SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everyone. I'm Nick Stockaberg here with my wife, Dr. Elaine Stockaberg, with another episode of the Real Estate Real Life Podcast. And we are crazy excited to talk to you about something today. It's one of the most important concepts I feel like we share with people. All the time, people come to us asking for help with financial freedom, and we serve people in getting to financial freedom. But living a beautiful life, a whole life, an integrated, fulfilled life, it requires so much more than that. And the brutal truth is that if we help you get financial freedom and we don't help you with some of these other things along the way, you have what's called the astronaut problem. The astronauts that landed on the moon when they came back to Earth. Such a weird phrase. When they came back to Earth, literally came back to Earth, there was a ticker-tate parade, and then they struggled with drug addiction and alcohol abuse and suicide. Because once you've landed on the moon, what else is there? When you get to financial freedom, you need to be prepared to live a beautiful, whole, integrated life on the other side. Otherwise, we know a lot of people who struggle with a lot of negative feelings. Because when you're broke, you have a good excuse to feel bad about yourself. But when you're wealthy and you haven't yet figured out your big why and gotten your physiology in order, and you haven't figured out what's going to wake you up in the morning, that's a tough feeling to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

It's so obvious to see in regular pop culture, there's this belief amongst people of once I get to the other side of financial freedom, everything will be okay. Yeah, we can look at any celebrity singer, actor, actress, whatever. There's so many examples of them. These folks have tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, would never need to work again a day in their lives, and yet they struggle with the work of being a human, of dealing with mindset and emotions and finding purpose in life. The opposite is true as well. There are plenty of examples of people who have very little or living in poverty, or even have taken vows of poverty to intentionally live that way. And yet they have so much richness in terms of knowing who they are, having social connections, knowing the meaning of what they want to get out of their day-to-day life, why they exist on earth. What I noticed over years of doing investor calls is people would have a number. It would often be 10,000 per month. That would be a number I would hear over and over again. There would be this sort of mythical hope when I get to the other side of 10,000 per month of passive income, everything will be okay. My marriage will be better, kids will behave better, I'll be on all these beautiful vacations. And I saw in both directions that people would get there and then they would find some reason that life wasn't good enough. I need to bump it up to I need 20,000 a month.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

If only I had that, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Exactly. But then the opposite was true too. And I realized that there was some theming amongst those people where someone would get to a relatively low floor for passive income. Say a thousand, two thousand per month. Like, truly, the number doesn't actually matter. While they were working on their financial goals, they were working on some other pieces as well. And I think I was so attuned to seeing them because of my background in psychiatry. We would have subsequent conversations and they would say, you know, I thought I would have to hit 10,000 before I would feel the way I wanted to feel, but I already feel so much better. I feel as though I have so much more autonomy and freedom and a sense of purpose and direction. After years of doing hundreds, probably thousands of investor calls for Black Swan Real Estate. I came to see these themes and really see this is a central thesis of what we're going to share today in the podcast. Financial freedom is really the gateway drug. And I've seen that so many times in our communities and other communities when we go to conferences, talking with other people. People come into this world looking for financial freedom, optimizing their income, decreasing their taxes, something related very tactically to the numbers. And they think that's the answer. And I'm grateful for this concept of financial freedom because it's the gateway drug. You better be sure. Like Nick and I spend a ton of our time working on helping passive investors, increasing their passive income. We believe that everyone should have financial security, financial freedom, but it's really just this ticket to this bigger world when you cross over that threshold and you realize that financial freedom is what welcomed you into this new way of thinking. That's when you realize that those are the real riches. The numbers are so much less important than the mindset and the other downstream ways of thinking that come as a result of being focused on financial freedom. The first thing that happens is people realize that you can't have financial freedom without working on your mindset. If you do, you get that situation where you keep moving that goalpost. You keep finding ways that it's not enough. And it's not because you're a bad person. I truly believe that everyone is trying their best to make sense of the world and of their life, unless you've worked on your mindset and found ways to incorporate abundance and affirmations and break through limiting beliefs and old disempowering stories and work on setting goals and time management and all of these things that make the day-to-day feel a little bit better. Whatever number is in the bank or on the balance sheet or flowing through the checking account each month, you'd find ways to be unhappy with it. That's just the wiring of the human mind. You'll hear me speak about that in the podcast now and in the future, that we have no resistance to the wiring of the human mind. We just say, yep, this is just a pattern that's seen amongst most humans, regardless of age, gender, upbringing. These are just common patterns. And recognizing them for what they are and saying, hmm, how can I recognize that pattern and make sure that I don't fall prey to it as well? I truly believe that you have to couple mindset work with the work toward financial freedom. Otherwise, they just fall flat.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

