2020 has been a long year. Now, we’re finally at its final chapter, and what better way to bring this challenging book to a close than to look back on the lessons we’ve learned and look forward to the next? In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer invites John Lee Dumas, the host of Entrepreneurs on Fire, to help us bring in the new year by talking about setting and achieving the goals that matter most to us. Taking with him wisdom from successful entrepreneurs, he shares The 100-Day Goal Journal that can guide you to your success as well as what is called the SMART goal. Join Moneeka and John as they break down its components and show you how you can greet the new year living your best self and being on fire.

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How To Accomplish What Matters Most To You With John Lee Dumas

Real Estate Investing For Women

I have a special episode for you. I am bringing on John Lee Dumas. He is the host of Entrepreneurs On Fire, an award-winning podcast where he interviews inspiring entrepreneurs who are truly on fire with over 2,500 episodes, one million-plus listeners a month, and seven figures of annual income. JLD is just getting started. I’ve asked John to help us bring in the new year by teaching what he lives better than most, setting and achieving the goals that matter most to us. I am excited to welcome to the show the only man on fire, John Lee Dumas. How are you?

Moneeka, it is great to be here. I love your energy and your vibe. It’s always awesome hanging out with you.

John, you put together a journal called The 100-Day Goal Journal: Accomplish What Matters to You. I know that you talk to entrepreneurs all over the place. Talk to me about why goals are important. Why did you put together this particular journal?

I’ve interviewed over 2,700 successful entrepreneurs. To be honest with you, I can only pull out a couple of themes that almost every single one of those 2,700 have in common. One of those few themes that are across the board is successful entrepreneurs know how to set goals, and then they know how to accomplish those goals that they’ve set. Frankly, unsuccessful people don’t know how to do either and they’re not doing either, and they’re suffering as a result. I wanted to create a strategy guide for people to step-by-step understand what it means to accomplish a goal that matters to them. That’s why The 100-Day Goal Journal exists, and I’m proud of that work.

I can’t wait to use it. Talk to me a little bit about what is a meaningful goal from your perspective?

“Successful entrepreneurs know how to set goals and how to accomplish those goals.” ~ JLD

First off, you could step back and say, “Let me set a SMART goal.” A SMART goal is five components, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It’s critical. Those five things need to be part of your goal every single time, and a lot of people don’t focus on the meaningful part of the goal. A lot of people accomplish a goal to be like, “I accomplished the goal, but why is my life still the same? It doesn’t feel like it’s moved forward.” It’s because you didn’t set a meaningful goal. You just set a goal and you accomplished it.

It has to be meaningful and it has to be something that matters to you. That’s why you’ve got to be specific with it. It’s got to be measurable. You got to measure what that goal is that you’ve accomplished. It’s going to be attainable. It can’t be unrealistic. Otherwise, you’ll quit. It’s got to be relevant. That’s that meaningful part. It’s got to matter to your life, then it’s got to be time-bound. You have to set a timeframe, which is why I use 100 days. Those are the critical components that a lot of people miss when they set goals, and it has to be a part of it.

Talk to me a little bit about the 100 days. To me, that seems like such an arbitrary number. Could you tell me a little bit about why you chose that?

I don’t want to say that it’s not arbitrary because it’s got some arbitrariness in there for sure. There’s no magical formula that 100 days is the perfect number. For me, I wanted to sit down and say, “What is a timeframe that feels realistic?” People are like, “I’m going to do this in 2021.” For me, a year is way too long of a timeframe. Yes, a year goes by like that but when you’re in the beginning part of it, it feels like you have all the time in the world to accomplish that goal because you have a full year. At the same time, anything like 25, 35, 55 goes by in a blink of the eye. I want people to not look at too short of a timeframe and say, “I’m not willing to create a stretch goal that’s going to push me.”

I want people to, number one, feel like they have a good amount of time, but not too much time that they procrastinate. To me, the 100 days slotted in there nicely where it’s enough time to accomplish something big, but not too much time where you feel like you can just slack off the beginning. You get 100 days and when you wake up the next day, you’re already down to double digits. You’re at 99 days. The clock is ticking. It’s time to get your butt moving and make things happen. It’s arbitrary, but it’s something that has worked for me, so that’s why I went with it.

Accomplish What Matters Most: A SMART goal is five components: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

If someone doesn’t succeed in achieving their goal in 100 days, what do you recommend?

I’m a big believer that if you get to the 100 days and you haven’t accomplished your goal, it’s time to assess. In fact, in this journal, you have reassessments where you’re looking back at day 25, 50, and 75 to identify your progress and hold you accountable that you are moving forward at the pace you should be. Frankly, you’ll know well before day 100 if you’re not going to accomplish your goal because there are all these specific check-in points on the way. There’s nothing wrong at day 75 to adjust your goal down, or maybe jack it up if you’re way ahead of the game.

Nothing’s wrong with that because this is not a perfect science. This isn’t like this recipe where if you get one ingredient wrong, the whole thing’s terrible. That’s not the case. This is a fluid process. That’s the best word. Challenge yourself. If you’ve got to tweak things down a little bit by day 50 or 75, you’ll know it and do so. If you’re going to jack things up because you’re way ahead of schedule, do that too so that by day 100, you’ll know 100% where you’re going to be by that point and you’re going to feel good about it.

How do you know if you’re succeeding?

If your goal is being accomplished and you’re seeing marked progress. That’s part of the process where you are grading and judging yourself every step along the way. You’re being hard on yourself. You need to be your own worst critic. This book, journal, guide, strategy, and system ensures that you are your most harsh critic because you need to be. Nobody else cares about you. I hate to say it, but they don’t care about you because they’ve got their own stuff they care about. It’s not that they don’t like, don’t love you, and not rooting for you. Frankly, they don’t care that much about your goal because they got their own crap that they’re worried about. Their life is crazy, mayhem, and tough enough without thinking about you every 10 seconds or 10 days or 100 days. Realize that you are your own best cheerleader. At the same time, you’ve got to be your own worst critic too.

“You are succeeding if your goal is being accomplished and you’re seeing marked progress.” ~ JLD

Nobody cares about you as much as you care about you. That’s the thing. We’ve got all our own stuff. Even an accountability coach or partner is not going to care about your achievements as much as they’re going to care about their own because they’re not in your head or in your life. That’s what I love so much about this journal. It makes you your own accountability partner. Could you talk a little bit more about accountability, specifically on why is that so important?

Even though nobody’s going to care about us like ourselves, we need that kick in the butt by people who care about us. When you are in an accountability group and you have people who you’re counting on and they’re counting on you, then there comes this bond together where you are rooting for each other, checking in with each other, and don’t want to let each other down. It’s critical. I have multiple masterminds for different parts of my life.

I’ve got a health mastermind and a business mastermind because I want to make sure that I’m excelling in both areas of my life. To do that, I need accountability in both areas of my life. That’s an example of why an accountability group is important because it’s going to ensure that you don’t just slither away and go watch Netflix all day. You know you’ve got a meeting with your partners, accountability group, or mastermind, and they’re going to want to know what you’ve done.

Would you call this journal your own personal accountability partner?

Absolutely. That’s why I wanted and liked the idea of a physical journal because you can’t hide from that. You can’t put the folder on your desktop and hide it somewhere. It’s on your bed stand, on top of your desk, and on your briefcase. It’s there taunting you, “I dare you not to use me today because the proof will be in the pudding.”

“Realize that you are your own best cheerleader. At the same time, you’ve got to be your own worst critic too.” ~ JLD

I heard you on another podcast talk about focusing on your strengths when setting your goals, which many people do like, “I’m going to improve this about myself,” but they’re trying to improve the thing that they suck at. To be blissful, which is what I’m all about, you want to focus on what’s awesome about you and make it awesome. Do you agree with me on that?

We don’t need another C student in this world. That’s the problem. We will go down this rabbit hole but a big problem with traditional education is they’re like, “You got an A in this subject. Good. We don’t need to focus on that anymore. You got a D and a C here. Let’s spend all of our time here.” It’s the opposite. What are you naturally great at? What are you good at right now? How do you become even better at that? Why do you want to go from a D to a C? You’re going from crappy to still crappy. This world doesn’t need more crappiness.

What this world needs is you living in your bliss, living in your best self, and you being on fire, and that’s going to happen when you’re doing what you love and what you’re great at. That’s how you’re going to blossom and that’s what the world needs. That’s why I’m a big believer in saying, “What am I great at? Let me spend all my time doing that.” The things you’re not good at, hire people on your team to do those things or don’t do them at all because it’s not worth doing average. It’s not going to move the needle for you. I only do a handful of things in my business. I only do the things that A) I’m good at and that B) I enjoy doing. That’s it. The other things that happen in my business are because I’ve hired the right people to do those things.

If you’re good at something or you enjoy doing it, you’re still going to fail. Failure is part of the game. Could we talk a little bit about that?

Failure is 100% part of it. In fact, I was in an interview where I was talking about sports and they say, “Why do you love sports?” I’m like, “I love sports because it taught me as a child growing up that you’re going to lose and you’re going to fail, but there’s always that next game. You don’t know if you’re going to win or lose that next game, but there’s always that chance to win and hit that home run.” It’s even more applicable in business and life because you can fail 100 times in a row. If you win on the 101st time, that’s everything and that’s all that matters. That’s all people will know you for.

The 100-Day Goal Journal: Accomplish What Matters to You

Does anybody know me for all the failures I had before I launched Entrepreneurs On Fire? No, because they don’t care about that. I don’t care about that. We don’t spend any time talking about that. What they know me for is my one success, which was launching Entrepreneurs On Fire. That was my first and biggest win. That’s what propelled me to where I am today. It’s even better in business than sports because if you lose 100 times and you win 101 times, your record is 1 in 101. You still won, which is great, but it’s still a crappy record. In business, you just want to know you won the game and you can take that to the highest level. That’s why failure is part of it. It’s getting back up and swinging everything.

Thank you for that. That is a big difference. In business, you can become an overnight success immediately. It could take you 30 years to get there, but then suddenly, you’re there. It’s amazing. My perspective on failing is this. When we’re reaching for a goal and we’re trying to succeed, we are becoming the person who can succeed. We become a better version of ourselves as we’re reaching for that goal. The thing about failure is along the way, it shows us who we’ve become. How we deal with those failures and how we handle a challenge or a let down shows us who we have become along the way towards our success.

In a way, it’s a milestone and a necessary thing in creating success. Without it, we don’t grow better and we don’t become bigger. The goals aren’t as amazing in general. They’re also not as gratifying. If you buzz to the top, you’re not going to be as fulfilled as if you had to learn along the way. Failure is an amazing piece of the success formula. Could you tell us one daily practice, John, that you would say contributes to your personal success?

Every day, I do fifteen minutes of yoga. It’s stretching-focused yoga. It’s part of my daily rhythm. I love it because a stretch is a time that I’m contemplating my day in a meditative state. I’m relaxed and I’m doing deep breathing. I’m having this private enjoyable moment that’s great for my body, mind, and soul. It’s this nice quiet start to my day. I will take that over a cup of coffee any day. Although I still drink my coffee.

John, this has been amazing. Thank you for joining us and sharing all your amazing wisdom with my ladies.

“What this world needs is you living in your bliss, your best self, and you being on fire.” ~ Moneeka Sawyer

It’s beenawesome, Moneeka. Thanks for having me. Take care.

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Ladies, thank you for joining John and I for this portion of the show. Wasn’t it amazing? I am excited about starting off the year in a powerful way and helping you ladies achieve your goals. That’s what this show is all about. I’ve got more in EXTRA. I am going to be doing a process that helps you to integrate your goal into your future. What that will do is it will pull you forward almost seamlessly towards the goal that you want to work on that matters to you most. That’s what we’ve got in EXTRA. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I am going to be working on John’s journal so that I can reach my favorite goal, the one that matters most to me for the first 100 days of the year.

