While on my morning mental health walk, I had a lengthy and engaging think-tank conversation with my closest group of female friends about AI and the future of work.
Among six working women, the viewpoints were strong and backed by varying degrees of personal experience using AI for both professional and personal tasks.
We all agreed that AI is a fantastic tool, one that can help us work faster, more efficiently, and tick tasks off our ever-growing to-do lists.
But it also raised some very real questions:
- Where does our transitional generation stand with all these rapid changes?
- What jobs will be completely erased because of AI and its efficiency?
- What does the trajectory of education even look like for our kids anymore?
- What will their future job market hold?
I can only speak from my own career in real estate about the many ways AI can enhance advertising, sales, and customer experience. It is an incredibly useful tool – full stop.
But it cannot replace human-to-human connection.
Here’s a fun fact about me: I LOVE travel agents.
I love the experience of mapping out a trip, speaking to a travel agent, and sharing all the reasons why the trip is so exciting for my family and me. Then, entrusting them to make bookings, suggest the most efficient routes, airlines, and hotels, and provide a complete travel itinerary.
God forbid there’s a delay or major disruption while we’re away – I can call my travel agent, and they can help rebook flights, utilize travel insurance, and coordinate everything while I’m on holiday.
To me, that is an absolute win.
Similarly, a real estate agent is the person you hand over the affairs surrounding the sale or rental of your property to. We provide that warm, fuzzy experience from the very first phone call. We offer real, on-the-ground insight into the best ways to price, market, and move your home.
We are the face and mouthpiece of your property.
We network with clients and other agents to find the most qualified buyer in the shortest amount of time. Sure, you can use AI to write the perfect property description, build beautiful visuals, and pay for advertising yourself but you are still limited by reach, strategy, and experience.
We are the human vehicle that guides the process.
We are the experts doing the heavy lifting and screening so you don’t have to.
The topic of AI became my obsession this week because of the amount of time I’ve spent talking to my good friend ChatGPT about ways to:
- “Grow my business while the real estate market is slow”
- “Diversify my boutique agency to offer value in tough economic times”
…and many other versions of the same question.
Trust me when I say: I don’t want to change a thing about the business model we’ve spent the last 11 years building. It is tried, tested, and true. More importantly, it has given me the work-life balance I fought hard to create for my family and myself.
However, a soft and challenging market – one that shows no immediate signs of bouncing back –can send even the most tenacious CEO boss babe into a pit of doom and gloom.
Not even my entrepreneurial spirit could stomach the dismal month of May.
I started telling myself:
“I need to do more.”
“I need to grow.”
“I need to diversify.”
“I need to create more opportunities.”
Chat politely replied with a host of business ideas that honestly left me feeling even more overwhelmed.
So, I shut my laptop and decided to take a step back.
Maybe instead of grasping at straws and obsessing over growth during a slow season, I should focus on the things I CAN control and release the things I can’t.
Here are a few ways I choose to stay productive during low seasons, while keeping morale high and momentum moving in both work and life:
- Calling, messaging, and checking in with past clients
- Going to the gym – exercise always falls to the bottom of the list during busy seasons
- Focusing on Barbados growth while the Trinidad market takes a little snooze
- Hosting educational events like our Hart & Co. X Altman collaboration
- Writing content and appearing on podcasts for brand building
- List! List! List! We need inventory when the market wakes up
- More playdates with my kids and prepping study papers for Term 3 exams (future Zoë will be grateful)
- Taking a holiday – because this is the ideal time to travel
After over a decade of experiencing the ebbs and flows of this industry – the feast and famine cycles – I’ve had to develop one very important skill: resilience.
The ability to bounce back and keep moving forward is not an easy thing to master.
It’s one of the main reasons many agents don’t last long in this business. They struggle to accept that these cycles become part of the job description.
Resilience in this industry means making the most of the downtime and finding the internal motivation to emerge stronger, more rested, and clearer than before.
It also means separating ourselves from our business.
As entrepreneurs, it’s incredibly easy to tie our self-worth directly to the success of our company. We are our business in many ways, but these slower market conditions are not a reflection of our value.
What resilience means to me:
- Looking at a blank diary and reframing the day as an opportunity for rest, exercise, or self-care
- Navigating disappointment and accepting that you truly did everything possible to facilitate a positive outcome
- Not giving up on a client after setbacks
- Continuing to write and create content even when the spark feels absent
- Holding weekly team meetings and training sessions to keep morale and motivation high
Maybe resilience isn’t about constantly pushing harder.
Maybe it’s about learning when to pause, reset, and trust that seasons always change.
And until they do – we keep showing up anyway.
Zoë
