Faking It Until You Make It: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

How to manage your mindset to present an image of confidence and competence when internally you feel like an imposter.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a 33-year-old viewer who says he suffers from imposter syndrome. He was raised by a single mom who tried turning him into a nice boy. He has done well with my book and videos and has a great supportive girlfriend. However, he was in the mortgage business which has been severely impacted by interest rate increases. He doesn’t feel very successful and his girlfriend is offering to help him find another job because he doesn’t like what he’s doing now. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

So I got an email from a guy, he’s 33 years old and he says that he suffers from imposter syndrome. He says he was raised by a single mom who basically turned him into a super nice boy, so he didn’t hurt any girls. The problem was, is that she just made him too soft, to the point where women walked all over him and didn’t treat him with respect.

However, he’s come across my book and my work. He’s done well for himself. He’s got a great, supportive girlfriend and he used to be in the mortgage business. Obviously, if you guys have been paying attention to the last two years or so, the fed has been dramatically raising the interest rates. So as I wrote about one thing I would suggest to this guy is that you read Mastering Yourself as well, because I used to be in the business and I had one of the largest real estate and mortgage companies and the whole state of Florida, so I’m very familiar with the industry.

One of the things I didn’t really understand back then that I really do now, because I spent a lot of time studying it, I did a documentary on it, is the economic boom and bust cycle, and it typically is about a 12 to 15-year cycle. It just happens. When the interest rates are low, the economy expands because the money supply expands, because the banks are creating new money by lending it into existence.

If you’ve ever watched the documentary that we did called Economic Prosperity For All, it’s about a half hour or 45 minutes. It goes into the purpose of money and really explaining it. We’re in a cycle now where they’ve been raising the interest rates. So the last time they raised interest rates this dramatically this quickly was 2004, 2005, and this same exact thing happened then where the the real estate industry got super overheated because there was so much cheap money chasing a finite supply of houses. So it’s simple supply and demand economics.

You got more people with money than there are houses to buy, and so they end up bidding up the houses. Then the fed raises the interest rates. Then when the interest rates more than double and a few short years, your payment and the amount your payment goes through the roof and your actual amount that you can borrow, because the interest rates are so much higher, are much less. So this reduces the borrowing power of people. So a guy that could afford a $500,000 house two years ago is only going to be able to at current rates, is only going to be able to afford a $250,000-$300,000 house with the same amount of payment that he would have had at a 3% interest rate, versus now close to 8% in some cases.

That dramatically increases the payment because people basically have a they have a fixed amount of income and a fixed amount of money on a monthly basis. They can put towards a mortgage payment. When the interest rates are real low, they can afford a much bigger mortgage because the payments are low. If the interest rates are high, they can only afford they can afford a less of a house just because of the fact that the payment is so high. So how can we all benefit from this? How I benefited it tremendously back when I was in real estate. I’m really excited about two to three years from now, because there should be a lot of foreclosures and a lot of opportunities in real estate.

So what the fed is doing now, because we had all this inflation because they doubled the money supply in a couple of years, I never imagined they would print that much money. So if you ever, ever studied Modern Monetary theory, it’s like they really threw some gasoline in that fire. With the lock-downs and everything, they printed more money and literally doubled the money supply within a couple of years. So you saw this. Plus the lock-downs, the supply chain issues, it caused all these problems that everything went up in cost.

So the way the fed brings inflation down is to cause the price to borrow money to go up. So just simple example how this affects, say, imagine you have a restaurant and you’ve been doing well and you’re thinking, “Hey I want to put all new equipment in. I want to expand my kitchen a little bit. I want to spend like $100,000 and redoing the kitchen because there’s other things I can do other meals and thing, recipes I can make with this new equipment.” It’s going to cost $100,000, and the guy knows what his cash flow is on a monthly basis for his restaurant, and he looks at what his payment would be when the interest rate is 3%, and then all of a sudden, a few years later, now the interest rate on that is almost 8%.

He looks at what the monthly payment is going to be to borrow the money that he needs to buy the equipment that he wants. It becomes cost prohibitive. So instead of him dropping $100,000 for new kitchen equipment, he just decides to wait until more favorable market additions come along. So that $100,000 he would have bought in kitchen equipment, that company that would have gotten the order, the sales ain’t going to get a commission on it. The people that make the kitchen equipment aren’t going to be making the equipment because there’s no demand for it. So they’re not getting paid either.