If you would like to join me on that, go ahead and purchase your copy of the journal. You can go to BlissfulInvestor.com/100dayjournal. Email me and I’m going to put together a list so that we can support each other towards meeting our goals. I’ll put together some videos about my process. I’ll help you, ladies, if you have questions. I have so much inspiration around this and I don’t want to let it go. I’d love you to join me through the whole process. We can do this together, but for now, stay tuned for Real Estate Investing for Women EXTRA so that I can take you through this amazing process to integrate your goals into your future.

If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. It’s coming next. If not but you would like to be, please go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free, so you can download this episode and you could download as many past episodes as you want to. You can just check it out and see if it’s for you. This might be exactly the time to get started on that extra step towards building your financial future. For those of you that are leaving us, thank you for joining me on this New Year episode of Real Estate Investing For Women. I appreciate you and 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 next time. Bye.

Important Links

• Entrepreneurs On Fire
• The 100-Day Goal Journal: Accomplish What Matters to You
• BlissfulInvestor.com/100dayjournal

About John Lee Dumas

John Lee Dumas is the host of Entrepreneurs on Fire, an award winning podcast where he interviews inspiring Entrepreneurs who are truly ON FIRE.

With over 2000 episodes, 1 million + listens a month, and seven-figures of annual revenue, JLD is just getting started.

Visit https://swiy.io/eof to set YOUR Entrepreneurial journey ON FIRE!

Piled up obstacles and challenges in our lives hinder us from moving forward. But without embracing our mistakes and gathering up the courage to take the punches, we cannot get past our fears and limitation. Moneeka Sawyer invites everyone to break boundaries that prevent growth with breast cancer survivor, author, and speaker Dr. Sheri Prentiss. Together, they go way back to Dr. Sheri’s life to discuss her takeaways on battling lymphedema that made her sacrifice her lifelong dream, as well as her rebranding journey from being a doctor to becoming an inspirational speaker. Moneeka also emphasizes how the lessons learned from Dr. Sheri’s experiences can help real estate investors level up and chase bigger goals.

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Getting Past Fears And Limitation With Dr. Sheri Prentiss – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to introduce you to Dr. Sheri Prentiss. She is a proven visionary, best-selling author and highly sought-after physician leader. She is a board-certified occupational and environmental medicine physician, public health expert and a breast cancer survivor. After breast cancer treatment, left her disabled from lymphedema in her right upper extremity, stripping her of her lifelong dream of being a practicing physician, she reinvented herself. She went on to become a national public figure, professional speaker and entrepreneur/owner of her own health care consulting business.

She has been the catalyst for transformation in the space of cultural and workplace diversity for a myriad of organizations for more than two decades. As a former national spokesperson person for six years and the former national African-American health equity ambassador for two years of the world’s largest breast cancer organization, Susan G. Komen, she is no stranger to the media be it TV, radio, print, or internet. She launched her show, The Live Show where you’re going to get to know about on CAN TV Channel 21. The show is designed to increase exposure to her nonprofit organization and provide valuable education and resources to individuals living with lymphedema. Dr. Sheri, thank you for being on the show, welcome.

Moneeka, I’m excited and I consider it an honor to be on your show. As a subscriber to your show, I kept thinking, “How can I pass that? How can I exceed that?” I took the tips. Hopefully, your guests will find me as exciting as your other previous guests.

Reading your bio brings emotion up in me because I know many people who have suffered through similar things. It’s interesting how we are on the other side of that. This conversation is going to be important to a lot of ladies. Thank you for being willing to be a leader in this space because breast cancer is huge. Many women suffer from it and we don’t talk about it.

I’ve always thought that it was important that I share my story because I could have gone through the diagnosis and kept my whole diagnosis, treatment, journey and path under the radar. Doing that was not going to share my testimony and it wasn’t going to bring strength in anybody else’s life. I would have garnered strength, but what was that doing to my fellow sisters out there that find themselves in the same situation?

What are the numbers?

It’s huge. You’re looking at 1 out of every 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lives. About every 60 seconds, we’re losing a sister to breast cancer. When we look at black women, in particular, we die 40% higher rate than our Caucasian counterparts, even when we control for types of cancer and access to care. When everything is equal, we’re still dying at an alarming rate. I think it’s important as a physician and now as a patient, having been on both sides of that table to be able to share my story so that individuals can journey down a path that is not as hard, as harsh, as painful and as lonely as mine was. Also, to hear my story and to implement changes in their lives, such that hopefully, they won’t even have my testimony. If they were to have it that they will jump on this bandwagon and on this crusade such that our children are not living with the fear of acquiring this disease.

It’s interesting because genetics do play a big part in it. Black women die significantly more. In Indians, I’m Indian and for us, we’re predisposed to heart disease and we tend to die from heart disease significantly more, even if all care is the same. It is interesting also the genetic element that you brought up.

Here’s what’s interesting with black women is that genetics make up less than 10% of the cancers. It is not genetics. With us, that’s why the role that I played with being the national ambassador for the Health Equity Initiative with Susan G. Komen, we were working with researchers and other nonprofit organizations in trying to figure out what are those elements that are causing us to die at an alarming rate. It’s not just genetics. It is a culture. It is a fact that we don’t talk about it. It is a fact that we may have the access. We may have hospitals there. The access is there, but we don’t have the insurance.

We’re finding that it’s more of the social determinants of health that is having the larger implications into why we are dying at a higher rate even though white women are being diagnosed, there isn’t as are higher, but our mortality rates are higher. What may appear on the surface, you got to take a deeper dive. What I’ve been helping other organizations do through my consulting business and through my nonprofit is trying to figure out what can we do? What are the areas that are contributing to these larger numbers and where our carrots, where are the low hanging fruits that we can get in right now, make a difference and see that needle turn just that?

Tell us a little bit about your story. What happened? Where were you when you got the diagnosis? What was going on?

At that time, my mom was in the end stages of her life. She had a condition called Sarcoidosis. It was primarily affecting her lungs. On October 1st, 2008, I had made arrangements for my mom to be transferred to inpatient hospice for what would be the last time to make some adjustments on her medications. I had to step back, be a daughter and no longer try to be a daughter and a doctor to my mom. I told her, “This is too hard for me. I need to take a step back.” I was proud of myself for taking a step back and letting other doctors care for my mom. While I’m on the phone with her, she calls me once she makes it to inpatient hospice, and being women, we multitask. I’m on the phone with her, ambulance dropped her off, but I’m doing myself breast exams at the same time.

Fears And Limitation: Social determinants of health have larger implications into why black women are dying at a higher rate of breast cancer.

It’s 9:00 PM. She’s asking whether or not I will come and see her because you can go anytime you like. The moment that I did the left and now I’m on the right, I felt a mass. I had my baseline mammogram in February of 2008. It was normal. Six months later, I’m doing my self-breast exam and this is why I tell every woman, “Know your body.” I feel a mass and it wasn’t there. Even though I am not a pessimistic person and I’m one of the most optimistic persons out there, immediately when I felt it, I knew it was cancer. That’s because I know my body. I wasn’t fooling around. I had helped a couple of other individuals two years prior and then one year prior along their cancer journey. As a result, I met some of the best breast cancer surgeons and oncologists in the country.

I had my repertoire and I kept their numbers simply because I was that other person’s confidant, their go-to, the person that helped them keep up with all of their schedules, doctors and numbers. I kept in my phone so that I would be able to talk to the doctor if my friend had an issue, not knowing that it would be me one day. I immediately called a breast surgeon at home and told her, “I found a mass. Are we going for a mammogram? Are we going straight for the diagnostic ultrasound? What are we doing?” I’m blurting out all of this stuff. She’s like, “Sheri, I need you to breathe. You’re going to come in. We need to do a diagnostic ultrasound. We’re going to go do that, but we’ll do a diagnostic mammogram first and we’re going to go through this.”

I found the mass on October 1st. Between October 1st and 13th, I had a biopsy done. I remember I was working from home that day in front of my computer the breast surgeon called me and she was like, “Hi, Sheri.” I’m like, “Bob, how are you doing?” It’s all nice and perky. She goes, “I’ve been better.” The moment she said that even though I knew that it was cancer, it was all these opportunities where you think, “Maybe not.” You would tell other individuals. I go, “It doesn’t have to be that bad.” When she said, “It came back as invasive ductal carcinoma.” Now that was the confirmation.

I immediately like, “What are we going to do? When is going to be the surgery?” When it was all said and done, I ended up with a partial mastectomy. They removed half of my right breast. She removed sixteen lymph nodes, three of which were positive for cancer. That meant chemotherapy. I underwent fifteen rounds of chemotherapy and 33 treatments of radiation all while only missing three days of work and those were the three days that I was in a hospital for surgery. I continue to plow through it. Most people didn’t even know I had been diagnosed because I was wearing wigs even before I was diagnosed, just because I like variety. I wear my hair one day, then I’ll be blonde next redhead two days later. They thought, “Sheri’s in another wig.”

This time, I was wearing shorter wigs because I think in my mind, I was preparing for being bald. I didn’t want to wear the wigs that were either my hair length, which was past my shoulder or longer. They thought I was wearing a cute, short style. It wasn’t until after radiation that when I got tired of wearing the wigs, I took them off. By then, I started having little peach buds, a little wavy, and everybody thought I cut off my hair. People are like, “Sexy haircut. Who did your hair?” I was like, “Chemo.”

Sometimes, that’s how I introduce people to my story. I said, “It wasn’t my choice. I’m having chemo. Chemo made the decision for me.” That’s how I began to share my story with other individuals. It wasn’t that I was initially hiding it. I was plowing through it. My mom died while I was going through chemo. When I got diagnosed, I still was her caregiver along with my dad. I had to deal with her death. I had to deal with being the executor of her state. I had to deal with caring for my dad. I had to deal with raising, co-parenting with my ex-husband two daughters.

I still had to oversee the 22 facilities that I was responsible for. I had to get on with life. I plow through it, sharing my story on an as-needed basis, but it wasn’t until I took the wig off. When people would complement me on my cute short hairstyle, I thought, “This is my opportunity to share my story.” Instead of saying, “Thank you.” I let them know, “It’s not my choice. Chemo made the choice for me.” I allowed that to be an opportunity for me to let them know what happened.

I’m like you. When I’m in trouble, I work harder. I know that for me, it’s the saving grace. I don’t want to talk about what’s wrong. I don’t want to ever see pity in people’s eyes. I don’t want to answer all the questions. A lot of times my own emotional stuff is enough for me to handle. I don’t want anybody else’s emotional stuff and their questions or the, “I’m sorry,” and the many times of, “How are you?” People are compassionate and kind. I’m not saying that that’s bad, but it pulls me more into it. That sounds a little bit weird. I realize as I say that, but it’s the way that I operate when I’m in trouble. Did you find that that was the thing that helped you go in and helped you get through the whole thing?

For me, yes, it did. Remember I told you I had two friends that I had helped from their journey and I was their voice to send out the update, emails to their family members or to friends or what have you. I chose to be my own voice. Since at that time, I was overseeing 22 different facilities. I had 110 full-time employees that are reporting to me. I became my own voice to those individuals. Now I added in my friends and family. I will send out weekly email updates. My closest circle knew. It wasn’t so much of me hearing on a regular basis that, “I’m sorry.” They knew how I felt because they were anticipating the updates.

Even though I would share and be very real with the pain, the sadness, the sorrow, all of the things that life continued to happen, it wasn’t just breast cancer, but mortgage still needed to be paid. The bad things still happen even in the midst of cancer. I sure would share it, but at the end of that email update, that Facebook post or whatever it was, I always left with an up note not necessarily so much for me, because I had already been through that experience. I had already suffered and went through all of that whole week. Now I’m letting you know what this past week did for me. How bad I felt when I was going through chemo on Monday. Tuesday was bad. On Wednesday, I felt a little better.

