[00:00:00] Mike: Hey everybody, welcome back. It’s Mike with Insider Secrets with another great episode. Today, I’m joined by Jason Safford. He’s my coach. He’s going to talk to us about living an exceptional life. Jason, tell the listeners what we’re going to talk about today.

Jason: Hey, Mike grateful to be here and so excited to be able to tell our listeners about an incredible story that I have as well as the 28 days of exceptionalism, and really getting into more about coaching and discipline and mindset and so many exciting things that you and I are going to be talking about.

Mike: Hey, I’m really grateful you’re here and you guys are going to have to listen in. We’ll see you inside.

Kristen: Welcome to this week’s edition of Insider Secrets. The show that turns multifamily investing into [00:01:00] reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Your host Mike Morawski has more than 30 years of multifamily, real estate investing and property management experience.

Mike is the founder of My Core Intentions. And he’s been involved in over $285 million of transactions. Focuses on helping you create short term cashflow and long-term wealth. Here’s your host, Mike.

Mike: Hey, good afternoon everybody and welcome back. It’s another episode of Insider Secrets and I’m Mike, your host with Insider Secrets and that’s brought to you by My Core Intentions. So I am excited about today.

We are going to do something a little bit different. Not only do I have a little bit different guest on this show from our normal multifamily platform. But I have my coach and entrepreneur, Jason Safford. Jason, you want to say hi real quick.

Jason: Grateful to [00:02:00] be here, Mike. Hello to your audience. And very excited to be on the show.

Mike: I’m grateful you’re here too, Jason, and I’m certainly looking forward to this interview here today. So we are doing something a little different today.

We’re recording and we are live on Facebook. Here’s one thing I always like to ask my listeners though, is what are your intentions? Did you sit down this morning and take some time and work through your intentions and what you were going to work on accomplishing today. Hey, was it maybe an extra sales call that you needed to make?

Was it an extra call to a seller to try and find that off-market deal? What were you going to do today to create some cashflow, to create some long-term wealth for yourself? You know what, and one of the best principles that I think that we all need to always keep in mind is how do we do that and live a balanced lifestyle.

So I want you to think about that as you go through the rest of your day here today. And what can you do actually to get back on track doing that. But anyhow, let me introduce my guests here today, [00:03:00] Jason Safford is a full his full-time passion is to help live the best life that you could live every day.

Jason is always in pursuit of exceptionalism and wants you to live the exceptional life as well. He’s a nationally recognized author of three books. He’s a keynote speaker. Jason helps high achievers breakthrough current growth challenges in their life, in their business to create an exceptional impact in their life.

And I can attest to that because Jason has been my coach now for a few months and he’s really helped me move my business forward. But he’s focused on executive leadership, on business development and environmental impact. For more than the last two decades, Jason has been growing his platform to help others grow an abundant life, a wealthy life.

And to help uplift humanity as well as the planet. I’ll tell you what, there’s a lot to be said there, Jason. Do this [00:04:00] for us though, one thing I always like to ask my guests is in one word, what best describes you personally and professionally?

Jason: Driven.

Mike: Driven.

Jason: Yeah,

Mike: That’s interesting. You are my coach. I don’t know that I would have really ever had any idea about, of course I would, because you drive me, that’s why.

Jason: That’s right, I drive you crazy. Don’t I?

Mike: Actually, if you talk about coaching, we’re going to come back and talk about coaching. But if you talk about coaching for a minute, I think you are actually probably a little bit surprised that my performance from the first week we started working together.

Jason: That’s true, absolutely. Yeah. Let’s put it this way. I am very focused on results and I’m driven to get them from myself and from others. And not only did you surprise me, but I was so impressed with your mechanics in terms of how you went about each step of your process for getting the results that you got on [00:05:00] a weekly basis and you beat yourself up better than anybody I know.

And that’s a Testament to how hard you work that you’re always looking for more and I remember, about a month into our engagement, you even looked at me and you were just like, man, I’m tired. And I said of course you’re tired because now you’re getting even more results.

