Episode 062 – Job vs Financial Freedom, What is Financial Freedom? What it is not, what blocks people from achieving it, overcoming these blocks, why Dr Ro pursued Financial Freedom and more

Harms: Hello it’s Harms here and welcome to another episode of the Seekardo show. 

Today we are talking about this amazing phenomenon that is financial freedom. That’s a big topic more specifically I will be focusing on what stops someone from going on to achieve financial freedom. 

In the past you may have been presented with an opportunity in order to learn or implement a set of actions that will lead you towards this amazing phenomenon which is financial freedom, you may be currently experiencing that opportunity or it may appear in the future and often it does appear in the future. 

So if we can clear the things that are holding you back or holding the people around you back from embarking on this journey of achieving financial freedom, which is 100% achievable, that’s the aim of today’s podcast. 

Ro I know you’ve been teaching people how to become financially free for decades and taken them along the pathway and that route and then actually seen them come out the other end completely financially free, transforming their lives. 

So, over to you and I think a good place to kick off would be to define financial freedom.

Dr Ro: Can we broaden this to not just financial freedom but to anyone embarking on a new venture in your project, stepping off your career or somebody starting a new business so that it really tackles the broader reaction that people get or the emotional blocks they have around that?

Harms: Absolutely because that also adds another word into the mix, which is financial transformation.

Dr Ro: Financial freedom or security is the ability to create an independent income, passive ideally, which can be a mix, finally leading to passive where you have sufficient external income coming in on a monthly basis to allow you to step back and not have to work. It covers your basic expenses business. 

Let’s say somebody needs £2850 per month or dollars, to cover their expenses. If that was coming in actually they wouldn’t have to go and work, that’s essentially the base level of financial security, financial independence or financial freedom.

Harms: Most people are used to operating within a conventional system. You get educated, go get your degree and work in the workplace. Can you open up the subject in terms of a definition for somebody around the topic of trading your time for money because that also may resonate with some people.

Dr Ro: We get indoctrinated at a young age, we get brainwashed to believe as you and I went through this particularly with an Asian background you get a certain level of education, study very, very hard and then you go get your qualifications.

What does that allow me to do? That will allow you to go and get a really good job. Great thanks, what will that allow me to do? You can get a really good job buy a home, you can have kids and a family you can have a car and have enough money occasionally to go on holiday and by the way you get weekends off and as you get older you put your money towards a pension so that when you work for 42 years what you can then do is retire. 

What does that mean? 

Basically you then don’t have to work right. I’m not working now though. I know but you’ll work for 42 years so then you don’t have to work again. So then I can go travelling and climbing and all those adventures. 

Well, not exactly because by then you’ll probably need a Zimmer frame and you might need someone to push you around. But at least during those 40 years you’ll have the odd weekend off and you might have to work evenings occasionally and sometimes your boss may ask you to actually work weekends as well. 

But just stick your head down, work and study, do your exams and that’s what you’ve got ahead of you. We’re sold that.

Harms: That’s what most people are living so if you’re listening to the words financial freedom, financial independence, financial security so that’s just a frame of reference jumping off point because most people come to you Ro to learn how to become financially free. 

They’re actually in this race that you just write this pathway A to B. 

I’m going to retire when I’m 65, maybe 75 by the time they get there, at which point they’re going to have no energy. They will be tired. Tired of 40, 50 years in the workplace.

Dr Ro: I got sent a video from a young man called AK who is one of the people who came through one of our property programs and he said I was literally going day-to-day feeling ill, stress, anxiety, frustration, anger. He used the word anger. He was functioning in a very well-paid job, but wasn’t happy and that explodes chemically in our bodies. It makes you feel ill.

Harms: On a spiritual note we have one life and I think people forget this on a day-to-day basis, but we have one life and we’ve got to decide what we want to do with our 40, 50 years.

We have high-energy and the ability to work and to do things that we want to do.

Dr Ro: You talked about choices. 

There is a great film in pursuit of happiness, that word happiness if you speak to most people I just want to be happy. If you think about it, that’s often what people say. I just want to be happy and when you ask them what that means they describe this lifestyle which actually monetarily means you’ve got to be financially independent to achieve it. 

People aren’t pursuing their purposes in life because they are caught trying to function to pay the bills. 

The concept of financial independence is providing yourself with an additional income which comes on a monthly basis and it’s sufficient to say you don’t now have to go and work all those 40 years to achieve the same thing. You can retire at 20 as you do, how old were you when you left your career?

Harms: About 26, 27.

