Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books "Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment" and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Mindset is everything. It is one of the ingredients that draws success. In today’s episode, Sallie Wagner, a number one international bestselling author, shares the tools she used to increase her real estate investments. Without taking action with the right mindset and skillset, we wouldn’t be able to reach our path to success. In this conversation, Sallie shares that social resilience is the driving factor in building your network and an outlet to ask for help or to provide help when needed. If you wish to increase your real estate investments, tune in now to this episode and learn more from Sallie!
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Sallie Wagner: Increasing Your Real Estate Investments With Physical, Mental, And Social Resilience – Real Estate Women
Real Estate Investing For Women
I am excited to welcome to the show, Sallie Wagner. She is a number one international bestselling author, lawyer, real estate broker, speaker, and life alchemist. She provides broker and contracts compliance consulting services to 2,500 plus real estate agents throughout Florida. She also owns and operates a real estate school. Her powerful transformation tools include the Emotional Freedom Technique, which you guys have heard EFT, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, NLP, clients move into action for rapid concrete results. Clients reclaim conscious choices in their lives and discover and live the life that makes them come alive. Welcome to the show, Sallie. How are you?
I’m fabulous. Thank you so much for having me.
I have been looking forward to this show. I love my mindset shows, and the strategy shows are important but I’m all about the mindset with the Blissful Investor thing. Could you give us a high-level version of how you got to where you are? Why are you doing real estate, and why are you taking this angle?
I spent most of my career in the corporate world positions like general counsel, house counsel, and those things primarily real estate related. I worked for big corporations managing and working on real estate transactions. I have always been involved in real estate throughout my decades, long career, longer than I care to admit. When I looked at going out on my own, it was natural that I would start doing something in real estate. That’s how I started my own business providing compliance services to real estate brokerages. I teamed up with my colleague now. We do broker and compliance services to brokerages throughout Florida.
Talk to us a little bit about why you chose mindset as the thing that you want to talk about now. I know how important it is. Why is that your highlight?
Everything comes from that. Bob Proctor said, “It’s 95% mindset and 5% what you do.” It all starts with a mindset. When you think about it, it makes sense because mindset includes the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We have this constant chatter. What are the things you are telling yourself? Are they things about, “I’m successful, productive, and powerful? I can be in business on my own,” or is it the snarky six-year-old who is going, “What are you smoking? What are you thinking about?” You wish you could do all those things. It all starts with a mindset.
If I may, I do a lot with critical thinking, and there’s a progression. It will sound familiar to people, I’m sure but thoughts determine feelings, feelings determine decisions, decisions determine actions, actions determine results, and results reinforce those thoughts. Everything starts with thoughts. Everything starts with a mindset.
I was having a conversation with a woman. We are starting to invest in some different things. My husband handles the stock portfolio. I handle the real estate portfolio but I’m interested in some other explorations now. There are many new opportunities. I want to discover all this stuff. I’m talking to this one woman about some of this stuff, and she has a mastermind that they have developed. It’s three women. One of the women is very wealthy. She was like, “I will put $400,000 into this investment.” It makes me choke. I can’t imagine putting $400,000 into anything that’s not real estate. Anything that’s liquid but that’s silliness too.
She was funny because she said, “Hanging out with this woman, my mind has completely changed. I look at things in a different way and make quicker decisions. I have a lot more confidence in my decisions, and I’m not derailed by people around me that are telling me that it’s not going to work or they are expressing all of their fears and projecting those onto me in my decision-making process.”
I was proud of her. There were two big things that I took away from that. I didn’t need to share with her. She was doing a great job but those two things that I loved were understanding that your mindset is going to determine your success for all of the reasons that you said. The second thing is that your mindset will evolve based on the people that you hang out with. Much of the time, people out there are scared of real estate, the stock market, and all these other things because they don’t know, and that’s fair.
It’s because they are scared, it does not mean that when they share their fear and impose that on you or project it on you, you have to take that on. You need to be around people that are going to uplift your mindset and support your goals. If there are people that are where you want to be, and they say, “That’s not a good idea,” that’s the person you listen to. You want to listen to your mentors, coaches, and people that are successful in the industry that you are looking to be successful in. In general, most of us don’t understand.
I experience fear around crypto, NFTs, and all these words that I don’t understand but because I understand that I don’t want other people projecting their fear onto me, I’m careful not to project my fear around those things onto people that are successful at that or starting out in that. My only suggestion is to make sure that your mentor, where you are learning, is someone who is where you want to be. They have experienced success over the long-term.
Even crypto has been around for several years. People can have gone through cycles and experienced the roller coaster that Bitcoin is. Whatever it is that you are investing in, don’t take on there. Hang out with the right people but your mindset is the first place because if you are not in the right mindset, those people are not going to want to hang out with you.
Isn’t that true? If you were, “I’m scared. I don’t want to do it. I can’t take action. This won’t work,” and all those things. Those people don’t want to hang out with you because you pull them down. We always want to hang out with people who are our equals or our peers and learn from one another. The one thing that you do not want to be bringing to the table is negativity.
I hijacked that but that’s why I’m excited about this conversation. Not only because it’s you, Sallie, and I’m excited to talk to you but I had this conversation and saw the level of success that is created by managing that mindset. Talk to me about some of the tools that you use. We are going to be talking about the tools of the business but the tools that you use for your mindset.
I use the acronym M*S*G, Mindset, Skillset, Get Off Your Asset. It gets a chuckle. It’s memorable and brings together some important principles. As important as mindset is, most of us are not taught to have that right mindset. If anything, we are taught not to because, as you said, we have all these messages from people around us. We are constantly bombarded with society, family, and friends. Most of them are all well-meaning, and yet, it changes our mindset to one that is suboptimal.
To have that mindset, many times, we need a new skillset. We need to learn skills about how we identify mindset. How do we change it? How do we maintain it? How do we make sure we are in the room with the right people? If you are in a room and you are the smartest, prettiest, funniest, and most successful, you are probably in the wrong room.
It feels super good. It’s a great ego boost. You will learn in every room. I don’t want to say you are not going to learn but you are going to be elevated if you are in a different room.
That’s part of the skillset to learn that and to listen to those mentors and people who are where you are planning to be because it is a plan and goal. You are going to get there. It’s a strategy. It’s not hope. It’s not wishing people who are where you are going. Those are the people you want to be around. You want to cultivate that mindset of openness to be able to receive that information instead of being close and going, “I know that. I have tried and done that. It didn’t work.” How many people do we hear like that? That’s a skillset.
I want to go back to that, Sallie. That is super important. I want to highlight it. Many of you ladies have heard this stuff before. You have even read it on my show before. There’s nothing new under the sun, ladies. It’s all said in different ways. There are new techniques that are altered, adjusted, and brought to the market and in our minds.
We have EFT on this show a lot. People were like, “I heard that on Moneeka’s show,” and then they will tune out. The thing is that if you are hearing it from a different voice, other things may click with you. The last EFT person that was on the show was in 2021, and she did a process for us. Maybe that didn’t work for you but you are a different person now than you were before. Your response to that technique may be different or maybe Sallie does it a little bit differently because there are different ways, and everybody puts their own personality into the process. That’s for the healer as well as for the recipient.
I know you, ladies, are respectful and great but don’t tune out because you have heard this before. Stay fully engaged and present. The other thing is that because you’ve heard something doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. If you have tried it, you are in a different place now. If you haven’t tried it and you’ve just heard it over and over again, you might consider trying it because nothing happens unless you take action.
I want to highlight that because I have heard it before, and I’m guilty of this all the time too. We have so much stuff coming into our minds and our worlds. The, “I have read it,” is a protection mechanism. When you are listening to somebody that you respect, put the I have read it aside and come with a beginner’s mind.
I’m holding my hands up. Studies show that when you hold your hands up, your mind is more open. You are more receptive to learning. You are better able to learn and retain information. Be open to knowledge from wherever it comes.
Real Estate Investments: Be open to knowledge from wherever it comes.
Ladies, you can go to BlissfulInvestor.com, so you can see how she was holding her hands. That was beautiful. Go ahead and keep going.
Skillset, and we have to put it into action. If we don’t take action, nothing happens, and nothing changes. That is an important skill to be able to take action because we have that tendency to procrastinate. We all do it. I have written articles on procrastination and how to overcome it. It’s a skill that we have learned to cope with certain things. Taking action is a skill that we can also learn to overcome that procrastination. It all goes back to the skillset and the mindset. That allows us to take action and put everything into practice. Otherwise, it’s a picture on the vision board.
Real Estate Investments: Taking action is a skill. We need to learn to overcome procrastination.
Part of the skill is learning to be decisive. It’s learning to trust yourself. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the skills that helped to build that mindset?
Anything that is resilience related. I speak a lot about resilience. It’s such an important thing, and resilience is M*S*G in practice. Four major areas of resilience in our lives, physical, emotional, mental, and social, all come together. As you build physical resilience, your body is more capable. You are better able to withstand the challenges that come to you if it’s stress, illness, injury or whatever it is.
There are specific ways to build that with physical activity. If you are sitting for more than an hour, studies show that your body is going to deteriorate. When you are coming up on the hour mark, stand up, move around, take a couple of steps, do something, get into physical activity, avoid negative substances, and binge-restrict behaviors.
The negative substances are not always about alcohol and drugs. It could be caffeine, gluten or whatever. It is harmful to me personally. Binge restrict is not always about eating and drinking. It could be that streaming service, all those things. Emotional resilience is our ability to access our positive emotions when we choose. That’s a mindset. We don’t get caught in those low-frequency emotions but can choose to respond rather than react to life events.
We have mental resilience. This is our ability to come up with systems and processes that have a different perspective mindset. Access our creativity, come up with creative solutions and consider different people’s perspectives on things that are opening our minds to mentors and knowledge. The last one is social resilience, which is our community. Our ability to ask for and give help to others, families, friends, neighbors or everyone in our community. Studies show that the more connected you are to your community, the more successful you are likely to be. All those things that can build resilience are important in life and business.
Could you talk to me a little bit about social resilience and what you mean by people being more successful based on social resilience?
Social resilience is our ability to connect with others, family, friends, society, communities, and groups that we are members of and the ability to know that there is somebody there when you need help, you can ask for help, and they will give it to you like a trusted mentor, for example. That’s social resilience. The ability to give help in return. The more connected we are socially, studies show that we tend to be more successful in life and business because we have those networks of people we can call upon. Here is a fun thing. People can build a little bit of social resilience. The next time you have a chance, shake hands with somebody. As you do that, tell them, “Thank you.”
I always refer to studies, and studies can say anything. However, the studies show that when we do that, the touch and the expression of gratitude, we produce a hit of oxytocin in our brains, which is the trust hormone. That makes it more likely for us to want to help and support each other in business, life, and whatever ways. The more we do that, the more we deepen that oxytocin trust bond and self-serving. That’s a fabulous time to ask somebody for a referral because you have already softened them up with oxytocin.
It has been such a fascinating thing over the pandemic over the last couple of years how our communities have changed dramatically. We spend more of our time on Zoom and less of our time touching one another and saying, “Hello.” Even when we see each other and are in each other’s energy space, we don’t touch each other.
We have changed the way that we socialize. Some of it’s certainly going to stick. I couldn’t have this interview with you, Sallie, if it weren’t for amazing Zoom. I love that. I think that our communities and having that physical, at least being in people’s energy space, are important. One of the big keys here that you mentioned, and I want to highlight it, does still need to be the right people. That does not mean you don’t hang out with your friends or family. The people that you love certainly have a place in your life and should. It should be valued, loved, and cherished.
When you are thinking about progressing in your business, you also need to have a community that supports that evolution, growth, expansion, open mind, new ideas, and lots of opportunities. You need that community to support you in that way, also. Much of the time, we are social resilience, and we focus on our personal life, like, “I need support because my parents are elderly. I need support because someone I love passed. I got something that I’m dealing with,” whatever it is.
I’m not good at asking for help. I’m getting better, and there’s a receiving it without feeling guilty. Those are all skillsets too. We are used to it in our personal lives. We tend not to want to do it in our business lives because, as women, we feel like it makes us look stupid. The problem is that if you are afraid of looking stupid, you are going to look stupid because you are not learning. You don’t know what you are doing. You are pretending that you are something that you are not. People can see right through that. Did you have anything you wanted to add to that?
I have experienced that myself, and for me, it was perfectionism. That mindset of, “I have to be perfect. If I ask somebody something, that shows I’m not perfect.” We miss out on many opportunities because of our mindset. I’m not perfect. More importantly, I don’t have to be. Something to remember here is that it’s not what you don’t know that holds you back. It’s what you do know that’s not true that holds you back. The idea that I have to be perfect is something that is not true that holds me back in business and life. When we can identify those things, and that’s all part of our mindset, then we are open to asking and receiving.
My little sister once said about my nephew because everybody was saying, “There was some stuff going on with him.” My little sister said, “He’s perfect just the way he is as long as you don’t compare him to other people.” That is something I take with me so much of the time because I’m like, “I don’t know this. I don’t want to look dumb. I don’t want to ask too many questions.”
It is about perfectionism because I remind myself, “You are perfect the way you are, as long as you don’t compare yourself to other people.” Allow yourself to be who you are because who you are now is you are heading to the next place. There are going to be people that are going to be delighted to help you get there.
Unless you ask questions, you are not going to know if you are hanging out with the right people because there are going to be people that are going to judge you and get snarky. Don’t hang out with them. Thank goodness you didn’t find that out after several years of investing in that relationship. Find out fast. If they are not going to tolerate your questions, curiosity, personality, and goals, they are not that person that’s going to help to elevate you.
That is another thing that brings up one of those things that we know that’s not true. Everybody has to like us, so we have to like everybody else. I’m not saying to treat people disrespectfully. However, it’s okay if you don’t want to be around certain people and they don’t want to be around you. Find the people who are supporting you in your goals, accomplishments, and vision of where you are going in life. That’s okay. Not everybody is going to be there.
Not only is it okay. It is preferred. We only got 24 hours in a day. You only have a certain amount of time to be social. Make sure it counts. Make sure it is fun and good for you. Make sure it is one of your bliss things, not one of your obligatory things. We only got so much to give. You want to make sure that when you are giving, you are also being nourished, elevated, and all of those things.
Maybe it’s me but I had similar conversations. It was such an epiphany when suddenly, it was like, “Not everybody has to like me and I’m okay.”
I’m a people pleaser too. I will be like, “The person didn’t like me.” Now, I give it about five minutes, and then I’m done. It doesn’t matter. I allow myself if I’m feeling sad or definitively if I did not have a connection with that person. It felt a little bit bad but then I realized, “That person that I didn’t have an affinity with if I tried to build that relationship, how many phone calls, emails, and time would it take to build a relationship with that I don’t have an affinity with and how much pressure and work?” If it was a fun person we were aligned with, then we enjoyed spending time together. This show is all about taking action. Let’s talk about taking action and creating a plan for building that mindset to achieve certain goals.
There are three things you want to consider with mindset, perspective, reason, and will. With perspective, we have talked about this before. It’s our ability to view things from other perspectives. We all probably remember the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each of them experienced the elephant in a different way, with trunk, tail, and tusks, and they defined it in a different way based on their perspective.
Real Estate Investments: There are three things you want to consider with mindset: perspective, reason, and will.
Could you tell us that story? I haven’t heard that one.
There were 9 or 10 men who were experiencing the elephant. One person had a trunk, a tusk, a tail, and an ear. They were all talking about, “What was the elephant? Describe it.” They all described it differently because they had all experienced a different part of the elephant. They were all right because there was the tail. That is what it felt like but they were all wrong because their perspective was incomplete. The truth is that our perspective is always incomplete.
Depending on what our perspective is, it’s either going to move you forward or hold you back. Be aware that we tend to have blinders on. That is partly because of our training and how our brains work with the reticular activating system. We see what we are looking for. We don’t see what we are not looking for. If you can open that up and take those blinders off, you broaden your perspective. That’s all part of the mindset. Become aware of that.
The easiest entry point into mindset is to look at the results you have in your life. If you are happy with those results, perfect. Do more of what you are doing. If there is a result that you are not quite happy with, then the easiest entry point to change that is to look at your thinking about that and change your thinking. All of that, and perhaps the answer as you change your thinking, is to have a different perspective. In LP, we call that reframing. Everybody heard about reframing. Tell yourself a different story, and you are going to get a different result.
