In this episode of Mindset Monday we’re chatting with property and life coach, Jill McIntyre. We delve into the topic of “Mindset Growth: Beyond The Loss”, whether it be the loss of a loved one or maybe a loss that you have had in your property journey. Jill provides us with some strategies on how to overcome this and get into a frame of mind where you are able to move forward.
Jill McIntyre is not only a property coach but a life coach as well. McIntyre herself has been through her own personal struggles which is why she is the perfect person to talk about the topic of “Mindset Growth: Beyond the Loss”. McIntyre delves into her own personal losses and the emotions behind these.
I think from my point of view, my losses probably have been very, very varied with my husband dying, with going into a franchise business and losing that. Then the big one when I started to get into property developing and I was so green and so naive, I had money in my home and I sold my home. Then I connected with a very good gift of the gab guy who I trusted and got into three deals with him that were all dumb and lost the remainder of everything that I had in that situation. I think what's really bought this to a head, where so many of my clients over time and even of recent times there's been a situation that has come to light, I suppose you could say of a property loss or a potential loss, where we automatically as human beings go back to the period where we lost something. Where the same emotions are evoked and provoked by the trigger that comes. How do we get over those losses? I think the other day Tyrone when you and I were talking together, I said about how do we get over loss? And you started to laugh and said, ‘I think I can put my hand up there.’ So many of us are in that situation. It doesn't matter whether we're just a beginner or whether we're established or invested or could be in business or could be in share trading. If you have a hit on any level, how do you get over it?It’s a big one and it really brings up some emotions.
After going through a loss it is normal to feel sad or angry, but McIntyre explains why it is so important to be able to change your mindset in a positive way.
I think it's very, very important if we don't look at what is behind virtually the feeling of loss. You said anger, sadness, frustration, shame could be another one, is the loss of self worth. Is it the feeling of, ‘I've lost all of this money I'll never be able to make it again.’ Is it because you live with a partner that will never let you forget it on a daily basis? So it is a constant sore and I call it a festering sore and with the festering sore we might be able to forget about it for a little bit at the time, but it keeps on coming back every time that same emotion is brought up. So this is why it's very, very important that we look at our emotions. If you've had a loss, what emotions are you feeling? And it's not the blame game, it’s not he said, she said, because that takes you nowhere. It's going into inner soul, in as far as you can.
I call it feeling into the onions, to go down and really look at what emotion is coming up for you. Are you angry? Are you sad? Are you frustrated? Do you feel guilty? What's coming up for you? And you've got to explore those motions. This is when, once you do, the further you go and the more that you can express that feeling, that's when you're healing or start to overcome that situation for you to be able to move on. It doesn't mean that you're going to forget about the situation, but it's about you learning to handle the situation or any similar feelings that would be coming from other situations that might bring up that same motion.
McIntyre provides us with more detail on the deal where she suffered a significant loss and how there are certain types of personalities that react differently to various situations.
It was funny because for me it was just the icing on the cake because as I mentioned earlier, I've lost my husband, lost my business through no fault of my own and things like that and trusted him. Since looking on from where I am now as a coach, I do so much as we've talked earlier and different times on personality profiling and everyone manages loss differently obviously. A lot can be very instrumental in where we’re coming from, from the personality type. If you're a very analytical person, if you've had a massive loss, it could leave you that you are repeatedly going over and over the numbers to make it work. You are asking more questions. If I was talking to a non-analytical person or fundraising say asking for money in a fundraising deal that I was doing, if I weren’t an analytical person, they would probably ask me about three, four questions.
I could bet my bottom dollar. If they're heavily analytical and they've had a major loss, I would be up to 50 questions and the 50 questions would get to the point of absolutely ridiculous. In saying that there’s another personality type that very much is get up and go like your Richard Branson type. They can move on very, very quickly. We've also got to be aware that that type of personality is very visionary as they move on, but they’re not good at the groundwork. So if you’re going to go in with someone that's like a Richard Branson or if you do have that Richard Branson type of personality it is so important that you build a team around you to help and support you at the nitty gritty stuff, I suppose we can say, about doing the feasibilities, doing the research, checking the properties, knowing supply and demand.
All of the things that we know that are good indicators in deciding on whether the deal is worthwhile or not. One of the other personality types is very much about if they are a quieter person, this is the largest population, within this area comes under that, they then devote all of their time to helping and supporting other people. They will put all of their energies and expertise into helping other people. What happens is, they help other people with their deals and they are successful and making money which then takes the spotlight off them and it also keeps them from getting into a deal themselves. So there's virtually four main profiles that I work with. The last one is the person who is a people person and a people person is very much where I fit in all of those years ago where I trusted someone because he was very exciting to work with, that had good visionary skills. All of the gift of the gab type things and I wasn't confident enough back then to know what questions to ask him, let alone feel, did I have the right to question him? And of course we do. But simple as that. So you know, where do you fit in with those four personality types because it greatly affects how we get over our loss but also how we move forward and how we go into future deals as we're building change.
