Tony Robbins famously said that success is 20% strategy and 80% psychology. No matter how good your plan is, if you don’t have the right mindset to set it into motion, then success is still far off. Inviting someone who has the right psychology and mindset in place for success, Monick Halm sits down with Amira Alvarez. With her company, The Unstoppable Woman, Amira has quantum leaped in her finances, making over $700,000 in one year and then onto seven figures. She shares with us the tactical strategies and mindset shifts that will help us get out of our own way, live life on our own terms, and master the art of achieving any goal we set our minds to. Follow along in this episode to know how to quantum leap in your business and more!

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Quantum Leap Your Business To Success With Amira Alvarez

On this show, we usually interview amazing, badass real estate investors, and this time, we have a special guest. She’s not a real estate investor, but she’s definitely badass. She’s the Founder and CEO of The Unstoppable Woman, Amira Alvarez. Her company is a global coaching company helping entrepreneurs, empire builders, athletes, creators, and rising stars in all fields to achieve their dreams and goals in record time. She’s somebody who has quantum leaped in her finances. She went from barely making six figures to over $700,000 in one year and then onto seven figures. This is in an industry where 90% of coaches don’t even crack $25,000 a year, and she’s making seven figures. She knows exactly the tactical strategies and mindset shifts that are required to get out of your way, live life on your terms, and master the art of achieving any goal you set your mind to.

Normally, I only interview female real estate investors on this show, but I have her here because, as Tony Robbins says, “Success is 20% strategy and 80% psychology.” Your psychology is the thing that makes the biggest difference and many people have crappy psychology. They don’t necessarily have the psychology for success. I wanted to invite Amira here to share some of her genius and brilliance to help us all shift in a way so that we can quantum leap because who doesn’t want to quantum leap? Wherever you are, there’s always the next level. Welcome, Amira. I’m happy to have you here.

I am happy to be here. I’m honored that you said, “Come on, even though you’re not a real estate investor.” Thank you. I appreciate that.

We had a conversation. She was sharing this way of shifting around money and finances that would be helpful to bring to this community. I’m super excited. Before we go into more specifics about how people can do that, I would love for you to share your story. How did you go from low six figures to over $700,000 in a year?

It’s still a little bit of a pinch-me experience to tell the story. I’ve looked back on it and I go, “Awesome, that really happened.” A little bit about my background. There are a lot of rags to riches stories. I am not the rags to riches stories. I’m the nice, solid middle-class to quantum leaping your income story. I think it’s important to frame it that way because I was a good student. I was a hard worker. I was a diligent employee. I always did my best. I played life by the rules, “Go to a good school, go to a good college, get good grades and work hard. Dot your i’s, cross your t’s and you’ll get ahead.”

That was my MO. I bought that story. There’s a lot of truth to it. It’s not a complete and outright story, but what I found was I got to a certain level where I had crossed that mythical six-figure mark, which felt good in my own business. Yet, I was working 10, 12, 14, 16-hour days. That whole gamut of work harder, throw everything at it. That was my strategy, to be honest. I was taking all the business courses and I was learning all the things that I needed to do. I kept trying to do it as fast as I could and without stopping. I had this urgency. I call it the spaghetti approach. I kept throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick. I didn’t understand what was going to work and what wasn’t going to work.

Quantum Leap: In business, there are always going to be some challenges. If you’re doing it right, you’re always going to be growing.

At some point, I realized this was not sustainable. I could not work double my hours to double my income, much less five times my hours to five times my income. It was an impossible math equation. I then had to think, “How are the people out there doing it that have the same amount of time in the day?” Everyone has an even playing field around time. How are they doing it? I looked at the Richard Bransons, the Oprah Winfreys, the Beyoncés. There are people out there who are slaying at a totally different level even than me. They’re at such a different level. I thought, “They had to start at someplace. How did they get from here to there?”

I knew that there had to be a better way, but probably most people didn’t understand it because if most people did, we would be getting those results. My way probably wasn’t the way that success happens at that level. I had to do a little flip in my brain because I thought the way I had always been doing it, I bought that it was the right way, that it was how success was going to come to me. Yet, I wasn’t able to get leverage. That’s the first piece. I had some urgency around being overwhelmed and not being able to grow in the way I wanted to grow.

Quite frankly, I went to a seminar and I heard someone on stage say you can make your annual income your monthly income. Normally, all my Spidey senses would go up and be like, “That’s a bunch of BS. Who is this person?” The person on the stage, who I ended up hiring as my mentor, had such clean energy. There was nothing disingenuous about what he said. He then said, “You can be a millionaire in one year.” I was like, “Huh?” I had never conceptualized either of those things as a possibility for me. The first thing was like, “Is that possible?” That was not in my worldview. My worldview was work hard for a long time and then maybe you could have something like that. That year, I made my annual income my monthly income. I made it in two days. That is crazy. I will tell you, that the first year I did not make $1 million. I was shooting for $1 million. I was like, “I’m going to bite a bite. I’ll believe. Sure, let’s go for it.” I made $700,000, I didn’t make $1 million.

