Archive for mental health
Didja miss me?
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I have received some “complaints” about the lack of blogs lately, so to those of you who missed them I apologise 
.
I have been around but frankly I have just been exhausted. One of the things I have learned about human nature is that no matter how much you try to shift peoples mindsets to help them succeed it is a slow and sometimes fruitless exercise. And I have been suffering on the receiving end of that lately!
Since a former associate of mine turned out to be a criminal and took financial advantage of myself and some of my clients I have had an ongoing barrage of misguided angst directed at me from those who seem unable to get their heads together and pursue the actual culprit. Even though the claims are spurious and a complete waste of time on their part some people seem to have unending energy trying to tie me into an unrelated ratbags behaviour.
So I have been super busy “wasting” my time getting rafts of documents and various other things to supply to various registrars etc. And when you are already over busy it just steals the time I would normally have to be writing blogs.
So the lesson here is manifold and may be useful for you also.
1. Pick your fights carefully. There is no point pursuing a party when your chances of success are absolutely zero. And to assist with Number One make sure you
2. Get good legal advice. A cursory glance by any decent lawyer can instantly tell you whether a matter is worth investing any energy in. I have let countless people off of debts or obligations because as soon as you see how their affairs are structured you know it will come to nothing so don’t waste your money.
3. Value yourself. Do you really want to invest a whole lot of negative energy over a dubious claim for a tiny amount of money?? If you “love yourself” why bother. The Bible has a lot to say about this in terms of mental health, it is better to be wronged than to screw yourself up over stuff. (NOTE: I am not saying gross acts of injustice should be ignored but this comes back to Number One again doesn’t it?)
4. Try to dial down your emotions and think rationally about things. I had some people who I classed as friends who went very weird overnight when my previous business relationship blew up on them. I hadn’t been involved and certainly hadn’t done anything to these people myself. In fact in many, many cases I had known these people for years and assisted them with education, deals and advice, often for free over an extended period. So I was in that sense a “known” quantity.
Yet they found it very easy to believe the most ridiculous lies of others about me and attack me for no reason what so ever. i saw their emotional flame get turned up and their intelligence levels drop to almost zero. From my side I never gave up on the relationships and continued to try and resurrect them where I could. I am extremely happy to say that basically all those people that I cared about are back in relationship with me and many have apologised for their behaviour at the time. And the rest have shown themselves to have never been my friends, even though I thought they were. But my point is that our emotional selves can do huge damage if given free reign and it can be very difficult to back out of some of the things that we say in that moment.
5. Lastly a sad lesson I have learned is this: Do not expect justice to be done, especially in lower courts or dispute tribunals. The disputes process in NZ is unbelievably biased and flawed at every turn. The referees can make any ruling they like. It does not have to follow legal precedent or even legal process. And it is 250% biased toward whichever party is an individual as opposed to a company. I have seen the most ridiculous rulings handed down and there is little right of reply or any recourse. Right now we are fighting an unbelievably petty case that has absolutely no impact on us regardless of the final outcome, other than wasting our time and theirs, but we are so angry at the ridiculous nature of the claim and the referees behaviour that we will get it corrected purely for the sake of my own company’s reputation. But to have to go through appeals and then escalate to counter suits in the courts is going to cost the plaintiff a fortune, all over loose change owed from an unrelated person. We had the same cases in formal court all tossed out because they were clearly directed at the wrong person. Our lawyers just shake their heads at the incompetence of the tribunal decision but there you go , it will happen to you if you are a company and the defendant. So be warned!!
So in spite of it all, Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean!!
What we need is a great big melting pot…..
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Or so goes the song. Certainly as we look at what is happening in the world we are indeed all in a great big melting pot of uncertainty, natural disaster and strangely, opportunity.
In New Zealand, USA and many other countries there are people going under and people going over. Trouble and opportunity all wrapped up in the same package.
So the important question is why? How come some people do well in difficult times and some fold. Obviously ones starting position and circumstances affect our ability to move forward but it is never as simple as that.
For example I have a client who is ten seconds from bankruptcy, however he saw the opportunity in the USA and begged and borrowed enough to purchase a property there. That cash flow is now helping him to stay afloat and he is very close to his second purchase.
So what makes one person take action in the midst of adversity while another rants at the sky?
