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Optimize Your Bliss Even Now! With Dr. Maegan Renee & Francois Braine-Bonnaire

 

It’s a challenge to keep sane with all the toxicity in the world that surrounds us, pandemic or no pandemic. Tune in to this episode to learn how you can practice self-care, optimize your bliss and achieve a balanced and stress-free life. Joining Moneeka Sawyer for this is the power couple of life optimization, Francois Braine-Bonnaire and Dr. Maegan Renee, co-founders of ToBeOptimized.com. Between the two of them, Francois and Maegan possess a wealth of knowledge and experience in counseling, consulting and life coaching. Among other specializations, they are also experts on social media detox, for which they have created a method and written a book, both of which are covered in this episode.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Optimize Your Bliss Even Now! With Dr. Maegan Renee & Francois Braine-Bonnaire

We have our wonderful friend, Francois Braine-Bonnaire, and his incredibly lovely wife, Dr. Maegan Renee. Dr. Maegan Renee is a Licensed Professional Counselor and holds a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision. She is the Owner of M.R. Counseling and Consulting and Cofounder of ToBeOptimized.com. She has presented on topics of mental health at national conferences around the country. She has publications on topics such as social isolation, early childhood mental health, and social media detox. She has many years of experience in the field of counseling, working with children, adolescents and adults. She also is the social-emotional coordinator for Florida Atlantic University.

Francois is a real estate investor and an international serial entrepreneur and certified life coach. Born and raised in Paris, France, he holds dual French and American citizenship. He is the Cofounder of ToBeOptimized.com and co-author of 21 Day Social Media Detox Journal with Dr. Maegan Renee. He’s also a contributing author of the book, Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way with me.

With the Turnkey Real Estate business founded in 2010, that continues to grow. He has helped more than 200 families from 15 countries around the world to successfully invest in more than 600 rental properties in the United States. He has a passion for helping people through both real estate investment and life coaching. He comes from a place of the heart. I love this transition that he’s making to also help with life coaching, because you could tell, even when he was talking about investing, he’s about empowering people to make their blissful lives possible. Welcome back, Francois and it’s nice to meet you, Maegan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Moneeka. It’s great to be here and meet you as well.

Maegan, could you tell us about who you are and how you’ve gotten to where you are?

I am born and raised in Alabama. I grew up in a small rural town and grew up to two parents who worked at a blue jean factory. Growing up, we did not have a lot of resources, and the school I attended did not have counseling resources. It was quite a challenging experience that molded who I am. I’ll be talking about how I got on the path of counseling. When I was in school, I experienced a lot of bullying, low self-esteem. I don’t know that many people escape middle school without those experiences. With those adversities, I decided one day, “I wanted an education.” I was the first in my family to get a college education. I knew I wanted to help youth, teens, and adults that had gone through experiences similar to my own or other adversities in life. I started volunteering at a young age, working with individuals through therapeutic horseback riding. My path went into Special Education Counseling and my PhD in Counseling because I wanted to give back on a larger scale and work with our future counselors and training them.

I went through a huge amount of bullying also. My sister-in-law is blonde, gorgeous, tall, she was one of the popular kids, which I never had the benefit of. I had a conversation with her and she said to me, “High school was hard because I never felt like I fit in.” Even the popular kids have this same issue. It shows up differently in our lives, but it still shows up. I was a colored person in a white community. I got bullied because of that, but we’ve all had these experiences and it’s valuable. This work as adults. Success cannot happen unless we feel supported and we are able to lift our own self-esteem and because of that history for all of us, sometimes it becomes a little difficult. The work you are doing is important. Talk to me about that piece, mental health in business and in life. Why and how can that be important?

I like to use an analogy that seems to reach a lot of people when it comes to mental health and self-care. For some people, they almost feel guilty about self-care and doing things that are for them. I like to talk about the fact that when you get on an airplane, one of the first things they do, when they talk about the emergency procedures, they say, “If there is a need for a mask, put the mask on yourself. Because if you pass out, you’re not going to be able to help the person closest to you.” It’s like that in mental health and self-care too. If you’re not taking care of yourself first, then you’re not going to be able to take care of those closest to you. When we can reframe it that way, especially for women, we can realize that, “This is an act of self-kindness to myself, but also to those I’m closest with.”

Maegan, I love that analogy. One of the things that’s interesting about that is everybody uses it. I’ve heard that ten times on my show. Why? Because it’s relevant. Ladies, this analogy is given because it’s real. What happens is we hear that and we go, “Yes.” Instead of saying that, hear us. Your self-care is not selfish. It’s one of the most selfless things that you can do because it empowers you then to take care of the people that you care about most. You can give from an empty cup. Many of us women discover this, we can get from an empty cup, but only for so long, we collapse and we become a burden on the people we love. None of us ever want to do that. Keep yourself lifted and filled up so that you never become a burden on the people you most want to take care of. It’s imperative that you take care of yourself and that you get your oxygen first. In social distancing, many of us are going crazy. Let’s talk about self-care and how to keep ourselves sane in this circumstance and environment.

If you're not taking care of yourself first, then you're not going to be able to take care of those closest to you. Share on X

There are many things you can do. First of all, getting in touch with a life coach. Many are offering virtual counseling sessions. Telehealth is not a brand-new thing, but it has not been utilized in the way it’s being utilized now. I can speak about virtual counseling because I’ve done it before. Francois has done virtual life coaching. I feel that people can establish an authentic relationship with the person they’re working with even through Zoom or phone calls. People are feeling such a lack of control in their lives. If you are a perfectionist, if you are a hard worker, this does not go well. I can’t control imperfectionism.

Pausing for a moment and thinking about the things you can control, what are the areas in your life you have some control over? For example, what time do you wake up? That’s important. What did you eat for breakfast? How you’re spending your time throughout the day? Are you creating a schedule for yourself? Are you building in time to stop working? Are you putting some boundaries around work? It’s hard to do. For example saying, “At 5:00 on this day, I’m going to stop and that’s my time to go have a bubble bath or listen to my favorite podcasts or go on a walk.” It’s important to pay attention to what you have control of and how your boundaries are surrounding work, especially in working from home.

We can’t control what’s happening out there in the world, but we can always control how we choose to respond. This is a theory or concept and you grounded that beautifully about these are specific steps and there in choose bliss also. Your morning routine is imperative. I’m guilty of this also. I’m crazy about my husband. I love every moment that I get with him. When he’s home, I’m completely distracted. I want to sleep-in in the morning. I want to cuddle more, reading later at night. We have this beautiful life, but the reality is that we can have a beautiful life without disrupting everything else. He’s re-implemented his workout schedule at 7:00 in the morning. I’ve reimplemented my morning routine. It changes life to feeling like it’s more in control. I love being in the flow, but unless you put some boundaries around your work life, that flow starts to feel not as yummy. It starts to feel like interference and even you can start to resent it.

It is time to ground our work-life since we’re at home. Ground that so that then we do have yummy time with our lovely partners or our children or doing those things that we want. The morning routine is such a key part of that. When you wake up, make sure you do eat breakfast, make sure you do get those workouts in, plan time with your spouse. Even though David and I are in each other’s faces all the time, we still have a date night every single week. That’s the night that we do something special. I do dinner in a nicer way, I have a tablecloth, we watch a movie. Doing those things is important. The other thing that I wanted to touch on is this idea of getting counseling remotely.

Much of the time we think that we have to go into an office and we can’t do that. This whole idea of doing things on Zoom or the phone can feel uncomfortable. I see it all the time in my own coaching practice. Once you do the first one, especially when you’re talking to someone like Maegan or Francois who are kind and open, you’ll feel their energy right through the video. Once you have that connection, you do it once, you can then pursue it further and it can help to support your life. Like with anything else, the action is the key until you take that first step, nothing else happens. Make sure that you identify the things that are going to support you and then take action towards pursuing them.

Looking at that with the life coach perspective, I would say that even when we are experiencing, keeping in mind something that can be the backbone of your wellbeing is your life balance. For those who are not super familiar with the concept of life balance, it’s the fact of considering that in your life, you have seven different key compartments in your life. Those being your social and your family relationships. That’s one. One would be everything related to your career and/or education aspirations. Number three will be money and personal finance. Number four would be mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Number five would be health and leisure. Number six would be everything related to your daily life responsibilities, which are important. Number seven is contribution and giving back to society as you do well, Moneeka.

If someone is focusing because it’s all about work or money. Chances are that by doing so that this person is going to neglect. Also, come back to the amount of ease our lives, like personal life, personal relationship, staying in shape in order to get rid of stress, any physical activities, having a romance life. When if you focus on one compact amount of your life, your life is going to be unbalanced. Without a doubt, it’s going to be extremely detrimental to your wellbeing, but also to your success in general. Even during the specific circumstance we are going through, it is possible to keep your life balance in a good way to dedicate the amount of time that each compact amount of your life needs to feel well to succeed in your life.

I got a text from a close friend of mine and he said to me, “I’m at home.” The kids, one of them is at college and one of them is staying with her mom. He’s alone in the house and he runs his own business. He’s working 14 to 16 hours a day because he’s got all this time. For the first two weeks, he was like, “I got all this time. I can get caught up.” After four weeks of doing that, he wrote to me, “Something has to give, I’m feeling hollow.” As excited as we are about our work and our mission and whatever it is that we want to be doing out there in the world. It’s only one piece of who you are. Immediately, I wrote back to him to start running again.

He loves to run. It makes his heart sing. Get out there and start running. It’s something you can still do. Create some Zoom connections, whether it’s a therapist or what about, we’re doing game nights on Zoom every Thursday night, come join our game night. Have Zoom conversations with your parents or FaceTime. Maybe you can help them figure out the technology. Create some interactions that will fill you up because they’re important. They’re such a big piece of who we are and they take a little bit of time. They take your mind off of the work and they put you back into being a human being rather than a working machine.

 

People would benefit from limiting their exposure to the news. Figure out the day and make sure you’re checking a reliable source. Another thing is we can connect, not just through social media. A lot of people think, “If I’m on Instagram or Facebook, I’m going to have those genuine connections with my friends or family.” Those are passive interactions. Not only that, it also increases your exposure to sometimes false news about the pandemic and what’s going on. You can’t control what you’re seeing unless you’re removing people that you don’t like their feeds. A more active way to get engaged is to schedule a happy hour with your friends, schedule a game night, you go play Yahtzee over Zoom.

I used to be part of a lot of these happiness groups. I’m known as Miss Bliss. Everybody wanted me in their group when this whole thing started. The conversation was all about the news and what is feeling bad and, “My kids are freaking out.” Eventually, I would say something to the effect of as global leaders, we are responsible for the global conversation. That global conversation needs to be uplifting. There’s plenty pulling us down. Let’s focus more on what’s going right than what’s going wrong. I got kicked out of most of those groups. That’s okay. I’m still part of a couple of them.

