From 16/10/2006

One of the frustrations with the formal mentoring groups I used to run was the sadness of knowing that many people wouldn’t take any action even though I was giving them great information.

I decided that this was a waste of their money and my energy so I eventually stopped doing it. Apart from a very smal number of one on one students I haven’t done much in the mentoring space at all this year. I was recently asked by a friend of mine to spend a few breakfasts with some men from a church in Auckland who all had an interest in property but more importantly, they all were looking for ways to generate wealth so that they could give it away to bless others.

We met for 8 breakfasts, this morning being the final one. What a different result people get when they have a passion and vision bigger than themselves. Of the 12 people attending 1 has already purchased a 4 unit development site, a second has purchased a minor dwellingable property. Another 2 have paired up and purchased a do up and 5 of the remaining 8 have made offers on more than one property.

So instead of the usual ratio of about one in 50 taking action I have had the privelege of seeing a third actually invest in 8 weeks and 75% of the entire group take consistent action towards their goals.

Just had to share this with you as this is what really makes me tick. Assisting others in their success really spins my wheels.

So find YOUR passion, develop YOUR vision and succeed!!

Since running that group I was recently told by a leader in that church that I will never know the impact that course has had. The people who attended are all using investing to fund the kingdom of God and they are succeeding.

I have just completed a second church investing group in Auckland and it is proving to me again that passion and vision make the difference to success.

Find yours and pursue them!!

From 17/10/2006

I’ve been working through some real issues with my counsellor today and part of our discussion is worthy of sharing with you.

Emotional Honesty:
The foundation of feeling good about oneself and not doing things that degrade oneself is emotional honesty. At a simplistic level this means simply the ability to be honest about our emotions. To honestly say how we feel and not think we have to be something we’re not.

People who are not emotionally honest follow a course similar to this:
Stage 1. I am unable to tell you how I really feel.
Stage 2. I don’t have to tell you how I feel.
Stage 3. I can do this damaging, dishonest or illegal bahaviour over here and lie about it over here to cover up because no-one really knows me or how I feel. It’s not my fault, no-one will take the time to understand me.

I loved learning this because I had always been uneasy about the “fake it till you make it” attitude. I know now why I want to smack everyone across the face who says “I’m amazingly, wonderfully, fantastically awesome” when ever you ask them how their day is going. Especially after you get to know them and in reality they hate themselves and their lives.

You see this is emotional dishonesty and it is very destructive. Now I’m not saying don’t look on the bright side of life. Speaking positively to oneself is a good thing. But it very easily crosses a line where we destroy our emotional integrity.

I see this too often in some investors where screwing an additional discount out of a vendor through dishonest or underhand means somehow becomes a positive thing. If we persist with this behaviour we basically become liars, typically dishonest with others but much more dangerous, we become dishonest with ourselves. Many “successsful” people now in prison for fraud caught this disease.

You don’t have to be something you’re not, especially to yourself. It will kill you. As a gentlemen I met this evening shared with me, “I have learned Dean, after 40 years and owning over 25 businesses, that being a bas`tard is not a prerequisite to being a successful businessman.

So do yourself a huge emotional favour the next time someone asks you how you are say: ” Do you actually want to know the truth about how I feel or do you want me to say I’m great?”

From 18/10/2006

I’ve been fairly aggressively buying lately as I accumulate property ready for the next boom. Because I spend a lot of time working with other investors these days I try to analyse what I’m doing and how I’m feeling so I can translate that into information for others.

It’s been interesting that in the last couple of weeks I’ve hit a new wall. In the last 6 weeks I’ve bought 4 houses, one subdivision, one property in Fiji and traded another 7. Every transaction involves varying degrees of stress to organise finance, find buyers, beat other purchasers off etc.

So for the last 2 weeks I’ve really felt just “sick of it all”. Sick of the stress, sick of lying in bed juggling millions of dollars of mortgages and equity and dreaming up creative ways to solve everything.

Now I’m not telling you this in the hope that you might feel sorry for me. And it most certainly is not to put you off investing. In fact I’m telling you so that you might be encourgaed to realise that no matter how far up the tree you climb you will always find higher branches, more thorns and impassable levels.