So the guy’s not going to be able to sell the other things he wants to do and expand his business the way he wants, because borrowing costs are just too expensive. In other words, it doesn’t make financial sense to take out $100,000 loan at a 8% interest rate when the numbers would have worked at a 3% interest rate. So it reduces the demand, and that just ripples all throughout the whole economy.

So what you see now, because I follow these stats very closely, is bankruptcies are going through the roof. There are dramatically up over, I think October, I think I saw was like, bankruptcies were up 36% over what they were in the previous October. Or maybe it was September, I can’t remember.

The other thing is that people’s credit card debt is going through the roof, because what’s happening is they’re taking cash advances and they’re using their credit cards to finance their expenses. The other thing that’s happening is the amount of savings that people have is dropping dramatically. The reason that’s happening is because people are taking the savings that they had and spending it to pay their bills. So they’re maxing out their credit cards and their line of credit just to maintain their normal bills, which puts them further into debt and gives them bigger, bigger monthly payments because they’re just hoping to buy some time until things turn around, even though this is a multi-year process. I mean, the whole cycle, the boom cycle that we’ve just come out of, and then now we’re entering the bust cycle, I mean that’s a 12 to 15-year cycle.

So when we look at the interest rate increases that started happening in like 2005 and 2006, Lehman Brothers happened in 2008, and the best deals were available in real estate when nobody wanted to buy about 2009, 2010, and that’s really when you want to buy real estate. So we’re about to become January in another month or so, two years into the interest rate increases. So Lehman Brothers happened about three years after the interest rate increases. So what I’m seeing in the real estate down in South Florida, especially like the high end rental market, those properties, because everybody was working from home, they were triple and quadruple what they were in 2019 and 2020 before all the lock-downs happened. So those things are all starting to come back down to earth, because you don’t have all those people competing for a limited supply of rental homes.

I’m just watching these sellers drop their prices significantly and how much they want in a monthly rent. I’m seeing things that were Airbnbs that they can’t get enough Airbnb business, and then they put it for a long term rental, and then they can’t get the rates that they’re thinking. Then they put the house on the market to just get rid of it because they’re concerned about being able to cover their mortgage. Whereas like a year, year and a half ago, you say let’s take a $4 million house in the water because there’s obviously a lot of them in South Florida, a lot of canals and are coastal.

So you take a house that was $4 million a year, a year and a half ago and the height of the boom, and you might get 10 or 12 people putting an offer on that thing as soon as it goes in the market, and it sells like that, usually over asking price. Whereas now a year, year and a half later, there’s they’re getting price reductions because they might send the market three to four weeks, but the houses still sell. Instead of having 10 people competing, there might just be one person.

So you’re starting to see prices kind of top out. It is definitely you know the $3-$5 million market in South Florida is still pretty good. It’s not as good as it was a year and a half ago. Like things a little lower, especially where the median price range, like half $1 million houses, $600,000 houses, something like that. Like talking to Andy in Orlando, he says you can get a deal on those because those things are not really moving at all. The higher end stuff tends to be moving because people with money tend to always have money. Plus, there’s a lot of people moving from blue states still to red states, but that is slowing down.

When you look at what’s going on in the economy and the other thing is like car repossessions, car repossessions are way up. People are getting behind in their car notes. We’re starting to see dealers offering incentives again. Used car prices are starting to come down, so it’s like everything’s slowly starting to come down. If you ever read any of the interviews with the people that are in the Federal Reserve Board, it’s like, they’re just guessing, man. They’re just kind of throwing darts in the blizzard.

When you lower or you raise the interest rates, it takes years to really see what the effects of that are going to be. When they jacked the rates up real, real quickly in 2005, 2006, it took about two to three years before the brakes really got put on the real estate market. Then about another two years after that, nobody wanted to buy real estate because the values were going down. So more than likely, the real estate prices are going to probably come down about 30% just because the velocity of money is just not there anymore.

The other interesting thing is that a lot of people are pulling their money out of the stock market. Now, why would that be? Well, because they’re cashing out their retirement accounts, or they’re cashing out their stocks because they’ve got to pay their bills. So that’s going to drive the stock market down. The money supply contracts the economy contracts. That’s why they do that. They’re withdrawing the money supply from the economy back into the banking system. So they reduce demand and everything’s supply and demand. When you have a higher demand for products and the supply of them, then what’s going to happen is the cost of those products is going to go up when there’s a huge oversupply of properties and there’s a low demand, they have to lower prices back down to what people want to pay for them.

