Dr. Joe White is a nationally know, Author, speaker and business consultant. Joe has a true entrepreneurial spirit and it has allowed him to join the ranks of those entrepreneurs who can boast that they have never worked a 9 to 5 job throughout their adult life. His professional experience has quite varied Dr. White has sharpened his skills in several capacities. From serving as CEO and COO of million dollar companies, to speaking on stages across the country.
In 2001 he started a real estate investment company buying and selling houses through out North Carolina. In 2005 he took to the stages across the country selling his Real Estate Course “How to Make 5,000 to 10,000 a month wholesaling real estate”. The course taught the successful strategies he learned and developed on buying and selling properties with little to no money down while running his company. During the 2005 lecture tour, he was asked to be the keynote speaker at the 2005 graduation of the Breakthrough Bible College in Temple Hills, Maryland. Where he was bestowed with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters during the graduation.
Sault after for his advise and insight by business start ups, celebrates and large corporations. For over 20 years he has served the entrepreneur community. Launching events like The Triad Entrepreneur Pitch Tank the number one business event in the Triad area of NC, serving on boards such as Benaiah Holdings Group a OTC publicly traded venture capital firm and serving as the NC reparative for CEO Space International, the business conference ranked #1 in the world by Forbes and Inc. magazine as” the conference entrepreneurs can’t afford to miss.
Dr. White is also the co-author of The Best selling book Concrete Jungle Success Strategies for the Real World, which also features best selling author and star of the movie The Secret Bob Proctor. Dr. Joe White is currently avalible for business consulting, real estate investing coaching and speaking engagements nationally and internationally. With topics ranging from Business Strategy, Goal Setting, Real estate Investing and Entrepreneurship.
To Book Dr. Joe White or get more information email admin@drjoewhite.com or visit www.drjoewhite.com
Here's the Transcript of the Interview
Hugh Ballou: Welcome, everybody. The Nonprofit Exchange is about goals today. I am attending a conference and have a little bit of noise in the background. While our guest today, Joe White, is speaking, I will be muting myself so there is no noise in the background. I have known Dr. Joe White for a number of years. He is an expert in real estate. He is also an expert in leadership and goal-setting, among other things. About a year or so ago, I asked him to participate in my Nonprofit Leadership Empowerment Symposium and teach the module on goal-setting. He was so good it was better than me doing it. I invited him to come on the Nonprofit Exchange and talk about goal-setting. Joe, we have shared one of your books, the anthology, but I believe you have a book that is more about goals. Feel free to talk about that book. Joe White, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange.
Joe: Thank you, Hugh. It is good to se you again.
Hugh: We have our co-host Russell Dennis who is having some technical issues, but he will be on here to ask you some really hard questions later. He is streaming it live to Facebook. Dr. White, would you tell us about yourself, especially your background working with leaders and setting goals?
Joe: Hugh, one of the things I always tell people that is unique about me is I am a person who has never had a job in my adult life. In not having a job or set occupation or set system, I pretty much had to figure out goals and systems and things like that at a very early age. What made me make that decision was when I had my first kid. I was thinking to myself without an college education, What can I do to mak sure my first daughter had the type of life I felt like she deserved? I knew entrepreneurship and business would be what I needed to do. I quickly started reading. I still to this day go through about four books a week. I study everything from business to entrepreneurship to real estate to religion to spirituality. I use all of that information and put it into different systems I use to help myself and my clients. I have been doing that since the age of 16, 17. I always had some way of making income that I would create myself just basically out of my head. I did real estate for a number of years. I took every course you could probably think of, every boot camp, workshop. Quickly made a million dollars in real estate. Switched from real estate to mental health for a while. Then I started doing speaking, consulting, and things like that, working with clients around the world, helping them be better in the areas of entrepreneurship and real estate investment.
Hugh: That’s more than I had previously known about you.
Joe: It’s something a little different.
Hugh: Absolutely. That is why I invited you on today so we could learn some more about these different areas of expertise. Let’s talk about this topic of goals. Everybody writes goals. Very few people accomplish goals. I wanted to hone in on this particular piece because I have seen you teach this before. Why have you gravitated to this as one of the topics that you teach?
Joe: I think that one of the things I feel like I am known for is making things simple for entrepreneurs and businesspeople because every business has its own language. If you were to go to Spain or Mexico and you didn’t speak Spanish, you couldn’t get a lot accomplished. What I try to do is make things simple. One of the first steps I think everybody needs to learn is how to set proper goals: the foundation of which everything in your business and your life is built upon. I feel like that was the best place to start. I read Think and Grow Rich when I was 14 years old. I have been setting goals ever since. I always learn something new. I am constantly studying. It is not like I learned about goals then and I stopped. I constantly study it. What I did was simplified the major techniques of goal-setting so that the average person could understand.