You’re booked solid with appointments and you’re still trying to do the same things at the same level. So you’ve got that much more going on and that didn’t stop you, you just kept going.

Mike: So here’s, what’s funny, right? I’m still tired. I just don’t tell you anymore.

Listen, let me just check in with everybody who’s tuning in. I just want you to know that we’re live with Insider Secrets here this afternoon. Something that we don’t normally do, but I also have a guest that’s out of the box a little bit of my coach on, we’re going to talk about entrepreneurialship and leadership and making some impacts in humanity and in the planet.

Hey, Jason, why don’t you tell us a little bit [00:06:00] about your backstory.

Jason: Sure. So I really decided to become an entrepreneur when I was in college. And I had entrepreneurial ventures growing up little side gigs here and there and you mentioned Gary V earlier when we were offline that I didn’t know baseball cards was an entrepreneurial venture, but I was doing that when I was 10, 12 years old.

To be serious, I was a part of the .com the original.com boom. Because while I was in college, I happen to be good with computers and there was a convergence of film to digital while I was in film school. And so that got me in some really cool jobs. First of all, NYU hired me right out of college because of my technology experience.

And then from there, I went to MTV networks and had a really cool gig with MTV for a little while. And that allowed me to launch my first real business, which was the precursor to everything that you now use in terms of social media. We had created a company called spiral connection, [00:07:00] and we were basically leveraging creative content online and working with artists and creators and trying to help them to get gigs.

And this was back in 2000. And based on the business plan that I wrote, we were able to attract the attention of a large law firm in New York called Cantor Fitzgerald. And that was located in the world trade center. And they liked the business plan so much and what our concept was that they had found a private investor that was willing to put a $10 million investment into our company.

And we were going to consummate this deal on 9/11. Unfortunately we all know what happened on that day, and my good grades being here was the fact that I actually woke up early to get ready for the meeting. And I fell asleep while I was getting the final preparations on the presentation that I was going to give.

And my best friend called me up and said a plane just flew into the world trade center. And I was like, Oh, okay. And then suddenly I realized [00:08:00] that I was home and I had missed my train and I ran out the door to get to the train station and my buddy who was at the offices for the law firm said, yeah, that was the other building, get your butt down here.

And by the time I got to the train station, obviously, there were no more trains running into the city and the second plane had hit. And that was the end of their business, it was the end of my business and the end of a lot of innocent lives. And that basically made me stop and think about what was important in life.

And as I thought about it, I thought about all the displaced people in downtown Manhattan, and I wanted to do something. And so I sat down with an advisor who basically wanted to know what I was going to do. And I said, I think I’m going to go into real estate. He said, wait a second, you just lost your company.

You got no money, no job. How are you going into real estate? And I said, there are all these displaced people in downtown Manhattan. I figured if I could get some empty shells of buildings in Brooklyn, fix them up, put some solar rooftops on them. I can give them a better quality of life. He says, that’s a great idea, let’s go into business.

And so [00:09:00] literally one month after 9/11 to the day, we incorporated shook hands on the courthouse steps and went into business as an environmental real estate company. And over the next 20 years, I really focused on sustainable projects and renewable energy. Learning everything that I could in terms of how to integrate clean technology and responsible environmental controls and sensors, and ways to improve, not only efficiency and lower costs, but also how can we get off oil?

And we were responsible for a lot of cool projects. We wound up installing more than 50 megawatts worldwide in renewable energy. And most importantly was that, we felt like we were contributors to the environment and to society. And it allowed me to understand my real mission in life.

Because, as I went through all of this, I had a number of ups and downs. You know what? We survived the financial crisis of 2008, which I think any real estate investor [00:10:00] looks at as the before and after, there’s BC and AD and there’s 2008 and after 2008.

Mike: Yeah, that’s right.

Jason:  And we survived. But when we came out the other side, we were focused on one property in upstate New York. And our goal was to turn it into what’s now known as a smart city, and I had to come up with a marketing concept, a business plan, and the first thing that we did was we turned it into a green venue.

