June 1, 2021
Last Updated
Being thankful and changing your perception of your situation is one of the quickest ways to change your outlook.
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Show Transcription:
00:00 Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of RentPrep for landlords. This is episode number 234 and if you’re listening on the day published, that would be Thanksgiving 2018. Yep. November 22nd Thursday. And I know right now as I’m recording this in a couple of days, I’m going to be eating a lot of Turkey and then trying to remember what that word is that starts with t, I think it’s triptafen or something like that. I don’t know. I’ll be dozing off, but before you guys doze off, let’s run some of that sweet intro music and then get to talking about our topic for today’s podcast.
00:33 1,2,3,4 ya ya ya…. Welcome to the RentPrep for landlords podcast. And now your host, Steve White and Eric Worral.
00:34 So it is just me today Eric Worral. Uh, Steve is busy working on the business. We’re busy. We are thankful for that. We’re thankful for our podcast listeners, our facebook group members, our clients, everyone who keeps us busy here at rentprep, running background checks so you get the best tenants in your rental properties.
00:58 So what I wanted to talk about today is gratitude and being thankful. And I thought that this would actually be a good subject for me to talk about right now just because in a little bit of a funky mood to be honest. Nobody slept particularly well in the world. Household last night, baby was cooing, making noises early. I woke up at two and fall back asleep until five and feeling kind of tired, you know, and it was just kind of started the day. But I was excited for today. And as I’m recording, this is November 20th and I spent the last probably three weeks reading up on this book. Really great book, if you guys haven’t heard of it, it’s called Raising Private Capital by Matt Faircloth. He published it through bigger pockets. I got connected with Matt through bigger pockets. And uh, I was excited because I was having a live interview with him on our facebook page. And when we do these live interviews, I use a service called belive.tv and it’s usually pretty good, but sometimes it can just be a little glitchy and you know, took all the time to read this book, prepare questions, you know, send out the newsletter, make sure that people were engaged, try to reach as many people as we can with it so we can put on a good interview for you guys. And you know right off the bat, as soon as I clicked the button to go live, this service starts glitching on me a little bit. I just see my entire face just turned into this pixelated image. I lost all the Christmas in my video. Then I’m hearing myself as I’m talking, so I don’t know if that audio is mixed up or what’s going on. And then about 25, 26 minutes into the interview, it’s going okay. I just wish the video and audio sounded a little bit better. I’m not sure why I was off. All of a sudden my, um, the screen goes blank for my guest, Matt and I can’t see him at all. And I’m sitting there and just like on a live broadcast trying to, you know, make things smooth and work through it. A wondering what’s going on, you know, just feeling Kinda like a dope because you’re caught with your pants down on a live broadcast. Just kind of being like, hey, all right, well we’ll see if matt comes back. It turns out he was never gone. He was there like saying, Hey, I’m here. I’m here. And like people could watch it. Not a big deal, but it’s just one of those bombers, you know, you spend three weeks putting this together, you put a lot of work into making sure you’re reading up on everything and coming up with thoughtful questions and the technology just glitches out on Ya. And when I got off that call I was pretty bombed, you know, but started to do a think a little bit about what we’re going to talk about on the podcast today.
03:19 And I said, you know, what would be a good topic talking about gratitude and being thankful because that’s what, you know, thanksgiving is all about. And wanted to talk about a couple strategies after doing a little research and be honest, a lot of this just comes from my wife who works in psychology, but uh, having gratitude is probably one of the quickest ways to change your perception and your mood. It’s not about necessarily like what people are doing to you. It’s about your perception of what’s happening. You know, the, the world happens regardless of what’s going on. But it is somehow like one person can go through a horrible situation right next to another person and one person comes out of that situation. Okay. And the other person is scarred by it and they’re thinking, woe it was me for the rest of their life. And I wanted to give you a couple resources if maybe that’s something you’re struggling with or you know, you got that self doubt or not a negative internal dialog.