Hugh: I have seen you present a short lesson on this. Are you prepared to give us Joe White’s overview of setting and achieving goals?
Joe: I am.
Hugh: Well, I am going to be all ears. I am going to listen for a little bit. Russell has been known to take notes and come back with a really hard question, so be prepared.
Joe: I’m ready for you, Russ.
So Hugh, what I will tell you is the system that I use for goal-setting, I call GPS. Just like you have a GPS in your car or on your phone, the purpose of the GPS is to guide you from one point to the destination you are looking to go to. I feel like GPS was the appropriate title for what I consider to be my goal-setting system. That stands for when I do that. When I say GPS, in this particular case, GPS stands for Goals, Purpose, Steps. Sometimes I interchange “system” with “steps” because sometimes we go through the steps, and sometimes we put a system in place in order to get what we actually need to get.
What is a goal? It’s something you want to achieve in your life, in your business, in your personal life, or wherever it is. Most people die within five years after retiring. The reason why they die is because if we are not growing, we are dying. If you lose your purpose for life, what I am saying is you are probably going to die shortly after. Now, some people, if they retire, they will switch to something else, whether it’s taking care of their grandkids or going to another part-time job. But if we are not constantly working toward something, it’s like there is no reason to live. Goals are that important to our life. What we focus on is what we get. That is why it’s important to find things that we have to focus on for achievement.
What really makes us happy—and it’s hard to define happiness—is seeing progress. Something about progress in human beings makes us happy or feel fulfilled. If you think about it, why I say that, I’ll give you an example. When we are growing up, most of the time in the house where we live, our mom would mark with a marker over your head how tall you were. You just couldn’t wait every month to see if you had grown. I used to be that small, and now I’m this tall. I was three feet, and now I’m four feet. We would get happy or excited to see that we had grown an inch or two inches and see how tall we got. That was progression. That was a way of measuring progression. We didn’t understand that was almost like goals because a lot of people will say, “I can’t wait to get as tall as Dad or my brother.” We were really setting goals. We were using the notches on the door or on the wall as a way of measuring that and showing progression. That is basically what I’m talking about when I’m talking about GPS. Let’s set a goal. Let’s measure the goal. Let’s put a system in place for getting that goal and knowing if we are on track or off track.
The other thing that I love to tell people about is what’s called goal alignment. This is what I really talked a lot about, Hugh, at your event. Most people understand the basics of goals. What they don’t understand is there has to be a balance to goals. You just can’t have a goal to make a million dollars and not have other goals. I will give you some examples and tell you what I’m talking about. I set goals in every major area of my life. Just like a car has to be aligned, if you drive a car and the car is not aligned, when you start to go fast, the car will start to shake. If you go off the road, you could crash. Something bad could happen because you are going fast and you haven’t aligned the car. The same thing happens in our life when we don’t align our goals.
You have to set goals in all the major areas of your life, not just in the financial area or the weight loss area. You have to set goals in your physical area. The reason why that is important, and I will give you examples on how goal alignment works in each of those areas, is if I don’t set a physical goal to exercise and take care of my health and go to the doctor and get checkups, if I am working on these financial goals and my business goals, and I get sick or have a heart attack or something else, all of those goals now crash. Then my #1 focus will have to be on my health, so I have to have health goals.
In my spiritual life, I have to have spiritual goals because a lot of times that is where fulfillment comes in, that is where balance comes in.
My family life: if I don’t take care of my kids, there are so many people who are wealthy who have problems with their kids where their kids are on drugs or whatever is happening. The kids are getting in trouble. When that comes up, now you have to take your focus off the business and money and build those kids. They are in trouble because you didn’t make taking care of your kids or teaching your kids part of your goals.
Part of my goals are physical and spiritual and family and friends. I don’t know about you, but I know we have all had a situation with a friend where we say, “I really need to call this person,” and then something happens. The friend passes, God forbid, and you feel really bad because you feel like you didn’t call that friend or family member before they passed. We have to have goals in the friend area.
We have to have goals in the spouse area. How many people do you know who have been successful in business, and then they get a divorce and lose it all or lose half or lose the focus? Now later on they are regretting it, “I am enjoying the money, but I wish I had a better relationship with my wife or my kids.” There has to be goals in every single area of your life.