I remember in real estate, like we would have these builders that would say, “Hey, we got 1,000 lots coming online. Please come out to our open house. Come see our models. Bring your clients.” They were really nice. They would come to our office, they’d bring us gifts and food and stuff. Then in the height of the boom, they turned into arrogant assholes. They’re like, “Oh yeah, we just got a Ralph Ray. We’re not participating with realtors.” It’s like their attitude totally changed to be like, “Yeah, fuck you realtors.” All we have to do is put an ad on the street, and then all these lots are gone in a matter of hours. Then when the market changed, they’re like begging us to come bring clients to their communities again, and that’s the huge swing you see in things.

So this particular guy that wrote this email, he was in the mortgage business. Especially, if you’re doing refinances and just originating loans, I’ve got friends that are appraisers. The market completely changed and it’s going to continue to decrease. The other thing to consider is people max out their credit cards, they cash in their retirement accounts, they spend all their savings trying to keep what they have. Then once they’re tapped out, they got no money left. The last thing that they make payments on or stop making payments on is typically their house because they don’t want to be homeless. If somebody files bankruptcy, because normally a bank doesn’t start foreclosure proceedings until you’re about six months behind, and if you file bankruptcy, you can tie that house up for six months to two years, depending on how long your bankruptcy takes to work it through the system.

That’s why when we look at the delinquencies, when we look at people getting behind in their mortgage payments, they’re getting behind in their credit cards, they’re getting behind their car payments, car repossessions are going way up. You’re seeing all these things indicative of the demand. Dropping for everything, for all goods and services and the economy. So it’s a slow process and it’s like dominoes.

It’s like, when the things start to go bad in the economy, they’ll lower the rates again, which they always do historically, but it’s years before you see things start to turn around. Usually it takes about a decade before things really start to come back. When you figure the worst time to sell and the best time to buy was like 2009, 2010, early 2011 when nobody wanted to, where things got super overheated, which was 2022. You’re like 10, 11 years before the best time to buy to the best time to sell. The idea is to buy low, to sell high.

The reason why I went on this long diatribe is because there’s going to be a huge opportunity to make a lot of money in about two to three years on real estate foreclosures, because ain’t nobody going to be buying. So this guy comes from the industry and he’s 33. He hasn’t been in it long enough. He’s not old enough. He was basically a teenager the last time we were in the cycle that we’re in right now. He’s got a lot of experience in the industry. If you understand the boom bust cycle, again, the idea is to buy low and sell high.

Right now I would not be buying any any real estate. I would just be stacking cash and waiting for about another two to three years when the foreclosures go through the roof. I mean, you’re already seeing that, but the best deals are still several years away the stats that are there now, the curve just changed to where the overall saving rate of everybody is now below what it was at the height of the lock-downs and everything. So people are going through their savings and their stocks and their credit lines and lines of credit pretty quickly. Once they’re maxed out and they’ve got no money left, that’s when they really stop making their payments and things just. Then you get banks failing and there’s lots of lots of opportunities.

So this particular guy, the industry that he was in, I mean, I saw the same thing happen to all my friends that were in it. Everybody’s living high on the hog, making tons of money, and it feels like it’s going to last forever, but it never does. That’s why it’s important to plan for it. It’s just like people that work in the food service industry, especially like if you live in South Florida, like Delray Beach, you see a 75% increase in in the population when all the snowbirds come down. So you make a lot of money during the holidays or the season, which tends to be after Thanksgiving through Easter, those are like the best times of the year. In the middle of the summer when there’s like 75% less people and there’s hardly anybody coming in, it’s like, you need to save your money. You don’t want to spend all your money that you make when things are in the boom. So you have to think about these things as a person.

So this guy is struggling because he was doing really well when he met his girlfriend. Obviously now he’s gone through some tough times. He got a DUI, he’s got a good paying job. He says he’s like one of the top producers, but he doesn’t like it and he feels like he’s an imposter at this point. He says he feels like he’s suffering from imposter syndrome because he went from having all his success. Same thing I experienced in my late 20s through my mid 30s. I was in the middle of this boom cycle, and it just felt like it’s going to go on forever. You start to think, “Hey, I’m a genius. Look at me, look at all the money we’re making.” It’s pretty easy when everything’s going up in value, but what happens? How do you make money when it starts to go down?