Dr Ro: I came through it a bit later.

You’re not going to have to work for anyone again for the rest of your life. For most people that happens at 65 years of age or 70 now. 

Any single human being can achieve it, and it doesn’t have to be just one vehicle it could be multiple sources of income, but the underlying principle is you provide yourself with enough income be it multiple source of income through property, online businesses and all those different rates of income come into a bank account and actually because it’s there it covers my expenses. 

It has different great gradients to it, but the fundamental is time.

Harms: What the difference between working in a job or a career versus pursuing, learning how to and implementing this process were talking about financial freedom is very much in the financial freedom realm you could live on a daily basis doing the purpose your passion, whatever it is you want to get out of life, but you don’t have to trade those particular hours in the day for an income.

Whereas in the job you go and work an eight hour shift and you get paid an hourly wage, if you don’t turn up to work you just don’t get paid depending on what your contract is. Try not turning up to work for a couple of weeks. 

They’ll stop paying you. This is just the nature of the job versus this process. 

The first thing I thought when I heard this concept of financial freedom is what do I do?

Dr Ro: Essentially it’s choosing a vehicle or vehicles that provide you with different sources of income. 

When I started years ago I grappled around looking at lots of different things. Network marketing is a business some people choose as a vehicle, online businesses which you’re very familiar with and you help clients with developing an online income.

Then you have income coming in from buying properties, renting them out and generating monthly passive income. You’ve then got trading the stock market, which is actually more of an active income.

 The concept is you can actually be everything from up completely independent where you don’t do anything outside of just managing the overall business to choosing to be in and out of it, which I think both you and I tend to do. 

It keeps you engaged, and you start to have choices and that brings me back to the excuse people say which is I love my job.

Harms: We are not talking about getting rich quick. Myself and my business partner we teach people how to become financially independent through a process which takes time, work, dedication. 

I would say no more dedication than you would need to put into your job, but then of course, once you get there, I know you’ve used the phrase you do the work once when it’s creating a business you are building a property portfolio once and you do the work once and then you get paid for life. 

That’s the financial freedom aspect of it.

Dr Ro: What I love is people say I want to do something. Trust me, once you get to that stage, you will absolutely find things to fill your life in a different way. You get to wake up and choose as opposed to feeling obligated to go and work in that job and pay those bills.

 Harms: Try to be a full time parent.

That’s another conversation a lot of people say I’m a parent. 

Dr Ro: They are workers who when they get home are exhausted and then try and spend some time with their kids who they’ve had to farm out to somebody else to look after during the day because they’re at work. 

But if you weren’t working then you’d have more time with them, now you could start doing the things you wanted to do and before you know it they’re grown-up.

Harms: You said demystify.

Dr Ro: There is no mystery around the subject of any single person listening to this, if they choose the right vehicles and they put enough time and effort into it they will get there. Some might take longer than others, so there’s no frigging mystery.

What is blocking people?

Harms: What is the number one thing blocking people?

Dr Ro: The overarching block is that people start listening to the conversation in their heads that are obstacles and they pull on pretty much every single resource they’ve ever had of language patterns that stop them going forward to do the very thing they want to do. 

It’s self-taught, negative self-talk. Fundamentally it’s all the bullshit that we tell ourselves about why we can’t do this. 

A child grows up never having any of that; they build it up over time. 

We experience through physical experience, observational experience, beliefs build up in several ways and the biggest and strongest beliefs are ones that have massive conviction. That’s what it comes down to, this constant self-talk and self-sabotage that stops us achieving things.

Harms: For some people also that concept you spoke about may be alien. They may be saying I don’t have any self-talk as they speak to themselves. 

Let’s talk about examples or excuses people pull on the reason, we’ve heard an incredible amount over our time. 

Personally a big one for me was would I be good enough? Am I skilled enough? Am I talented enough to actually achieve this? Am I the person like those property investors who can actually go out there and build a property portfolio?

Dr Ro: As you’re talking I’m just thinking what if we just move that aside and actually let’s start with why people pursue financial freedom, because that has to be the fundamental drive and then let’s put in place the blocks that stop them getting there. 

When people pursue this journey let’s start with rule number one they’re doing it for a reason and then let’s come to rule number two, a lot of blocks stopping them getting there.

Harms: Personal one just linking back to what I said previously, the desire and becoming a full-time parent.

Dr Ro: Were you in the headspace way back then?

Harms: I genuinely was. 

Asian child watching my parents both work didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them, so I had to decide if I wanted to repeat the cycle being in a job I was in railway, unsocial hours weekends, night shift that was affecting the marriage in terms of time spent together. 

