SFREI #34: 5 Steps to Battle Overwhelm (and Some Exciting Changes!)

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Do you ever feel overwhelmed?  Like you have a huge vision, but it feels daunting?  You’re not sure what to do next, and as a result, you feel stalled out—like you’re not making much progress?  Well, it happens…in real estate investing, in life and even in podcasting. In this episode, host Jeff explains how he has been experiencing these feelings about this very podcast, and the changes that will be coming to this podcast soon as a result!  Jeff discusses 5 steps to overcoming overwhelm and getting back on track—the same exact step he’s using in his own business and life. 

Episode Transcript

Yes, it is something we can all relate to doesn’t matter. If you are in real estate, if you are in any other industry, if you are a human in modern society, you have certainly felt one of these ways. Maybe you felt overwhelmed, too much going on. You felt like you weren’t making the progress you wanted. Maybe you felt like I have recently that you’ve got a huge vision, but that it feels a little daunting and you just don’t know what to do next. Well, I hope you don’t mind me sharing a little bit underneath the hood. But that’s how I’ve been feeling about something. This very podcast. And in fact, not only this very podcast but all the other stuff related to this podcast under the umbrella of the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. You’ve probably noticed that the schedule that this podcast has been published on has been Completely non existent. It’s been sporadic, with huge delays in between each episode, if you have been a part of my facebook group, if you have been on my email list, you’d notice the same pattern, which is effectively no pattern at all. But really, it’s a pattern of things being sporadic. And if you are anything like me, that makes me feel bad, it makes me feel bad about myself. It makes me feel like I’m not living up to what I am capable of delivering, it makes me feel like I am not doing right by you, my audience and my listeners and the people who I know that I was sent here to help. So I decided that I could not any longer let this sense of overwhelm, or this sense of too many things I wanted to do at the same time and my feeling of the lack of progress get in way any further, you know, the truth about me is that I am a world class starter. But I am not so great with continuing things and with consistency. And I’ve been letting that thing that is not my strength, make me feel bad, and also prevent me from making any more progress and sort of getting back on the horse, so to speak. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about today is how do you get back on the horse when you’ve been feeling that way? And I knew that I wanted to kind of get things going again. And the question I realized that I needed to ask myself is, if I just forget about the fact that I might not be where I want to be right now. And if I just let go of the sort of feeling of guilt and disappointment in myself for having not been consistent over the past several months. If I do that, then the only question that matters moving forward is this? What changes do I need to make in order to get myself moving? Because movement is really what it’s all about. You know, there’s this expression that you can’t steer a parked car. And I knew that I wanted to steer what I was doing in a new and better direction, but I can’t steer it if it’s not in motion. So the real question is just simply what changes are necessary to get back in motion? And I wanted to tell you then, about what I answered that question with in a couple ways because that my friends is a reflection of some upcoming awesome changes to this podcast that I am actually very, very excited to share with you. Firstly, we are going to be changing the name of the podcast. So why would we do that? Well, I’ve really enjoyed the name Sleaze-Free Real Estate Investing. And I’ve always felt like it is such an important way of describing How we do what we do as Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs. But as I focus more and more on how to clarify our message out in the ginormous world of real estate investing, and how to make it clear what we’re doing here so that the right people can decide if they want to listen to our message or not, I’ve realized that focusing the name of this podcast on how we do what we do, what tone we do it with, in other words, is not as important as letting them know what we do. So as we work to reposition this podcast and help people understand what it’s really all about, what we’re going to start to focus on more are a couple things. One is wealth. I realized very much that what I want to be talking to you about is not making money with real estate. It’s not how to get big fat checks so that you can take pictures of them and feel rich because you got one big wholesale

