Most doctors took on medicine as a lifelong calling, but many, like me, find the flame of passion dimming over time. The stress, the changing nature of the job, and dwindling joy led me to a crossroads. My leap from cardiologist to real estate shocked everyone except me. I kept my practice open for six more years while quietly building a real estate practice. Eventually, I realized I needed more fulfillment and less stress to survive the long haul. Real estate became my new path, a healthier path, blending my medical expertise with a fresh start.

The Spark of Change

I loved being a cardiologist. I thrived in high-intensity, critical care. But over time, it became unsustainable in solo practice. I didn’t crave change; rather I needed it to survive. Real estate made sense—I saw parallels to medicine in helping clients with quality of life, complex decisions, and trust. I saw consumers at a disadvantage, often using only narrow thinking in taking on major life transitions.

Taking the Leap

Leaving medicine wasn’t easy. I had doubts—what would people think? Could I handle real estate? The change left my family worried that I was out of my element. But as I studied the craft of real estate brokerage, I felt a stronger pull toward this new path. I could handle the tech, the data, the project management. It wasn’t only courage that pushed me, but also need to leave medicine. I leapt from the operating room to a different world that I prayed would be synergistic. I approached real estate with the same precision as surgery—and learned “more is lost by indecision than wrong decision. I learned analysis paralysis and how to consider the cost of marginal returns.

Learning the Ropes 

Starting from scratch felt daunting, but familiar, like the uncertainty I felt in my job search at the end of my fellowship. Real estate has unpredictable cash flow, a risk I could not take, so I couldn’t fully abandon my medical career. I took on part-time gigs—medical malpractice testimony, telemedicine, and administrative medical director work—allowing me to control my time and work flexible hours. My medical experiences trained me in discipline, attention to detail, trust-building skills, like being prompt consistent and reliable.

Yet, I discovered that in real estate, especially in the residential brokerage business, you need relentless positivity and instinctive decision-making. My gut instincts would be tested in this new venture. I was ready for the challenge.

The Emotional Connection

I didn’t anticipate the deep emotional parallels between cardiology and real estate. In medicine, I supported patients in navigating illness and maintaining their quality of life, especially seniors aiming for independence. Real estate brings a similar intensity: clients face the challenge of leaving cherished homes or finding spaces that meet their changing needs. My years in cardiology taught me empathy and the skill to connect deeply, which have been invaluable here.

While closing a deal brings a familiar rush—though perhaps less enduring than life-saving moments in medicine—I now have the balance of controlling my schedule and prioritizing personal well-being. My medical training instilled instincts rooted in care, which continue to guide me in real estate.

A New Kind of Reward

The sense of fulfillment I get from helping someone find their dream home or make a sound investment rivals the satisfaction I felt as a cardiologist. My days are less chaotic, but no less rewarding. I now control my schedule, allowing me to balance my personal life while still pursuing a career I’m passionate about.

Finding Balance and New Purpose

I leap from cardiology to real estate was sidestepping, always keeping one foot in medicine while venturing into my new business. While I cherish my years in medicine, and all the people I met along the way, my heart now beats for real estate— in pursuit of creativity, flexibility, and greater sustainable business. I put
people and opportunities together, and help keep parties on track. I help clients with strategy with a focus on quality of living.

I sought to know more the rhythm of life’s great dance. I traded stethoscope hearing for keys to open doors of opportunity
Passion blooms in every opportunity, where deals echo beats in harmony

The ability to persuade others is an essential tool in your business arsenal.
Our native persuasion skills derive from “natural” survival skills, so there is, in us all, a sturdy basis upon which to refine persuasion technique.
For most of us, on a daily basis, we seek to convince someone to see our side of an argument, have someone who does not really know us to do a courteous favor, or hope to sell a product or service to a potential customer with whom we are not yet familiar. All these involve reflexive yet particular persuasion skills.

How do you define persuasion? In what situations can you measure and improve your persuasive effectiveness?
When you try to influence a transactional outcome
When you want to impact opinions, conclusions or behaviors
When you are appealing to subjective (ill)logic, emotional intelligence, misaligned personal interests.