What I did was leaving that upbeat message at the end was for those individuals to know that I’m okay, that I’m good. If you find yourself in this situation, you can be good too. I didn’t hold back what I went through, the emotions and the bad stuff, but because by the time we shared it, I was already on the upswing. I left them on the upswing. It was less of them to come back and feel sorry for me or to feel sad. When I felt the, “I’m sorry,” it was when with the new individuals. It’s the person at Walmart that was checking me out and say, “Cute hairstyle.” I said, “Chemo will do it to you.” People are like, “You had chemo?” I’m like, “I’m a breast cancer survivor, but God is good. I’m surviving. I’m here. We going to keep it moving.”

That’s how I would approach it. The few times when I was around a group of individuals where it felt like my story was bringing them down, I would take the lead and say, “I didn’t share this with you to bring you down. I shared this with you so that you can have this in your armamentarium, such that if you’re facing this again, something similar or what you’re going through now feels overwhelming. Imagine you had that and breast cancer.” “I don’t have breast cancer.” Now you can say, “What I’m going through is not so bad.” I said, “No pity for me because I’m getting through it. God has given me the strength to go through it. I’m only sharing with you such that when you see me on the other side strong, you’ll know that there was a whole bunch of weak moments in between.”

Fears And Limitation: Individuals have varying levels of pain for different reasons.

Know that it’s okay to have your weakness and know that it’s okay to express your weakness. Stop feeling like you got to be strong for everybody because that’s not what God intended and that’s not even realistic. Men and women, have your moments of weakness and be willing to share, “I’m weak right now. I’m feeling bad right now. I don’t tend to stay here, but let me have my moment.” When you come through, you’re stronger and now you can bring somebody else along.

I had this whole experience of four years where I was trying to get pregnant. There were fourteen pregnancies and fourteen miscarriages. People are always looking at me like, “How do you get on the other side of that?” Could you imagine the level of emotion that I was suffering, my poor husband was suffering and to have to explain it over and over again. We all have different strategies on how we deal with the stress of going through this stuff. I wish I had heard when you had said now before that series of events for myself, because there were few up moments. There was the up moment of finding that I was pregnant, which was exciting. I immediately went into fear about losing it because I was under so much treatment.

I did have the highs and when I was excited, I couldn’t tell anybody about it. It was such an interesting thing. I’m glad that you’re talking about the way that you deal with this. I wonder how I could have done differently to have supported myself and the people I loved more. I feel like a lot of people felt shut out. It was protective of them. I didn’t want them going through the rollercoaster, but it was also protective of David and I so we didn’t have to deal with all of the questions.

It’s important because it ties in and it goes to show you that individuals have varying different levels of pain and sometimes, they’re at the same level for different reasons. I’ve never experienced a miscarriage. Two times I got pregnant, I delivered those children. I had complications with the second one. We didn’t think she or I would make it. I had a previous pregnancy that was successful, not that I was thinking of this at the moment, but people could look at it and say, “If that one was, she still had a successful history and so there was a chance.” I can only imagine six times in, “We have a five before, this is sixth times and then there’s the seventh time.” It’s important for individuals to hear the different levels and the different causes of extreme pain, what that means and then to be able to look at us now. It doesn’t mean that we’re still not impacted or affected by our past painful experiences, but look at what we’re doing with it.

Your story is empowering. Thank you for that. Tell us a little bit about how the diagnosis changed your worldview?

One, I’ve wanted to be a doctor ever since I was two years old. I announced to my parents when Marcus Welby on television. I jumped up in bed and said, “I’m going to be a doctor.” They asked me, “Why?” I said, “I want to help people.” Number two, I want to make a lot of money. They thought that was funny. I’m listening to it even I’m 52 and I’m like, “Yes, this is funny because the second part wasn’t as evident. I made enough to do well by my family but didn’t make tons of money, but I did help thousands of people.” Now having rendered the diagnosis and having gone into medicine because I wanted to help people with my hands, with healing and do what I call it to alleviate suffering, I’ve always had what I thought to be a great bedside manner, emotional and cultural intelligence.

I made the point of understanding and knowing my patients and their families, respecting their wishes, religious beliefs and all of that. I’m lenient. I was one of the doctors that would take diagnoses home with me. We’re taught in medical school, “Get in there, do what you need to do, but you got to learn how to leave work at the job. Don’t bring it home.” I wasn’t one of those individuals. I am too tightly connected in my personal relationship with God for me to make that separation and that cut. I carried individuals with me. When I gave cancer diagnosis, terminal diagnosis, I offered up a prayer to my patients that were willing to pray because I know that this was a familiar diagnosis. It’s happening to that person, but the dominoes that that person is connected with, they’re going to be dominoes that fall and they’re going to be some that will never get back up again.

Now, I’m the patient and it caused me to see things from the insurance perspective. I had issues with insurance. I decided to be a part of a clinical study. My insurance then wouldn’t pay for some of my chemos, although my chemo had nothing to do with the research study. Because I was a physician, I knew how to fight that battle, but now I’m thinking about, “What about the patients who don’t know how work? Now, they’re stuck with these bills and thinking that they have no way out.” I’m now seeing what it’s like to live with the burns from radiation and still having to go to work and smile in the midst of pain and like, “Please don’t touch me. Please don’t hug me.”

Going through that, now living through it, it caused me to take a different approach with my patients, even when they came in for a back injury. If it was a back injury to a truck driver and now he couldn’t drive and it affected his job, I now had a different impact. Even though I worked through chemo, it was difficult. As far as my patients were concerned, my viewpoint changed and my viewpoint for life changed because I realized how your life can change in a split second. Had I not found the mass when I did, I would not have lived to see the summer. I was diagnosed in October. I was also diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening congenital heart defect while I was going through chemo.

It’s another condition that drove me to the hospital. My right coronary artery is being squished by my aorta and my pulmonary artery. The chemotherapy made the constriction even more. My right coronary artery was close to 90% blocked. I’m staring at a heart attack. A cardiologist tried to put in 22 different size stents but none of them work. I could see the tears in his eyes like, “I can’t do anything for you. I’m going to send you home with some lifelong medications. I pray you never get atherosclerosis. God bless you.” Now I’m living with life-threatening breast cancer. I’m dealing with a life-threatening cardiac defect. I realize life is too short for me to continue to exist. I thought that I was living, but in retrospect, I was existing. I would go from one health project to the next.

If this girlfriend needed me on this journey, I was there. This one needed me on that, I was there. My children needed me to do this, I was there. My patient needs me to do this and our families, I was there. My dad needed this, I was there. That’s what I did. I helped people. It brought me joy in helping individuals because that’s my nature, but I wasn’t being present. I could have planned a vacation with my daughters and work. I’m looking forward to the vacation where instead of when I had precious moments at dinner or precious moments watching the movie.

In my mind, I’m like, “I’m going to do this and going to take care of this. We leave in two weeks.” Occasionally watch the movie, then the commercial on my phone, I realized I had made my life very overwhelming. Suddenly I heard a voice that said, “You shall live.” I thought, “I had overcome breast cancer and this whole cardiac heart thing, I am living.” That was when I had the reflection of, “No, I wasn’t. I was existing. I was doing, I was being, but I wasn’t living.”

Fears And Limitation: Everybody is typically uncomfortable with change, even with good ones.

I want to stop and highlight that because we’re doing, does not mean we’re living. We have exciting vacations, we are taking the kids out, roller skating, dancing or whatever it is we’re doing does not mean we’re living. I want everybody to highlight, we as a world community are going through an experience of re-evaluating everything. As we do that, are we living? Are we hoping for a future so that this ends? Are we hoping that we’ll continue to be able to have what we have right now, or are we fully present and living in this moment for exactly what it is? If we’re living in the future and the hope of a future, if we’re this end crying over a past and things that we can’t have, if we’re in fear, if things are going to stay the way that they are right now, all of those things take us out from being present and being present is what is being alive.

That’s the realization I had to come to. When I accepted that, it stayed with me for a few weeks. I still didn’t understand what living meant, even after the acknowledgment that I had been existing. Now that I’ve realized that I existed and I was doing, “What does it mean to LIVE?” I then heard the voices again of what LIVE means. LIVE for me means, “To love myself and others, to inspire those around me, to voice my dreams and ambitions and finally, to enjoy life. That flipped the script for me.”

Now I’m like, “I get it.” That’s the type of living I’m talking about that I do now and every day. I don’t let anything get in the way of that. When something tries to creep in, a double-check, take a step back, look at my life where I was twelve years ago. When it flipped upside down and my lifelong dream was stripped from me in an instant. I went from being a practicing clinical physician to now being told by my boss at the time who wasn’t a clinical physician, “Sheri, a physician who was not clinically capable because of my lymphedema is of no value.”

That’s what I was told when I’m at the job that I’m overseeing 22 different facilities. It is the largest healthcare system in Illinois. I did my thing while fighting this battle, fighting for my life, losing my mom and all of that. When lymphedema struck, which caused permanent, severe swelling on my right arm, hand and fingers made it impossible for me to do the clinical functions on my job. My fingers don’t move the way they normally do. I had neuropathy from the chemotherapy. Touch is not even the same. Now all of a sudden, “I couldn’t do the clinical part, but overseeing 22 different facilities, I can do the administrative part.” We’ll bring in a resident straight out of residency. They can do my clinical stuff. My clinical staff was filling in for the docs when they were on vacation or out on CME.

Most of my position was administrative but what I didn’t appreciate at that time is that my boss had an ulterior motive. I believe that even if I didn’t have lymphedema, he was going to find a way to cause a severe there. This was his opportunity to bring me to his office in the midst of everything. Keep in mind that I only missed three days of work. I didn’t let any of my facilities suffer. I worked for the organization to be brought in the office, to be told that you had no value, it stripped something in me. That was the period of time when the realization of my existence came to my mind. When I accepted the fact that I had been existing, I still didn’t know what living meant.

Once what live to me meant was realized, my whole world changed. Opportunities changed because I looked for opportunities in areas that I had never looked before. My eyesight was close to it because I was existing. Sometimes you’d find when you were existing, you go along the same path and everybody is typically uncomfortable with change. Even a good change. Change is changing. It shapes your world. We stay in a safety zone when we’re existing because it’s safe, it’s comfortable. We’re existing. We’re staying on the radar, but when things like breast cancer, congenital heart defect, the death of a parent, and a divorce shake your existing world, what will you do with it?

What realization will you come to, to get you over that? Mine was to live. It opened my eyes to opportunities that I had been blinded to. It doesn’t mean that I wasn’t scared of stepping out of that safety zone because I was, but I learned by stepping up to the plate, even when I was afraid of striking out. It opens up a world of blessings and opportunities to me that I would never experience had I not been willing to step out, but learning to live is what caused me to gain that strength to step out.

Tell me what you’re doing now. How did that turn around? You went from managing all these hospitals. What did you do?

I realized I was existing in December of 2010 and was told that I had no value. Now, God tells me to live. I know how to live means. In January, Susan G. Komen put out a call looking for a new national spokesperson. Because I had participated in my first three-day event four months prior, I was included in the call. They terminated me from that job that I thought I was going to one day retire and now I’m clinically disabled, I guess I could apply. I had never done media, been on a stage, did the opening and closing ceremony, conducted a camp show and did entertaining, song, dance and all that stuff. Now all of a sudden, they’re looking for one and I’m like, “I’m free. I don’t have a job.”