Real Estate Investments: As you change, your thinking is to have a different perspective.
It’s funny because I will frequently say, “You are always making up stories. Everything that goes up in your mind, you are making up.” It’s your story. You might as well make up stories that make you feel blissful. Is it stories that make you feel bad?
I have a perfect example if you don’t mind. Years ago, I was with a successful real estate agent in this area, and she was doing some lead-gen cold calls. She was starting to make a call. She said, “I’m going to call up my friend, Bob.” I’m making up a name. I’m like, “She knows Bob.” She called him up, and he hung up on her. It was a cold call. She didn’t know this person. I thought from the way she approached it. It was her friend because that is the way she approached it. That was the story she was telling herself about Bob.
When he hung up on her, she was like, “We got disconnected.” I’m like, “Are you stupid? He hung up on you. You didn’t get disconnected.” She called him back and was like, “We got disconnected for some reason. I’m sorry.” She tried to talk to him again. He hangs up on her. She was like, “We got disconnected again. He needs a smile. I’m going to ask an agent on her team. I’m going to ask her to go and see him at his house and give him a smile because he needs somebody to make him smile.” That’s the perspective. That’s the story she was telling herself about. She was there to contact her friend, and if her friend was not happy to hear from her, he needed somebody to help him smile. Those are the stories that we can tell ourselves to change our results.
I love that you and I are mindset people, and we are both like, “What?” It’s funny because it sounds hokey. Those of us grounded in reality know what’s going on but does that help us? I don’t want to have fun doing cold calls. I would probably have a lot more fun if I had her attitude. The reality is that we create the story in our heads. We have the story. We create the reality for ourselves. We are not necessarily creating the reality for the world around us. Although many times we are because people take on our energy and start to experience life differently when they are around but you are experiencing your own personal response to any given situation.
That’s the emotional resilience to be able to tap into those positive emotions when we choose so that we are responding rather than reacting.
Let’s talk about developing the action steps to achieve specific goals.
That is important because it is not only the goals. It’s the system and the process because goals can be overwhelming and intimidating. We look at the goal and think, “How am I ever going to get there?” It’s all about reverse engineering goal setting to the present. You ask yourself, and people will recognize this, “What is the one thing I can do that will move me in the direction of that goal?” I break it down into daily steps that will move me in the right direction every single day. It’s important to do that because if we’re focused on the goal, we’re living in a constant state of failure. I’m only successful when I get to the goal.
I’m going to lose 20 pounds. If I have only lost 19 pounds, I’m still a failure because I haven’t met the goal but if my goal is to improve my health and nutrition, and I’m doing things every single day, I’m successful every single day because I’m moving in the right direction. Systems and processes over the goals always. Break it down into daily steps. “What am I going to do now that will continue to move me in the right direction?”
That may change from day-to-day because we are going to course correct. It’s not always a straight line to that goal. The NASA Apollo moon projects were off course 97% of the time and made it to the moon and back. It was because of that constant course correction. We are always going to be adjusting and correcting our course from day-to-day, and yet, we are still moving in the right direction.
One way that you can launch into action is, first of all, to write your goal and your steps down. When you do that, you increase your chances of success to 56%. There are only three steps. The next step is to share that goal with somebody. You have an accountability partner. Maybe it’s your mentor, a coach or whomever but it’s an accountability partner because we can’t hold ourselves accountable. We have to have somebody else do it. When you do that and come up with those daily action steps, you increase your chances of success to 64%.
The accountability partner should not be someone who is going to be supportive all the time. What I mean by this is that you should be embarrassed if you report that you didn’t achieve your goal. Not like so much that you don’t want to show up or get the response from the other person that you don’t like them anymore. I do think that it’s important that you should be embarrassed with your accountability partner to say, “I didn’t do it.”
You should feel like you have to explain why and what your plan is to catch up. Your accountability partner is not your best buddy where you were both like, “I didn’t lose anything last week.” “I didn’t lose anything last week, either.” We might as well get a milkshake. I had those accountability partners. I’m telling you, it has the opposite effect.
It’s a weird thing because I have these in my life. It’s not that you want to do it for them. Somehow there is something about that relationship that inspires you to be the best you. That is why you do it. Not to please them but to honor yourself. If that makes sense.
You should value their opinion enough that if they say something that’s hard to hear, you are able to step back and not get all flustered, offended or defensive. You are able to say, “Maybe they have a point. Let me think about that.”
You need to be willing to listen with open hands. Listen so that you are receptive to the learning and without being defensive that you are going to go, “What do they know?” The third piece is to make progress reports back to that accountability partner, which is what you were saying. At least once a week, you are reporting back on your progress over the past week because accountability is key, and the progress report is key. When you do that, you increase your chances of success up to 76%.
I want to say that this isn’t hocus-pocus. If you know anybody in corporate, what have they instilled? It’s the agile program. They got two-week sprints. At the end of those two weeks on their deadline, they have to report to everybody what they achieved, how they had the course correct, what didn’t work, and what did work. If now you found that that system that you guys were all working on isn’t working, you have to course correct completely new products and new features.
The whole agile framework is about accountability. That’s all it is. They know that they got a two-week window to achieve a certain number of goals. They are given, discussed or created those goals all for themselves and have a whole accountability meeting to figure out what’s next. It’s done in corporate all the time. I haven’t yet met anybody in the last several years that is not on some version of the agile format. It’s because we may not be in corporate, and we may not have that experience. You have to create it for yourself. With agile, they do a two-week thing. Sallie is recommending one week. You need to find what works well for you. 1 month or 3 weeks is usually not going to work.
It takes too long in between reports because it is easy not to do it. You think, “I got a whole month before I have to do it.” It never happens. You are setting yourself up not to succeed there.
This has been good. Thank you so much.
It’s a pleasure.
Ladies, we have a surprise for you in EXTRA. Sallie, who’s an NLP master, is going to give us a process. She calls it the Ring of Power, which is stacking anchors so that you can choose different states. We call it in NLP states. A state is like confidence, passion, calm, self-reliance, and joy. There are lots of different states, and you can use these states for different things. I have different Rings of Power for when I’m going on a date with my husband, making cold calls, sitting at my desk, speaking or doing a show.
You can create these different rings that you can hold at different times so that you can use them in your life. We never had anybody do it for you ladies on this show. It’s a tool that I use all the time, every day. I got many of them. I’m super excited that she is going to be sharing that with you. It will be a useful tool. I’m excited that Sallie has been generous enough to offer that in EXTRA. Thank you for that.
It’s a pleasure.
Sallie, could you tell them a little bit about your free gift?
It is an eBook. It is entitled, Reboot Your Thinking With M*S*G. We have already talked about what M*S*G is. Reboot Your Thinking is a signature coaching program that I develop. This is a little taste of what that is. As we develop the mindset, skillset, and action, we must reboot how we think.
A Quick Guide to REBOOT Your Thinking With MSG
M*S*G is Mindset, Skillset, and Get Off Your Asset. I love that. The URL to go to get this free eBook is BlissfulInvestor.com/reboot. Thank you for that. Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions, Sallie?
I am.
Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.
Start small, and figure out what the market is before you get started.
What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?
Continue to stay knowledgeable about what is going on. Understand the basics and things change, particularly in the area of Fair Housing, which can be very problematic for people.
What specifically are you referring to there?
For a lot of property managers, at least in this area, there are testers in the area, and they are being hit with claims of Fair Housing violations for various reasons. For example, it could be with screening for criminal background checks, service animals, emotional support animals or familial status. Those are the hot-button items that I’m seeing a lot of.
What is one daily practice you do, Sallie, that contributes to your personal success?
It is all around building resilience. I find ways to build resilience in those four areas, physical, emotional, mental, and social, every single day.
Ladies, thank you so much for joining Sallie and me for this portion of this show. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. We got more. We are going to be doing a Ring of Power Process so that you can be powerful in whatever you are doing in your day or business. Stay tuned for that. If you are not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com, and you can check it out there.
For those of you that are leaving Sallie and me now, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for all that you are doing in your life and for continuing to stick with me. I love you, ladies. I’m looking forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
The real estate industry has been growing faster than ever because of technological advancements and other factors, leading investors to analyze data more easily. Listen to your host Moneeka Sawyer as she talks with Stefan Tsvetkov about the importance of data-driven real estate investing. In this episode, Stefan shares his knowledge and key insights about the market and different scenarios you can review so you won’t make mistakes. If you understand data analytics, you can make better decisions and generate more income. So, tune in to have a deeper understanding of the market and the industry.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Data-Driven Real Estate Investing With Stefan Tsvetkov – Real Estate For Women
Real Estate Investing For Women
I am so excited to welcome Stefan Tsetkov to the show. Stefan is the Founder of RealtyQuant at RealtyQuant.com. It is a company that brings data-driven and quantitative techniques to the real estate industry. They are on a mission to add industry value through education, investment, technology, and analytics. He is a financial engineer turned multifamily investor, analytics speaker, and live webinar host.
He holds a Master’s degree in Financial Engineering from Columbia University. Entering his finance career, he managed $90 billion of derivatives portfolio jointly with colleagues. He was featured on multi podcasts and webinar events including Elevate, Best Ever Real Estate Show, and Investing in the USA. He is the host of the Finance Meets Real Estate webinar series.
That was a great introduction. Thanks for having me.
Tell us a little bit about you. Give the executive version of how you got to where you are investing in real estate and why you love talking about analytics.
I’m a financial engineer. Originally, I’m Eastern European. I came to States. I went to Columbia and New York for my graduate degree. I worked in the financial industry for about a decade. In the last couple of years, I’ve been a real estate investor as well as a founder of a technology analytics company in the real estate industry called RealtyQuant. I took on analytics related to that. We publish market evaluations as to how over, under, and fairly valued our different markets are. We also do data-driven investing and build different technology and tools in the industry for that.
We’ve had one person come on and talk about data-driven real estate, but he wasn’t an analyst. This is exciting. Don’t be shy about talking about numbers. We can handle it. I’m super excited to hear how you run this. First, let’s define data-driven real estate investing.
It incorporates different data science or technology techniques for investing or discovering inefficiencies and opportunities in the real estate market. A big part of that is automated underwriting. Automated underwriting where you can pull thousands of on-market and off-market listings and underwrite them even to a partial extent. Later, you would perhaps need to go to the property in person, but it is still this preliminary analysis.
Automated underwriting is a big part. To that, there are different machine learning also that comes into play a bit. These are things like computer vision where you are able to see real estate images and define the condition of those properties. You can define the condition scoring based on real estate images or texture descriptions and also extract other intelligence from texture descriptions.
There’s also financial modeling for off-market inventory in the commercial multifamily space. That’s very useful. It’s a set of techniques for finding deals and markets. On the market side, it’s also engaging valuations. It’s having appreciation predictors and downside predictors for your markets. That’s so very useful in the commercial multifamily space. In residential investing, you’re able to gauge markets and pick the best ones. That’s what data-driven investing is. It’s a slightly different approach than the more local real estate investing, and there are good reasons for that such as you want to be vertically integrated. You want to have your team within a location. You want to understand that location really well.
Data investing is more agnostic to that. Thus, you try to gauge those markets somewhat in a bigger way. You’ll be able to scale and do this anywhere in the US. That is the difference. It’s also getting your own intuition with the data rather than reading reports. That’s not data-driven in my mind. If you’re purely working on reports, it could be, but it’s a little bit hard without also interacting with the data yourself or an analyst on your team doing it. It takes bigger insights with that.
With the reading of reports, do you think it takes more insights?
Yes. It takes more than a summary reports of what are the best markets in the US for this and that. In my experience, at least, you need the whole data for the whole US everywhere. It’s a bigger endeavor.
How did you get started investing in real estate? I want a little bit of context. How did you get started and why did you move from where most of us are where we’re looking at reports or listening to the news? We’re trying to invest locally because those are markets that we understand. That’s the more intuitive way that most of us invest, and you moved to more data-driven. Could you give us a little bit of your journey? How did you get started, and how did you get to where you are?
I’m in New York. The first property I bought was with a house hacking strategy. Many people are familiar with that. I bought a multifamily post in New Jersey. I lived in one unit and rented out the other one. I thought it was working well. There was a beautiful discount on the price as well. I thought, “I should work into it more professionally and find investment opportunities as a professional investor.”
From there, I started as a residential investor doing condominium conversions in the New York City area and other projects. I started pulling lots of data. I pulled perhaps 6,000 on-market and off-market properties within three hours from New York City and would have them underwritten on different strategies. It’s not only that, then you can compute your cap rates and different things like that. You can also underwrite on strategies that are otherwise hard to think about at such a scale for so many properties such as condo conversions or perhaps converting a residential to a commercial property. That was the way I started.
I’ve been doing residential deals in the New York City area in the small multifamily space that are close to markets like downtown Jersey City and WeHo which are very close to the city and some in upstate New York. From there, I’ve been transitioning to the commercial multifamily space in the Midwest and working for different deals in places like Iowa, Minnesota, and more fairly valued markets at that time.
When you moved out of New York is when you started becoming more data-driven. Is that true?
No. I am still physically in New York. I was data-driven when investing around in the New York City area as well. We pull residential listings for many. When you’re transitioning to commercial multifamily, the market side becomes more relevant because you’re not in your local market. You want to pick the best markets out of state. There are also concerns about whether they are overvalued or if we are going to have a recession. That prompts some of that analysis on the market side.
That’s a perfect segue. Let’s talk about how to determine if a market’s overvalued or what is the downside risk. Let’s talk a little bit more about that.
That is a million-dollar question if you think about it. Think ahead of the global financial crisis. Ahead of the global financial crisis, there were investors who invested in, for instance, California or Nevada. Those had a 50% decline, roughly speaking. They were extremely successful investors. That’s more speaking to the residential single-family space for this discussion because the commercial multifamily market is a bit of a different dynamic with cap rates and so forth.
Some of those investors lost all their networks. They were not the biggest investors, but the biggest people you watch in podcasts in the US. They were extremely successful and they were extremely successful with their operational process. They knew how to find deals, yet, they lost a lot of their network. The reason is those markets were extremely overvalued.
On the contrary, there are others. One of the bigger syndicators purchased his property in Midland, Texas. It was his first syndication. It had a super huge return. The reason is that Texas was undervalued. That’s ahead of the global financial crisis. This is a backward discussion. It was undervalued at the time that didn’t decline. They did decline but at a 4% average. They declined very little. They declined on their income, but on valuation terms or normalized terms, they didn’t.
I want to stop right there quickly because you’re going fast. It’s super awesome. You’re coming in with a lot of good stuff. I want to highlight some interesting things that you said. Which decline are you talking about? Do you talk about 2008 and 2009?
Data Driven Real Estate: You don’t just get to compute your caps and different things like that, but you can underwrite on strategies for properties that are hard to scale.
Yeah.
That’s what you’re referring to. I’ve been through three of them, so I want to make sure I knew which one you were talking about. In many of the markets in California, we were overvalued. I tell this story on my show many times. In 2009 and 2008, I lost 50% of the valuation of my properties in a period of three months. Things dropped so fast. When you go to a market like what he’s talking about in Texas, it’s not overvalued. It still did have a response to the crash, though, but it was only 4%. That is what he’s quoting us at.
It doesn’t mean that the other markets don’t move, but it’s a gentler move down. The correction is much easier to make that happen. In California, we saw a correction. It took about 6 or 7 years, and not all markets recovered. Only some of them recovered. Location was a big deal. I don’t know the rest of the country, but based on what you said, I wanted to point out that it’s not that because you’re in a low-risk market, you’re not going to see a drop. It’s that it’s a much gentler drop in response to the national or international crisis that we had.
Some markets in North Dakota at the time could see no drop as well. They could see zero drops. That was during the global financial crisis. Since you asked me what is the definition, the definition is price deviating from fundamentals of income population and housing supply. This is a fundamental analysis similar to the stock market.
I did a back study for the past three recessions. The global financial crisis is 1 of those 3 recessions. The correlation for the Metropolitan Statistical Areas or MSAs was of decline with the market evaluation and the peak ahead of the global financial crisis. Price decline peaked to bottom over the next roughly four years and one quarter on average. There are different periods in different regions, but those are declines that took four years forward. The correlation between the magnitude of decline and valuation was 89%. That’s huge. Declines were predictable in magnitude ahead of the global financial crisis.