Persuasiveness is a scalable affectation, and is amenable to “automation”, that allows you to adjust your resource allocation for matters big and small.
Persuasive Effectiveness is contingent on consistency, accountability and continuous process improvement. It is a commitment to your personal brand and your professional esteem. Breakdowns in your persuasion method can be very costly in time and effort spent to recover your persuasive power either in a situation at hand or more systemically, across your varied initiatives.

• Know your audiences & Understand what they want (of you).

  “Understanding” your audience is not a static exercise. Needs, wants and desires are dynamic, amidst of pool of often times conflicting priorities that may result inertia and indecision or miscalculation. Think your persuasiveness matters in these circumstances. Time for your role as SuperHero to step in! Inventory, score, be ready to modify logic in a moment’s notice. What do they value? What motivates them? How will you separate a “need” from “want” from a a “desire” to assure expectations are reasonable.

• Setting “common ground” between you and your customers is an immediacy of the engagement.

  Consider it a “communication facilitation pathway” that when the interactions get tough, all parties can revert to, to be a “eye on the prize” orienting point. Practicing the art of building common ground. If the persuasion effort loosing momentum because of your idea itself or mis-interpretation of your idea, you may be seen as a “taker” not a “giver”. Check yourself for “agenda bias”- your perception of yourself as advocate y not be the consumers.

• Build rapport.

  Comfort with your counsel is the result of consistent, dependable and overt competency, backed by data and proofs, Being an expert listener, with an unbiased, unpresumptive method is a key skill in building rapport.
  With rapport then comes the opt-in opportunity to influence.

• Know the science of persuasion.

  Including knowledge of human psychology in decision making is useful in crafting your persuasive argument. Every process step carries a “checking” function, spoken or unspoken, conscious or unconscious. In aggregate this “checks” feeds the relationship management method for vendor and consumer alike.

• Being confident of your message and value.

Your confidence, based on real capability, can be contagious. If you’re not naturally confident, don’t worry – it’s something that can be learned. The theory of being confident does not require you practice the teachings of mass marketers who practice “toxic positivity”. Be yourself (best self)!

• Be convincing without being pushy or phony.

Pushing too hard may be unconscious to you but painfully evident to your audience. “Fake it till you make it” does not work, and may undermine your persuasion.
Strike a balance between being confident and being humble. Get comfortable with your self in the role at hand and the place you are in within your career development.. Of course, be your best self, but don’t posture to be what you are not (yet). And reach out to other colleagues, willingly collaborate to elevate competencies.

• Refine your “advisory attitude”.

By nature, people resist being told what to do/ Learning how to persuade others by building their inquisitiveness, without you being overly forceful. is an exercise in “balance”. Use logic and reason, be respectful of the privilege of conversation, and allow your audience to set the rhythm and the agenda. Be patient, kind, and willing to take a “long run approach”, even if your need is for a “quick result”.

• Use positively aligned language.

  Customer centric filters apply to your approach.
  – What they think. What you think they think
  – What they think of what you think
  – What they think as a result of your input
  Being positive means being solutions based. Every “problem” is your “opportunity to optimize”.
  Staying calm and embracing challenge as a philosophy can help pull you back from life experience driven reflexes to “go negative” when challenged or disappointed.

• Appeal to emotion without manipulating the issues at hand.

  Stories are powerful venues for validating emotional intelligence without challenging the ownership of faulty logic or unrealistic expectations. When your audience feels they know the issues faced by and the personalties of the characters in your story, they’re much more likely to be persuaded by what you have to say. You will have taken the stressful or disputable issue out of the first person, out of conflict, and buffered the stress by a fictionalized surrogate.

• Minimize the ego or relation risk of pressing for agreement with your viewpoint.

  It’s easy when you are seen as the expert, and your customer values your expertise. But it’s not always so, when ego or control is part of the equation. We all know comedy in which the worker has the genius, and the boss takes the credit. Skill in helping consumers on a “journey of discovery” are basic necessities.
  It’s important to make it easy for your customer to agree with your fact driven advice. Here’s an example of minimizing decision-making risk. For example, you know your customer’s preferred restaurant for your meeting was just cited by the public health department for deficiencies. They insist because they know the owner. So, in trying to redirect, to persuade them to try a new restaurant with you, you might offer to “celebrate our good fortune in working together on this important project” and offer to treat them to their meal at your favorite place. By doing this, you’re taking on the majority of the risk, and your audience is more likely to say yes.