In this case, he’s lost his job that he had in the mortgage industry because the demand is totally gone. I mean, I think the stats I’ve seen for real estate and mortgage and construction is about 19% of the economy. That’s like one fifth of the economy just got the brakes totally put, put on it. So those ripple effects takes years to really see what the net effect of that is going to be. So his girlfriend’s offering to help him, but internally he doesn’t feel the same way that he used to. He’s like, “How do I get past this?”

Viewer’s Email:

Corey,

The biggest regret I have with your work is not finding it sooner.

Well, I wish I would have learned this stuff when I was a teenager, but you know, it is what it is. This is why I do what I do, so the next generations don’t have to go through all the shit that I went through.

I’m 33 and for years, I wasted my time with “gurus” that I thought could teach me the easy way to get a woman to fall in love with me with magic words but as you tell us time and time again there’s no shortcut to success. 

I stumbled upon your work after a breakup that sucked and being arrested for a DUI (I accept full ownership of my actions and taken steps to ensure it never happens again).

That’s life, man. Good for you for getting past it.

I completely turned my life around in a short few months after reading, listening and applying the principles of the Bible and your work to my life. 

Cool story: While I was casually dating my current girlfriend, she told me she knew of your work and thought I was applying your principles to our interactions. I teased her about it and stayed firm. Shortly after, SHE asked me to be her boyfriend. 

So she gave him some friction about, “Oh, I know what you’re doing,” but at the end of the day, it works. That’s the beauty of truth. It’s self-evident.

The reason I’m writing you is that I’m currently dealing with imposter syndrome. I was raised by a single mother who tried to condition me into a nice boy and was always soft growing up.

Growing up, I can relate, dude. My mom mostly raised my brother and I. My dad was just working and too checked out to really pay attention.

I have taken the correct action to change my behavior, but I still feel like the “real me” is in the back of my head telling myself I’m a fraud. 

In a little over a year, I was impacted by the mortgage rates being increased and lost my management positions at two different lenders.

Like, yeah, they’re getting decimated. The same thing is happening all over again in the industry.

When I was younger, I didn’t know I hadn’t gone through a bust cycle on my own. I watched my parents go through it, like when the stock market crashed in ’87 and it crashed like 500 points in a day, and my my parents, my mom actually was managing their money from the business that they had sold. It bought a bunch of stocks on margin. When it crashed like that, the margin got called and poof, they got wiped out. My dad had to go back to work.

At the time I was a kid, I didn’t really understand what was going on. When I got into flipping foreclosure properties in the mid 90s, I was actually buying some of the properties from the RTC, the Resolution Trust Corporation, that was part of that bust cycle from ’87 through the SNL crisis that happened, and I profited very well from that.

I’m now in sales and hate the job but am a top performer. I bar-tend on the side and go to school. I’m also flirting with joining the national guard. I live on my own with no roommates and know that I’m not a bum, but can’t help but feel like an imposter sometimes and that I don’t deserve the things that I’ve earned. The shame of having a DUI on my record also makes me feel that it defines me and that I’m forever a horrible person for that. (didn’t hurt or kill anyone during my arrest).

Hey dude, what happened, happened, and it couldn’t happen any other way. You learned from it. You made some changes because, what would have happened if you didn’t get the DUI? Would you have changed your behavior? You probably would have kept doing what you’re doing, and maybe the next time you drank way more, then something bad would have happened. So I looked at it as that DUI probably saved your life and somebody else’s life. So it was supposed to happen that way. It couldn’t have happened any other way.

You should look at it and be grateful that you got past it. I assume, like you said, you don’t do that shit anymore, but I can understand the imposter syndrome because I went from doing really well in real estate, making half a million a year, to just a few short years later, at the height of things like when I got out of it 2005, 2006 to where in 2010, 2008, 2009, 2020 through summer of 2010. For about ten months I was waiting tables at a sports bar and in the middle of the summer when it was really slow in Delray Beach, and like 75% of the people are gone back up north.