04:10 You know, lately maybe you got some rental projects that aren’t going like you had hoped or some tenants that aren’t working out or who knows, you know, there’s a million and one reasons why you can kind of get down sometimes. And probably one of the best books that I have ever read on this, and I wish I had it in front of me right here because I can’t remember the author’s name off the top of my head, but it’s called Man’s Search for Meaning. Uh, I just remembered his name actually. It’s Viktor Frankl, so if you haven’t read this one yet, I highly suggest it. It’s only like 120 pages or something like that. It’s not a really long book, but this book is about this, uh, this guy who went through the Holocaust and came out on the other side, was suffering an incredible model of loss, whether that was, you know, family members or his own travesties and just horrible memories, but he kind of just created his own system, his own kind of form of psychology to get through these tough times to the point that the guards, right? The Nazi German guards, were impressed with him. They wanted to know how he was able to withstand the amount of pain that he was going through. So that book is a great read for anybody. I mean, I read it and to be honest, by the time I finished it, I, my eyes welled up many times during the book and you think, wow, I, you think that you’ve got problems like imagine going through this and having this guys’ outlook on the other end. So the main takeaway of that book for me is about purpose, right? It’s about having some sort of purpose that drives your life. What is that thing that’s going to pull you through those tough times? Uh, and especially in American culture, American society, I think a lot of times we can kind of get wrapped up in the purpose being, you know, money, you know, or maybe it’s power or some sort of accolade or something of that nature. But, uh, in this book it kind of breaks it down to what true purposes and if you’re feeling that little bit of, you know, what am I doing? You know, like you’ve got these rental properties, things are going well, but it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe there’s more to life than this. I would highly suggest checking out that book. So one of the other things you can do too, if you want to express more gratitude, feel more thankful in your life. And I know my wife is, um, she’s a recommended this to me in the past and it’s pretty simple, but start keeping a gratitude journal. Now, the idea of keeping a journal seems weird to you for whatever reason, there’s plenty of apps that you can now search in the marketplace to a, you know, if you search gratitude journal, but it’s a daily habit of writing down what you’re thankful for. So what it does is it just forces you to kind of reframe some of your thoughts, even if it’s just for a few minutes as you’re sitting down and you’re putting pen to paper or you’re writing it out on the APP, uh, you’re, you’re, you’re letting your brain. No, you’re letting yourself know that there’s things that you’re thankful for. And the more specific you can be, the more thoughtful you can be in this exercise. The easier it is to kind of start shifting your mood because one of, one of the quickest ways to change your mood is to either, you know, take the time to express what you’re grateful for or do something nice for somebody else. It’s really not complicated, right? If we get to these, uh, and I think it happens to all of us to get in those funk. I was in a funk earlier today, I’m like, I’m tired. Uh, all that time getting ready for this interview and the, the technology glitches out and I start getting those thoughts of like, oh, the world’s conspiring against me. No, it’s not like, you know, an interview glitched out for, you know, a little bit and you had to end it early. Not a big deal. Right? So I think, uh, you know, I should probably take my own medicine on that as far as gratitude journal, what I usually do actually was a gratitude text. So I would text my wife every day and I’d let her know something that I was thankful for. Uh, whether it be her or situation, our family work, you know, just something really simple that maybe happened on my computer or whatever it may be. But, uh, having a, a gratitude journal is a super, super easy way to just be more thankful.
08:21 So another one that you can do too is sending out a thank you note. A thank you card. Right? I find that in today’s world it’s much easier to stand out to people by taking that little bit of extra effort of just sending them something in the mail because everything is so easy to text, you know, write an email, facebook message, whatever. But if you take that time to write a thank you card and you know, maybe it’s to somebody that’s had a positive impact in your life, you could sit down, it’ll probably take you 15 minutes and you could write out 10 thank you cards. Uh, maybe a little bit. You longer in time if you’re being real thoughtful about it. But you know, somebody is just gonna get a card in the mail and be like, wow, like that. That’s pretty great.
09:04 So it’s just such a simple thing that you can do, but it’s going to brighten up somebody else’s day. And I think that this time of the year, sometimes we can kind of focus on things such as, you know, food is probably the first thing a lot of people think of when it comes to thanksgiving. Family, travel. Oh Gosh, you know, me and my wife were just talking about each other day. We’re going to be going back and forth between the parent’s houses and the babies, you know, only one years old. Is he going to do all right on naps and is this gonna Happen? Like what about that? And you started thinking about all the negatives as opposed to the fact that you know what, you got four days off, you got time to spend with family. Okay. Good food, good. You know, conversations you can really enjoy this time.
09:46 You can really be present with it and just have just a great experience because it might be a morbid thought to think, but I, uh, I can’t remember what book I read this in, but it was talking about the fact. I think it was Jordan Peterson, he’s a psychologist out of Toronto and he wrote a really popular book, I think it was called the 10 rules to live by something along those lines and he said that his family was clear across the other side of Canada and what he realized is he’s like, I see my parents twice a year and he’s like, they are 60 years old. Average life expectancy is about 80. That means that I’ve got about 40, 40 times left in my life that I’m going to see my parents. So he’s like, I kind of reframed the way that I thought about visiting my family, visiting my parents, and I would try to stay as long as I could. I tried to, you know, be as present as possible and enjoy that time as much as possible because when you’re visiting it’s like when you think about it that way. And especially if you’re somebody who’s, you know, does a decent amount of travel to go see family and you don’t get to see your family as often as you’d like. You know? It can be kind of morbid to think of it in that way, but it’s like you might be on, you know, your last 50 visits with that family member you never know. So you know, taking a moment to just think about those things and even though it is a really morbid way of thinking of it, it kind of makes it more precious and more special to take that time and think about, you know, what really matters. Taken a step back, getting your head out of the fog, the day to day, all of those things that just kind of, you know, create this just fog around us of like thinking that matters and when it doesn’t or that person did that when I was driving and how could they do that? Or Oh my gosh, I’m so tired, or whatever. Those like things that pop up every single day.
11:41 It’s like take a moment, hit the reset button, enjoy life, enjoy all the opportunities afforded to you. I mean, if you’re a landlord, you got one rental property. I mean just think about that. You have a property that somebody else pays you money to live in, like there’s so many people who don’t have two nickels to rub together and you’re providing housing for other people, including yourself, hopefully. So it’s a cool thing that you’re doing. You’re impacting the communities that you live in. You get an opportunity to make a great living arrangement for somebody, a situation that works for them, so be thankful for that. Be Thankful for that dynamic. I know it’s sometimes a thankless job, a, and at times it can feel like it’s not worth all the frustration and headaches, but you got a good thing going. You got a good thing going and hopefully you’re gonna enjoy your Thanksgiving. I know that I am, and I’d like to finish this podcast off just by saying that I’m thankful for you guys for listening. We really appreciate the feedback. We get seen you guys in the room prep for landlords, facebook group, and uh, we just really appreciate all the support and following that we’ve kind of accumulated over the years and we just truly appreciate it and I hope you have a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving.