Momentum Podcast: 45

Get Comfortable To Create Momentum

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Every entrepreneur I have worked with has been through a period of time in their lives with a didn't have enough resources, we're short on time, and have the cards stacked against them but still came through. For many of us this is in fact where we defined and created our lives.

This is why so many of us put up with being uncomfortable for far too long. There's a difference between being vulnerable, and uncomfortable. When you stop allowing yourself to be uncomfortable, you will have an easier time being vulnerable.

Full Audio Transcript

I'm Alex Charfen. And this is The Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trail blazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off, and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy. And we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution.

Sure, we pay attention to their rules but only so that we can bend them, break them, and then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat, because the only way you lose is if you stop. And we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real.

We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive, human evolution. And we always will be.

Welcome to episode 45 of the Momentum Podcast. Get comfortable to create momentum. This is one of those things that is so counterintuitive for entrepreneurs, that if we are willing to allow ourselves to get more comfortable, we will go faster. If we allow ourselves to do the things we want to do, we will go faster. I know that this is hard to even put together.

Let me start here with this condition that every entrepreneur has been in, in their careers. I've been there. You've been there. Anyone I've every worked with that has created any type of successes, absolutely, been there. We've all been in that condition where we are working our everything off, and we're not creating momentum. We don't have the resources. We don't have the time. We're putting in everything we possible can, and we're just not getting anywhere. We're not moving forward.

Everyone around us is telling us to do something else. We can see a small light at the end of the tunnel, and the rest of the world is saying, "It's a train." But we walk towards it, emerge from that light. And that is exactly where we created our lives. Would you agree?

Do you know that period of your life that I'm talking about? See, that period of your life defined you. It showed you who you were. It let you understand what you were capable of. I'll share that period of life, one of the most dramatic ones, for me.

In the early 2000s, I sold my consultancy. My wife and I went into real estate, and we ended up building up a massive real estate organization in South Florida. We had a ton of property that we owned. We bought and sold hundreds of properties, sometimes a dozen or two in a day. We had couriers that would drive around South Florida, pick up all of our closing documentation, bring it all to us so that we could close as many properties as we were.

In 2007, when the real estate collapse hit, 100% of what we were doing was in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. Everything we had was in the fastest depreciating zip codes in the United States. We hit the wall of bankruptcy. It's hard for me to even say this now. But we had to go into an attorney's office and have him tell us that we were bankrupt, because our properties lost, overall, over 65% of their value. But some of them lost 90% of their values. We had condos that were $180,000 appraisals that, at their lowest, sold for $15,500. We lost everything.

I remember in 2007, right after we declared, the trustee for our bankruptcy wanted me to get a fire-sale price on my wife's wedding ring. When you go bankrupt, you have to turn in a list of all of your property and tell the court everything that you own in the world. Then they tell you what they want you to do with it. You don't own your stuff anymore. I didn't have a choice. I had to ask Katy to give me her ring. I mean, I remember she took it off that day, and her eyes teared up. I went and headed down to the closest pawn shop I knew of. We lived in Boca Raton, so I had to drive a little bit. Let me tell you, the pawn shops in real life are nothing like the ones you see on TV. I had to go to three, and it was absolutely horrible.

Katy and I hit this massive wall. But even though we hit this wall, we could see a tiny light at the end of the tunnel. We wrote a product called the Certified Distress Property Expert while we were in bankruptcy. We started teaching it before we got out of bankruptcy. We had to get permission from the trustee, because it was originally a book that was in the bankruptcy, because there was a contract value on it while he had to try to buy it. We worked nonstop. We had a little baby, Reagan, our 10-year-old was a couple years old back then, I'm sorry, about 1 year old back then. She was with us, and we had to do everything. We were uncomfortable every day. We had to figure out how to eat. Had to figure out how to move forward. Eventually, that company that we started in bankruptcy became the 21st fastest-growing company in the United States.

But being in bankruptcy, being in that period of discomfort, kept me in that mindset for so long. Katy and I were liquid millionaires. I was still driving a 1994 Ford Ranger that we bought for me when we were in bankruptcy, that had over 145,000 miles on it, and had not one ... None of the body panels were clean. Every one had a dent, or a scratch, or something. Because I had been uncomfortable for so long, I just got used to it.