Same thing was going to happen with children so being a full-time parent being available, being able to work from home, working remotely.

Dr Ro: I think it’s not about criticism of our parents because fundamentally they didn’t necessarily and weren’t aware they had choices. When my mum grew up she couldn’t go to a property education course even though she might have had aspirations. It was like a head down function, especially after my father died. 

One of mine actually was just being able to wake up in the morning and choose that day what I want to do. 

As a self-employed person I had more choice than when I was in the job, but right back when I was in the job I used to think what would it be like to put my hand on the alarm clock and lie there. I’d always loved to travel and one thing after my father died my mum had a tiny amount of money off the back of his death and she had a choice to put it into bank accounts for us or give us an experience. 

She literally said right, I’ve decided to take you on a trip and we went six or seven weeks around Europe. It was incredible. We had this old Ford Cortina and she drove us round and she decided that she wanted to leave us a memory that would stick in our lives. 

I still remember going through the Alps and looking at the glaciers and I was like, 13, 14 years of age so that gave me this bug, but I remember coming back and then she had to work and work. I kept thinking at a young age why can’t you just drop everything and go and I had this association with work being a block to that. 

So one of my massive aspirations was to choose what you want to do that day and if I want to drive to Denmark or fly to India I can do it because I had that choice and that was massive to me. Travel and freedom.

Harms: There is another underlying one that is alongside parenting . It was very much around the career and job I was in.

I quickly realised five years later that this was not my personality. This was not my natural pull, I was an engineer and very logical. Yes, I could do it but as years and years went on it became less exciting. There’s no fire, so bear in mind once I achieved financial freedom I was way too early to retire sitting on a beach, that never even came to my mind. Instead it was how can I tap into who I am as a person and work on whether it’s businesses, tasks.

Dr Ro: Having time to evolve you as a human being?

Harms: Yes, work on things that fuel me that wake me up in the morning. That tap into the creative side as that’s what I am by nature.

Dr Ro: You couldn’t do that in your job because…

Harms: Because there are policies, processes and systems, time is consumed. You get home and generally the energy that you have after working a night shift and having another nightshift doing seven shifts in a row there’s not much space for creativity. And of course, you want to do the other life things: find a partner, socialise. 

This is the problem with the job when you do have a bit of time you just fall back in front of a videogame, Netflix and that’s it.

Dr Ro: Then there’s that conversation of doing next week,

Harms: Next year and then it becomes that thing I could have done. I had to escape before I got to the point and I was very aware of this.

Dr Ro: Another one for me was the ability to be able to go and treat myself to things and sometimes people are afraid to say it but I actually did want to have the ability to go and stay in a nice hotel. I remember getting frustrating booking holidays to Greece when I was in my job number one for two weeks only.

That used to piss me off. I had to juggle around people on the job. But also stretching to try and get to a three-star hotel and if we went to a three-star then we can spend a bit to go for a nice restaurant. This is what people don’t realise you can have both.

The problem is if you shrink down and condense your life to a certain standard you’ll never expand to grow into other opportunities. I wanted to just go. I’m going to book it and not think about staying there because it’s cheap.

It was actually being able to choose going to a restaurant just to eat the food and not feeling guilty as well for going to a more expensive restaurant or driving a more expensive car because I think there’s a little bit of that in all of us. 

I went through that as some of the family were a little bit resistant to the changes in our lifestyle but I couldn’t keep myself small just because other people had blocks.

Please think about the importance of expanding these ideas and what’s the driving force because without that everything else becomes irrelevant. 

If you don’t have a big enough reason to drive behind it when a block does come up, a negative person comes up, or a negative thought comes up, it becomes bigger than the actual reason so the reason has to be so huge the obstacle is tiny in front of you. But most people do the opposite way round to make the obstacles huge and the reason is it will be nice to have it. People play the lottery because it’s easy.

Harms: For those who are thinking, what is my reason why let’s chuck out some examples that we found over the years that people have shared with us. 

Travel is a big one.

They want to see the world as it is amazing and they just haven’t seen anywhere apart from their town.

Dr Ro: They tell themselves it’s because having the time to travel as well it’s not the money now it’s physical time to go and not have to book. 

Go for three months and enjoy the culture. To spend months in a place you really get to know people.

Harms: On a personal level, I know you’ve done it and we spent 30 days in Thailand. We spent 30 days in Bali and Malaysia, we went to Uganda and there was no time limit on that.

