The Surprising Secret to Stress Management

Can't control it and you can't influence it, you don't stress about it.

We usually save this topic for our mentorship group, but wanted to share an 8 or 9 minute segment on stress management. There's a huge part of real estate you will not move forward and not scale your business if you don't get these tips down.

Welcome back to the channel. My name is Cody, this is Christian, and we're talking about stress management. Now, for those who have been watching this channel for a while, you might have noticed my hair grew back.

You did it.

I did it. But we weren't always very good at stress management. We've come a long ways and figured a lot of things out along the way. Yes, we got a lot of takeaways from a couple of our first mentors, and we'd like to share a few of those today.

We're going to share a couple of quick stories in here, too. This is a little bit more personal episode than we often have, so hopefully you enjoy this. But a little background on me. I'm someone who's been since a kid prone to panic attacks. Not a ton of them, but maybe once a quarter, 3, 4 times a year, I'll just absolutely freeze up. Uh, just some things seem so important, it's all that I could think about. Uh, we've applied some of these concepts to, uh, like on a real estate thing. This let us move really far on a personal level. I just don't have panic attacks anymore. So really excited to share for, uh, today's lesson one of the first ones that causes a lot of stress, like big, big stress is going to be the people part. And this is in every business. You're going to work around people who are either unethical, just stressful, lazy. There are a whole bunch of personality types that are very difficult. Cody had one very early where the partnership did not work out at all. That's actually part of what launched us into our partnership was how bad that ended up being.

Yeah. And that was over their misallocation of money. They took a lot of money from a lot of people, misallocated it, and I had ethical issues. And then you left that company because you had ethical issues.

Yes, I did.

Not a great place to be, especially when I was 20 years old, just figuring out that I was almost an adult allowed to drink. And I was having to go through all that. And you were going through that. I think you're 28.

Mm-hmm.

So that was quite the mess. A lot of stress involved. And that actually, I didn't know how to handle it back then. So I did have a lot of hair fall out. And we can see that in a lot of these videos that we posted. But the way that we overcome that and overcame that for us was we put things into a couple buckets, things you can control and things you can influence. And an example of that, if I wanted to control Christian, I could do this. Oh, if I wanted to influence him, I could ask him to go get me a cup of coffee. Oh, he actually had one.

I brought a backup.

Wow. Can I drink this?

Yes.

Okay.

That was statistically improbable.

Didn't know he had that.

That was not pre-planned.

No.

I accidentally poured two cups. Oh, that's funny.

Okay. Uh, so influence does work and control does work. If you can't do either of those things, you don't worry about it. I didn't expect to get coffee, so I wasn't going to worry about it because I didn't think that was within my realm of influence. But sometimes it works out. So if you can't control it and you can't influence it, you don't stress about it.

And that's a funny analogy because often you don't feel like you can influence things and they come together. And we've seen that. It's not usually a cup of coffee, it's usually hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we've seen it come together many times. It's been actually very similar. We've gone and looked at our piece and said, huh, we really need a few hundred thousand dollars. How would this come in? What do we do? There are times in our portfolio where either we need money or we need deals or we need a momentum or something needed to happen. It could be very, very stressful. Instead, we look at our pieces and you go, can I control anything here? Usually the answer is no, especially when you're starting, you don't have a lot of capital. If it's a money thing, uh, no, I can't control anything because I can't just go out today and earn a couple hundred thousand $100,000. However, who could I ask who knows how to do this? The first person we go to, same person we say to talk to all the time on the channel, the other owners who have done what you want to do. This is why networking is so important. We will reach out to the people who are much bigger than us, much farther along in their journey, have actually been through what we're going through right now, and we just say, hey, here's our scenario, what would you do? They've already survived it. That is about— I'm making up the statistic, of course, but 87.5% of statistics are made up. And I was going to go with about 90% of the problems that we've had to solve on a daily basis are just reaching out and calling someone who's done it. Uh, we were in Moses Lake just a few days ago. Two days ago, we're driving to Moses Lake. Um, we're working on something with the hotel conversion and the actual licensing that we need to have in place while we are doing the conversion. Uh, some of the process of the city, just on a standard day, made two phone calls to different people about licensing, employees, game plan. Not that long ago, we had a money crunch. We went, okay, we need about half a million dollars. Within a week of having that conversation, we made $550,000 appear. And that was just out of the circle of influence, talking to people about where we're at, what we're trying to do. Now granted, we were looking for $750,000. $500,000 is really what we needed. $750,000 would have been the silver bullet that would have fixed everything.

We don't get those.

