Today’s episode is taken from a live training session I hosted for a group of real estate professionals.

The real estate industry is experiencing a real shakeup right now, not just from a sales slump, but also from big changes happening in regards to industry practices and agent compensation. These adjustments are leading to a lot of anxiety and fear in real estate professionals, but even if you’re not in the real estate world, odds are you’re experiencing some anxiety in your industry right now, as well.

In moments like these, it is absolutely essential to remember that you can handle anything.

Today, I’m sharing the advice I gave these professionals (which are applicable to anyone!) on how to bring peace, joy, and enthusiasm to every area of your life, no matter the circumstance, along with some techniques for handling discomfort and negative emotions. 

Tune in to experience a massive perspective shift, no matter where you’re at in life right now!

Takeaways:

• Bringing lightness, joy, and enthusiasm to your day is possible regardless of external circumstances.
• Spirituality and personal growth are essential in all aspects of life, including business.
• Techniques like the three, two, one, relax method can help handle discomfort and negative emotions.
• The ability to handle anything that comes your way allows for a more enjoyable experience of life.

View full show notes here.

I'll ramble for a few minutes and you guys, if you have any questions, feel free to interrupt me.

You know, obviously you have a lot of amazing leaders around you. You guys are all in the ALC. You guys are at a high level already. There's a lot of wonderful people in here that could teach you probably how to sell real estate better than I can. I'd like to talk about a little different perspective today, which is really some near and dear to my heart, which is really about how do you bring more lightness and joy and enthusiasm to your day, regardless of how your energy is, regardless of how the market's doing, regardless of how

you know, this lawsuit shakes out regardless of any event, regardless of your personal life. And I think the first place we want to do this is, you know, spirituality gets a bad rap, right? It's like I, I, I, I'm on a lot of podcasts and I, people ask me what spirituality is and it has nothing to do with wearing a white robe and like sitting in a cave anywhere. Right. That's just like this idea that in order to be a spiritual person, you have to like be in the mountains reciting haiku, sitting Indian style in front of a fireplace, which isn't even comfortable to sit that way anyways.

Like it's like no one wants to do that. You know, if you, you guys probably heard of Eckhart Tolle before, you know, the most common question that man gets is why are you in Starbucks? And he turns around, he's like, because I like coffee. And it's like, it's again, this idea that if you want to work on your inner self, which is really all spirituality is, right? It has to like, you have to reserve it for some other area. Well, the whole point of life is to work on yourself. So there isn't,

a life, a personal life, a business life and a spiritual life. It's everything. It's everything that you do. It's you're leading with as a parent, as a friend, as a leader, as a coworker. It's all of that. And every day all of us wake up in a frantic way to try to get our inner state to a point where we feel good. That's what everybody is looking for. Everyone wakes up looking for happiness, joy.

Whatever word you want to put up, they're all made up anyways. But you're looking for a feeling inside, aren't you? Most of us have gotten it from work, right? We've become successful. We've closed the deal. We teach and we feel rewarded for doing that. Those are all wonderful things. But the reality is they distract us a lot from the inner work that we can do, because that's what we do with work. We use it as a distraction instead of going deeper. The whole point, though, is that you don't have to separate them at all. You can actually marry the two together.

of a number to necessarily double. But in there, I share that only for one reason. Because probably like many of you, I set out right out of college to go conquer the world. And I wanted everybody to know that I could do it. I wanted my parents to know, I wanted fame, I wanted power. Here's the thing, people go out there and they tell you, go be successful. Go be successful. And what do they really even stop to even think about that word for a second? It's like you tell your kids, go be successful.

Right? Or you tell an agent to go be successful. And I understand the mechanical nature of saying, you know, if you go and make money, that's going to be your thing. But the reality is what people are really saying when they say go be successful is that if you go out there and you get enough power, money, fame, leverage, initials behind your name, right? You'll be able to control the experiences around you so that your inner state is the one that you want it to be. So ultimately what people are doing.