Dr Ro: I got a lovely message from Kelly and she was just saying how it’s a weekday and she’s down at this re-enactment experience where they’re going through and ploughing the land and bringing up natural things out the ground. 

There are kids selling food. I think people are coming into this fair and she’s doing this during the week. If you see her today the lines on the face she looks younger to when u first met her as she’s got the time to do it. 

That’s another big reason for having quality time with people’s kids as well.

Harms: You mentioned spending time with loved ones whether it’s elderly parents, whether it’s children, with their partner what I love to see is when people come to become financially free they come as a couple and they’re just engaged similar to my story, but they want to spend those first four, five years as a married couple together. 

What happens is they get engaged, get married and go back to the job. There are really aspirational couples out there who are like actually as a couple we want to experience life together. We love each other and want to experience life together.

Dr Ro: It can be done and they can enjoy the fruits of the joint work together. 

So when people come to the property course the thing about the property is because it’s just functional. You come into this property course to learn a vehicle. The early questions I ask when it comes to the property course is why? 

I’ve had people say to me I love the fact you wrote a book Dr Ro I’ve always wanted to write a book and then I think back for years and years and years on my computer at the start of a chapter but I never had the time to do it and the minute I stepped back from working for other people I said breathe, be creative now and create this product.

Record this, do this and I think that’s what I say to people, yes you’re coming through a property course, but that’s just a functional vehicle to get you to where you want to get to and it’s that destination that we have to focus on. Then it makes it easy to deal with the blocks.

Harms: We do get people who have worked in their career for decades and they are just tired and they just need a decade off.

Dr Ro: It’s almost adrenal burnout.

Harms: In their circumstances they have this conversation with us and I just need to replace my salary. If you look at the average salary across the UK about £30-£33,000. 

We’re talking between two and £3000 and that’s so achievable whether it’s a property course, stocks and shares, trading, whatever your vehicle is when you put it into context like that to have your energy back, to be able to rest once again after decades of work that’s another big reason.

Dr Ro: Look at us you rocked up at 9.30 set the microphone up and we will probably have a coffee afterwards and then I’m going to head back and my daughter comes back at 2 o’clock, we’ve got our new garden as you know you’ve got stuff going on. Tomorrow’s Friday.

Harms: I’m seeing my mum and dad just heading home and I went to the gym this morning.

Dr Ro: People go, but is it possible? 

Yes. Did we get there easily? 

No. Did we have blocks? 

Yes, but there comes a point where you just have to make the right decision and then you make the decision right. You do whatever it takes to make that decision right. 

That sentence is stopped by one thing and that goes back to our conversation in our heads.

Harms: In your mind, think about what your reason is to achieve financial freedom and have that in your mind, because as we are talking some of these blocks might resonate more than others.

Dr Ro: What has stopped you doing it up until now, and whatever comes out of your mouth next will be the first of several things that you’ve used as an excuse. Let’s not put sugar coating on it. 

You can make excuses, or you can make money, but you can’t make both.

Harms: When I was 25 years old I went to a property course and I was training it Ro and although I was excited about it and I wanted to get there, there was still the conversation happening in my head which was this isn’t really for people like me. I have nobody around me in my family circle, my second family circle who have done something like this who are financially free. 

Everybody I know is working hard so this is not really a thing for me. Then came the conversation. If it was for me would I really be good enough to actually do it? 

It was very much around, would I be good enough was my thing that was appearing at that time and that was a block that could have stopped me. 

It didn’t, but I wanted to kick off with an example of mine because I do remember that going through my head and it was very much because of my family circle everybody just worked hard.

Dr Ro: This is a no bullshit conversation. 

Let’s put them into groups and you set the standard for the first group, the first grouping, let’s call it the stuff we tell us about ourselves. Then we’ll have another grouping which is what other people tell us about why we shouldn’t do it, and then maybe we go to another one, which is the broader information that we hear out there about all the stuff that we’ve heard out in the media, so three groupings essentially. 

Let’s talk about stuff we tell us about ourselves. 

One of mine was that I’ve got a PhD. I’ve worked all my life to get to this point. I spent five years of my degree and then another four years getting my PhD. I climbed the corporate ladder. Can I give all this up? 

Does it feel right to change direction and go in a different direction having spent all this time in my life getting here? 

That was one of my personal blocks. I started to convince myself that maybe I should stay in my career longer. That’s why it took me longer to get to my first training, first property course. Before I got to my first property course, there were very close points to making a shift but I kept saying maybe I should wait a bit longer to see where I can get my career. How can I take my career a little bit further, that was the talk to me. What about your wife? 