I want to help you build wealth. And to me wealth is something that has a lasting effect. And to me, wealth is different than income. And that then leads to the fact that wealth is built through stuff you own for the medium and long term. And that means rental properties. So we’re going to be focusing more and more with not only our content, but with the name of the podcast on wealth accumulation. rental properties, specifically now when we talk about things like flips and assignments and wholesale deals, sure, we’ll talk about that sometimes. But those things are in service to the accumulation of wealth by actually owning things over the long term. And the last prong of what we’re going to talk about, of course, is the idea of using relationship to negotiate directly with sellers. Now we’ve always been talking about that but when you listen to the name, Sleaze-Free Real Estate Investing, you don’t really understand It’s about wealth, specifically, that it’s about long term holds that are going to create that lasting wealth and that it’s about relationship focused, direct negotiation with sellers. So those are the things that I want to really convey with the new name, which I’m not going to reveal to you today, partly because I haven’t totally decided yet of our podcast. Secondly, you’re going to notice in the podcast, a slightly different format. Now, in the world of podcasts, as I’m sure you’ve seen, there is an insane spectrum. You know, there are multi hour podcasts that have the level of production of a PBS or NPR type of documentary, and they’re two hours and on the other hand, you have three minute episodes that was recorded by somebody as they’re walking down the street with cars driving by just into the speakerphone of their phone, and the wind blowing in the mic and you can barely hear it. thing they’re saying, those are the bookends and everything in between exists as well. Well, as you might have noticed, at the beginning of this podcast, I really tried to focus on having a longer format, and highly polished podcast, it was almost like every episode in my mind was supposed to be kind of like a seminar. And I wanted it to be very well prepared for you and not feel like I was winging it at all. Well, I was really proud of those mini episodes I created like that. However, the downside of that approach is that recording the episode is really easy. It’s all the preparation for that, that becomes the bottleneck. And so one of the things I asked myself that I learned from Tim Ferriss is Tim Ferriss recommends that you stop often and ask yourself the question, what would this look like if it was easy? I love that question. And it just allows you to, to brainstorm openly about What something could look like if you just removed all of the friction. So when I went through that exercise myself, what I realized is that I still don’t want to just open up the microphone and just completely start winging it. However, I also don’t want to feel like I have to spend two hours writing out my bullets in order to be able to record an episode. So what you’re going to experience now is we’re going to start doing shorter episodes, I’m guessing in the range of maybe 15 to 20 minutes, they’re going to still be highly focused. However, there is going to be a little bit less preparation on my end, and maybe you will be able to tell that, but I want to get you more episodes that are shorter on more specific topics. And I want to be personally working from a simple bullet outline, and improvising beyond that for you. Maybe that’s more information than you really want to know. But that’s kind of part of what I want to do with this podcast moving forward is I don’t want to have to feel quite so fancy. And instead, I just want to be transparent, not just obviously about the real estate side of things, but just about how this podcast works, where the challenges are for me as a regular old human, and how you might be able to relate to that. So the third change then is related to the second change in the sense that I want to produce these episodes with much greater frequency. And my theory is that by removing some of the friction, of needing to prepare for hours in order to record one, that it will enable me to get my thoughts out to you on a much more regular and routine basis. When I think about the podcasts I listen to, they come out with a great level of consistency and predictability of their frequency. And frankly, I love the ones that come out multiple times per week. I always look forward to those and I want to be able to now do my very best to create that experience for you, too. So there’s going to be some changes coming in Here at the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur in general, but especially with our podcast, but let’s take a moment and pivot in our conversation. And let’s stop making this update about what’s going on at the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. And let’s make this about you. Because at the beginning, when I asked you if you could relate to feeling overwhelmed, or not knowing what to do next or feeling daunted, or like you’re not making enough progress, I know that’s a rhetorical question. Of course you do. Unless you’re some kind of a superhuman, then you absolutely must feel that way on probably a frequent basis. I know I sure do. So I wanted to kind of break down for you some of the things that I have found to be successful steps and approaches and processes for when I find myself in that exact situation. And in fact, that’s how I’ve been feeling recently. So I’m going to share with you now, some things that you can apply that I’ve been doing to help get myself out of this little bit. Have a read to because this read might be for you. Other things in your life, but it very well might be your real estate investing work to, maybe you feel stuck like you’re not making enough progress or like there’s too much to do and you don’t know where to start. So if you’re feeling that way, but anything in your life, I encourage you to do the following things I’m going to give you five ideas I did number one is simply take a step back. If you are behind where you feel like you should be in something, taking a little bit of a break for yourself is not going to hurt, it’s really going to help. I personally find that I have so much clarity, more clarity, in anything I do when I give myself a little bit of whitespace. That might mean just taking a few days completely off from thinking about this project, my business, whatever it might be, but just give your space yourself some space to clear your head and when you take a step back that enables you to take a Step back forward at some point and do so with a refreshed level of clarity and perspective. Number two, during that time that you’ve taken a step back, focus on reconnecting with why you wanted to do this thing in the first place. You know, if you’re feeling overwhelmed or frustrated by where you are with your real estate work right now, take that, take those few days to step back and reflect and ask yourself, why in the world, were you interested in this in the first place? And I have found consistently that if you connect with your why, why you’re doing something and you start to remember that you start to visualize what it would be like if you accomplish that and really think about the underlying reasons. It brings so much more natural motivation, right back to you. So step number one is take a step back. Number two is reconnect with why you wanted to be doing this in the first place. And step number three is good. Have yourself some not fragmented time, some focused time, I’ll tell you in my life and my business. In my busy world, I’m sure you can relate to this too. I’ve got a long list of stuff I’m trying to do every day. And it ends up coming down to these little tiny chunks like, Okay, great. I’ve got five minutes to do this here, then I’m totally switching gears mentally. And here’s seven minutes, I’m going to do this. And then I’m going to kind of multitask, which really just means I’m switching back and forth every couple seconds between tasks. And then I’ve got this meeting, and I’ve got this thing and I’m just trying to get everything done before it’s due and before any, you know, before any fires start. And what that means after a while is that I never have more than a couple minutes to focus on anything. And I realized that’s a huge, huge problem. I really don’t think we as humans were meant to have completely splintered and fragmented Attention all the time. So if you’re not feeling like you’re making progress, after you’ve stepped back After you’ve reconnected with why you’re doing what you’re doing, give yourself some completely blocked out time to focus on it. And you’ll find the you make so much more progress in, say two hours, then you do in eight blocks of 15 minutes, even though it’s the same amount of time, total, the ability to have the cumulative returns of focusing is so so important. Number four is what I call pull it apart. When I feel overwhelmed with something, it’s usually because I have a bunch of different topics that feel like one big jumbled cluster, not a mess in my mind. And I realized that what I need to do is simply pull things apart. So what I love to do to pull things apart is I just grab a nice notebook, a pen, make myself a cup of coffee and go sit down somewhere comfortable, and just do a massive brain dump of every little thing that is comprising the log jam of thoughts and worries and concerns. And