There were people who were talking at that time. I don’t want to go into too much detail. He was a guy from Massachusetts. He doesn’t come to a local market monetary but he was on CNN in 2005 and 2006. This is practiced by the Quadrants Institution and done by Moody’s Analytics. This is studied for entrepreneurs. It’s done by my company, RealtyQuant. For your audience’s benefit, we do publish the data for every US County. We have 2,700 US counties. We have every single county if it’s over, under, or fairly valued. That is a statistical predictor of declines in the recession. It’s an important one. I’m not sure if it’s a good time to share my screen to show a table on this.
He asked me for permission to share his screen. I said yes because those of you that are going to check this out on YouTube will get the visual benefit of this. He is going to walk us through this. If you’re audio-only, don’t worry. He’s going to walk us through this. This also might be a good time to go check things out on YouTube. You can look me up, Moneeka Sawyer, and you’ll see all the YouTube things. It’s all yours.
Thanks. Are you able to see tables in an Excel sheet?
There are a lot of numbers.
That’s a big table with a lot of numbers, but I’m going to give you the gist of it. What I’m showing here is ten years ahead of appreciation or price changes in the US. These are how different markets perform after a mild or a severe recession for ten years forward based on how over, under, or fairly valued they are. It’s the peak ahead of the recession. To repeat, this is how different markets perform for ten years forward based on their evaluation and based on how overvalued the peak of a recession goes, and how different markets perform following that.
The 1990 recession is referred to by most economists as a milder recession. The global financial crisis is a scenario for a severe recession. That is what this table shows. It’s a lot of numbers, but it’s extremely interesting. It gives a perspective for many investors. At this time, investors have had the price performance in Western and Southern markets. The first column on the table shows overvalued percentage. The valuations in some Western and Southern markets are 20% to 30%. Some are in the 40% to 50% range. That’s overvalued. I can get to that part as well.
This has a picture of the United States and all the different states and markets. We’ve got a little bit more clarity on which states he’s talking about.
I’m showing a picture of the US and what is the overvaluation or undervaluation in different US states. This is the deviation from fundamentals. The dark-colored states in the picture are to the West and to the South. Idaho, for example, is at the top. It has been reported by Moody’s Analytics and other studies. It had a consistent observation for everyone with Boise, Idaho being the most overvalued city in the US. You can even search for different methodologies by Mark Zandi, Chief Economist of Moody’s and others, or RealtyQuant in my capacity. It’s generally consistent. Boise is at the top of 800 US cities.
Idaho is over 50% overvalued. On the counter, the Northeast and Midwest are under to fairly valued. These variations have been accelerating a lot with inflation since 2021, starting with what was a fairly valued US market at that time. I know it’s a lot of numbers, but it’s extremely important. I could put a lot of work into that myself.
It’s not to get a doomsy perspective. In the Western market, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado are overvalued to an extent. It’s less so than Idaho, but still to an extent. I speak to investors and syndicators who say, “We think these markets have such strong fundamentals even if they have a bit of a decline for some time. Let’s say they have a 5% to 10% decline. They’re going to do well afterward because they have such strong fundamentals. There’s so much job growth there.” That’s not what history suggests. What happened in the previous recessions was markets were at the very peak of valuation.
I suppose we take either at 54% overvalued. I have a table that shows the valuation ranges of how overvalued different markets are and how they perform ten years ahead. Markets that were in the 50% to 60% range were extremely booming ahead of time. For instance, the 1990 recession is a milder session. We have nothing doomsy. Nobody even knows about this as far as the real state declines.
I know about that one. I lost 20% of my value.
It’s a very milder session. There’s nothing terrible happening in your state. If one invests in a metropolitan area that is valued at 50% to 60%, which is the case of a few metropolitan areas in Idaho and some other states, what happens is not the situation of a milder recession where the market declines quickly a little bit and jumps back. What happens is the market declines a little bit, but it doesn’t jump back quickly. It takes a long time for that decline to happen. In that case, it took eight years. What is more important is, what is the relative performance over ten years of a market like that that was overvalued versus the other ones?
For instance, in this case, older markets in Metro areas that were over about 56% only appreciated a little bit. It was 16% over ten years. They were heavily outperformed by the undervalued ones. That is not intuitive. That’s not what people are imagining for Western and Southern extremely booming markets. They’re imagining that those are fast markets. The Midwest is a small market. Other places have small markets that are steady. They’re not slow and steady. They are expected to outperform another recession. It’s interesting. Undervalued markets following a recession outperform the overvalued ones. It’s important to know that the overvalued ones were also the top-performing ones ahead of the recession.
Ahead of recession correlation between how overvalued they are and how well they’re doing becomes very high. They’re doing incredible. For instance, if we go to 1990, that’s Hawaii. Hawaii was the top state at that time. They were 150% top from their previous market cycle. They were the top market. Nobody would easily imagine unless doing this kind of fundamental analysis that their prices are going to be lower 80 years later. They’re going to have the weakest price performance for the following decade. That was the strongest performer. That’s why fundamental analysis is extremely important.
Similarly, if we go to the global financial crisis, California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida were the four big overvalued states at that time. In the table, they had the worst bottom performance consistently year after year for ten years ahead. That’s extremely important. On the contrary, if someone invested in undervalued markets at the peak of the global financial crisis, they outperform. They didn’t perform great, but they still performed. Let’s say 20% over the course of ten years is extremely poor performance, but it was not negative. It was better than the others, so they outperform.
This isn’t true of the whole state. California is a huge state. There are different pockets that perform differently. It’s the same with Texas.
Data Driven Real Estate: The Midwest are small markets, and, like other small markets, they are steady. They’re not slow and steady; they are expected to outperform a recession.
These are the statistics for the MSAs or Metropolitan Statistical Areas.
What he’s saying is that, for instance, California was 52% overvalued. It went down 50% in five years, but then its recovery up to ten years took it to 25% down. It was still a negative 25%. If you look at some of these other markets that were maybe 6% or 3% overvalued, they went down initially during the crisis by 1% or 2%. One of them went down 3%. After ten years, they had gone up 18%, 27%, or 17%.
As opposed to these highly overvalued markets that are still down 25% from when the crisis started, in ten years, they’re still down 25%. In these lower-valued markets, they went down a little bit. Their recovery was not phenomenal, but at least it was recovery. We weren’t negative. We were closer to 18% or 19% after ten years.
That’s a great summary. Thank you for that. I don’t want to focus on too many numbers. It is the big picture intuition of it. The big picture intuition is valuation is extremely important in general, but it is even more important than the turning points in the market cycle. When we’re at the peak of a market, it’s the most important variable that overshadows fundamentals themselves. At the other times, I’m like, “I’m going to be forecasting fundamentals.” That’s how I get to the best appreciation. The goal of this is not a doomsy thing. My goal is where I get the best appreciation. That’s what I care about.
As commercial investors or residents, we do our forced appreciation. As good business people, we generate our business and business profit in this way by being quality investors on the forced appreciation side. That’s always there. If you do that well in a recession, you do it well in other times. You still don’t want to have the effect of markets overlaying on top of that. That is the goal here. That’s why I want to show this complicated table with many numbers. It’s to point that across different levels of overvaluation ahead of a recession where one is mild like in 1990 and one is severe like the global financial crisis, the undervalued markets is a big shift in what most investors are thinking.
Austin, Texas is an extremely booming market that has very strong fundamentals. It happens to be that Austin, Texas is overvalued. That overvaluation has to find relative to those fundamentals. Some investors say, “There’s so much housing shortage. Real estate is not going to decline because of the housing shortage.” That’s not true because housing shortage depends on how you define it.
If you take the broad housing shortage, which is the US Census Bureau total population in that market versus the US Census Bureau housing supply in that market, that is reflected in the numbers that I’m showing. They’re reflecting income and also population to housing supply ratios. Austin, Texas is the best market, but if prices run too forward, it’s going to underperform. That’s a consistent observation. There are around 400 metropolitan areas here and these are two very different recessions. Investing in a 50%-plus overvalued market, which is likely to be the top performer in the market cycle and going to have a reversal in price performance.
That is so not intuitive. You think that a strong market, once it goes through a recession, will continue to be strong. That’s very interesting. The numbers prove to be exactly the opposite.
It depends. In itself, a strong market would recover better, but that is even the comparison of the 1990 recession versus the global crisis. In 1990, why did they have markets that were over 40% to 50%, but they only dropped 15%? The reason is it’s not that the global financial crisis was a “crash” of sorts so much. It was a severe recession and the recovery of fundamentals was very weak.
I know you did mention a sharp decline in some months. I feel terrible about that. That sucks, but in the big picture, the declines took whole four years. Prices still kept dropping. With those four years of declines, what happens in a mild recession is that the fundamentals are strong and they catch up. Even though the market is overvalued more, it ends up declining less because there is a strong recovery. It’s not that one is a crash and the other one is another crash. It depends on how severe that recession is and how strong the economic recovery is from a fundamental perspective. That’s, at least, my perspective.
From this standpoint, it’s true that a strong market would recover faster. That happens in markets that may be overvalued and may recover fast and well and would get a small decline. That is possible. The question for me is not only predicting downside risk. We don’t have a recession yet. That’s all hypothetical. There’s no official declaration of a recession still, but if we were to have one, how do we forecast appreciation? Where is there going to be the best appreciation? This is suggesting that it’s not going to be in the booming ones anymore and they would underperform. The reason is valuation.
I can go overvaluations in different cities, but that is what the studies suggest. It’s a very different scenario. For instance, we had a recession such as a dot-com bubble in 2001. I’ve studied that one, too. It’s a different scenario. If we have that and there isn’t any significant overvaluation in the market, which there wasn’t at the time, then nothing happens. That’s because they’re mostly fairly valued and things continued going forward. That’s what happened. They continued going forward and then they became overvalued ahead of the global financial crisis. It was a fairly valued period.
It was very fairly valued, but we had a lot of people that lost jobs. People couldn’t afford homes. We did see the markets pull back a little bit to accommodate all those people that couldn’t get homes. Rent went way up because people’s credit got screwed up. Some other issues that happened there that did cause the market to go down a little bit, wouldn’t you say? They’re not strictly statistics.
That could have been perhaps in new listing prices or some of the more transitory kind of data of sorts. At least in the recorded statistics for prices, they’re showing no decline anywhere. It’s quite interesting.
This is the difference between real life and statistics. I want to talk about 1990. I’m sorry. I was mistaken when I said we lost valuation on that one. I do remember that. I was in college. I was listening to my dad and what happened there. I wasn’t personally involved. In 2001, I was personally involved. In 2008, I was personally involved.
In 2001, it was interesting. It was the dot-com crash. It was in Silicon Valley, which is where I lived and where I owned all my homes. This is a market-specific thing. During that time, because of the bust, so many people lost their jobs or had this weird thing that happened with stocks. If you would get laid off, you would have to exorcise your stock and then owe taxes. They couldn’t afford the taxes, so they would have to either sell their homes. There were some weird things that were happening in Silicon Valley. Your numbers are probably national.
What was interesting to me was property values dropped about 20%. During that time, they recovered very quickly. Interestingly, rents went up dramatically during that time because people that would normally buy were not able to buy anymore. When you say you look across all metropolitan areas and you didn’t see anything, that’s interesting to me. San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento areas are big metropolitan areas in California. They didn’t see what we saw in 2008, but they saw some discomfort. They recovered quickly, but there was some distinctive discomfort.
That is extremely interesting. If you think about real estate prices, you could have a change in value and there’s illiquidity. The price at which those transactions would happen would be lower. There could be a big decline in unrealized terms. Let’s say it is something like COVID.
What he’s talking about is what I always say. You don’t lose money and you don’t see the valuations change until selling happens. It’s all on paper. That’s all I wanted to add.
That’s the Federal Housing Finance Agency or the main government agency following US prices. The specific thing for 2001 is the 400 or so metropolitan areas in the US. There is San Jose and San Francisco. In the MSAs, they don’t have the data, but then, you did experience it in real life. That’s quite interesting.
That surprises me and confuses me a little bit. How is that possible?
It’s interesting. That’s what you observed, but on the other hand, we haven’t heard anyone else say about any real estate declines in 2001.
Data Driven Real Estate: What happens in a mild recession is that the fundamentals are strong, and they catch up. Even though the market is overwhelmed more, it ends up declining less.
What is true is that anybody that could hold, did. Rents were going up so fast. My property dropped 20% in value during those couple of years. It was not immediately, but it was over those two years. It recovered quickly. During that entire time, rents were going up dramatically, so I could hold property. When you’re talking about the numbers that are only going to show when people sell, maybe people were holding. What do you think? Is that a possibility?
Was it multifamily, perhaps?
Mine was all single-family. I’m sorry to challenge you, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?
It could be segmented in the market or possibly in neighborhoods. Still, that’s the whole MSA. As you are saying with the dot-com bubble with some people losing their jobs in some regions in Silicon Valley, perhaps some neighborhoods had declined and others still continued going up. It flattened out the metropolitan area. This is still a pretty high level for the whole metropolitan area. That one that did not have declines is another single metropolitan area. You’re making a very good point. If you’re in a neighborhood, the decline doesn’t matter. You have the same effect. It doesn’t matter what the market did. It appears that perhaps other neighborhoods did better.
What I’m learning from this is that the market went down, but then it recovered very quickly. Rents went up, so holding was easier. What I love about this is that as you talk about the market data, it showed that there was no real decline. I was in a pocket where I experienced a decline. As long as I held, I had time to be right, but it was still a good time to buy. This is such an interesting thing for people. People were asking these questions every day. They were like, “Interest rates are going up. I want to capture the lower interest rates, but markets feel overvalued. Is it a good time to buy?”
Your statistics show that even during that time, it was an okay time to buy because everything was valued fairly. Even though I personally experienced a decline and many of my friends did in Silicon Valley in this little bubble that we were in, it recovered very quickly. We were able to hold. It was still a good time to buy even then. The recovery happened very quickly even though you saw a dip. That’s what I’m taking from that. What do you think?
I agree. You’re making great points there. If we think of what we are doing here, it is a very high-level fundamental analysis. If we start making it super granular, it’s going to be working less well, I suppose. If we go to super tiny neighborhoods and try to do fundamental analysis, it’s not going to work too well. For instance, in my data counties’ predictive power is less strong than states’ predictive power, but it happened with metropolitan areas for some reason. I don’t know if it’s the quality of statistics of those versus counties.
Metropolitan statistics have extremely high predictive power. That’s a little bit interesting. I’m sure if I went to ZIP codes, neighborhoods, and so forth, it’s going to get harder because there are going to be so many other factors. You’re making a point that there is also the liquidity thing. These are quarterly governmental price statistics. If your price dropped for two months in between and jumped back to the same level, then that’s not even detected. If the neighborhood dropped, other neighborhoods increased. It is smoothened out.
On the other hand, for a fundamental analysis like that, perhaps we want it smoothened out. It’s not even going to be tied to fundamentals if it’s too not smooth. It’s like these other things that are either not fundamental. That is the thesis there. You make a great point that it is not applicable to where your property can still decline or your neighborhood can still decline. It’s the broad market.
You were talking about appreciation of the properties with these statistics. We’re not talking about increases in rents or any of that stuff. In a lot of these stable markets, rents continued to go up even though they didn’t appreciate as fast. They didn’t go down as much. Their rents went up dramatically. When you’re looking at which markets to invest in, you want to look at the statistics of whether the markets are going to appreciate whether they’re going to take a hit when the markets go down or when we have a recession. If you’ve got some markets that you’re interested in, you want to keep in mind what your cap rates are, what the rents are looking like, and how those are going up, wouldn’t you say?
I agree. That is a great point, especially for commercial multifamily investors. We’ve seen that very much in this period with humongous rent growth in some markets. Those are different dynamics. If we think of cap rates in the commercial space, they’re driven in a theoretical sense. They tie to something in finance called the Dividend Growth Model. It’s the denominator in that one. It’s the discounted cashflow analysis for commercial property. There are interest rates there. It’s the risk-free rates and then risk premium on top of that.
Also, what is reducing the cap rates is the expectation for future income growth. That would be the same for any business and valuing other companies as well. That wouldn’t be only for commercial real estate. It would be the same methodology. That methodology derives from a mathematical series of discounted cashflow analysis of any company, business, or property. Rent growth is extremely important, and that drives cap rates in a theoretically valid way. That is a whole different dynamic. We’ve seen that in the commercial multifamily space.