You have to look at where these different areas are, where these different roles and responsibilities lie. I am a father, I am a son, and I am a business owner. You have to set goals for each of those. If you don’t, what happens is you are going to have a crash in another area that will take away from you achieving those goals. That is what goal alignment is, and that is why that balance is super important. A lot of people don’t think about that when they think about goals.
The next thing is the P. Do you have a question, Hugh?
Hugh: This is good stuff. You got my attention when you said people die five years after they retire. That is why Russ and I never retire. We keep pushing the inevitable later and later. This is so good. People set goals without the realization of what is the benefit. How is it going to benefit me in my life? You talked about that a little bit. Go ahead. This is extremely valuable stuff.
Before you end, I want to focus on personal goals and corporate goals. We are leading a charity, church, or synagogue, so those are organizational goals. Very often, we don’t write personal goals. Then compare the two. Let me not interrupt you any more. This is really good stuff. They can comment. Russ, is your audio working yet? I don’t know if his audio is working yet. Are you there?
Russell Dennis: I’m going to try. Can you hear me again?
Hugh: Yes. Glad you’re here. Just know, Joe, that he is capturing sound bites in his brilliant way. He will have a chance to come back with questions. Russ, if it’s okay, we’ll let him finish his presentation part, and then I’d like to throw it to you for a few questions, if that works for you.
Russell: That will work.
Hugh: All right, Joe, go on.
Joe: Those are called areas of management. Everybody has two main areas of management, which are the personal areas of management and your business areas of management. Each of those areas has to be aligned. You want to balance out your business area. What are the key elements in business that make you successful and set goals in those areas? What are the key elements you need for your personal life? Set goals in those areas. I used to think, I only need a business goal or a sales goal or a money goal. But I quickly learned I had to balance all those areas in business and personal.
Going to the P in GPS, the P stands for purpose. It is your why. I can tell you about setting all these goals, but it doesn’t make a difference if you don’t have a why. The why is the gas in the tank of the car. It’s what makes things go. If I tell you, “Don’t touch the stove,” we would tell little kids not to touch the stove, the first thing they say is, “Why?” “Because it’s hot.” Maybe they don’t understand at first, but the moment they touch the stove, they quickly understand that it’s hot. That is the motivation, the why. Why don’t we run red lights? Why does everybody stop at a red light? Because you will get a ticket. That motivates us not to do it. We have to understand with anything we’re doing what’s our why. Why are we doing this? What feeling, reward, are we going to get from actually achieving that goal? That is going to be the motivation for us to act. If we don’t understand that why, we often don’t achieve the goal.
One of the most average, normal goals that everyone wants to set is how to lose weight. The problem becomes a lot of times the why isn’t strong enough. The why isn’t more powerful than the ice cream sundae. Sometimes we have to do a deep dive within ourselves and figure out why we want it. Sometimes it’s not important enough to us. We’re okay with where we are. Sometimes people don’t go after that goal. We definitely want to build a strong why.
The S is Steps or System. If you remember before there was GPS, everyone would pretty much have a map. We would get these maps from the gas station. How we would gauge if we took a trip to Winston-Salem, where I live, to Orlando, Florida, where Hugh is now, is we would look at the map and see the different cities along the way. I would see in an hour and a half I would be in Charlotte. Then I’ll be in Georgia. Then I’ll be in Jacksonville. Then I’ll be in Orlando. That was a way of us gauging we were going in the right direction. Sometimes when my GPS screws up and it sets me on the wrong road, it will reroute me back the right way. That happens to us sometimes, too, when we are doing goals. We start going the wrong direction, and we have to reroute ourselves to go back in the right direction.
I’m saying all that to say if we have a goal to lose 30 pounds, we want to plan stops along the way. We want to say, “Okay, in one month I am going to lose ten pounds. Month two I am going to lose pounds. Month three I am going to lose ten pounds.” When we gauge or check, we know we are headed in the right direction. If we’re not, we know we need to do something different. We need to exercise more or diet more or whatever it is we need to do. But that is just a way of gauging if we are going in the right direction.
The other thing is systems. A lot of times you don’t have to think of everything yourself. There are systems already in place created by other people that allow you to just plug and play. I am a big fan of systems. I listen to Dave Ramsay and use his budgeting system. There are different dieting systems. If you think about a company like McDonald’s, every Big Mac at every McDonald’s tastes the same way. That is because they have a system in place to make it the same no matter where you go. There are systems in every area of life that you can plug and play that will help you get the result you are looking for. Again, that goes back to that why. If you don’t have a strong enough why, you don’t move forward in the systems and actually do the things you are supposed to do.
