How you view yourself and others have one of the greatest impacts on our life and success. It can be the difference between staying stagnant and reaching heights you never imagined. In this episode, Shannon Waller shares advice and lessons on the mindset you have toward yourself. Applying these lessons has helped Shannon become one of the best entrepreneurial team experts and transform the lives and businesses of her entrepreneur clients. Listen for how you can apply the same for yourself.

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast

How Changing Your Mindset Can Help Generate More Wealth | Advice from Shannon Waller

Welcome to the Real Estate Investor Goddesses podcast. I’m your host, Monick Halm. On this show, I interview incredible women. They talk about their real estate investing business strategies and how they have achieved incredible success. I’m super excited today to have with me Sharon Waller, who is a passionate expert on entrepreneurial teams. She also had some real estate, but I brought her here to talk about the best advice and strategies that she knows for successfully creating a business. Real estate investing is a business! Even though it’s a side business for a lot of people, it is a business, and the better that we can do that, the more success we have. Shannon Waller has been working with a strategic coach since 1991. She’s the creator of the Entrepreneurial Team Program, a parallel program for team members of coaching clients that focuses on fostering a winning entrepreneurial attitude. Shannon is a sought-after speaker, presenter, and coach as the key decision maker at strategic coach and a recognized entrepreneurial team expert.

She is a Colby certified consultant and the 2015 recipient of the Colby Professional Award for Individual Leadership in Building Co-Native Excellence.

She’s also co-authored the best-selling book Unique Ability 2.0: Discovery, is the author of The Team’s Success Handbook, and most recently wrote Multiplication by Subtraction. I’m super excited to meet her at the InvestHer convention in Charlotte in June, and I’m thrilled to have her with me. Welcome, Shannon.

Monick, I am so excited to be here and to see you again. You are wanting people that influenced Meat InvestHer, so it is a real pleasure to connect again.

 

Likewise, before we got rolling, we were talking about books that we exchanged, you know, book recommendations we exchanged at the conference that have changed our lives.

So in the spirit of sharing the good stuff, I’m going to say that she handed out this book, The Gap and the Gain.

The Gap in the Games was written by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, so Dan Sullivan is co-founder and strategic coach with Bab Smith, his wife and business partner, and she is the person who runs strategic, in case anyone’s wondering.

And then there’s Benjamin Hardy, a fantastic author who can take our ideas and do a fantastic job of multiplying them into much larger books than we could. So, from time to time, those are the writers of “Who, Not How.”

 

It was completely life-changing for me to get that book.

And then I recommended to her the book Unbound by Kasia Urbaniak, which was fantastic for her. I won’t go into the books because we have so many other people to interview, but for those of you who are bibliophiles like me and are always looking for book recommendations and great books to read, I highly recommend those two books.

Shannon I know you have some real estate investments, and as you know, this is a podcast where we interview women real estate investors, so we’re not going to dwell on that, but you do have some real estate investments, which you were sharing with me before we got started on a big recent real estate deal. When do you want to get started?

Why don’t you just share a little bit about your background in real estate investing and then brag about your win?

 

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, and our real estate is largely what we enjoy, so I knew I’d return to the conference thinking, “I think I need to become a real estate investor.”

But my husband and I have bought a house on a vacation property, which, in Canada, we call a “cottage” because I’m based in Toronto.

which is a lakeside cabin in case it doesn’t translate, so that’s what that is, and I was, I was calculating the value of what’s happened since we bought it.

And I think the initial value was around 700,000, and now it’s closer to 3.2–3.5 million. It’s fun to look back and see progress.

And then, most recently, and this is a bit of a sad situation, my stepmom passed away, so my dad passed away about eight and a half years ago—eight and a half, I guess—and then my stepmom, unfortunately, passed away very suddenly, like a month from diagnosis to passing away.

But she had a condo that was mid-construction, not a good time to pass a note to oneself (don’t do that anyway), and it had been delayed. Having done all the things anyway, we finally closed on it, and my husband and I are the executors of it, so on the very first day that it was listed.

Our fabulous real estate agent got a bunch of offers. The first person who came in made a preemptive slash-bully offer of $250,000 over asking.

which, of course, we accepted.

So in Toronto real estate prices, condos at Queen and Woodbine, which are in what’s called the Beaches area, are 932 square feet, and they were listed for 950, which wasn’t a huge jump from what she said.

paid for it years ago, so we weren’t making a lot, but it sold for 1.2 million.