I have concluded that it is all about our internal principles. These come to the fore when things are tough. For me personally I keep looking for solutions no matter how bad things get. The worst thing that can happen is I will fail but at least I know I have done my best. I have successfully turned terrible investments into good ones, learned form mistakes and viewed them positively as a growth opportunity many times and the fruit of that is that I am a happier, wiser person.
Some people conversely go looking for someone to balame and hunker down waiting for something to happen. And what happens is they get bitter, old and somehow “smaller”.
Man I have seen a lot of this in the last 12 months. One person going gang busters, another pursuing enormous energy on a no win situation.
So what about you my friends. Where does your internal clock sit. Are you looking for answers or looking for justice in your situation? And whichever way you answer ask yourself: “Is this working for me? Is this making me a bigger, better person?”
Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus
Nothing to do with Property….
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Feeling Truly Loved
This may sound like a strange question but…..
“Have you ever felt truly loved?”
I ask because I would have answered yes to that question for many years. I knew God loved me and that was to me a fact.
However on Sunday in Phoenix I attended a black Baptist Church, something I had wanted to do for years, and was amazed to discover during that service an incredible encounter of knowing I was truly loved. I’ve never cried so much in my life and it was a life transforming moment in my life. I am “different” today and it is so wonderful I am sharing it with you .
Nothing else to say other than you can know love deeper than you thought possible. The decision is to put our own biases aside and be willing to seek it out.
If you’re in Phoenix I found it HERE
Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus
The Circus comes to town
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I admit it, often. I have done things I shouldn’t. I have had things go wrong and it causes me much grief and lost sleep because I see the impact some of those things have on other people.
Because I am a quick adopter I understand the risks attached to that personality type but often people jump on board without doing their own homework. I try and structure my business now to force people to do their own homework and be more informed.
Anyway I digress……….
My way of “coping”, (when things go wrong for other people around me), if you like is to try to learn from those mistakes and to do the “right thing” to the best of my ability.
I think that is well, normal behaviour and by being honest and doing my best generally people understand and will even assist.
So I have been stunned this week that the biggest news in property has been about Bryers and Hotchin, property related stories but certainly nothing to do with investing per se.
Bryers it would appear is continuing with exactly the same strategy in Australia as he was here of selling stuff that isn’t built at exorbitant prices and getting paid up front. To hell with his clients as long as it’s good for him.
And Hotchin was on TV last night pointing the finger at Allied over the Hanover failure. You would take Hotchin seriously except for the fact that he needed 5 grand a week to live and continued to build NZ’s most expensive house when everything had gone t*ts up.
The funniest thing about Hotchin was when he said he had no “cash” stashed away. By his body language and eye direction it was obviously a lie but my guess is he was technically telling the truth because he probably has assets stashed not cash. To expect anybody to believe that someone worth hundreds of millions of dollars and working in the finance industry wouldn’t have funds and revenue streams hidden away is frankly ridiculous. He would be an idiot not to do that.
So I guess my point is, how do these guys sleep at night. I have a client with a deal going badly that might be costing them 30 or 50,000 and I feel sick about it.These guys have over a billion in lost funds from mums and dads between them and it appears to not scratch their surfaces.
Do you have to be a pachydermatous prick to be a big time businessman these days??? Is that what it takes?? To have no conscience and be willing to blatantly rub people’s noses in it??
If that is true then I’ll be poor thanks
What do you think??
Get Going and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus
Hurry up and slow down
Posted by: | CommentsRaewyn and I generally work way too hard and often neglect looking after ourselves. It is easy to lose sight of this until you actually do something to look after yourself.
We finally managed to get a few days to do nothing except rest, seek God and rest some more.
I am fully convinced that the way we live in the West is not good for us. Within 2 days of arriving at our rest stop we are feeling “human” again and starting to think straight, relax and focus on what is really important for us.
Why do we have to go away and isolate ourselves to achieve this? Shouldn’t this be how we live all the time?
The answer of course is yes, this is how we should live. But we find it difficult if not impossible to not fill our lives up with stuff in our normal environment..
