Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
A New Perspective: Learning to Love Change and Cherish Life
Ever felt overwhelmed by life's constant changes and craved some guidance? Tune in as I, Ryan DeMent, spill the beans on how I have overcome my fears to embrace change and pursue my passion. I'll take you through my journey of adding a loan originating to my business and how I am learning to balance the challenging front end of training and meetings, without missing out on life's pleasures. You'll hear about the strategies I'm adopting for better time management and how I'm delegating tasks to focus on what truly matters.
Imagine having a tribe, a group of like-minded individuals, to help you cope with life's rollercoaster ride? I found mine in Jerry's office hours on Thursdays, a space where I discovered support, accountability, and a sense of belonging. Also, we will touch on the essence of finding your 'why' in tough times and how to understand the motivation behind what we do. I'll share some personal methods that have helped me connect with myself and could potentially guide you to find your purpose too. Join me on this enlightening journey about personal growth, change, and finding joy in life.
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Hey guys, ryan Dement, hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast, you guys have me. I did have a guest, but I moved that guest into another slot because I wanted to talk about kind of things that are going on in my life, but also just an overall discussion about where we're at in life and in how we're actually accomplishing things. But also, are we just doing it to check the box or are we actually enjoying what we're doing in life? And I'm not just talking about work, guys, I'm talking about personal life, I'm talking about family, I'm talking about all the other aspects that come along with why we're on this earth. You have to have some type of purpose and and, unfortunately, kind of to circle back and start from the beginning.
Speaker 1:Most of us are just checking the box, man getting up in the morning and calling it a day and going to work. Why would you want to continue to do that for the rest of your life? That sounds like it's absolutely boring. Why not go after your passion or what makes you happy? And most of us, including me, it's fear, change being a four letter word. But also I don't think at times we've been given tools through our lives, to be able to effectively implement change and to be able to really understand where we're at in life and where we want to go and how to get there. And I think this is an old saying and I might screw it up, so be it.
Speaker 1:There's that path out there that everybody's beaten down. You also have a path that no one's beating down. Which path do you take when you're at that, that Y in the road and that cross? Do you go down the path everyone else is going down or do you go down that, that path that is truly not been beaten down at all? And you have to use tools to get through the weeds and the brush and everything. To that extent, I guess a machete would be the right tool to use Duh and most of us turn left at the end of the day and most of us turn left at that wire, the fork, because it's the easiest way to go about it.
Speaker 1:And I know we've spoken about this. I've talked about it, but these last five years of the roller coaster that I've been on through being an entrepreneur, small business owner, real estate development and now I just added in this week I'm going to be a loan originator. So that would be a great piece of the pie that we get to add on to our business, to where we can help home buyers, investors, anyone to really buy property. And yes, the market's crazy with interest rates but there's still some great opportunities out there. There are still lenders allowing you to do buy downs, especially if the seller is willing to have some concessions in there. Those buy downs can get into the fours Four percent interest. That can make a difference between ooh and ah Depends on how much you want to spend up front to buy that rate down. There's some options out there, but here and there and I would say in this past week, I'm reflecting on everything that I'm doing and the company I joined in and I'm not going to share it yet because I'm still working through the bugs and so forth and I want to be prepared before anything.
Speaker 1:They're very heavy on the front end of training, spending time with you, getting to know you, but also they have a lot of meetings and I'm struggling with that in general, just for the simple fact I'm a go-getter and I just need to get stuff done and I'm spending four, five, six hours a day on meetings and it's holding me up and I have to find a way to work within their system. It's their rules, their guidelines. I signed up for that, so now I need to be able to follow the rules and that's what I'm doing right now adjusting, adapting, overcoming. I don't think I would do that if I was a traditional nine to fiveer. I would just kick it down the road and just sit there and take it and move on. Could there be some things that change in their process? Yeah, but I don't know enough yet to be educated, so I'm not going to speak at a turn. But they share a lot of information, there's a lot of support, and that wins all the way at the top. So that's why I joined, because that's how it was presented to me.
Speaker 1:But the meeting part is hard. Before I get done shooting this video, I got to go jump into another meeting for an hour and a half and they put you through six months of an academy. They want to make sure you're producing. I get it. They don't want you on the payroll Sorry, I shouldn't say payroll, because it's commission-based. They don't want you basically sucking up space at their company unless you're producing. But don't? We do that already in our traditional, in our normal lives. We just take up space because it's what we're told to do.