What would you say one of hers was?

Harms: For her it does fall into the next category, but for her she had trained to be an accountant so similar to yourself. Imagine being 19, 20 going to university to train to be an accountant in my wife’s case alongside that there’s an additional set of exams you have to do. That’s intensive, that’s university, she had a job as well, and then she was doing exams on the side. 

That’s all put in play and been done over the course of four, five years, so that’s a serious time commitment. 

Again similar to myself she’s creative and accountancy is not the role she was destined to have.

So for her it was like how do I step away from this? I think let’s categorise this as this is who I am and the best way to describe it is this is my identity.

Dr Ro: Think of this as you’re on a ship and it’s a classic wooden ship and this massive mask in the middle and this mask holds the sale and that’s our career, identity and a lot of us will wrap our arms around them and that is our ship. 

We’re attached to it, and these are our blocks and then suddenly the winds blow you in a different direction. There’s an island there in the Caribbean. There are fish and fruits and you say no we need to hold onto this mask, but we’ve got to get to another ship to go and do that with. 

No, I’m going to hold onto this mask and that’s our identity, who we are, the conversation we have about this is why we can’t do it and it becomes a case of you don’t understand I’ve been an architect for this long and we become professionalised in our attitude. 

We can’t see ourselves being a property investor, which is just a label and so what typically I find instead of us pursuing the thing that we talked about suddenly we attach the block to the label of what it means I’m going to be. I’m going to become a professional property investor or trader or an Internet marketing guy, that’s not what I want to be. 

We’re talking about what you want your lifestyle to be. It’s almost like we have to have a job or something to make the transition. 

You’re getting confused here. 

You are attaching a label to the new thing you are doing as opposed to pursuing the new thing.

Harms: I think it is ingrained in us from nursery, kindergarten, primary school, university and that is who we are is defined by the job. If we take this deeper, that’s how you get the validation of self-worth. You sit around a table and we have a conversation so who are you? I’m a doctor. So you’re amazing. Who are you? You don’t have a job? What do you mean you’re financially free?

You’re in between jobs?

Did Covid affect you? No, I’m financially free. From the outside world nobody knows how to label you as that’s what we’re used to doing.

Dr Ro: I get some pretty high level tax people, barristers, lawyers and part of the benefit when you come through a property course they go this guy has a PHD, Harms was an engineer they made the transition, but we never talk about a lifestyle change. 

You can do both as well. 

People say they love their job and they go. I can’t give this up to go and do that. We’re not saying that we’re talking about it’s just a vehicle, so you’ve got to detach your identity and your internal blocks away from this thing that you’re holding onto. 

Stop using this language pattern around you and start to use a language pattern that defines who you want to become in the future because it might be that you’re holding on to this identity and actually you don’t like it. 

So we deflect who we are to what we do. 

You’re a human being. So what are your aspirations? What’s your sense of purpose? What are your core values?

I don’t know. Why? 

Because I’ve been so busy working. Bingo. You’ve lost yourself because you’ve pursued a career and now the job owns you, it defines you.

Even if you love it, to some extent it still owns you.

We’re not saying drop the job if you love what you do but create financial security so that at some point if we have another pandemic or if something happens like my father he became paralysed and couldn’t physically function, he had multiple strokes. Had he had financial security there my growing up years would’ve been completely different, I wouldn’t have seen my mum work so much. 

This is the stuff we have to focus on. It’s the bigger aspirational side as opposed to this little thing we call our job, our identity. This is more about self-worth. 

Have you been kicked around over the past? Have you been abused? Have you had a partner in the past crushed your beliefs about yourself? 

It really does come down to our beliefs about who we are as human beings. I think Harms and I are here to tell every single one of you, you can do this. No matter what your circumstances are, you have the ability. 

When it comes to the property course, yes, there are things to learn and there’s a process and different levels of learning, but everyone can do it.

Harms: Shifting to the next stage, which is the other category, which is one of the biggest in my opinion.

Which is other people putting a block or barrier in various different ways in that route that you’re aspiring to go on. How does this show up and how have you seen this show up in people’s decision making?

Dr Ro: The first of course, and the classic one is your partner. Here’s the thing couples generally do have the same aspiration for what they want. 

They want holidays, the romantic conversation at the beginning and then they get caught into a frigging job which then consumes them for so long and then of course those aspirational conversations stop because it’s functional now. Taking the kids to school, I’ll do this, what about that bill? 

When was the last time you chatted about a holiday? 

