3: Your Adversities are Your Advantages

Welcome to the Purpose Driven Real Estate podcast. This is where passion meets purpose in an ever changing real estate market. I'm your host, Steve Valentine, former real estate agent turned real estate entrepreneur, speaker and guide to all things real estate. And this is my co host, Paige Tons, former D1 college athlete turned real estate adultrepreneur. Whether you work in the industry or you are a consumer of real estate, with each episode we intend to raise the bar in our industry and show you the purpose behind every piece of real estate in your life. What's up, Ms. Paige? How's it going today?

Pretty spectacular.

Yeah? What was spectacular about today?

We started our first podcast episode and did the introduction.

Right. And I nailed it. Right, Nibs? Only a few of you will know what that means. Anyway, what's on the topic for today?

Today's episode is on your adversities that turn into advantages.

You know how much I love this topic?

How much?

How much? I thought you'd never ask. Paige. Jeez. You know, it's such a great question because I think that life is full of people. I hate using the word victim, but it's one.

I thought you were gonna say life is full of failures.

Right, sorry, go ahead. No, I just. I think that so many people use the victim mentality and they use as an excuse to continue to fail and not rise up. And what a lot of people don't realize is using their advantages, their adversities as their advantages, is because they think that things happened to them and not for them. And here's why I say that. You know, I believe that early on in 2006, when Wendy and I lost everything, come 2007, 2008, we were already over the pain. I mean, it was substantial amount of loss and substantial amount of debt with two toddlers running around, Not a lot of stuff going on and not a lot of income happening. But we quickly realized the advantage of that adversity. And what the advantage was is that it happened to us long before it was popular to be at a cocktail party talking about how many houses you lost. And so we were able to counsel and guide people through the emotional process and what to do and what not to do as they started to go down that road of maybe going through a short sale or a foreclosure, because nobody really KN what to expect at that time. Cause it just started happening. And I was the fortunate guinea pig, so I knew exactly what was gonna happen.

Fortunate guinea pig?

Yeah. It's not so fortunate at the time, but at the time, I never thought it was happening for me. It was happening to me. So sometimes we have to change our mindset that, you know what? It's okay, we're gonna figure this out, and it's gonna work together for good and kind of move through that process. And so you just look at those challenges and figure out, how is it gonn. How did it help me become the person that I am today?

Right, Totally. What has been your biggest adversity that turned into an advantage?

Oh, I'd say thus far, we've had quite a few of them again from losing everything in 2006, breaking my neck in 2008, and almost being paralyzed.

Slight challenge.

Slight challenge. Not my biggest challenge, though. My biggest adversity was really losing my dad in 2015. My dad, for some of you may or may not know, real estate genius, been in the business forever, a great man. And he was suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014, December. And it was nine months from death to diagnosis. And so what ends up happening is diagnosis to death, diagnosis to death. Well, either way, it was backwards. But what happened was, is it. It was a healing process for me because my dad and I kind of have a rocky relationship after we had split our partnership in 2006 when the market tanked. And that was a rough couple of years. And so it was a process for me to go back in because he and my mom needed my help because he was going through chemo, going through all going through chemo and brain radiation to try to cure the cancer. And what it did was it took him into basically just culture shock. I mean, he just wasn't there anymore. So, you know, my only goal was to make sure that my mom was stable and that the business was gonna function because he had still had a real estate broker gonna function once he passed. And it happened pretty quickly. But that adversity created my greatest advantage, because what I saw in that nine months was something that my dad had created that I started to be able to look from the outside in and started thinking about, well, if I could tweak that just a little bit. And keep in mind, we were just coming out of basically the bulk of the bank owned or the REO days where there wasn't as much business, and I was trying to figure out how to pivot shift with the change that was happening. So now we relied on the REO business for all those years, and now all of a sudden, we're having to try to find a different niche and kind of walk through that and, you know, that adversity of, you know, my dad was 65 when he passed. Just seeing that gave me a different insight into the business and a different type and a different way of doing it by tweaking it just a little bit.

And that's really into your advantage.

Correct. So our advantage is. Is what we do now in providing a handcrafted real estate solution because we have so many options, and there's not one size that fits all, whether you're a consumer or real estate agent. You know what, there's a ton of different things that can be done and ways that you can wrap up a piece of real estate, whether you're buying or selling.

Right. So when I think about adversity, turning adversity into an advantage, I don't have, like, a very specific time or experience.

Right.

It's actually when I was playing softball. Well, most of my life, from 10 to 18. Mostly in my college experiences, though, because in the game of baseball and softball, you're failing. If you fail 7 out of 10 times, you're a great hitter.

Right.

So it was softball taught me a lot about being. Having. You have to turn your adversities into advantages, or else you will be in a slump for a long time, without a doubt. So that was actually like, very, very difficult for me to accept for a long time. So how did you learn to do this? A lot of times, as humans, like myself and in the softball example, we just want to, like, give up.

And, I mean, what's the difference between, you know, giving up and moving forward and figuring that out? You know, there was a great book that I read when I was going through our challenges of our loss, and it was John Maxwell's Failing Forward. And basically, if you look at a mental picture of failing forward is that every time you fail, you're actually one step closer to success. Because, let's face it, successful people didn't get successful by having success 100% of the time. They became successful because they're guinea pigs in life. They tried, they failed, they tried, they failed.

Imagining all these guinea pigs everywhere, guinea.

Pigs everywhere, climbing up ladders. So you want to go through and figure out, okay, well, it didn't work that time, so how do I change it and make it work better?

Mm.