I remember working a closing shift, and keep in mind I’m like 39, 40 years old. I hadn’t waited tables in almost 20 years since my early 20s, and this was a busy sports bar. So you’re just moving and shaking constantly compared to the high end restaurant that I used to work. I would work an eight hour shift and my shins are bothering me, my calves are bothering, my feet hurt. It’s just a lot of walking around, running around. I was exhausted when I went home. Then you go home like 80 bucks in a closing shift in the middle of the summer when there’s like, hardly anybody coming in the restaurant. That’s very humbling. I didn’t feel like a super successful guy like I had once been. Or I could just walk into a Rolex shop and go, “Oh yeah, I’ll take the submariner. I got a submariner.” Was like, $7,500 or $8,000, whatever. It was 20 something years ago.

25 years ago, whenever it was, I got that and we were in Hawaii, but I could do those things like that and had the cash in the bank. I was making money hand over fist and then to work my ass off and make $80 for a closing shift because things were so slow. Then the very next day, get up and go to my little office that I had and do a Google Pay-per-click campaign to send traffic to my website as I continue to test and refine my business and figure out the right way to market my business.

I mean, I could blow that $80 in a matter of minutes on a pay-per-click campaign. So it’s very humbling. I didn’t feel very successful. I didn’t feel like the shit anymore. All the success that I’d had in my life to go from making half a million a year, having an exotic car and nice boats and jet skis and living a big ass house and a multi million dollar office building to basically sleeping on my dad’s couch, and coming home with $80 in my pocket and my legs and my feet hurting, it’s like, I can totally get the imposter syndrome.

I remember when things started going really well. Then when I moved down to South Beach, I lived in this really luxurious building down in south of fifth. I kind of felt like an imposter. It was weird. I remember walking around there those first few months and I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there, you know, because my confidence wasn’t the same, because I had this experience of this really difficult time that I had financially, emotionally, mentally, spiritually where I questioned everything. It’s like, everything that I thought I knew about the world and business, I had to unlearn all of it, because all that success that I had really got in the way of me being successful at what I’m doing now.

That’s why it took so long to figure out my business model, so that was very humbling. I didn’t feel too good about myself. Even though I’m driving a nice, luxurious car, I’m walking around and I’m seeing all these famous people, and if I mention the names of who they were of your celebrities, sports stars, business moguls, billionaires, and here I am, just four or five years beyond waiting tables and coming up with $80 a night, and I’m able to afford living in this really super expensive, luxurious community of with a bunch of other uber wealthy people. I mean, I was a pauper compared to most of my neighbors, but over time and I got to know everybody and be there and got to experience it and get used to my new reality that, “Hey, I’m kind of back.” It took a long time.

What’s different the second time around is that, you know, as Jocko Willink says, “Be humble or you will be humbled,” and I got humbled big time. I’ve learned, especially being older now, it’s just like I let my success speak for myself. I don’t go around pounding my chest and talking about how great I am or successful I am, or you look at somebody like an Andrew Tate, and I could see I was never like that. That’s a guy who’s totally in his ego and all of his success has gone to his head, even though that dude’s got a lot of trouble facing him. Life will always give you some humble pie, and it looks like he’s going to get a huge dose of it, so I can relate to that.

The only thing that really keeps you going in all of this really is your mindset. What’s my outcome? What do I want to create? Secondly, why do you want it? What are your compelling reasons why you want what you want? Because it’s the emotional energy, the emotional passion that you have for whatever it is that you’re trying to create that will cause you to to take a bullshit sales job or consider going into the National Guard or bartending on the side and going to school. You’ll be willing to do those things, because down the road you’ve already had a taste of success.

If you were a manager and a lender business, I’m sure you’re making really damn good money, and you’re in a same boat that I was. It doesn’t feel good and it’s not fun, and you’ve got a girlfriend. The other thing that’s important to understand is when a guy is doing really well and he’s very stable, that’s when you want to be in a long term relationship with a girl. I was sleeping on my dad’s couch and coming home with $80 after seven or eight hours in the middle of a summer when it’s just slow as hell and nothing’s going on. It’s not a pleasant feeling, and it’s hard to feel confident. So when you’re in that kind of a phase where you’re not stable, you’re going to feel more comfortable with shorter type relationships, not getting attached, not really getting serious with anyone.