Questions, Russ?
Russell: Good day. Thanks for joining us. Can you guys hear me okay?
Hugh: We can.
Russell: Excellent. I love the GPS. It’s really a good direction. We rely on these for our cars. We rely on them to keep us going the way that we’re going. It’s important to put the right information in the GPS, so the why is really critical. How long have you been using the GPS system, and what sort of success have you had with the people you work with in explaining this system? It certainly sounds like something that people, once they hear about it, get.
Joe: I have been using it for five years. I use it a lot of times on projects. I have a lot of clients I work with. Some are celebrity clients. I am working on projects, whether they are movies, television shows, major real estate projects, or projects for hedge funds. Pretty much, even though they are all big strategic projects, some are small or some are up to ten million, the premise is till the same. There is a goal they want at the end: if it is a movie, to get the movie made; if it’s a TV show, to get the season filmed; if it is a real estate project, to raise the money in order to buy the land. It’s the same process, GPS. I have used that process with major clients to regular people.
Russell: Do you find that people who work with this system enjoy using it? Whether the results they have gotten using the GPS system as opposed to what they have tried before.
Joe: What I find is that people like things they can relate to something else. What helps us understand something is when we can say, “Okay, this is sort of like this.” When you can say, “Okay, I get it because I can think of a map and destinations and directions. It’s pretty simple.” The current project I am working on is for a large television show with a celebrity who has been on TV for years. We use the system for funding and getting the project done. We had great results and raised half a million dollars. I am using the system now with a former NBA player. He is raising five million dollars, and we have had great progress. We are still in the middle of it. I have used it for myself for years.
I used it also on my kids. I don’t tell my kids what to do anymore because they are all in college, but I coached them. This is one of the things I coached them on. What are your goals? What type of grade do you want to get in this class? How many hours do you ned to put in? How much do you need to study? What do you need to study in? Things of that nature. I am working on my daughter now who is taking the bar. We are using GPS to get her prepared for the bar. Her goal is to pass the bar and start to practice law. So far, we are having great success with her as well.
Russell: The thing with this system that makes it so beautiful is that it’s simple. But it can be deceptively simple because of the concept. Have you found people that stumble with it or just stumble grasping the simplicity of it and applying it to their goals?
Joe: I think that goes back to that why piece. Most things to do with success are easy anyway. We all pretty much know what we need to do. If we need to lose weight, we know that we need to move more and eat less. What stops us from doing that is not having a strong enough why. You want something that you shouldn’t have more than you want the results that you want. I don’t think it’s so hard; I think the discipline comes into anything you want to achieve. Anything you really want, there is an element of discipline. I always think about people who pray but never take any action. There is a funny story I heard about a woman who wanted to win the lottery. She would get up every single morning for a year and say, “God, please let me win the lottery today. I hope I win that million dollars.” She kept doing it for a year. By the end of the time, He said, “Listen, lady, I need some help. At least buy a ticket.” Often that’s what I find a lot of people do. They don’t buy a ticket.
Russell: When people come to you, they probably have gotten to know who you are. When people come to you, where do they typically find themselves? Is a typical person that comes to you someone who is already a high performance person, or do you get people who are stuck personally and professionally looking for solutions?
Joe: I think a lot of people find me when they have vision confusion. They have a vision of something they want, but it’s almost like they don’t know how to get it. I do believe a good coach doesn’t really give you the answers, but a coach pulls the answers out of you that are already there but you just don’t believe that those are the answers. With anybody I work with, from celebrities to my kids, I find they all have the same similar issues. They know the answers; you just have to pull them out of them.
Russell: Okay. I think people have an inherent genius and they get blocked. You talked about the word “belief.” I think that’s critical because I have had blockages. It’s really a matter of what I believe would actually happen. So when you meet a person and they are in that place and it is clear to you that the belief is the problem, how do you approach getting them on track? Seeing the possibilities when they are stuck?
Joe: I think that there is something I use called the power of questions. Anytime there is something wrong, pray first. Then if you sit down with a piece of yellow paper and write the numbers 1-50, I say to write 50 ways to make this happen. Let’s look at the top three ways you come up with and read those top three ways every day. There is something, too, about the subconscious mind. That is when we go back to reading Think and Grow Rich. Normally I fall asleep with it playing on my audiobook, and I will wake up and play it again. Building that subconscious mind, that self-confidence, doing affirmations, redoing it every single day to build your confidence and faith in yourself, and then going back to those solutions that you know you should use and implement them. I was seeing something on Facebook the other day: Motivation gets you in the game; execution keeps you there.