So we were like, “I think we have to take the offer.” It’s my responsibility to the beneficiary to do that, so anyway, that was my latest real estate transaction, and we just felt thrilled. As it turned out, we hit the right top 15 minutes from the top of the market.

Just after that, it started to go down or flatten out, so yeah, I feel very, very fortunate about that.

 

Congratulations, that’s amazing!

Yeah, I love real estate, so for all of those reasons for this big sale, including the cash flow, I could go on and on.

But I want to ask you some questions about advice. I’ve been doing a series of interviews about advice, and I want to ask you: What’s the best life advice you’ve ever received?

Oh, interesting. I’ve received a lot of really good life advice. I can tell you what it boils down to, so here’s what I’ve internalized, and I kind of have one rule or one principle by which I live.

which has proved to be incredibly useful. I’m someone who was raised by kind of cool hippie parents who didn’t have a whole lot of boundaries and had to figure out my own.

So, now that I’m an adult with a lot of time on my hands, I have been exposed to tons of different types of people and experiences growing up, but it was a little more challenging.

But the one rule that I have is life advice that I’ve gleaned. Let me put it that way: I trust people to the degree that I think they know themselves.

And so what that means is that if someone says, “I’m not trustworthy” I believe them, and I don’t try to get them out of that. I’m like, “Oh, I’m not sure what I’d do,” if someone says that. Neither do I.

And I think a lot of people blow those up because they haven’t had that experience, almost certain you’re trustworthy. Oh, you know, you do the right thing.

Hmmm, who knows, so that means one of the most important things for me and anyone in my sphere is one of the most important things for me

is “know thyself.” That is my byline. I want it to be for other people. I’ve got awesome tools to help people do that, but the importance of actually just knowing yourself at a deep level is kind of interesting when we’re together.

As children, we go through life, but we don’t get enough; not only do parents not get an operating manual, we don’t get ours.

You have to figure out who you are and where you can contribute where you aren’t as useful.

 

What’s important to you, what’s not important to you — we all give meaning to very different things and are very individual — and the more you can explore yourself, the more predictable, trustworthy, capable, and aware you are of where to place yourself to contribute and what things to stay out of so you don’t make a mess, which I have personally found very helpful because I developed my muscles earlier in my life. Nothing disastrous, but you know, and you just keep doing it. That’s not working, that’s not working, what can I do to make it work? So, when I finally found a strategic coach for sales, presenting, and coaching, I was ecstatic.

Finally, I was like, “This is what I meant to do, not all the other 18 million things that I tried.” So knowing myself and trusting people to the degree that they know themselves has proved to be some great life advice for me.

 

And how do you trust people to the degree that they know themselves? How do you assess how they will know themselves? I know, sometimes it might say, “No, I’m not sure.” Do people often say I’m not trustworthy?

Surprisingly, it’s often relationships.

That people, and its strange people, are strangely honest; we just don’t take it seriously, I’ve discovered.

And some people are out to confuse you and manipulate you, and you know they’re designed with their agenda. That turns out to be a very small percentage of the population.

I think people give us enormous clues about who they are; we just don’t want to listen or pay attention to those.

So I just asked a question. Oh, what do you think you would do in that situation, or have you experienced this before? What have you done? What’s your response when they tell you?

Mostly because it’s kind of hard to make up a lie, let me just give you a really simple example. I want to be organized. Do I still have the mental capacity to make that guess?

If you can see behind me, be like, “Oh yeah, you’re not organized.”

Right now, I look organized because I follow a calendar, I have a great system, and I have a Katrina is my brilliant support partner. She organizes all of my activities; I look organized, and I am.

But I didn’t have anything to do with it in the same way that I gave direction, so I know that left to my own devices, without support or help, I’m way too distractible, have “bright shiny object syndrome,” and all those other things, but I know myself, and I have no expectation or desire to be anything other than who I am right now.

Right, like I want to grow and expand? Absolutely. But do I make any part of me myself? Nope, and I don’t think other people need to either.

Yeah, a fun, fun example of that is that I was talking to someone yesterday and said, “Oh my gosh, I procrastinate like I know I do,” and I was like, “Really?”

Okay, good, and the way I looked at some of her profile information, like, “Okay, tell me a couple of examples,” it turns out she doesn’t procrastinate at all; she just has a different time frame for getting things done than the person who was judging her.”

 

She’s not seeing herself.

Yeah, based on other people’s input, and I’m like, “Oh when you started to study for that exam, that was way sooner than I would have.”

I don’t call that procrastination.