We see it in single-family homes, too. If you’re out there buying a portfolio of ten homes, or for me, whatever I own, we see that in the cap rates also. When we’re buying a single-family home, how is that? We want the property to appreciate, but we also want to know that we’re going to be cashflowing within a certain number of years or hopefully, right away. Those sorts of things matter. When we had our bubble burst here in Silicon Valley, it was the rents going up that saved us from having to sell because we could carry our mortgages still.
This is so interesting. I feel like we could talk forever, but we’re running out of time. First of all, thank you for all that information. You blew up my brain. I’ll have to read this again. Ladies, you do the same. There was a lot of good information. What I want to talk about a little bit is the states. Who’s overvalued? Who’s undervalued? Where are the opportunities? Where should we stay away from?
From your perspective, this is the end of the first quarter of 2022. It’s only the first quarter. The second quarter hasn’t come out yet because that’s a fundamental analysis based on the governmental statistics of income, population, and housing supply. Those will come out soon. Those take time. This is the first quarter of 2022, but it’s not going to be too different. It changes a little, but it has kept increasing. What’s important to notice is that US real estate was quite fairly valued even through the first quarter of 2021 at the broad level.
This surprises me a lot.
The way to see that at the country level is there is a study by Niraj Shah at Bloomberg Economics. He had it for different countries in 2019. It came out at the beginning of 2021 as well. US real estate has pricing combinations, for example, and that’s a good one I can explain why that works well, but in another discussion. It was around zero. That’s very contrary to some countries.
Other countries were reported to be SCANNZ Economies. That’s Sweden, Canada, Australia, Norway, and New Zealand. They were overvalued even as early as 2018. They still don’t decline because there are economic conditions. There’s no trigger for them to decline. There are low-interest rates and so on and so forth, but they are overvalued since then. That’s driven by central bank policies in water and small coast oil-exporting economies. Their real estate has been reported to be overvalued. That’s by Bloomberg Economics and other sources.
US real estate was fairly valued. I had it in my data as well that it was fairly valued. I started doing this in 2020, the beginning of COVID, on my end, it’s RealtyQuant. This is data powered by RealtyQuant.com. As late as 2021, the first quarter of US real estate at the broad level was close to 0%. If we take the US real estate broadly at this data, it is around 13% only. The whole nation would be only 13%.
It’s not a small number because if you take the global financial crisis, it’s the same government data in the FHFA data, the global financial crisis in the same one would be past 20%. That’s already 2/3 of the global financial crisis. You have to keep in mind that’s a history many years back. Most other time periods tend to be slightly undervalued. This is the material overvaluation, but that is at the whole level. The whole level doesn’t matter so much to particular investors.
If you go to specific states, it gets more overvalued. The reason is that we have undervalued states like Illinois. We have fairly valued states like New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and so on and so forth. What was overvalued is Idaho. It is above 50%. Idaho has been the leader. The states of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona are above 30%. We have Texas, Florida, and Colorado at above 20%. There are, in total, ten US states in Q1 of 2022 that are above 20% overvalued. They’re all Western and Southern states. That’s Idaho, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Florida, Washington, Texas, Colorado, and Montana.
On the contrary, if we go to the opposite end of the spectrum of what’s undervalued, I’m not saying that’s necessarily desirable. That ends up being desirable over the next decade, but not necessarily until a recession hits in that period. The undervalued ones are still the markets that are not performing well, which are Illinois, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Connecticut. They are not trending. They are poor in their fundamentals, but they do tend to carry less downside risk simultaneously in a recession because they didn’t get overheated.
Data Driven Real Estate: If we go to super tiny neighborhoods and try to do fundamental analysis, it will not work too well. For instance, a county’s predictive power is less strong than a state’s predictive power, but it happens with metropolitan areas for some reason.
Boise is at the top. There is Boise MSA and Austin. There are some other MSAs in Idaho, Nashville, Phoenix, Tampa, and Dallas. These are booming and strong markets. They’re incredible markets. They have incredible people who have made fortunes in those markets. That’s completely true. In the past few years, things accelerated with inflation. Those are some overvalued cities. It’s half at the county level. Perhaps, there are some other ones that can be based on county data as well. That’s a good list around the top ten.
The important thing to notice is it’s not that it’s predicting necessarily big declines in something. Let’s say Boise’s overvaluation is at 74%. That sounds very high. In Boise, if we experience a severe recession like the global financial recession, that would be a decline. I have predicted declines in different scenarios. If you have a GFC-like recession, which nobody expects, then the decline for Boise’s overvaluation of 74% evaluation will be 46%.
That’s if we have a huge crash in the market.
If we have a milder recession like 1990, even though it’s overall at 74%, but because the recovery is going to be so strong, the decline is only 18%. To clarify, that overvaluation is still a real thing because that 74% overvaluation is going to go to zero. It always does. It’s not that the number is fictional. Some investors might say, “If something is overvalued, it stays overvalued.” That doesn’t happen. It doesn’t stay overvalued. It will go to zero in valuation terms. If prices don’t decline too much because we have a very strong economy or strong recovery, then the declines will go about 18%.
That decline takes a long time. It takes six years. Especially for small declines with big overvaluation, it tends to take a long time. It could be even eight years forward. Over these eight years along that period of time, incomes increase and populations and housing supply ratios change in whichever way they change. Those fundamentals shift in a way that they compensate for valuation. They drive it to zero. That is a strong recovery case, but this is an example of what would happen.
We take the case of Austin, Texas. It is an incredible city with hugely strong fundamentals. Though exceeded by the pricing, what would happen to its valuation is it will be around 66% overvalued. The model for the severe recession that I have has a 40% decline and only 15% in a mild recession. Those are all possible. It’s not a doom thing. I’m a positive and eager investor who wants to continue investing my funds in a recession as well. What is important to me is how to make a model to forecast appreciation and what is the best one.
Here, it’s suggesting that even without incorporating in a model fundamental forecasting itself but purely looking at market valuation at the peak ahead of the recession, so to say, I can take the simple model and invest it in the undervalued MSAs. Those would be very counter-intuitive at the time. Those would be MSAs like San Francisco and San Jose. They were undervalued at the time with population issues and all kinds of issues.
Purely, what the history suggests from those two different recessions at different times in US economic history, if you will, is in both of those cases, the lowest markets of most undervalued metropolitan areas outperformed over a decade forward. That is extremely interesting for me. We have to keep this in mind. They were performing poorly at that peak. That’s why they were undervalued at that time. It’s a mix of those weak fundamentals. It would be below the prices or those weak fundamentals, but they do tend to have weak fundamentals.
There is a strong correlation between how strong a market is and how overvalued it becomes towards the end of a market cycle by overheating, like investors taking up more stuff there and so forth. That’s an interesting thing. For me, this is the perspective of how you forecast appreciation in those. It becomes counterintuitive because that’s shifting the whole expectation of investors. It’s also how we’re accustomed to the west and south as the booming places and how it perhaps is statistically likely to shift in the next market cycle.
That was awesome. How can people get more information? I know that you’ve got a free report. It’s the free state-level market valuation report. To get that, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/Markets. You can download that. How can they reach out to you?
My website is RealtyQuant.com. That’s the best way to reach me. They can also read my blog about some of the things we discussed. They can look up the data that we have there for 2,700 US counties. I also have a YouTube channel. It’s Stefan Tsvetkov – Finance Meets Real Estate on YouTube. It’s a weekly webinar.
We don’t have time for three rapid-fire questions. We are going to try to do an EXTRA. We’ll see how this goes. Stay tuned if you are subscribed to EXTRA. If you’re not and you’re leaving us, thank you so much for joining Stefan and me for this portion of the show. I appreciate you. I hope it was helpful. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.
Founder of RealtyQuant, a company that brings data-driven and quantitative techniques to the real estate industry. On a mission to add industry value through education, investment, technology, and analytics.
Former financial engineer (Columbia MSFE) managing ~ $90 billion derivatives portfolio jointly with colleagues. Multifamily investor, analytics speaker, and live webinar host.
Featured on over 40 Podcast/Webinar events including Elevate, Best Ever Real Estate Show, Investing in the U.S. etc. Organizer of Finance Meets Real Estate live webinar series, with ~3000 subscribers and over 80 live webinars.
Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Being a single parent is no easy feat. You have to balance being a mother as well as providing for your family. If only there’s a career that could give you the lifestyle and flexibility to be a mom. Our guest in this episode found one in real estate! Real estate broker of Sotheby’s International Realty, D’Nette Wood, sits down with Moneeka Sawyer to share how her path shifted from being a single parent into a badass REI mom, finding a blissful hustle that is motivated by her passion. She then talks about the importance of outside-of-the-box thinking in real estate and overcoming the fear mentality. Join D’Nette in this conversation and get inspired by the ways she took action to create the life she desires!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
From Single Parent To Badass REI Mom With D’Nette Wood – Real Estate Women
Real Estate Investing For Women
I am so excited to welcome the show, D’Nette Wood. D’Nette is a realtor and entrepreneur. She has had an incredible career with Sotheby’s International Albuquerque and luxury homes and income-generating properties, advising a range of clientele, from new home buyers to retirees. As a former loan officer, she understands the impact on clients’ long-term goals. She’s helped them navigate and manage life, investing, finances, divorce, death, downsizing, and empty nest. I was a loan officer too. I totally get this. When you are looking at their financials, you get everything. It’s this huge puzzle. She also has had that same approach to being a loan officer.
Prior to real estate, D’Nette sang in Nashville and is an actress with the Screen Actors Guild. This is one of her quotes, “One of the things I feel has helped me succeed is empathizing with my consumer base as a creative artist who utilizes that side of her brain. That connects us and gives them an experience they want to share with their friends and relatives.” As a mother of three, D’Nette is inspired to leave a legacy for her children. D’Nette, welcome to the show.
I am so happy to be here in Zoom person. I would be on your couch but I’m on my chair instead.
She looks gorgeous. She’s got all these beautiful jewel tones going on. I love that.
I lived in New Mexico and grew up here. We have Native American culture. I wear turquoise a lot. I love the colors and the feel of it. I wanted to represent you on your show. Thank you so much for having me.
Teal, if you know anything about chakras, is very close to the color of the throat. It also opens us up for communication. It’s a beautiful color, especially for this. Thank you for that.
Thank you for sharing that.
You have such an interesting story. I’ve shared a little bit in your bio but could you give us the two-minute high-level how you got here type of story?
I was very focused as a kid and goal-oriented, and I still am. I wanted to be a professional singer. My whole life was geared toward being a professional singer. I moved to Nashville, and then life shifted for me. I became a mom. I was faced with this real dilemma. I didn’t want to go on the road for 280 days a year as a professional singer. I wanted to be a mom and have a certain lifestyle as a mother. Being a mother is a nugget of who I am.
At that time, I needed to reinvent myself. I needed a different job. I wanted to create a career. I wrote it down, “What career is going to give me the lifestyle I want and give me the flexibility to be a mom?” Through that reinvention of myself, here I am on your show talking about the success of pivoting. I tell people, “All I do is to pivot. We are like a 360 sprinkler. Keep pivoting.”
Many of us had to pivot over the last couple of years with COVID and stuff like that. I myself have pivoted quite a lot. I’m going to have you talk more about this. What’s fun about pivoting, from my perspective, is that we get to discover the other sides of ourselves or other powerful assets that we may have forgotten about because we got stuck or whatever in what we were doing. We knew that skill base but we are all such full people with so many resources and skills. It’s fun to discover and apply some of those other things that we didn’t get to with what we were doing before. Would you agree with me on that?
I would. With age comes wisdom and experience. I appreciate being on this show because I want to mentor younger women. If I had the knowledge I do now, I wish I would’ve had all of that knowledge. I love to mentor and help younger women be successful in whatever they do. It’s all of those tools that we put in our tool belts as we grow, change, and mature.
Why I do, this show is that I want to mentor all women. We’ve got young women and older women than me. All of us have opportunities and things to share with one another. From younger women, I get new ideas about, “What’s going on in the work that I’m not fully aware of.” They bring energy, excitement, and lots of new ideas. The older women that are wiser than me bring even more experience that we can then plug into what we talk about on the show. As mentors of women, we all bring so much to one another.
A collaborative effort is what I love it. I love people that’s the bottom line. I hope to learn something from everybody I meet. If I’m not in front of people, I’m not making money. That’s getting back to the sales part of my business. People are my business.
You sent me your questions, and the very first one you talked about was learning how to hustle. I want to give you some context on this and how I see this. What you said is, “Achieving what you want takes energy and hard work. It’s not going to be handed to you.” I absolutely agree with that comment. I frequently call about living a blissful life as the anti-hustle. It’s like hustling without the stress that the word implies.
I will say that I’m a blissful millionaire. I talk about the anti-hustles, and yet many people could say that I hustle. I have a lot of energy, motivation, and passion for what I do. I do not stay lazy or whatever you want to call that. I don’t want to imply that not hustling is lazy. Ladies, don’t take that the wrong way. I’m saying that bliss does not mean that we are not working towards the things that we are passionate about. The word hustle has been an interesting thing on this show. We’ve talked about it in different ways. I would love to hear your perspective on that.
I love that you use the word bliss because when you are doing it all correctly, it is bliss. It doesn’t feel like a lot of work when you are hustling the right way. When about I think my earlier career, when I thought of the word hustle, I was like, “I got to get some sales in.” My kids would confirm that living with me is like a mix between Doris Day and Tony Robbins. I’m on fire. I was like, “Good morning. What are your goals now? Get your homework done.” I’m a tiger mom.
Now, if I feel like if I do all of the right things and be authentic, it all works. I let go of the stress of the hustle and was a little more mindful in my morning. That’s the biggest thing that has changed in the last few years for me is mindfulness in the morning. When I talk about hustle, you have to have some passion to drive the hustle. The passion is the motor that drives the hustle. What are you passionate about? Identifying what you want is the hardest thing. It’s like, “What do you want?” “I want to make a lot of money.” “Why do you want to make a lot of money?” “It gives me food on the table.” You can get to basics, then you get back to, “Do you want to survive or thrive?”
Surviving can be very motivating to a point. I see single moms who are so motivated to provide for their children. That can be a very high motivator but for many of us, it’s almost depleting. It drains us rather than inspires and lifts us. After you get past that strive to survive mentality, now you are living for passion and a motivator that will uplift you. There are also different stages of what it is that you are needing. The way that you hustle is going to change based on what that motivator is.
We get to the basics as I said, you make more money. If you are in that back against the wall time in your life, I’m raising my hand. I have been there.
I have, too.
I was a single mom for a long time. I couldn’t think outside of the basics. I need rent and gas for my car but you also have to have some joy behind that. I want to send my kids to college. For me, I didn’t have to have some great big business plan but by writing it down, I created a vision board for myself because that keeps me focused on what my passions are and what makes me happy. That fuels my hustle for the day or where perhaps I direct my energy. Am I directing it toward finding the people that I need to find to help me generate that? Am I researching all of those things?
The hustle is not getting on the phone and making 50 calls a day. It’s creating the process that gets you to where you want to go. You have to have a process to get from A to Z, which is the hustle. The process, to me, is the hustle. How do I get from here to there? Is it a new job? Is it my first investment property? It takes energy and passion for being a hustler. Some people send me memes of me as a hustler.
A thought that came to my mind. I don’t know if you know Leeza Gibbons. She’s a friend of mine. This is one of those pieces of advice that I hear in my head frequently, and she says, “Show up, do your best, and let go of the rest.” Look at the level of success that she’s achieved. What she doesn’t say in that is that you have to have the goal first and the passion. You’ve got to do that internal work first, your big why, what are your core values, and what is your goal.
REI Mom: Keep a daily calendar and write down what you want to achieve for that day. That will help you get to where you want to go.
Once you have that goal, now you are setting that into action and show up, do your best, and then allow the universe to take care of the rest. Don’t be so attached to the outcome as to being your very best self in everything that you are doing. To me, that’s a blissful hustle. We can get out there, do our very best, do what brings us joy, and then let go of the rest. How do you feel about that? Does that make sense? It feels like exactly what you said.
I’m going to make a request that Leeza Gibbons share with us a one-day snapshot of her calendar and how she’s time blocked her day. That process that we are talking about is partially how you schedule your day. If you schedule your day thoughtfully, you will achieve all of those items, and then you are going to have this blissful moment at the end of the day that says, “That was a productive day. That was a good day.” Taking a few notes at the end of the day, “Was that a good day? Why was it a good day? Was it a bad day?”