Russell: It is about executing. It is about taking action. For me, I have had to act my way out of these blockages more than anything else. Once you get somebody to believe, do you start on the small scale, or do you just say we are going to go into this at full speed? Do you start at a small scale and build small victories? Or does that approach vary from person to person?
Joe: I think it varies from person to person because different people need different things. I have had celebrities that you would think would be much further ahead than the average person, and they really aren’t. Everybody has different strengths and weaknesses. Most people do a SWAT. What are your strengths and weaknesses? We talk about that. We need to look at if we need to strengthen the strengths or the weaknesses first. That is normally where the first place I start is.
Are you the right person to be doing certain things? There are some things you maybe shouldn’t do. Maybe if you are bad at accounting or bad at money, instead of getting stronger at budgeting, maybe you need to bring in someone who is already strong at that, a CFO or something like that, to handle that particular issue. Everybody we deal with a little bit differently.
Russell: Okay. I think it’s probably better to work from your strengths. Sometimes we can burn a lot of energy working on weaknesses. Do you find that that is a big part of the roadblock? Too much focus on the weakness.
Joe: Most definitely. Recently, I was doing a lot of studying on how to do Wordpress to do my own website development. I felt myself spending so much time on that. I said, “You know what? The time I am spending on trying to learn this, I could have hired somebody and been doing something that actually matters that makes me money.” It’s not that it’s not important, and I like to be able to update it; I’ve got that part. Some of the design, it’s not a good use of my time to learn how to do all of that. I think we all have to look at what things we should remove from our day or remove that we don’t do.
There’s something I call the time-money equation. Is this the time I’m spending off the money I will make doing the major things that I do? If it’s not, I don’t need to do it. That may be cleaning the house, cutting the grass, washing the car, whatever it is. The majority of our time needs to be spent on what h most important things for me to do to make progress.
Russell: That’s a good way to measure. Does the time spent actually pay for itself? Does it pay for itself? Everybody has got a little bit of a different value. Do you tend to move people toward monitoring value? Is it personal core values? How do you help people prioritize that cost and that value, that time spent?
Joe: I think there are different currencies. Sometimes we only speak of money as currency. Time is a currency. Health is a currency. So I think we have to look at what the most important currency is. Do you want to free up your time so you can work on the other areas that we talked about with your goals, keeping that system in balance? Now I am going to stop doing the things that I’m not good at. I’m going to outsource them. I am going to focus on freeing up the currency that is time so I can spend it with my family, friends, wife, or whomever, so I can achieve the goals in those other areas we talked about that are important. There are all kinds of currencies. I don’t want to think money is the only currency. Some people’s goals are not to make lots of money; they want to make enough money to be comfortable but to have enough time to spend with their family and enjoy life. There is a balance we all have to find.
Russell: I believe that people just don’t have money for the sake of having money. What are the things that money are going to allow me to do? That might mean spending more time with family. That might mean vacationing. That might mean providing help or actually spending time working on a cause that is important to them. It’s a little bit different for everyone, I believe. As a group, I know you work with people from many different walks of life. Do you find that people who are what I call difference-makers—my friend Wendy Lipton-Dibner says they are people with the heart space. They are either faith-based or working with a charity. Do you mind that these folks are more conflicted than folks that work in the corporate area, or are the problems universal, regardless of the type of profession a person takes on?
Joe: I think they’re universal. There may be the different currencies they are looking for. But I think it’s universal what they’re actually looking for. Some people in the heart space are looking to make a difference in as many lives as possible. Other people are looking to make money, and maybe they use that money to make a difference. It depends on the individual.
Russell: How common is it when a person is sort of stuck professionally for it to be a personal heart space type of manner? Do you find that most of the blockages, regardless of what they are, can be traced to personal confusion or blockage?
Joe: I think sometimes we want to repeat the same act but the show has moved on. What I mean by that is things change. When you look at commercials that have the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, you will start to see a big change in fashion, but also the energy, how everybody looks. I think every ten years, the world changes. If you don’t change in that ten-year space with the world, you will often get left behind. Then you’re stuck because you’re still trying to use what worked in that ten years in this ten years. I look at some of the changes that are coming up, and I see a lot of people who are stuck.
We have a system where they are doing self-driving trucks. In the next six years, they are probably going to get rid of 60-70% of truck drivers. We get self-driving cars. We have screens on restaurants that are going to be taking orders. If you are still trying to drive a truck, and 70% of the work is gone, then of course you are going to be stuck. I think what happens to people that we are not adapting.