So when they say go be successful, it's like, how do I go out there and get the world the way I want it so that it's the experience that I want? Well, if you haven't noticed, that doesn't really work. If it works, it works temporarily. And then you're confused, you're nervous, you're scared about keeping it. How many people have ever had like a great year profit wise and GCI wise and now you're so excited, but deep inside you're sitting there going, how am I going to do it again? What happens if I don't do it again? What if I don't get that number again? What are people going to think of me?

So again, it's the same concept that go be successful is essentially telling somebody to be able to control their experiences around you. Well, to me, wouldn't it be easier just to wake up and be successful and bring that into everything you do? And people ask me this number one question that I get from people that read our book or listen to our podcast is, you know, I need to go find my passion. And as a lot of us right now in real estate,

There's probably not a ton of passion being thrown around in the real estate industry now. It's very difficult. It's the hardest it's been in 40 years. It's also a chance for your story to show up and do a lot of inner work, but we'll put a pin in that for a second. And people go, how do I go find my passion? And for me, I wake up and go, why can't you just be passionate about everything you do? Why do you have to have these conditions in your life so that only when I'm succeeding at the level that I've determined in my mind,

that I can feel excited and passionate about it. Well, wouldn't it be much easier to go live your life to be passionate about holding the door open for a stranger or to drive your kids to soccer because you're doing it anyways? So this whole, instead of stop putting conditions on your life, all of us wake up and we, I'm only going to feel this way, which is again, nobody's denying that when you get what you want, you feel better. You do.

Of course you do. And when you don't get what you want, you don't feel good. But those are just emotions that happen in life. Really life is 200%, isn't it? It's 100 % inner world, it's 100 % outer world. Your inner world consists of emotions. You don't have to be psychology or into spirituality or into religion or any of this to understand these concepts. You wake up every day and does everyone have a voice inside your head that's talking to you? Yes, you do. If you don't, you're that attached to it that you don't realize it's even there.

But everybody has this voice inside your head that's trying to narrate. Actually, I just did a video for Livian this morning and I said, look, the number one reason why people actually don't regenerate is because the voice inside their head derails them from doing that. So self mastery, that term self mastery is actually overcoming that voice inside your head that says no. So give you just simple examples of this, right? You wake, you go, before you go to bed, you go, I've got my shoes laid out. I'm going to get up and I'm going to run three miles. I'm going to do this.

and you're set to go, what stops you in the morning from running three miles? The voice inside your head. Because you literally wake up and it goes, just check your email, just give it a few more minutes. If I just go get lost in social media, I need to do this, it's more important anyways. And then you go, I don't have time anyways, I'll do it later. It's only that voice. So when people look at structural integrity inside or personal growth,

It's first and foremost about overcoming and overriding that voice that derails you from doing the most important things that are there for you. And it's the same thing that happens with lead generation. I mean, again, we are in real estate. So the only way that we stay employed in real estate is to be face to face with buyers and sellers or investors every day. It's simple as that, right? If I gave you all the best AI robot out there and said, go tell me how to program this to be the most efficient and most effective real estate professional in the world, everybody

in this room right now would be able to do that. So it's not a question about how to sell or go be successful at real estate. The question comes is this internal drive, motivation, inspiration, whatever you want to refer to it as. To me, I look at it backwards, which you don't need any of that if that voice isn't derailing you. So it's not that you need to go out there and fight with it, but just first acknowledging that there is this annoying roommate that sits inside of there just talking about the most random things ever. You'll be driving down the road and it's like, go punch that person in the face.

I just, it's colorful, but you get the point. Like it says some really weird stuff and it just does. And so you can use business as this wonderful opportunity to grow in that way. So every time that voice says, don't go for your three mile run and you go for your three mile run, you want part of that lost it's whole for you. Cause that's what it is. Isn't it?

When you want to do something and it's derailing you from doing it, you want to go public speak, you want to start something and fear jumps and the voice starts taking over. I get those emotions there too that you experience, right? The voice starts really, really kind of going after you. And there's a pull. It's almost like somebody last sews you in there, pulls you down towards it. So it makes it very difficult for you to be able to go and execute on that. And of course you have these emotions as well too. But let me ask you another question. Every thought you've ever had, has it lasted forever?