I applied and after 586 applications, they offered the job to me. I realize, “I can do more than just treat patients clinically. I have an opportunity to heal with my voice. I have an opportunity to share my story on a national and global scale. I have an opportunity to speak and my voice be heard by millions. What can I say that will make a difference that would drop a seed in their life and cause a spark?” Sometimes all you need to leave with a person is a spark. They’ll take that spark and somebody else will help them run with it. Now, this opened doors for me. It allowed me to see that I’ve always had the gifts and talents of being able to speak. Speaking in front of people has never been an issue for me. As a matter of fact, the more the merrier. I got into my element and I learned that people want to hear my story.

Now I realize that even though I’m cultivating the ability to speak and do interviews, there was still certain expertise that I didn’t have so I self-taught myself. I joined the NSA. I went through the appropriate steps to become a certified speaking professional. That is the highest designation awarded by NSA and less than 600 of us in the world hold this designation. I didn’t stop there. I realized, “I still got it from a medical standpoint. The administrative work that I was doing for that healthcare system, I can still do it for other employers, for other healthcare systems if they need me.” I put together my LLC. I made it official. I put myself out there. I learned what it meant for branding. I learned how to brand myself. I worked with different marketing and advertising agencies. I set up the right pathway to brand Dr. Sheri. What does that mean?

Now when people hear it, Google it, they know what to expect. They know that they’re getting somebody top-notch, that’s going to come in, help them organize their organizations such that their employees are in a safe and healthy work environment. They know that Dr. Sheri is coming in and she’s going to serve as an expert witness on the stand for either a work comp case or maybe for a patient who has had some type of environmental insult. They know that Dr. Sheri is going to come to the stage and bring the keynote 110% of herself, emcee a program or moderate a panel. I went through the proper channels to now reinvent myself, doing something that I would have never imagined in 100 years that I would be doing on a consistent basis and I have not looked back.

Fears And Limitation: You will never be fulfilled if you’re not living out your full potential or unwilling to take the first step.

I thought that when the clinical practice left, that depression and loss was deep and real, I didn’t think that I would be able to feel that void. Once I learned that I would live, I did because again, it changed my mindset, viewpoint. It put me on a whole new path for myself. Now, Dr. Sheri is a keynote speaker, moderator and emcee. She’s also a best-selling author of When Everything Changed: My Journey from Physician to Patient. She’s also the president and CEO of S. Phillips Consulting, a healthcare organization and consulting firm that provides organizations with all of their policies, procedures, updates and guidance to create a safe and healthy work environment.

Ladies, I met Dr. Sheri at the New Media Summit. I was impressed by her personality and vivaciousness. She’s fun because she wears this beautiful black glove. It goes all the way up over her elbow. She looks incredibly elegant. She wears sparkly bracelets around it. She stands out as this amazing woman. When you know her story and you’re like, “That’s interesting.” That’s her signature. You walk into a room and this is part of her branding. It’s incredible. I was thinking like, “What can we talk about on this show as a real estate show that would keep this relevant.” I hope you ladies see why I wanted so much to share her with you because this story, many of us go through our own journey of challenge. The big thing here is to recognize how important mindset is in dealing with change.

We’re dealing with change in the world community now, but even on a micro-level, those of you who are reading may be thinking about investing in real estate. Maybe you have an executive position, a stay-at-home mom or a single mom trying to survive with the kids and to make a change into a new career, a new type of investing or into real estate in any way can feel like such a huge barrier to get past. Whether it’s a big life-changing thing that you can’t be a doctor anymore or it’s, “I want to do something better for me or my family and start investing in real estate,” it’s not less real, not less big, and not less hard. We go through this stuff on so many areas of our life. I hope that Dr. Sheri’s amazing story will encourage and inspire you to take a look at what you can do bigger in your own life for yourself.

I hope it does because there are many individuals out there that need help. Whether we like it or not, people are watching us and they are impacted by how we live. You may think that your role in life is insignificant. You may think that your neighbor doesn’t notice you, you think that, “I’m not noticed in my job. I’m not appreciated in my home,” but you are part of a whole domino series. There are many individuals that are connected to you. You possess an inner strength that if you tap into it, I know that it can be very fearful and scared. When I tell individuals to have courage, I’m not telling them not to fear. I’m telling them to go forward in the midst of that fear. Fear is an emotion that you can’t say, “I’m not afraid,” because fear is going to exist. You can say it all you want but that doesn’t make it so.

Courage is when you can move past it. Courage is when I travel across the world and I’m seeing in women that are affected by lymphedema and they’re not treated. They know the treatment, they know to have compression garments, but they can’t afford it. I hear it over and over again until one time I make up in my mind, “What can I do about it? I’m hearing about it and I’m comforting them. I’m telling women that, ‘You need to get treated.’ I’m informing, I’m making them aware of it, I’m educating, but for the women who can’t afford it, what do I do for them?” I will reach out to them and say, “Send me an email.” I would connect them with the company and tell the company to bill me.

After a while, I realized that, “I can’t do this with everybody that I meet because I meet a lot of people.” I decided to start my own nonprofit organization, the LIVE-Today Foundation. That was a lot stepping out with still having my business and children that you’re raising. I felt that it was necessary because there are underserved, under resourced cancer survivors out there living with lymphedema and they can’t afford compression garments. I wanted to be an avenue for that. There are still physicians out there that don’t know how to properly diagnose lymphedema. They certainly aren’t aware of the psychosocial impact, like losing a career as I did. There are patients that don’t know the importance of treatment. By starting my own nonprofit, I reach out, find partners, found the right sponsors and now we can meet a need.

Can I meet the global need? Absolutely not, but I’m doing my part. That’s what you and I are sharing with individuals. There is a part that you can do, but you will never know what you are capable of and you will never be fulfilled because you’re not living out your full potential unless you’re willing to take that step. It’s like going up a staircase in the dark. You may not be able to see the full staircase but once you take that first step, even if you can’t fully see that next step, proprioception, your foot can feel that next step and it can help guide you.

Sometimes it may not be a light shining on that next step, but maybe a bump. Maybe a bump from your husband and say, “Get on out there and go take that real estate test,” or a bump from a sister that says, “Can you be my realtor for my home? If anybody’s going to get the commission, I’d rather keep it in the family.” You never know how things are going to come together until you take a step. Nobody’s going to come and knock on your door and say, “I want to buy a house and I want you to be the one to find it for me. Could you go ahead and become a real estate professional?” You got to take a step because God is only going to do what you can’t do, not what you can. Do what you can and allow things to fall in place. If that path doesn’t work, you’re not a failure because you tried something and it doesn’t work out. You fail only when you stop trying.

If that doesn’t work out, it’s okay. You’re not married to it, but you got the experience of stepping through your fear of embracing your own courage and that’s extremely admirable. Few people do it. It’s a thing that makes you feel most alive. Sheri and I are going to do an EXTRA and we’re going to be talking about how to stay in your own lane. What are the top three things you can do in your business that you can excel at so that you can grow and sustain your own business? Dr. Sheri explained it to me this way. There are about ten million things people are telling you you should do for your business. This is true in real estate and any business.

In real estate, it’s how many different strategies are you going to expose on this show? There are many things we could be doing. You need to focus because success does not come until you focus. She’s going to be talking about that in EXTRA and how she’s done it and how you can do it too. Before we move on from here, Dr. Sheri, tell everybody how they can meet you and tell us about your amazing gift that you’re offering my audience.

If you want to find the go up to my website, www.DrSheriMD.com. You can also shoot me an email at [email protected]. There’s a contact form. Reach out to me. I’m here for you. I want to help individuals learn how to truly let go, live today, and every day. My free gift to individuals is the Four Tips On How To L.I.V.E. As I expressed to you, LIVE means, love yourself and others, inspire those around you, voice your dreams and ambitions and to enjoy life. I’ve created an entire blueprint on how to let go and live. What I want to give you, at least as a starter is a teaser. It’s something that can get you started on that journey are the Four Tips On How To L.I.V.E. If you apply those four tips, something’s going to stir down on the inside of you and a light bulb is going to go off. If you never say, “I want the full blueprint.” If you can change your life in jumpstart something of those four tips, then my appearance on this show would have been well worth it.

Dr. Sheri, are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?

Fears And Limitation: Following your passion will push and carry you through the ups and downs of life.

Yes. I’m ready.

Tell us one super tip on getting started in real estate investing?

One super tip would be to know your passion and follow it. Whatever your passion is, that is what you want to follow because that’s what’s going to push you and carry you through the ups and the downs, through the questioning, “Should I? Would I?” It’s going to be the thing that drives you from day-to-day waking up with joy, pursuing your passion, going to bed at night knowing, “I did a good job.”

Tell us one strategy for being successful in real estate investing?

It’s remaining true to yourself. You’re going to get a lot of advice about what to do, what to say, how to say it and where you should be, but remain true to you. You can follow advice, but if it’s not part of you, the real you, part of your truth, don’t follow it because you won’t be able to live in that truth.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

One that I would say is my time for devotion. I say that because people can choose what their devotion is. For me, it is a quiet time to reflect on what I’ve done, what I want to do and how will my life be glorified in someone else’s life? I can’t do that unless I have quiet time to myself to reflect into here where I should go. For me, on a daily basis, I start off my day with a quiet time of devotion listening. I know I have my to-do list, but in my to-do list, what can I do that will also not only be a blessing for my household but a blessing in someone else’s household? Sometimes that takes me different than what I had in black and white to do that day. Sometimes it’s an added phone call, a checkup text or a check-in email, but I find that when I’m willing to give of myself, giving comes back to me.

Thank you for everything you’ve given on this portion of the show. I can’t wait until EXTRA, but this has been amazing.

Thank you, Moneeka for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Ladies, stay tuned for EXTRA. We’ve got more. We’re going to be talking about how to stay in your lane and pick those things that you can excel at so that your business can succeed. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. If you’re not subscribed but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. The first seven days are free. You can download as many of these EXTRAs that you like and binge. You can decide if it’s for you or not but get started. There’s lots of good juicy stuff. For those of you that are leaving us, thank you for joining Dr. Sheri and I for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, always remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

Important Links

• Dr. Sheri Prentiss
• Health Equity Initiative
• When Everything Changed: My Journey from Physician to Patient
• LIVE-Today Foundation
• [email protected]
• Four Tips On How To L.I.V.E
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Sheri Prentiss

Dr. Sheri Y. Prentiss, commonly known as Dr. Sheri, has impacted lives across the globe, promoting the essentials of health and well-being.

Dr. Sheri is an industry leader and subject matter expert in occupational health and wellness, having more than 20 years of experience as a Board-certified occupational medicine physician.

She is also a Certified Physician Executive with a Master’s degree in Public Health and proficiency in healthcare management and organizational administration.

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Our mind is often what holds us back from achieving more success and fulfillment in business and in life. We create our own reality, but too often what we create falls short of what our consciousness is actually capable of. There is a way to upgrade our consciousness and it’s been inside us all the while. Carl Hunter specializes in helping people achieve this upgrade through subconscious mind programming. Carl uses an incredible technology that he invented, called MindFlavors that accelerates this process for his clients. He is, in fact, one of Moneeka Sawyer’s secret weapons in her journey to success! Join in as he humors us with a sneak peek of what this revolutionary technology is truly capable of.

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Listen to the podcast here

Upgrading Consciousness And Finding BLISS The Fun Way! With Carl Hunter

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome to the show, Carl Hunter. He is an artist, entrepreneur, transformation coach, and subconscious mind programming expert. He’s also the inventor of the amazing new MindPower Acceleration Technology called MindFlavors. He began his self-development journey as a young child by seeking ways to improve his own behavior in order to get better results in all areas of his life. He started pursuing it seriously in 1987 when he discovered a powerful method to reprogram his subconscious mind.

This led to him achieving his dreams by the age of 31 of traveling around the world, getting into the diamond business, and moving to the Virgin Islands where he spent many years enjoying the tropical island life. In early 2015, while continuing to pursue faster and more powerful methods of transformation, Carl discovered some ancient power secrets. Using these newfound ideas, he invented this revolutionary technology that has trumped all his previous techniques for harnessing the power of our subconscious mind.