The thing that you have to pay attention to is that you’ve got to do the fundamentals that are in the book. You’ve got to continually apply those things, even though on the inside you might feel like an imposter. Just like the first few months when I moved down to South Beach, I had a place for a couple of years in Orlando, and I kept that home. Then I had this new place down in South Beach.

Like I said, the first couple of months walking around there, it’s like, you guys should have seen the parking garage, is like the parking garage in this building, there literally were hundreds of millions of dollars and just cars. Most of the people that had places in this complex, that was just like one of their summer homes. They’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of any and every kind of exotic car and custom made car that you can think of is in there. It was unbelievable. It was an amazing experience. Like I said, first few months I didn’t feel like I deserved to be there.

So the only thing that keeps you going is your mindset. You got to get up every day. What do I have to get done today before I go to bed? The thing that will keep your girl attracted to you is that it’s OK that she knows you’re struggling, but at the end of the day, you’re handling it, “I got this, I’ll figure it out. Something will come along eventually. Eventually, I’ll figure it out.”

Like one of my buddies that was in real estate when they had lost both their houses and short sales and they still had some capital. He had multiple kids he’s got to take care of. They had a nice yacht. They were going to the yacht club. They had multiple houses. They were living large, having big parties. Now all of a sudden they’re short sailing both their houses, they’re downsizing. They ended up moving to a different part of the state where it was cheaper, and the school system was really good, so they could send their kids to to public schools. They completely changed their lifestyle.

I remember he was just saying, “Yeah, if I can’t do what I’m doing in real estate, I’ll wash windows, I’ll paint houses, I’ll do whatever I got to do in order to survive and provide for my family.” That’s what a woman wants from you, is that she wants the attitude, “Whatever I got to do to get to a happy place or get to where I want to be in life.” The mortgage in the real estate business before, if you’re going to go back into the lending side of thing, it’s going to be two to three years before.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that in the last year, 60,000 realtors have gotten out of the business. Those are your weekend warriors tapping out, going, “I can’t make any money.” They’re getting out of the business. So this is just part of the cycle and you know a good time to get back into it if you’re going to be in real estate and you’re going to sell properties, like I said, it’s going to probably be about two to three years, probably closer to three years down the road.

The only people that will really be buying that are going to be the investors, and when does the regular residential stuff come back? You’re probably at least six to eight years from now before the rates are low and the economy kind of returns to a normal level where you have normal buyers and normal sellers. Because the government’s borrowed so much money and the federal government has so much debt, they’re going to have to lower the interest rate.

Again, it takes years to recover from that. It takes years to blow things up with the interest rate increases and it takes years for it to recover once you start lowering it, because it’s not like flipping a light switch. It takes time for that money to go into the economy, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to have a lot of borrowers, they’re going to have their credit ruined, and their ability to borrow money is going to go to zero.

So it takes time to recover. It takes time to go through bankruptcy. It takes time to get a new job. It takes time to save up some money. It takes time to grow a business from scratch until you’re able to once again be able to afford to get a really nice house and do those things.

Your girlfriend just needs to see that you’re handling things. It’s where guys get themselves into trouble in situations like what you’re in right now is when they flounder around and they don’t do anything to help themselves. Like if you just start coming home every night and bitching and complaining about your job, but you never do anything about it, and you keep working there and you keep bitching to your girl, what that looks like is that you’re not doing anything to help yourself. What she needs to see is that you’re just taking action, and you’re doing it, and you’re making some progress and you’re not. You may feel fearful inside, but at the end of the day, it’s you just got to take action.

You just always have to keep moving forward because this boom bust cycle, that’s how the banking system works. That’s how the money supply works. Every 12 to 15 years, you’re going to have a boom and you’re going to have a bust. If you understand that and you understand what causes it, like watching the documentary we did, Economic Prosperity For All you can profit significantly, whereas I’m really excited about three years from now and all the deals that I’m going to be able to make in real estate is gonna be a great, great buying opportunity and a great investing opportunity, even if you’re just going to buy a house to live in, the same thing will happen again.

So you buy a house in three years, the best time to sell. It’s going to probably be about 10 years from there to the point where everybody’s buying the properties are going through the roof again. That’s when you want to sell and dip out and get a rental and just chillax and wait for the bus to go down again. Or you keep one primary residence and you sell some of your other rentals.