I want to be part of groups that are engaged in the uplifting of our lives. One of the key factors that I say over again, watch the news once a day, you need to be aware and vigilant so that you know what you need to be doing. You also need to stay positive and blissful. How do you do that? When you’re watching the news, take the pieces that support you and let go of all those pieces that create drama and upset because that drama and upset serves no purpose. It brings you down and brings it into your home. Instead, take what serves you, take what’s important for you to know. For me, I do want to know the numbers in Santa Clara County because it makes me feel good that they’re going down, but when they were going up, I wasn’t checking that. My husband gives me an executive summary. Make sure that whatever you’re taking in serves you in what you’re trying to create in your life. If I can say, try to create bliss, it’s much more fun than fear.

I love that you have this perspective that in some ways, we can control what we’re focusing on and thinking about that. That aligns with what both Francois and I do when we’re working with individuals, it practices what’s called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You can’t change the situation always, but you can change certain ways you view it. For example, taking what you can from the news that serves you and trying to let go of that doesn’t.

For many people, seeing somebody with a mask on, when they go to the grocery store, they’re walking down the street can be very scary and frightening. People have this thought of, “This is scary and this is so bad.” What if we reframed it and said, “Look at all these people trying to take care of their health and protect others. Look at us all coming together as a community to not think about ourselves, but I’m putting a mask on because there may be a person who’s more susceptible to this.” That’s a beautiful reframe that you’re still acknowledging the reality of the situation, but you’re taking a more blissful view on it.

I went to the grocery store and we realized that afterward, I was full of anger. I could visualize, it was like black, gooey, horrible anger that was completely taking over. What I was noticing is that I was wearing a mask because it was important to me that if I’m a carrier that I do not infect anybody else, but only 50% of the people in the grocery store were wearing masks. This is a place that we have to go to, we need to eat. Only 50% of the people are taking responsibility for whether they’re spreading or not. It filled me with anger because I’m about social consciousness. I sat with that and I thought, “What can I do about this?”

Instead of being a victim and being angry, I went on Amazon and I bought myself a full-face mask. What this does is it keeps my eyes, nose and mouth protected. I can’t send anything out but now, I’m also protecting myself so nobody can infect me. Certainly, if they’re standing closer than six feet, they cough on my back or whatever, I’m still exposed. The most important part is my face. It looks weird and people look at me strangely, but it empowered me in a place of being angry and victimized.

It empowered me, “I’m not angry, I’m protected.” I can stand as an example in a safe way or wherever I am of taking care of myself. I moved from anger to empowerment. As you’re out there and you’re seeing this and you’re feeling, “I’m scared.” It is a scary time, but we can reframe every piece of that experience to empower ourselves to feel better and it’s supercritical because I was focusing on the 50% that was not wearing the mask, I should and can focus on 50% that is, and it’s increasing all the time.

We’re seeing a great increase and people seem to be taking things more seriously. That’s a beautiful thing to see that people are being more socially aware.

You can't change the situation always, but you can change certain way you view it. Share on X

I would say that we can look at the situation in two different ways. It’s extremely helpful. I love to see everyday people being more respectful of what’s going on by being more self-conscious and protecting not only themselves but others. It’s evolving in a good way.

When we go into EXTRA, I want to do a deep dive into behavioral cognitive psychology. It’s one of my go-to, so I can’t wait for that conversation. Can you give some real specific tips that people can use to improve the bliss in their lives?

It’s a wonderful opportunity to keep on learning. We are all stuck at home with too much time in our hands. A life lesson that I’ve seen for all times, keep on your learning, all your lifelong, you can read books, you can listen to podcasts. With Dr. Maegan Renee, we have started to take online classes on different topics. It could be topics in which you want to become an expert in or it can be a brand-new topic, something you don’t know anything about because it’s rewarding to be always joyous and to keep on learning. It’s helpful to spend some time because we have too much time on our hands, but also, that’s something we should keep after what’s going on to keep on using our brain and in my opinion, that’s a wonderful recipe for wellbeing, but also for success.

It’s fun to do these things together. If you can’t, you can still do it on Zoom with somebody, but learning how to make homemade salsa. I have a few tips too. One, gratitude journal. There’s a lot out there that you can order online there. I love the One-Minute Gratitude Journal. It’s literally one minute, there are a lot of us who are and have busy schedules. There are also five-minute journals. You can create your own. There are apps out there, but I’d encourage people to step away from the screen and to write down or draw a picture or get creative, take a picture of something that makes you happy and to have that moment of gratitude and to start your day off that way.

Practicing with self-compassion. We are good at giving compassion to others, “You made a mistake? It’s okay. I made a mistake, let me beat myself up for half-an-hour mentally.” There is some great information out there. There are some great leaders in this field. A lot of people wonder like, “What is self-compassion?” It’s not self-pity, nor self-esteem, it’s acknowledging that you are human and you are going to have experiences that are not ideal, that are difficult and acknowledging that as a human, there are other humans that are going through this suffering with you.

You’re not isolated in this experience and being forgiving of yourself, especially keeping in mind, it’s not the time to be the perfect parent, spouse and employee. We’re living under conditions that nobody has all the answers to or knows exactly how to navigate. Putting undue pressure on yourself to perform better in any of those areas is not practicing self-compassion. It could be valuable to take a step back and say, “Am I being kind to myself? Am I talking to myself the way I would talk to a friend or am I being a lot harsher? If I am, maybe I need to try practicing talking to myself as though I would a friend or a partner.”

We are allowing grace for each other. I love the beauty of schedules are getting mixed up. Things are going weird all around us. We’re allowing grace for each other but we’re not as much allowing grace for ourselves. I love the way that you said that compassion for yourself is not weakness, nor selfish, it’s grace. It’s the same grace that every human being deserves and you deserve it too. Whether are you getting it from anybody else is irrelevant. It’s important that you give it to yourself. Are there any other tips you’d like to offer before we sign off on this part of the show?

I would say that on ToBeOptimized.com, one of our products besides counseling and life coaching is this Social Media Detox. That’s something very important because indeed that social media platform is engineered for you to get totally addicted to it. There’s no other word and to spend a lot of time on that. We wrote this journal in order to help people to go through the journey of making better boundaries with social media, but also, quitting for a long period of time or quitting forever, or using it in a better way. That’s something special. We are proud of it. We have done it ourselves. The benefits of not using our using social media, a component of your business, sleeping better, less anxiety, no social side comparison, they are complex. It’s beneficial.

What I wanted to offer to your audience is something special is that if people are visiting our website ToBeOptimized.com, they will be able to access the Journal that they can structure. It’s affordable. It’s $25 and they can buy it for themselves or their children or their best friend or even the employees. If you consider that you have no problem with boundaries with social media, that’s wonderful, but we are 100% sure that you know someone who has a problem with social media. You can buy the Journal and if you do that, we will offer a 30-minute free session with either Dr. Meagan Renee for the consulting part or if people want to work on life coaching, that would be with me.

 

We consider it to be optimized. There is no better investment than an investment in yourself. $25 and you get more than $100 value that you could use for you or for the people you love. Social Media Detox is a good start to optimize the life balance and because it’s taking so much time that you are not going to give to something else. If some people among your audience interested in starting the journey of consulting or life coaching, we are happy to offer that to them.

If you’re thinking about, “I need a little bit of support around this or that,” this is an amazing opportunity for you to take advantage of some time with some heartfelt professionals. Thank you for that, Maegan and Francois. That website again is ToBeOptimized.com. Thank you for all that you’ve offered in this portion of the show. It’s been fun.

Thank you for having us. It’s always a pleasure.

It’s fun for us too. It’s something we look forward to.

In EXTRA, we’re going to be talking about behavioral cognitive therapy and it’s a tool that I use all the time to stay blissful. You’ve got to check this out. Please subscribe to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free. You can go out there and hear all this juicy stuff. If you decide that you love it, you can stay in it. If not, at least you’ve got some good deep dive tips to improve your bliss. Thank you for joining us for this portion of the show. Remember, bliss is your birthright. Choose to live your bliss every single day. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

 

Important Links

• M.R. Counseling and Consulting
• ToBeOptimized.com
• 21 Day Social Media Detox Journal
• Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way
• One-Minute Gratitude Journal
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

About Dr. Maegan Renee

Dr. Maegan Renee is a licensed professional counselor and holds a PhD in Counselor Education & Supervision. She is the owner of M.R. Counseling and Consulting and co-founder of www.ToBeOptimized.com. She has presented on topics of mental health at national conferences around the country. She has publications on topics such as social isolation, early childhood mental health, and social media detox. Dr. Renee has 11 years of experience in the field of counseling working with children, adolescents, and adults.

 

 

About Francois Braine-Bonnaire

Francois Braine-Bonnaire is a real-estate investor, an international serial entrepreneur, and certified life coach. Born and raised in Paris (France), Francois holds dual French and American Citizenship. He is the co-founder of www.ToBeOptimized.com and co-author of a: “21 Day Social Media Detox Journal” with Dr. Maegan Renee. He is also a contributing author of the book: “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way” with me (Moneeka Sawyer). With a turnkey real estate business founded in 2010 that continues to grow, Francois has helped more than 200 families from 15 countries around the world to successfully invest in more than 600 rental properties in the USA. Francois has a passion for helping people through both real-estate investments and life coaching.

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook

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Social Tightening While Social Distancing With Thom Singer

 

We think of social distancing as a necessary health protocol now that we are facing a pandemic, but the term can be misleading when it comes to human relationships. As we are all forced to physically distance from each other, the need for social connection – for “social tightening”– becomes all the more acute. Author, podcast host, content creator and growth leadership speaker, Thom Singer coined this term to remind people that we need to have to connect with the people in our lives, now more than ever. In this conversation with Moneeka Sawyer, Thom explains the epidemic of loneliness that has been going on ever since before the pandemic, how physical distancing has been exacerbating it, and how we can take action and make the effort to have real interactions beyond social media likes and blanket emails.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Social Tightening While Social Distancing With Thom Singer

I am excited to welcome to the show my friend, Thom Singer. He is an advisor to executives, a speaker, and a content creator. After a successful career in sales and marketing, he became a growth leadership speaker in 2009. A decade later, he has brought his high energy presentations and action-oriented content to over 950 audiences. He is the author of twelve books and is the host of two podcasts, The Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do, which I have been on and the Digital Enterprise Society Podcast. On these shows, he has interviewed over 550 business leaders and others with a focus on discovering how the most successful people get farther across the gap between potential and results. He and his wife make their home in Austin, Texas, and are the parents of two highly spirited daughters. Thom, how are you?