We had to attract people there. So we started by making everything as environmentally responsible as possible. The first concert we put on was called reggae for climate protection, and this is an hillbilly country. We had no idea, and come to find out that hillbillies love reggae, but we had no idea cause we didn’t know any country artists.

And then, as we got our feet under us and it’s a constant struggle. Now you’re dealing with the fact that you’re a real estate developer who’s now a concert promoter and [00:11:00] a venue owner and you’re getting into all these different things. Anyway, and it was cool because we learned lots of different concepts, but we were so far from where we started.

And at a certain point, the stress was incredibly overwhelming. And my business partner who was much older than me finally got exhausted and there’s all sorts of life events that happen in the end. You deal with business as it comes at you.

You’d love to be proactive wherever possible, but you get reactionary. And so we got into the challenges of trying to figure out how to keep things together and it really became my responsibility. And at a certain point, just when I thought we were turning a corner, he decides that he’s had enough and he just wants to walk away.

And now I have to figure out how to make this whole thing successful on my own. And at the same time, I’ve also got to figure out how am I going to handle all of our [00:12:00] outstanding challenges that we have a mast over the last so many years, including investors, different obligations that we had taken on.

And then I get bit by a tick, a small bug insect that carries a bacteria called lime. And that causes Lyme disease, and if you get bit by it, any number of things could happen. And for me were really sucked was the fact that a year before my father had been in the hospital for seven weeks with Lyme disease and they had misdiagnosed him.

And so here he was going through all sorts of tests for weeks and, he’s losing blood count and at a certain point they had him sign a DNR and finally they say, Hey, let’s test him for Lyme disease. And fortunately, they found out that’s what it was and they were able to save him and he made a hundred percent recovery. Thank goodness. He is still with us today at 84. But here I was a year later and I was proactive and [00:13:00] I went to the doctor and I said, Hey, I think I’ve been bit by a tick. And they said, no, it’s a spider bite. And they gave me the wrong medication and they sent me home. Three weeks later, I’m sitting in CCU with a defibrillators strapped to my chest resting heart rate of 26.

Nurses and doctors coming in and out every five minutes. And they’re saying, we think you have Lyme disease and I’m saying I had gone to the doctor and they said that wasn’t it. They were like, no, listen, you’ve got the rarest form of Lyme disease called Lyme carditis.

It affects your heart less than 1% of all cases get it. The unfortunate thing is less than 1% of those cases survive. So here I am, I’ve got a wife, a 3 year old and a newborn three month old at home. We’re renovating our house. My business manager comes in for me to sign payroll and she’s got tears streaming down her cheeks and she says, we need to have this sign.

And I’m like, trying to be stoic and say, it’s okay, we’re going to be okay. And she says, you can’t say that. We have all these [00:14:00] people that are counting on you and you have all these machines that you’re tied up to, and nurses and doctors coming in and out of here every five minutes, we don’t know what we’re going to do without you.

And I suddenly realized that I had, for all my success, I had enabled people rather than empowered them. And so I decided going forward that was going to be the change. And that made me realize why was I on this mission and this path. And so I really looked at funny enough, my core intentions, and my intentions were to uplift humanity.

When I looked at 9/11 and why did I go into environmental real estate development. And over the last 20 years, I had accumulated all of this incredible knowledge and experience and understanding that we could end homelessness and hunger today if we wanted to. It’s not an issue of resources.

It’s simply a matter of distribution. So we have all the supplies in the world to be able [00:15:00] to uplift the weakest among us and make our lives incredibly abundant as a human species. We’re focused on ourselves and we’re focused on how can we restrict people from having access to the resources they need to be able to enjoy life and be abundant. And that motivated me to reposition myself. And that was when I started to focus on exceptionalism and why I did things the way I did them. And at the level I did them. And I wrote the book “Winning With Exceptionalism” after that.