We all have bad days. I wish I could have a redo about one day a month but we learned from those redos. How could I have made that better? What could I have possibly done to have changed that outcome to be different? We don’t have to beat ourselves on the back but it’s okay to say, “I wish I had done that differently.”
I learned from it and then let it go. Tomorrow is a new day. One Day at a Time. I love that song. Marijohn Wilkins wrote it, and she was a mentor of mine too. She was an amazing older woman that took me under her wing in Nashville. She was a teacher as a younger woman and had those life lessons to learn as we learned from other women.
Here’s a nugget. Keep a daily calendar. Write down what you want to achieve for that day that will help you get to where you want to go. Maybe at the end of the week, and then reflect on that and say, “Am I getting to where I’m going?” We have Google Maps now, but even with Google maps, you’ve got to read the directions of where you are going, and that’s what having a plan does.
You have to have a destination to put in there, so it knows where to send you.
Otherwise, you can’t complain about where you are because you haven’t told yourself where you want to go.
Talk about thinking outside of the box. How does this relate to real estate? Everybody has a problem, and lots of people have a problem. Not everybody is able to come up with a good creative solution. We talk about finding off-market homes or even on-market homes. People have a problem that they are trying to solve. There’s a reason that this house isn’t working for them. Can you come in and be a demanding buyer or can you come in and solve their problem?
The house that I’m living in and moved into a couple of months ago, we got, after it left us, somebody else came in with a full cash offer with no contingencies but we ended up getting the house because we solved a problem for this seller. Not because we came in with the best offer. Let’s talk about that whole piece. Thinking outside of the box and making the negotiation all about solving problems for one another.
Thinking outside the box is one of my best skillsets. I call it specialized learning or expertise but you can learn how to do it and that is by reading the room. If you are a buyer and looking at a house or whatever investment A is, the best thing that you can do is to ask what are the seller’s motivations. If you can match that or get close to it, you’ve solved their problems.
In COVID, there were a lot of different needs. More so than any other time in my career. The sellers had a lot of different needs. The first-time home buyers had a lot of heartbreaks. They couldn’t compete but they are back now. We are all talking about the market shifting. Sellers now are living in the past. Buyers now are living in the future. We have two different points of view. We are not doing that old dance anymore. We were doing this fast.
I was spinning around many times, and then the music changed. We are in different music and dance. I hope analogies don’t drive you crazy but we are. I see sellers want this high price, and buyers say, “Your house has been on the market for twenty days now and hasn’t had an offer. It’s too high-priced, and it’s not updated.” If you are representing a seller, educating them on the front end is important because we have to be realistic.
As a buyer asking the questions up front, don’t just write an offer. That’s like going out with a person, and you don’t know anything about them. You got to get to know them. Do they need a lease back? Do they need a 60-day close? Would they prefer that you not get any repairs because they have been out of work for six months? Here’s something that’s coming up. We are in a period of deceleration. We are not this double 18%, 35% appreciation. It’s slowing down. Deceleration is the key term here.
I want to highlight this. Ladies, what we are reading out and about is the fear mentality of, “Interest rates are going up, housing prices are going down.” This is the fear that everybody is hearing on the news and from all of their friends. It’s a fear-driven idea. I want to clarify what D’Nette said. We are not seeing housing prices depreciate or go down. We are seeing a slowing down of those prices.
Prices are still appreciating if you look at the numbers. They are doing it much more slowly. They are doing it at a pace that’s much more similar to before we went into this gangbusters market. I want to warn people against this fear mentality that takes over everybody in the media. Understand that we are decelerating. We are not depreciating. Our appreciation is not going down. It’s not to the same levels that it was before. I’m so glad you mentioned that because this fear is driving many people and is important.
I’m happy that you took the time to talk about what deceleration is. I do not watch much news at all.
Nor do I.
I quit watching the news a few years ago. This is a very important thing to go to. If you want to learn about what’s going on, FHFA is the place to go. Federal Housing Finance Agency came out with its Q2 report. That’s where you need to get your news. It’s from the source, not the news agency, that does the shock value to get ratings up. FHFA doesn’t have that problem with sponsorships. They serve the data. They have graphs and little videos that tell you what’s going on in the market. It’s still a strong market. It’s just different.
We need to read the room. We need to ask the seller what’s going on with them. Every deal is different. That’s why I love real estate every house is different. Every seller or buyer’s motivation is different. As an investor, I thought I was going to sell one of my properties because I had unsolicited offers. I’ve got five. I said to myself, “Is this the time for me to sell this property? It’s an investment. I would need to do a 1031 exchange. There’s a time limit. Where am I going to find something?” I had to go and do the deep research myself to say, “Is it the best time for this particular property to be sold?” You have to do the work to understand what options are best for you, the investor or the buyer.
What I love that you said is getting to know what the seller is needing. It’s interesting that when I was moving back up to Sacramento from San Jose, I had a brand-new realtor. He was a broker and was very good. This is not anything against him. My realtor in San Jose would do the exact same thing, and I have been working with him for many years. This is to let you know what happens out there in the market. Realtors are also very used to a seller’s market.
What they are used to is that the seller is going to be very demanding. The buyer has to kowtow to them. The market is changing, and what’s happening is going back to what it was several years ago. I was making offers then too and asking the questions. Having the realtor go and say, for instance, what you said, “Could we use a lease back? What is the situation?” You want to know the story. “Would you like to not have to move for 60 days? We could include that as part of your bonus. Do you want a faster close?” That’s normal, “Do you want no contingencies? Do you want to not have to fix anything?”
In our case, they were moving across the country. They had a bunch of furniture they wanted to leave behind. “Can we take care of that for you and donate it all?” What are the things that you are needing?” They needed a certain date to close, and we offered that even if we don’t close on that day, we will start to pay them that day.
There are things that you can offer but what was so interesting about this is that every single realtor I’ve ever worked with has said, “Moneeka, you are asking so many questions. It’s not going to make a difference to them. They want money.” No. I have found that almost 100% of the time, every single one of my offers is accepted, and I’m not the highest financial offer.
REI Mom: You’ve got to read the directions of where you’re going. Otherwise, you can’t complain about where you are because you haven’t told yourself where you want to go.
The realtor that I have been working with for many years still argues with me on it. I’m like, “How many times have we been right on this?” Ask the questions, and don’t be afraid. The thing is, you have to make sure that your realtor will do it because a lot of time, they will be like, “Whatever,” and then they don’t say anything. You also have to train your realtor. They need to do these things. They don’t have to do it for everybody but if they want you as a client, they have to do it.
You want the answers back. That’s the other thing is to make sure that you get the answers back. I love my realtors. They are my best friends but you do see a little bit of this tug of war because of their mentality of what’s expected on the market. It’s not always true with their mentality. They bring a lot to the table. They are the professionals but you bring some of this stuff to the table, and that’s what helps you to win.
Thinking outside the box is so important as a listing agent during COVID. I had some pretty popular properties. One property had fifteen offers, which is a big deal in Albuquerque. I called my cousin up in Denver and said, “Do you have a good Excel spreadsheet that I could look at because this is getting pretty complex?” He shared it with me. Shout out, cousin. Thank you.
You can see the difference between a good realtor and a brand new or less competent realtor when you have fifteen offers in front of you. To your readers, you need to interview your realtor to see how good they are. What is their skillset? What is their background? You are relying on them to think outside the box. If they don’t have that skillset, find another realtor who does. The top 25% of the bulk of the offers are all pretty close because they’ve all called me. They’ve all said, “What does your seller need?”
They’ve done that work to think outside the box on behalf of their client. The middle quarter didn’t call. In the last quarter, at the very end, their contracts were crap. They might have been missing documents or it didn’t even make sense. They weren’t even in the game. I feel bad for those buyers who wasted a lot of time going after house after house and didn’t get a deal.
A lot of the realtors are like, “You are going to get a bit out of ten houses. Let’s start placing offers.” If you can’t do more than one at a time. If you get it, that’s great, just sign. We will start placing offers. It’s a numbers game,” but the reason it’s such a big numbers game for you is because you don’t win and don’t take the time. It’s like a balancing act for them too like, “How much time am I going to spend on each one of these offers?” If you spend the time, you will have to make fewer offers. You will be more likely to win.
That causes burnout on the buyer’s part.
Also, frustration.
Their heart is broken and is like, “Forget it. I’m going to go rent or something.” The good news is buyers, come on, back in. Get pre-qualified, interview some realtors, and get back in the game. You can think outside the box because reading this gives a lot of information to make them a more educated buyer the next time around. Taking some of these ideas and maybe you have to teach a realtor a thing or two. “I read in Moneeka’s show that we can do this.”
I feel like we could talk forever but we are going to have to wrap up the show. We are going to change EXTRA a little bit. If you don’t mind, I would like to talk on EXTRA about financial literacy and how you taught your children how to fish, would you be up for that?
Okay.
That’s a piece of what my ladies would love to know. Ladies, we are going to do that in EXTRA. We are going to talk about how to teach your children how to fish and give them financial literacy and how a mom of three has done that. I’m excited about that. Before we lead into the three rapid-fire questions, D’Nette, could you tell people how they can reach you?
DNetteWood.com, and I have a YouTube channel, DNette Wood Albuquerque Realtor, where I have little nuggets of helpful information that people can go and watch. You can find me there.
Thank you so much for that. Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?
I am.
Tell us one super tip on getting investing in real estate.
I’m going to take this for the market that we are in. A tip for getting started in real estate investing, buy a house that someone else will feel comfortable renting. Think about it as, “Would I live here?” Do you want to be a slum lord or do you want to have pride of ownership? Do you need to do a little something to it? Can you get it rented, casting the wide net? When I look at a property, I say, “Would I want to live there?” That’s how I am.
We talk a lot about that on this show, buying a house in reverse order. Picking who you want to live in your house is first, and then buying a house to match that market. Most people do it where they buy the house first, and then they find somebody to rent it. I always say that your tenants are going to be the biggest factor and how blissful your life is. They are your biggest business partners. If you know who you want to be as business partners with, buy a house that they would enjoy living in. I love that. What is a strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?
As a successful investor, you have to know your numbers. It starts as a dream. “I want to own an investment property.” That’s the dream. You then have to get back into the process and go deeper into how do you be successful, “Am I going to make money on this investment?” I’m going to throw out the rule of 72, go look it up, “Am I going to make money on this property?”
Let’s say you need to do some remodeling to this property. You are walking through this property, and it needs some remodeling. You need to get educated in your mind when you are walking through that property. “This bathroom is $10,000. Hardware all throughout the house, $1,000.” You are adding up these gross numbers to say, “How much does this property need for me to fix it up to rent it to the avatar renter that I want to bring, and does it make sense?”
If you get those numbers, you need to make your offer price consistent with all those numbers. For your loan, you want to make sure it all fits into the budget that you feel is appropriate for the return on investment that you need to get over this property. You can’t control the economy but you can control your budget.
Be careful not to go over your budget because you fall in love with something. Would you agree?
I did this video on my YouTube channel called Decorating Faux Pas, which I love. You are going to go into a rental property. You are not going to put a gold-plated copper tub in there when your budget is $500 that you need to get on the Facebook marketplace to make it work. Facebook marketplace is a fabulous resource. I’m not even trying to plug them but to get some things like furnishings, if you need to furnish it, you don’t have to go and get expensive things. It’s an investment property. It’s not a dream house.
I love that you said that. Remember that it’s an investment property. It’s not your dream house. I’m going to use that one. Could you tell us one daily practice that you would say contributes to your personal success?
REI Mom: The one daily practice that contributes to success is being authentic, mindful, and service to people.
The one daily practice that contributes to my success is being authentic, being mindful, and being of service to people. My job is people. You never know where your business is going to come from. That’s the top, people are my business, and then underneath that big umbrella is follow-up. I went to a function and met 30 people. I come home, write down those names and something about them. I want to reach out and send a little note card in the next couple of days saying, “It was so great to see you again.” I mean it authentically.
You can see that grow exponentially in my sphere of influence and with the people that know me. I’m able to remember, “I need a good folk painter for this wall in my investment property. I bet I could call Debbie.” It’s your connections with people and resources that make me overall successful. Not only financially but emotionally, I’m not burned out. It’s an enjoyable lifestyle. I got past the hustle. I’m in the bliss hustle because I’m connecting with people, and I love to be of service, and it makes it fun. I’m having fun working. Am I working or am I having fun? I don’t know.
It looks like you are having fun.
I’m having fun now.
That’s awesome. Thank you for that. D’Nette, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for all that you’ve offered in this portion of the show.
Thank you for inviting me to be on your show and connecting with your readers. I hope they find something to help them move forward toward their goals and passions.
Thank you so much. You’ve offered plenty of nuggets that they can take with them. Ladies, we are going to be talking more in EXTRA. We are going to be talking about financial literacy for your children and how to teach them to fish. I don’t know if you know this saying, you probably do, “Teach someone to fish. They can live for a lifetime. Give them a fish. They only have it for a meal.”
We are going to be talking about that in EXTRA. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. We’ve got more. If not, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com, and you can sign up there. For those of you that are leaving us, thank you so much for joining D’Nette and I for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember that goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires.
With a dynamic background anchored in creativity and lifelong learning, D’Nette Wood has established an incredible 20+ year career as a Sotheby’s International Realty agent in the city of Albuquerque. An expert in luxury home sales, income-generating properties, and investments, D’Nette advises a range of clientele from new home buyers to retirees with complex estates.
With a keen eye for strategic decision-making, D’Nette’s background as a loan officer provides her the ability to understand how real estate decisions can impact her client’s long-term goals. She uses this mindset to be a strong consultative ally and offer a long-term view for those looking to buy real estate.
In addition, her family’s four generations in New Mexico have driven her appreciation for the state and developed a connection to the area’s rich history. As a result, D’Nette has participated in many local initiatives, supported non-profit boards, and was appointed to the New Mexico State Investment Council.
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Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
You have to avoid blaming others for what’s happening in your life because you’re always in the driver’s seat. It’s time to unlock your power and reclaim the life you desire and deserve. Listen to Moneeka Sawyer as she talks with Karen Abrams about unlocking your power and focusing on lightness and joy. Change is within you. What’s important is learning how to adapt, build resilience, and overcome challenges to embrace those changes. In this episode, Karen shares in-depth insights on believing in yourself while taking responsibility for the outcomes you’re experiencing. Tune in to learn more about confidence, self-worth, and shifting your beliefs.
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You’re ALWAYS In The Driver’s Seat: 3 Keys To Unlock Your Power With Karen Abrams
Real Estate Investing For Women
I am so excited to welcome to the show, Karen Abrams. Karen is a UCLA Educated Entrepreneur, Master Theta Healer, gifted intuitive, and international bestselling author. For many years, she has helped entrepreneurs and professionals with self-sabotaging habits to gain confidence, financial security, and personal fulfillment.
Karen works with clients worldwide to transform their subconscious beliefs and break free from trapped emotions, traumas, and limiting mindsets to build the financial and personal success they desire and deserve. She is known for integrating her energetic work with practical tools to bring about powerful results. Karen’s keen sense of humor, insights, and healing abilities have made her a rising star on radio, podcasts, and the international telesummit circuit in the Human Potential Movement. Karen, welcome to the show.
It’s so great to be back.
It’s so nice to see you. I met Karen in 2018 before the pandemic, and we’ve been keeping in touch. She did some sessions for me because I am a huge advocate of theta healing, and I learned it myself as a healer several years ago. I’ve been practicing my version of theta healing. I was so excited to see Karen’s focus and the way that she does it. She does it very differently than I do, which is awesome. It was healing for me because I got a completely different perspective on that. She was phenomenal. I wanted to share her with you. Karen, thanks for coming by to talk to my audience and share all your amazing wisdom.
Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be back in your happy space.
Thank you. Karen, let’s start by how did you become a healer. Give us the high-level version.
I watched a friend of mine change all of these major areas of her life with theta healing. I wanted to give you a background on her to know what was going on so you can relate to it. She’s a brilliant woman. She had a business degree from a great Ivy League school. She had big health issues that were very difficult for her to resolve. She had a long-term relationship that wasn’t going where she wanted it to go. She wasn’t making the money that she knew that she could.