• Be direct in asking for what you want.

Be specific, and presuming your ask is rational, win:win, unselfish, then be confident. If you’ve addressed the needs of the other parties, and have been respectful. Then you can fully believe that you deserve what you’re asking for. Of course, be polite, and always ask your audience opinion of what you propose.

• Incentivizing Consensus.

  Always within legal boundaries and best business practices, offer some value to your audience coming to agree with you. This is especially valuable when the agreement is just a piece of a bigger picture, that the process at hand has many conflicting participants or time value is of the essence.

• Self interest is not selfishness.

  Often times, folks need to feel they are “getting something” for their positive participation. While you may know their agreement is in their own interest, explaining how they benefit “now” may help their “incremental” insistence of “always winning”. The something could be affirmation attestation of their contribution to others in the process. Material and physical rewards are not the only “relationship currency” in your toolset.

• Provide decision making choices, with a pro/con framework that support a sense of control.

  Empowerment by choice is a great persuasive technique. Your audience will be more likely to be open to being persuaded. Let the person you are attempting to persuade feel like they are making the decision, with your insightful support. This is stronger than you saying “I recommend you do this or that, or in my opinion you’’ll be better off my way”
  The consumer really is always right, even when they’re completely wrong. You’ll be much more successful helping them be right, by enriching their sense of being in control! And the more subtle your competent gentle hand, the more right they will feel comfortable being…because of YOU!

• Use flattery with restraint and purpose.

  Be genuine. Excessive flattery will make you seem insincere or suggest that you are compensating for an insufficiency or holding back other critical information.

The consumer really is always right, even when they’re completely wrong. You’ll be much more successful helping them be right, by enriching their sense of being in control! And the more subtle your competent gentle hand, the more right they will feel comfortable being…because of YOU!

“Step out of your comfort zone”… What does this mean, why do so?

Let’s start with belief systems and set a simple binary: If there were only two choices,
My business is optimized, and is not subject to disruptions and market forces. “I’m good” or
My business exists in an ongoing vortex of change, internalities I can control and externalities I can either manage or at least impact to my developmental advantage.

The second is my reality, and my theme is that bolstering your comfort zone while expanding it’s potential by regular excursions outside the comfort zone is a Business 101 survival mandate.

These are are my 7 motives why:

# 1 – Business Growth: Growth within the comfort zone is constrained and linear. Growth external to the comfort zone is dimensional. The first concepts is certainly true if your comfort zone functions as “insulation” a protection mechanism overlaying insufficiencies and buffering disappointments and traumas.

# 2 – Creating Positive Pressure: Incrementalism, easily achieved process improvement steps can, iteratively, create momentum and positivism in your critical self-review. Think of this as compounding interest in the investment you make in yourself. Create a positive pressure cycle or rhythm, with a good doses of automation and accountability. Create momentum by which little successes. These can be moved once proofed, to become trusted dependable comfort zone elements. .. Comfort is NOT just the management of displeasures.

# 3 – Be the source of Positivity: Evolve stages of “feels good” focus, create a ladder step of healthy self enriching beliefs and an integrated visual mapping of achievable accomplishments. You can then create a scaffolding by which ideas become vision more readily verbalized to others, vision becomes process, process becomes implementation and dreams become reality.

Become a productiveness ninja, executing while conserving resources. Apply leverage that comes from your personal brand development.

# 4 – Face Your Fears head on
Just because they are your thoughts does not mean your thoughts are kind or healthily and helpfully aligned with your mission, let alone the outcomes you must have occur. Yes, an active state of mind is needed to manage the way you think. Blocking subjective sub-conscious to lend advantage to your objective task aligned conscious is needed. Fear, doubt, negative self speak takes harbor in the unconscious.

# 5 – The Performance Temperature

By pushing yourself to territories outside your comfort zone, your weakness and strength in the process. Start doing what works for you. Stop what doesn’t. By human nature, you’ll migrate to allocating mindset bandwidth outside your comfort zone. Once you filled the gap between your comfort zone with the external zone, you can then operate in a hybrid space. Let’s call that the Performance Zone (PZ)

PZ is where you become more conscious and deliberate in your thinking, feelings and actions. More insistent and iIl intentional on delivering incredible results, with positivism for “making stuff happen”.