Speaker 1:Checking the box and that's really where I want to go and talk about is how do we better ourselves in life if we're not willing to take a risk and be able to implement or create change in our lives that make us happy and I use happy a lot, and that's the only way I know to describe it is if you're truly not happy, you need to make change. Can I say that I'm happy right now with onboarding all this and going through these first two weeks? No, I'm not. It's an adjustment period. I'm doing the best I possibly can, but it also I feel like it hinders me at time. But I also know I'm growing because I have to find ways to be even more effective with my time management skills. That's what it's pushing me to do and I'm really finding ways to dig deep and make sure I'm not dropping the ball on any of my other tasks.
Speaker 1:I'm in the process of bringing on a VA that will really handle 99.9% of all our social media, because I spend 30 to let's call it an hour each day working on social media. It's an hour. I can be doing something that's more productive or more conducive to the business operations other than putting out our message. Don't get me wrong Putting out our messages is important, but if I'm out talking to realtors or buyers or cities about acquiring more land, that is more impactful in the business sense than putting out social posts. But what we do and how we go about this in our lives, we tend to put the most difficult or daunting tasks at the back and let them sit there until they start boiling over. And I think we can get on a total different path of life if we decide that we're going to take our challenges or our obstacles head on, and I relate that to running a business and being an entrepreneur. You don't get a choice of pushing things to the back. When they come up, you have to handle them, otherwise you're potentially putting your business at risk, and I know for all you guys out there that are entrepreneurs. I know this.
Speaker 1:But one of the biggest aspects that I've learned in this journey is just being present at every single turn. So when you're working on something, don't try to do four things at a time. Try to do that one task at a time and finish it. Bring it to the, bring it to conclusion and then go on to the next task that has helped me out tremendously. I have struggled with I guess it's shiny object syndrome, squirrel, however you want to call that and it's really hurt me. It's hurt me personally, it's hurt me business wise Excuse me and ratcheting myself down to where I'm hyper focused on a task at hand is working.
Speaker 1:I still have a lot of work to do with it and I'm getting practice and this is odd through these training classes that I go to. They're typically an hour to an hour and a half. They're all zooms. They require you to have your camera on and your face on the camera so they can see your face at all times and every so often they'll call you out on it, but they're not like the Gestapo and trying to find ways to call you out. But they know that you are not being present at the moment. If your camera's not on, you're not facing forward and you're not paying attention. So why can't we take that and apply that to life in general? Why can't we stay focused, be present, facing forward towards life? And it can start.
Speaker 1:Every morning, when you wake up and you get out of bed, what's the first thing you do? Do you get on your phone? First thing I do is I'm very thankful for waking up for another day of life and I'm thankful for my family, my friends, the blessings that I'll have and to have a solid day. I start journaling after that and go through a quiet time to where I'm not worried about my phone. But could we do a better? How should I say this? Could we actually go about starting our day differently to improve our outcome in the end?
Speaker 1:And if you're struggling with going to work on a daily basis because you truly don't like it, then there's the change. The change that you need to go out and find is what do you want to do? I don't care if you're a W2 employee or a small business owner or whatever. If you're unhappy, why do you continue to be unhappy? That's the question. And if you're not enjoying life and you can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you might need some help. Whether it be talking to friends, family coach, therapist, whatever, we all need help. We all need a tribe, and I know I need a tribe. I'm trying to create one. I have a small one, but I think I can get a little bit bigger and really surround myself with people that can help me get through life and push me through the tough times and be there to support me during the tough times, and I can do the same thing for them.
Speaker 1:But it's that obstacle of getting there. You have to get to that point in life to where you're saying I'm done, I'm ready to move forward and I don't know where else to go. If you don't know where to go, you're there. It's time to sit down and think about what you want to do. If it's the job that you want to change, okay, what type of job do you want? That's the hard part of sitting down and actually giving yourself the space and time to be able to figure out what you truly want and then how to accomplish those wants. And we sell ourselves short, and that's that whole aspect, Because that means we were putting ourselves first and we're not putting our family first or whoever you're supporting or whatever the case is.
Speaker 1:How can you love and support somebody else if you have nothing to give? That's one of those other old adages too. So if you're running on empty and you're trying to give love to somebody else and support them, how does it work? I've been there Having a relationship, when you're on empty and you're stressed about your business and there's a pandemic going on and you don't know where your next dollar is going to come from.
Speaker 1:I know that feeling all too well. It's a very lonely place to be. It's very I call it down the rabbit hole. It's a dark tunnel, man, and you feel like you're on planet by yourself and there's no one else around you that can help you. And I think for myself I don't think I know it was self motivating to be able to find a way to really pull myself out of out of that black hole but also understand I got there for a reason. Whether you believe in God, the universe, whatever, you're being tested every single day and more than likely when you're in that space, you're failing your test every single day.