And even worse than resetting the goalpost is sabotaging yourself, which we tragically see very often, where people kind of suddenly, spontaneously get that goal and then they do something consciously or subconsciously to unwind it or to get rid of it because they don't feel like they're worthy. A huge portion of what Elaine does with her coaching is just helping people understand their incredible value to themselves, to their family, to their community, to the universe or God or whatever they believe in. And somewhere along the line, they also figure out that they're missing a critical set of skills. Elaine calls it skill set, and it's a yawning gap when you sit down and say, Okay, I believe in myself. I think I'm worthy, but you don't, for example, know how to hire someone. It's very likely that if you need to hire someone to mow your lawn or to help take care of your kids or to hire an employee in your business, that this could be one of the most important skills you could ever master. It's not a skill that they teach you in school. And so you could believe in yourself and say, I believe that I am worthy of not having to mow my own lawn or scrub my own toilets, but you lack the skill of how to find amazing people and manage amazing people in your life to help you get the things and the freedoms that you want. Well, there's going to be an upset. There's going to be a mismatch. So a huge part of what we teach is not just believing in yourself, but knowing the hard skills that are needed to communicate effectively with people, to communicate effectively with your spouse or your children, or to communicate with yourself. Communication is one of the most important skills that you can have. If you're trying to get to financial freedom in real estate, just believing that you are worthy is definitely not enough. You need to know how lending works and how to get a great term sheet on a loan and how to underwrite a deal if you want to buy a property or how to understand what real estate private equity fund to invest in if you're wanting to be a limited partner. These are hard skills and affirmations, mindset are not enough. In fact, they can even set you up for disaster. That's something that we believe in very passionately.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Absolutely. You have to connect the mindset and the belief to that way that you create real value in the world. That's the skill set piece of it. The next piece that I see is folks had spent a lot of time working on their mindset. And I define mindset as things like goal setting, visioning, time management, delegation, affirmations, working through limiting beliefs, telling oneself an empowering story. That's the basket of how I define mindset. But then people would find that they were carrying some really negative emotions. Maybe these came from childhood, burnout at work, exhaustion, or a difficult relationship that was causing emotional strife in many areas of life. All of these things are normal, right? All of these things happen to us as humans. And yet it can be very hard, if not impossible, to stay focused on, say, your goal setting or your time management, utilizing your resources well, focusing on the future, telling yourself an empowering story if you're carrying this chip on your shoulder that you may not even know is actually there. Right? It has become a part of your inner narrative that you don't realize the weight that you are carrying day in and day out. I call this heart set. And it's the idea that we want to be heart-led people. Our mind can only get us so far. Our mind is this beautiful tool. We are so blessed to be gifted with it. And yet our heart is what gives us that sense of intuition, that sense of inner knowing, and they must be working together. If our heart is struggling with feelings of doubt, letdown, burnout, anger, hatred, or shame, that's a big one that comes up for many people. Shame, guilt. If our heart is struggling with those things, it makes the mindset work so much harder, right? You can still get through the mindset work and have massive accomplishments there, but it's 10, 100, 1000 times harder if the heartset piece isn't also aligned. You're seeing this kind of trajectory that people will go through. They'll enter into this world tactically through the lens of financial freedom and realize that without mindset, financial freedom becomes almost impossible because the goal just keeps running. Then mindset alone is not enough. And so that's where I've developed this framework that includes skill set, mindset. We just covered heart set. And next up, we're going to cover body set and soul set.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

Fundamentally, something you figure out when you go down this whole mindset journey is if you don't have your physiology in order, nothing else is really possible. If you have your health, you have a thousand dreams. If you don't have your health, you have one dream, and that's to have good health. If you're hungry, tired, exhausted, low energy, it doesn't matter if you have all the best affirmations, or even if you have the skills, you're not going to be successful. And Elaine and I today were privileged to be able to meet with a personal trainer five days a week at an amazing gym and have nutritious food that's provided for us. But it's so much more than that. Something incredibly simple that we learned very recently in our life, just in the last 10 years, is that you have a lot more focus early in the day. Your testosterone levels are higher. You are less susceptible to distraction and operational noise in your day-to-day life. And you should probably do your hardest things or make your hardest decisions first thing in the morning when your physiology is at a peak. You should probably start your day with some gratitude. I walk outside first thing in the morning and go in our woods, even when it's like 20 below zero. And thank God for another day where I'm breathing, where I get this amazing abundant life. I love on my kids. I do a little bit of prayer on the drive to work, and then I tackle the hardest problem of my day. And like Jeff Bezos, he doesn't make a tough decision after 1 p.m. It's this profound of an effect. Your body, your physiology has such a huge impact on your judgment and your ability to make good decisions that you probably shouldn't make big decisions after 1 p.m. This was new technology for us, and I can tell you that we live with 10 times more energy than we did before we started living into these concepts. Until you have your body set, until you have as much vitality, health, energy as you can possibly have, none of these other things matter, but you often don't figure it out until you've started to master these other concepts and you physically feel that gap.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