I am great because I’m here on your show.

We had so much fun on your show. I can’t wait to see what happens here. Ladies, one of the things I wanted to tell you about Thom is he is a very compassionate person. He’s very business-focused, but he brings compassion in his heart to the business. He’s got this blog that he writes and it’s on ThomSinger.com. He writes these amazing articles about how to stay connected, how to bring your heart to business as well as a lot of different topics. One of the articles that he wrote one day, and I loved it, was about a term he’s coined called Social Tightening. With what everybody is going through with the Coronavirus, I wanted to talk specifically about that and how we can help our relationships to thrive and fill our hearts back up if we’re feeling lonely. Thom, talked to me a little bit about social tightening. Let’s start by defining it.

This term, social distancing started coming up on all the newscasts and all the articles that you read because this was going to be the way that we were going to flatten the curve and be able to stop this virus. Some people were stepping up going, “Social distancing doesn’t right. It’s physical distancing. People need to keep socially connected.” I started calling it social tightening as you social distance or as you physically distance. Long before this started, going back many years, there’s been an epidemic of loneliness that has been under the radar in our society.

A gentleman by the name of Dr. Vivek Murthy, who was the nineteenth surgeon general under President Barack Obama, when he was doing research and going out and talking to people about this big opioid crisis that we face in the country, an underlying thing he discovered was this whole epidemic of loneliness. He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review. It spoke to me because I go out and teach people how to connect, but there are always people at conferences who don’t feel connected to that conference, to their coworkers, etc. Long before we had to stay at home, there were already 20% of our population felt lonely. I got concerned that this is going to get worse however long we have to do this.

We were at the airport down in San Diego after the New Media Summit. When you’re at a conference, one of the things that you talk about is this whole idea of social media versus networking. Could you tell me a little bit about what you told me then? That is so impacted me.

I think that we have forgotten over the last decade that a link, a share, or follow does not equal a human relationship. Just because you’re connected to someone on Twitter, doesn’t mean they ever log on and look at anything you say, it used to be. I talked to a person who worked in technology years ago and he said, “Email is a best-effort communication tool. Just because I send you an email, I don’t know if it got there. I don’t know if you ever read it. Even if you open it, I don’t know if you read it.” As much as we rely on email, it’s always stuck on me that it’s only a best-effort communication tool. Social media then came in, and everybody’s broadcasting everything. Everything is on Twitter. They’re going live to all their friends and they’re putting up fancy pictures of them making Kardashian faces or whatever.

The problem is that once I put something on Facebook or whatever medium, I assume that everyone who knows me has seen it, but there are two problems. That person may have paid no attention or the algorithm of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter decides who sees what we post. It’s only 10% of the people who follow you. A couple of years ago, before the algorithms had even taken over, I was talking to a friend of mine from high school and I said to her, “How’s Lisa,” who is her best friend from high school. She went, “Thanks for asking. She goes into this whole thing.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” “Lisa’s dead. She had been killed in a hiking accident three weeks earlier.” I was like, “I had no idea.” She went, “It was all over social media.”

I had been on a European vacation and didn’t check Facebook for two weeks. When I had logged on, it had all died down amongst all of our friends. I never knew. Nobody ever thought to call, to email, or text because it was put on Facebook. That was years ago. I learned right away that that is worse than a best-effort communication. That’s a crap communication. We think that social media is networking, but we have no idea if it’s landing with anybody as opposed to if you’re face-to-face and we have a conversation in the bar. I’m pretty sure you heard me if we’re standing there. We can’t treat them as the same thing. We have to get back to this whole idea of personal interaction with people, whether it’s digital or live. My motto through this whole Corona crisis has been, “More personal/less broadcast.”

Let’s talk specifically about social tightening. What that means and what are some strategies we can use to get closer?

While we’re living in this era, it’s going to be with us for a while. Now, we’re all on lockdown, but soon it might be partial lockdown. We’re working from home. Let’s look at coworkers. There’s office culture. There are things that happen. Billy always takes the big coffee mug. They aren’t happening, but that also means that we’re not having real interactions. We need to make an effort. We have to be intentional of where we are putting our intention and attention when it comes to the people in our lives. With coworkers, there’s probably a team meeting where everybody’s on Zoom and they might be a Slack channel or a group email, but that doesn’t mean that Mary Lou and I are having a conversation. We need to take a little bit of time to reach out one-to-one to our coworkers.

The same thing is true with our friends, with our extended family. The same thing is true with our clients. How many newsletters have you gotten in your email inbox since the Coronavirus started? Mine has gone up unscientifically by five times. I get 100 newsletters a day, where people are telling me to check the CDC website and wash my hands. That’s great, but my local pet store didn’t need to be the one to tell me that. We’re having all of this broadcast and everybody thinks, “What’s important to people COVID, so that is the title.”

Maybe if my doctor or if the White House sent me something, but I don’t need that from my accounting firm. We need to broadcast less, especially about things we’re not experts about and have one-to-one communication, which means you’re going to have to take the time to send an individual email, an individual text, make a phone call, reach people, and leave a message. Whatever that says, “Moneeka, I was thinking about you and your show is such a delight for everybody as we’re going through these rough times. It brings bliss to people. Thanks for doing that.” That’s personal. If I send an email to every podcaster I know and go, “Keep up the good work. Podcast like crazy,” you probably won’t even open it much less understand that I was saying, “You’re an important part of this solution.”

As you said those two things, one of them made my eyes well up with tears and gratitude and the other one was, “Yes, I heard that.” It is an emotional reaction. I don’t know if you felt what that difference was like, but it’s true. My email box has ballooned from 1,000 emails a day to 3,000 emails a day.

During this crisis, we need to make an effort at having real interactions with the people in our lives. Share on X

It is 3 to 5 times more is what’s happening.

I can’t keep up with it all. It is so much more as falling through the cracks. I feel like I’m working harder, feeling less satisfied. There’s this weird thing. Instead of being part of the problem, which it is now, it becomes part of the solution. Make someone’s email box, inbox their friend again. Whether you do email or not, and I’m not encouraging that, I love the idea of doing texting, personal phone calls, even to leave a message. On Facebook, you can do Messenger. You can still direct message all of them on Facebook, on Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever you’re using. You can do personal stuff. I am getting personal stuff there.

I did get a message on Instagram as to what you said, Thom. They’re like, “Thank goodness that you’ve pivoted and done a little bit more about Bliss. We need that.” It was good feedback for me and it keeps me going and it keeps juiced. What can we do for each other? You’re taking a look at the whole balance of it because you’re business-focused. In our families, with our friends and in business, how can we pivot with all of those people? You gave us all an exercise while we were at the New Media Summit. Can you tell us about that? I’ve been doing it. You told us to send five personal messages a day.

I’ve narrowed it down since then to three because five freaks people out. I’ve been telling everybody to reach out every single day to three people because there’s a thing called the Dunbar curve. Some of your readers may have learned of it. It was a series of research done many years ago and people have tried to dispute it. I don’t care if somebody thinks, “That’s been disproven.” The concept of it is awesome and that is we can only have about 150 people who were friendly with. You have your inner circle of about five. You then have maybe your friends that are about fifteen, but your community can only be about 150 people. Where if I were to say their name, you would be able to tell me who their children are and where their children went to school, etc.

The argument has been made over the last years and that’s been expanded. Social media allows it to be bigger. I had somebody say, “My extended community is 30,000.” That’s crap. If it is, then you’re the outlier. Using 150 people who can be in your circle of friends and associates, and they took this back to ancient times. Villages used to be about 150 people. When the village would get larger, it would split in half. Some people would move away because it gets too big to handle. Your personal brain is wired for about 150 people. I don’t care if you’re in sales, if you have online courses, or if you have a podcast, you might have a mailing list with 5,000 or 50,000 or more people on it, but you don’t know who those people are.

During this crisis, blanket mailing people you don’t know isn’t what those people need. I don’t care how brilliant you think you are. They don’t need another newsletter from you. However, the 150 people who know you, know your kids’ names, not because they’ve heard you say it on a show. Because they’ve had dinner at your home or your paying clients or past clients, you’re a coach, the people you used to coach who you were part of their life for a year on that monthly call. Those people probably need to hear from you. If you narrow it down to, “Who are my 150?” You could follow up with all of them every month by doing 3 to 5 a day.

In 30 days, that could be 150.

Some people might say, “My list is smaller.” Some people list is bigger, then put a little thing, who are my 150 favorite people? Those are the people who need to hear from you and to get that email saying, “I was thinking about you and I care.” Those are the people who are going to say, “Wow.” A lot of people scrape emails from the National Speakers Association and they think they’re so smart because they’ll email like, “I have this product I sell to speakers.” We all go into back-channel talk going. “Does anybody hear from this?” “I never heard from him before.” “I got the same email now.” We know when it’s a random thing trying to sound personal. You scraped my email off a website, I get it.

However, if I know you or you’re one of my college fraternity brothers and you reach out and say, “I realized that the speaking and meetings business has been hit harder. I was thinking about that. You’re my only friend as a professional speaker. My heart goes out to you. I hope your family’s okay.” Am I going to stop and feel as a human? Yes and that happened. The fraternity brother I haven’t talked to in years said I was reading something about what’s happened to the meetings industry. “You make your living speaking. I had never thought about that. You’re the only person I know who makes their living that way. I want you to know I care.” That’s what we need more of.

It’s because there is a way in the old world. When we didn’t have so much contact with each other, through social media, email, and all of that stuff, we used to write letters. We used to send each other notes. When the phone came along, we used to make phone calls. A lot of that has gone away for a lot of reasons. Part of it is we’re overwhelmed with all the things that we’re supposed to be doing and that’s expected of us socially. The other piece is we’ve also got comfortable not having to do those things. Some of the things that I’m loving it. I’m getting personal cards from people with pretty pictures that make me feel good, the phone calls, and the texts. These sorts of things, “Moneeka, I was thinking about you.”

The handwritten note is valuable. Imagine if a client’s got a handwritten note that said, “I want you to know that I’m here for you when the world returns to normal.” It is not trying to sell anything, just helping and checking in. Helping and checking in is the new selling. If you want to be remembered when the economy comes back, don’t be cramming down by my coaching program. I have been doing that, but I want to go back to something you said because it’s a perfect analogy. Let’s go back 15, 20 years before we had email and before everything was a broadcast. We used to have broadcast companies like CBS and NBC and the radio stations. Humans had to be personal because we couldn’t broadcast to everybody, but there was one-way people did use to broadcast and that was The Christmas Letter.