No, it's gone. What about every emotion? Good and bad. They come and go, don't they? So who is the one that's experiencing the voice inside there? Who is the one that's experiencing the emotions? Well, that's who you are. Because once you understand that, then the strangle over you lessons. There comes to be a bifurcation of this. And to me, I think the most effective leaders in business and in the world are the ones that recognize these aspects.

I think this will the next generation of leaders are just as committed to their inner growth as they are bottom lines and spreadsheets because they understand the two actually go together. If you are if you are in a fear mode, it's impossible for you to lead at the highest level you can lead. If you are in angry mode or irritated mode or nervous mode and you're acting through those emotions, it's impossible for you to lead at the highest level.

If you're in the grocery store with your six year old and they're causing a fit and now you're all pissed off because they don't look good, it's impossible for you to be a great parent at the time, isn't it? It's no different, right? Yet we look at all these and people, we judge them, all these other individuals, yet we do it all ourselves. And so we get riled up in these emotions and it prevents you from being the highest probability of succeeding that you can. So to me, in the short period,

that we have together, the concept that I would really love for you to take away from this conversation is that you can handle anything. That to me is personal growth. That to me is spiritual growth. That to me is being a great leader. That's being a great parent. That's being a great human being. Is you're simply able to handle what's in front of you. If you can't handle the sight of blood, then you are no good to the scene if you're a doctor. If you can't handle

a changing landscape in real estate, then you have no business being a leader. If you can't handle your kids coming home from being in trouble for being a teenager and you freak out on them, then you have no business being a parent in that mode. So to me, all of the work that you do is simply providing the best scenario for you to take care of the people around you. It's actually handling life. And you all know the difference from when you respond to an agent that comes to you

or respond to a client when you're in a really good mood and you're calm and you're centered, is that response difference, right? Versus when you are, you don't even have to do it. How many people in the last three days have seen a phone call come in last hour, have seen a phone call come in and before you even answer your phone, you see the name of the phone and you just get pissed off, right? I mean, seriously, how many times has that happened so far this morning? You literally, you're fine, you're fine. The phone's ringing and you look over and you're like, mother.

You just like, you just, and you're not even, you haven't even answered the phone yet, right? And you're still deciding whether or not you're actually going to answer the phone, but now you're pissed off and you yell at your kids because you have a phone call that's coming in, right? Okay. Well, first we can handle it. It's, it's magic that somehow somebody can call your cell phone right now. But anyways, let's put that aside for a second. You can pick up the phone and you can handle a voice, a person communicating in words that we can actually hear. I know I'm.

I don't mean to yell at this, but think about the concepts of why we suffer every moment. And so when you can handle life, you're handling life. Yes, are things morally right? No. But that's not a different conversation or debate. Are things always the way they're supposed to be for you? Absolutely not. And they shouldn't be, by the way. I don't know if you guys watch those Planet Earths at all.

I'm always reminded by like, look, you didn't, there's an episode in one of them of these, like a whole bunch of like little like lizards. You ever seen this one where they get hatched in the beach? Yeah, you guys, couple of you guys have, right? And it's literally like, they come out and they like come out of this egg for the first time, like, wow, this is amazing. And then like three seconds later, they turn to the right and there's a hundred thousand snakes ready to eat them. And they're like six feet away. And they have literally two minutes to run up and get into the water or up over this cliff and order before, or they're going to get eaten. Like a third of them get eaten.

So, I mean, you didn't have that happen to you. Every animal, every vertebrae, every plant and every human being is supposed to have adversity in your life. And some it's going to be more and some it's going to be less. It's designed for you. It's just your experience that you get to have of life. And there's going to be a lot of things that come and go. There's going to be different moments that are easier when the wind's calm for you. And there's going to be moments when the wind is very strong.

