There really are some great deals appearing now. I spoke to a friend yesterday who was saying that he is struggling to do lease options because buy and holds are now cashflow positive in Auckland .

At my mentoring group this week I was reminded again that so many people are afraid to take action and subsequently get a zero result.

So what to do? I find that by doing the step by step approach often helps people overcome their fear and almost trick themselves into doing stuff.
It’s a bit like the people who attended Up Strategies being made to ring an agent “just for practise”. I know of four completed purchases so far from the day and most people wouldn’t even think to contact me so who knows what the real number is.

So with this thought in mind I am preparing the next newsletter which take you through step by step in filling out and presenting the current 8th edition S&P agreement.

Once you know exactly how to fill it out without risk to you then you can go and “practice” buying some property.

So if you’re not a newsletter subscriber yet click here, it’s free and excellent value!!

Look for it in your inbox tonite

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus

I have discussed this often in the past but sadly “The Secret” is rearing it’s ugly head again. I’m being invited to join “the Opus” group on Facebook and various other LOA exponents are vying for the punters dollar again.

So at the risk of beating my head against a brick wall again let me give you some of my thoughts on the Law of Attraction combined with some research material I gathered previously.

The “law of attraction” is presented as a “law”. However a law requires either an authority to enforce it or it must be 100 true all the time. That is it must be inflexible and unmoving. The law of gravity for example is a “law” because it fits the 100% rule and murder is a law violation that has government authority to enforce.

The teaching of the “law” of attraction is always presented without any external authority, therefore to be a law it must be 100% true, which it clearly isn’t. So let’s get that clear, there is no law of attraction, it is at best a possible pattern of results.

It is never directly called a principle but it is described as if it were one. This is a slick marketing ploy as no promises that can be properly tested are ever made while at the same time it promises everything for the price of hearing the teaching or reading the book.

Did it not work for you? How surprising. There must be a problem with you… are you doing it right? Just look at all these people who claim they are doing so well from it. I tell you what by my tape series and I will unlock the secrets for you that the other teachers don’t have. See the bull dust in the air?

Follow the money and we see that the best teachers make the best money from books and DVD’s on the subject.

In fact like the gamblers addiction the hooked victim feels that just one more step, one more tape, one more book and they will grasp the secret and the more they spend the more they are willing to spend.

The LOA is a straight repackaging of various previous practices. It is a rehash of Think and Grow Rich with some more spiritual and much more sinister overtones. More recently it has been copied from the New Age cult practices of “awakening the giant within”. The giant what is the question, (evil spirit is the correct answer by the way).

It seemed the answer and yet over time it failed to deliver and the new age did not rise and fill the world with the power of the internal godhead.

It could not deliver because there was nothing to deliver. It was in short a self perpetuating scam and many of the scammers did not know they were doing so.

Why is so much money being pumped into “selling” this idea? Who gains from this? Oh yes the ones that collect the profits from the sales.

It plays on human greed – “have whatever you want”. The best advertising often does. By convincing your target that they can have whatever they want the price you charge seems tiny.

The answer to having whatever you want is often to buy a book or DVD. But more importantly it promises power without effort and in doing so it offers a great reward like a dangling carrot without apparent cost.

If you can fleece a crowd and have them feel they came off better they will come to you again and again to have their wallets emptied. Casinos work on this principle.

“If you fear it you make it happen by thinking about it”, or so they claim. Fear is a self fulfilling prophecy or at least it can be so. In this they are somewhat right in that when it takes hold of your life your own strong and controlling feelings set you on a course for that fear to happen. But there is a lot more at play than just pure thought.

The most deadly lies contain mostly truth – the principle (or fallacy) of selective reporting means that every one who has a bad thing happen to them might say “I feared it would happen” and so you might conclude that fear is a killer. But I would not mind betting a lot that many people drive a car every day wetting themselves about he thought of an accident and it does not happen.

Consider the parent that stays up until three in the morning worried about little jimmy. The story of mummy telling little jimmy she was “worried sick” is so common that we forget it. Yet, according to the law mummy’s fear should have killed little jimmy. Clearly his continued life is a breach of the “law” and a fine must follow or we can conclude it is not a law?