You will get a Christmas card and somebody had typed out a letter, “Dear blank,” and they would handwrite your name into it. They then would photocopy both sides, maybe with some clip art of a Santa Claus and a tree. They would go through and they would broadcast their year. “We were so fortunate. We went to the Grand Canyon. My husband won the trip to Hawaii and we got to go there. Our room had a view of the diamond bed.” Who loved getting Christmas letters? Not very many people because they weren’t personal. They never talked about your true life. It would say like, “This year, my son Johnny found a way to get free lodging.” That translated to Johnny’s in prison, but nobody ever wrote that Johnny was in prison and they flowered it up. Johnny’s got free lodging for 3 to 5.

I still do get Christmas letters. It is rare. I get three a year. What’s comical about that is, in the old days, I used to be like, “I felt like I was reading a report.” I had to read everybody’s stories so that I could keep up with everybody. It felt like an obligation.

It is a form of novelty, that handwritten note that says, “Hey.” Even if it’s a typed email that says something personal, I can tell if something is cut and paste. I was at a conference one time and while on the plane, I was sitting with a bunch of people from the conference and all of us got emails at once that said, “Dear insert name,” The mail merge didn’t work. They sent a 1,000 people a note addressed to dear insert name. In the middle of it, it said, “As you know, insert a name.” They had too many mail merges to make it sound personal and all it did was prove that it wasn’t personal at all because the mail merge failed. Let’s go back to the real thing, “Dear Moneeka, it was so much fun to be with you in San Diego, sharing the cab to the airport and having dinner together before our flights. I laughed so hard. I hope we can stay in touch.” It means so much more than some mass-produced broadcast.

 

It is like, “It is nice to meet you at the New Media Summit. You were light in the room. I look forward to keeping in touch.”

I got to paste that to everybody.

I got about 50 of them.

You were the light in the room, maybe all of those were personal. I got them too. I thought I was the light in the room.

I am jealous. I have to share the stage with you. That’s such good tips. Let’s talk a little bit about some connecting inside our homes. This is what’s happening. We’re all stuck together. We look at each other and initially, we’re like, “I get all this time with you. This is amazing.” By now, we’re like, “Could you go to another room?”

There is a woman who posted a meme that says, “This man is the love of my life. I now want to kill him.”

It doesn’t mean that we all love each other. It’s just we’re wanting to get back to our more normal rhythm, but because we’re in the same space, that does not mean we’re connecting. Let’s talk about how to connect and how to disconnect? How to create the space and then how to create the love? It’s like a dance where we have to create this wave in and out. Talk a little bit about that.

I am talking from personal experience. I have two daughters. One of them is out of college and engaged to be married and lives in Chicago. She and her fiancé were supposed to be married on May 16. That date has been changed, thanks to Coronavirus. Their wedding is temporarily postponed. In addition to spending fourteen months of their lives planning a dream wedding, they are sequestered in a 700 square foot apartment in a high-rise where there are no common areas open. You have to stay in your own apartment and a city there in Chicago on full lockdown. My future son-in-law, his job has moved home. He has an important job and he’s working 8 to 10 hours a day. My daughter has to stay out of his way because he’s got to use this brain for what he’s working on. He’s a mathematician.

She has got 100 square feet to hide and her job has been canceled. One of the things we did is every week, we’ve been having a Zoom dinner with them. We open up a Zoom room. They come in, they make dinner. We are ready at 6:30 and the five of us sit down and have dinner together. That has been a great way to keep in touch with extended family. In fact, I’m wondering why we haven’t done this forever. We get to have a meal. We, as humans, we love to break bread and we’re able to talk and laugh. My wife, my younger daughter, and my son-in-law say, “It’s just like dinner around the table because my oldest daughter and I are big talkers and they can’t get a word in edgewise.”

They said, “It’s like being in a restaurant with you. Thom and Jackie are stealing the conversation.” I’m not sure I’m proud of that, but that’s what they said. It was real is the point within our mini-society here inside the house. With our eighteen-year-old, I have a high school senior. I have commented that at least she likes her parents because we are on lockdown, but my wife and I are very different. We both still have some semblances of jobs we have to run. We both work for ourselves. We’re not sure how much money we’re making, but we’ve got things to do, but we operate differently. I go into my office. She has her office. She has taken to wearing headphones and listening to music or a book on tape when she’s not working. If she doesn’t want me to be like, “I thought that, that, that.” I’m much more of an extrovert and she is much more of an introvert.

We’ve agreed if she needs introvert time, were headphones and music, or whatever because otherwise, I’ll come in and start going, “Guess what I just read online.” We’ve set up that parameter, but being an extrovert, I can’t go forever without human contact. I’ve been hosting a happy hour in my Zoom room. I’ve been inviting people to come, get their beverage of choice, and log on with me in Zoom. I’ve been hosting anywhere from 8 to 12 people. I do a little bit of standup comedy and so in Austin, I’ve been hosting the only ongoing virtual open mic night for the local comics. I get about eighteen people for an hour and a half every Tuesday night. What’s funny is a lot of them are young and single and live alone. They stay after it’s over. They’re like, “Do we have to hang up?”

Yes, I’m a grownup who wants to go to bed now because it is 10:30, but it’s just doing that. Within my daughter and my wife, we’ve sat down and had dinner together every night. We make dinner. I guess once we had a restaurant catered in, but every night we make dinner and everybody comes and sits at the table. Even if it’s twenty minutes, we have that human connection time. I think the long answer to your question, there’s a lot of ways to do it, but you have to have some structure and you have to appreciate, “She’s an extrovert. She needs to be left alone.” “He’s an introvert. He needs some human interaction, even if it’s his friends online.” “She’s eighteen. What a nightmare to be stuck with your parents for months.”

There is compassion for what everybody is going through. I have trouble with this and I’ve had to pay attention to this is dinner time with David. We used to go out to dinner. We created that as a pattern because when we would get home, he was interested in looking at the mail and I knew that there was all this cleaning that needed to do. There was all this stuff that distracted us. We started just going out to dinner every night, which was great.

That doesn’t sound bougie at all. We hit all the restaurants in Northern California. Only Sunday through Saturday.

Building relationships, both personally and professionally, doesn't happen by accident. You have to be intentional about it. Share on X

I am grateful for the life I’m allowed to live.

I was going to add in, when you don’t have to send two children to super bougie colleges, you can eat it as many restaurants as you want. I bet you and David couldn’t outspend the cost in decades of educating two children.

We are like it in what we’re able to do. We’re noticing it, and believe you and me. Where I was headed with this is that we’re at home, we have dinner time, and we are very committed to eating together. We’re both tempted to poke at the phones. We’re tempted to run over and do something in the kitchen or attempted to turn over the laundry. There are all these things. We have to force ourselves to sit down, even if we have nothing to say because we’re both exhausted from the day and be together.

It is funny because the first couple of weeks we were like, “This is so much fun. There was so much to talk about.” The next week, it was like, “Hey.” We’re starting to get back into that old world, like having a conversation over dinner when we didn’t have everything on our phone. Everything interesting was not on our phones. We found each other interesting. We are doing that again. It’s just funny how we evolve and to set expectations on how we’re going to connect. Sometimes people think, “Connections should be organic and fluid.”

If we left it to organic and fluid, then a lot of people would never find the business success that they find. Networking and building relationships that matter, both personally and professionally, doesn’t happen by accident. I speak at a lot of conferences and there’s a lot of meeting planners that say, “What are you doing to encourage great connections?” People come to conferences for two reasons. Remember when we used to go to conferences, people used to go into a ballroom, but the thing is sometimes meeting planners are like, “We’ve got a sponsor for an open bar.” Booze is not a network.

That is not a social lubricant like we think it is. In order to do this, you have to learn the number one thing I teach people is you ask other people questions and then listen when they talk. I know that sounds shocking, but it does. Within your family, we establish this years ago when the cell phone, the smartphone first came out and that was no phones at the table. Whether we’re in a restaurant or we’re in our house, no screens at the table have been a family motto. I’ll be honest, we’ve been a little bit lax because we are around each other all day. At dinner, if somebody was to pick up a phone, we probably wouldn’t go, “No screens at the table.”

No screens mean just no phones, no iPods, no laptops, no TV, nothing.

We’ve had the TV on during dinner more than usual, but it is a new rule. My 23 years old was commenting that we were letting the eighteen-year-old have a glass of wine. She’s like, “That’s different rules than when I was a high school senior.” I was like, “Coronavirus.”

The main point is to understand that it’s not just that in business that we have to pay attention to building relationships, in our personal lives, we do too. It’s more important than ever because we’re spending so much time together. We are spending time together does not mean connection. It’s not quality time necessarily. Most of the time, it’s just time. We need to figure out how to have that quality interaction within our own homes, in our environment so that we can stay connected. Otherwise, what will happen is that you’re going to be surrounded by all these people that you love and you’re going to go back to feeling lonely, separated, and isolated.

You feel lonely in a group. It happens all the time.

It is because people aren’t connecting.

The other thing we have to do is realize different people are going through different things. As a person who travels 100-plus nights a year, being home for months on end, there’s like this, “I’m going a little bit stir crazy.” Whereas my wife, who’s a pretty serious introvert. Having me gone 100-nights a year is causing her to go a little bit stir crazy because I’m right there. I don’t pick up after myself the way it wouldn’t happen if I was gone. I think you have to take into effect, how is this affecting her? Not just me. We also have a high school senior. The news is not covering this well enough. There’s a couple of little stories here and there about brides getting married on their iPad, socially distance from their fiance.

My daughter and her fiancé chose to postpone until the fall, which hopefully it will happen then, but they’re not covering these major life events like weddings, high school graduations, and college graduations. There are many major life events that are being swept under the rug. I don’t think as a society, we’re giving them enough attention. In our house, I’ve tried to ask my daughter, “How are you feeling about this? How are you about this?” She got accepted into her first-choice college. She has a Facebook group with some other students who are new.

She has this community and it’s been a little exciting. She’s making some new friends there, they’re doing some Skype, and some Zoom and stuff like that, but I’m like, “How do you feel at school doesn’t start in the fall?” Her answer was, “We’re not talking about that yet. We’re not going there.” These are things that I don’t think as a society, we’re doing a good enough job of saying, “I have to work from home. My speaking events are canceled. My income is cut to nothing.” There’s a lot of that being covered out there, but there’s not a lot about, what about these people who have nonmonetary major life events? How are we honoring these people? I don’t know that we’re doing a good job of it.