We’re too busy, we don’t have the time for that. I do believe if anyone has a negative partner it’s not that they’re not aspirational it’s just they’re not aspirational to build a property business or trade the stock market. 

The negative from a partner is the most acidic because it goes right into our heart. That’s the one person I wake up with, the person that I trust that I would give my life for and help me father or mother my children so it hurts us most because we want them to be completely behind us and they are telling us you’re doing? 

You’re going on that property course, why? 

You can’t do that and then they start to reinforce category one, which is our beliefs about whether we can and can’t do it and that’s what concerns me. 

They can actually magnify a concern that we have. We might have a little seed there that maybe you and I if we were talking to somebody, could take the seed out of the ground, but if we don’t get to them the partner that’s negative comes in waters that weeds and that’s how it grows.

Harms: We light their candle and they say honey, I want to be financially free and I want us to be financially free and then she just blows the candle out or he blows it out.

Dr Ro: With a negative word, sentence or frown. It can be as subtle as that and what happens in the body of the person that is aspirational?

Harms: They’re not smiling, shoulders dropped, they don’t want to have the conversation with us the next steps because now they don’t feel like they have the support from their partner. When we do get to speak to them it’s just reminding them that they’re doing this for their partner for their family. 

They’re not doing this for selfish reasons for themselves, it’s for the four walls that they live in. 

Embark on any of the journeys together that’s always a great starting point or at least certain the starting point of that.

Dr Ro: There is a fundamental challenge here. 

If two people are in a relationship, but their values have now shifted or for whatever reason one wants to grow and the other one doesn’t, that’s a different conversation. If you’re not aligned in that space this will just be a magnifying glass on an issue in the relationship. 

Let’s assume actually both of you do want to, but it’s just fear in the other partner and then they come up with what if we lose money? They go to external, that’s the third category. Then often the partner will use the third category, which is validating it through other sources of information, plus the press the first category which is, you’re not good with maths and you say, that is true. 

There’s all these other factors, it’s just like putting fuel on the fire. 

But going back to your point, if you’re both aspirational you have to hold their hand and tell them you love them and I’m committed to doing this. If not this, then what? 

I think it’s a brilliant conversation to have with any partner, it’s like you are now bringing a solution to the table. But if they’re not going to support you and do it with you at least morally support you. 

You’re carrying that candle and protecting that candle, having the right support around you.

Harms: In the same way that you lead your family’s financial security by turning up to work every day, it’s the same thing, just a different vehicle.

You’re building somebody else’s dream by being in a job because it’s their business.

That’s the difference. 

If we think about our sphere of influence we’ve spoken about a couple in the inner circle. If we take one step out into the next ring we’ve got parents. I’m blessed because when I did the property course my parents were amazing, they supported me.

Dr Ro: You pretty much paid for a lot of it initially with your wedding money.

Harms: Yeah, initially savings and my dad invested into the property business. My parents never put these blocks in front of us, they just tried to guide us but I feel like I’m in a lucky few, because the more people I interact with, the more the parents have a grip on their children. 

Even if they’re in their 30s, 40s and I’ve even seen it in the 50s and the parents have some kind of emotional hold on what decisions the children make.

Dr Ro: A lot of this stems because I think firstborns tend to lean on getting approval from parents whereas second borns are usually rebels, not always. But you’re right we’ve grown up being spoon fed our beliefs and values and we have this unconscious, irrespective if they’re expecting it but an unconscious reliance on seeking approval. 

The problem with that is we become adults and we actually make decisions, or if there is a slight doubt I’ll let my parents know. 

We revert back to being a child because being a child we didn’t have to make certain decisions our parents made for us if we were uncertain our beliefs were weak, and then all of a sudden the kids go. 

Thanks I can do this on my own now. Like my daughter went to her first piano lesson yesterday and the eldest one is going already and on the way down she said she might be a bit nervous. Could you come in with me? 

As soon as she walked in and she saw the piano and she recognised his face because we were doing it online she went you don’t need to be here now you can go. She went in and she was at that point and that’s where we need to be as grown-ups. We need to be able to go. I don’t need to lean on my mum. 

I nearly did it at 35 years of age and I was in London for a property course. It was an American company and I was there and they said mentoring was available but I was like shit let me call my mum and see what she thinks. It was that little bit of shit and that’s what we revert to, we go back to what we know a pattern of behaviour in the past. I’ll check with my parents. 

She has no clue she’s not financially dependent, she’s not been there on a course like that and yet there’s me thinking I’ll call her and luckily that emotionally developed part of me went why?