She had a lot of self-sabotaging issues going on with her, like getting in fights with clients and her boss and all these things. Her friends were making $400,000 a year, and she was a fraction of that. She wasn’t able to turn it around by herself. She started working with the founder Vianna Stibal, who’s the Founder of ThetaHealing. I saw over a relatively short period of time that all of the areas of her life started to change in a big way. Her health got so much better. Her relationship transformed into the loving friendship that it was meant to be. She then started making money.
I went, “That’s interesting,” because that was an area that I was having a challenge with. When something like this work shows up so conventionally in somebody’s life, my antennas are like going, “What is that?” Vianna came out and did a beginning theta healing class. I love the class. I loved how she worked with the toughest people in the room. They changed in minutes with tough issues they were doing and looked years younger afterward.
I remember after the class I felt like I could breathe. It was a three-day class. I remember walking through my apartment doing the breaststroke like, “What is this space in front of me?” I don’t even understand it. I had anxiety for a couple of years. I’ve been working with a therapist for a few years, and we got it down from an 11 to a 3, but a 3 still meant that I woke up every day terrified and that my heart was beating out of my chest every day. Nobody knew because I was like, “How’s it going?” I’ve got a great smile. I was like, “This is cool,” but what was happening was something very different on the inside.
I realized in that moment of appreciating all that space that my anxiety was gone. It was the first time in a couple of years that my body was out of fight or flight. It blew me away. I flipped out. I signed up for every single class I could take. I didn’t even know how to describe what I had been through and what it was. I knew I had to do it. I had to do it for myself, my family, and my friends. That’s as far as I got.
A few weeks after this, some of the symptoms started coming back. For anxiety, it’s a little bit, but by then, I was already in class and taking classes. I shifted away. You know when something in your life is an issue, and it’s up to here, and that slowly comes down until you stop noticing that it’s there and you go on with your life. That’s what happened. I can’t tell you the day that left, but I can tell you it did. I doubled my income. My relationships got better.
I believe that this changed the foundation of my life. I’m in a very happy marriage. We’ve been together for many years. We have a wonderful kid. We have a tight close relationship. Financially, everything’s going great. It worked out. There’s always growth to be made and things we need to do. I can’t say I’ve reached Nirvana, and I’m on the hilltop looking down, but I can say that life is amazing, and I have this tool with me all the time, and anytime I need it. I thank God for that.
I love that story. I love how you talk about, “It’s great, but there’s always room for more.” I was at a mastermind, and she said, “For us, there’s the yumminess of more.” You can be so excited, happy, and delighted with where you are, but there is this yumminess of more. What’s that next evolution? What’s that next level of joy or that next level of intimacy in our relationships? I also love how you were talking about yourself and how it started above your head. You bring your head down, and it starts up above your head, the stress levels, and then you bring it down until it disappears from your heart.
In a lot of theta healing, and I had this with many of my clients in the early days, they wouldn’t even remember what they had come to me for. You would do this session, and they would be like, “I feel great.” You have to remind them at the end of the session, “This is what you came for. You said you were at a 7, 8, 10, or 12 of 10.” They’re like, “What? That’s not even an issue.” You then try to talk to them next time, and they don’t even remember. For you, it was a process, and you remember the process. With Theta, sometimes it disappears, and it maybe not even a part of your memory base. If you remember it, it’s like it happened to somebody else.
I had that same experience myself. People would say, “Moneeka, do you remember when?” I’m like, “I don’t remember that pain, trauma, and all those things,” which is interesting. I don’t know if you do this, Karen, but I got into this habit of having people write it down. You don’t want them affirming bad things, but I would like them to write it down in their own handwriting what they were trying to fix, so I get to hand it to them and say, “This is what happened. Tell me what you notice in your life around that.” I don’t want to say magical because that takes it out of the realm of science, but it does feel in many cases.
Unlock Your Power: A simple meditation allows you to connect to your inner wisdom source and also connect to your subconscious mind. When you make that connection, you’re able to access your bottom beliefs and change on the ones that really are messing with you and your life.
I agree. I remember I had a friend when I was taking all the classes. When we were towards the end of all of our education, she was like, “When I first met you, you didn’t even notice me,” I was, “That’s so weird. I don’t even understand that.” She’s like, “I remember we were eating together, and you were in your own world.”
Isn’t it funny? I understand. Tell us what theta healing is. Why don’t you describe it from your perspective?
It took me years to figure out how to do that. I don’t know if it did for you too.
It’s the thing with brainwaves.
When Vianna would describe it, I was so high in theta. I was like, “What did you say? I don’t understand.” What theta healing is a simple meditation that allows you to connect to your inner wisdom, source, whatever that name is for you, and also connect to your subconscious mind. When you make that connection, you’re able to access your bottom beliefs and change them, the ones that are messing with you and your life.
That is, “I’m nothing. I’m worthless. I’m unlovable. Nothing ever turns out for me.” With your permission, you can energetically shift these beliefs. Since we’re in the subconscious mind, we have access to all of these trapped emotions. There are things we’ve inherited, like trauma, anger, and betrayal. There are things that we went through of the same name, like sadness, grief, and all these things that have been there forever or for too long. When you’re in that theta state, your mind can talk to your body and help you release it. What gets replaced is unconditional love, understanding, and compassion.
What happens is when you take your most damaging beliefs and change them into your most powerful and positive ones, and when you replace these old toxic emotions with your most supportive ones, you start feeling better and lighter. You start making decisions in support of yourself. The dynamics in your relationships change in a loving way in your favor.
The cool thing at the end of all of that, which was cool enough already, is that those barriers to following the great advice that you’ve heard and to take the actions that you’ve needed to do to move your life forward will come down. You start moving forward with more ease and focus, like a new lightness and joy. That’s what I have noticed.
The way that I used to describe it is very technical. I was scientific. There are four different brainwaves, but theta is the deepest brainwave we have access to. It happens naturally in sleep, which is why we talk so much about it, where you get messages from the universe and your subconscious when you’re sleeping. I believe it’s the place we are in, REM. Is that true? Do I remember correctly?
It’s right when we’re accessing our dream state. It’s at that point when we’re starting to space out, and we don’t know where we are. We’re on the fence between two worlds.
That’s the dream state, so you’re already asleep. You’re already gone way past alpha which is the normal meditation state that we do. You’re about to go into REM. You’re already deeply asleep and about to go into this dream state. You’re wide open for the messages, but you’re not getting the messages, or your subconscious is getting the messages, or they’re working through those messages that you’ve delivered to it.
It’s this interesting place. I’ve done some interesting things. What happens when you’re in this place is your vibration rises, and you’re sending your vibration out into the world. Readers, I hope this isn’t too woo-woo for you, but this is how it works. You know that I’m all about bliss. You know that your vibration impacts what happens to you, what you’re delivering out into the world energetically, and how you receive and perceive things. That’s why we talk so much about bliss.
You can use theta to create that energetic field. It’s like a radio, where you’re receiving and delivering. You can deliver out into the world and have this impact. I would have these things that would happen. I would have a tenant in one of my houses that was having problems. I remember once I got a call from a tenant that said, “Moneeka, I have lost my job. I’m not going to be able to pay for three months.” I said, “That’s fine.” He’s been with me for a couple of years. “I’m not going to put pressure on you, but let’s see what we can do about this. I am very happy to continue to have you be my tenant.” He was not able to make it one month, but he made up for that.
What I had done is I did my own theta process on his healing around money. I did it remotely as a surrogate for him because he wasn’t open to it. He got a new job. The next time I saw him, he was uplifted. We can’t heal other people. I’m not trying to say that, but I was healing that business process or that business exchange of money.
Unlock Your Power: When you take your most damaging beliefs and you change them into your most powerful and positive ones, and replace these old toxic emotions with your most supportive ones, you’ll start feeling better and lighter and you start making decisions in support of yourself.
I’ve done this many times when I want to find the perfect tenant. I ended up with a house empty on December 1st. That’s the worst time to find a new tenant. I did a theta process and had a tenant within two days. It’s so interesting that we can use this not just in our relationships, our money, and our beliefs, but it’s the energy we send out into the world and the expectation that we magnetize back to us. It is a phenomenal tool on so many levels. Does that resonate with what you’ve experienced, too?
Absolutely. I remember I had a business mentor who said, ‘”Business is one of the most powerful vehicles for self-improvement because whatever we do or don’t do, it comes back to us.” The other description of theta is it’s like focused prayer. We’re connecting to that energy that makes everything happen and putting something positive into the mix. When we were talking about a cycle, what you feel inside you emanates out, and then the universe reflects that back. When you go into worry, which is this focus on a bad outcome. “What if this happens?” If you went into that space, it’s like, “He’ll never be able to pay. This guy that I love, I have to kick out.”
We all have a reaction. That’s okay. We got to come back from that afterward and go, “What is this triggering?” Get to the deepest part of that. Maybe there was an original wound, something going on, or something about being disappointing because you’re a people pleaser. You get to the bottom of that, and it opens up that space also for somebody else to move freely.
Everybody’s got a role in the family like, “Here’s the black sheep. This is the one who never makes it and can’t rub two nickels together.” Every time you look or think of them, you have this low vibrational signal you send out, like, “It’s okay to stay this way. This is how I expect you to be.” When you open that up and get yourself out of the mix, it frees them up to do what they need to do.
They do their own path. The thing is, we don’t want to be infringing on someone else’s path. Everybody’s here for their own learning, growing, or whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing. As long as we deliver angst, worry, or expectation, we’re delivering our interference into their path. I understand what you’re saying about that. The result that you get is not always what you expect.
Have Faith
The universe works in interesting ways. It’s not always exactly what you expect. The next step to that is having faith that it’s happening as it’s supposed to. It’s not necessarily how I expected, but as it’s supposed to be. That’s helped me to go through that theta process, too, when it didn’t happen instantaneously, but to know that, “This was the first step. Now, here’s the next step.” It’s like that.
Let’s say he didn’t get a job immediately, but something else happened so that you could go, “I found a grant for him.” You don’t know how it’s going to show up. Even at first, it looks like contrast and something that appears negative. It’s like, “Maybe the solution to that thing is the thing that’s going to get all of this done.”
Everyone you bring here, I’ll take a good educated guess that they’ve had some major thing happen to them that caused them to do the amazing work they were doing. In the beginning, it was the worst thing ever or somewhere around there, but they made it the best thing ever. Was it really that? We don’t know what we’re looking at. When we judge it in one way, we’re holding it in a space too tight of a box, and we got to open that up.
We can talk about this forever. Let’s talk about the driver’s seat. You talk a lot about you can be in the driver’s seat of your life always. What do you mean by that?
We’re always in the driver’s seat, even if we feel like we’re in the passenger seat, because it’s your life. You’re living the consequences of your life all the time, whether you’ve got a bossy partner who makes all the decisions for you or you make them yourself. This is about you. I want to give you an example. There’s an amazing statistic out there that you probably know that women lose up to $1.5 million in lifetime earnings because they’re afraid to ask for a raise. When they ask for a raise, they typically ask for 30% less than men.
We live with those results. We live with that vacuum. If we don’t fill it, we have this income vacuum that won’t take care of us when we’re older, yet if we decide and know that we’re in the driver’s seat, we can change that around and fill that space with something that’s going to support us when we need it. When I think of real estate, is there any business that has more of that in it? The decisions you make, don’t make, and the actions you take and don’t take turn up in a property, no property, worst property, or in the best. As you said, the best tenant is a nightmare. All of those things are always going on. We have to know that in order for us to come from a different and more powerful place to create what we want to create.
That was so powerful. I want the readers to sink into that. You are in the driver’s seat. You may feel like you’re in the passenger seat. I’m going to repeat this because you said it so well. You may have a bossy partner that you think is in the driver’s seat, but you are driving the car, and that is your life. You picked that partner. In your car, that person is the backseat driver. They’re in the passenger seat in your life. Not your life together, whatever that looks like, but your life.
I released a panel where I talked about conscious leadership and how we’re all leaders. It’s that same thing. We’re all leaders in this thing that we’re calling our life. We’re making our own decisions, even if that decision is to turn over all of our power to somebody else. That’s a decision we make, and that is you being the leader in your own life. That is you being the driver in your own car.
“I’ve decided that I don’t want that responsibility. I’m going to turn it over to somebody else.” Maybe we haven’t made that consciously. That’s maybe how we’ve been trained to live in the world, but you are still making that choice. We always have a choice. We’re always a driver in our own world. As I said in that panel, we’re always the leader of our own life, which can show up in many different ways. Talk to me about being in the driver’s seat in a more meaningful way, rather than, “You just are.”
Unlock Your Power: When you lose faith in yourself, it’s going to reflect back out in the outer world and show you in a dissatisfying deal and unsatisfying client, whatever that is.
Make Yourself A Priority
Here’s the way you can do this in meaningful and empowering ways. The first thing you need to do is take 100% responsibility for your life. That’s where meaningful change happens. If we don’t do that and you’re always like, “No, it’s not,” you can’t be the victim here. You’re the one who’s painting the picture, so that’s first. The second thing you have to do is you have to create me time. There has to be a place in your life where you’re at the top of the list. “I am a wife and a mother of a teenager. I am a daughter of an elderly parent with health issues.” I know when I’m 4th or 5th on the list. That has to happen sometimes, but we have to create that time where we’re at the top of the list because it’s easiest for us to break promises to ourselves.
I don’t want to break a promise to my kid because she looks at me and goes, “You promised.” I don’t want to do that to my partner. I don’t want to do that to other people and see that look, but I can’t see the look on my face, but it happens. What happens is if I become disappointed in myself and break promises, I lose faith in myself and my ability to carry out my promises, which breeds dissatisfaction. This brings us back to what we were talking about before, which is if that’s what’s going on inside, it’s going to reflect back out in the outer world and show you a dissatisfying deal and unsatisfying client, whatever that is. We want to have that me time. That’s very important.
You need to have something that keeps you grounded and centered that takes you away from your day-to-day business, “I’m doing emails. I’m doing calls. I’m with clients.” You have to have something that’s completely away from that. Meditation is very important to me. That helps you stay grounded and centered in the face of chaos if that happens. Since we had COVID, we know that can happen. When things are great, and the skies are blue, it helps you soar. You can be happy for no reason. What’s better than that?
You talked about 100% responsibility. I want to go back to that. I talk a lot about me time on this show. As a women’s show and as women, we are the masters of taking care of everybody else and letting ourselves down. Building that faith in our own selves and keeping our promises to ourselves is as important. The thing is to make promises that you can keep. You’re going to make a promise to your child that you’re going to keep. You’re going to make a promise to your partner that you know you can keep.
When you make promises to yourself, make sure you’re making promises you know you can keep. In other words, don’t say, “I’ve got no me-time for myself in three years. Now, every day, I’m going to have two hours for a bubble bath.” You’re never going to be able to live up to that. It’s like, “I can do a five-minute meditation now because I haven’t done anything for myself for so long. I’m trying to build those muscles,” but you need to make commitments to yourself that you can keep and then keep them because you need to learn how to trust yourself.
This is important in business, too, because when you’re out there and don’t trust yourself, how are you going to make your own decisions? You’re going to doubt everything that you do. You’re going to doubt your promises to others, your ability to make decisions, and your ability to deal with the consequences of those decisions. That’s the biggest fear of all. It’s, “I’m going to get this property. What if it turns out to be this nightmare, and I can’t deal with it?” If you trust yourself, you can deal with it. You want to build that trust. This piece of 100% responsibility is hard. Would you say that you found that this is the hardest piece?
Blame is the ultimate self-victimization. “The economy is bad. We’re in inflation. I can’t buy a house. Look at interest rates have gone up. I hate the president. This country is going to hell,” whatever it is, I don’t believe those things. I’m saying that this is what I hear. There’s so much out there that can victimize us that we have no control over.
We can vote. Some of us get politically involved, but we feel victimized by that. That’s the macro level, but then in our own lives, it’s like, “My husband’s bossy. My children are needy. My dog always is at the hospital.” There are all these problems, “I don’t have control.” That is self-victimization. You don’t necessarily have control, but what you do have control over is how you choose to respond. That choice to respond is what you have to take 100% responsibility for.
When you make a choice, and then there’s an outcome, you can be victimized by, “I made that choice. It didn’t work out.” Make the decision or the choice that you see this outcome, “That wasn’t awesome. What other choice can I make that will bring a better outcome?” We feel victimized by what’s going on out there. We can if we choose to, or we can choose to respond in ways that support our own bliss and joy in our own lives.
