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How to Reach New Levels of Success by Changing the Thermostat Setting of Your Life

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Do you ever feel stuck at a certain level of success in your life? Like you’re destined for this level of success…but not more? That’s because you’ve set your “life thermostat” at the current level, and it won’t let you get too hot or too cold.

In this episode, Jeff shares the metaphor of the “thermostat of your life,” an idea from podcast host and businessman Ed Mylett. Jeff shares how this affects real estate entrepreneurs, and most importantly, how we can “turn up” the thermostat permanently so that we can achieve higher levels of success.

Episode Transcript

Do you ever feel like in life, you’re just kind of stalled out that there’s a certain level that you have achieved that that’s the level you are destined for that it doesn’t really matter what you do, you’re not going to get to a different or higher level that that’s really your fate? Well, if you’ve ever felt that way, first of all, trust me when I say you’re not alone in that, and in today’s episode, I’m going to share a powerful little visual metaphor that I think about a lot that helps us to figure out how we can get on to the next level of life. Without further ado, let’s queue up that theme song. We’ll jump right into this.

Welcome to Racking Up Rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections, can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans, nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs are just looking for “motivated sellers” to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people-oriented deal makers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out win-win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media, this show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio.

Thank you very much for joining me for another episode of Racking Up Rentals. Show notes for this episode can be found at www.thoughtfulre.com/e72. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button in your podcast app, it does make a big difference in helping other fellow thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs who are searching for a community in a message like this to find it. Alright, so onward with today’s episode.

Now most of the time on this show, we talk about philosophical ideas, but very practical philosophical ideas about the pursuit of real estate acquisitions, by working directly with sellers using a very relationship-oriented approach seller financing, and all of that good stuff, because that’s what we love. We don’t talk too much about simple mindset ideas, but I do have one I want to share with you today. And I got this idea from a guy named Ed Mylett. He’s got a podcast called the Ed Mylett Show. And in that podcast a few different times I’ve heard this metaphor mentioned. Now, Ed is a very experienced, extremely successful businessman. And now he is kind of developing a very rapidly a very strong brand as a kind of a thought leader and a person who helps inspire others and just provides great perspective and clarity. And he has this metaphor about a thermostat. And he says that the temperature of your life is like a thermostat. So here’s what that beats. Let’s say that your current level of success in this metaphor is what you’ve got the thermostat set at on the wall just like a thermostat at home. And you say, “Hey, I want it to be 70 degrees in the house”. You set the thermostat. And if you have heat and air conditioning, then what happens when the heat starts to drop below 70? Well, the heater kicks on. And it warms it back up to 70 degrees. And what happens if the temperature starts to rise, and now it’s suddenly about 73? Well, the air conditioning then kicks on and it cools the room back to 70. So the thermostats job is to keep the temperature of the room at the setting where you have set it with very little variance. Well, in this metaphor. It’s like saying that in our lives, we have set the temperature for the life that we think we are supposed to have, right? So let’s say you set the thermostat of your life at $100,000 per year income. The truth is that that thermostat will keep you at $100,000. If you start cooling off, and it starts dipping below that the natural inclination is your brain and everything else your heart will jump into action and they will warm you back up it will tell you hey, you need to work harder, you need to work smarter, you need to work better, and you will warm back up to that average of right about $100,000.

On the other hand, let’s say you start heating up a little bit and things start going really well. And you’re making more than $100,000. And suddenly though, what can often happen is that our minds and our hearts and our voices in our heads can then start creating a little bit of self-sabotage. And it says, hey, look, who are you to be making $150,000 a year, we both know you’re $100,000 a year kind of person. And then there’s this cooling process that will then bring you back to your average temperature, again. So this is a it’s a very realistic metaphor, but it’s also very, very dangerous, because it means that we are intentionally keeping ourselves stuck at this thermostat temperature, this thermostat, state of life that we defined for ourselves, whether we did that consciously, or subconsciously. So in our life, as real estate entrepreneurs, there’s lots of examples of this, you know, I just mentioned, I’m $100,000 per year lifestyle kind of person, if that is your self-image, that’s where you set your thermostat, and you will pretty much stay right at that level.

I remember saying to myself, I’m a single family, one-to-four-unit kind of guy. I wasn’t saying that consciously. But later, when I deconstructed some of the beliefs I had for myself in my life, I realized, yeah, I see myself as a one to four unit kind of person, I didn’t see myself as necessarily being capable of doing bigger projects than that, or new construction projects or buying 10 unit buildings or commercial buildings, I had to consciously identify that and change that thermostat setting, you might have something on your thermostat that says, I buy existing properties, and I fix them up, I don’t do big projects, I don’t do structural work, I don’t build new things from the ground up. I don’t buy single family homes that are more than $500,000, there might be kind of a deal size or a project scope, element of your thermostat setting. In your mind, you might continue to make kind of humble, but self-deprecating types of comments in your mind. Like I’m a rookie, I’m a small fish. I’m not one of those big players. And that’s okay, I’m a part time real estate investor, I don’t have what it takes to be a full-time real estate investor. And these are all just different ways that we set the thermostat in our life, especially as it relates to our real estate endeavors. And even if we try to kind of get past that, and heat up to a higher temperature, we can’t really seem to do that. So the question, of course, becomes, are we stuck at this thermostat setting forever, is the 70 degrees setting that I’ve put on my life, destined to be what I’m going to be feeling forever, that is destined to be the level I’m going to be at forever.