Were you sad about it?

The honest truth and I’m embarrassed about this but I share it all the time because it’s the truth. There were 2 or 3 days at the end of the year where I was in tears. I was disappointed. I worked hard. I wanted it badly. I then woke up and I was like, “Don’t be an entitled you-know-what. Look at what’s happening.” I then realized the truth is amazing. I went on to reach my goal and all of that. That was great. That’s where it started.

Often, it is that paradigm shift that makes that big difference. I had a similar situation in real estate when I thought that the biggest thing I could do was take fourplex, get another fourplex, then another one, and then grow. You get the little greenhouse and then somebody said, “You can bring a group of investors together. You can get 100 or 200 units.” I went, “What? Is that possible?” In a year, I went from 2 doors to over 1,000. Quantum leaps are possible when you have that paradigm shift.

What’s interesting about that story is that someone had to tell you it was possible. We’re like horses with blinders on. Our stories, paradigms, beliefs, upbringing, and conditioning keep us looking like this. If we’re open, we’re doing the personal growth, we’re invested in learning. At least I had a mindset around learning, I was appreciative of learning. Someone comes up and says something like that to you, and if you’re open and you’re willing, then it will land. It’s then up to you to execute on it. There are a lot of steps after that.

There are still steps, but knowing it’s possible. It’s partly why I do this show because when I bring women in who are doing incredible things, other people who are reading who didn’t even realize this was possible for them, they’re like, “That’s a thing? Can you do that? That’s amazing.” You can make your yearly income in a month and that’s such a beautiful thing. It’s powerful when that happens. Why do you think many people get in their way?

There are many aspects of this, but it fundamentally comes down to the paradigms or the belief structure, the conditioned thinking that we have around how we see the world. I don’t know if you talk about this a lot on the show or not.

Not so much on the show, it’s something I teach in my courses.

Let me give a little mini-lesson on it to frame it, then I’ll answer specifically the kinds of things that show up for people that stop them. Fundamentally, when we are children, our security and actual life-death survival are based on getting love from our caregivers. These are generally speaking our mother or father, but it could be our grandparents or whoever’s raising us. If that love is not consistent, we know instinctually that our security is at risk because we’re 100% dependent on other people when we are a small child for food, shelter, and safety.

Let’s say you are 5 or 6, you want to play with your toys instead of getting ready to go to school. Your mother, who knows that if you go to school, you’ll be educated, good things will happen and all of that stuff. She’s like, “Hurry up.” The third time, she loses her cool and she yells at you. You want to be playing with your toys. That’s your big desire in life at that moment. Your security person has cut off the love and your map in your mind, “I can’t have what I want because it will make other people mad at me. It’s not just that they will be mad at me, but I will lose that love and my life will be in danger.” It’s black and white, like oil and water. There are no two ways about it.

What happens is that we start mapping these meanings for ourselves and they were useful for survival when you were a child because they taught you how to continue to get love and that’s security but they don’t work as a full-grown adult. What happens is that we stop owning our desires. We start saying things like, “Having what I want is bad.” We have mixed double-binds about whether it’s okay to claim our big desires in life. The stories that end up coming up are like, “I can’t do that because I need to take care of my family and kids. I won’t have time. I can’t do that because my wife will feel alienated.” There are all these rational reasons, “I don’t have time,” but really it’s not, “I don’t have time.” It’s that you think you’re going to lose love, safety, or belonging in some fashion. There’s some fear there that keeps you from claiming what you want and doing the thing that’s going to get you where you want.

If you can unpack that, and this is the specialty that I have, which is helping people see that blind spot for themselves. It is a blind spot. It’s this place where, intellectually, you can see it in other people. You might get the intellectual idea when I describe it here, but for yourself, you’re running a program that you cannot see because if you saw it, you would have changed it, and you would be getting different results. Your results always show you exactly your level of awareness and your belief structure. It requires someone to help you see that blind spot. Otherwise, you keep playing out the same thing over and over again.

Everybody has some blind spots, but I love how you talked about the results you see is reflective of your beliefs about what’s possible for yourself. Why do you think it’s important to have big goals? Both of us, once we saw a new vision for our lives and a new possibility, we were able to create amazing things. Why do you think that’s important?