The fallacy of selective reporting sits at the heart of the teaching. For who would be willing to stand up and say I spent the day thinking hard about getting a million quid and found a fiver. No the person will feel exited because they thought hard about getting money and found some. They forget that although the subject was the same the amounts are way off. As for the person who focuses hard on paying off the mortgage but didn’t he does not stand up but thinks – “I must be doing it wrong” as do all the others that do not get a result.

Consider the incredible similarity to the actual law of sowing and reaping which matches the physics law of cause and effect. However this “law” claims to be able to change reality by dint of mental effort alone.

A man we know as Jesus once wisely asked: “But which of you, by fretting, has added but a single inch to his height or a day to his life?”

Well, stand up that man or woman.

And lastly consider the amount of faith required to believe something as ridiculous as the LOA. It obviously only works for less than 1% of the people who try it because if it was a law we would have solved world poverty and achieved world peace.
We don’t have the ability to even reproduce a blade of grass from nothing with all the scientific advances in the world but we can achieve our wildest dreams without effort, discipline or principle?? Hello, how could any intelligent being entertain this for even a second.

Does a small baby attract rape or abuse? Give me a break.

And if you are a Christian understand that this is a demonic strategy to turn hurting people away from the only source of their hope, healing and deliverance. I have shared the stage twice now with people teaching this stuff and on both occasions I could sense the demons manifest as soon as they started teaching.

This is not fun, a joke or a law. It is a force contending for your faith.

A positive mental attitude can help set your thinking on the right course but if there does not follow measurable long term results then you are wasting your time. At a practical level the LOA has marketing scam written all over it and at a spiritual level it is sinister and causing people to allow a power they do not understand to enter their minds and souls.

So do yourself and me a favour and STAY SAFE by keeping completely away from anything to do with “The Secret” and The law of attraction.
You are way too intelligent to believe such nonsense anyway

Dean Letfus @ www.massiveaction.co.nz

Following on form yesterday’s blog about cycles, I was talking to my solicitor this morning and he was commenting on the “bad behaviour” being displayed at the moment.

It is sad but not surprising that when things are difficult or uncertain many people abandon their principles and will do anything to get out of a contract or avoid paying money they owe.

Obviously in tough times things can get difficult and we may need to make arrangements with people and “get through” stuff, but instead many people simply become dishonest.

Even in circles I know I am finding people arguing about bills they agreed to pay and doing anything to try and avoid their commitments.

I struggle to understand this because if you believe in right and wrong, if truth is important to you, if you have principles you live by then how can they be optional??

It’s not possible to have one set of standards and ethics for the good times and a different set for hard times.

Well actually you can because I see it everyday, but what I mean is you cannot live a whole or productive life that way.

The Bible refers to this behaviour as being “double minded”.

“Having different minds at different times; unsettled; undetermined.
A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

And in the long run the consequences of being like this are sad.
Leaving the strictly Christian disciplines aside if we operate “double-minds” we will

1. Know the right thing to do and increasingly choose to not do it. As our consciences become damaged we will eventually be unable to tell right from wrong. This is how most con men and “slippery characters” get that way.
They were born wonderful people, just like you

2. become narrow and biased in our friends. Because we are behaving badly we start to cultivate friendships with others who behave badly. Our guilt forces us to shy away from close friendships and we pursue those who we can benefit from, take advantage of or who share our duplicity.

3. If we persist we eventually become law breakers. White lies turn into fraud, borrowing becomes theft, the law becomes a game to be conquered.

4. Lose control of our tongue. If you have ever had something unkind or untrue “pop” out of your mouth and you just couldn’t help yourself, then you have experienced true double mindedness. Only when we have principles in place can we control our tongue. Before we say anything about another it should be able to pass the TNK test. We can’t do that if we are double minded because we will speak before we think. Sadly we will often tend to speak the most unkindly about those we have taken advantage of or who have exposed our double mindedness somehow.