Think about a typical week for you. How many evenings are you free to do nothing if you wanted? Most people I know “try” and have 1 or 2 nights a week when they don’t have regular commitments. This is just so wrong. We should have 1 or 2 nights maximum when we have commitments, not the other way round.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people speaking at events or conferences saying how many days a year they travel or how long since they’ve been home. People applaud at their sacrifice for some reason. I cry inside thinking how tragic for that person AND more importantly their friends and family. They will look back on their life with much regret because they are living a life out of order.
We are created to work hard and rest hard. We are designed to be busy sometimes but to have incredibly intimate deep relationships also. That level of relationship only comes through much time spent together, relaxing, laughing, debating and loving each other.
No matter what is going on in your life you MUST look after yourself to be of any use to yourself, your family or God.
I have developed a relationship recently with a pastor in Myanmar thanks to Facebook and recently I sent Him a prophetic word about spending time in God’s presence as a necessary doorway to see God’s power move amongst his flock.
His response was to than me as he had been “so busy serving God he had little time to spend with God”.
So this is not just a western problem. And it could just as easily been his wife instead of God, the sadness and damage is the same.
So today get out your diary and start to categorise the things you do that destroy your ability to be who you want to be.
Be honest, list everything you do that you don’t like and that frustrate you……
AND STOP DOING THEM
Then list the things you wish were true in your life. Look at your relationships. I had a failed marriage because I didn’t know how to have a good one. I didn’t understand the work required and the skills I needed.
So when God gave me a second chance with the greatest woman in the universe do you think I am blasé about that? Do you think I work hard to have a great marriage?
For me it took failure to understand the need to change to succeed. I hope to spare you the failure by exhorting you to do whatever it takes to remove the cr*p that fills your day and start to get breathing space that you can fill with life, fill with enjoying your kids, fill with writing that book, fill with getting the training to pursue the career you want, fill with learning to sail/ski/race cars/fill with things that fill YOU up and bring life to those around you.
Today is a good day to start looking after yourself better, why wait?
Stay Inspired and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
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Whose life are YOU living?
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I have found it impossible to educate investors without also having to help them understand their spiritual, emotional and “thinking” selves. And the reason is simply that investing in property is not that hard. There are lots of strategies and techniques that can help us succeed but the fundamentals are …….. well fundamental.
But how our heads and hearts affect our investing is another story. The impact of our beliefs and attitudes not only influences us but generally speaking controls us completely. You may have heard the stories of lottery winners who end up broke a short time after winning millions of dollars. Until I understood the things I now teach I always used to think how stupid they must have been to end up there. But now I feel tragically sorry for them because they were set up for failure. They were living someone elses life, probably their parents.
You see I spent the first 40 years of my life living my parents financial lives. My parents both worked very hard and they trained me, by the way they lived, to believe that the answer to success was “get a good education, work really, really, really hard and you will be successful”. This is the post depression generation mantra that most of us were raised on. The only problem is it isn’t true. Ingesting this belief without any real financial literacy is doing one thing. It teaches us to fulfill the dreams of another man or woman, not our own.
If you work really hard in a job you will make your boss far wealthier than you will ever become. IF you pursue education without purpose you end up educated, but poor. Go to most universities and cars in the students car parks are way more impressive than the faculties
So for me I discovered that years and years of hard work had made me a highly skilled employee, who worked 60 to 80 hours a week and managed to look after a wife and 5 kids but I had no ability to give generously, something which I was passionate about. So by subconsciously living my parents life I replicated their results. And their results were all I was equipped to achieve. If I had a windfall of any kind it vanished pretty quickly to charity or a something “special”. Like the lottery winner I didn’t have any way to handle anything outside of what I had seen modelled to me.
Then I met property and the wealth creation industry and suddenly started hearing another story. This story was far more appealing, this was basically the “do almost nothing and be rich, it’s almost like magic” life. It took enormous courage and emotional angst to enter into this world. It would take way more than a blog to tell you how hard it was to change, but change I did. Suddenly I found that this life seemed to work as well. There was a different set of rules that I had never heard before and when I followed them I got different results.
However what I have found is that simply jumping off my parents back onto the back of another is still a recipe for disaster. I was still living someone elses life. My financial situation changed and became more volatile as I took more risks but whose life was I living?
I eventually realised, NOT MINE!!
So more recently I made a decision. I am going to live my own life. I am going to learn the things that will help me and really understand them, not just parrot what others say. I am not going to abide by the so called rules without understand why they are rules. I am an adult, not a child. If something is right or wrong I should know why.