The way I teach this is that there are three types of goals. There is the sideways goal, which is like, “I’ve done this and this is an equivalent level goal.” It’s a step to the side, but it’s not growing your capacity at all. There’s then the second type of goal, which is a step goal. It’s like if you made $100,000 last year and you say you want to make $125,000 or $130,000, it’s a stretch. It’s a step up, but it’s not a giant stretch. It’s something significant, but it’s not going to change how you show up radically. You could probably achieve that by doing much of the same things that you’ve already done. It peaks here and there.

There’s a third type of goal and it’s called a stretch goal. You’ll get a divine download. That thing that says, “I want that,” and then instantaneously, the other part of your brain starts scrambling it and it says, “How are you going to do that? That’s impossible. That’s crazy.” It’s this instantaneous thing. I always tell people, “Stop right there. What was it that you originally said that you wanted?” We go into denial about it, but we always know. It’s in your secret thoughts. It’s in that space when I ask someone, “What do you want?” It’s clear for them. I told my story, I was like, “I want to make $1 million this year.” It was clear. That sounded great and there was nothing ambiguous about that. Then I was like, “Is that going to happen like that? I don’t know.” All the hows come in.

That first thing, if you can latch onto that and it’s exciting enough for you, you have to latch onto it, you have to ignore the voices and you’re going to tell those voices in your head, “Give me three days, I’ll deal with you later.” You’re going to like be like, “That is what I want.” It’s going to be big and scary, but also exciting. It needs to be that juicy and exciting to have enough draw and magnetism behind it that you will do what it takes to move through all the fears because the fears are going to come up. The challenges are going to come. I still have challenges in my business. It’s not like you get to a certain place and suddenly no challenges, everything’s perfect.

You always have problems. You just want to have better problems. There’s always a problem, but then there’s like, “How do I keep a roof over my head?” problem. Then there’s like, “I have a problem. Do I buy this thing or that thing?” They’re problems but they’re different levels of problems. You have better problems.

That’s the thing. In business, there are always going to be challenging because if you’re doing it right, you’re always going to be in growth. I’m always in growth. My clients are always in growth. We’re always going for that next level. When you’re going for that next level, inherent in that is the fact that you haven’t done it yet. It’s the next level. There’s going to be a learning curve. There are going to be challenges there. The trick is figuring out how to intro and use your mental faculties to look at them differently so they’re no longer problems. They are just the thrill of doing business and that you move through it that way instead of constantly hitting a wall, which is what I was doing initially.

Let’s talk about money because I know people have things around money. It’s a separate category in a lot of people’s brains. Why do you think it’s hard for people to make money? Some people have that natural genius around it and it is easy, but a lot of people, they are blocked around money. Why do you think it’s hard for people?

There are a lot of different ways to approach answering this question. Fundamentally, it goes back to what we were talking about in terms of our upbringing. I often take people through an exercise to look at what their environment was telling them about money when they were growing up. Did your parents say things like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees or money is the root of all evil, or that money doesn’t buy happiness?” That last one always gets me like, “Of course money doesn’t buy happiness, who believes that?” People throw that out as a reason to not act in this world and not go after what they want. There are happy people who are poor and there are happy people who are rich. There are miserable people who are poor and there are miserable people that are rich.

It’s not the mechanism for happiness. Yet, we have all these cultural stories around money, “It’s greedy. Don’t be greedy.” That last one, “Money is the root of all evil,” is a big one. Not for everyone, but a lot of people were brought up to believe that money is evil and contradictory to God. That’s a big conflict for people in their minds and hearts, “Why would I want to be the opposite of God?” Even if it’s not a conscious belief, there’s an unconscious discord there. There’s a whole unpacking process around that. Fundamentally, what I help people see is that money is a tool. God, spirit, Source, the Universe, is for more life and expansion. You’re on this planet to live out your purpose, to help expand the world. For you to live out your purpose, expand the world, and do this good work in this world, you need the money to do so. You need the mechanism, the resources and the means to do that.

If you are constrained, “I don’t have a roof over my head. I don’t know where my next meal is coming from. I can’t hire that person on my team. I can’t purchase that new suit, dress, or clothes that are going to make me feel like $1 million when I go in to make my presentation.” If you are constrained in any way because of finances, you are constrained in your ability to do your work in this world, which in my perspective is the work of the spirit. It’s what we were all placed on this Earth to do, not in a religious sense by any means from my perspective but in like, “We’re here for more life. If you’re constrained because you don’t have the means, that needs to be solved for.”

Quantum Leap: You’re on this planet to live out your purpose and help expand the world, but in order for you to do that, you need the money first.