Bodyset is also about feeling the way you want to feel in your body for whatever you want to accomplish with that time period. I know as a psychiatrist that most Westerners have very few words to describe their emotional state. They might have words like happy, sad, glad, mad, tired, excited, very limited vocabulary, just the way of the world in Western thinking. Yet when we expand that vocabulary, when we're assessing how we feel and saying, what is my body set right now? And developing more language around that, right? We want to be like Eskimos that have dozens of words for the word snow. We want to have dozens of words in our emotional language repertoire so that we know exactly what it is that we're feeling at any given moment. But more importantly, we know what it is that we want to feel as we go into whatever the next thing in our day is. And this can be very near term. Let's say you're a physician and you are about to go in and deliver some bad news to someone. You would want to create a calm, centered, grounded presence where you can show up in that room, you can stay composed, and yet you can keep your heart open, you can connect to the people there, you can absorb any of the emotional energy that's happening in that room. And they leave with a sense of maybe I'm really scared about what the doctor just shared with me, but I feel confident in them so that you can create that body set. Conversely, maybe your next thing is you're heading home and you're gonna have a joyful evening. Maybe you have young children at home and you want to show up and be playful. You want to be the golden retriever of parenting. So you need to shift your body set. You need to shift your energy very different than mindset thinking. And you would want to know, okay, what is it that I want to feel in my body as I cross into that garage and I lay eyes on my children for the first time? How do I create that energy in my body? You do this for all of the things that you're experiencing throughout the day. You have many versions of yourself that show up in different meetings with different people under different circumstances. That is a life well lived. That is a life lived with intentionality so that when you get to the end of the day, number one, you don't feel like you've been pulled in every which direction, right? You feel as you intentionally showed up as versions of yourself the way you wanted to for the wide range of human experience. And then you feel as though you got the juice out of life, you got the marrow out of life. I find that when people really focus on their body set, their life may actually look the same. If there was like a little drone camera following them around for a month, the tactics of their life look the same, but they feel more connected and present to themselves and to the situations around them, that they're getting so much of the value out of life. That is body set. The final thing I'll say about body set is I like to say our minds and our hearts live inside of our body. Our minds and our hearts live inside of our body. We can spend innumerable resources working on our mindset and our heart set. Yet if our body set isn't right, if we're frazzled, nervous, angry, unsure of ourselves, exhausted, whatever you name it, your mind literally in neuroscience based, your frontal lobe does not function at its highest capacity. So then you're using the much more primitive parts of your brain, you're literally behaving like a lizard or a bird, and then wondering why you're not getting what you want out of life because you're not using your human frontal lobe, because the wiring has gone offline. Versus if you keep yourself really present and grounded and aware of your body set, you still feel these things. You still feel exhaustion, you still feel hunger, you still feel sadness, but you're aware of it and you have an intentionality around it. You keep your frontal lobe active. That's what allows you to tap into all of the wonderful, beautiful things that you're working with in your mindset. It is not as though in skill set, mindset, body set, heart set, and soul set that one is better than the other, that we're reaching some sort of crescendo. It's that they all work together as a comprehensive operating system for the body and they support each other. So when your mindset's in a good place, you can work on your skill set. When your body set is aligned and strong, you can activate the things that you're working on in your mindset. Then the final component of this framework is soul set. Soul set is the thing that makes it all worth it. This is distinctly not a religious paradigm. It applies to all of the world traditions, agnosticism, atheism, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you feel as though you are connected to something bigger than yourself. You feel as though there is a reason and a purpose for your existence on this earth. You weren't just plopped down to endure getting through 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years on this earth, but that you have a reason for being here. You have a community that you're connected into. You have a sense of purpose. You understand your unique gifts and perspectives and the things that you can offer the world. Conversely, you see the beautiful things that this world can offer back to you. For Nick, it's going out and being in our woods in the morning. It might be traveling to amazing places in the world and seeing new experiences and new cultures and new foods for you. For many people, this is where they bring in their faith tradition and their connection to a higher power. Soul set is the bow over everything that takes our human experience and elevates it to something more. We are more than just animals. We are more than just sophisticated monkeys that can use tools and have language. There's something about us as humans that separates us from all other living beings. And it's that connection to that greater sense of purpose. And that's what you find in SoulSet. I find that Soul Set is this like beautiful icing on the cake that makes everything worth it. But then it's also this like reserve of energy and gas in the tank that when times are tough, you realize there's a reason for everything. There's a reason for the challenges, the setbacks, the hardships, and it keeps you going.