And so Ed talks about really two things that you need to do if you want to permanently adjust your temperature setting, right, because it’s easy to sort of temporarily adjust it, you just start, you know, start acting a little bit differently. And here, you’re heating up a little bit, and that’s great. But the inertia will pull you back to where you were unless you permanently change that temperature setting. And it’s really about two things.

The first one is the beliefs that you install, in your mind. My own coach, Greg talks so much about the beliefs that we have, and being very intentional and deliberate about choosing those beliefs. And that fits into this idea of the thermostat, too. So if we see ourselves as one-to-four-unit kind of people, we have to become extremely intentional about changing that. Now, that could mean looking at pictures every morning of 20-unit buildings, it could be writing down a statement and affirmation that says, I am the owner of 20-unit buildings, it could be any number of things. But we have to start really being intentional about saying, I no longer believe that I am just a one-to-four-unit kind of person. I believe that I’m also a 20-unit kind of person, I might believe that I can continue to do one-to-four-unit types of deals. But I do that because it’s a choice not because it’s the only sandbox that I’m capable of playing in. So the first step is really to identify what all of these beliefs are that comprise that thermostat setting of your life and then decide very consciously here’s how I’m going to change each of those things. If you’ve been sort of subconsciously telling yourself Yeah, I’m $100,000 a year kind of person and you’ve said that’s good. That’s it’s not poor. It’s not super rich. It’s sort of this comfortable. Six figures is nice Mark, that’s relatable feels like success. If you need to change that thermostat setting to, I’m a $500,000 per year kind of person, then you’re going to really have to be intentional about doing that. How does a $500,000 per year person live? What do they do differently? What do they think? What types of clothes do they wear? What types of food do they eat what types of home or house or cars perhaps do they do? They have start seeing yourself in that exact way. And the second thing, so the first one there is changing your belief system and really consciously deciding which things you need to uninstall from your mind and install into your mind.

The second thing is, is also pretty simple, but very, very powerful. And that’s who you spend time around. Now, we’ve all heard a million times that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. And I hope you believe that I know, I certainly believe that. And this idea relates to that as well. If we want to turn up the thermostat in our life, then we should start spending time with people whose thermostat is set a lot higher. If you’re a 70-degree, life, thermostat kind of person, and you want to heat up and stay heated up and not come back down, you want to reprogram your thermostat for 125 degrees, then you need to start spending time around 125-degree people. And that is not complicated at all. But it can be I will say a little bit challenging, sometimes not necessarily because you don’t know where to find those people. But if your frame of reference is that your current circle is the people, you’re comfortable with, they’re loyal to you, they’re good friends, all of that might be true. However, they are going to be inadvertently holding you exactly where you are now. So I don’t believe it’s so much about abandoning the people who are in your current thermostat level, as it is about beginning to incorporate a lot more people into your life who are at a much, much higher thermostat level that reflects the thermostat level you want to be at. That’s why it’s so important to choose which groups you enter our social media environments are extremely powerful for creating community. But you also can find yourself in a group of people who are not necessarily further along than you. Other people who self-identify as beginners as people who are also figuring it out along the way. And that can be valuable in a certain sense. But it’s also really valuable to enter into circles of people who are playing a bigger game than you. When I think back on my own life, especially my childhood, I think about all of these different examples that have the same lesson to me that when I was playing soccer, as you know, I’m a lover of soccer and I grew up playing soccer, when I was playing in the sort of parks and rec league where anybody could sign up, I was the best player on the team more or less, as soon as I tried out for the teams where you had to be accepted. And you actually had to try out and be accepted onto the team and invited, I quickly became the worst player on the team, literally a team of 18 people, I was clearly the least fit and least skilled player. But that is when I experienced the most growth it wasn’t when I was the big fish in the small pond. It was when I became a small fish in a much more competitive pond that I actually grew as a person and as a soccer player a lot more. And I think there’s so many examples in my own life that I can share with you that I think you will find the same examples as well that you progressed faster when you started spending time in a more challenging environment. And that’s really about upgrading the people that you spend time around.

So my friends, that’s the idea for today. And I want to thank Mr. Ed my lead for this I this beautiful metaphor. That’s so relatable of the thermostat on the wall. So the first question for you is, what’s your thermostat set up? And what are all the things that comprise that thermostat setting? Is it all the things that make up how you see yourself whether it’s your income or what you’re capable of, or what you’re good at any of those things? identify those and then consciously decide how you want to change those? And secondly, start asking yourself how can I enter the circles of people whose thermostat setting is up so much higher than mine? And so that I can I can benefit from being around them seeing how see how they think and feel and let some of their self-image of being 125-degree people rub off on me. That is it for today’s episode of racking up rentals. We’re getting your mind working on a mindset topic today, not just the skills of real estate entrepreneurship because both are so important.

Again, show notes for today’s episode are at www.thoughtfulre.com/e72. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button would be so appreciated. And if you would rate and review this show just real quickly, doesn’t have to be long or eloquent. Just a rating there and a couple words would be super, super helpful and very appreciated.

Did you know that we have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs? We do and you should be a part of it. It’s called Rental Portfolio Wealth Builders and we would love to have you join us there. Just go to group.thoughtfulre.com and you will be taken right to that page we can hit the Join button. If you liked this episode, please take a screenshot of it to post that screenshot to Instagram and tag us. We are @thoughtfulrealestate on Instagram. I will see you in the next episode.

Until then, this is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to Racking Up Rentals where we build long term wealth by being win-win dealmakers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.

It is also important to make sure that the patient does not suffer from any allergies when increasing the dose. Like all medical treatments, it is advised that you use Cialis in a low or medium dosage.


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