5. Lose our hearts. We will become emotionally shattered if we behave like this. If you have a new partner every month, can’t hold a job down, onto marriage number 4, these are all symptoms of double mindedness.

Even before thinking about what we say we must examine the thoughts of our minds and hearts.

We cannot always control what we hear, but we can control what we hold dear in our hearts. Each day we are offered the opportunity to hold to our hearts improper thoughts, damaging communication from coworkers, fellow students and acquaintances. Movies magazines and other media invite us to embrace values, morals and behaviour that undermines our souls integrity.

So you decide, are you living a life of integrity or not. Do you have principles or not?? Better to run deliberately into a life of duplicity than pretend to be one and do the other.

A final word to my Christian readers……

We must immerse ourselves in God’s words and ideals; they must become a part of us; we must keep them in our minds and hearts. “Purify your hearts, you double-minded,” counsels the writer of the epistle (James 4:8).

We must pray without doubting, read God’s Word daily and believe it, EVERY WORD, fellowship without bias treating the rich and the poor, the saint and the sinner with the same love and care, consistently keep God’s law and obey our conscience, and speak edifying words that inspire friends and brethren to honor God.

With single-minded attention to God’s will as shown in His Word, we can draw near to God and He will draw near to us.

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus

Well what fascinating times we are having .

Whilst we can’t accurately predict everything nor control it, the reality of “cycles” is becoming very clear.

The NZ dollar went through the floor against the US last night which will have everybody who imports goods from overseas very upset.

However our exporters, who have been bleeding for a long time, will finally be rubbing their hands together for a change.

So no matter what is happening in life somebody is being disadvantaged and somebody is benefiting. This is life isn’t it?

It’s hard to think of a situation where everybody loses. When I was researching the 1929 depression recently I discovered for example that the second world war “rescued” the American economy. So even something as sad and destructive as a war has positives.

Now the thing to understand and get a hold of in this principle of life cycles is that we can live in the positive side of the cycle all the time.

Am I saying we can make money all the time? No.
Am I saying that we can win every battle we face? No!.

What I am saying is that whether we benefit from an event, situation or process is determined by our attitude towards it, not the situation itself.

I talk more about this in my own life HERE so I won’t repeat myself but understand this principle can and will impact your life positively, if you let it.

Let’s say you went belly up financially.
So your natural mind will focus on…….

1. How will I face my friends and family?
2. How will I ever recover from the shame I feel?
3. My life is over, every dream is gone.
4. I will never take that trip, own that car, (fill in the blank)
5. How could I have been so stupid to have done/said/(fill in the blank) whatever I did.
6. I am stupid/a failure/useless, (fill in the blank)
OR

You could think this way:

1. I have just joined the ranks of the human race, I can fail.
2. Failure is an event, not who I am.
3. I won’t implode, i will use this to make me stronger just like many other successful people, including

Kim Basinger
George Best
Toni Braxton
Buffalo Bill
Francis Ford Coppola
David Crosby
Walt Disney
Mick Fleetwood
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Ulysses S. Grant
Isaac Hayes
Milton Snavely Hershey
Larry King
Cyndi Lauper
Abraham Lincoln
Meat Loaf
Rembrandt
Donald Trump
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
George Foreman
Thomas Jefferson

4. I am thankful that I still have my health/partner/kids (fill in the blank).
5. I am thankful that as I analyse what has happened I will be better equipped to succeed on my next adventure.
6. In this wonderful country I call home I I am thankful that I will not die, I will not starve and I will be allowed to start again

I could go on but I am sure you get the point, your ATTITUDE will determine your ALTITUDE.

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz

Actually I have to say first that I am surprised at your shyness. I get web stats for my blog so I know that hundreds and hundreds of people in over 17 countries have read that blog, yet only a couple are game to comment.

Anyway the answer is that the off duty policeman in his unmarked car went and got his hat.

What power a hat has, that it can instantly stop tons of speeding metal and strike fear into the heart of many who see it.

So what does the hat represent?
Authority.

