Stop Performing. Start Connecting.

The most dangerous thing you can do in a client meeting isn't saying the wrong thing. It's trying too hard to say the right one.

Let me tell you about one of the most humbling moments of my coaching career. And yes, I am going to use the word humbling without any of the Instagram filter that usually comes with it.

To earn my Certified Professional Coach (CPC) designation through IPEC — which leads to the Associate Certified Coach credential with the International Coaching Federation — I had to record a live coaching session to be evaluated. Someone was going to watch it. Grade it. Check boxes.

Now, I want you to understand: I had been coaching for years at that point. I'd sat across from clients in some of their hardest moments. I knew how to be present. I knew how to listen past the words to what was really being said. I knew how to hold space without needing to fill it.

And then the record button started.

I became a different person. I was in my head, searching for the perfect question — the one that would demonstrate I knew what I was doing. I was nervous. I was monitoring myself. I was performing. And in doing so, I stopped doing the one thing I am actually very good at: being genuinely, fully present with another human being.

The irony? I was being evaluated on the exact skills I was too busy performing to actually use.

"I was making it about me instead of the other person."

Sound familiar? Because I see this play out every single week — and nowhere more than in how loan officers show up in front of real estate agents.

A loan officer sits down for coffee with an agent they've been trying to get in front of for months. This is the meeting. And so they arrive with their pitch ready — rates, turn times, the technology platform, the three things that make them different. They have rehearsed it. They are going to deliver it.

What they don't do is ask the agent a real question. What they don't do is get genuinely curious about what's hard in that agent's business right now, what their buyers are going through, what a true lending partner would actually look like to them.

They want the agent to see how good they are. And in doing so — however well-intentioned — they've made the whole conversation about themselves.

The agent feels it. They always do. And that's usually where the relationship ends before it ever really begins.

Why we perform in the first place

The performance isn't vanity. It usually comes from something much more tender than that.

Underneath every performance is an inner story — something we are telling ourselves that is quietly running the show.

And here's the thing: most of us aren't even aware it's there. It might sound like I have to prove myself. Or they're going to compare me to every other LO they've met. Or simply a low-grade hum of anxiety that we've never stopped long enough to actually examine.

Whatever form it takes, that inner story drives the behavior. And the performance it produces is exhausting — for you and, frankly, for anyone on the receiving end of it.

You cannot sustain a performance. But you can sustain being yourself.

What actually creates raving fans

The loan officers I coach who have the deepest agent relationships are not the ones with the most polished presentation. They are the ones who walk into every interaction genuinely curious about the other person.

They ask better questions. They listen without an agenda. They let the conversation go where the agent needs it to go, not where the script says it should.

That's not a sales technique. That's a way of being. And it starts with believing — really believing — that your genuine self is enough to show up with.

You are not broken. You are beautifully and wonderfully made — and the most powerful thing you can bring to any agent relationship is the real, unperformed version of you.

One thing to try this week

Before your next client meeting, take 60 seconds and ask yourself one question: Am I walking in here to impress them — or to understand them?

Notice what comes up. That's where the real work is.

Be a student of yourself — not a follower of the version of you that you think you're supposed to be.