McIntyre listed four different personality types and how each have their own reaction to loss but is it possible that one person can align with more than just one type?
You might have three and even that's very rare, but usually you might have two of them. You could have a single one or you could have two of them that would be side by side. So because I can delve down further into the personality type. where you come into the actual range, I can see how you are or how other people perceive you. I can also check out any behaviour that you've had or I can check out on how you cope under pressure. I can also check out on how you perceive yourself and inside these areas they could be very, very different. It's not a [inaudible] across the board that you just fit into one spectrum.
You might be really gung ho in how other people perceive you and this might be a learned behavior because true necessity or desire you've really had to get out of your comfort zone and learn skills. But then when it comes down to a personal situation, if the pressures on, you move to the back of the room because that’s who you were years ago and you will revert back and this is where your feelings or emotions come up because that's where you felt that's your place in life when in actual fact it's not. But we’ve got to acknowledge who we are, we've got to look deeper into just taking ourselves for granted. If we can find out more about what our [inaudible] is. Do you think it's helped you moving forward?
The hardest part for someone who has gone through a major loss is actually realising that they need to change their mindset in order to overcome it.
Leading up to my property loss, I'd had a bit of practice from when my husband died and I was 39 and had two young children and I got to the stage after he died where I was [inaudible] women out there certainly wasn't the money or handouts on any level from the government other than about $27 dollars a fortnight for child endowment. There was nothing else at all for a single parent. So I got to the point where there was a lot of trauma. There was a lot of drama around that on many levels. But I got to the point where I had to learn, or had to ask myself, ‘Was I going to sink or was I going to swim?’ That was really a turning point in where I was going to move forward.
Moments in a person’s past can impact their future and McIntyre gives an example of how repressed emotion can be triggered.
It could be any emotion. If you were bullied at school and then you had a massive loss because you're with a very Richard Branson type personality and I don't mean that he's hard by any negative words, but there's a lot of people that are very controlling with that personality. You would automatically go back into what it felt like to be bullied in the playground because that person would be all-consuming over you if that makes sense. They would be controlling you in your mind and we must remember that our mind plays the biggest part in anything we do, our success in moving forward. You might be into share trading, you might be into business, you might be into property development. All of those are vehicles. What is the core of what really makes us a success and abundant in mindset growth?
In money, in real growth, in how you feel, how you perform on a daily basis. It all comes down to what’s between your ears and we've got to keep feeding into our mindset. I quite often put a similarity to, we put petrol in our car and that's to make run, it's an automatic thing. You might do it every three days or something and I've got to do it again and you do it until the red light. You feel that you haven't got much more left in there. We do it because we know we want to get from A to B continually and it's gotta be reliable. Why don't we do the same with our thinking? Why don't we, we'd have positive thinking, not our negative and positive thinking. We've got to keep on feeding and topping our mindset up to keep us at optimum.
An optimum point of, ‘Yes I’m really focused, I’m directional, I’ve got good time management, I'm working on a game plan,’ this sort of thing. There's a lot of material out there that you can do it that’s free online or [inaudible] just give you a positive mindset thinking things. You don't have to pay money for those that are thinking how much is this going to cost me? It's free. A lot of it's free and buddying up with the right people who are in the same mindset to help and support you is very, very important too.
There comes a point in which you finally make the decision to move on from your loss and we find out the question McIntyre posed to herself to help her out of her negative mindset.
I knew that I wasn't going to give up. I had two children to look after a roof to keep out of our head. I had to get out and earn more money and this is why I looked at getting into other areas of making money and property was eventually the one that you know, gave me the answers and certainly something that I've grown into and I'm very passionate about. But how you get over something you've got to make a decision. Are you going to move forward with this or are you going to stay in your space which is really quite debilitating. You mightn't be an egotistical person, but an ego works very, very hard on us and if you come up with a positive outcome that you want to move forward in property, this is my plan I’m going to go back on all of the strategies that I’ve put into place.
But the deal that I've done on most money on, I'm going to look at what I could have done differently. Who did I need to bring into the team? Could I have worked on another outcome that could have given me a better situation? Could I have improved on the timing? If you go back and you look at that example and quite often for a lot of people, it's too hurtful to go and do it, but if you go and do it and then take what you've learned in the process from that loss on to anything else that you're doing, it gives you the beginning of a mind shift and with your mindshift you can say yes, I can think outside the square more, yes I can come up with multiple exit strategies. Yes, I need to go to some more networking events and start to really build a support team around me.