One of the blogs I am working on writing right now is what would happen if you got fired today? It’s one of the reasons I am really big on entrepreneurship and why I love working with entrepreneurs. There is not the job security that we used to have. So many jobs are going overseas, technology. I think that we have to adapt with the times. We have to always be growing. Going back to when we were talking about how when people don’t grow, they die. I think that there are a lot of people I come across who haven’t read a book since high school. They spend all their time either working or watching TV.
Hugh: Russ, those are really good questions. I was going to encourage you to make them harder and harder. What Russ and I know to be true, and I have discovered this about Joe a while back, is that we in SynerVision—Russ is one of the WayFinders in SynerVision—reframe a consultant to be a WayFinder, but we also reframe strategies that aren’t working. I would want to know from Joe a couple of things. Russ, maybe you had a couple more and I interrupted you. I’m sorry if you do. But may I ask two right here?
Russell: Go for it.
Hugh: It’s piggybacking on what you are setting up so well. What are some of the things people do that are wrong that hurt them? What are some of the worst practices? You are giving us some best practices. What are some of the things that people should avoid doing? Russ, I will give it to you, and then you can take us out. We are in the last 15 minutes of the interview, so I will let you do a wrap, if you will.
Joe: I would say number one is not being consistent. Sometimes you have the start/stop issue. They start something, they do it for a week or two, and they stop. If you start losing weight and working out, then you stop, of course your body will go back to where it was before, and then you are starting over. When they start over, they get discouraged or they can’t find that same why that actually motivated them the first time.
The other thing is to listen to people who don’t have their best interest at heart. A lot of times, what happens is when you start to make progress in your life, that makes people around you who aren’t making progress uncomfortable. If you can do it, then they have to look at themselves and say, “Why aren’t I doing that?” It’s much easier to stomp on your dreams or tell you you shouldn’t be wasting your time losing weight than it is to actually do something themselves. I think that when we are starting to make change, we have to start to be friendly but not familiar. What I mean by that, even with family, sometimes we have to distance ourselves, or just show up at the Thanksgiving dinner but maybe in between that we don’t talk as much because we are working on our goals. We don’t need anything to taint that process or contaminate it. We need to stay focused on it and we need to stay consistent.
Russell: Some people won’t lift you up. It’s hard to leave people behind. I think that’s kind of a common problem. If I change, I am going to start losing people. That becomes a personal challenge that creates an inner conflict. One of our running jokes that I have with Hugh is that when I am standing in a room and I look up and realize that I’m the smartest guy in there, I run like hell and find myself another room because there is that disconnect. I know the work you do has a way to build accountability as part of that system. Do you find that a lot of people make commitments to others they don’t make to themselves? In those instances, how do you help them work around that?
Joe: I deal with that all the time. As a matter of fact, a coach is almost like a paid accountability partner. What I find a lot of people, and I’m guilty of this, too, is we will keep promises to others, but we won’t keep them to ourselves. When you don’t keep promises to yourself, that is actually what starts to kill your self-esteem and your confidence. Now you don’t have confidence in your own word. If you kept breaking promises to your kids, eventually they won’t believe what you say. If you do that to yourself on a constant basis, say I’m going to lose weight or I am going to make $10,000 and it doesn’t happen over a period of time, you actually lose confidence in yourself. Whether you feel it or not, it’s actually happening.
What I believe you should do is either make a public declaration, like going on Facebook and saying I am going to do this by this time, because normally people will say something about it. Or you have an accountability partner who checks in with you once a week, and you tell them what you did toward your goal that week; maybe you do the same thing for them. Or you pay somebody to be accountable to. When I had a trainer, I felt like he was trying to kill me. I don’t know if he had life insurance on me or what was going on. He would ask me every single week, “Let me see your food journal. What did you eat?” That accountability does help.
Russell: I have an accountability coach. Wonderful guy. Hugh knows him. He has become a very good friend: Ryan Roy. The name of his business is Justify or Just Do It. His reasons are results. I think there is a level of comfort that comes from finding a reason why something didn’t happen. Sometimes what we do doesn’t work, but do you find that you come across a lot of people that would rather be in that comfort zone than actually really looking at results? Is excuse-making something that happens frequently?
Joe: I think we all do that at times. We make an excuse as a way of keeping ourselves comfortable, but it’s not getting us closer to our goals. I think that one of the reasons we have to measure constantly is when we measure something, there is no way we can deny that we are not getting results. The other thing is sometimes you have to come up with multiple ways of measuring.