Carl is one of my coaches. As we go through this show, so much of the time, I feel like I’m bringing you new ideas by real estate professionals, but I haven’t shared with you yet my secret weapons. The people that make me who I am in my business and my life. They support my bliss and take me to the next level because bliss is a forever evolving thing. I’m going to constantly be getting more blissful and should you too. I asked Carl to be on the show because he’s one of those secret weapons. I wanted to share him with you because he’s amazing. Ladies, lean into this conversation because Carl is a special friend and mentor of mine. Carl, welcome to the show.

Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Moneeka. It’s always great to be with you.

Tell us a little bit about your journey, like the high-level two-minute version of how you got to where you are.

About many years ago, I got into business for myself. I was young and I started a diamond business. In the beginning, it was going well, and then things started falling apart. I didn’t know why. I didn’t have the experience in business to understand a lot of the mechanics that normally people could put into place. I had some good understanding of the business, but what I didn’t understand was, what was affecting the business was my consciousness.

I had to hit rock bottom before I could realize that something had to change in me in order to change the outer world. I started learning about the subconscious mind. I discovered a way to program my subconscious mind in such a simple way where I could see overnight results. Once I started experimenting with that, it completely changed everything because I realized that like in the diamond business, real estate, and any other business where sales are involved, our level of success is in direct correlation with our level of success in our consciousness. If our consciousness expands, we are a larger container to handle more success.

Ladies, feel into that one. Wouldn’t you like to be a larger container to handle more success, more bliss, more joy, more expansion and more money? I love that, Carl.

What I learned in this whole process is that everything in life, we’re creating our reality in every way, all the time. Most of how we’re creating our reality is below our level of consciousness. We think that we’re in control of things and we make decisions, then we use our willpower, which is with the conscious mind to make things happen in the physical world. It’s like the tip of the iceberg below the surfaces, 95%, that’s driving the behavior and communications that happen between us. A lot of things that we don’t see there, that’s more of the invisible communication and things that are happening that have a bigger impact and influence on the outcome.

Let’s start talking a little bit about MindFlavors. How you develop that technology and why?

Once I learned how to program my subconscious mind, it’s a writing technique. It’s simple. You do it before you go to sleep in a certain way, and you can see the results the next day. Once I saw the magic in this and the power of it, I decided right away that I was going to master the process. I did everything I could to leverage the tool of the programming with my own mind. I’m tapping into my own genius mind. For years, I live my dream life. I traveled around the world. I lived in the Virgin Islands. I did all the things that I love doing and moved to New York City to expand my art career. I had got to a point where I realized that again, my consciousness had to expand in order for things to go further. At this point, I was ready for a big expansion, big upgrades, big next level and high-level transformation.

I decided to program my subconscious mind to produce that result. I programmed myself to increase my manifestation abilities exponentially. The beautiful thing about the subconscious mind is it doesn’t have limits. Whatever you can describe, you can program and it can happen. The way this works is you program it and then you observe in the outer world things that show up in your experience because you begin to attract new things in alignment with the new requests that you’re putting with your programming. I attracted to me information that opened up new doors to new ways to influence our minds for a manifestation. I came across some ancient wisdom that I’ve now combined with modern technology to create this MindFlavors experience that creates new neural pathways in your brain in 4.5 minutes.

What does MindFlavors help you to do? It makes near more neural pathways and more access to your subconscious mind.

It does a lot of things automatically right off the bat. I’ll give you some ideas about what types of things we hear from people when they first experienced this. One of the first things that we noticed about everyone is that the negative mind chatter that most people are accustomed to hearing all day long suddenly disappears. It’s completely gone. For most people, that’s such clarity they’ve never experienced before. What goes along with that because when we talk about rewriting and rewiring the brain, creating new neural pathways, everything that we experience is based on patterns of beliefs that we’ve developed during our impressionable years when our subconscious mind was being created with that structure. According to that structure, those patterns, that becomes its own frequency that then attracts things that match that frequency.

Our frequency is based on a lot of different patterns that we’ve developed over the years, that we’ve picked up. These patterns for most people are not expansive patterns of unlimited possibilities, success, and all of those things. They’re patterns that were developed in moments of crisis or moments of fear and things that we developed when we didn’t know that we were developing those beliefs. If somebody gave us a dirty look, we might’ve decided that people are mean.

If we decided that in those impressionable years, then that pattern gets developed. It gets ingrained into the subconscious and then the subconscious simply executes the pattern. It carries out the pattern. If it picks up a pattern like that, then it’s going to influence everything else in a person’s experience. It’ll always have to be filtered through that pattern. The MindFlavors technology immediately clears out a whole bunch of that on a broad scale. It’s called MindFlavors because there’s more than one flavor. What you’re focusing on while you’re using the technology is what tends to expand in your experience.

Consciousness Upgrade: Our conscious mind is the driver. The subconscious mind doesn’t know where to go unless you tell it where to go.

People experience new levels of clarity right away. In our program, around day three, people experience and often express getting a complete new download of their business. Maybe things that they’ve been struggling with for years to try to figure out. Sometimes, all of a sudden, they get crystal clarity on how to put it all together. The reason why I believe this is happening at such a rapid pace like this because we’re tapping into the language of the universe, which I’m sure you’ve heard before that the language of the university is Math.

What I’m talking about in particular is Geometry and not just Geometry, but Sacred Geometry. There are all kinds of new patterns of connections that are occurring here and alignments that happen from this advanced technology that wipe out those limiting beliefs and give you the opportunity to immediately create new neural pathways of success, happiness, joy, and all of the things that we like and believe that we can create with our conscious mind.

Our conscious mind is the driver. The subconscious mind doesn’t know where to go unless you tell it where to go. For most people, were they told it to go is not in the places where they’d like it to go. This is a way that you can rewrite that, turn things around, and have things flowing in the direction that you enjoy, and having all of your energy and focus. It’s amazing how easy life can be and how easy we can manifest when we are not working against ourselves. With the old programming, most people are working 95% against themselves without realizing it. They’re working with their conscious mind and willpower, and that’s why it can be challenging. This is a way to completely release all of that stuff and have life flow a lot easier.

I do know that most of us are taught that the way that we succeed is through focus, willpower and discipline. That’s what equals success. What’s been amazing is to discover through my process with you that those words can be changed. I love how you change them around. You call discipline to blisscipline. Tweaking the paradigm a little bit doesn’t take a lot. Tweaking the paradigm in the conscious mind allows us to open to all these new possibilities while you’re working on the subconscious so that they can come together in a much more cohesive form rather than this tug of war that normally happens. You talk a lot about living from the inside out. I know you’ve already touched on this a little bit, but let’s dive a little deeper into that. Can you explain more about what living from the out is like?

It seems like it’s such a simple thing, but it’s a big concept because we’ve all been conditioned to live from the outside in. When I was young, like everyone else, I grew up that way. I got trained to work hard and I was good at it. I was able to have success in those ways. Do you remember my story about the diamond business? I worked hard. I made things happen. When they weren’t staying in place, I didn’t know why that was happening. Why it was happening is because the inside wasn’t already built and in alignment with what I was seeking in the out outer world. I was approaching it by looking at how do I fix it in the outer world?

Living from the inside out is we don’t do that at all. We don’t completely ignore, but we ignore the outer world. We look at the outer world as an indication of what our creation from our past experience or past programming. If you see something show up now, it’s because in the past you were in alignment with that outcome and now, it’s here. That past could have been five minutes ago or could have been a year ago. You may have put out the intention. Living from the inside out is instead of fixing things in the external world, we build it on the inside. When something happens in the outer world, it is like the gas gauge in the car. When you see the gas gauge go down to empty, you don’t get mad at the gas gauge and say, “Why aren’t you went full?” You realize that’s an indicator telling you to fill up the fuel tank.

The same thing is true here. When we’re living from the inside out and we have an interaction with someone in the external world and maybe it’s not one that’s pleasant at the moment, we look at that like, “This is interesting. The programming that’s inside me, that whatever pattern from the past is producing this result. What is happening right now?” We identify what’s happening. We reverse engineer and change with our words. With our program, we change what we see. When I was in the jewelry business, in any sales, it’s the same thing. If we have an interaction with a customer and it didn’t go the way we would have liked it to go, we can say, “What happened there? Maybe the communication wasn’t great.”

We can change and program that our communication is excellent with our prospective clients and they easily turn into happy clients and happy customers. Living from the inside out is a whole new way of looking at your world, knowing that you are the one that’s creating your reality. You’re not looking at the world from, “What’s happening to me?” You’re looking at the world of, “What am I generating and creating in the external experience?” You look at everyone else and every other component in the world as simply actors or props or components of your movie, that you are the writer, director and creator of it all. If we’d like for other people to show up differently in our world as actors in our movie, then we rewrite the script and program ourselves that in our movie and our pattern, we attract people who show up in this way.

That’s important because so much of the time we think we have somebody in our life that we care about and, “They’re not making us happy” and we need to change them. It’s a little bit different to think about, first of all, they can’t make you happy, they can either support it or not. The person that makes you happy is you and your response to that person is what changes that relationship, not changing them. We can’t change other people, nor circumstances. The only thing that we have real access to is ourselves, and this technology gives us more access to take more control, as well as more responsibility for our own lives.

What I love about this whole process is when you get started with it and you start living from the inside out, it’s the most exciting thing in the world. You will realize that there’s nothing out there happening in your world that you aren’t influencing and with the stroke of a pen or other tools and easy things that you can do quickly, you can transform your reality. It can seem magical because most of what is happening, is below our level of consciousness. We’re only 5% and some people say it’s as little as 1% conscious of what’s happening and all the different things that are going on in our experience.

We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg and the surface of that. When we program ourselves to have a different experience and people show up differently, it can seem like magic because our conscious mind of that 1% or 5% is saying, “How did that happen? I worked hard to do this before and nothing showed up. All of a sudden, I’m doing nothing. I’m not doing anything different and there it is.” It seems very magical in that way.

I know it’s technology, but let’s do a little deeper dive into what makes this different than other modalities in personal development that people might have already seen?

What makes it different is that this is an external tool and technology that you can use that changes things internally. It allows you to reset who you are, currently showing up as to who you truly are because we’ve taken on all kinds of patterns and things. What’s different about this is it’s highly accelerated and it’s transforming things on many different levels at the same time. It is a synergistic approach because there are many different things.

I’ve been using the technology to program myself, to make the technology better. It’s been continually improving in that sense. Most approaches that are recommended in this world for change are dealing with the conscious mind. That’s one of the main things that is different here is living from the inside out. We’re working primarily with the subconscious mind. Our program is a lucrative sales success, but we don’t even talk about sales because we’re working with the consciousness that is what affects the outcome.

What’s interesting in my experience in working with you guys, is that I’ve done a lot of work. Bliss is my thing. I’ve done all of those things. I could discover it in life to bring me closer to my own bliss and to clear out all that stuff and all those patterns. We do meditation. I’ve done a lot of brain entrainment. There’s been a lot of different stuff that used even some visual stuff, but nothing pulls it all together in the same way and goes as deep. I feel like I had cleared out so much stuff. I was totally over all that stuff and somehow, we got even deeper. I’m even lighter. I’m even more clear. We got to new levels that didn’t seem accessible with any of the other things that I had tried that’s available, even if it’s dealing with the subconscious mind. Not everything that I’ve tried deals with the conscious mind and willpower. There has been a lot that also deals with the subconscious, but nothing to this level.

That was very well put and especially from someone who’s experienced it. Thank you. That’s nicely put.

Let’s talk a little bit about how you see that MindFlavors might help in the real estate business. There are a couple of things I want to preemptively tell you. There are a lot of people that are reading this show that our agents are in sales, but most of the people are investors. They own their own properties, purchase them and might put renters in there.

