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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
How To Find All The Money You Need For Your Real Estate Investing
“Expect your every need to be met. Expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level.”
Eileen Caddy
Would you like to buy investment real estate? What is stopping you? Is it the money to get started?
If you are like most people, you think that the way to get enough money to buy a property is to go to a bank and apply for a mortgage. Read more
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Ready Or Not, Here I Come!
“Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is there something you say you want to do…but you are not doing it? What is stopping you from doing it?
I had a telephone conversation recently with a potential coaching client. She said she wanted to start investing in real estate. I asked what was stopping her. She responded, “Fear.” I told her that I don’t believe fear stops us as much as we claim it does.
”Fear!” as the answer to the question, “What is stopping you from doing what you say you what to do?” is a cliché. It is an automatic first response, deeply conditioned into us in our self-help culture. We have heard that fear is an acronym, “False evidence appearing real.” But after saying, “Fear!,” what comes next? Fear of what? Where do you go with that declaration?
A few years ago, I took several screenwriting courses. One of my teachers made the comment, “When you are writing a screenplay, never take the first idea that comes into your head.” He said that the first thought is always going to be a cliché. We have seen or heard it a hundred times before in movies. He told us to go deeper. He urged us to go beyond the cliché to find something authentic.
I asked my potential client some more questions to get to a more authentic response. Her answers revealed a belief that the only way she could make money in real estate would be at the expense of other people. She considers herself a good person who doesn’t want to take advantage of others. This is valuable information and lies several steps beyond the automatic response, “I’m not investing in real estate because I’m afraid.”
I just retrieved a book from my bookshelf with the astounding title, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Gotten Worse. It is one of the most provocative books I have ever read. (And I have just reminded myself that it is time to reread it.)
The core idea of the book is that psychotherapy has taught us to look inside ourselves for our weaknesses and pathologies, with the idea that we have to fix ourselves before we can act in the world. In other words, psychotherapy teaches us that we have to “get ready” before we act.
“The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.”
George Bernard Shaw
I suspect that the sense that “I am not ready” stops us at least as much as “I am afraid.” Therapy teaches us to look for our flaws, to tend to our wounded inner children, to name the addictions that we are powerless to overcome. We cannot possibly act powerfully in the big scary outer world when we consider ourselves frightened children on the inside.
The same dynamic occurs in education. Because I come from an academic background, I saw again and again the ways that academics stop themselves from action by the belief that they are not ready. There is always one more book to read first.
And if you are a seminar junkie the way I am, “getting ready” means you have to take one more seminar, buy one more book, work with one more coach, and then you will be ready to act. Except that getting ready to take action is not the same as taking action.
One of the most valuable conversations I ever had was with a professor at the University of California in Berkeley. I had just passed my doctoral oral exam and he was a member of my committee. He was also one of the most brilliant and “street-smart” academics I have ever met, with an impressive resume of published books and articles behind him. I went to his office to ask him a question. The question was, “What do I need to know to write and finish my dissertation?”
I knew the statistics. 85% of doctoral students in the humanities who pass their doctoral oral exams never finish their dissertations. They become permanent ABDs (“All But Dissertation”) for the rest of their lives.
The professor said, “Most people who reach the point of writing a doctoral dissertation know enough, work hard enough, and are smart enough to finish. But everything they hear is, you don’t know enough, you don’t work hard enough, and you’re not smart enough. And so they never finish.”
Those words impressed me deeply. I went home and wrote the question, “What is enough?” on an index card and taped it to the wall behind my desk. During the months I worked on writing the dissertation, that question brought me back on track again and again. And I am convinced that the fundamental reason that I did write and finish my doctoral dissertation was because I kept asking myself, “What is enough?”
This question, “What is enough?” will liberate you from the belief that being “ready” means you have to know everything and be like Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way,” before you act.
“The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”
John Maxwell
Yesterday, I played hide and seek with my granddaughter. Even played with a four year old, whose idea of hiding is to hide behind the same tree each time, the game has a great phrase, suitable for putting on an index card and taping to your wall: “Ready or Not, Here I Come.” The truth is, you can’t do anything by getting ready to do it. The only way to do it is to do it.
This article was originally published November 8, 2005.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2005-11-08.htm
WARNING: BEFORE YOU INVEST IN REAL ESTATE…
FREE “No Money Limits Consumer Guide to Real Estate Investor Training.”
www.nomoneylimits.com
© 2005 Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Debt or Alive, Inc.
2248 Meridian Blvd. Suite H
Minden, NV 89423
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