 

I don’t know if you know this, but I have two sets of my show. There’s the free show, which is this piece and then we’ve got EXTRA. There’s another article I want to talk to you about an extra. We’re going to finish the show in a moment, but I’m going to spring this on you and let my audience know what’s coming next.

I love things that are extra.

In EXTRA, I want to talk about the article that you wrote and I’ll admit, I haven’t read it, but it is about if you’re wealthy, how to be compassionate for those who are not. I’m excited about that topic. We’ll talk about that next, but first, let everybody know how they can get in touch with you and hear more of your amazing advice.

ThomSinger.com or Thom Singer on all the social media.

Thank you, Thom. This conversation has been wonderful. It’s filled me up. Thank you so much for joining us. Ladies, thank you for joining Thom and me for this portion of the show. If you are subscribed to EXTRA stay tuned. We’ve got more. If you’re not, please do go sign up at RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. If you’re leaving us, thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to seeing you on the next show. Until then, remember, bliss is your birthright. Choose to live your bliss every single day. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

 

 Important Links

• The Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do
• Digital Enterprise Society Podcast
• ThomSinger.com
• Thom Singer – Facebook
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

About Thom Singer

Thom Singer is an advisor to executives, a speaker and content creator. After a successful career in sales and marketing, he became a growth leadership speaker in 2009. A decade later he has brought his high energy presentations and action-oriented content to over 950 audiences.

He is the author of 12 books and is the host of two podcasts, “Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do”  and “The Digital Enterprise Society Podcast”.  On these shows he has interviewed over 550 business leaders and others with a focus on discovering how the most successful people get farther across the gap between potential and results.

He and his wife make their home in Austin, Texas and are the parents of two highly-spirited daughters.

We talk about what Thom calls Social tightening…it’s important, no matter whether we are social distancing, networking, or building a business, to remember that we always need to stay connected.  Thom gives us some great ideas on how we can do that effectively and lovingly.

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook

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The Ultimate Bliss Meditation With Bruce Langford

 

Do you need a respite from all the stress that clings to your being as we all go through the challenge of COVID-19? Join Moneeka Sawyer as she invites Bruce Langford, host of Mindfulness Mode, to guide you through the ultimate bliss meditation. Whatever life throws at you, remember that you can control your success if you choose to. Be prepared to open your mind, express gratitude and move from stress to bliss. Let Bruce guide you to take that EXTRA step.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The Ultimate Bliss Meditation With Bruce Langford

I’m gifting you another amazing episode of EXTRA. I hope this helps you to experience bliss no matter what you’re going through. Enjoy the meditation.

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Bruce, we are here in EXTRA.

I’m glad to be here with a select few and this is great that you’re here joining us on EXTRA because this is an exciting place to be. This feels blissful.

I was telling Bruce that this is like the true gift of what I do. EXTRA is the place where I get to give you the real deep dive. It’s where my guest gets to shine and provide you with what you need to make your life and your business better. I love doing EXTRA. Thank you, Bruce. This is going to be fun. You talk a lot about moving from stress to bliss. Let’s do a meditation on creating that bliss in our lives.

You are enough. You are what you're meant to be right here and right now. Share on X

I’m Bruce Langford, host of Mindfulness Mode, and it’s great to be here. As we move through this challenge of COVID-19, we all have certain levels of stress. I want to help you find your bliss in this place. Wherever this place is, whatever that means for you. Begin by finding a good place to meditate, whether that’s in your office, at home, or in a quiet corner. Even if you can’t find a quiet place, it doesn’t have to be that quiet, but find a place where you’re comfortable. Sit in an upright chair. A kitchen chair, a dining type chair, where your back can be straight. Maybe you’re sitting on a stool, a cushion, a carpet, or on a yoga mat. Any of those things work, any of those things will be fine. Let’s begin with an inhale. If you can inhale through your nose, that’s what I suggest and if you’re not comfortable with that, that’s okay too. Take a deep breath, and notice the air as it moves past your lips or through your nostrils.

Notice how you feel. Notice that small level of bliss that’s beginning to come to you. That’s beginning to move into you. Notice how beautifully you begin to feel a little bit more relaxed. As you let the air leave your body, realize that you are exhaling the stress. You are exhaling any of the pressures that you’ve been feeling. Every time you inhale, you’re inhaling bliss. You’re bringing bliss into your life. You’re bringing bliss into your body. As you begin to prepare to breathe in again, imagine that we are walking in nature. We’re in a beautiful wooded area with lovely trees and the fresh air feels invigorating. You can hear the water flowing from a stream that is flowing nearby and that trickling of the water makes you feel relaxed. You stop and notice the birds in the air singing and the sound of the water.

You realize that that is truly bliss you’re experiencing at this particular moment in time. You’re noticing beautiful lush greenery along the path. You continue to notice the happy sounds of the birds as they’re celebrating life. You think, “I’m celebrating life right in this moment. This is my life that I can celebrate because I am experiencing bliss.” As you take a breath, you start to focus on your forehead and your temples. You decide to let the tension go as you exhale. You let tension release that was holding itself in your forehead and your temples. It feels good to be in that place of nature, walking along that pathway, noticing the beautiful plants, flowers, the leaves, and the birds. You decide to release the tension that’s holding itself in your jaw because that is where we tend to hold more attention than any place else.

As you exhale, you’re releasing that tension from your jaw, from your chin, from the area of your body there that is holding tension. You feel incredible and peaceful. You realize that this moment in time is truly your gift. This is your blissful, relaxed, peaceful place. You know that not only are you enjoying us at this moment, but you can return to this place. You can return whenever you decide to. At another time, you can choose bliss by slowing down, by finding a quiet spot to meditate. As you do it, and it becomes a habit, you’ll realize that it doesn’t even matter how quiet it is because you’ll be going into your own place of bliss.

You’re noticing that your level of gratitude is increasing and you feel incredibly grateful for not only the way you’re feeling at this moment, but you’re thinking about some of the other things in your life that give you gratitude, the people you love and who love you. You’re thinking about some of the things that you love to do in life that give you pleasure and give you bliss. Gratitude is a gift that can bring you to a beautiful place of being grounded and feeling peace. You walk a little more along the pathway and as you round a bend, you see a new grouping of trees and they look comfortable. Think of a tree, it’s been living its life there for many years and there’s nothing more grounded than a tree being what it is. It’s not trying to be a flower. It’s not trying to be a stream. It’s a tree and it knows its identity and that’s like us. We can accept who we are. We can accept that we can enjoy being the best person we can be. You are enough.

 

You are what you’re meant to be right here and right now. You do not need to think of being something different because you are perfect, absolutely the way you are. You’re aware of that beautiful, fresh air that you’re breathing out in this nature experience. You decide to take another deep, full, relaxing breath. You’re feeling incredible. As you walk along, you hear the sound of your feet walking on the leaves. It’s almost like you’re looking down at yourself, seeing yourself in this peaceful, beautiful place of nature. This person who is enjoying such a beautiful experience of bliss and you’re thinking, “This moment is pure relaxation. I feel content. I know that I can return to this spot.” Knowing that you can return and come back to seeing the nature, hearing the sound of water and enjoying the relaxed feeling in your body, it gives you a beautiful feeling of strength and confidence, knowing that you can control what you can control.

 

You can let go of that, which you can’t control. As you think that beautiful thought, you begin to open your eyes and you decide to come back and you know you’ll be much more relaxed and grounded as you return to your place in this world. Thank you so much for reading this guided meditation. It’s my pleasure to be here in EXTRA with Moneeka. Thank you for sharing your space here with me. This is beautiful.

That was amazing. I have nothing more to say. Thank you much, Bruce.

It’s my pleasure, Moneeka.

Ladies, thank you for joining Bruce and I. Thank you for taking this EXTRA step towards your bliss. Remember, you can control your own success.

 

 Important Links

• Mindfulness Mode

 

About Bruce Langford

Bruce Langford is a Mindfulness Life Coach and founder of the highly acclaimed Mindfulness Mode Podcast. Through his consulting, Bruce helps professionals, corporate employees, entrepreneurs, team leaders, and CEOs decrease anxiety and stress, by helping them change their mindset and improve their work-life balance. Having spent 14 years working in the field of bullying prevention, Bruce realizes that many individuals actually bully themselves, resulting in self-sabotaging behaviors. Bruce has invested in various forms of real estate during the past eighteen years.

 

 

 

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Staying Focused & Positive in the Stressful Real Estate World with Helen Krause

 

Real estate can easily become a stressful place to be since things can change very quickly. How can you stay focused and positive despite all the challenges, relieve yourself of stress and truly enjoy a successful life? Learn a great deal about this as Moneeka Sawyer talks to real estate investor Helen Krause. Aside from real estate investing, Helen has also been in the title business for over thirteen years as Marketing Director at New World Title & Escrow. Also on this episode, learn about Helen’s recent projects, her strategy in structuring hard money deals, the intricacies of the title business and her must-get weekly motivational quotes freebie.

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Staying Focused & Positive In The Stressful Real Estate World With Helen Krause

I am excited to welcome to our show our guest Helen Krause. Helen earned her undergraduate and Master’s degrees from James Madison University. After graduation, she worked for a local home builder. She has been in the title business for over thirteen years focused primarily on the sales and marketing side. She has her Title Insurance license and has conducted hundreds of settlements. Her background is in marketing and her passion is to help others achieve their goals. She likes to partner with her clients to provide value to their businesses. She loves speaking to agents who are starting and growing their careers and teaches educational and motivational classes and events. Helen, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Thank you much, Moneeka. I’m excited and happy to be here.

I’m excited to have you too. Thank you for coming on. Let’s start by you telling us a little bit about your history and your story.

I have an interesting background in school. I studied biotechnology and then some marketing where I got my MBA. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do and I ended up working for a local home builder. I did some sales and marketing for them and sold some homes and that is how I got into real estate. From there, I switched over to title and settlement services. It ended up being a great shift for me. Instead of working directly with clients all the time, I got to start building business partners. Other real estate professionals, mortgage loan officers, investors, other builders. I enjoyed that because I got to see my clients more often than just selling them a house here or there. I’m grateful that I’ve gotten into this business. I do mostly the sales and marketing business development. I also conduct the closings as well as some of our clients want me because I’m the face of the company or to help out because fortunately, we’re busy, which is great.

Are you also an investor yourself?

I am.

Many people get into investing accidentally and then they’re like, “This is amazing.”

I bought my first house. I was young. Since I worked for a builder, I was like, “I’m selling homes. I have to put my money where my mouth is.” I think I was 23 when I bought my first house and it was great. It was in an area that I enjoyed but then I got engaged and my husband said, “I don’t want to live there. I’d rather live somewhere else.” We bought our first house together and fortunately, we were able to retain the house that I had owned myself. That’s how it all began. We rented that property out. I still do. We’re landlords. We own that property and have dealt with tenants.