The cop had no power to stop the traffic. If he had gotten in its way he’d be dead. But as soon as he donned his hat he suddenly had authority. People automatically make an association that goes like this.
1. Look there’s someone standing in the road
2. It’s a cop
3. If I disobey him I could be arrested
4. If I am arrested i could end up in court and even go to jail
5. I will follow his instructions

This process takes a nano second. So if we short circuited it we could say that a policeman’s hat represents the entire legal system and the consequences of disobeying it. In other words it carries authority.

Many of us crave power because we don’t understand authority. I know business people who treat their staff like cr*p because they seek power. They think that by exerting power over their staff they will somehow gain their respect.

Reality is that they lose respect and trust and loyalty from everybody. What they are really seeking is authority.

When Nelson Mandela stands up to speak everybody listens. Why?, because he has an authority that has come from years of mistreatment and abuse that he not only survived, but he overcame with dignity, integrity and love.

When I read the book on Robert Laidlaw’s life, (the guy who started Farmers), his staff adored him, admired and respected him because he had shown his love and commitment to them over and over again. He never abused his power and he consistently put his people first. The resultant authority he carried was amazing.

Almost without a doubt there will be relationships in your life that have power issues that can be resolved with understanding authority.

For example lets say you have a friend or associate who is doing something you disagree with or think is destructive to them. You try to talk to them and they react with anger or “none of your business”.
You try again and eventually they won’t even speak to you. What’s going on here? You are trying to exercise power over another person and they don’t like it.

Now what say instead of telling then what is wrong with them you instead pursue a friendship with them that focuses on you showing how much you genuinely care about them. The day they feel genuinely loved and therefore safe with you, you will have the authority to speak into their lives and they will welcome it. And what’s more they will leave that door open to you for life as long as you never revert to trying to exercise power over them.

Understand the difference and make a commitment to yourself to walk in authority, earn it no matter how long it takes, it is a secret of a successful life.

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.co.nz

Sorry for the absence guys. I have been in Rotorua speaking at the New Zealand Property Investors Federation Conference in Rotorua.

I didn’t quite know what to expect till I got there and I found that I knew probably 75 to 90% of the attendees, so I had a great time catching up with people from Invercargill to Whangarei.

It was the first opportunity I had to hear Bob Jones speak in person and I was really looking forward to it. Whilst what he said was intelligent and interesting I couldn’t help but be saddened by his totally unnecessary attacks on minorities.

It created much offence for many innocent people and was just a pity. It made me wonder why he feels the need to do it, apparently it is quite common for him to do so?

Anyway other than that we had a great time. I did a workshop on PI screw ups and how to avoid them and spoke today on why and how to keep investing.

My personal thanks to Fritz and Maree and Mark for inviting me and making the event so wonderful. It was most invigorating to spend 3 days with a bunch of mostly positive, active investors and people focused on solutions and opportunities instead of problems.

Tomorrow I’ll get back to my man in the road story, I promise!!

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus

I’ll give you another day to tell me what the man forgot as I received another email today from someone who attended my Up Strategies event.

He wrote to advise that he had now bought the property he rung up about at the event.

I made everybody pick a property from Trademe or their local rag and ring up about it as an exercise in overcoming fear.

So far I have had 3 people who actually bought and a fourth who I believe bought and sold the property at the event.

I’m confident there are more who haven’t let me know.

But my point is that by encouraging them to take some action they actually got great results.

This is of course logic, it’s like saying if you get into water you will get wet but it’s amazing how many otherwise articulate intelligent people don’t get it.

Why can’t I find any great deals?
Why can’t I benefit from this weird market?
Why does everybody else seem to be doing well and not me?

Could the answer be that the other people have decided that they need to do something and have then
A: Contacted Kris (021300192) or their broker and established what they can borrow
B: Created a no money down solution if they can’t borrow anything
C: Gone out and made offers on the right sort of deals until they succeeded.

What, it can’t be that simple surely?

No you’re right, it’s rocket science, you need a degree to get anywhere in property.

Forget about it, turn the TV back on and buy another bag of chips, Coro starts soon

Stay safe ~ Dean Letfus

PS if you’re coming to the NZPIF conference make sure you come and say hello!!