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By Sindee Lee Gillespie
Have you ever made big plans for your real estate investing business, only to fail to act on them? Or maybe you started with a bang and kept your motivation for a few days, then suddenly lost interest?
It’s easy to lose motivation after the initial excitement wears off. However, if you want to be successful in building a portfolio of real estate investments for passive income, it’s important to keep going. We all know, and know all too well, the deals aren’t going to get done themselves.
What’s Your Stopping Strategy?
While it seems obvious that a ‘stopping strategy’ is completely counter-productive to achieving your goals in real estate, what’s not so obvious is that you have one or how it was developed.
A ‘stopping strategy’ is a program your mind runs when you hit a place internally (mentally and/or emotionally) where an inner dialogue creates a story about why it’s a good time to quit. It’s not something that you put together by choice and yet it’s a way your subconscious mind/beliefs do their job of keeping you right where you are. In effect, it’s like hitting the brakes in your car when you’re attempting to cross a busy intersection quickly to avoid oncoming traffic!
When your private ‘stopping strategy’ rears its ugly voice and starts to list all the reasons why you don’t have time to start your business, you don’t have the money, there are no good deals available right now, success is easy for other people and yet not “you” — and you listen to it — you stop. While the job of this programming is to keep you safe and exactly where you are, what it’s really doing is keeping you from having what you want. Nothing outside of yourself is stopping you. You are stopping you.
Understand What Starts Your Stopping Strategy
#1. The planning phase is WAY more fun than the execution phase. Sitting alone at night and making plans for the future can be an exciting time. Everything seems possible, because you’re only limited by your imagination at that point. When the sun comes up in the morning though, it’s time to actually get busy. It all seems a little more daunting and less enjoyable when it’s time for the rubber to hit the road.
#2. You lose track of the end result. Remind yourself of the reward at the end of your journey. Take control of your thoughts. Catch yourself early in the process of thinking negative thoughts and redirect your focus to something more positive. It takes time to develop this ability. The key is to notice quickly that your thoughts are going off the rails.
#3. Your goal isn’t really yours. Many of us choose goals that are acceptable to the world at large. It might be having a certain income level or owning your home in the “right” zip code. Maybe your goal is totally mismatched to your real desires or temperament. Ensure that you’ve chosen goals that match your interests and true desires.
#4. You feel uncomfortable and aren’t dealing with it effectively. Of course, it’s uncomfortable to do anything new. Whether it’s creating your first offer to present, beginning to learn the legalities of being a landlord, or running the numbers for a wholesale deal, it’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s important to deal with this discomfort effectively. Expect to feel uncomfortable. Have a plan for working through it. If you’re making changes to your life, discomfort is the norm.
#5. You have too many negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are paralyzing. Negative thoughts will make you rationalize that you should quit. Though it doesn’t always feel like you have control over your thoughts, you do. You can choose what you want to think about.
#6. You’re stuck in your habits and routines. The older you are, the more challenging it can be to break out of your established patterns. We find comfort in our traditional routines, and our brains become hardwired to repeat them. You’ll need to create new habits and routines if you want to change your behavior and your results.
While you can expect that at times your motivation will falter, be prepared to deal with it. Along the way to your goal however, it eventually becomes obvious that the biggest enemy you have is yourself. Between your limiting beliefs and negative habits, there really isn’t anyone in your way besides yourself. We often doubt our ability to succeed in the future based on our previous struggles.
How to Start Finding More Deals
It’s much like the saying made famous by Henry Ford “If you believe you can, you’re right and if you believe you can’t you’re right too” because if you’re not proactively pursuing and finding deals it’s because of something you believe. Beliefs are a feeling of certainty about something. When building a real estate investment business there are thoughts a person is sure are ‘true’ and yet quite often are simply experiences which have been misinterpreted and then revisited so many times that it appears they are the truth.
Essentially, the story people tell themselves is the story people then live. And the story people live is the story they believe. It’s said we do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are!
It is very easy to get taken down the rabbit hole on this one since there is so much ‘evidence’ surrounding us which only confirms that the real estate landscape is a tight one. Here is the fact though – if a person holds the belief that times are hard and opportunities limited, then the mind will only allow in information that reinforces that belief.
There is so much sensory data coming at us second-by-second that a part of our mind, called the subconscious mind, (which is like a huge memory bank) sifts through it all to distort, delete and generalize everything we encounter to ensure we continue to operate with consistency. This is great when it comes to the other functions it also oversees, such as keeping our body temperature and heart rate intact, although it’s not so helpful when it comes to the mental realm, since it wants to keep thinking and behavior repeating the same pattern
Beliefs are held in the subconscious mind, acting like programming, which is how habits are formed, including habitual thinking and comfort zones, where it works diligently to keep you in them.
While many people scoff at the idea of positive thinking, saying “I never find any deals” is actually guiding your mind not to. Have you ever had the experience where you’re looking all over the place for your keys while saying “I can’t find my keys, I can’t see my keys any place. Has anyone seen my keys because I cannot find my keys?” only to have someone walk in the room and point to your keys right in front of you? That is because as you were instructing your mind to not see them. Same goes with finding real estate deals.
A very helpful strategy is to reframe your self-talk about finding deals and opportunities. It can be as simple as “I know there are people finding deals every day of the week and I’m going to be one of them” or “Wouldn’t it be nice if today was the day I found the best deal ever?” The idea isn’t to walk around making up stories about rainbows and unicorns – the aim is simply to open the neural pathways in your mind to new ways of thinking so that it can then alert you to the opportunities you’re looking for!
While there are always going to be ups and downs in any economic cycle, there are also people who thrive in those times, regardless of how outside events may be influencing everyone else. Each person is going to experience a situation differently based on the beliefs they hold at the time, since those beliefs do indeed act as filters to what they’ll see.
Success in real estate investing isn’t so much about positive thinking as it is about changing thoughts that lead to negative thinking. Empowering thoughts and perspectives will naturally surface when the ones that are wreaking havoc in your business are gone. By reconstructing thoughts and adjusting the balance between positive and negative, it will have a profound impact on your level of achievement!
Photo by Daryl Wilkerson Jr from Pexels