And obviously started the company except from results now and created the platform called the exceptional life. And that’s obviously where I am today is trying to help people to really learn how to empower yourselves, and take off the limiting beliefs and the barriers and the restrictions that prevent you from being exceptional. And a lot of that comes from our parents and our schools and our government and our society. And they’re just things that we [00:16:00] believe that we have to live a certain way and do certain things by a certain rudimentary format.

And we get stuck along the way through all of those things. And we don’t allow our best selves to reveal themselves because of that.

Mike: It’s interesting. I just want to ask you about the Lyme disease. So are you fully recovered from that now?

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: Or how does that show up in your life today or does it?

Jason:  So it’s a great question. So yes, I’m fully recovered. I have to go through normal tests like anybody else. When you do your physical on an annual basis, they check you, they do the blood work, and when you go for your insurance exams, it’s the same thing. So it’s basically just a blood test that can check these things.

In my case, I had to go to a cardiologist because it was my heart and I got a clean bill of health from my cardiologist and she fired me. And it was very funny because she literally said you’re the one client I don’t want to fire. I’d love to have you as a patient for the rest of my life.

And then she jokes. I never knew that in calculus [00:17:00] and trigonometry, you learn sign and co-sign and the different waves. So I never knew that your heart was a sign wave and she shows me my heart wave and she’s look at this beautiful sign wave and she’s literally geeking out over.

And I was just like, okay that’s good to know.

Mike: Oh, that’s funny. Hey, you talked about 9/11, 9/11 is one of those days that I think that you will always remember where you were that day.

Jason: Oh, absolutely.

Mike: And I can recall, exactly where I was.

And when you said 9/11, I like went right back to that spot where I was standing and hearing all that was going on. I was actually on an appointment, I was standing on somebody’s front porch knocking on the door, and I watched the first plane on TV. She had a big screen TV in the living room, and I watched the first plane fly in and I was like, what?

What’s that? And she came to the door and said, I don’t think today’s a good day. My husband was on that plane.

Jason: Oh my, no. Wow. Yeah.

Mike: It was quite [00:18:00] interesting where the world went after that.

Jason: It’s been an amazing experience to become connected to so many people because of 9/11 and th the one thing that I can share with you, just about my own experience is that now having actually three near-death experiences, my first was when I was one years old.

And I have my grandfather to thank for me still being here to be able to participate in this interview. I had a form of either yellow fever, Scarlet fever, or some ridiculously dangerous fever when I was one years old. And I was in the car with my mother and my sister and my grandfather, and he heard me cough.

And something about that cough made him Hightail it to the hospital and my mother didn’t even know what was going on. She just said, where are we going? And he said, we’re going to the hospital. And I now get the story from my father years [00:19:00] later, I’ve heard the story in different times, recently I asked my father about it just out of curiosity, cause he was in New York and we were in Maryland.

And at that time, in order to have any type of surgery done, both parents had to consent. So my grandfather gets us to the hospital and he runs in with me and says, my grandson can’t breathe, somebody helped me. And they have to perform an emergency tracheotomy on my neck. And they needed my father’s agreement and they needed him to sign it.

He’s in New York, so they called him up and fortunately they got him at work. And my mother is hysterical on the phone and saying, they need you to sign to, give your consent so that they can operate on Jason. Fortunately for him, they said, if it had been like another five or 10 minutes, I probably wouldn’t be here.

So then you have 9/11 where, the one time I oversleep in my life. Thank goodness. And then I get bit by this little bug called a tick and I’m one of the rarest survivors, because Lyme carditis, when it affects you, [00:20:00] what it causes is what’s called a stage two heart block and it messes with your electrical system in your heart, and you could go into cardiac arrest at any minute.

It’s literally one of those things where you have an irregular heartbeat and your heart doesn’t know what’s going on, it’s just beating. But the electrical system is telling it something different. It’s the motherboard is fried. And so in my case, my heart was beating at half its normal rate or less and 26 beats a minute. Yeah, it was half its normal rate because my normal rate is in the low fifties. But the thing about it is that, it’s reading with this irregular beat. And so what they had done was that if it dropped below 26, I was going to get a shock from a defibrillator.