catch 20 twos and not sure what to do in your mind on a certain topic. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got it all out. First of all, once it’s all out of your brain, it feels a million times better anyway. But then you can go back through and because of the way you have to write it down. When you do this exercise, you can really see that these are actually a bunch of individual things. And if you start to pull it apart and look at them as individual things, each one does not seem so daunting. So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with this podcast, right? I’ve been thinking about, oh, well, this part seems stressful. That part seems stressful. I feel bad about this. This is hard. I just want to avoid that. I wish I didn’t have to do this part. And once I really pulled it all apart, I realized there is actually more friction free path to solving each of those things individually, once they don’t seem like a big jumble of stress in your mind, in my mind. And number five is you have to remember to measure Your Progress from behind you, instead of from looking forward. Now I get this idea from the Strategic Coach and Dan Sullivan, the guy who started the Strategic Coach, and this idea is so, so powerful. We always tend to, especially those of us who are entrepreneurial, tend to measure our progress as the space between where we are and where we want to be, and are we getting closer to where we want to be, however, that’s kind of a fool’s errand. And I’ll explain that in a second. Instead, what we need to do is sort of turn around and look at where we started. And then look at where we are now. And when you look at where you started and where you are. Now, you can see that you’ve actually come a really long ways. But if you look forward and you say, Well, where do I want to be versus where I am now? And am I getting closer to it? That’s kind of a way to set yourself up for failure. And the reason is this as entrepreneurs, our vision for where we’re going, is constantly evolving. It’s constantly getting bigger. So the analogy that they gave us and Strategic Coach, which I just love, and I think about this all the time, is this. Imagine, you got on a boat, and you set out to sail on the ocean. And you get out on the boat, and you walk to the front of the boat and you look at the horizon and you go, yes, the horizon, that’s where I’m going, I’m so excited to get there. And the sun goes down and you go to bed, and you get up and you run back to the front of the boat and you go, oh, look how much closer Oh, I don’t feel any closer to the horizon. And it’s really defeating because of course the horizon just keeps moving outward as you’re moving towards it, it keeps moving further away too. But if you were to run to the back of the boat, you wouldn’t even be able to see land anymore. You would just see open water because you So far, so don’t measure your progress by standing at the front of the boat looking towards the horizon while you’re going, go to the back of the boat and look back at the land and you’ll see the land get smaller and smaller and smaller. To the point you can’t even see it. And you realize you’ve come a very, very long ways. So my friends in many ways, I feel like this is the episode of us just acknowledging our humaneness. I’m feeling very human lately, in my inability to be perfect in my inability to keep up with everything I’m trying to do. But I am personally excited because I’m rebooting some things now. We’re making some changes to this podcast. Other parts of the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur because the truth is the mission of the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur deserves it. It is worth fighting for. It is worth working hard on it’s worth struggling through the the friction and figuring out how to remove it because you guys are worth it. I know the mission I’ve been on the journey I’ve been on, to build wealth through real estate and to formulate a unique way of going about doing it by focusing on relationships and people and face to face negotiation, and you guys deserve to get the best of me and the best of these ideas and the best of each other. So I’m going back to bat to figure out how to move this whole thing forward. And some changes to this podcast are the first step. And when you’re feeling like that,

I want you to go back and remember these five steps. I’ll give you the quick recap. Number one, take a step back. Number two, reconnect with why you wanted to do what you’re doing in the first place. Number three, give yourself some unfragmented focused time to work on it. Number four, pull it apart. Look at the individual components of this topic and what might be bothering you and tackle them one at a time. Don’t try to tackle the big jumble of thoughts in your mind and number five Make sure to measure by looking behind you at how far you’ve come not looking forward at where you’re trying to go. Until I talk to you next time, at which point our podcast will have a different name, which I’m super excited for. And I hope you are too. I wish you the very best. Hope you have a great week and get out there and talk to some sellers.