When we moved up into our next house, we kept the second house. I do have two rental properties and that’s how I fell into it, which I think is great for anyone that’s able to do that. I’m fortunate that we do have those two rental properties. There have been some hiccups here and there with tenants, but in general, we’ve been fortunate. It’s been great. We’re making money from that and it’s wonderful. I do some investment and some hard money lending opportunities too. That’s a little bit different.

I want to backtrack on this a little bit. How long did it take you to move from house to house? How long did it take you to get to house number three?

I was in my first house for three years or and then the second house for five years. There are reasons why you have to move like everyone out there. We needed a bigger house for a bigger family.

How did you get the down payment for each of the new houses that you bought?

I am a saver. I’m cautious about finances and money. I keep close track of all of that. Sometimes my husband says that I’m driving him crazy because I’ll look at all of our accounts and be like, “What is this?” I’ve caught mistakes before, like a company charges you twice or something like that. I am a little bit crazy about that in a good way. We try to save money. Fortunately, we were able to save up a decent down payment for all the homes and we’re able to move up in that way comfortably.

That’s great advice. I usually use equity and my primary residence to buy the next one. I was curious about what your strategy was.

I did not use equity. I saved up and was fortunate enough to be able to put money down for the next one.

For your properties, you’re cashflowing. Is that true?

The first one’s breaking even. I will say about that in the height of the market in 2005. I’m in the Washington, DC, Metro area on the Virginia side. That, unfortunately, was not probably the best time to purchase a home, which is part of the reason why I didn’t sell it and held onto it. Now it’s come back but I break even on that one. I probably could raise the rent but I’ve had a great tenant in there and I’m not going to ruin that. We keep him at the same payment. Essentially the second house we do, we make a good amount of money on that house, which made it a lot easier to move into the third house. At that time, I was also about to have my second child, getting a new daycare. I was nervous about all the expenses. We were making about $1,000 off of that second house a month. That helped offset some of the other costs.

On the first one though, it’s appreciated. Even though you’re cutting even, but it’s appreciated so that one’s doing fine.

It’s appreciating and then we can take depreciation on our taxes. There are benefits to some tax write-off and things like that.

Easy, simple, blissful, intuitive strategy. It doesn’t take a lot.

Nothing is ever completely perfect in real estate. It's important to get back into a positive mindset and move forward. Share on X

Some people are savvy investors. I hope that I can be out there to say, “You can do it too.” I didn’t go out there and try to figure some complicated strategy out. It ended up working. I wouldn’t consider myself a super-savvy investor, but I am doing it. Those of you out there that aren’t sure, you can do it too. You have to be smart about it and do your research.

I love that you’re saying, “I’m not a super savvy investor,” but at least you’re investing. Many people are like, “I need to learn all this stuff.” No, you just have to buy a house. Do your research on your areas. If you’re going to live there, you’re going to want to live there. It’s the easiest thing to do and we overthink this stuff. We think before I can get started, I have to have this cool strategy for making a bunch of money. The thing is, if you never get started, the money will never happen. Buy something. Do that thing. Like you, I bought it at the top of the market. I bought it in 2008. I bought even higher than you did. I also bought at the top of the market in 2001, but I cut even on those properties on rents for a long time but they both appreciated beautifully. They’re an important part of my portfolio financially, as far as my net worth. As long as you give yourself the time, you don’t have to do fancy-dancy stuff. You can build your wealth through real estate doing simple things like buying a house to live in to start.

That’s one of my biggest pet peeves. I do think you want to be educated and do some research, but you’ve got to take action. Action is the most important thing. I completely believe what you’re saying and I think that’s good advice for everybody.

I was a mortgage broker for a long time. I know what it was like. I was hoping that I was nice to deal with. I will say that my title officer was like, “You are my favorite client,” which is awesome but I know how much stress you guys are under. How do you stay focused and positive through all of that? This is a show about bliss, so that’s relevant.

It can be stressful. Anyone in real estate says it’s stressful because things change every minute. It is a difficult industry at times, but it’s also fun because you’re helping people buy homes. I feel like there are not many things that are better than that. I try to always think about the big picture. We’re making people happy and almost always people are super happy. Some situations are not, but in general, this is a good thing and we’re helping people. I do try to stay focused. There are people all around who are negative. They’re not doing well in their business. They hear something in the news that is putting them down.

I don’t allow that to enter my mind. Maybe I listen so I know what’s happening, but I focus and I keep working. I keep working hard, I put my head down, and do what’s working. Maybe I’ll still market share from these people that are being negative. Continue to do what you know works and don’t get distracted by the negativity. Some other things like being organized so that you’re on top of your business and you’re not letting things slip through the cracks, and having a good team. I’m lucky because I work with amazing people. All of our processors, our attorneys, every one of my company, I feel like I trust them and I feel comfortable with them.

I’m able to delegate a lot of things. I jump in and help as much as I can if they’re overwhelmed. Having a good team is valuable and important. Also, being proactive. There are going to be problems, things are going to go wrong. I try to get ahead of it. If there is a problem for us with title work, we see a lot of title problems. The earlier I can find out a problem, the better. I don’t like being the one to give bad news, but if I give bad news and we still have a month to resolve it, we are likely going to be able to resolve it and we’re going to settle on time. I think being proactive, being ahead of it, having difficult conversations so that we can all problem solve and make the best move for everyone.

Sometimes people do need to walk away from homes. Hopefully, they’re making a good decision. I think being proactive and delivering that news is important in a good way. I try to be a problem solver and help people move forward. Also, on negative days, if something’s going wrong, I do have a folder in my email. I have a testimonial folder. When I get a good testimonial from a client, I’ll put it in there or other positive things. If I’m like, “Today was frustrating.” I can go in and look at that. I’m like, “These people loved us and we did a great job.” I think it’s important to do that and remember because we all have those bad days and you’re like, “This closing didn’t go perfectly right.” Nothing is ever completely perfect. I think that’s important to shift your mindset, get back into a positive mindset, and move forward.

There are two things that I want to highlight there. First of all, you call it proactive. Many people will procrastinate on that. When things are rough, they’ll procrastinate on making a phone call or they run their business where they’ve got a schedule, but the schedule is about doing the next thing that has to be done. They’re not proactively looking three weeks ahead of time. I know this is what I loved about my title officer is I could call her with a problem and she already knew that I was going to call with that. I was proactive. She was even more proactive than me. The reason I worked with her is that other officers heard the news from me, I got to hear the news from her. She made my life easier.

When we would have difficult conversations, yes, my clients were upset but as you say, they were more likely to be able to close on that house because it was being handled. They saw me as a pro as a mortgage broker, they saw my title company and my title officer as a pro. There was no question about whether we knew what we were doing. They didn’t do their hand waving thing that often happens with mortgage brokers, which is, “One more piece of paper. Are you kidding? Why didn’t you tell me this two weeks ago?” All of those questions didn’t come up. They would get frustrated, but it was never like, “Do you need this?” They know that I’m a pro enough that if I’m asking for it, I need it. So much of that had to do with my title officer.

You are important for our businesses on the front end because we’re bringing the clients in. You bring in the clients too but it’s a different way that we work with our clients. I often wondered why don’t other people do it and the truth is, it is its own level of stress, but it’s a level of stress that it’s much more manageable than if you have to deal with it on the back end like closer to the closing or whatever. I love this propensity may be to procrastinate can cause more stress, to have the harder conversations.

I talk about in this show all the time that this is a people business and those hard conversations are part of that. Developing skills and doing that and understanding that they’re necessary and it doesn’t make you bad or anybody else bad. It’s important and if you come at it from this problem-solving approach, which is what you talk about, it’s a completely different thing than if you’re frustrated or negative. I used to hear title companies and mortgage brokers all the time talking about, “I can’t believe that bank changed the programs again.” They would commiserate with their clients, “You’re right. This is horrible. I hate this company too.” You’re like, “Really?”

I’m like, “If you want to vent for a second, no problem but then we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to solve this.”

You’re not going to close. You don’t get your dream unless we close. I completely commiserate and make this an hour-long vent between the two of us, it’s probably not going to be helpful.

I find people seem to, for the most part, appreciate it. We’re not trying to find problems, but our job is to find problems. If there’s a title issue, we’re supposed to find it. It’s how you handle it and how you deliver it. When you are working on these difficult situations, that’s when you shine. If you’re a good title person or real estate investor, any of us, if we’re solving problems and we’re doing a great job when it’s difficult, that’s when you prove your worth.

You show who you are when you’re dealing with challenges. That is the truth. Thank you for that. That was inspirational. In addition to owning a title company, what else do you do? What other ventures are you involved in?

As far as going into the real estate investing world, we talked a little about the rental properties. I briefly mentioned the hard money lending. I’m lucky because being in the title business, I work with investors. I work with lenders who know of creative opportunities and things like that. My financial planner has also been helpful because they know that we’re looking for creative ways to invest. The hard money lending, I’ve also done given some money for some restaurants, which I know can be a little risky. We are part owner of a Potbelly, a franchise in Richmond. That’s exciting and fun as well. It’s not completely real estate related, but investment-related. We have a few different things going on. Also, we lent money out for other real estate projects.

We have a lot of contacts in Richmond. Randomly a few different things going on in that area as well. It’s been good real estate investing. The hard money lending is I feel fortunate. A loan officer I worked with introduced me to a gentleman who flips homes and he is always looking for funds. It’s been a great situation. We were the first non-family members that contributed to his projects and things like that. It’s been a great return on investment. It can be risky, but it’s been a great partnership. It’s been great for us.

Do you mind if I ask how you structure those hard money deals? I had hard money lenders on the show, but I know that we’ve had private money. They are asking other people for private money. I’d love to find out your structuring.

It’s similar. Most of them are six months’ notes because they’re purchasing the property, renovating it, and then selling it. Typically, it’s a six-month note. The people who are facilitating it, they receive the points. The borrower is paying maybe a few points upfront because it’s riskier and then we receive the interest. We get 10% interest on the money that we are contributing. That’s how it’s structured and then after the six months it’s paid off and we determine if we’re going to put it into another project or take the money back and that sort of thing.

 

Who is it that gets the points?

The person that we’re contributing to the hard money loans, the gentleman who’s structuring and facilitating the process. He gets the points and then his investors receive the interest on their portion of the funds.

What is the interest range that you guys charge?

I believe that he charges the clients 10% and we get 10% of our portion. I could be wrong, but I’m sure that’s how it’s been structured unless it’s changed since we began. He’s charging 2 or 3 points. He receives that portion.