And so that becomes your stepping stones to move forward, but you've got to make the decision. Are you going to be playing the victim and staying in [the mindframe of], ‘I've lost all this money, I'll never get it back, things will never be the same, poor me, the blame game.’ If we stay in that state, it's toxic long term. If we stay in that state, it will affect us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Certainly there'll be something in our body that eventually will come out in effect because we haven't worked through what's been blocking, stopping us because what we've been doing mentally is just building the event and the emotion further and further into our psyche on a daily basis. It's a mountain, or what becomes a mountain, that we just can’t crossover. So it becomes a real fear and our fears are something that can totally control us if we allow them to be. This is why you need to be working on your emotions that will eliminate those fears.
So that's really, really powerful what you've just shared there. And it's really, really practical and it makes sense for me. I can give you an example of one that I've just recently felt, and this is kind of really, really close to me because it's just happened recently and these wounds are still very, very fresh.
A partner and myself have been involved in a particular deal and unfortunately we were not able to foresee what would happen with this deal. We were promised that we would be able to get funding for it. We'd have to pay a certain amount of fees that were for due diligence and valuations and when we did that, we were expecting that we would get a successful outcome. Unfortunately, they came back and said, ‘Look, this deal can't be done.’ The valuation didn't stack up when we clearly knew that the market would say that the valuation is much higher than what they came back with.
When we dug deeper and found out that the people that they had got to do the valuation were inexperienced and quite unknowledgeable about the area. It was just basically they just wanted to just take our money and then run and this is from a private lending institution and this is the frustration that we had and were angry at the same time. But you know, in saying that there was nothing that we could do because in the contract it stated that a lot of these things were nonrefundable.
So could I have just stood there and just said, ‘Look, this is the way it is and just take it in and move forward and, and look at other opportunities.’ Or I could have just sat there and just swallow it all in and just continue to devour it and look at all the negative emotions. I'm taking on what you've shared with us and how we've actually approached this. We're actually looking at different opportunities to make this firstly successful for all of us as well.
Do you think that out of that event, you've got to look for what came out of it because you would've had a lot of learning out of that event and a lot of good, I'm not talking about the negative stuff, I'm talking about the positive stuff, you would certainly restructure how you would go into other deals very, very differently to the way you went into that one. You would also set up your strategies very differently if you hadn't delved down deep enough to find whether the deal was going to be feasible or not. Who do you need to help you here and where do you go to get those sorts of people? This is where you've got to start to get out of your comfort zone and ask questions. We don't quite often ask the right questions because we don't know what questions to ask. That has left you, that experience, with education of never ever going back there again, but you would set any future deals up very differently and you can turn around and say, ‘I've learned from that. Thank you.’
Yes. That's what I feel like I've learned from that is next time I make sure that I don't look at the actual price of the valuation saying that's what they're charging. We need to actually do our own due diligence and say, look, this is actually the market price of what a valuation should cost. We were charged 10 times higher than what we should have been paying and that should have been alarm bells to tell us, okay, that's not what we should have gone.
At the same time we didn't do enough due diligence behind this group of people, cause we trusted the mortgage broker and expected the mortgage broker was doing the work for us. But we can never rely on external sources and we always need to do our own research as well just to make sure that we're 100% comfortable with what we’re proceeding with. Because at the end of the day, that's our responsibility as well too and we're accountable for every decision that we make.
When you go into a deal I always suggest you find your strengths in a deal if you're going with other people and your strengths might be one particular thing, but when you're going in and finding joint venture partners, their strengths have to complement yours, but it doesn't mean that you leave their area of expertise totally up to them and that you’re not going to question it. You've got to have a pretty good overview of what questions you need to ask them just as a buffer. So say for example, I love back of the envelopes, I love negotiating, I love talking to agents and that sort of thing. I love finding property, there's no doubts about that and how I would work through that. If I’m choosing a joint venture partner, I want someone that is very, very analytical, but he's very, very good at doing feasibilities.
Does it mean I can't do a feasibility? Yes I can. Does it mean that I don't know what other people are putting into a feasibility, whether it'd be on the money or not? Yes, I do. Because you need to know all avenues and this only comes with experience and it comes with you getting further and further in and listening to other people's real deals. What happened in their situation? I always feel that real deals are listening to other people's experiences, you sit there and while they’re sharing automatically the further on you go as you’re listening, you would be thinking in your own mind, I could have done that differently. That’s a good lesson to take from that experience. I really feel sorry for them, but this will be something that I'll have my feelers out next time for and that I'll make sure I won't do. So it's about finding the strengths from other people, but as time goes on you need to be learning all facets but you don't need to be physically doing it, but you do have to have the ability to check it or otherwise bring someone else in that you know can check it and give them a dinner or give them a gift voucher or say thank you very much and do something for them.