I go back to losing weight because it’s something we can all relate to. I know I want to do it. But I realize that sometimes I would work out super hard, eat right for a whole week, and I wouldn’t lose one single pound. What could happen is I would get discouraged, say this isn’t working, and go eat the ice cream sundae. Then I start realizing, You know what? Maybe what I have to do is measure inches, too. I have to take a tape measure and measure the inches in the areas I want to lose because maybe I’m not losing pounds but inches of fat. Or maybe I’m gaining muscle. One of the things to prevent being discouraged or getting in the zone like feeling something isn’t working is we have to find multiple ways to measure if we are making progress. There are multiple ways to see the growth.
Russell: One of the things that Ryan has said to me is it took me a while to wrap my mind around the idea of celebrating small things. It doesn’t matter how small. It’s celebrate. That’s what I like about your GPS system because you are talking about pulling things apart. That’s what we try to advocate. Pull things apart. Take the larger goal. Pull it apart. Get smaller, more manageable. These little things add up to success. You get momentum. What are some of the ways that you help people build that momentum so that they are actually moving forward and are looking at things that can be measured?
Joe: I think that any time you start a goal, you need a springboard. You need a way to have at least a small succession in a short period of time so the motivation stays high for you to continue. I go back to losing weight. It may be that you have a week where there is a cleanse or a fast. It’s a little simpler to do, and it gets off three to four pounds. All of a sudden, you kickstart everything. When I am teaching real estate, I give my students a kickstart course, which is a simple course with four to five simple instructions that allows you to go out and see progress instantly so you are motivated to continue.
Russell: That’s it. Sometimes it’s hard. We have to look back. That’s the beauty and importance of making instant win. When somebody hasn’t been doing things, they start working with you and they’re not stuck, but you go a week and they are just on fire. You talk to them a few days or a week later, and they don’t just have a list, they start off with a list of three things. The next time you talk to them they have War and Peace in front of them. How do you help them manage that process? Does it go from one thing to the extreme to the other? They’re enthusiastic; you don’t want to dampen that. But how do you reel that in as it were to keep somebody from overextending themselves?
Joe: That’s the catch. When we were first talking about GPS, we talked about setting goals in multiple areas of your life. They have to crash sometimes. Something happens in the personal life because you didn’t set a goal in that area. All of a sudden, you can’t focus on the business life. Or something is happening physically because you didn’t set goals in that area. That is why those crashes come up. If you align, that doesn’t happen as often.
What I mean by that is if you think about a lot of pro athletes who didn’t study finance, all of a sudden they get a contract with millions of dollars. Life starts to go fast, and now you see all those other issues. They didn’t focus on their spirituality, so issues come up. They didn’t focus on learning their financial piece about money, so now they start having money problems. When they leave the NBA or NFL, they’re broke. They didn’t align everything, so when life starts to go fast, a crash happens.
We have to balance out all those areas in our life and set goals in those individual areas from financial to physical to spiritual to family to spouse to home to auto. When I have my system in place, I have home, auto, style, fashion, everything because there has to be a balance in there that all of these things are important to my life. If I neglect them, there will be a consequence at some point in time. That’s the crash: the consequences from not actually balancing everything out. It’s simple, but it’s complicated. It’s simple because all you have to do is sit down with a piece of paper and say, “What do I want in my physical life? What do I want my health to be like? What do I want my relationship with my creator to be like? What do I want my relationship to be like with my kids? Am I once a week going to take my kids on a date?” Sometimes couples do date night; what about your kids? Have a date night with your kids where you are going to take two hours once a week to spend with each kid because you are going to have two to three kids and not know them as individuals. You have to have that individual time as well. Or what about your spouse? After being in a relationship for so many years, you start to be more like roommates than lovers. There is no romance. That’s because you didn’t set a goal for that to happen. You didn’t focus on that, so it didn’t come to fruition.
I saw Hugh on his birthday, and he was out on a date with his wife at a concert. Go, Hugh! That’s GPS in the works. It worked. Keeping the juices going.
Russell: I’m just wondering if he said to her, “Honey, you should probably drive because I’ve had a little bit. Because of my age and mental condition, I’ve forgotten my way to the theater.” She probably said, “Turn on the GPS.”
Joe: That’s probably exactly what happened.
Hugh: My wife taught me harassment is a form of affection. I’m getting some of that now.