Each one of those is designed just for you. It's not about if it's fair or just, it's the experience that you're having. And the question comes back, can I handle it? Because I see a lot of people right now being, I can't handle this change. Then I go, well, then you're no good being in business. And I love you, but you have no business. You can't handle this. I'm not saying it's not uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's not gonna require additional work.

But if you can't handle the situation in front of you, then simply you're saying, I can't handle it. Therefore, you're not going to be able to show up and lead and serve and contribute in the highest way that you could. So then what do you do? Right? That's the next question that comes in here. I'll give you a simple technique because it's very easy. We don't have much time. Right? The next time, which will happen really fast, maybe some of you already pissed off from my conversations that I'm even having with you, right? Whatever it is.

In the next few minutes, you will feel some level of discomfort and you don't have to be a psychologist to understand as everyone feel different emotions, right? We label them, right? You go, you know what? I'm irritated. You go, you know, I'm not even irritated anymore. I'm actually angry. And the anger has subsided. So now I'm just really disappointed. So I always ask people when they say it's like, well, how do you know? And they go, well, what do you mean? I go, how do you know you feel these different emotions? How you just labeled the subtle change of energy that you feel inside there. You've now labeled with the different

word that we've made up that describes the experience that you're having inwardly. Right. And they go, well, yeah, I go, well, who's having that experience? And they go, well, that I am. They go, great. That's you. That's you. You're not you're in a physical body and we should take care of it. Yes, absolutely. But that's that's all you. Anyways, I'm getting off track. So, again, the simple technique that we can do is the next time you feel some level of discomfort and it'll happen, happen really quickly. The simple thing is I.

This is the first technique that I always like to teach is just three, two, one, just relax. Just drop your shoulders, breathe out. Three, two, one, relax. Simple as that. And then what that does, you know, the Dalai Lama talks about his sacred pause. Actually, somebody asked him in an interview, they said, it's called the Book of Joy. If you haven't read it, it's a great book. It's Desmond Archbishop Tutu, who was the previous archbishop. He soon passed away, but...

And the Dalai Lama do this book together. It's called the Book of Joy and they asked him said you get angry and he goes well, yes But it's like writing on water It's there for one moment then gone It's a trace So I feel the event but it doesn't cripple me. It doesn't prevent me from making a decision. That's biased in one way or another So the whole goal when people use these big terms like be more awake

When people are like, I am awake, what are you talking about being awake, right? Or be more conscious, to be in the present moment. All of those signposts are just simply pointing back to you being able to handle life. And when you can handle life, you can serve life at the highest availability. So three, two, one, relax. You just drop, you just drop your shoulders, you breathe. By the way, and here's a pro tip here. As you start to do this,

Don't have this expectation that the anger or frustration that you're feeling is going to go away because it doesn't. The nature of a wolf is to howl. OK, the nature of anger is to be angry. So you're going to feel it. The nature of irritation is to feel irritated. And if you're pissed off, that's its nature, too. You have to let it run its course. Just like a cloud moves through a tree.

the energy event of whatever you're feeling moves through you and whatever it is, it's nature you're going to experience. And it's just simple, simple techniques. Again, if a deal falls apart right before the closing table, you're probably feeling an array of emotions. You're supposed to, because that's the event. Your heart gives you this wonderful ability to feel different vibrations that are out there. It does. Think about how boring life would be if they had no depth to it. Think about it.

If you couldn't feel your heart or emotions, I always there's a spiritual heart and your physical heart, your spiritual heart, if you couldn't feel it, think about how life, how boring life would be. Seriously, so we have it's like a built in piano that's in there that's giving you the lowest vibrations and the highest vibrations and you get to experience all of them. That's the great grift. So it's three, two, one, relax. As you relax, you just simply breathe. So I was going back with the, the Dalai Lama.

He always called it as a sacred pause. They said, you get angry? He said, yes, it's like writing on water. It's there for one moment and then gone. It's the same thing here. And he always talks about he takes a sacred pause and he says he counts to three either internally or outside. It is three. And by the time he gets to three, it's gone. Now, we all know, because at some point when you get lost in anger, you come back, don't you? Sick, where'd you go? Right. But you come back. And then this is the simple ones is like you go to your partner and you're like, look, I'm sorry.