 We revert to being a child when we feel a little bit weak and it makes it easy for us to go. I’ll check with my parents. 

Then we can wave that banner around and say my mum and my dad said I shouldn’t do it. it’s about taking responsibility, this is a chance to change your life. Take responsibility for it. 

Take control of every decision you make, and that includes the challenges you face, the ups and downs because you’ll get to a point where you’ll be financially dependent and you’ve got to put the work in. we’re looking just for a slight glimmer of validation that maybe our doubts we just want to have them confirmed.

That’s the conversation we should have with our parents. Saying mum and dad you’ve worked all your life. I remember you saying you don’t want that so if I carry on doing what you’ve done and I adopt your way of thinking surely I’m going to have what you had. 

So sensibly why would we listen to our parents, they do not have what we want.

Harms: There are few other categories like social circles that influence us, they use language like property doesn’t work. Or my dad tried this and that didn’t work for him, all of that plays out which leads us to the wider outside the circle, the external circumstances.

Now we’re talking about the Internet, media, and newspapers.

I can be standing there and I can have the same conversation with two different people one person will say there’s not enough properties, the other person will say there’s loads of properties in my area but not enough tenants. 

The other person will say actually there are lots of properties but there’s too much competition in the area. It goes on and on.

Dr Ro: These are all the external validations. 

The classic example, I haven’t got the confidence and not very good with numbers so Harm’s says to them, how about if you’re working say privately with a coach or mentor and they can help you with your confidence and help you look at these properties and we’ll put you through a process of working out how to do the numbers. 

How does that feel? That will be good. 

And then they go to another but my mum and then they go to the next level of validation. What did you mum say? 

She said that her friend tried it and it didn’t work very well. Okay, well did your friend’s mum have any education? No. 

So imagine if you came through this process as a property investor and they say I’ve heard interest rates might be going up. Now they go to the third layer of excuses.

Harms: It’s fascinating because they will work within these categories.

Dr Ro: I love what you say as you say let’s take all those away, what’s the real block? Then it comes out and they might be like, well, we’re having a few challenges. Then it just may be a relationship issue.

Harms: It’s almost never to do with the money, the cost of the training, the price of the training, the actual course all of these are just surface excuses, it’s something to do with the core.

Dr Ro: Or the fundamental fear of failure.

Harms: That just hasn’t come about in them. I’m looking at our little one now who is just over one he is afraid of nothing. He’s chasing dogs four times the size of him. 

We are not born with the fear of failure, so where does it come from?

Dr Ro: We learn it by observation. 

We learn it by a story from an uncle, auntie, your brother or sister, or parents. There’s a point when a belief system goes from an observational belief which is slightly less impactful on our life. 

Maybe their parents had an argument about money and now they’ve got the belief that money is not good, but then maybe later on they have a bad experience with money and lose money now that becomes a stronger belief. 

If then something else happens in a similar vein, then you get a conviction and absolute conviction and now you really believe it. People we meet have built these beliefs up. Failure is fundamentally one of our greatest fears because people don’t want to look stupid to other people and it’s our ego, pride a whole bunch of other things. 

The reality is you can’t fail in something if you learn to do it properly. If you’re consistent and you keep navigating through it. 

There are learning lessons and certain things will go wrong but keep working through it and you’ll get to the end result. 

Harms: If you fail in school you get a bad grade. That’s another place you’re indoctrinated, it’s reinforced.

That’s one area in your job if you fail, you know, the performance review you’re going to get sacked. Whereas the opposite in the world we’re talking about in business in start-ups in a new venture is, the quicker you can fail, the more you can get these failures under your belt, you get to the result. 

If it’s done in a controlled environment where you know what you are doing you manage the risk we’re not talking about catastrophic events.

Dr Ro: A classic example in property people are afraid of getting the wrong price so your first failure point is getting rejections, so we encourage people to go out and put lots of offers that are very low and get used to the no’s, because that’s a feeling of failure. 

Great as you might go through 30 or 40 no’s before you get your first yes. 

The next stage is getting the work right, it might be that you plan to spend £22,000 worth of work, but ended up being 23 and a half so you didn’t fail, you just learn a lesson next time round. I’ve got to improve my maths or allow for contingency. We’re building all these factors in, it’s reframing the way we have our learning experience.

Harms: Another example there for the property investors you’re going to raise money for a deal within the communicating with impact program that we run one of the things we show people is how to raise money for their property business, but as part of that is you go and do your pitch, you reflect, you change the structure of the sequence and you go back in. think of these as micro failures. 

