Why Don't You Like Me?

Jun 29
The Approval Series — Part 1/3

Why Don't You Like Me?
The coaching industry didn't just teach estate agents the wrong skills. It taught them to want the wrong thing.

There's an estate agent I admire. Confident, alive, not afraid to sing in the car or in public. He posted a video recently about a seller who'd suggested they were going to instruct him — and then went quiet. No call. No explanation. Just silence.

He said he wasn't bothered. The video existed because he was.

He suspected another agent had got in there. He wondered what they'd said. He wondered what he could have done differently. He framed it as curiosity. But underneath the curiosity was a question that most agents carry — and very few will say out loud.

Why don't you like me?

"I could be brown, I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could be hurtful, I could be purple
I could be anything you like"
Mika — Grace Kelly (2007)

Mika wrote that song after being told by a record label to sound more like someone else. To be more commercial. More accessible. More like what was working. The song is his answer to the question — which is not really an answer at all. It's a refusal. He lists everything he could become, then asks: would that be enough? Would you like me then?

Estate agency coaching has been asking agents to become Grace Kelly for thirty years.



Not in those words, of course. The language is more polished. Scripts. Systems. Follow-up sequences. Objection handlers. Value propositions. "Touch points." The industry — largely populated by retired agents who sold houses and failed agents who didn't, unified by the conviction that what worked for them will work for you — has built an entire economy around the art of becoming whatever the seller needs you to be.

The coaching industry didn't just teach agents the wrong skills. It taught them to want the wrong thing.

Approval. That's what it sold. Not results — approval as the route to results. Follow up persistently enough and they'll respect you. Adapt your pitch to their personality type and they'll choose you. Add enough value and they'll feel obligated. The entire architecture is built on the premise that the problem is you — and the solution is to become more like whatever they want.

The agent in that video wasn't expressing curiosity. He was expressing the hunger that coaching installed in him. The need to know why they didn't choose him — so that he could fix it. Improve the pitch. Close the gap. 

Not To Be Ghosted Next Time

I replied to him that he didn't need to know. That if he found out, he might be tempted to change. And that changing — shrinking himself to fit the preferences of people who didn't choose him anyway — would cost him something he can't invoice for.

His identity.

The ghosting wasn't a gap in his technique. It was a decision made by someone else, for reasons he will never fully know, based on criteria he may not share. Chasing that explanation is not curiosity. It's approval-seeking with a professional label on it.

Approval-seeking is not a character flaw in estate agents. It's a manufactured condition.

That's the thing the coaching industry won't tell you, because it can't afford to. If agents understood that the hunger for approval is something they were taught — not something they arrived with — they might stop buying the solutions designed to feed it.

The agent in the video is not broken. He's been shaped. There's a difference. And the shape he's been pushed into — likeable, adaptable, persistently available, desperate to understand the rejection — is not his natural form.

You can hear it in the video. Under the bravado, under the joke, under the "I'm not really bothered" — there's a man asking the same question Mika asked.

Why don't you like me?

The answer to that question is not a better follow-up sequence.

It's the wrong question.


The Brand Within — Character before competence.
Next in the series

The Mask →
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