I totally agree. That's the thing. At the end of the day, the costs or the loss is much greater than what you'd spend time speaking with them and we've discovered that in the most recent deal. I think only through experiences like this, we can actually see that lesson and now that we know that and we've experienced that ourselves, we know for the next deal.
We need to know how to bottle hindsight and I think we would be the wealthiest people on earth if we could bottle hindsight. I like that idea, maybe we need to start thinking about that one too.
But when we look back that's a good point. You know, we're just laughing at that. But that's a good point because in hindsight that can really pull us down because if we get into the victim mode, and I always say, you've heard me say many times before, there's no such thing as victims, there's only volunteers. I used to say that to myself so many times over a week, early days when I heard that saying, it really hit in the [inaudible] with me. You know, was I playing a victim? Did I have to get out of my own way? Did I want to become a true victim? Because if we do, nothing works, we just go round and round and round in a circle. It's exhausting. Mentally, physically and emotionally and everything else we've got to get out.
One way is to reach out and help other people and support other people and give your time. If you're starting at the bottom and feeling that things haven't been right, go and support other people and offer your services and say, I'm happy to do such and such. I'm with you in property. If I can come to some opens with you and have a look at how you appraised the opens, and it's a two way street where you've got to think laterally about how you can get in, how you can learn. Sometimes that means you've got to give some of yourself and give it freely, but you'll be looking to work with people with integrity that are not worrywarts, that if you’re going to go into a deal or if you were getting money from an entity that was a worrywart, you don't want to have an email every single day from them.
So concerned as to whether you’re going to actually work or not. It could be the best deal in the world or is my money safe or what's going to happen? These are the sorts of things when you're going in and you're looking for joint venture partners, regardless of whether someone would spread equity or money or a skill set that isn't your strong point, always come down and look at the person. Where do they fit in? How are they going to fit into this deal? You've also got to do it with yourself. What's your strengths? Where are you going to fit into a deal? But once you found your strengths, you need to be monetising it because you could have had a big loss like I did and it could've stopped me totally in property. But by turning my mindset around and looking at, ‘That was my problem. Now what are the solutions?’ I turned it around and my solution was to get out and be a sponge for everything that I could in property to learn. That then in turn, as time went on, became my asset and my selling point when I'd go into property deals.
After hearing all of the fantastic tips and strategies that can help when trying to overcome a loss, McIntyre outlines some actions steps that she would recommend.
In a quiet space I would most definitely work on what's been the loss, what's been the emotion that's coming out of that? I would say the emotions, the further down with your emotions that you are happy to go with, It's like peeling an onion. The further down we go, the more raw it gets and sometimes we don't want to look at those emotions. Sometimes we feel it's just too exhausting but sooner or later for you to move on you've got to look at what's really happening because this is where you will start to step over what you've done and start to open up to solutions. Second one that I would do would be most definitely draw a line down the middle of the page and once again in a quiet spot, turn your phone off, no distractions and do this when you’ve got some space.
On the left hand side of your page, put what the problem is. It'll be short and sweet, probably two lines, about losing whatever you've lost and how you are angry type of stuff. On the right hand side is your positive side. You’ve got to come up with all of the positive solutions and steppingstone outcomes that are going to motivate you and change your thinking to, ‘Wow.’ On your right hand side has to be in the now or in the future because you're starting to visualise where am I going, what lies ahead, what can I get excited about? What's going to stoke the fire in my belly? What meet up groups do I need to go to? What do I need to find out? Who's going to keep me accountable? So you start to name people, you start to identify specifics. What you then do, so your left hand side has got probably two lines on it, your right hand side, keep this going for a day or so because you’ll come back with more inspirations on your right and it's these inspirations that will raise your level of consciousness to a higher level of excitement. These are the things that will stoke you up and give you the motivation to move forward.
Then the third thing of course is to go on from there and do an action plan from those steps that you've just noted.
McIntyre provides details on where you can keep in contact with her if you have any other questions you would like to ask her.
They could just email me on my email address, [email protected] and the door is always open. Just contact me and see if I can help you or on what level I can help you. If we help and support each other, this is what it's all about. The world would be in a very different situation from where we are. But this is how we grow and we've got to get out of our own way to take that first step to do something and contact someone else that you don't really know.