I agree with that. One of the things that I talk about in a session, and I’m sure you know this too, is the difference between responsibility and blame. Blame is a judgment, and it puts you in a corner. You have to get out of the blame. “I can’t get out of that corner because I’m bad. I did a dumb thing. How could I be so blockheaded? I keep pelting myself in that corner.”
You have to get out and heal that. All responsibility is, “Yes, I’m here. I did this. Every decision I’ve made got me here. If I’m that powerful, I can go anywhere. I just ended up here, but I can go somewhere else.” It’s a little directional change. I always talk about it like if you had a cannon pointed at one village and put it 3 degrees West, it would eventually hit a whole other place. That’s what we do. We make these minor changes that down the road will become huge, and we’ll end up in a whole different wonderful place because of it.
They’re little course corrections.
We do them. It’s life.
Unlock Your Power: If you don’t have a really great self-worth of your self-sabotaging, that’s what’s going to show up in properties. You’re not going to get the properties you want, but if you do that inner work to clear yourself up and be in that blissful, joyful space, then you’re going to create that on the outside world.
It’s the way that it is. I took a class on flying a helicopter. It was so hard. Part of it is because those propellers don’t have wings, so you’re in constant course correction. You can’t even hold it straight because it will go the wrong way. In our lives, that’s a fairly dramatic view, but it is true. I say this in my book, Choose Bliss. We’re constantly course-correcting. From the moment we wake up in the morning, we decide what time we’re getting up, whether we’re going to push the snooze button, what we’re going to do with that time when we get out of bed, which side we’re going to get out of the bed, “Are we going to push these sheets back? Am I going to pet the dog? Am I going to run to the restroom?”
In five minutes of the alarm going off, it’s all these choices that we’ve made. Most of them are not conscious choices, but I’m saying that we are constantly on course correct. Each one of those choices could have been different. I could have chosen not to snooze the alarm. I could have chosen I wanted to drink some water first instead of running to the restroom. There are a lot of choices that I could make, even in the first minutes of our day, that will course correct and set me up for success.
It’s a thing that we, as humans, are constantly doing. It’s something we do anyways. Why not see it as your responsibility and keep that course correct in a way that’s going to support you as best as you can? You see the consequences and the results. If they’re not what you like, you course-correct some more. You do something a little bit differently. Tell me some examples of some of your clients that have stepped into this power of full responsibility, being in the driver’s seat, and those things.
I’ll talk first with a client I have worked with a lot. She has a tutoring business. I worked with her for a long time. She was towards the beginning of her business. Her gift was to teach young children. She could speak their language and loved them, but she didn’t have a formal education. It created this insecurity because she was going into the educational business. At that space, the parents are college educated or higher, and all of this stuff, and she’s coming into these environments. She also had very serious health issues that affected her memory, concentration, focus, and energy, which could happen at any moment. She had to be taking care of herself constantly.
As we said, business is a motivation for self-improvement. “What’s happening this week? What’s going on with you?” It was the insecurity that was playing. We would work on what are the root causes of all of that right at this moment. She could learn from it, let it go, and be like, “Cool.” She could work with her clients better. If she had a health issue, it’s the same thing, “What does it remind you of? What’s the root issue?” We would do the same thing, find the root issues, heal them, and move on. She went from an upper 5-figure business to a 6-figure business to a 7-figure business. She is looking to create this as an 8-figure business, and I have no doubt that she will get there. You can see the evolution. It was cool.
We’ve got another one who is in a relationship. This couple was in that tough spot. We all have those years where they’re hard or something. They kept disappointing, angering, and triggering each other to the point where they fought all the time. They had a kid, so the kid is in the middle of this and is not having a great time here.
I saw them separately. It was like, “What is your partner triggering in you? What’s the wound your partner’s triggering you? Is it by saying, ‘Pass the salt,’ or, ‘You didn’t get that done?'” We found all of those root causes and healed them, which gave them each more compassion for themselves. They were no longer triggered by what the other person was saying because they were coming from a different place, and they got it. It saved their marriage. They turned into this tight little happy family unit. They’re thriving even now. It’s wonderful.
I have one in real estate one that I wanted to share with you too. I was working with a guy in commercial real estate who had some issues with his dad. We all have an issue with a parent somewhere. We got to the root of that thing. We’re able to heal it. He was able to forgive and have this beautiful outcome with him. Right after that, he had this $10,000 deal fall in his lap that came out of nowhere in real estate. He was like, “Okay.” It opened up a space that he didn’t know was filled with this anger, resentment, and withholding of love. Those are some of the amazing things that have happened when you can open up and receive this stuff.
I love the relationship thing that can help with partners, business partners, negotiation, and all of that stuff. It’s amazing. First of all, readers, have you loved this? I love theta, and I love Karen. I hope you’ve loved it too. In EXTRA, we’re going to be doing a sample session, and the focus is going to be being money worthy. I’m looking forward to that. That will be fun. How can people get in touch with you?
It’s pretty easy. You can go to my website, which is ThinkTheta.com. Contact me from there. I have my phone number and my email there, which is [email protected], so it’s easy for you to reach me.
She also has a free gift which is at BlissfulInvestor.com/Theta. Can you tell us a little bit about what the gift is?
This is a theta meditation that I call Enough Already. This is about letting you know what it feels like to have all of your needs met. When you come to the table with all of your needs met, you have the discernment to know what’s in front of you. “Is this a good deal? Is this a bad deal?” You’re not coming from that vacuum of fear, worry, or insecurity. You’re coming from this place of being completely sated and going, “That sounds great. That’s good. I’m going to pass on that.”
The more you fill yourself up with everything you need and the feeling of it, the more you will create it in the outside world. It’s wonderful. I also suggest very wholeheartedly that you do this right before you go to bed because whatever you end your evening with, it’s going to marinate in your subconscious mind for another eight hours. You might as well get the most bang for your free buck here.
I love that. You can go to BlissfulInvestor.com/Theta. You can take a look at that, but thank you so much for that gift.
Unlock Your Power: Life happens for you, not to you. That’s going to help you react in ways that are really constructive and help you move into that space of creating the outcomes that you really desire.
You are so welcome.
Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?
I am.
Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.
Regain Self-Worth
You got to remember this. Your net worth only goes as high as your self-worth. As we’ve been talking about before, if you don’t have great self-worth and if you’re self-sabotaging, that’s what’s going to show up. You’re not going to get the properties you want, but if you do that inner work to clear yourself up and be in that blissful and joyful space, then you’re going to create that in the outside world. It’s going to come to you.
What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?
That is about getting comfortable with change. As we learned from COVID, we need to be able to pivot. We might not have to pivot all the way around, but enough to make that happen. Change is always with us. We saw a global version of it. We’ll never know if that could happen again, but knowing that you’re comfortable with it is going to build your resilience. If it builds your resilience, it’s also going to be this place that’s fodder for more creativity. Creativity is the mother of invention. It’s great.
It also gives you confidence that you can handle anything like what we were talking about. What is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?
I’m going to give you two because I already gave you the one that’s the biggie, which is meditation. Meditation saves me. When COVID hit and everything shut down, it’s the thing that saved me from staying calm and go, “What needs to get done?” This is the new little thing I wanted to give you. We also need little energetic practices. I always say metaphorically, “Stub our toe,” and we go, “Ouch,” and it starts to ruin our day. We need to be able to shift back into that positive energy.
Here’s one easy thing that you can do anytime that happens to you. Let’s say something bad happens right at the moment, and you don’t get this client, or a deal falls through. At that moment, close your eyes and say, “Thank you,” and then ask the question, “How does it get any better than this?” What happens is when you go into the thank you, you’re going into gratitude. That’s the receiving mode. When you are grateful, you can’t be mad because you’re grateful. Even when it happens, it’s getting you out of anger or those things. You just keep saying it.
That, “How does it get any better than this,” is training your brain at that moment. Instead of saying, “What could be worse?” which is a lot of places we go to and get pessimistic quickly, you’re focusing on what’s going to be the better thing that happens next. That’s going to bring about a better outcome and bring about your actions, which will manifest a better outcome. It’s an easy thing you can have in your pocket at any time. It’s great. I use it all the time.
That’s so interesting. I love that. I’m going to try that. This has been so amazing. Karen, do you have parting words for my readers?
One of the most important things to remember is an old saying, but it’s a good one, “Life happens for you, not to you.” That’s going to help you react in ways that are constructive and help you move into that space of creating the outcomes that you desire. As I was saying, we don’t know if this event changed our whole life and, on that day, which might’ve been the worst day of our life, turned into the best thing that ever happened to us. When you remember that in the moment of something going on, it could change the way you react to it. What you were saying, and as a mentor of mine said, “How you react will determine your existence.”
There are so many tweetable quotes in this show. Thank you so much, Karen. That was so valuable. Readers, stay tuned. We’ve got more in EXTRA. We’re going to be doing a sample theta on being money worthy, which I love. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. If you are not, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com, and you can get this there for free for the first few days. After that, you can subscribe if you feel like it’s valuable content.
For those of you that are leaving us, thank you so much for joining Karen and me for this portion of the show. You know how much I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, remember goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next episode.
Karen Abrams is a UCLA educated, entrepreneur, Master Theta Healer, relationship expert, and gifted intuitive. She is also an award-winning international bestselling author. She works with professional women to transform their subconscious beliefs and self-sabotaging behaviors to create new habits, mindsets and actions that bring about personal and financial fulfillment. Graduated in psychology.
Karen has honed the skills critical to Theta Healing, and as a student of meditation, her insight and intuition allow her to identify and pinpoint root causes of long-standing issues to create new understandings, forgiveness and strong inner resources. She has worked with thousands of clients worldwide who are at a crossroads in their lives- helping them heal the underlying causes of their issues and get clarity and understanding on how to move forward from there. Karen is dedicated to helping women break free from living in survival mode so they can bring about fulfilled, healthy and balanced lives.
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Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Leadership has different styles, but it should always focus on connecting with people most effectively while living joyfully. Tune in and be a conscious leader by listening to Moneeka Sawyer as she takes the hot seat opposite Catherine Rowan. Moneeka shares deep insights on discovering the beauty inside of you and focusing on affirmations so you can clear those blocks and live peacefully. She also explains different chakras and evolving through them. Learn how you can create a whole sense of power, energy, and excitement for your business and your life.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Be The Conscious Leader In Your REI Business And Life
Real Estate Investing For Women
I’m on a summit for conscious leadership and the title of my talk was Tantra for Leadership. If it’s a fun opportunity to share about the different styles of leadership. It seems that most of us here think of leadership as a very masculine style. That’s what we see and think we need to be. It turns out that there are many different kinds of leadership and many of them are very feminine. There are types of leadership that we are very good at as women and they help us to stand in our power and be more powerful in everything that we do.
A lot of people think that they are not leaders. I’m not the type of person that stands up and leads people, but that’s not what leadership is all about. We are leaders for our children and family. We are leaders when we are trying to get something done, maybe in a PTA, in a club, or at work. We play leadership roles in a lot of different areas of our life. Understanding that you are a leader and what type of leader you are helps you to stand in the power and amplify all of those great assets that leadership style has.
We discover that type of leadership is great. There are all these things that are amazing about it and so you feel good. For me, it’s a big part of my bliss to understand what type of leader I am, what turns me on, what excites me, and what my style is. I’m not trying to be something other than what I naturally in but I can still be a leader.
It’s been a part of my bliss in my life but also it has helped to make me powerful in my business. It helped me to be more decisive and powerful to negotiate more strongly to understand myself. This conversation is relevant because it is going to show up in your real estate world and I wanted to share it with you. Enjoy this talk and I love to hear your feedback. I love to hear if you want to email me and let me know what you thought of it, that would be awesome. Enjoy the talk.
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My guest is Moneeka Sawyer. She is a personal success coach and tantra energy expert who has been coaching executives in Silicon Valley for over ten years. Her unique approach to leadership has helped clients from artists and solopreneurs to high-tech CEOs discover their own personal leadership style and create a whole new sense of power, energy, and excitement about their businesses and their lives. She loves the power, playfulness, and daring of using tantra to make us our best selves. She teaches how to understand your own innate energetic makeup from proving communications, creating more fulfilling relationships, and being a more effective leader in all areas of life. Welcome, Moneeka.
It’s so nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
I’m looking forward to this conversation with you. I love the way you describe your work in your bio and that you are even talking about tantra, leadership, and connection. Maybe we could start to define for the audience what tantra is. Let’s see what it is to you, Moneeka.
When people hear that word, especially here in the Western world, they have all these weird ideas. It’s not weird, but what we have been taught. We think it’s about sexy or kinky. Let me clear up traditionally what tantra is and what we are talking about. Tantra is the yoga of living. It was created thousands of years ago and it was first documented in India.
People in the Indian caste system who were not considered yogis are Brahmans, which is the highest caste, and those caste members had the inherent God-given right according to the culture to pursue enlightenment and spirituality, but that wasn’t something that the rest of us had access to, the normal person.
Tantra, the yoga of living, was created to give access to enlightenment to everybody else, those of us that wanted it but were in the lower caste. I hate to talk about the caste system but that’s how it all started. When we talk about the yoga of living, what that means is utilizing every daily thing that we do as an opportunity for spiritual growth.
In those days, it might be we were working in the field. We were milking a cow. We were taking care of our children. We were cooking. We were praying. We were having sex. It’s all of those things. Every single one of those was an opportunity to slow down, be mindful, and get access to the spiritual enlightenment inside of us and to the unknown knowledge of what it’s like to be connected and live joyfully.
I will often say it to people and people laugh at me all the time, “Everything that I do is a spiritual experience,” and they are like, “Uh-huh.” Even doing the dishes, if you slow down, feel the warm water, the bubbles, things moving over the plate, and the metal. You try it. You feel the softness of the towel. Suddenly, this is a mindful experience. Suddenly, it’s so sensual and live that makes you feel good.
That’s what life is as a tantra yoga practitioner. The reason that it’s become so sexy in the Western world is that sex is a piece of that and that’s exciting to talk about. Our sexual energy is the most powerful energy of human beings. Redirecting that and transmuting that helps you to achieve a lot of this tantra fully coming alive thing, but it’s not the only practice. It’s one of many.
The Conscious Leader: The yoga of living means utilizing every daily thing we do as an opportunity for spiritual growth. Every single one of those was an opportunity to slow down, be mindful, and access the spiritual enlightenment inside us.
Tantra is a practice for householders and also great for women as well. There have been so many spiritual traditions in the past that have elevated men above women and tantra doesn’t do that.
As a matter of fact, with tantra, we worshiped the goddess. Historically, when the Western world came to India and started to notice this, they would say that they had these sex temples. It was horrifying. They stopped them and they shut them down. The sex temple was about the male serving the goddess because the woman creates.
The woman has the children. The woman has creativity. The woman is the pillar of the household and society. These temples were about worshiping the goddess and men learning how to do that. When they came home, they treated her with love and respect. They cherished her and build her up so that she could be the pillar she was meant to be.
That’s a whole lovely conversation for both women and men with regard to the place of the role of women and also the place of the feminine in our society. We live in a society, more or less, worldwide where the feminine has been suppressed if we look at it from the context of how these were looked at in these ancient traditions.
It’s also true in India as well. Even though people might do religious practices and honor the goddess in that sense, it doesn’t always translate into how they do that in human society in terms of how women are treated. There is a lot for us to learn from that with regard to the role of the masculine and feminine and for the inner feminine to be honored in both men and women, which is something that the world seems to sorely need. Tell me more about how you see tantra associated with leadership.
I would like to start by asking anybody who’s reading this. When you think of a leader, what is it that you think about? Who is it that you think about? In the Western world, we usually think about the President of the United States or the Prime Minister in England. We’ll think about these sorts of people, even the President of India.
You think about that person that they are bold and big. They love talking, they have opinions, and everybody gets to hear their opinion. They do have the love of their country in mind, but the way that they present themselves is powerful and confident. “I have an opinion. You get to hear it,” type of person. In reality, that is not the only kind of leadership. There is a whole range of leadership.
When I talk about tantra, my big thing is clearing the chakras. That’s the base of my tantra practice. If you don’t know what the chakras are, we have energy centers in the body that move and create energy to support us in different areas of our life. We have over 200 of them, but, for the most part, we focus on the seven, which I call the pillar of perfection.
In the pillar of perfection, we have our seven chakras and they represent different parts of us. For instance, the root chakra is all about safety. It’s about being rooted. It’s about trust. Many people don’t have that handled, so they are not able to take care of the rest of them because it all builds on top of each other.