If I do it too early, I forget, and I don’t have the retention I’m looking for, then you’re doing it exactly the right way for you.

not how this other person told you. So I just had to reaffirm her sense of herself and the fact that she knows what works, and it turns out she wasn’t a procrastinator at all.

Just what are the kinds of fun conversations and coaching that are so joyful?

Because people will then go Oh, this is how I’m constructed; this is where I have strengths; this is where I have weaknesses; I need to get support in these areas, and that’s all well; we’re not all supposed to be one cookie-cutter version of one another; that’s boring and not true.

We all have our zones of genius.

So what’s the best financial advice you’ve ever gotten?

 

Oh, that’s easy, and it comes from the book The Richest Man in Babylon.

Pay yourself first. And then there’s the exponential nature of money, so overall, I can’t tell a good enough story, but someone they served asked to be paid.

The following is how I see it: I want to take a chessboard with a grain of rice on one square, then double those grains on the next square and the next square by the time you get to 64 squares on the chessboard, or however many there are.

Yeah, it’s like this incredible amount of rice.

The Emperor didn’t want to pay that, so we killed them anyway,

exponential nature, which is not easy for our brains. Our brains are linear by nature; we take 100 steps and then stop; you know, 100, but exponential looks very different.

So compounding nature and paying yourself first is by far the best advice I’ve had to give to my children.

Some with one are easy, the other one, not so much.

 

So what’s the worst advice you could give someone?

Trying to be somebody else.

But the quote is something someone gave me yesterday or the other day again.

Be yourself; everyone else has taken it.

 

Everyone else is already taken, yeah.

The other one that’s kind of fun is by the brilliant Saturday Night Live comedian.

“You know, I always wanted to be somebody,” the actress who played Rosanna Deanna says, “but I realized I should have been more specific.”

But if you can be yourself, you know everyone else is thinking, “You have to do this to be successful, you have to do that, you have to control yourself,” and Kathy Kolby, one of the people that I admire and creator of what’s called the Kolby profile, says that success is the freedom to be yourself,

So, I believe that truly successful people and people we admire in the news who accomplish some pretty amazing feats have taken advantage of the freedom to be themselves.

 

I love that.

And who do you turn to for advice?

 

So many people.

That’s a great question: who do I turn to for advice? My best friends, I suppose, are people like my husband and my friend Joan, who I met at the cottage.

Later in life, I developed a bunch of women friends; when I was growing up, most of my friends were men, but now they’re women, and I’m like, “Oh, I have women friends now.”

And so we go. We go walking when we’re up on vacation together, and I will ask them.

Business-related questions. In a strategic coach, I look for a concept called “unique ability,” and so where people have a passion like superior skill and passion, they love doing it, and they have insights that other people don’t.

And I don’t, so I look for someone who is good, not just for their ego.

Other people say you’re really good, and their eyes light up and they talk about it, and they have a passion to ask for advice, and names are going through my head. Right now, my friend Kim White he’s my energy guy.

My speaking coach, Deirdre Van Ness, coached me with brilliantly crazy-good talks. Brilliantly on how to be a better speaker, she’s someone I go to for advice on that, so the answer is kind of it depends.

Yeah, people like people, and I trust people who have unique abilities and people I know who have my back; those are the types of people I go to for advice.

 

Trust their unique ability, and they have your back, yeah.

I love that that’s so good.

So what advice do you have for a woman who’s starting real estate investing? What would your advice be to her?

Oh, first of all, congratulations.

It’s a super smart, super cool thing to be doing, and the fact that you are getting started is huge, even having the desire and putting yourself in a learning place like this where you’re supporting your desires.

High five like that’s awesome, celebrate that it’s very so I want to talk about the gap in the game.

impacting you, and I think if there’s anything that holds people back, and I say women a little bit more, and the address at the conference was saying that she goes, you know, you know, I talked to men, and they go, “Oh yeah, I’m crushing it,” like, “Great, how many buildings do you have?”

When you ask a woman how she’s doing as a real estate investor, she says, “Oh yeah, I’m doing okay, kind of working my way through it,” and she has 16 buildings.

I’m not trying to slam the guy, but we’re way too humble.

 

Yeah! That’s why I get my goddesses to brag! You’ve got to celebrate!

This is where we could take a page out of that book if you think of every single little step.

What you learn for every other new capability is to implement everything you learn from every book you read and podcast you listen to.

Like stuff, your built-up capabilities include people, so if you can find people who are great to collaborate with to help you accomplish your goals, those are wins.