Do you ever have a note where they ask to extend?

We haven’t. They’ve been able to do the projects in the amount of time. Sometimes it’s shorter than they thought so they’ll pay it off early, but I think they usually are conservative with the timeframe. It’s up to six months and then they finish it earlier.

When they finish early, do they pay you for the entire six-month term or they just pay for the time that they used?

They pay for the time they use. It’s close to the timeframe. We’ve been in this rhythm with them for a few years, it’s been going well, but you’re right. If it pays off early, then we would be done, but usually there’s a new project coming, so we roll the money into the next one.

Do you ever look at the projects or you give the money to the facilitator or whatever you call it?

No, I have never seen one of the projects at all. That’s why the first time we’re a little bit nervous and then now we’ve built a good relationship. We trust them and we feel lucky. I have been approached by other hard money lenders or private money companies and lenders but I haven’t switched. Someone’s like, “I’ll give 11%.” I’m like, “No. I’m going to stick with what I know.” One more percent is not going to sway me necessarily. Unless he gets too many partners and we want to have more avenues to share that. I feel comfortable and good with what we have going on.

The facilitator that you’re dealing with, does he have a minimum or a maximum investment amount? What’s the range?

He does. Initially, it was like $25,000 minimum and now, for anybody new coming in, it’s $50,000. Usually, people are giving $50,000 to $100,000 and I believe partly because I share his name a lot. He usually has plenty of investors now. Now, when I’ve given him a few contacts, he’s like, “I don’t have enough projects for everybody.” It seems to be working out.

How did you find him?

Through a loan officer, I work with. I’m lucky to know loan officers and some are conservative by the book. They do conventional or typical loans. This particular loan officer, he’s into investing as well and does all sorts of different types of mortgage loans and contacts. We were maybe talking about the Potbelly or something else and he’s like, “You guys are into doing some different types of investments. Let me introduce you to this gentleman, Robert.” That’s how it all came about.

Did you do due diligence on Robert? How did you do that?

Of course, recommendations, I always feel a little more comfortable. I’m not an attorney, but I have the attorney, the other owner of our title company. He helped us create the notes that we have. Before that, they were only working with family members. We were the first non-family member and I was like, “We’ve got to make sure that we are doing it in a wise way.” We had an attorney prepare and review the note and move forward. I probably could have done more due diligence, but I felt comfortable with the few things that we did and we went for it. As you said, take action and see where it goes.

Thank you for sharing that. What specifically are your investment goals? Why are you doing all of this cool stuff?

One is because if we want to be smart with the money, as I mentioned, I’m a saver and you don’t want your money sitting under your bed or in the banks that aren’t making much money. I used to be conservative and risk-averse and I still am. We can’t be making no interest on our money. That’s how we started looking at different investment opportunities. I was at an investment seminar and this resonated with me is eventually to make enough passive income that it pays them the major bills that we have. The mortgage, childcare, that sort of thing. If we could have enough passive income to pay that then our salaries and all the hard work we’re doing at other things would be extra. I’m not there, or not close, but that is my goal and hopefully, we will get there.

Do you have a timeframe?

I don’t and I should. You’ve got to do those SMART goals and I don’t have a timeframe. If we could be there in ten years, I would be happy with that.

Be smart with money. You can’t be making no interest on it. Share on X

The other thing is that you’ve invested in high appreciation markets. Do you have a vision on what you want to do with appreciation, for instance, on that first house?

Not really. It will be interesting to see. Being a real estate title company, my hope would be that when we sell that home, do a 1031 exchange potentially. We handle a lot of settlements on 1031 exchanges. I think long-term in an ideal world, which I could probably make happen. If I could sell both those investment properties and roll those gains into a new investment property, I think that would be an ideal situation. Maybe a beach house down in North Carolina or something that eventually we could retire to or something. Thinking about what’s the smart way to do that. I talked about researching a little bit before, but I need to work with good partners to make sure that I’m doing the right things for tax purposes, that the business attorney we’ve talked to, and all of that. I think that would be ideal if we could do a 1031 exchange.

Regarding your timeframe thing, I want to make a comment personally, when I started investing too, I had no real timeframe goal. I thought I wanted to retire by the time I was 40. I’ll say to my audience that if you retire at the age of 40, you get bored because then what are you doing with your mind and your time? I ended up starting to coach because I was retired and bored out of my mind. I think what’s also true is that I couldn’t have retired with the lifestyle that I wanted. We continued our path in real estate and I started to work again. I didn’t have to, but I started to work again because I was bored.

The point that I’m trying to make is that even if we miss our timeframe goal does not mean that you’re a failure. I know that you don’t think this, Helen, and this is more for my audience, but I think that what happens is people are like, “I should set this SMART goal.” The SMART goals are all about making the goal specific. When we’re talking about retirement, part of that specificity is a timeframe. For you and me, it wasn’t but for a lot of people it is. I want to help people to understand. Hal Elrod was on my show and he said the same thing that even if you don’t hit it in your timeframe, it doesn’t mean that it’s over and it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure. It means that you’ve got to give it more time.

You may need to pivot to do something a little bit differently Tweak it a little bit, focus a little bit more. For me, I wasn’t even focusing. I was doing whatever I wanted in the world. For me, it took a long time, but there are a lot of people that could do exactly what I did and retire earlier if that’s what they wanted, if they focus. I wanted to speak to that a little bit about you not having a timeframe and I never did either. I had wishy-washy whatever one but had I reached that, where would I be? I don’t know that I would be as excited about life if I didn’t have a mission beyond retiring.

It’s like what you did. You pivoted into a new role of coaching. I guess you would find something because you’re a motivated person who wants to have a bigger purpose. That’s how I feel too. I feel fortunate in what I’m doing now. I wouldn’t want to give that up. Even if I wasn’t, maybe I’d work a little bit less and travel a little bit more, but I’d still want to do it because I enjoy it and it’s something that gives me energy and purpose.

It’s a good reason to wake up in the morning. Some cool things to do and some cool people to meet. You don’t get lonely. The other thing I wanted to ask you, this is going to put you on the spot a little bit, but this is a personal question. I’ve heard about the reverse 1031. Do you guys do those over there in Virginia too?

We do. As far as the title portion goes, we’re at the mercy of the qualified intermediary. They are a little more expensive, but they are something that you can do and we have done them before. I personally haven’t had a whole lot of interaction. We do 1031 CE, Continuing Education classes. We have some partners in that business. I know they talk a lot about them. I’m not an expert on that though.

Why don’t you explain how that works?

On a 1031 exchange, you would be selling your property within a certain timeframe. You have to identify the replacement property, I think is the term, and then within another set timeframe, you have to settle on that. When you’re doing a reverse 1031 exchange, you’re purchasing the replacement property before you sell the initial property. That’s how it works. It’s a little bit different. I know that they do charge a lot of extra fees because it’s a little more complicated. I believe that’s how it works. You probably know better than I do.

Let’s say, for instance, I purchase a piece of property and then I want to sell another piece of property, is there a timeframe restriction?

I believe that is correct.

Who do you go through to do the reverse? I know that you can’t just go through the title company. There are some other people that are involved in that.

For both either way of 1031 exchange, the client cannot touch the money on a regular. I guess in reverse, it’s a little bit different but the money is going through what’s called a QI or a Qualified Intermediary. When we’re doing a 1031 exchange, someone’s selling their home, the proceeds do not go to the seller, they go to the qualified intermediary. When they purchase the home, the qualified intermediary sends the funds back to us to do the closing.

For us as a title company, it’s not that different, except there’s one other party that’s involved with some of the funds. There’re maybe a few extra forms to fill out. When it’s the reverse, I believe that then they’re borrowing the funds from the qualified intermediary, because they haven’t yet sold their property. They’re then giving them the funds after they close on these properties that they’re selling. There is always someone that’s involved in holding the fund’s purposes.

Does the title company recommend the intermediary or do we as an investor need to find it ourselves?

We can recommend one. There’s one primary one in our area, but there’s a handful out there. Anytime you make a recommendation, you want to be a little cautious because heaven forbid, they don’t have a good experience. I have recommended people before, but sometimes the investors will already have a relationship or they’ll find one on their own. The title committee does not have to approve them necessarily.

If we’re not going to go with someone that the title company recommended, how would we find that person? What would we look for?

You would probably find a recommendation from someone, but you could go on Google and nowadays, everyone’s finding things online. You’d want to find a 1031 exchange company or a qualified intermediary. That’s what you’d be looking for. They can do them throughout the nation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be local, but sometimes I do think it’s nice if it’s local especially if both of your properties are in one area. There are a lot out there. Even some of our title insurance underwriting companies do 1031 exchanges. They could even help you out. A recommendation I think is always best from the title company or if you’re working with a realtor who does a lot of investments, probably they have had other clients do it. I think asking the resources, your mortgage company, your real estate agent, or your title company is probably the best way to find someone.

It’s interesting because here in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to buy something. You get outbid constantly. For me, it makes intuitive sense to purchase first and then sell because you’re doing the hard part first, and then selling is relatively easy. The market’s strained a little bit right now. Things are changing but when it’s a seller’s market, that’s what it looks like. I’m surprised at how few people know about this. My realtor didn’t know about it. I have not yet found a title company that’s used to doing them. None of my loan officers know about it. I read about it somewhere. I thought, “This makes sense in these hot markets to do it this way.” I also know that the fees are fairly significant. Like I was quoted at about a $6,000 Delta on the title fees. That’s probably about what it’s going to cost to do a reverse. Are you finding the fees to be similar to that?

 

As a title company, we do not charge different fees for a 1031 exchange, but the qualified intermediary does. In California, maybe different. Every state is a little bit different in how they handle things. Maybe the title company is more of a qualified intermediary. I don’t know. Here on the East Coast DC area, we work with a qualified intermediary and they have the fees. The reverse 1031 is quite a lot. There’s a big difference in cost. That is the main reason why people don’t do it. We are an expensive area as well. I can see what you’re saying as far as that desire to do that. It doesn’t have to be in the same area. We’ll see people sell here and buy in a different state. That may make sense for certain people when it’s not quite as crazy of a market.

The other thing is that, do you need an intermediary for regular 1031 exchange or does that get handled through the title company?

You need one also for a regular 1031 exchange. You cannot touch the money as the person that’s selling and buying. That’s one of the roles of the qualified intermediary.

We’re going to have to pay an intermediary, whether we do a straight 1031, or we do a reverse and the change in price is going to be what their charges are based on what we’re doing.

I can’t quote their fees, but I do know it is riskier and therefore, more expensive for them to do the reverse.