Let’s use that same concept of success in sales with investing. It’s the same thing because what we’re talking about is changing our own patterns. It doesn’t matter where we are. Wherever we are, we can always increase and go higher. With regards to investing, the best way to go into an investment is to be in alignment with the successful outcome. The best way to be into that is to tap into things that go beyond what the conscious mind is aware of. The conscious mind is like being tossed about on the top of the ocean in comparison. When we’re working with the subconscious mind, you are more grounded and more in alignment.

It is what motivates you to take the actions that produce that result. Let me back up a little bit. With investing, for example, if you’re starting from scratch on investment, if you can program your mind in advance to produce a successful outcome from that investment. Whenever decisions come up, maybe it’s when to get out of the investment, the whole host of other potential points along the way, but when it comes to decisions, your motivations are going to come from those patterns and programs that are in the subconscious.

If the pattern says, “No matter what I do, I always get less than what I put in.” No matter what a person does, that’s what’s going to be the outcome. If the reverse is true, you can be skipping along happy doing hardly anything at all and have huge success. It’s based on those patterns. The same thing is true in an investment. When you’re going into that investment, you can program yourself to be calm about your investing. You can program yourself to always buy low and sell high. That’s a good way to put it here, to bring it down into more basic terminology here.

Buy low and sell high seems basic and obvious to the conscious mind. When someone is making the decision and there are all kinds of emotions involved and all kinds of other factors, variables, and business effects different things in their lives and their decisions, go right back to that subconscious program. If they believe they deserve to have all of those things working wonderfully, then they will make the choice that will create that outcome.

If the person believes, but they have a fear about something or whatever patterns in there, then they might make a decision that would cause that potentially good investment to not be such a great investment. We are influencing these things on many subtle levels. The best way to get more advancement in any part of your life is to upgrade your consciousness and that happens primarily through the subconscious mind.

I think that through working with this technology, one of the things that have expanded in me is my trust in the universe. I trust that the universe has my back and that things are working out exactly as they should be working out. For instance, I have a construction project that I’ve been sitting on for eight years. We’ve been bleeding money on this. We finally got our permits and we funded on our commercial loan, but it’s been a real process. I know that through the beginning, there was all this angst, upset, anger and frustration. We moved through this. It’s been a long process. I’ve had to let it go. My trust in the process and the trust that everything is going to happen exactly as it should did not happen.

I believe that the universe has always taken care of me. It will always provide success for me. I believe all of those things and my life shows that, but to the level that I’ve experienced it now with this project, didn’t happen until I was working with you guys. I am in absolute awe of when the loan finally closed, we thought we’d be opening champagne and having a big party. What happened inside of me was, “Of course.” There was an expectation, not that we don’t celebrate. Life is a celebration because I know you guys do that more than anybody. There’s the expectation of success. Success is not a surprise. Failure would be a surprise.

Most of us live in the other way, where success is a surprise. If we can look at that, success is not a surprise, success is expected. When we have things that don’t go exactly right, we might consider failures, they’re just a signal to tweak. It’s not a failure. It’s a completely different way of looking at things and so much more relaxing, especially in a situation like mine where, “This is a $5 million project. We’ve got a lot going on and a lot riding on this.” There’s lots of opportunity for stress, for being afraid of what will go wrong and for those things, but they’re not happening. None of that is happening inside of me and because of the way that I’m leading, it’s not happening to my business partner either. It’s been such an interesting shift in me, in my life and my business.

That is one of the things that we notice right away are doubt, worry and fear disappear. Those are the things that usually affect people in making decisions that they don’t want to make. When doubt, worry, and fear are gone and you’re in flow and confident naturally without even an effort, you’re using all of your energy in a positive creative way. I like to use certain expressions and cliches in reverse. When those things happen, I like to say, “That’s life.” When the good things like that happen, when you got your financing, “That’s life.”

Since I’ve been working with you, I do that too, “C’est la vie.” It’s all about like, “I got a Tesla.” It’s such a sweeter way of looking at life. I’m good at this bliss thing. When you met me, you knew that immediately. I believe that we are constantly evolving and I will always get more blissful. I’m not as blissful today as I will be tomorrow. I do believe all of those things. I did not think anybody could take me to such a higher level. I’m grateful that we joined forces and that’s been happening in my life. I want to say thank you to you for that.

You’re welcome and thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that on many levels. It’s true. It is an entirely new level of experience. Sometimes it’s not the easiest thing to explain to someone until they’ve experienced it themselves. That’s why we do like to let people have that opportunity to experience it themselves and see what all the excitement’s about.

In EXTRA, he’s going to be talking about this programming, the writing exercise that he does for his programming in exactly how he does it. You’ve probably heard things similar. In my many years of personal development, I have never seen anything like this or have an impact on me that it had. It’s surprisingly simple, but because it’s simple does not make it impactful. As a matter of fact, because it’s simple, it makes it more impactful. He’s going to be sharing that with us in EXTRA. Before we move on to any of that stuff, Carl, could you tell us a little bit about what you are offering my ladies so that they can experience the technology?

We like people to have the experience of what this is like and see for themselves. What we can offer for your readers is, we meet on Zoom and we give you the opportunity to experience this 4.5-minute video. We stay right there with you while you’re experiencing it and then we talk about it afterwards. The way to do this, what we do ask that you do beforehand is to take a look at some of the before and after videos of other people who have gone through this experience so you have an idea of what to expect. It’ll be things like you’ve never experienced before, but this will give you some idea of what to expect from the experience.

If you go to BlissfulInvestor.com/MindFlavors, you can look at the before and after videos. Also, you can see some of the testimonials of what other people have been experiencing, and you can also get more information if you’d like there. Once you’ve done those things and looked through that information, you can sign up to meet with us. We will meet with you on Zoom and have you experienced the technology yourself.

It’s such an amazing experience the first time you go through MindFlavors. Ladies, go forward, go check it out. You’ll be grateful. You never pursue the program or anything like that. Having that experience, knowing that there’s this whole new world of opportunities opens you up to new ways of thinking and being. It’s an amazing experience, even doing that initial consultation. Carl, are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Consciousness Upgrade: When we’re working with the subconscious mind, you are more grounded and more in alignment.

I’ll do my best.

Tell us one super tip by getting started investing in real estate.

One super tip would be to program yourself to be successful right from the start. That what I would say is you can do it right off the bat. Program yourself to be successful with all of your deals right from the beginning.

Tell us one strategy for being successful in real estate investing.

To get into the mechanics of your deals, have clarity on what are the pieces to your deals that require being in place and then programming that on the inside so that you are completely aligning yourself with all aspects of success in all aspects of your deals.

What would you say Carl is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

I do my programming every night. It’s the power of the pen here. The thing that I do is I live from the inside. I focus on the outcomes that I’d like to create and I create it on the inside. I then just live life, be happy and let the flow happen.

You’re consistent. I mean, “I program.” “You should program.” You should live from me and say that. There is a thing about people that are consistent and successful is they know what they’re doing. Someone successful can give you advice about what they’re doing to create success. It might be repetitive, but it’s because it’s real and it’s what they do. Thank you for that. I’m excited about moving into EXTRA. If you are already subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned, we are going to be talking about his secret weapon, the thing that he does to program his mind and he’s taught me how to do that too. It’s a special thing that he does.

We’re going to be talking about that in EXTRA. If you’re not subscribed to Extra, but would like to be. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free. I would recommend this is the time that you go and check it out. What Carl’s going to share with us could change everything, not just in real estate, but in your life and your relationships with your health. We’ve got another year. 2021 is right around the corner. This might be the thing that you take into the new year that could change everything.

In the meantime, if you do get Carl’s episode and you can get a bunch of other ones downloaded too. However, if you are leaving me now, thank you for joining Carl and me for this portion of the show. I appreciate you. I look 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’ll see you soon. Bye.

Important Links

• MindFlavors
• BlissfulInvestor.com/MindFlavors
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Carl Hunter

The creator of MindFlavors® is Carl Hunter, an artist and entrepreneur from New York City.  He began the self-development journey as a young child by seeking ways to improve his own behavior in order to get better results in all areas of his life.

He started pursuing it seriously in 1987 when he discovered a powerful method to reprogram his own subconscious mind.

This led to him achieving his dreams by the age of 31, of traveling around the world, getting into the diamond business, and moving to the Virgin Islands, where he spent almost 10 years enjoying the tropical island life before moving to New York City to pursue his art career.

Most people who dabble in real estate investment focus solely on wholesaling, rehabbing, and acquiring properties.Only a few pay attention to land investment, which actually offers high returns at pretty low costs. Michelle Bosch, the Cofounder of Orbit Investments, shares with Moneeka Sawyer how to take advantage of some dirty piece of land and turn it into something profitable. Michelle looks back on her journey from being an immigrant to a full-time real estate professional, dissects the four stages they used to structure cashflow, and underlines the importance of pouring all of your courage and concentration on your selected niche.

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Listen to the podcast here

Create Inflows Of Cash And Ease In Real Estate With Michelle Bosch

I am excited to welcome to our show our guest, Michelle Bosch. Michelle is the Cofounder of Orbit Investments and a full-time real estate investor since 2002. She has bought and sold over 4,000 pieces of real estate and built the third largest land investment and auction company in the United States, bringing that company successfully in the eight bigger revenues in a matter of eighteen months. Through the recession, she positioned Orbit Investments for rapid growth in the single-family and multifamily investing space with over $40 million in assets under management.

She’s also the creator of the nationally recognized Land Profit Generator program, focusing on teaching others how to invest in land, and has created over 145,000 followers via the Forever Cash podcast radio show, LandProfitGenerator.com, UltimateBoardroom.com and social media channels. Her businesses have been featured in Inc., Fox, NBC, ABC, and Forbes, and she holds an MBA in Business and Finance from Thunderbird Global School of International Management, the world’s number one graduate school in international management. Michelle, welcome to this show.

Thank you, Moneeka for having me. It’s an honor to be here with you.

Why don’t you tell us Michelle, a little bit about your story, how you got going and started doing all this amazing stuff?

It sounds like an amazing bio, but at the end of the day, we all have to have faith in the small. We started small with humble beginnings. Both my husband and I are not originally from the US. We’re both immigrants. I am originally from Honduras. He’s originally from Germany. We came here to study. We decided to stay here, got jobs, and found companies that were willing to sponsor our working visas and eventually, our permanent residency or green cards. We got jobs 100% travel. We hated it. We’ve spent all this money on an MBA, on a degree in the promises that you’re going to go and get a job and live the American dream.

We were far from living the American dream. We had living paycheck to paycheck. A glamorous life for about three months and then traveling 100% gets old and working 60 to 80-hour weeks for someone else as a consultant and a client-side was not necessarily our idea of how I thought that the end goal was supposed to look like. We started looking for something else to do. We came here with two suitcases to our names and hearts full of dreams. Parts of those dreams were getting the job, but it wasn’t entirely fitting the picture of what we thought we were going to be doing in terms of having the freedom of money, time, relationships, and purpose and living out those four freedoms. As a result of discontent with our life back then, which was comfortable, but it was comfortably miserable.

That’s how many people live, constantly miserable. They don’t feel miserable. They’re like, “I’m fine.” There’s a difference between, “I’m fine too” to “My life rocks.” It’s a completely different thing, but we don’t know that when we’re stuck in comfortably miserable.

My family back home had some experience in real estate with a commercial property. I knew about passive cashflow from back home and I’m like, “Let’s start looking at real estate.” When everyone thinks about real estate, the very first thing that comes to your mind, at least for us, it was like, “Let’s look at single-family homes.” Perhaps we can get home, wholesale it, rehab it, flip it, make some money and be a hot side hustle because we couldn’t go over jobs. Our jobs were the ticket to a permanent residency here, so we couldn’t leave our jobs. We put a junker under contract. We realized quickly that we’re way over our heads. We had no idea how to estimate repairs, a new kitchen flooring, which had foundation issues, and roofing. Nobody took our wholesale special that we were going to have to probably look for money partners and have holding costs. Eventually, secure probably traditional financing, so on and so forth.