I avoid sticking my hand in fires, for example, not because my parents taught me “Burny, burny”, but because I have seen people scarred by burn damage. I know it will permanently damage me physically and the pain is unbearable. So as an adult I do things for a reason, not because I am told to, if that makes sense.
So what about you. Are you living your parents life, your bosses life, your therapists life, your gurus life?? It is unlikely that you are living your own life yet, we nearly all get trained to be somebody else. Coming home to start living our own lives is hard work baby, hard work. We have to learn to strip off years of conditioning and think about what we really want out of life. It can be terrifying but is more satisfying that I can express in words. I feel alive in ways I never thought possible.
To relate this back to money let me finish with a story that underlines this:
A young man tragically lost his parents when he was under 20. He hod no financial education or training to know how to live his own life, so when his parents died leaving him a fortune he entered the drug world.
He quickly became an addict and as he had so much money he would check himself into therapy and get cleaned up, only to be released and go back to the drugs again.
Within a remarkably short space of time the money ran out and then his life really started to feel pain. Shortly afterwards this 21 year old committed suicide as his only way out. Wealth and money killed that young man. His parents might as well have given him a loaded gun.
I heard recently that Bill Gates told his kids he wasn’t leaving them much of his fortune because it would destroy them. He’d leave them enough and then they could make their own. In other words he was going to let them live their own lives
Whose life are you going to live today??
Stay Inspired and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
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Enjoying the roller coaster?
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It’s certainly an interesting time to be alive isn’t it. We can now definitely say that nobody really knows what is going on.
In Iran we have an election that is simply being rejected to the point of death.
In the USA we have billion dollar bailouts that haven’t even slowed the carnage down, let alone arrest it.
In England we have corruption issues and the nation is basically bankrupt.
And on the NZ Herald website today the top national news stories are Big Wednesday and Air New Zealand’s cheap airfares. So at least we have our priorities sorted .
And on the property front things are weirder still. I’ve had very “ordinary” properties for sale since October without a serious offer suddenly sell at full asking price and at the same time have had a very saleable property not even attract 60% of genuine value. There is no silver bullet or secret weapon with property in this market. Utilising your skills to help those wanting to buy or sell is a low risk strategy currently and if you are cashed up then it is a pretty good time to be going shopping. But anything leveraged is difficult right now because of ongoing uncertainty.
This is also a good time to be working on your own skills, whether that is getting more financially literate so you can analyse deals better, working on your personal development so you are better emotionally equipped for the stresses of property or simply taking stock of your life and ensuring you are spending time on and with the people and things that really matter to you.
This market will change and given enough years everybody will forget about it, but your friends, lovers, memories, children and adventures you only get to live once.
And don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes and change your world view if that is required. I know I have rethought and readjusted many things in the last 6 months. Situations, events, failures all come to give us feedback so we can grow.
So whatever “stuff up” is looming large in your mind today remember it is just an event. You will get over it. It is never as bad as it looks.
I’m not quoting meaningless platitudes to you here, I am sharing with you things I know to be true. I have days when a head on car accident would be a good solution to a problem, but given time, help and advice, I don’t die. It does end. Sometimes it works out way better than I expected. So I adjust my life to what works. Let me finish with one example.
As a “new school” property investor I embraced the “never sell” mantra and I could see all the reasons why it was good. In addition to the “why sell assets that are going up in value” there was also the luxurious thought of being able to say I owned 10, 20 or 30 properties.
I also remember becoming quite set in my opposition to “old school” types like Olly Newland and others who taught that it is good to sell down when the time is right and never sell was a bad idea.
So we go through the last 9 months in the New Zealand property market and I now understand why Olly et al said what they do. It’s because they have been through this before and they are therefore wiser. Their position has been achieved through the crucible of experience. And that is something we can do every day. Learn through our experience. I now know that owning 50 rental properties is a 2 edged sword. And I was wrong to bag the old investors whose wisdom is well……. wise!
So don’t waste this opportunity to learn about yourself and reassess your goals, your rules and your life.
People think fresh scars are ugly, but on an old battler they engender honour and respect.
Make sure you become old, don’t check out early.
Stay Inspired and Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
PS Don’t forget to join me for free this weekend!! INFO HERE
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