That’s why I have my big, crazy mission or big goal is to help one million women create financial freedom through real estate investing. A lot of voices came up and it drives me. Financial freedom for women is not because I want everybody to have a private jet or closets full of Manolos. It’s because I believe that when women have money, everybody but special women, I feel like then they’re unleashed to go and share their gifts in the world. We can then make the difference that we were born to make. The money piece doesn’t matter, it’s coming in, it’s supporting your lifestyle. You don’t have to worry about it. You’re not working because you have to. You work because you’re passionate about what you’re doing and you’re drawn to it. Money is a tool. It’s a vehicle. As Mother Teresa says, “It takes a checkbook to change the world.” Money is a valuable tool, but it’s something that I desire women to be able to handle.

It’s essential. If you are spending your mental and emotional energy wondering how to work your finances, that’s mental and emotional energy you’re not putting into your work in this world. If you look at it that way, you are doing a disservice to the world if you don’t get your finances handled. You’re doing the opposite of your mission. In my language, you’re not doing God’s work. You’re not doing your work in this world. You do the exact opposite, even though you thought money was a spiritual tool. That’s my perspective on it.

This has been such a great conversation. You help people and create these big visions and goals that they have for themselves. How can people connect with you?

My big mission in life is to help women become unstoppable, which means, “Tell me what you want, and let’s go for it.” Some people tell me that they want to make $1 million, $2 million, or whatever the financial goal is. Some people tell me that they want to win an Oscar. Some people tell me they want to be horseback riding champion of such and such. Whatever your big stretch goal is, tell me what it is or tell me you want to find out what it is and I’ll help you sort that out and then get there. I help people collapse time, to close the gap on time so they can do what feels impossible in a much shorter period of time. The resources that I would point people to would be to go to TheUnstoppableWoman.com/freestuff. We have a ton of things there. We have links to our podcast. We have links to our Morning Mindset Club, which is a total program that currently we’re doing at no charge. That helps people get the mental aspect of success. That would be a great resource.

It’s time for our famed end of show trinity, which is a brag, gratitude, and a desire. What is one brag you have? What are you celebrating?

My brag is that I have built an incredible company that I love and I have an amazing group of women on my team. I am thrilled to have this loyal, amazing group of women working with me on this mission. I remember when I was starting, it was challenging to get good help like, “How come it was hard?” I was doing everything myself. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve created a culture of strong, smart, go-getter women who are having a fabulous time, laughing, joking, and growing themselves in the container of our business.

What’s one thing you’re grateful for?

I’m grateful to be alive, healthy, and have abundant energy. Here’s an aspect to that which I’ll be more specific around. I am grateful to have control over my mental faculties. I used to be someone who was driven by outside circumstances. Things would happen and I would start having the conversations in my head, blaming people or being like, “I didn’t do that wrong.” I was thrown asunder by everything that was coming at me from the outside world. I have absolute 100% control over my responses now. I am extraordinarily grateful for that. That is even better than all the money. It’s true freedom. That’s what brings me happiness.

What’s one thing you desire?

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. I moved here in 2019. I know it’s crazy. I just moved here, but I have in my mind’s eye that I’m living on the beach in Florida. That’s my next desire. It’s funny because I’ve helped many women find their perfect house, move to Florida, buy the apartment on the Upper East Side, whatever it is. You’re in real estate, there’s something about women and their environment, their houses. We dream about it. We start playing with it. We start imagining it. It’s important for our nesting. I do have this vision that’s dropping in now about my tropical beach house in Florida.

So shall your desire be or much better than you can imagine?

Thank you.

Thank you. That was such a fun conversation. I love this stuff and it’s important. I truly hope our readers have expanded in terms of what they see as possible for themselves. I want you to have it. I want you to be abundant. What we desire, desires us and so we’re meant to be, have, and do. Thank you for that inspiration and beautiful interview. You can find Amira at TheUnstoppableWoman.com. You can reach me at REIGoddesses.com. There you can join our community of amazing real estate investing goddesses from all over the country and around the world, and also doing our Investor Club to find out about passive investing opportunities. Definitely subscribe to this show and share it with your friends. Comment and rate us. I will be back next time for another episode.

Important Links:

• The Unstoppable Woman
• TheUnstoppableWoman.com/freestuff
• Investor Club

About Amira Alvarez

Amira Alvarez is the founder and CEO of The Unstoppable Woman, a global coaching company helping entrepreneurs, empire builders, athletes, creatives, and rising stars in all fields achieve their dreams and goals in record time. As someone who has made a quantum leap (going from barely making 6-figures to making $700k in one year, then onto 7-figures) and has lived to tell about it, she knows exactly what tactical strategies and mindset shifts are required to get out of your own way, live life on your own terms, and master the art of achieving any goal you set your mind to.