You know, and we think of it as bragging, but it’s celebrating; it’s like, “Okay, I’m further along today than I was yesterday.” That’s progress, and this is why women tend to go into what we call the “gap,” which is measuring where we are now against our ideal.

Now ideals are fabulous; they inspire us to get out of bed in the morning; they keep us on track when we might rather be doing something else or someone tries to dissuade us because, like, “No, I have this ideal.” Now the challenge with ideals is that as you move towards them, they move too.

And there’s a little demonstration I do on stage where you know you’re here and you’re looking ahead, like, “Okay, that’s where I am, and then you and then select the horizon,” and you run really fast and look up as if it’s still not there.”

 

You know the carrot in front of you is dangling and you’re chasing it. I’m sure I’ll get that carrot!

Right, but as you keep putting time and effort into the struggle for right ideals, you get close to it, and they must for their heads, so you can’t get to the rise, and even if you run really fast, even if it’s dark outside, you’ll never get there because it’s a mental construct that we made up.

We made up this ideal now; use it to inspire yourself to set goals and hit the goals, but trust me, it’s like health or weight loss; as soon as you get close to that, you’re like, “Oh, okay, I’m going to be thrilled with my body when,” and then you list all these things, and then you’re close to that and that becomes true, and then you’re like, “I thought that was true, but it’s not really.”

This has to be true; this is what happened. That’s an ideal. We have ideas about our kids, our spouses, our days, our bodies, our clothes—you name it, we’ve got ideas about everything. That’s natural and normal. Just don’t measure yourself against it; instead, turn around and look back to where it came from.

And then you’re like, “Whoa!” Look at the progress.

The interesting thing is that you’re in the same place; all that has changed is the direction that you’re looking and how you’re measuring yourself.

So when you measure yourself against the ideal, you fall into what we call “the gap,” and it’s permanent.

Instead of your turnaround, the permanent gap between where you are now and your ideal. Remember how we came from progress?

And that’s what we’re celebrating. So please, please, please measure your progress not against where you started, not against your ideal; if you can do that, you will succeed. Here’s why your nervous system is affected: When you compare yourself to the gap, it has an effect on your emotional system; there is a constant sense of failure. pessimism, negativity, discouragement, all those things.

 

You’re trying to get to that horizon; you’re like, “I’ve been running forever, and I’m never going to reach it!”

And people get depressed.

Yeah, can you read the news? You’re like, “you’re anxious,” and there it is, like, the carrot you’re never going to get.

 

Yeah, but looking back, you’re right.

Then, have a sense of success, optimism, and positivity looking forward; you’re open; you’re communicating your collaborative nature; it’s like, “Oh my gosh, look at what I already did; what’s next?”

And people think that unless they’re kind of beating themselves up, they’re not going to strive.

It’s because we don’t fuel ourselves with the wind. By the way, if you’re winning, do you want to stop?

Most people do not. You’re much more likely to stop because you’re measuring yourself. After all, you’re in the gap because you’re putting yourself in the game.

Yeah, that’s my speech for today.

 

Thank you, I was saying before we recorded that it was life-changing for me and I’d started this year, and that was a lot of good, but I really felt that after hearing you and looking at that book, and I was like, “Wow!”

So I was down at the beginning of the year and couldn’t get myself out; it was it, and I was like, “There’s you know, it’s just like that.”

I couldn’t really figure out what it was, but I was just like, and then I read it, and I realized, “Oh, I’m in the cannon and everything red lost a ton of weight and I will you know, like live, I’ve lost 50 pounds and I’d say my arms flabby my paper like I was focused on like and but I don’t know about the six-pack.” It was like that’s what I was focused on instead of what I’ve done, you know, so I realized, “Oh, I’m in the gap” about almost everything in my life, so no wonder I’m down that, and then I just like switching the game to look at all, where I am compared to where I started.

You need to protect your confidence level the same way that you would your bank account. It’s that important.

So it’s strategic, it’s not and it’s not a nice to do, it’s a need to do. Entrepreneurs, especially.

Real Estate investors or entrepreneurs and that’s who, with whom we work, you know we’re always doing risky things we’re always doing hard and scary things that we’ve never done before, if you’re not supporting your confidence, who is? We have to be able to fuel ourselves that way, and it makes such a difference.

I was just coaching someone today. He was depressed the first three times I spoke with him in two weeks. He was in the gap; he’s just sold the biggest part of his business. He’s now got freedom of time, money in relationships, and purpose, and he was concerned that he’d gone back to the beginning. No, I’m with Michael. Look at the increase; if you’re starting from any place where I talked to him today, he was lit up; he’s had momentum here; he was like, “This is amazing; thank you so much.” All I did was help them get on the board.