In fact, we have. Every now and again, I pull it back out. I have a top 10 lessons I learned after splitting up the partnership with my parents and losing. I think at the time, we had lost a little over a million dollars worth of cash and assets, and we were stuck with a million dollars worth of debt. In my late 20s, and I sat down and just began to write, what did I learn from this experience? So that I don't repeat it. And so you start going down, and every time you fail at something, and I don't even like to use the word fail. I like to use the word challenge, because I think we all have challenge.

Or your adversity.

Or your adversity. Right. So we're challenged by a ton of things, and it comes all the way back down to a diet, getting healthy, weight loss, any of that stuff. There's going to be adversity, and there's going to be challenges and everything. So what did you learn from the day before that you could do better? You know, do you. Do you need to stay away from the donuts? The candy bowl at the front of the office on your way out?

God, that's empty.

Paige likes the candy. So does everybody else. Just one piece of chocolate every five minutes, every hour. So I just. I think that everything in life.

We should put celery in that bowl.

Oh, gross. How about brown bananas? I just think that every challenge in life, you have to look at and figure out how you do it better and figure out the impact it's not only going to have on you, but it's going to have on somebody else. And this is the one thing I can tell you that a lot of people don't see. Maybe the challenge, maybe it did happen to you, but it happened so that you could help somebody else down the road. So it happened for you in order to help somebody else, to have an impact on them.

Gotcha. It's a good outlook on it.

Well, you only have two ways to look at it.

Right. But it's really hard to look at that when it happens.

Oh, there's no doubt in the moment. That's kind of where, you know, you have to have that faith that something good's gonna come out of this, and you pull yourself up by the bootstraps and start making it happen. I think even for some people, I think some of the things that took me out of my adversities was, A, my family, B, my faith, and C, was the drive to want more. I want more for my life. I want more for my kids. I want to have a greater impact. And I think some people stop because they don't have a why and they don't have a passion, and they've lost their drive to succeed because they felt like they've been, you know, hit in the gut.

Mm. Just gotta keep getting up.

So what do you do? What do You. So you've been around me long enough, last couple of years, to see what happens, you know, when you see adversity. What happens when you see adversity in the millennial age group? That's one of the reasons we're here. What's. What's that look like? They go back to play Fortnite.

Yeah. I don't know. I. I guess I feel kind of lucky because I've been around a lot of motivated people. I've surrounded myself with a lot of motivated people who are driven. Like I said, they. They want something better. So maybe it's a positive outlook where. You know, I think where the millennials, or maybe people in our age group miss out is either they're trying to do it by themselves or they're not asking questions or they're too prideful to ask for help. And I think that having a group and surrounding yourself with other people who are able to help pull you out of that, whether that's family, friends, an outside group, community, I think that's a huge piece in pulling yourself out of adversary and turning it into an advantage.

I mean, you make a huge point. It's one of those things that maybe we should talk a little bit more about on the next episode is the depth of your relationships versus the surface level. Relationships. I know you've been reading a book, and you started a group with A Tribe Called Bliss with Lori Harder and your group, and you're loving that mentorship, and they're loving just being around that. And I know that early on in 2008, when the crash was happening, there was a group of guys that we'd have coffee together, and it was about, how do we do it different? What can we do? What does it look like? And that helped. And even now, we're in the same piece where you're constantly moving from group to group in order to hopefully be there to help you with your adversities and help you turn those into your advantages.

Yeah.

So what do you say that maybe.

Everything is better with. When you put your. When you have a support group, when you have people lifting you up and not just yourself.

Yeah. And I think that you also look at how many people rely on social media for their ups and downs. You know, that's. It's one of those pieces, you know, that's why they call it fake book. Right. You know, everything. Everything is. Is, you know, flowers and roses and fluff and donuts when it comes down to it. But, you know, people live in that fake world, and they have to Go back to their reality and when the election comes around, Right. But they, they miss the opportunity because they don't want to post out of embarrassment. Right. And, you know, I remember, I think.

We'Re all guilty of it.

Oh, we're all guilty of that. I remember having. Here's probably the greater piece, maybe we can leave off on here. I think sometimes we limit our abilities to have a greater impact on people because we're not vulnerable, because we're afraid of judgment, we're afraid of being ridiculed, and we don't allow ourselves to be out there. And it also causes us to look weak. And I remember in 2008 specifically being challenged with an article that was written on myself being a successful real estate agent. And we had this team, and this is what it looks like. And I was faced with the choice of do I show my weakness and my vulnerability to the entire industry, that we had gone from this great, amazing real estate team to broke and losing everything in order to have a greater impact, inspiration on people that were getting ready to go through it or were too embarrassed to talk about it amongst other real estate agents.

Right.

So when that article came out, I was thankful that the impact it had on the industry in 2000, you know, I had.

Well, it just makes you so much more relatable to other people.

Well, you, you don't want to look untouchable. And sometimes I think when you get to a certain point of success, you're afraid to be vulnerable. You know, if you looked at even where you're at in your current ride, you're looking pretty successful and things are good. So are you going to have the ability to be vulnerable if something happens? And same thing with me, you start looking at all those pieces. But I know that it had a greater impact than if I would have been, oh, look at me, things are good, blah, blah, blah. And instead it was. The impact was reversed. You know, I had real estate agents calling, crying because of the impact it had on their lives. And people say that it changed their lives and gave them hope that it would pass. So, you know, make sure that you're using your adversities to your advantage. And if you're currently going through an adversity, really try to have the faith and surround yourself with good people. They're going to help you get through it and make sure you look around and. And figure out how to use that adversity to your advantage. Till next time.

Peace out.

Peace out.