Month: April 2017

April feels like it’s been the fastest month of the year so far. Chris and I have taken on and set up two new SA units this month and doing all that whilst keeping on top of everything else, it has felt like we’ve been non-stop hectic busy!

This week I’ve been studying a webinar on TIME from one of my non-property mentors (Peter Shallard – The Shrink For Entrepreneurs – if you’re curious to know about his work feel free to PM and ask me). The underlying message and actionable hacks are great so I thought I’d share a couple in my end of week post. So, the webinar was explaining how poor performance, stress and unhappiness comes from mismanagement of time.

I’m sure you can all relate to the sentiment that ‘busyness’ is often regarded as a sign of self worth i.e. people believe it establishes them as ‘worthy’ and we tend to use it to brag eg, “oh I did a 15 hour day yesterday”. I admit, I’ve been culprit to this many times, but its not big and it’s not cool. We have to learn to reframe this and develop self awareness around time.

If you’ve taken action on the advice that Rob and Paul give to do an audit of your time and what you get done, then you’ll know the powerful insights that can be had from doing that exercise.

Do you regularly tell yourself you have no time get things done? In the webinar I was studying, business psychologist Peter went on to explain how our brain lies about busyness. In other words there is a difference between how we think we spend time (the story we tell ourselves) versus the reality. That example I gave about the “15 hour work day” is a prime example.

We all have 168 hours in a week, here’s a deeper look at that week timeframe:

168 hours in a week

-50 hours for work = 118 hours left

-56 hours for sleep = 62 hours left

The average person has 62 hours to allocate to what matters!

By doing a thorough time audit, like a ship’s log book, to look at how we spend our time, it gives us power insights and aha’s like the following:

1. Time for “Personal life” is typically under-optimised in terms of not actually doing the things we think we want to do or love doing
2. Task switching, travelling can be super costly to our well being (i.e. our productivity and therefore impacting our emotional health)
3. Four hours of true “in the zone” working per day is outstanding and can be planned for. (If we go into a day thinking we will do eight hours of awesome work we’re probably being unreasonable with ourselves)
4. Most people need less unwinding time than they think (but to have none is a disaster)

Looping back to my super busy April, absorbing this insight on time has been, well very timely. In addition to the aha’s above, I have started to implement the DONE LIST at different points throughout the day. This reality based log serves to help me feel good about what I got done, but also remain realistic about how time has flown past and not beat myself up about it.

Bit of different post this week but this stuff has been helpful for me so I thought be may help some of you out there. If so, then great.

One other thing I learned on efficiency- we should never open and read emails unless we are also committed to responding to them at the same time as well.

This week’s post draws directly on borrowed inspiration from my daily dose of Darren Hardy (yes I’m a huge fan). Darren’s message today really resonated with me because each of the key points he mentions has direct parallels to the journey Chris and I are on within the Progressive Community.

Here are the 3 key principles of how the rich get richer:

Seek the best coaches, advisors and counsel that you possibly can

• I showed some appreciation for mentors and advisors in the community last week and this little video further reinforces our investment in time and resources to be working with some of the best coaches and advisors. Chris and I are hugely grateful to be working with such coaches and we’re excited about the growth journey supported by these people.

Find and immerse yourself in a network of high achieving relationships and associations

• Voila – look no further than these brilliant groups of like minded entrepreneurs creating wealth in property. I worked at growing a property portfolio for years on my own outside of “employed J.O.B time” and it can be very lonely. Working with a great business partner in Chris and within communities like this is massively accelerating the results vs the previous years in isolation.

Learn the specific strategies and systems that power the best in the world in becoming the best in the world

• Since joining VIP our bar of ‘normal’ has been raised significantly. Prior to joining, I  remember reading about successful investors in the pages of YPN – stories of people who were leveraging exciting high cash flow strategies and doing big property deals. I would be reading those stories inspired, but thinking, “how am I going to jump to the next level and accelerate growth from a few BTL’s and HMO’s?” Now, with help of the courses we have selected and the mentorship, Chris and I are implementing strategies and systems that are helping us build a solid property business with multiple revenue streams (i.e. the cashflow of the SA division, and the longer term profit creation from development, conversion and flip opportunities in the pipeline).

Having completed one year of VIP we have grown tremendously and we are eagerly commencing year 2 in the programme. If Chris or I can be of any assistance based on the experience we are building up then feel free to PM either of us and we’ll be happy to help where we can.

Here’s the short video from Darren Hardy as I thought many of you out there might appreciate it too.

http://dd.darrenhardy.com/stop-whining-five

Have a great weekend.

The run in week to Easter has been both thrilling and challenging!

On Tuesday our Development Discovery mentorship group met for our monthly meeting- great timing for us to be together as it was also the day that we finally completed on the purchase of our development site. We are all extremely grateful to the efforts of our mentors Alan and Pauline and for all the group’s contributions, particularly Neil.

We are hugely excited about the journey ahead to develop 11 luxury apartments.

Tuesday’s learning continued into the evening with great presentations at the Edinburgh PPN from Pauline on their HMO Freedom System and Osmaan Sharif on Rapid Transformation. Osmaan gave a succinct insight as to how our mind works in relation to our goals, and if you’ve ever done Wealth Dynamics, he shed some new light on this to help play to our strengths.

As the week progressed Chris and I forged ahead working on growing our SA portfolio. I’d like to say thanks to Chris P for his guidance over facebook this week, and in particular a big thanks to our brilliant mentor Paul for his time on the phone to help guide our SA strategy whilst on holiday with his family.

It’s been a rollercoaster week and we approach Easter ready for a little rest and celebration.

Happy Easter All

Hope this finds everyone well putting the finishing touches to a great week. This post is coming to you from Edinburgh airport in the final few minutes before my weekend flight to Northern Ireland (N. Irish wife you see).

As a quick summary from our Adaero SA business this week – Chris and his team put in a big shift to upgrade the bathroom of our latest property, just in time for us to welcome our first guests on Tuesday.

We’ve had a full on sourcing week looking for the next addition to our East Lothian portfolio. Slim pickings out here but with hard work and perseverance we are confident we will steadily grow. There is some light at the end of the tunnel with a few avenues starting to emerge. There is a even a possibility we may do a little SA JV into the North of England, watch this space.

Whatever you’re up to this weekend, have a great one, and keep on persevering.