 

Yeah, thank you, Shannon, for everything.

What is the best way for people to connect with you and find out more about what you do?

Oh, my gosh, if you’re an entrepreneur, strategiccoach.com is a brilliant place to check out all the strategic resources we have; there is a ridiculous amount available for free.

We also have a great knowledge product store, and when we have a knowledge product, it’s because our books include audio and videos and extra downloads, among other things.

So go check that out if you’re kind of just curious to see what coach is up to. If you’re interested in entrepreneurial teams, that’s my particular jam.

I have a few, but your team’s success is mine, and I also have a team success website or podcast.

Dan Sullivan and I do a podcast called Inside Strategic Coach, which is fun. He’s one of the world’s best—I would say general philosophers, but certainly concerning entrepreneurship.

So interested in great conversations I would do that. If you’re interested in the Gap in the Gain and our other big book called Who Not How are available from Amazon or any of your favorite booksellers, that’s where to find that.

 

Awesome, alright, fantastic, so now that it’s time for our trinity, we start with a brag. So what are you celebrating? What’s your brag?

What I’m celebrating is a big shift. I helped someone decide what they were struggling with, and it came from the book Unbound that you recommended to me, which changed my life.

And so I’m just really grateful; I’m proud of having been able to have that super tough conversation and get something forwarded that was stuck.

And that’s a big deal, knowing how to do that well with grace, love, and care and still get phenomenal results, so I’m very grateful for that.

 

Well bragged! And what’s one thing you’re grateful for?

Oh, am I grateful for Deirdre, my speaking coach, and I’m grateful to Crazy Good Talks because I did a two-hour presentation this week to people who signed up for coaching but haven’t yet started, and it was the best one I’ve done, and I know what I did differently; it was because of what I’ve learned from her. And so just having that confidence and clarity and being on time, like to the minute for the break and the end and still creating this incredible sense of community that I’m so passionate about was amazing so I’m grateful for the learning because then I can translate that into a better experience for my tribe for people I care about.

 

Beautiful! Thank you, and, last but not least, what’s one desire?

Oh, my gosh keep keep keep using my powers for good.

This is one of the things I like; I always coach people when I do know them, and they use profiles like Colby or Clifton strengths or something. to use your powers for good, and I have a new leadership opportunity that I’m excited about, and it’s going to be a whole new level of learning for me. It’s a subject I’m I’m passionate about, but I don’t know everything, wish I know a lot to be perfectly honest, so I’m on a steep learning curve as of two days ago and that’s kind of exciting slash terrifying and I want to do a good job, both from a result standpoint and from the people standpoint. It’s all about knowing more about marketing, so I am excited and slightly terrified to take on that new adventure, but I’m pretty pumped that I desire to do a really, really good job for everyone and everything that impacts.

 

So shall your desires be, or so much better than you can imagine.

Thank you; I love that! I’m taking that right in!

 

Yes, all right, well, thank you, this was so fun.

It’s my absolute pleasure and y’all you can connect with Shannon find out all those resources at strategiccoach.com, and yourteamsuccess.com inside the strategic coach team success podcast there are so many places to go get more information and learning.

Growth in gains, so it was a pleasure to come back subscribe, and join us for another Real Estate Investor Goddesses podcast interview.

 

 

Important Links:

Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork

Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power

Your Team Success

Strategic Coach

 

About Shannon Waller

Shannon Waller, Team Program Designer, Strategic Coach Toronto

Shannon is a passionate expert on entrepreneurial teamwork. With Strategic Coach® since 1991,
she’s the creator of The Strategic Coach Team Programs, a thriving program for team members of
Coach clients that focuses on developing leadership and strategic planning skills in its participants.
She’s a key decision-maker at Strategic Coach as well as Babs Smith’s Strategic Partner and Dan
Sullivan’s Creative Collaborator. A recognized entrepreneurial expert, Shannon is a sought-after
speaker, consultant, and coach.

She also hosts two top-ranking podcasts (Team Success and Inside Strategic Coach with Dan
Sullivan), co-authored the bestselling book Unique Ability® 2.0: Discovery, and has written two books
about entrepreneurial team success: is a wealth of her distilled teamwork wisdom, and Multiplication
By Subtraction is a comprehensive guide to gracefully letting go of wrong-fit team members.
Shannon’s a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant and the 2015 recipient of the Kolbe Professional Award for
individual leadership in building conative excellence. She’s also certified in both PRINT® and DISC
assessments.