Or for me, it's like my kids, when they're doing something, I'm like, look, I got riled up there. I said something, whatever it is, right? You come back and now you're centered. Well, to me, when I started this conversation about being able to handle anything, that's the goal, isn't it? It's so that you come back much faster so you can handle the situation in front of you. It doesn't mean life's going to be the way you want it to. It doesn't mean it's going to give you a billion dollars, right? It doesn't mean that the money flow is going to be exactly what it is, but you know what it's going to happen?

is that you're going to enjoy your life more. There's going to be a lightness. You're just going to enjoy. It doesn't mean you go look for challenges. There's plenty of them. Trust me, they just show up. So when the winds are calm, enjoy that experience. When they're blowing really hard like they are right now, enjoy that experience. Cause guess what? It will be gone too. In 18 months from now, we'll look back and you'll be like, man, that was wild. Hardest real estate market conditions in 40 years.

How'd you do? Man, I learned. I grew from this. I really did. And remember, at the end of the day, life is very short. And I know you know that. But if you haven't realized, if you haven't really realized that it's on the table for eating any point in time that you are going to die, if you haven't recognized that, it will. You never know. As you get older, I'm sure all of you experienced this, you start to see friends, family members that are your age, younger, start going.

That's fine. That's all part of life, by the way. Earth's been here for 4 .5 billion years. You're here for 110 at best, 120, maybe 80, 60. I don't know. It's almost irrelevant whether you're here for 80 to 120. If somebody said to you, the Earth's been here for 4 .5 billion years, and somebody said, well, what's the difference to me being here for 80 years or 100 years? Statistically, that's insignificant, right? So at some point anyways, you recognize that you're going to go. And I'll pause answering the questions after this. But listen, think about it from this perspective.

When you are, whether you have seconds, days or months to think about this, what do you think is going to be going through your head? Do you think you're going to be thinking about all the times of all the successes of how life went on for exactly the way you wanted it to? Or are you simply going to say, did I get to enjoy this experience? Did I enjoy the experience of life? Did I enjoy the challenges? Did I enjoy the successes?

I simply get to experience life. You know, the reason why people fear death so much is that they still think that life owes them something. You're still walking around thinking that life is going to give you some special experience that you're searching for. Well, the cool thing is the minute you call off the search, you realize there is nothing to search for. There's nothing to search for at all. In fact, you are the search. When you're searching for yourself, you can never find yourself, which is why you always feel like you're in search mode.

So think about it, contemplate it. When you are about to, again, pass through this life, whatever you want to refer to it as, die, I don't really care. When you're about to do that, again, you're going to ask yourself a simple question. Did I enjoy this ride? Did I enjoy this experience? And I share this with all my kids. I have a 12, 10 and seven year old and I always tell them, and I love coaching sports. I love sports. I love all that. I'm like, look, I am the coach for your life. Sports will come and go. Businesses will come and go. Jobs will come and go. Girlfriends, boyfriends will come and go.

I'm here to be your coach for life. And what I'm going to teach you is how to critically think. And I want you to ask deep, deep questions in your life. And I want you to contemplate death at an early age. Because I think that once you actually make peace with it, you can start to live your life. And so the same thing for you. Once you make peace with that, you can start living your life. So again, if you think about the couple of takeaways I'd love for you to think about today is number one, can I handle life? Can I handle what's happening right now?

In any situation, just hear it in whatever voice you want to in the back of your head. It's OK for the higher self to talk to the lower self. Just hear it. Just if something happens and it's frustrating today, you simply going to remember this conversation and go, can I handle this? And you're going to go, yeah, I can. Boom. Next thing you know, 15 minutes later, you no longer feel disturbed. And now you're back to center. That's the gift. And then three, two, one, relax. And then, of course, should always contemplate the fact of your own mortality.