones for me and a very personal experience that I’ve had throughout that.

And that one particular scenario I shared is probably was a pivotal moment in my life and my career when I really learned what that really meant and why I was feeling that. Another big one, one of my signature quotes, and I haven’t told this story, but I’m happy to. But one of my absolute signature number one things that people like to quote me on is that God gives us a message to give us a message.

And in 2024, I went through some personal stuff that had me talking to God very closely saying, excuse me, but what’s going on here? And what came out of it was life is hard and business is hard. And in order for, I’ve been in business now 11 years and I think most people didn’t think I’d make it past two.

And the messy aspect of life, things that happen in our lives, that’s already hard enough. And when we understand that the mess is designed to give us an opportunity and to hopefully help us see something on the other side of it, we look at messy as opportunity as opposed to why is this happening to me? So my book, The Black Line came out in August last year and that’s my number one quoted thing that people copy or like highlight and they’ll like text me.

They’ll be like, I read this sentence and oh my gosh, I get it now. And it’s kind of one of those big eyeopening things. One of my other favorite ones specifically related to social is failure is feedback.

Failure isn’t I suck at something. Failure is feedback of how do I redirect and that’s how we need to look at it. So think of it as like a warning light when you get in your car.

If the warning light is on, it’s kind of trying to tell you something. And a lot of us do the sort of normal thing of eh, I’ll get to it when I get to it. It’s not that bad, right?

And then we’re like, oh crap, I’m stuck on the side of the road. And this happened to me when I was driving from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona. It’s about a four hour drive from where I lived to where I was going and literally sitting on the side of the road in the middle of going through Indio, California, right, to get to Phoenix, stuck on this side of the road because I didn’t pay attention to my check engine light.

And so that’s where the funny saying came from, but the truth is so there, right? When we’re failing, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just a, okay, hold on, let me sit in here for a second.

And what is this showing me? What feedback is this giving me? And if I’m gonna keep doing the same thing and expect different results, which we’ve all heard this quote, right?

That’s definition of insanity. It’s pretty stupid to try to keep assuming that eventually it’s just gonna fix itself cause it won’t.

[Mattias]
Right. No, I love it. That’s so true.

Do you have, we can, you’ve already mentioned your book a couple of times, but do you have a book that you think is fundamental for everybody, everybody should read or maybe one that you just currently really enjoy?

[Michelle Mikel]
Yeah, I have one, really two in particular, especially for anyone listening to this that’s a high performer or wants to be. Two best books I’ve ever read in my entire life still to this day. Number one is High Performance Habits by Brennan Burchard.

I’ve read that book back and forward 55, I mean, gosh, so many times. And every time I hear it or listen to it, I see it differently. And I think that that’s important cause what he does is he traits the six high performance habits of a high performer.

And if you’re missing any of those traits, what does that look like? How do you find it? How do you acquire it?

You know, all of that. So I reading it in 2019, when I launched Beyond the Method versus reading it today, I read those pages a lot differently. So it’s kind of one of those, you can go back to a million times and get something different, especially as you evolve in your career.

And then the other one, my number one favorite book I have ever read in my entire life. And if I ever have the chance to meet this man, I swear I will hug him until he tells me to let go. But Jim Collins wrote the book, Good to Great.

And the best book without a doubt, I mean, just wholeheartedly the best book. So both of those are on Amazon, go get them. My book is on Amazon, but I can’t say my book is like my favorite book, right?

Wouldn’t that be weird?

[Mattias]
People have. Then finally, are you on social media? Is there a place people can go to follow?

[Michelle Mikel]
Never, nowhere actually. You really can’t find me. No, yes, of course.

@bermanmediasocial all over everywhere. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, doesn’t matter, you’ll find me. Michelle Berman Michael is my full quote stage name, but legally Michelle Mikel.

Awesome.

[Mattias]
Michelle, thanks so much. Like I said, we could talk for hours. This has been really fun.

I really appreciate it. And it’s always great to talk to another CrossFitter.

[Michelle Mikel]
Awesome. Same. I share that sentiment.

We really could probably talk for another hour, but nobody wants to listen to us ramble for that long.

[Mattias]
Yeah, well, thanks again. It’s been awesome. And everybody go check out her book, go buy that.

Leave her a review. And yeah, again, thanks so much.

[Michelle Mikel]
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit reiagent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.