What happened was, we started creating more and more momentum as we started getting comfortable. This is what any of you can do to get past that thought process, that thinking. I had to reprogram my brain after that. I had lived in bankruptcy. I lived with nothing. I had to start getting out of a scarcity mindset. I started wearing the clothes that I wanted, the shoes that I wanted, bought the chair of my desk that I wanted, the actual desk I wanted. These things are really important to me.

We both made sure, Katy and I, that we got rid of the people, the places, the things that we didn't want to be around, that we didn't want to have in our lives. We focused in a way that we hadn't focused before. It created this massive momentum and allow us to grow the 21st fastest growing company in the United States.

Now for you today, where are you dealing with discomfort? Where are you putting up with something? Where are you allowing pressure and noise into your lives? Because here's an equation: The more comfortable you get in your life, the more vulnerable you will allow yourself to be in your mission. I'll say it again. The more comfortable you allow yourself to be in your life, the more vulnerable you will be in your mission.

The challenge for most entrepreneurs is we just see being uncomfortable as somehow being progress, because believe me, it was not comfortable to work our way out of bankruptcy. It wasn't comfortable to do any of those things. I have this imprint in my mind that if the weight of the world is on my shoulders and everything's pushing against us, that I can move all of that and then recover from bankruptcy, which we did.

But I had to let go of that. I had to move beyond that. I had to get out from under that massive weight of bankruptcy and start reprogramming. I did it by reducing how often I'm uncomfortable, because here's the issue. If your days are getting tactically harder, you're building a house of cards. If you're allowing your days to get tactically harder, eventually you won't be able to do it. Here's what self-care means for an entrepreneur, because I tell people all the time, "Self-care is a bridge to success. Self-care is a bridge to vulnerability. Self-care is a bridge to momentum."

Here's why. There's this place in our lives, in our careers. You're probably there right now, where we are pushing ourselves, because this is almost where we live. We're pushing ourselves. We're making ourselves do more. We want to do more. We want to contribute in a bigger way. We want to have a bigger impact. We want to make more things happen. That is a time where the more we take care of ourselves, the more we refuse to be uncomfortable, we will be more vulnerable.

The more we ask for help, the more we take care of ourselves physiologically ... We eat the right foods. We hydrate. We move. The more that we plan in the mornings, the more we have a routine, the more we put in place, the more tactics of reducing the level of discomfort we put in place in our lives, the more vulnerability we have, the more momentum we will create. This is from working with hundreds of entrepreneurs. If everything in your life is difficult, if everything feels hard, if everything feels like pressure and noise, if you don't have help, if you aren't telling people what's really going on, if you're just putting up with stuff trying to create momentum, what ends up happening is, we get pessimistic, frustrated, stuck. We feel constraint. We stop being vulnerable. We stop being transparent. We stop telling people what's really going on.

But the less discomfort we make ourselves deal with, the more we take care of ourselves, the more we ask for help, the more we buffer everything around us, so that we're doing the things we want to do, so that we feel like we're in momentum all the time, then our natural vulnerability goes up, our natural transparency increases. We create near unlimited momentum. Self-care truly is a bridge to success. But here's the challenge with this is that we, as entrepreneurs, take care of ourselves last. We don't pick up on the cues of the wildly successful people around us that are doing this, because the average billionaire will not put up with any pressure and noise that they don't proactively allow into their lives. But the average entrepreneur appears to be in a contest to see how much pressure and noise they can withstand.

If we were to look at the world a little differently, and we took care of ourselves first ... and for you, if you start hydrating, and sitting down and planning, getting clear on what you want ... You understand your numbers. You eat the right food. You move in the morning. You have a morning routine. All of these things, the tactics of lowering discomfort, will create momentum everywhere in your life. It'll also help you with the vulnerability to let you get the help you need, create the momentum you want, share in a way that is genuine, raw, and real so you attract the right people into your life. That is the fastest way to create momentum.

If you're ready for more momentum, and you want to understand the tactics of lowering discomfort, of increasing awareness, of creating more vulnerability, and refusing to allow yourself to struggle with discomfort, go to momentumwebclass.com. It's amazing what some of the people in that course are already doing, the results they're already getting. I'd love to have you take a look at it. Momentumwebclass.com, momentumwebclass.com, W-E-B-C-L-A-S-S. I look forward to sharing with you again soon. Thanks for listening to The Momentum Podcast for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type.

Thank You For Listening!

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With gratitude,

Alex

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