For me I need to firstly look at whether I am simply doing too much and have a rest, or whether I need more help to do some of the leg work, or whether I am simply experiencing a new level of perturbation. When I get over this wall I will come to a place where there is more fruit, bigger fruit.

Whichever of the above is my issue is OK with me but for most of us, most of the time, it is perturbation. Are we willing to face our wall and learn the climbing techniques required to get over it. Will we acknowledge that the problem is NOT a shortage of deals or a lack of money or unreasonable vendors but a wall of fear. Our heart and mind haven’t learned how to climb yet so they tell us to stay where we are. It’s safe here, don’t be stupid and try and climb up there, you might fall. So I ask you again, are we willing to face our wall and learn the climbing techniques required to get over it.
We need to because the other side of the wall is where they hide all the money!!

So 9 months later I find the same sentiments to be true. Perhaps because I am so focused I find I go and go and go, and then collapse!! I have learnt however to identify this tendency within myself and plan times to rest and be unobtainable. We fly to Fiji shortly after our CHCH event and for about ten days I don’t even have cell coverage so I will have to relax. And I find when I have time to sit and think I do my best work!!

From 20/10/2006

Had a very pleasant lunch with Robyn Grinter today. She’s one of the few people I can talk to who thinks like me. Her success in property is outstanding and her story similar to mine in many ways. We both trade properties like some people trade stamps and so neither of us have to filter what we say. It’s nice to know someone is on the same wave length as you and it reminds me to remind you of the power of like minds.

Many of you will have to, temporarily at least, sack your friends. Now I know that sounds harsh but my experience is that nearly everyone you know now will have a horror story or 3 about property and will be very quick to warn you of the dangers of investing. Even though you know they don’t know what they are talking about it can and will affect you.

I meet people regularly who bought an IP, mentioned it to uncle Bob who couldn’t wait to tell them about his brother’s bosses daughter’s dogs aunty’s housekeeper, who had bought an IP and lost money.

Trust me it really happens and people really stop investing because of this type of advice.

So if you want to succeed in your investing, get some like minded people around you. People who think that being wealthy is cool. People who will applaud you for having a go at investing. People who will encourage you to keep going when it’s hard.

The reality is it’s lonely on the way up, let alone the top. You need some people to take with you or else the majority will forever be trying to cut you back down to where they live, working full time.

You only have one life, really live it!!

I have also yesterday, 24/06/07 had the pleasure of spending 13 hours with nearly 150 like minded people in Wellingotn at our Trading event and it was great to see so many people just enjoying the opportunity to hang out with others who love property. Attendees in Auckland and Wellington have just been the most wonderful people and have really embraced the opportunity to not only attend but really enjoy being together. Like minded people are an encouragement to us individually and a powerful force when we work and walk together!!

From 21/10/2006

I have cultivated a habit of telling people that I am a property investor. I used to find it really hard because I felt like I was either showing off or setting myself up to be shot down. I expected them to either think I was up myself or weird. Thankfully I got over that and now just naturally talk about property and what we do.

I think this is a great skill to develop because if people know what you do then they can ask for your help regarding property and this can create great win~win opportunities for you.

My latest lease option is a good example of this. I had a meeting a while ago with someone from my church who was trying to buy their own home and they had heard me talk about helping people into their own homes. This led to a meeting with a friend of his. As part of talking with them I talked about being an investor etc. Recently they mentioned kind of in passing that they were having a problem getting finance for the occupant of a property their trust had just built. I asked them the details and suggested I could lease option the property. They had no idea what a lease option was but after explaining it they thought it was a great idea. Their purchaser was about ot sing up for a 12.5% mortgage and being offered a similar deal at around 10% was doing them a real favour.

So yesterday we did the papaerwork and I now own a property delivering over $140 a week PRETAX after mortgage, rates and insurance with a $40,000 deposit. All because I talked about what I did. Even better their trust wants to do another 12 in the next year. So one conversation in a church foyer will deliver me nearly $2000 a week pretax income in the next year. Beats workin.

I guarantee that in your circle of friends/work associates/clubs will be people desperate to either buy/sell or own their own homes. You could be helping them and making money, serious money!!

I now teach on lease options and continue to use it as a strategy to build income. Last night I explained teh process to about 30 people in my Elim mentoring group and you could hear the gasps of astonishment as they considered the possibilities.

The more I talk about property, the more people get helped into their own homes, the more funds I generate for Fiji. Life is cool!!!

So tell people what you do!!

Off to Wellington in a minute to get ready for tomorrow where I’ll be telling a sold out room of over 140 people how to take massive action by trading property!! Hope to see you there.
And don’t forget you can join us in CHCH for the final hurrah!! Click on events to your left

From 22/10/2006

I watched part of a fascinating documentary tonight on American lottery winners. Some of them won 20, 30 million dollars. The programme followed their decisions and life style changes etc.

The conclusion of the doco interested me because it’s conclusions echo my own beliefs, exactly. They said that how people were within themselves had nothing to do with money, and all to do with mindset. Those people who were happy and content with nothing, were happy and content with much. Those who were miserable with $10, were miserable with a million.

This is because principles of life cannot be violated, they just are. Our happiness comes from inside us. People who are negative and nasty are negative and nasty all the time. Their circumstances don’t improve their disposition. People who are selfish are always selfish. Bad character is never changed or healed with moolah.
We must learn to line our lives up to be in tune with the genuine principles of life: To love, to leave a legacy, to be a man or woman of integrity, to be committed to genuine loving relationships, to have a passion and vision bigger than ourselves. In these things we find real success.

I was reading a blog recently where the person said you can “build rapport in 30 seconds”. I totally disagree. You cannot “build rapport in 30 seconds”. You can pretend to like someone, you can use physcological tools to manipulate someone into thinking you understand them. However any genuine relationship takes time, lots of time.
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. If you want real success then forget trying to artificially speed up the time required for a genuine relationship. People who genuinely feel understood by you will crawl over broken glass for you. But only the furnace of time will allow that relationship to flourish.

It takes months or even years to get to know someone, even close to well.
Usually we spend a year or so getting to know someone. Then as we drop our guards and behave more normally in front of each other we often find the real person is quite different. We then have to choose whether the real person is someone we want as a friend. That way the people we do remain friends with know that we know them and love them anyway. So building a relationship with the primary aim of getting that person to agree with you or behave in a particular way may be a relevant sales strategy, but it is a poor substitute for real friends and real relationships.
You cannot manipulate people into genuine relationships, you can only love them.

I freely admit that because I am a genuine people person I find this relatively easy. I love meeting people, getting to know them. I love to build friendships and I am really genuinely interested in people’s lives, family and history. Taking advantage of them never even enters my head. But so often as I build genuine relationships with people I reap financial benefits. I don’t understand it but I see it operating in my own life.

It sounds really cheesy but the more I genuinely try and love and connect with people, the more financial success I see in my life. How about you? If your bank balance was linked to the level and number of genuine intimate relationships in your life would the balance be black and growing or red and shrinking.?? Hello, is anybody still there??

Some thing to think about!!

Since writing this I have seen it played out many times in my relationships with others. i tis interesting to me that many of my first mentoring students, Ben, Jo and Rob and Mark and Sharon in particular, are now good friends of mine. Time has shown us all to have our faults but genuinely like and care for one another. They have proven, to me anyway, to be what I first thought them to be, great folks.

I have had other relationships however where the painted over spots eventually have shown through the veneer and I have had to terminate the relationship. These occasions gut me totally because I love people, I really do. But you have to choose to surround yourself with people who’s lives and principles match your own.

It is interesting to me that the people I now trust the most and choose to work with, like those mentioned above and Kris Pedersen and Farida and others, are not Christians like myself, yet they all display the hallmarks of character that I connect with, honesty, integrity, humility and a sense of humour.

My apologies for no video blog the last few days. We are getting ready for the trading event in Wellington and I take these things very seriously so I am making sure everything is as perfect as possible and dealing with the many people who want to attend but we can’t squeeze in.

On that note if you were to consider joining us in CHCH please email me and we will try and assist with airfares to make it do-able for you to come. We have room there and would love to have you join us for the grand finale!!

On top of that I offered a great new subdivision in Gisborne to my subscribers and the response stunned me. We sold an entire development in under 48 hours. I suspect that it may be the fastest complete development sell down in New Zeland history!!
Great news for Matt Gilligan the developer and wonderful news for the investors who are in on the ground floor of an outstanding opportunity.