No, and you probably won't either. There's a few people who get really lucky. This is not a, hey, influence everything and win the lottery. This is when things are stressful, when things don't feel like they're in your control because they might be out of your control. How do you take steps to put them into your circle of influence? Now let's talk about the third category. So you have control, you have influence, then you have the things that you can no longer do anything about. We do a lot of board game analogies here, but The stress game plays just like a board game. It's a turn-based game. You go through your stages. First phase is what can I control? Which, by the way, a lot of people get stuck there. Quick sidebar. A lot of people go, this is stressful, and they freeze up and they don't proceed. A lot of the people who don't buy real estate are stuck on the control phase. That you go, what steps can I take just to move forward? And oftentimes that's making the next phone call, that's asking for capital, that's asking for help. It's structuring a deal. Then you have influence, which is, okay, who's done what I want to do? Where am I stuck? How can I push moving forward? Once you've moved through those two steps, the control step and the influence step, your turn's over. You wait for feedback. You wait for whatever you did in the control phase to play out. The other players need to take their turn. Then it is back to you and you take action again when actions are available. During that phase, you are not allowed to stress.

Not authorized.

Yep. Now I know the internet right now is going to go, how dare you tell someone what they can do? But sorry, you're not allowed to. Just—

we're not telling what you can do. We're telling you what you can't do.

Yes, that is true. You cannot do this. This is— these are the rules of the game. It's been really helpful for me when I know that I've gone through everything that I can control. I can't change anything. Because I can't change anything, it's not going to change. So no matter how much stress or energy I put into it, it doesn't matter. It's not my turn to make a move. Focus on other things. Go about your day. You're still alive. Focus on your health. All is good in the world until it's back to your turn. And when you start to feel that stress of like, oh man, what can I be doing? You ask yourself, what can I be doing? Can I control anything? Can I influence anything, or am I still waiting on the next move? That is about the best way I've ever seen to play the stress game.

Yep. And I used to worry about everything, so we've come a long ways.

We've come a long, long ways. I do not have panic attacks anymore, and I don't worry about anything. And look how fast we get through problems now. We have— Cody and I have problems that are seriously stressful. We have employees, we have multiple businesses, we have a lot going on in the day to day. We also do a lot of speaking, a lot of travel. There's a lot of things that would normally apply a lot of pressure to people. Following this really helps. There is one more thing that you need to do to manage stress. Your health matters a lot. Your ability to actually physically cope with stress and all the chemical things that happen in your brain because you are in fact a human and your emotions are driven by chemicals. Yeah, you need to get good sleep. You need to eat food that is considered actual food. If you're eating Pop-Tarts and drinking soda all day, your stress levels will in fact just be higher because you don't feel good.

And we've seen that in mentees.

Yes, we have.

Drinking a liter of soda a day.

And when they stopped, their stress levels went down. For me, you don't have to do this. It's a personal choice. I don't drink alcohol. I stopped, gosh, going on a year ago. My stress levels have gone down. Turns out your body doesn't really like alcohol that much. There's things like that. No, pick and choose your battles. Have fun, enjoy your, you know, enjoy what you eat. But if you're just eating junk food, you're eating tons of candy, you're drinking lots of soda, you're drinking tons of beer, if you cut those things down, your stress levels will in fact go down. I'll add one thing to that. You have your physical health. So Cody and I both lift, we both work out. But one of the best things that helped me relieve stress is do one sport, any sport, with other humans. Cody and I played pickleball last night.

We got crushed.

Oh my gosh, people don't want to play with us. We get on the court and people just like, they'll go to put their paddle up and then they'll realize it's us and they'll look the other way. And it's very interesting, but we have a blast and I have a ton of fun.

That's what matters. Yep.

We play frisbee, we play spikeball. We're a little bit better at those two sports.

I'd rather lose on the court than lose in business. So pick your Pick your wins.

Yeah, but if you manage all those things, your ability to move forward in business and real estate is going to be so much more like, yes, this works through all of life. Like these are actually just good life topics. A lot of the breakpoints in business are just pushing through. Like, I don't know how to do this. The unknown causes a bunch of stress. Put it in the buckets: control, influence, or is there literally nothing that I can do and I need to wait? If you know what your step is, there's no ambiguity. Without ambiguity, there's no stress. You can push forward onto the next task. And my goodness, you save so much time too, not stressing out. Facts. And hair, apparently.

Yeah, it grew back. Proud of you. We did it. All right, well, hit the subscribe button. And if you want to go to our Robinhood events, we will put a link down below.

Oh yes, we will. Robinhood Village Short, November 11th, Creative Finance Summit, part of a 4-part series. Excited to see you guys there.