Speaker 1:So the only way to turn your results around, to get the A in life, is to fight back and truly peel your layers back to find where you want to go in life Personally, professionally, emotionally, physically, whatever All of the above I should say. But, guys, I sigh there because we as humans really struggle with that aspect of our lives and I can't tell you personally why I did, but I can tell you what I got out of it. I found new habits that could actually help me cope with it, help me work through the situation and get me to the other side of it. I'm still coming out of it. I still struggle with it on a daily basis because we're in a real estate market that has headwinds. Great Prices are still strong in the markets we're doing business in, but interest rates are 725, 735. So you've got to be creative with that and find ways around it. So we're working on it. We're doing some buy downs and trying to find other ways to entice buyers to come in.
Speaker 1:But the coping mechanism in all this was journaling, and I know I've spoken about this on prior podcasts, but this is a little more in depth. Every morning I journal my thoughts down from the prior day and I really get focused in on what went right the prior day, what could I have done better and what was truly the crap show, what was at the bottom of the barrel that just failed miserably, and what can I learn from it. That's really started me down the path of understanding where I wanted to go, how I wanted to go and when I wanted to go, and the win was like instantaneously. I was ready once I started having a financial purpose which had passion behind it and serving, because there's nothing out there that says we need to be broke as a joke. You make more money, give more back, find charities, your church, find local people. You can help. It comes back to you in spades. But don't do it because of that. Do it because you love to do it and that's one reason why we started True Community. The nonprofit is because I want to be able to give back through that, through the things I'm passionate about Real estate, financial education, mortgages. If we can help out with other things, then we will. But those are three main topics.
Speaker 1:But the coping mechanism was the piece that worked for me because I had no other coping mechanism other than, just, like anybody else, when you're stressed, you eat, you're doing things to your body that you shouldn't be. I found a way to help my body be able to start exercising in the morning, journaling and really focusing in on the mental aspect, the mindset aspect, and then I really started focusing in on the emotional aspect. Excuse me, because there's a lot of emotions that come along with this rollercoaster riding. But how could I address those things? I was on a beer budget man and I didn't have a lot, and I was able to find a tribe through one of my prior guests that came on to the show, to where Jerry invited me into his office hours. That happens on Thursdays, it's free. There's other business owners in there.
Speaker 1:We all talk about stuff that's going on. It does get personal, but you can start with very little or just, or you could go deep and initially, for the first few times, I didn't talk a lot about what was going on. I would start posing questions and asking some direction and guidance, but I didn't share all my details. Jerry would reach out to me Jerry's a really good guy and he would reach out and say, hey, man, what's going on? He would ask under the hood questions, but during that time this is part of COVID there was other real estate developers in there and other people that were in the real estate space and they were struggling too and you could tell on their faces man, we've got a group here, a solid group that can really help us out and get us to the other side and bounce ideas off of one another to make things work.
Speaker 1:That felt like I had the world taken off my shoulders. I had a group, I had a tribe, and by all means, guys, if you find a tribe that works for you, go do it. But, like I've said in prior videos, I'm not a fan of coaching. Just for the simple fact, everybody's a coach and everybody wants to charge you $10,000. They tell you that they're going to get all these great results and most of them don't deliver on it. It's really sad.
Speaker 1:So I needed to find a way that I could find a tribe that would help me and be able to truly impact my life from a positive aspect excuse me, aspect but then also hold me accountable, because in there we talk about goals and we talk about things that we're trying to come up with no-transcript. The group is very good about talking to one another on goals or helping each other accomplish goals and then holding them accountable. That's a tribe that you truly want to be part of, because ultimately, we all need accountability in our lives and sometimes it's hard to find the right people to be accountable to. You can't always be accountable to yourself. I've tried that. I've been on that lonely island way too long. It doesn't work. It's an island that you, it's just going to be an island of one and it's just high. It's an exercise that you lose and there's no reason to continue to do that. But, guys, I know I've gone down a rabbit hole and I wanted to talk about it, but I'm going to wrap this up and bring this home to you.
Speaker 1:Guys, if you're not happy, you're not in a place where you want to be. It all starts with you inside and you have to find a way that works for you, whether that's journaling, going for a walk or running in the morning to where you get to clear your head. You need to figure out your why every single day until you actually find it, and then you have to go after it. That why should always resonate in you. If you're just getting up in the morning to check the box and say I did it, there's no why behind it, there's no excitement, there's no happiness. You're just mailing it in.
Speaker 1:I don't want you to mail it in. I want you to have a life that you're proud of, you're passionate about, you want to share with others. You can be there to help others during their tough times. So, guys, if you're struggling business, personal, all the above find your why and if you can't find it, reach out to somebody that you trust, that you want to talk to or you can talk to to be able to get through that time, because your business, your family, your friends all depend on you and if you're running on E, how are you supposed to support them and be there for them if you can't be there for yourself? Have a good one, guys. Talk to you. Guys on the other side.