The problem is when most people think of the word failure they think it’s massive.

Dr Ro: Look at trading in order to succeed you’ve got to fail, meaning you’ve got to accept losses with wins, you just mitigate those losses you have stop losses to reduce. You have like 1% risk on your account, all those things are part of it, but the thing is, if you don’t start the journey of learning that all you do is focus on the blocks. 

First of all, when it comes internally, keep growing and start to believe that anything is possible. And yes, you might have some confidence issues and yes, you might feel uncomfortable about numbers or whatever it is or dealing with people, but they are all things that can be developed and evolved and you can work on that.

You can water that part of you, you can start to grow and evolve so never use that as an excuse and realise that whatever you’ve got inside you if you show it externally to people around you the negative ones will use that and reflect it back on you. 

You’ve got to make a decision fuck it, this is who I am, I appreciate there are things I need to work on, I’m not perfect and I don’t need to be perfect, but I do want to make change and grow. 

So what do I need to do to make that happen? 

Stop using that negative self-talk to block it because there will be loads of other people that want to block you as well. Even when you start to get successful there will be people that get pissed off because you’re successful and then you’ve got to deal with that as well. 

That’s another whole conversation about fear of success.

Harms: One of the suggestions would be to relisten now your mind is open to actually what are my personal blocks?

Dr Ro: Negative people I think tackling that category are choosing who you put around you, don’t divorce people, don’t divorce your family, but just filter. I learnt to filter when they said stuff I just looked and thought they’re afraid. 

They don’t have the same aspirations, we’re slightly differently aligned, they can have their opinion but I choose not to accept it. Start to filter those things and don’t allow it to get into the inner circle of your internal chat. 

Almost be grateful that there is a yin and yang and a difference otherwise everyone will be trying to do the same thing and then it gets boring, so welcome the input but you don’t have to take it. Be strong in yourself and filter what you take in internally. 

The last one is those external things. What would you say to those?

Harms: Just cut social media out and have a cleanse. Maybe don’t use it during work hours. Filter the way you use social media but because we’re talking about vehicles that can help you create financial freedom. 

Now the magic with learning a new vehicle is just like learning a new profession, getting a new degree, you’re going to learn and become an expert within this new field. 

The advantage you have by actually going ahead and learning this new skill is when you see these headlines you’ll look at them and laugh as you now know way more in depth beyond the headline, the click bait headline that’s trying to grab your attention, get your click, you can actually see beyond the ignorance. 

Because if you see a headline where there are no more properties for sale in the UK you’re on the ground as a property investor, you know that’s absolute baloney. 

You’ll know this because you’re now an expert in the field practising it, and this is why property investors or traders are actually living the aspirational life you want to live because they’re getting on with it not being distracted or being blocked by these headlines.

Dr Ro: By going down this path association is huge here. Jim Rohn’s great book 7 strategies of wealth and happiness. Your income is directly proportional to the people you hang out with and associate with on a regular basis. 

By going through a property course learning and associating with other people for example, you’ll be around people that actually have different attitudes. They want to go and do it, they’re showing you what they’re doing. 

That mixing and matching with people takes you on a different path. If you want to trade the stock market hangout with traders if, whatever it is associated with the one’s actually doing it, not the ones criticising those doing it or telling you it can’t work. It’s a massive difference in association.

Harms: You now know what financial freedom is depending on where you are in terms of having experienced the opportunity to learn how to become financially free. We spoke about certain vehicles, not exactly how to do that because that’s the elements you’ll learn in order for you to actually get there. 

Then we discussed in detail different emotional blocks in three big categories. 

The internal self-talk those within the small sphere of influence, other people and the wider external world.

Dr Ro: Every single one of you and if it’s not property and it’s not the stock market or starting the business if you’ve just got an aspiration maybe writing a book it might be becoming an artist and starting to create your own art and selling it privately alongside what you are doing, whatever your aspirations are just know that if you’ve even got that seed of feeling in yourself somewhere spiritually there must be a reason why you are having that feeling. 

You didn’t come onto this earth just live and die if that’s a passion go and pursue it. 

The people that you need to have on your path will come to you because you’ve now put it out to the universe that the law of attraction will happen. 

But all the time you’re thinking small and living small you won’t attract it to you, so you have to expand, you have to grow and know that it will happen. Just trust in you and I promise you all of the signs and the right people will come into your path to take you to that destination.

Harms: That’s myself and Ro signing off. We shall see you in the next episode.