If we don’t do the reverse, what happens? Do they release the money and then we pay capital gains on that? Do you have any thoughts?

In the normal 1031 exchange, you would be selling your property, the money goes to 1031 exchange. Say it’s $300,000 that you’re using towards the next property, you can use all of that. You shouldn’t have to pay the capital gains. I’m not an accountant. Say you only use $200,000 on the new property, the Delta is $100,000, you pay capital gains on that portion, I believe.

That’s all stuff to talk to our CPAs about. I understand. There are many questions about 1031s and when I’ve got a CPA on the line, most of them don’t seem to understand all. The CPAs are good at their jobs and detailed. A 1031 conversation can take hours. To do the high level seems a little bit harder sometimes and it’s nice to have a conversation with the title company because you guys know the high level. You don’t know all the details. You can be a little bit more approachable for us as audiences.

You would want to talk to an accountant to go into more detail. I don’t know all the nitty-gritty, but the general information.

Audiences, this is a high level. We’re not telling you the rules. Your CPA will tell you exactly what kinds of properties you can buy, how you need to use that equity. They’ll tell you your timeframes. They’ll tell you all of those pieces. Talk to a CPA. This conversation is to give us a high level because I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the 1031.

The qualified intermediary should be able to give you timeframes and a lot of information too. They’re a great resource as well.

What are your passion and your big why?

I’m sure like many of you out there, my big passion is my family. I’m married. I have two young kids. They’re two little girls who are five and three. They’re in growth mode and an important phase. My passion and my why is trying to figure out supporting them and being a good role model for them. Trying to figure out how to raise them in this crazy world that we live in to be good people. I want them to be good, kind people. I’m trying to make sure that I’m always that way as well. The other thing would be then giving back. Even before I had kids, work-wise, I did a lot with Habitat and some local home-based organizations trying to give back. That makes sense for real estate.

In my area, I was active with this organization called AFAC, which is helping people in Arlington County with food and that sort of thing. I’m looking for ways I can give back with the kids so that they can see we’re fortunate. Let’s make sure that we’re helping others and give perspective. That’s one of the things I’m looking for. If anyone has good ideas, I’m also open to hearing some great suggestions of things you can do with children to help them be exposed to everything and that they understand and give back and are grateful and thankful for what they have. That’s my big why.

You and I are aligned in that way because since I was a young girl, I’ve been donating to a school in India for the education of girls. That’s a big deal for me. I was horrified when I lived in India to see the way that women were treated. For me, it was like, this cannot keep going. It starts with education. I became involved in that. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to give more money, but then also, because I’m not working as hard, I’m able to give more of my time. It started small and this is something for us to remember is that as we’re giving back in the world, we can give in many different ways. We can give time. We can give a little bit of money. We can give a lot of money. We can start an organization.

There’s a whole gamut of what we can do to give back. We can also help somebody with a cart that’s blind. We can also smile at somebody. We can also work in a soup kitchen. There are lots of different ways to give back. One of the tenets of bliss in my book, Choose Bliss is that it gives life more meaning. It fills you up. There’s this thing called the givers high. In a way, it’s selfish to do this but what a great way to be selfish is to help people in the world. It does give life more meaning. Those days that I feel like, “I worked hard.”

There are a couple of big reasons why I keep going. First of all, I know I’m helping my audiences. I hear about it all the time and that’s fulfilling to me. That’s my way of giving back. When I’m doing my properties, all of my real estates are in redevelopment areas. I’m always trying to improve a neighborhood and a community. That’s fulfilling. My school in India, I’m involved with that. We filmed a documentary there. That piece of giving back to communities and teaching our children to do the same thing, it’s such an important piece of bliss and an important piece of finding meaning in life. Thank you for bringing that up. That’s important. What would your advice be for people to have a more successful life?

Some of this we’ve touched on already, but I think we all need to be thankful for the things that we have and live your life in a full way, instead of always thinking like a scarcity mentality kind of thing. Be thankful for the things you have and try not to dwell on the things you don’t. We all wish we had more of this or that. Everyone has things that they need to be thankful for. Investment wise, save when you can, and then be smart with it. Save the money and then be smart with what you do with it. The quote that I live by is from Zig Ziglar and it’s, “You can have everything in life, as long as you help enough other people get what they want in life.” Trying to give back to others, make connections, how we can all live and enjoy our lives together. I feel great when I’m able to help someone else out. It’s a win-win situation because they’re thrilled and you’re thrilled because you were able to do something great for someone else.

Thank you for that. The other quote that I love by Zig is he says, “Sometimes they’ll ask somebody how are you doing?” They’ll say something like, “I’m doing fine under the circumstances.” He’ll say, “What the heck are you doing under there anyway?”

He’s got a lot of great quotes.

Be thankful for the things you have and try not to dwell on the things you don't. Share on X

Could you tell us how people can get in touch with you?

I would love to hear from you guys. If there are questions you have or suggestions, the best way would be to email me. My email is [email protected].

I know that you’ve got a free gift for my audiences. Tell them about that.

We talked a little about quotes and staying motivated. My big thing in quotes. When I meet with a client, I try to bring a little quote book with me. I got the suggestion, which is to create my own. I might put together a quote book, but in the meantime, I send out a motivational quote every Friday. If you are interested, I would love to add you to that list. It’s a little Friday morning motivation to get you through the end of the week. If you are local, a list of a few events that we have coming up, you’re welcome to attend those as well. A little extra motivation on your Friday morning. If you’d like to be added to that list, I’d be delighted to add you.

That’s at [email protected].

Send me an email there and I’ll add you to the list.

This is something I want to highlight. We are fed negativity all the time. We have TV, we have the news, we have advertising that tells us we’re not good enough and we need these products to be good enough. We’re getting a lot of negativity fed to us all the time. We’re doing that by choice. We watch the television, we watch the news. We read the news where we are allowing ourselves to be in that position. It’s important that we also prioritize taking the time to give ourselves positive stuff, to reinforce that positive side, to balance the other side that we can’t avoid. A lot of people think, “Whatever I don’t need positive quotes.” You do because you have to feed yourself the same way as we feed ourselves knowledge.

As we feed ourselves the news of the world so that we can be part of the world community and the world village. We also need to feed ourselves the positive things that will keep us uplifted. A bliss practice is that if you’re not feeding yourself that then you’re not getting it because that doesn’t come to us naturally. That’s something we have to seek out. Unfortunately, I would love it if more news stories were happy, but there aren’t enough to compensate for what’s coming out on the more negative side. I love that you’re offering that. Ladies, I would encourage you to get on that list so that you can get good quotes and cute videos and all that stuff that you can get to uplift you to balance out all the other stuff that we are fed in the world.

If anyone out there has a great quote that they love, send it to me. I would love it. I’m picky. I only put quotes in there that do motivate me. Sometimes I’m like, “What am I going to do this week?” If you have a good one, send it my way. I would love to hear it.

Thank you for that. Helen, are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Let’s do it.

The first one is, give us a super tip on how to get started in real estate investing.

It’s not that difficult. You’ve got to take action. Find something you’re comfortable with. There’re many different ways to invest. It doesn’t have to be something huge, start small. I would try to find a mentor or someone that’s done it before. They could ask some questions to someone you trust and then start small and then grow it from there.

What would you say is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?

I know you said don’t research too much, but I do think researching is important. I think finding a good CPA, we’ve talked a lot about how important accountants can be. Finding a business attorney potentially because maybe you’re going to put that investment property into an LLC and you want to know the pros and cons of that. Also, for liability purposes, you may want to talk to an insurance person. Collaborating with a few people who are going to protect yourself, is also important and will help make you more successful.

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

The mentality of being grateful and thankful. I don’t know if anyone’s read The Secret that book back in the day. Every night before going to bed, I say a little prayer or think about my day and the things I’m grateful for and I think always looking back. Celebrating those little successes you have. Also, one other thing outside of that is finding an accountability partner. Stay on track with them and make sure you’re both achieving and moving forward in the right direction. Be patient, it doesn’t always happen overnight. Sometimes I think I’m like, “I started doing this. I should see results right away.” Some things take a little bit of time. Take action, but be patient and be grateful for those things that you have.

 

Thank you for all the amazing information. This has been a great conversation, Helen.

Thank you, Moneeka. I’m excited. I am honored and feel grateful that I’ve been on the show with you.

Ladies, thank you for joining Helen and I on this show. We’ve been delighted to share our information with you. I look forward to seeing you at the next show. 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.

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Thank you again for joining me on the Real Estate Investing for Women Show. If you love this show, please subscribe, rate and review it on iTunes. As women, we need to support and empower each other to build wealth and live joyful lives. Your support of this show by subscribing, rating, and reviewing it will help other women as you learn about building blissful wealth through investing. Remember to download your free report so you can get started on your investing journey at BlissfulInvestor.com. See you next time. Here’s something you individually can do to create a peace that’s as simple as pressing play. Get the download from PeaceAndHarmonyDownload.com and be a peace hero. Create your own pocket of peace around you so there are fewer family squabbles and more harmony in your life.

 

 Important Links

• Helen Krause
• Hal Elrod – Previous episode
• AFAC
• Choose Bliss
• [email protected]
• The Secret
• iTunes – Real Estate Investing for Women
• PeaceAndHarmonyDownload.com

 

About Helen Krause

Helen Krause earned her undergraduate and masters degree from James Madison University. After graduation, she worked for a local homebuilder. She has been in title business for over thirteen years, focused primarily on the sales and marketing side. She also has her title insurance license and has conducted hundreds of settlements. Her background is in marketing and her passion is to help others achieve their goals. She likes to partner with her clients to provide value for their business. She loves speaking to agents who are starting and growing their careers and teaches educational and motivational classes and events.

 

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
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EXTRA: Anchoring bliss in your work space and home with Devi Adea

 

Devi works with Spiritual Entrepreneurs and Conscious Leaders to help them embrace their soul’s purpose, upgrade their consciousness, and share their message and mission with the world through their own media platform and/or own soul-driven lifestyle business.

Devi is a recognized “Icon of Influence” in the New Media Space. She interviews today’s top podcasters and influencers on her show, Podcast on Purpose and shares her spiritual entrepreneurial insights on her top-ranked Spiritual Entrepreneur Podcast.

When she is not serving or interviewing conscious leaders in their industry, Devi enjoys making music, doing yoga, and spending time with her husband and their adorable fur babies in their home in San Diego, CA.

In this episode we discuss:

Specific strategies to anchor bliss in our home and work space.

You can reach Devi at DeviAdea.com

Would you like to listen to other EXTRA episodes like this one? Just go to: RealEstateInvestingforWomenExtra.com

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Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com