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Again, this is not a religious concept. Elaine and I are students of top performers. And a very interesting thing, if you look at the last hundred years of Nobel Prize winners, exceptional performers, like five or seven percent of all Nobel Prize winners don't believe in some sort of higher power of God, universe, mission, creation, whatever it is, there is something there. And you can have an amazing body, an amazing soul, an amazing mindset. You can have financial freedom, but until you see your greater role in the world, whatever that means to you, until you lean into it, you're not going to be happy, you're not going to be satisfied, you're not going to be fulfilled. The amazing thing about all of this is it works in reverse. As Elaine alluded to at the beginning, the financial freedom, that's the gateway drug that gets people into the whole mindset, body set, heart set, soul set ecosystem, that world. But once you master soul set, these other things come so easily. Once you see that your physical body is a gift, that if you put your hands on your heart right now, just put your hands on your chest and feel your heart beat, I'm doing it right now, like you did nothing to do that, to make that happen. This is a gift to you. And once you live in gratitude for that, you realize that you have to take care of this body that's been given to you. If body sets a challenge for you, it suddenly becomes so much easier. And you realize that every moment of your life is a gift. All of a sudden, that time orientation, that skill set, that becomes almost effortless. Elaine and I, we had the privilege to eat this really beautiful brunch for her birthday here this past weekend, and we just sat in gratitude at this amazing meal, this beautiful moment, and the reality that it's just a gift. It's just a gift. The tragedy is that so many people can't accept that uh gift with gratitude, that they get in the way of God or the universe giving them everything they could possibly want. They sabotage it, they think they're not worthy because there's a gap in the mindset. If they could just accept that gift, they could have everything that they would possibly want. And once you truly internalize that truth, you get financial freedom effortlessly. You get new levels of health, of mindset, of heart set that you didn't even think possible, there's an unlock that happens. My hard close to you is if financial freedom is a gateway drug that goes into this whole greater world, there is such a beautiful, abundant universe waiting for you on the other side. And if you feel like you've had to push and grind and fight your way to financial freedom, it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that hard. When you learn these other skill sets, these other pieces of the puzzle, the money can come effortlessly, my friends.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

My hope is that you see here about 20 minutes later that what started as this gateway that almost always comes from someone thinking about their financial freedom leads to so much more, leads to so much richness, leads to a deeper, more centered, present, grounded human experience. That's what makes it all worth it, right? None of us want financial freedom just so we can have a big balance sheet and look at it. None of us want to be Scrooge. What we really want is this big, beautiful life with people that we love, doing experiences that are both calming, interesting, but also exciting and novel, having a sense of purpose, having a sense of connection, feeling good in our bodies, that financial freedom is just that gateway that leads into this. And this is the real prize. This is the real richness. All of this I've captured into a framework that I've trademarked over the last year called the All Set Framework. This comes from my years of studying as a psychiatrist and doing therapy with many people, working with. Hundreds of investors over the past many years building a business, investing, leading our employees, and the coaching work that I do inside of Freedom and Legacy Blueprint MD, all of that came together into this concept of the all set framework. I believe that mindset is not enough and that we trip ourselves up if we solely focus on mindset because we need these other dimensions of ourselves to really live out that full human experience. That's the all set framework that we presented here for you today. Skill set, mindset, heart set, body set, and soul set. I'm hosting a live workshop on April 23rd and 24th at Noon Central. That's April 23rd and 24th at Noon Central, a live Zoom workshop. We'll dive into these concepts with even more detail. And participants will have a personalized workbook. You'll assess yourself for where you are in each of these domains and make a plan to move the needle in your life. Whether this is a brand new concept to you, you've had some ideas of these things before, wherever you land in that spectrum, there will be something in those workshops for everyone. I warmly invite you to attend. I'm personally excited about this because it's my first time really bringing this Allset framework to our broader community. And I'm excited to share this work. I believe that it is so impactful, perhaps one of the most impactful things that I do. And I'm excited to bring it to the world for the first time. So I invite you to join us live April 23rd and 24th at noon central. You can register at allset.mykajabi.com forward slash all set workshop. And we'll make sure we have that link in the show notes here as well. Please do register even if you're not able to join us live, as the replays will go out that same day, and you can catch this great content in the replay as well. Again, we'll have that link for you to sign up here in the show notes. Would love to have you share with a friend who you think could benefit from this work. The most beautiful thing about doing this work is doing it in community. I look forward to seeing you there.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Thanks, everyone.