Land Investment: Nobody talks about land. Jurd is something that is so way out there for people.

It’s not like we didn’t have bad credit. We had no credit because we were not originally from here. There’s a lot of moving pieces. To cut the story short, we decided, “We’re not doing this. We’re pulling out during our due diligence period.” We came across something interesting to us, Moneeka. Here’s where I think that a lot of it is your perspective and the immigrant advantage. I always talk about the immigrant advantage being that you have, number one, zero fear of hard work because you’re willing to create a better world than the one you left. Number two, you see opportunities that others perhaps missed. What we came across here in the US was a concept that was completely revolutionary to us. Both in Germany and Honduras, people do not lose their properties to property taxes.

I found out about tax liens and tax deeds. I went to Sonoma County to a tax deed, which means they’re auctioning off a property that has been delinquent five years or more. What I noticed that most of the properties that were coming for auction, which is incredibly competitive were pieces of land. I’m like, “These people have decided mentally, have checked out and let these properties go probably years before this is coming to auction.” My husband and I were like, “Why don’t we send them a letter and try to see if we can get some of this vacant land before it goes to auction because I saw it going for good numbers, for way about what it was doing back taxes.”

We perfected what we call our proven performance ladder over the years. It took us about three years to perfect our methodology and split test every sentence. The whole process of buying from the lead, all the way to closing on a property and having actual profit been made. I’m like, “Let’s put the pedal to the metal. This is it.” We’re able to get properties to this day, not just ourselves but our clients and our students are able to get properties for $0.05 to $0.25 on the dollar. For every 750 to 1,000 pieces of mail that we send, we get anywhere between 6 and 15 calls for every hundred offers about three deals.

Those are amazing conversion rates when it comes to comparing that to the house flippers. The house flippers need to send 10,000 pieces of mail in order to be able to get one deal. For us, it was a gap in the industry that others overlook and don’t care to explore. To be frank, if you go to any real estate investment conference, anything that people are going to think of has to do with rehabbing, with wholesaling a home, with multifamily, small multifamily, large multifamily, commercial property, and notes. Nobody talks about land. Jurd is something that is so way out there for people. That’s the opportunity that we saw that there were in a blue ocean with no competition.

We could get these properties cheap and that we could turn around and sell them quickly because we were getting them cheap. We could sell them for 60% to 80% of the market value. We specialize in three types of properties. We buy properties that are infill lots in the cities, in the path of growth, or that are in recreational areas. This is how we started. The first year, we did 60 deals. In the second year, we did about 100 deals. By that time, our green cards were coming. We’re like, “We can let go of our jobs.” We didn’t put a two weeks’ notice. It was more a three-month notice because I’ve always thought you always want to leave the door open with someone that has given you a hand. We were both immensely grateful to our companies for having given us the opportunity to stay in this country permanently forever legally.

How long did you work for each of them?

Five years.

That’s great because they sponsored you. They also got good high-performance out of you. It was a win-win and I loved those stories.

We decided to go at this full-time, then the next year we did about 150 deals. That was with us doing this full-time. What we noticed is that we were at a point where we were as tired, as exhausted putting the number of hours that we were putting in our jobs we were putting it into the business. We were like, “Do we shrink in order for us to have the freedom of time that we have because we were making good money, but we didn’t have any freedom of time, or do we expand so that we can have a team that helps us leverage our time?” That’s what we decided. We went for expansion. We hired a team that next year. We did our first auction and we sold about 200 pieces of land in one day.

We used to do those once a quarter. We continue doing that even through the recession. What that allowed us, Moneeka is to have an incredibly privileged situation. When 2008, 2009 came around, a lot of people were losing their shirts. We were having a situation that we were sitting on a ton of cash and a ton of liquidity from our cash flips, which are anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000 for each piece of land. We can either flip it for cash or we can flip it using seller financing. For example, I buy a property for $1,000, I sell it for $20,000. Somebody gives me $2,000 down so I have recouped my entire investment. They make $300 to $400 payments for the next 5 to 10 years. That’s how we’ve been able to make land cashflow.

At some point, we had over $70,000 in passive cashflow, $12 million in notes from the land. It’s like doing the right strategy at the right time in the market. It was our time to start allocating some of the cash profits because our land continues to be our cash machine and putting those profits into single-family homes. We went crazy shopping because in Phoenix in 2009, it was the bottom of the market. We could buy a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom home for $40,000 to $50,000, put in $5,000 and $10,000 and rent it for $900 to $1,100. Those properties have quadruple in price and we’ve sold some and bought in other markets where we could buy them again for $40,000 to $50,000 and do the same thing over again.

Back in 2016, we’re doing this amazing thing because the end goal has always been at the end of the day, passive cashflow. We call it Forever Cash. There’s one-time cash from flips. There’s temporary cash from notes and the land, then the Holy grail, in my opinion, of all cashflows is that Forever Cash. That comes in forever. We decided, “How can we start not looking at one door at a time, but a hundred doors?” That’s when we started looking into multifamily. We now have four projects. We are almost coming full circle with one of them where we purchased, totally improved, efficiency operating it at a high level. We increased market rents. Any deferred maintenance that was there with the property is taking care of, and we’re looking to sell it.

We’re coming full circle with our first project, which is 94 units from a purchase in 2016. As we grew as investors in our sophistication and understanding, we were able to go up asset classes. To be frank, the land is my darling because it is the cornerstone of our wealth. It has been transformational to us, Moneeka not just like real money in my bank account, but as individuals, people, and entrepreneurs. Nothing will sculpture spirit. Even if it’s a small deal where maybe your spread is $3,000 to $5,000, going through the process of having the courage, talking to a seller, talking to a buyer, figuring out the documentation pieces, how to close on it, and how to market. There’s nothing like that to sculpt your character and help you become a better person in all aspects of life.

A couple of questions I have for you, first of all, where do you live? Where are you located?

I live in Phoenix, Arizona, in Paradise Valley. There are beautiful mountains here. I’m five minutes from the mountain preserve and a hiking trail. We love the outdoors. Now’s the time to be here. Usually, June through September. We try to escape the heat from Germany. We have a yearly pilgrimage to Europe. Part of it is from leveraging our time with the team, but also finding asset classes. In the beginning, an asset class that we could wrap our mind around and that could put our family first and could give us those four freedoms. We’re all looking for freedom of time. We’re all looking for freedom of money, but also relationships and a purpose. The land business is giving me also that freedom of purpose is that we’re teaching that to others. I’m able to give back in some way, shape, or form, and pour my heart into developing a person from going from an employee mentality into an entrepreneurial mentality using land as a vehicle because it’s simple.

That’s been a lot of my purpose too. I use my favorite vehicle which is real estate. I’m a buy and hold person, but my journey and message are about living a life of bliss, which is all about the four freedoms that you talk about. For me, that emotional freedom too, living a blissful life. We’re aligned. Where do you invest? Do you invest in Phoenix or do you invest all over the place?

Land Investment: With land, you have to be much more creative to move it quickly and for the prices you want.

For land, we invest all across the US only because we don’t need to look at the land. Back in the day, there was no Google Earth. Now, we can do everything through that. I don’t need to look at any single piece of dirt whatsoever or run down to negotiate with a seller with the land. These are people that have never been approached by anyone ever. They are happy to take my offer whenever I’m ready to give them an offer. It’s single-families. There are three markets and multifamily three markets that we specialize in so that we can understand those markets well. We can understand the employment base and become masters because I’m all about mastery. Repetition creates the possibility to scale. That repetition also gives you the opportunity to do something over and over again until you mastered it. We write on those two asset classes when it comes to single-families and multifamily. We like to focus on those three markets only.

My big question about land is if you buy it on $0.05 to $0.25 on the dollar, where are you going to sell it? Who do you sell it to? Why they did just sell it?

This is the story of our lives. It’s beyond me, but people will sell at that amount of money or that level of discount because they decided that they were going to purchase two pieces of land, one in Florida and one in Arizona. They decide to retire in Arizona. There is a piece of property in Florida, their kids don’t want it or they pass away, Arizona want it, or there’s a divorce and they need to get out. There are endless reasons why, but circumstances are always difficult for people. There are always reasons for money. Why didn’t they list it with a realtor? Many actually have. Realtor suck when it comes to selling pieces of land. You cannot put in the MLS a piece of dirt with two corner markers and expect to sell it. You have to sell a dream when you’re selling land. You need to sell the possibility of what could be in that piece of land and create your listings and your marketing with a completely different perspective than when you’re selling a home, which is easily stageable. With good lighting, you can make it look attractive and pretty. With land, you have to be much more creative to be able to move it quickly and for the prices that you want.

If the buyers are developers, it’s a quick lookup. It’s looking up on Google, an association of builders in the city that you’re in. You can get a list of builders that you could send your property and market your property to. If it’s an infill a lot, neighbors will win your property. We have what we call our proven neighbor letter. Fifty percent of all our sales and our client’s sales come from a neighbor letter. You can sell on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Zillow, LandWatch, or LANDFLIP. There are many places where you can do it for free. You don’t even have to pay to market the property.

Are they easy to sell?

Yes. If your listing is looking nice and a piece of property, it’s not going to sell. It is just a piece of dirt with two corner markers, but if you say, “Selling two acres of paradise for 40% under market value,” and that’s your heading versus “Here are my two acres of land in such and such county or such and such city.” You start building the dream of, “Look at all the amenities. We’re about an hour away from the main city of such and such. These are the homes and developments that are happening in the area.” You put views of that, “These are some of the hospitals and some of the employment centers.” You then go narrow your focus and maybe your picture number 5 or 6 is the actual piece of dirt.

You finalize by saying, “I offer either 40% market value, or we could talk about seller financing with a low down payment and monthly payments of X.” All of a sudden, you’ve opened your pool of potential buyers when you have the opportunity for them to buy with seller financing. Maybe not everyone is going to have $20,000 sitting around. Maybe they’ll have $2,000 to give you as a down payment and then you can start creating those notes and that passive cashflow. Now, what has been off the hook has been Facebook Marketplace out of all places.

You do land, single-family homes, and large multifamily. Talk about how you’re structuring your cashflow to get that from each one of those that you invest in.

For example for us, when we started our business, after that Forever Cash and after those four freedoms. We have broken up into different stages, a level of freedom in each of those four areas. Our first level is always like, “What we call our security plan?” If the security plan of my lifestyle costs me $5,000, how can I create with passive cashflow from land, houses, or multifamily? $5,000 is easily 10, 20 properties of $20,000 each, where I’m getting maybe $400 or $500 in monthly payments. That’s easily doable in a matter of 1 or 1.5 years to build that passive cashflow.

That was our first milestone. How can we get the first $5,000 over lifestyle to be paid? For everyone, that security will be different. When we started, we had nothing. $5,000 for us was a great lifestyle. We even afforded a vacation if we wanted once a year. We then moved on to our second plan, which is our comfort plan. That comfort plan for everyone will be different. For us, it was about $10,000. How can we create $10,000 of passive cashflow either with land, with a single-families, or with buildings? How can we build up to that? All our lifestyle is being paid for that and luxury.