# 6 – Self fulfilled
Many people wake up everyday with the stress of “too many things to do”. This is an underachievement mindset that bleeds over from the work mind set to then bleed the life and quality of living mindset. Call it the negative power of missed expectations. Bad stuff that to be needs contained, abated, and remedied using reflexive continuous surveillance.

Celebrate what you can control, what you can collaborate to control and what you can conceive of being able to control…tomorrow, next day, everyday, someday. Take negatively self-critical, time related expectations out of the self fulfillment loop. Get stuff done…you’ll be the happier for it.

# 7 – Positive Influence
We are affiliative creatures, by nature. Being a positive influence to others is a “feel good” that exceeds the discomfort of stepping outside your comfort zone. As the first grows, the second dissolves.

Whether passive or active, as you help others to grow, your function as a role model, mentor, and coach becomes a nutrient ego boost that drives your own development to the point of becoming a healthy compulsion (work is now joy phenomenon)

Attraction by your audience’s self interest is a fair agreement. When you, through your positive contribution and imprint, become “magnetic”. Once so, you will feel the acceleration of journeying towards attaining your goals, personal and professional. There is no such thing as ‘fail’ if you can get something out of the exercise.. Consider “fail” to be an abbreviation for “First Attempt In Learning”.

Your ability to “externalize” your engagements and interests is parallel to your capability to be, on your own behalf, more than you thought possible!

Share your process! There is an appreciative audience awaiting you!

I love equations that encapsulate “risk”, using the Greek letter Rho, the calculus symbol for “uncertainty” Perhaps that resonates for me, sending my thoughts back to medical school days, the early days (ah youth, I remember it well!) We learned in year one about maternal:fetal blood compatibility, where Rhogam was a treatment for anti- body
incompatibility. Fundamental year one learnings. An ultimate life:death representation of uncertainly,

So, how could it be, that this really smart guy, Masayoshi Son, went for Adam Neumann’s WeWorks vision big time, and left his Rho behind?

My point: What happens when workforce behavior changes faster than usiness models can anticipate or accommodate? When tech accelerates human behavior, faster than a business plan can adapt. That’s Business mojo turned to Business Rhojo! In the case of WeWorks, there were signs, but how do you anticipate and measure sociology, WorkCulture, WorkGroup and WorkIndividualism after you’ve gone public?  I was readily eager to shift to the digital workplace. I try to learn from inter-generational dynamics. Gen Z<->Millenials<->GenY. I myself am a Boomer. But my read on WeWorks
came from a different perspective, SALT tax law. For me “working harder and harder and paying more and more property taxes” that were less and less deductible, that is a “real cost” up-prioritized my decision to find a way to maximize my use of the comforts and conveniences of my costly physical personal world.

Any office setting that I pay (fractionally) for by the “company take” in my“comp package”, no matter how interim, transient or habitual that space utilization might be for me is a negative Sure everyone has their own rationale. Watercooler…forget it. I’ll have an Evian and lime and share witty repartee on a video conference call! And if my boss wants or needs me, or when I’m boss, my staff needs me…we’ll just meet in the cloud from the leisure comfort of wherever we care to be!

So did Masayoshi Son have a work culture bias and forgo differences in workforce dynamics? Was the momentum of a public offering too much to pull back for introspection?

https://www.businessinsider.com/differences-between-japanese-and-american-work-culture-2018-3#in-japanese- companies-employees-must-get-their-superiors-approval-whenever-they-make-a-decision-2

Now roll up data from survey’s of the working population, understanding that “do what you love and you’ll never work a day” while a truism, is ultimately not the common experience, not by a long shot. Just by “lost personal life opportunity costs”, going to the office to work, lest that venue be on your phone, device, home station, risks your
precious time.

Please do write in, feedback and insight, on your work:life “style”, and your impressions of whether “my precious time and life defined therein” is a generational, regional, industry sector, culture or “just plain common sense” concept. Know your Rho, (and act accordingly!)