The past year or so has been the culmination of so much for Christine Beckwith – and at the same time, it seems like a beginning as well. There’s a good reason for it all: her award-winning mortgage sales career has continued to reach new heights, all while she has launched 20/20 Vision for Success Coaching and published two books, one of which goes right with hew new business. She also spoke at Gary Vaynerchuk’s Agent 2021 Conference back in January.
It’s a lot that has come together, and a lot of promise for more to come.
In Wise Eyes: See Your Way to Success, Beckwith covers a lot of ground in guiding a reader to lessons one can learn from her life to this point. Hers is not one of a golden girl who started life on third base by a long shot, but rather, one who is a self-made success story with the requisite challenges and changes many of us have on our road to success. At the same time, she did not become the highly-accomplished woman she is by accident.
She starts off by relating the story of her running for the student council board president when she was just eight years old. She had a mix of thoughts about the possibility of winning, and managed to pull it off. That serves as a jumping-off point for the larger subject of putting your effort into something you want and subsequently making it happen.
Right behind that, she poses the question, “Who are you?” A short self-assessment looks at a person’s confidence and desire for success, and following that, she reminds us that we are in charge of our destiny no matter where or how we start in life and no matter what we have had to deal with. Later, she goes into eight core philosophies that are basically steps one can use for a guide to their success.
An interesting part of the book is a little later, when she talks about the housing bust and its effect on her industry. Naturally, as someone in sales in the mortgage industry, she was in the thick of what was happening over a decade ago. She has her battle scars, and reflects not only on that but also on what changed with those who work in the industry after that – an industry, it should be noted, that she never planned on being in let alone an unqualified success. She shows pride in her industry, not a desire to run away from it despite the fact that during that time, few industries were as widely disliked because of the recession that resulted from it.
A little later is a chapter most will easily remember, entitled “The Female Phenom!”, which talks about gender, including her experiences with it. Suffice it to say that if you come into this expecting a particular take on the subject, you are likely to be disappointed, because overall there is a lot of ground covered and in a rather nuanced fashion instead of a facile one that might be sure to get a reaction out of readers one way or the other. Having been a woman in the workplace and in executive positions, she has not been an idle participant in the subject matter. She has shared in other settings how on LinkedIn, where she is at the connection limit and a very authoritative voice, she has had males hit on her in private messages – even in a setting that is purportedly a professional one, she can’t escape this entirely. It is worth noting here that she is also the co-author of another book, Clear Boundaries: Every Business Woman’s Essential Safety Guide (along with Jessica Peterson), which she wrote in honor of two friends who have been murdered and also from situations that have arisen that many of us take for granted.
The second half of the book moves towards career and company management ideas. It is heavy on sales, which is only natural given where Beckwith’s success has come, but a lot of this is applicable regardless of industry or career field, including where she touches on organizing and planning.
Beckwith recently shared that this journey has largely come without female mentorship, but that is one thing she is looking to alleviate with her company, as she has recently announced “Women With Vision”, a division of the company providing specialized training for female professionals.
Through all of this, you sense in the book and if you ever get the chance to meet her (as I have) that this is not someone who speaks from on high. Beckwith has faced challenges, has had failures and also faced cancer three times despite not having spent 50 years on the planet. It makes her message come across differently, because you come away feeling that if she can have the success she has, any of us can have the success we want as well. It is not unlike the feeling I have often had in reading and listening to Michael Hyatt, another who has had plenty of challenges and failures en route to his current place as a significant leader and voice on the subjects he talks about. Ironically, a lot of what Hyatt talks about in his most recent best-seller, Free to Focus, is similar to some of what Beckwith does here late in the book when she talks about organizing and planning.
Wise Eyes is not a book that is easily categorized. It touches on business, sales, leadership, and has a good dash of personal coaching as well. It is perhaps best described as part memoir, part inspirational story, part personal and business coaching book. You may not have heard of her – I had not until late in 2018, when I had the pleasure of moderating a panel she was an undeniable star of – but once you do and find out more, you will be glad you did, including if you read this book.