Now, we’re working on our luxury plan. For that, it’s going to be different for everyone. Maybe someone wants to have living la vida loca and fly private. Maybe that idea of passive cashflow for you is $50,000 to $100,000 a month. Maybe for some of you, $20,000 would be fine, so it depends. For us, we gave ourselves personal numbers of what each of those would look like. In the beginning, we use the land, and then we transitioned some of those land profits and cashflow into the single-families, which we continue to own to this day and into the multifamily. At the end of the day, one drawback from land is that there are no benefits when it comes to taxes. There is multifamily where you can use a lot of the depreciation to shelter and offset. What we use is a lot of the depreciation from the multifamily and the single-family to offset a lot of our active income that comes from the land flips. We get the benefit of both worlds. That’s how we structured it.

I’ve never heard it done that way. Everybody that I’ve spoken to that does land love land and they will not touch anything else because everything else is higher maintenance than land is. From my perspective, the land wasn’t that exciting in the past. I’ve looked at it several times. You would bring in the other asset classes so that you could take the tax benefits that offset your profits, which gives you a lot more income. It’s a simple way to do that.

It’s still in an industry that I understand now intimately well. I don’t understand the stock market. I don’t understand foreign exchange. I don’t understand cryptocurrency, but I do understand dirt and I understand creating a home in a first in the class community for someone such that they can continue paying rent and there’s that pride of ownership in our community. I understand how to do those things, but I don’t understand a lot of other things. It’s like sticking to your lane. There are so many shiny objects out there that it’s an exercise and discipline in terms of putting blinders on. I always say to my husband whenever he comes home, “So and so is doing this.” I’m like, “Is that a carousel ride?” I call it a carousel ride because of those shiny objects. You get on the carousel. You go for a wonderful ride. It’s fun. For the three minutes that it lasts or three months or whatever you’re doing, get out of the carousel. You’re in the exact same spot financially. If it’s one of those I’m like, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

You meet some good points here. First of all, there are a million ways to make a million dollars in real estate. We have a lot of options. The first thing is to get to know real estate, but you do need to specialize and you need mastery. When you up-level what you’re doing, you started on land. You wanted to use that cashflow differently so you up-leveled to single-family homes and then to multifamily.

The team is also up-leveling so that you can have ahead of the horse that you’ve mastered. That runs on its own before you can go and get diluted with something else. That’s the key.

The point that I’m trying to make is when you decide you need to do something different, don’t suddenly jump to Forex Trading, Bitcoin, or from, “I own land and now I’m going to run a syndication project on this apartment building.” You don’t know anything about it. You need to step into it and allow your mastery to be the foundation for those next levels that you go to. You want to make sure that you’re climbing with mastery rather than starting on the ground floor for every single thing that you do. That’s what we love about your story. It’s true with building a team too. You start with one employee and then you might grow to 100, but you got to start with one. You’re not going to in general unless you’re a big corporation buy another company with 100 employees if you’ve never had employees.

Land Investment: If you are going through uncertain times, it will only last for a specific period of time. It will pass.

You want to make sure that when you are deciding to grow, many of the ladies that are reading are just beginners. They’re trying to figure out, “Where am I going to start that path towards mastery?” Maybe it’s going to be land. Maybe it’s going to be single-family homes. I do BRRR where I rent things out. What is it that we want to do? What is the starting point for that? The thing that I want to say to the ladies is where you are now, you’re not going to be able to see that next step. You create mastery where you start, which means it takes a commitment. It takes a willingness to cry through some nights because things get hard and you don’t know everything yet. It takes an understanding that you’re going to make mistakes and that’s part of evolution and mastery.

As you move through that, you become, as Michelle says so eloquently and I love, your business will turn you into something you didn’t know you could be. It will be an amazing journey. Sometimes it’s hard, but it’s so worth it. The thing is that if you’ve got bliss tools like I talk about, you learn to see the hard as a piece of the puzzle, a part of the game. Even though it’s stressful, it’s part of what you do. You learn to reframe it, but then when you get to mastery, you understand. You can look at some other things and you’re like, “On top of this, what can I build?” I love this image of starting with land and then building a single-family home because that’s what you do. It’s literal, but in your business is more metaphorical, then you go, “That’s kind of playing monopoly too. You buy land, you buy a house, and you buy a hotel.”

It’s important to start your journey towards mastery and understand all of those pieces and become the person that you want to be and you need to be to make that successful and then evolve into the next step of mastery. That’s the way that it goes. I’ve been in this business for many years now, and the growth and the learning never stop. I didn’t have all this knowledge back when I started. What if I had waited and not done that waited for the mastery? You have to grow into mastery. It’s a one-step process of the time. You have to have the full experience.

In our ecosystem, we talk about the four Cs. The first one is commitment. Commit to one thing. If your lane is going to be land or if your lane is going to be housed in a specific strategy, commit to that one thing. What you’re going to find is that once you commit, you’re going to be like, “What have I gotten myself into?” You’re going to have to muster the second C, which is courage only for a period of time. You’re going to go through uncertain times, uncomfortable times, but it’s only going to be for a specific period of time. It will pass.

As you do and willing to get your hands dirty, you’re going to gain the capability from doing it. That’s the third C, capability. Once you have the capability, you have the confidence of looking back, “Look at what I’ve done.” That gives you the opportunity to go say, “Now that I have this confidence, I can go and iterate in zeros and look at properties with a few more zeros at the end.” It’s like an upward spiral of confidence of going through those four Cs, committing, killing other options because if you feel overcommitted, you haven’t decided. Deciding on one thing, mustering the courage, gaining the capability by doing it, getting dirty, and doing the hard work. We all have to do it. There are no shortcuts.

There’s a way to collapse time, which is through a mentor, especially when we started on the multifamily side because we didn’t have any mentors for the land. I don’t know if anyone back in 2002 was out there teaching land, otherwise, I would have invested. By the time we wanted to do multifamily, we invested in a mentor. We invested in someone willing to basically bring the deal, mentor us. We put in our money for the escrow deposit. We did the fundraising and so forth. It has been the best money spent because this person has helped us collapse time and has steered us away from possible landmines that we would’ve never known were there.

It takes a little bit of sometimes banking on ourselves and willing to reach out for support more than likely. Once you have found the vehicle, a lot of the answers are not going to come on how-tos and what, but from who is going to have the what’s and how-tos for you and help you steer you in the right direction. That’s something that I wish I would have focused on earlier. Who’s in my life are going to hold me accountable that are going to walk me in and collapsed times and help me have less heartache and fewer headaches.

We’re almost out of time. We’re going to head towards the end of this part of the show. I want to let the ladies know that on Extra, Michelle and I are going to be talking about the details of how to get a land business going. We’ve never had anybody cover that in this show so I’m excited about that. We’re going to talk about specifics on how to get started. How do you pick areas? How do you do a mailing? That’s going to be valuable information. Before we head into our three rapid questions, could you tell people how they can reach you?

They can reach me by going to MichelleBosch.com. I’m also on Facebook, Michelle Bosch, Michelle Bosch Official on Instagram. You can also go to LandProfitGenerator.com/bliss. You can find me in any of those places.

I know that you’re offering a free masterclass as a gift to my ladies. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

It’s a masterclass on the five steps to finding a deal and closing a deal with land. You can go to LandProfitGenerator.com/bliss. I know that you guys are going to be blown away by the simplicity of the method and how so many of us are looking for that one thing. We’ve been looking sometimes in the wrong place, especially on the house flipping world. A lot of the stuff out there is not designed for a beginner. There’s nothing like finding that one thing that where things are going to click where things align where you can see yourself doing this, and getting an ROI quickly.

I love what Michelle said, “Who I like to be a hero for is the beginning investor.” I can see based on the masterclass and how you talk about this that you are. You’re a hero to the beginner. I appreciate that Michelle.

Our mission is if we can touch a thousand families and turn them into millionaires, bring fathers to become stay at home dads or allowed them to retire a spouse that hates their job, allow them to have private schooling for their children, that home that they’ve always wanted, moving closer to family, traveling the world or extra money for retirement. I’m all for it. We’re already well underway. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see the stories, especially like I was telling you inside of our Facebook community. Just seeing people making their dreams come true. We’re not talking dreamers, but these are people that are doers as well. I have found a higher purpose, a higher why and therefore, there’s a higher income as well that correlates with that. Sometimes it’s just tapping into that and snapping out of that comfortable misery somethings were in.

Thank you for the free gift. I know I’m going to go download it. Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions? Tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

The first time I’m going to say is to take bold action. I know that this has been said and it’s overused, but I cannot overemphasize how important it is. Courage loves speed. If you are sitting there doubting, analyzing and being stuck in paralysis analysis, nothing happens when you’re stuck. Things happen when you’re moving. Take action and make sure it’s an action that is bringing you forward. Sometimes we think, “I’m taking action. I’m setting up my website. I’m setting up my LLC.” That’s all fantastic, but that’s not what’s going to make you money. What’s going to make you money is reaching out to sellers, making offers, and selling properties. Those are the three activities. Don’t be like thinking that busy movement is moving forward. It’s a good movement. It’s better than nothing, but take bold action that scares you, at the same time, excites you. That is bold action.

What is the strategy for being successful in real estate investing?

The strategy on being successful, if you’re going to scale, have the discipline to go through the repetition. The repetition will eventually allow you to bring in team, to leverage your time by leveraging other people’s time. That’s the secret to scaling. Otherwise, you’re stuck like we were back in the day with freedom of money, but no freedom of time. When I say bring in team, it’s not recruiting them. It is developing leaders within your team. In the beginning, it’s like, “I need to find someone that helps me.” You might get a VA and that’s fine. I’m a big proponent of being all-in. If someone is all-in in my company, I want to be all-in with them. The Return on Involvement or ROI that I get from that person being 100% dedicated to me versus a VA that is dedicated to maybe 3 or 4 different clients. The ROI, I find it with someone that is full-time. They’re dedicated for you. You’re not recruiting, but building up and empowering to make decisions with the intentions that buy into your mission and into your vision for sure.

What would you say is one practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

Land Investment: As long you are willing to get your hands dirty, you’re going to gain the capability from doing it.

I practicing something that is called Yoga Nidra. Back in 2011, I went through a period of complete burnout. Burnout is something that we hear about. It’s very real. I was burnout mentally, physically, emotionally. It was not because, “We still needed to get to where we needed to.” It was because I had noticed that we had gotten to where we needed to. I had not allowed myself the opportunity to enjoy and smell the roses and that journey. One of the practices that I stumbled into was yoga. Within yoga, there’s a meditation called Yoga Nidra. You don’t even have to sit up, criss-cross applesauce. You can lay down.

It’s a visualization of relaxation through the body. I love starting my day with that. It includes a little bit of breathwork. I love doing that also in the afternoons before picking up my daughter from school. That way I can let go of whatever crazy energy I’ve had during the day. Pick her up completely grounded and centered. Sometimes we can be a complete jerk to the people that we most love and it’s because we’re stressed. That does not help me with my relationships, but it also creativity. It has helped me in being braver and more courageous because how can you freaking be brave and courageous of your stress out of your mind? That meditation has been instrumental for me so I highly recommend it.

This show has been truly amazing, Michelle. I can not wait to move into Extra to get more details. Thank you for what you’ve been offering so far.

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

We do have more in Extra. Michelle is going to be talking about the details, the specifics on how to get started in land. I’m want excited to engage in that conversation. I hope you are too. If you are not subscribed to Extra but would like to be, it’s easy. This is what you do. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You’re going to subscribe. You get seven days for free to test the waters and see if you like the content. Once you become a member, you will get that episode wherever you’re reading this. You don’t have to worry about, “I need a new app. I need new tools,” nothing. It’s all right there.

When you drive, you walk, you’re working out or whatever, we can read that piece in the same way. Go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com to check that out. If you are leaving Michelle and I now, thank you for joining us for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Important Links

• Orbit Investments
• Forever Cash
• LandProfitGenerator.com
• UltimateBoardroom.com
• MichelleBosch.com
• Michelle Bosch – Facebook
• Michelle Bosch Official – Instagram
• LandProfitGenerator.com/bliss
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Michael Bosch