Andy had these guys that they were from Saudi Arabia, you know, wealthy family multi generations. That’s the benefit of when you have a successful family is that you can teach this stuff to your kids. So these guys had hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in real estate. So 2009, 2010 he was selling these condos that had been like $80,000-$100,000 condos, and they were picking them up for $20,000-$30,000, and they were brand new because the developers had gone bankrupt.

Nobody was buying, and guess what they did with all those properties? It was like 22,000 like 21, 22? They sold all of them. They had hundreds of these things, and they sold every one of these fucking things for like $250,000 to $300,000. So they bought it free and clear because they had the cash for $20,000-$30,000, sometimes $40,000 back in 2009, 2010, and they rented it out, were positive cash flow the whole time, all through for about a decade. Then they liquidated everything. Literally ten times their money in a decade just because they bought low and they sold high.

I don’t remember who said it, but they said, “Buy when there’s blood in the streets.” In other words, buy when nobody wants the properties because that’s when you’re going to give them the cheapest and sell when everybody’s buying them and the prices are going through the roof. You can study over the last 100 years and just see the boom bust cycles, see how that works. It just keeps going, so you can set yourself up for that in the future.

My girlfriend offered to help me find a new job, but I don’t want to rely on her or make her think that she’s my mommy and I feel an immense amount of pressure on me to continue being the person I was during the courting process while I’m in this rough patch. She tells me she’s not going anywhere and is supportive but I have my doubts (unfortunately I made the mistake to tell her my worries, I know bad move). 

I am not sure how to overcome this imposter syndrome and rough patch. What would you suggest that I do? 

Thanks!

Bob

Well, you can flounder around for about six to 12 months tops. Even if you’ve been with your girl 30, 40 years, doesn’t matter. You have about six to 12 months to flounder around. If you don’t help yourself, they’re going to start looking for the exits. That’s just the reality.

I know guys don’t like to hear that, but it is what it is. So as long as you’re taking care of of what you need to do, then find something that’s going to continue to do well over the next several years. Maybe you go back into real estate, mortgage industry, you know, four or five years from now, three to five years from now, that’s up to you, but you’ve got to find some kind of work that you love and you enjoy. If you hate what you’re doing in sales, there are other things in sales that are always going to do well. The higher the ticket item that you’re selling, the more money you can make in commissions.

You want to work smarter, not harder. Simple thing like working at a restaurant. If you work at a high end restaurant and your average dinner check is $200, versus you working at someplace like a Denny’s, where your average check is maybe $15 or $20 at the most, it’s the same amount of work to wait on a table at Denny’s versus working at a really nice steak house where you’re checks are hundreds of dollars a piece.

So just by the nature of the fact that you’re selling more dollar volume of food, and if you’re like most waiters, you get on average about 20% in tips from that, you’re going to make a lot more money working at a high end steakhouse than working at someplace like a Denny’s or some kind of a diner where you just you have high turnover and the dinner checks or lunch checks are really cheap.

The idea is that you want to sell expense if you’re good at sales, sell some expensive things, find other products and services that you’re really passionate about. If you’re the top sales person that tells me you’re great at sales, find a product or a service to sell that you love, and that’s going to do well even in an economy that’s not booming like it once was. Anything real estate and mortgage related, even construction related, is not something I would be spending all of my time because that industry is going to get hammered pretty badly in the coming years.

As long as you’re doing well and the outward appearances that you’re taking action and that you have the same attitude, like my friend, he’s like, “I’ll wash windows, I’ll paint houses, I’ll do whatever it takes to make enough money to keep a roof over my head, make sure my kids are fed and and my wife has money to get the things that she needs to get for our family,” that needs to be the attitude. Even when you don’t feel like on the inside, like I said, I went from having everything, having it all to having nothing, sleeping on my dad’s couch to doing really well again. Then, despite all the success I had, kind of felt like I didn’t belong there those first few months.

With anything, it’s like becoming good at women or good with with women and going from not being good with them. It’s you have to have enough time and repetition of the new way of being. In other words, you have to have enough time and repetition and being successful, and then those feelings of unworthiness will slowly fade away. Just like when you have no girl in your life, it’s hard to find somebody, but when you have a girlfriend, you notice that women notice you all the time and are flirting with you and hitting on you.

It’s just time and repetition. What must I get done today before I go to bed tonight? If you do that and you focus on taking action, remember, inaction breeds fear and doubt, and taking action breeds confidence and courage.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.