Russell: I only torture people I love. Speaking of people that we love… What happened to me is I said I was going to do some things. Your family may hear some of these grand ideas and schemes and go, “Ah yeah, there he goes again.” There could be a little skepticism from those who are close to us. It’s easy for a bachelor like me, but if you get somebody that is married and they have a family, sometimes that natural resistance that we have within ourselves, it comes from people around us. What are some ways you help people address that? That is very real. There is a lot of pressure with children, spouse, and other obligations.
Joe: I believe every new ideal is born drowning. When you first come up with something in the first few minutes, the moment that you come up with it, it’s best not to share it. It’s better to fully develop it. Someone could say something negative, and it automatically starts to kill that dream because you haven’t fully completed a vision. If you are going to share that idea, don’t share it with anybody who is going to say something negative right away. Go to your support system. Go to your mastermind. Go to the people who are going to tell you how to make it happen, not the people who are going to tell you what could happen if you start to move in that way. I always believe if I come up with a great idea, I don’t even want to share it. If I come up with a new book idea, there are certain people I am not going to share it with, except for a Hugh or a Russ who are going to say, “Joe, you should do this with that,” and they start pouring into that idea, breathing life into it, giving me positive feedback.
Russell: That’s important. Use the support systems that are available and keep it moving. Hugh?
Hugh: I have a contrasting perspective on that. Sorry there are people being loud around me. My A of SMART goals is accountable. I find there is power in sharing it. I find motivation in like you said, Joe, when you write a goal and people go, “Let me connect you with some people. I can help you with that.” That is one powerful way of motivating ourselves with our goals, by sharing it. Another one is what Russ brought up, sharing it and people go, “You’re going to do what?” I call that motivation. Watch me! There is a twist on that piece. I think you can win.
We are coming up to our last five minutes here. Russ, do you have any more questions? Or do you want to let Joe do a final tip or piece of advice for people?
Russell: There is a lot. I could spend all day asking questions. But I would really love for Joe to put a nice bow on it and talk to people because they face all of these doubts. As I said before, their system is deceptively simple in the concept of its intent. Taking that initial step, taking that initial step no matter how overwhelmed you are. I would love to have you talk to people about how they can do that, how they can fight that fear and move through that.
Joe: Going through the system like you said is really simple. Figure out what you want in your goal. Hugh spoke briefly about SMART goals. You could easily, and I’ll be happy to put a link up to a SMART goal sheet people can use. SMART goals is that the goal should be specific, measurable- What is the A, Hugh? I forgot.
Hugh: Accountable.
Joe: He said it before. Accountable. The goal should be realistic and time-sensitive. I will put up some SMART goal sheets on my website that you can use when setting your goals. I like to keep things simple, and that is why I came up with GPS. Know your goal, know why you want that goal, and know the steps to getting there. Simple steps. If it’s five steps or ten steps, whatever the steps are. One of my goals is to help 100 people make $10,000 in real estate investing. To anyone who is on the actual podcast, if they will go to drjoewhite.com/freegift, I am going to put up the SMART goal sheets. I will give them a book on actual goal setting, and I will give them my free real estate kickstart course. That is quite a bit of stuff. Drjoewhite.com/freegift. They can have all of that stuff if they go there.
Russell: I put that link up in the chat. That’s great stuff. That’s wonderful.
Hugh: We’ll make sure that link is in the notes for the podcast and on the page for the Nonprofit Exchange at thenonprofitexchange.org. We will put those links on that page.
Russell: Yeah, I’ve got it in the chat here. This is wonderful stuff, Joe. I love your system. I am going to go have a look at that. Love to talk to you a little bit further.
Joe: Most definitely, Russ. I am here to help anybody I can. I enjoy helping. I think service is super important. I want to serve and be a servant and help in any way I possibly can. We all have some things we want to achieve. We all want to be better. I would just say to everybody that now is the time. If not now, when? That is what I always ask people.
Russell: Now is the time. Hugh?
Hugh: Time is now. The time is now. Russ, those were really good questions. Joe, I teach goals, but like I said earlier in the broadcast, Joe did this module in my workshop in Raleigh. He did a better job than I do teaching my modules. I wanted to have him here to do that. When Russ does a module, he does a better job than me. One way I look really good is surround yourself better than you are, which is what Russ talked about earlier. Joe, thank you so much for being a guest today. Russ, thank you for being my co-host in this and crafting such great questions. Joe, we will put your information on the podcast and on the site. Thank you for the offer and the free gift for people.
Joe: Thank you, Hugh. Have a great trip and a great time in Florida.
Hugh: I’m loving it. Thank you.
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