Anyway rather than rush the video blogs I will conclude the series next week, starting Monday. Too important to do off the cuff as it were. Thank you for your patience.

FRom 23/10/2006

I have been having an email discussion with a friend of mine over the weekend about the whole “fake it till you make it” scenario.

I remember at the Oct 2004 Academy listening to an Australian speaker who talked about cycling to an onsite appointment with a developer. He pedalled away wearing a 3 piece suit and then hid the bike so the developer wouldn’t know that he couldn’t afford a car.

I applaud his ingenuity and believe there is nothing wrong with “looking the part” to instill confidence, appear professional and avoid not being taken seriously. We all have to start somewhere and our circumstances shouldn’t preclude us from opportunity.

However, (there’s always a however), the danger in doing this is that we are all tempted to cross the line to where we are simply not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

As I started moving more in property circles I was amazed at the amount of “property people” who owned hardly any property. Or the “property experts” who had hardly done any deals. These people aren’t “faking it till they make it”, they are “lying through their teeth” and hoping they’ll get away with it because hardly anybody ever checks. I found them everywhere. The reason I became “flavour of the month” was that I had done more than 10 deals. People I thought were experts and in some cases whose books I had learned from were impressed by my results?? And I’d just started. It was a real revelation to me and still saddens me today.

Because I have a natural tendency to tell a great yarn I made a conscious decision in my own life to be very specific about my property transactions so that I couldn’t get accused of stretching things. Whenever I speak I happily detail my net worth, what deals I’ve done and what property I have traded and currently own. Ask me what I’ve made out of trading and I’ll actually tell you the truth.

I think the fact I have done this has been a significant part of my so called “success” publicly. Everybody knows what I’ve done, nothing to try and guess.

Fortunately now I have friends and move with groups of people who have actually succeeded, who are actually investing and most importantly genuinely know what they are talking about. Many of my students have become close friends because they are actually doing it iand have in many cases achieved more already than many of the “professionals”.

I share all this with you to encourage and exhort you to do the same. You don’t have to advertise your failures or your dirty laundry, but to celebrate and talk about your successes. You don’t have to make them up or pretend to be something that you are not. People love genuine. People warm to real. People get excited and inspired by integrity.
I’m serious. People, especially women, can spot a charlatan at a hundred paces. So don’t go there. Especially if you’re a good story teller like me, choose to keep the line well off behind you in the distance.

By all means put your best foot forward and make sure the shoe on the foot is spit shined. But when you are tempted to advertise that hush puppy as a Gucci original, run a mile.

There is an unfortunate character flaw in many property people to try and see how close they can get to the line without crossing it. Blatant honesty and being transparent about what you do is a great way to combat this. When Raewyn and I appeared in the Herald recently, the only negative phone call I got was from my accountant who was concerned that IRD might want to investigate me. I replied that as everything I had said was true, why would I worry about an investigation. I had nothing to hide, nothing to get “done” for.

In another forum recently also I had someone “investigating” me and “informing” the community that I had been in prison for fraud. Albeit that it was 28 years ago this so called investigator had failed to visit my website where I already tell the world that I spent my 18th birthday in prison. I can’t think of the words to convey the power of this in YOUR life. Being transparent is amazingly freeing and such a low stress way to live your life. Can I encourage you to please, please choose to live your life and do your investing this way. You can sleep at night, enjoy every day and never be afraid of a phone call or a knock at the door.

Dean lives at www.massiveaction.co.nz

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
John Wooden

Rereading this blog I feel this to be even more true today. I see all the promo’s and advertising from some “experts”, but get them 1 on 1 and actually ask them specifics and they have very little to say. i think they will over time get exposed. And that doesn’t mean to say they are not good peole to have in the industry, but people need good quality advice and education and I don’t think you can offer that if you are not actively investing. Some things, like Kierans property cycle commentaties for example, are fantastic and relevant whether Kieran is investing or not, because he is commenting on the cycle, not teaching you the latest tricks etc. However if some multi trillionaire property investor is offering to teach you the miracle pathway to success you want to, and I believe have a right to know, exactly how many trillions: show me the properties, show me the money, show me the S&P’s.

I always do this and always will, at least you know what you are getting.