When you talk about leadership, once you start to clear those chakras, you start to become in tune with where your leadership is coming from. Most of the leaders that we see in the world that we think of as leaders are coming from the first chakra the root, or from the power chakra, which is the third one. It’s all about power, presenting, and how they stand, but there are so many other different kinds of leadership. I have got a chapter that I wrote on this. Can I share with you some of the different leadership styles to make this real?
That would be wonderful. Yes, please.
Red is the root chakra. Those are the pillars of society. They are solid, reliable, and stable. Those sorts of leaders were George Washington, Bill Gates, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Orange, which is the sacral chakra, is those who lead with creativity, playfulness, and joy. Those are people like Princess Diana or Ellen DeGeneres.
Yellow is the power chakra, and that’s the third one. These are powerful, confident, and inspire awe. These are people like Oprah Winfrey. I like to say Jean-Luc Picard if you like Star Trek, but he was the epitome of this person in a beautiful way, and then Margaret Thatcher. Green is the heart chakra, and these are the people who lead with connection, collaboration, and compassion. This would be Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa.
Blue, these are people that lead with their words like JFK, Martin Luther King, and those types of people. Indigo is for the third eye, and those are people who lead with knowledge like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thomas Edison. White is those who lead through elevating the spirit. These are people like Mahatma Gandhi or Maya Angelou.
You see leadership shows up in so many different ways, yet we think it only shows up in one way, and because of that, we don’t see ourselves as leaders and we can’t step into our personal leadership. That’s why when I talk about tantra, I talk about who were you. Fill yourself up. Clear all your chakras and discover where your leadership lies then you can fully step into your power. Does that make sense?
It makes absolute sense. That’s such a nice way of looking at leadership to point out the different styles, like different chakras. You mentioned clearing the chakras. I’m sure there might be people reading here saying, “How do we do that?”
That’s its own whole class. It’s been a lifelong practice for me. I do want to say they will never be fully clear and it’s like brushing your teeth. They get muggy. You have to continue to clear them every single day like you brush your teeth.
A teacher of mine once said, “Have you ever heard of a house that only needs 3-in-1s?”
The Conscious Leader: The woman creates. They are the ones who have children and creativity. The woman is the pillar of the household and society.
It gets dusty. That’s so true. I love that. To clear the chakras in tantra, we talk about breath, movement, and sound, and then I add visualization. You utilize those 3 or 4 elements to open the chakras, and I have some meditations that you can do. You can find them online. The chakras work from the bottom up. If you are living a spiritual life, you will clear each chakra, and then each chakra opens you to clearing the next chakra. You go from the bottom up. People often think in spirituality, you want to start from the top down.
The problem is that even if you are fully open at the top, you can’t ground it and bring it into your life and be fully activated unless everything below it is clear and available to receive. You want to start from the bottom up. There are practices where you start by focusing on the chakra that you want to focus on. I always start at the root.
You take a few deep breaths. You focus on the color and chant a sound for that particular chakra. If you see it as a rosebud so that one’s red. You see it as a red rosebud, and then as you do the sound and the breath, you watch the rosebud. That visualization allows a clearing of that chakra, and if you do it enough, it stays open. It gets wider, more available, more receiving, and more stable. It becomes the foundation for the rest and you do that for each of them.
In a practice, I will do all of them. I start at the bottom and work all the way up. You’ll notice in your life that things start to shift. When you are red chakra, your root chakra feels solid, open, and clean. You feel stable and confident. You trust yourself and the world more, even if you have reasons to not, you open up so that you can see those things.
If the second chakra is opened, this should set the sacral one. You start to be more creative. I remember when I went through one of these tantra classes. Suddenly, I came home and I was starting to do beadwork and painting. I didn’t even relate it to the sacral chakra, but there was creativity. It suddenly entered my life in a new way. It’s like that. You breathe into them, you open them, you visualize that rose opening, and then you get to experience in the world what starts to happen. Is that helpful?
That’s very helpful. I’m wondering if I could add something in there. When we talk about the clearing process, we are also talking about clearing out emotional patterns, wounding patterns, defensive patterns, and reactive patterns that no longer serve. As leaders, we are at our strongest if we haven’t got all our own stuff in the way.
There are many different ways to clear a lot of the ugliness that’s happened to us in life that sticks to our insides. Many practitioners will focus on the blocks. I come from a place of wanting to focus on bliss. For me, I want to focus on all that’s good and all our potential so that eventually, it pushes out all that other stuff because it can’t exist in the same space. Where some practitioners will help us to clear those blocks by approaching, “What are the wounds?” I approach, “What are the affirmations? What is the beauty inside of you that you can now focus on and make it so big that there’s no room for anything else?”
There’s the other side of some spiritual practices, which are very wound-clearing focused. We can get addicted to what Eckhart Tolle calls the Pain Body. It’s never going to be completely cleared. If you are that way focused, you are going to find some new stuff to clear.
What’s important for people to understand is that we came to this planet to have a series of experiences to create evolution for ourselves. Those experiences are often not awesome, sometimes horrifying and they rest in our bodies. Our mission is to find ways to clear that and stand in our power in spite or even because of those things.
Understand that this is a lifelong process. We were built to create, to evolve through the chakras and that clearing and our capacity to be fully human our entire lives. You will never be fully clear, but you can be clear for yourself, and then you keep working. That’s why it’s a lifelong practice like you say, “You have to keep dust in your house. It doesn’t stop.” As you work on that, you evolve higher.
The other thing I was trying to think of is it has to be a lifelong practice, too, because we live in an evolving universe. We don’t live what’s outside of us that isn’t any more static than we are. How can there be a place where we don’t still have the potential to evolve if the universe is evolving? We talked at the beginning about tantra and its associations with sexuality and sexual energy. We need to talk about sexual energy because the people who are reading are interested in that.
It’s the most exciting word. If you read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, you will notice where he talks about sexual transmutation, when we talk about sex, especially in many Western cultures. It’s true even in the Eastern cultures now, but it wasn’t always. We don’t talk about sex as good energy that we can utilize.
You had said before that in India, that’s what all the leaders do, but it’s not just India. It’s everywhere. Think about who was interviewed by Napoleon Hill. It was Henry Ford. It was all of these big moguls. They talked about sexual transmutation because sex is the significantly biggest and strongest human force that we have access to.
Why not utilize that to improve our lives, our powerfulness, and our leadership? True leaders understand this. We get irritated that they are out there having so much sex because so many of them haven’t mastered this skill of how to transmute it and to use it for the betterment of our life and the betterment of others. It’s been studied forever, but we don’t use it.
Let’s talk a little bit about how to use it and why that’s good, if you think about when you are first in love. What is that? Some of it is a compassionate love connection. Some of it is lust. Our sexual juices are flowing. Have you ever noticed, when you are in that place, how much more creative you are? How much more kind you are? You are nice to everybody. The world is beautiful and all you see is beauty.
You are creating, you are doing more at work, and your relationships are better. That’s what it does for us, and that is sexual energy. What if we could live like that? If we get access to that sexual energy, we can. Things are going to evolve. You don’t want to be in that spastic and love energy all your life. It can be exhausting. You want access to what brings you confidence, passion, compassion, love for life, feeling fully alive, and all of those things.
There’s another thing that’s important. People think that sexual energy is only created through sex. That’s not true. Mine started when I was sixteen. I didn’t have sex until many years after that. The practice can be a solo practice. It’s important to understand that if you are tuning in to your sexual energy in that way and utilizing it, you don’t want to muddle it by having sex with the wrong people. Bad energy, while you are having sex, will muddle your own energy. It’s so much more work than the cleanup after that.
It’s always been imperative. Anybody that I am intimate with is tantrically trained or has an interest in it. That energy has to be a match for me because it’s that important. You may not have that, but understand you have to take the responsibility for anybody that you have an intimate relationship with. You need to be responsible for the energy that is coming to you and for clearing that. That’s my tantra sex talk, but let’s talk about how we could use it.
The Conscious Leader: It’s really important for people to understand that we came to this planet to have a series of experiences and create evolution for ourselves.
The sexual energy comes from your sacral chakra. It’s the second chakra. I have a gift for your people that talk about how to clear the sacral chakra. That will be what I will be giving everybody, but let me give you a little bit of a highlight. You are going to want to breathe into the sacred chakra. Take a deep breath and have it go down to where you feel it’s tickling the back of your belly buttons. You want it to go all the way down, and then you are going to let it out, and then do it again.
Take white light and breathe that down into your nose and the back of your belly button, and then release it through your mouth. You may notice that white goes in and gray comes out. If you can visualize that, you are already starting to do clearing with the breath. On your third breath, you are going to take that in and hold it. You are going to meditate as you visualize a yellow rose opening. While you pull that out when you are breathing out, I want you to visualize the energy that opened, flushing through your entire body, all of your chakras, as you are breathing it out.
Now, you’ve got clean energy and you want to wash your whole body with that yummy clean energy. That’s a super simple practice you could do. What does that take us? It will take 15 to 30 seconds that will clear that energy, invigorate you, and put you in a wash with the beauty and excitement of that joyful sexual energy that we can utilize.
I will do that when I’m losing focus or creativity. I’m a dancer, so I do that if my dance isn’t working quite right. There are a lot of times that I utilize that, and the chant that I use where the vomit started with a V. That will open up that chakra. You are going to do better if the first one is open first. That’s how you get direct access to our sexual energy.
There are all of those creative possibilities that come with that. Let’s talk a little bit more about how often there are various stories associated with leaders, sexual misdemeanors, and things like that. Whether we are questioning if they were practitioners of tantra, they were followers, and had some training, whether that would happen because they would have other places to use it. It all comes into the whole conversation about integrity and leadership, too.
It’s important for all of us to understand that we take responsibility for our own leadership. You show up as the leader that you are and want to be. Many people think about leaders and think, “I don’t want to be that person. I’m not that person. I don’t aspire to that.” You don’t have to. Your leadership style is individual to you.
As you step into your power in your leadership, you get to decide what that looks like. How much integrity do you have? What are you bringing to your power? What do you speak? Is it kind or necessary? Does it improve the world? All of those things that you do as a leader are your responsibility. You don’t have to be like any of those people, any of those impressions that you might have.
If you see all leaders as sexually promiscuous, it doesn’t mean that you need to be sexually promiscuous. You could utilize that energy in ways that I have mentioned and through other studies. Don’t be so quick to judge what’s possible as a leader based on what we see out there in the world. Take responsibility for who you are going to be when you step into your power.
I would love to talk more about power from this point of view, the tantric view of power. One of the talks that I have given in some events is where I will talk about the feminine as power because, in tantra, all energy or power is Shakti, which is the feminine. It is a different view of power than we have in the West, where power generally has more masculine connotations. There are more men in power.
We have these many situations where if you say, “People are put off perhaps at times from seeking positions of power because of the abuses of power that they see.” It’s either because they think, “I’m not like that,” or perhaps they fear that they are like that if they are in that position. I’m wondering if you had any more comments on the subject of power with regard to tantra.
Thank you for bringing it up because I had forgotten to mention some of this stuff. We do think of leadership as masculine and understand that it does not have to be. It’s only what’s being modeled. Even female leaders often tend to focus on their masculine traits so that they can step into leadership in a world of male-dominated leadership. It’s what people understand, trust, and believe we need to be.
I have paid a huge price for my own leadership role because I have refused to step into that because, for me, I understand that I will never be as good at being a man as a miss. No man is ever going to be as good at being a woman as I am. I have innate abilities that make me powerful that no man has access to. Why would I try to step into something where I can only be second best instead of utilizing what I can naturally be the very best at?
Men, as leaders, are powerful. They are hunters and decision-makers. There are all these things we associate with masculine power. What about the feminine? We are collaborators. We are powerful in our ability to lead and change through love. We collaborate and love. We stand in the feminine power of holding space for change and evolution in ourselves and others in the world.
Our power is in creation. We are visionary and we are also implementers. It’s like magic. Who gets that? As women, we get that. Men don’t have access to that. They have one or the other, but we can do it all. We are better at some. You want to focus on what you are best at. We have access to a whole other set of skills and superpowers that we can bring forth powerfully without having to be a man or act like a man.
It’s so much more powerful because you are at your best. You are not doing an imitation of yourself. All of us need a balance of masculine and feminine. Even as a leader, even though I focus so much on my feminine, the masculine is there and it has to be. For men, there has to be a level of feminine, but our superpowers are in our God-given gifts as women.
The whole point about superpowers and that each person has them is so important. Often, when we are talking about power, the real thing is to discover where your own innate power lies, and so often, that is to do with connecting to energy and the clearing work you’ve spoken about, which brings a person into connection with their creativity and their unique gifts. Maybe the leadership comes from there.
I do want to say one more thing about the feminine and our feminine power. I feel like we, women in this society in this world, are gifted because we have been brought up to believe we have to act like men. We have learned so much about masculine power. We have had to live in that. We have had our whole lives access to all of those masculine superpowers, and then we have our innate feminine superpowers. We can marry them and be powerful in both of those areas. Men do not have that gift. They haven’t been taught how to have feminine superpowers because they have been favored. They haven’t gotten the gift. We got the gift of having access to both.
I once heard somebody say that living in a patriarchal society for men was like being fish and water, but for women was like being birds trying to swim in the water.
The Conscious Leader: Your leadership style is individual to you. As you step into your power in your leadership, you get to decide what that looks like.
We are birds that can swim, too. We get both because we have to survive in this society.
Having followed some traditional tantric pathways, it’s been so helpful to have that model of equal honoring of masculine and feminine as a guiding framework for life. I love what you are offering to people, and that you have developed a whole suite of practices and writings where you’ve boiled it down to some essential points. You’ve focused on joy and bliss, which is something else that’s missing largely in our society at this time. People want it, but they don’t know how to get it. You are the one person they can go to learn both of them. How can they contact you?
There are a couple of things I want to tell your people about. First of all, I wrote my flagship book called Choose Bliss. You can find that book on Amazon. That would be one place to start. The other thing is I created what I call the Missing Chapter. This is the chapter that I didn’t want for the mainstream because people do think it’s a little bit weird and they hadn’t met me.
I called it the Missing Chapter, and it’s all about how to utilize your sexual energy to live your most blissful life. I call it the Missing Chapter and I would like to offer that to your audience so that they can get that, now that they have met me. You can read the book. If you want to start with the Missing Chapter, go to TantraForLeadership.com. You put in your email address and the Missing Chapter will be delivered directly to your inbox.
I’m sure you’ll get lots of people wanting that. I certainly want to read it.
It’s fun. I was rereading it. I wrote it a long time ago. They were such good information. This is the thing like when you’ve been practicing, I have been practicing since I was sixteen. I’m not going to tell you how long that is, but it is many decades. You forget some of those basics that they are the simple things that make such a big difference in our practice. It was fun to read it again.
I’m curious to ask you about what led you to practice when you were sixteen. Can you boil it down to a couple of minutes?
Yes. I was living in India. I remember that I was walking down the street and there was a book fair. There was one vendor who had an English bookstore. I went one day and I bought Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. I started to read those books.
I hit chapter eleven in Think and Grow Rich, and I was like, “What is this? I’m a sixteen-year-old girl. How can a sixteen-year-old girl resist? This sounds sexy.” I went back to that store and I found a book about tantra and using your sexual energy. I was in India with my uncle and so I couldn’t buy this book. What I did was I took it. I threw money at the guy, stuck it under my coat so that nobody would see it, and then I would read this under my blanket at night after everybody had gone to bed. That’s how it started. Napoleon Hill told me to go to buy a book about tantra. That’s how the whole thing happened.
That’s a wonderful story. Thank you so much. That’s a lovely ending to our talk. Thank you so much, Moneeka. It’s been a delight.
Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Moneeka Sawyer
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With a dynamic background anchored in creativity and lifelong learning, D’Nette Wood has established an incredible 20+ year career as a Sotheby’s International Realty agent in the city of Albuquerque. An expert in luxury home sales, income-generating properties, and investments, D’Nette advises a range of clientele from new home buyers to retirees with complex estates.
Karen Abrams is a UCLA educated, entrepreneur, Master Theta Healer, relationship expert, and gifted intuitive. She is also an award-winning international bestselling author. She works with professional women to transform their subconscious beliefs and self-sabotaging behaviors to create new habits, mindsets and actions that bring about personal and financial fulfillment. Graduated in psychology.