That’s a protocol with the hospitals. They have to do that. You know what the problem is, if the electrical systems already messed up with the heart and now you send electrical energy into it, do you think that you’re going to do any good to the heart? And so [00:21:00] now they even told me, they said, listen, the last thing we want is for this thing to go off.

So don’t let your heart go below 26. I said okay, great Thanks. I’ll just concentrate on that.

Mike: Yeah. Just one number, right? Just 27.

Jason: Yeah. And believe me for the first day, all I did was look at that number and hope that it stayed above 27 or 28. My point to it is that, I’ve had several experiences.

And I think your question really was, I forgot your question, actually, at this point. Where are we going with it

Mike: I was actually thinking about you not pushing the envelope to see if you had nine lives.

Jason: Oh, okay, yeah so.

Mike: With the three.

Jason: Yeah. So I think that, if I were to go somewhere with this, again, what’s come out of it for me is really in creating the exceptional life. It is about recognizing that you really only have the 24 hours of today to live.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: And that was what came out of the whole experience for me. And actually in the last year, I’ve been [00:22:00] dealing with a situation and in dealing with that situation, I’ve really had to focus on just taking it one day at a time. And really learning how to maximize this 24 hours and that’s what I try to help people with, yourself included in terms of how do you go about what it is you’re doing and just keep improving 1% every day? Keep working in adjusting things.

Mike: So let me ask you this. What does it take today, in today’s environment where we’re at to be an exceptional entrepreneur? And I think that’s a big question, right?

Jason: It’s an awesome question. It’s not big. It’s awesome. And I think that so many people today have delved into entrepreneurship because of the pandemic and because they just don’t know where things are going in society and with big companies and everything else.

And everybody’s fearful right now. And so entrepreneurship becomes something where you feel like at least this way you’re taking a shot at your own freedom. [00:23:00] And the truth is that what makes you exceptional as an entrepreneur is your willingness to understand that self-mastery is an everyday process of accepting your mistakes.

And improving on them, learning lessons. But also really focusing on just trying to do the basics really well, developing good habits. If you can develop 10 good habits and master those habits on a daily basis where they become so ingrained in your functionality in life, those habits are going to be what carries you through every storm, every speed bump, every wall. Because you have the presence of mind, and presence of mind is the most important thing as an entrepreneur, because everyday you go out there, you’re going into battle with unknown forces and unknown circumstances, and you don’t know. Listen, we put plans [00:24:00] together with the idea that everything is going to go right, knowing that never happens. And so that’s what’s funny about it is that, I’ve been writing business plans for two decades, and the first thing that you learn in business planning is that as soon as you’re done with the plan, everything changes.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: The minute you’re done with the plan, everything changes.

And the plan is just the framework. When people say stick to the plan, they don’t mean that you’re going to do the same thing that’s in the plan every day. What it is it’s a matter of okay, you have a fundamental framework. How do you stick to this framework and add meat and skin to it slowly over time, based on testing things, seeing what works, what doesn’t work.

And I think that’s where a lot of us get hung up. As you hear a lot of people saying you don’t need a plan, they started their business without a plan. You may have had a plan in your head and you didn’t tell anybody and you didn’t write it down.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: But over time, if you want to be [00:25:00] successful, you got to write things down and you’ve got to create a strategy and a plan.

Mike:  And I always talk about one of the things I always coach my clients on is having a plan and.

Jason: Not only having a plan you’re all about the exit plan.

Mike: And I got that years ago when I read a Stephen Covey’s book “Seven Habits of the Highly Effective People”, chapter two in that book is, start with the end in mind.

Jason: That’s right.

Mike: And I believe that’s where we need to start is we need to know where we’re going to go. And then we can plan. Hey, I live in Chicago, you live in New York. If I want to come and see you, and I’m going to drive my car, I have to pull a map out and map how to get there. So you’ve got to have a plan.

Jason: And on that point Mike, did the whole thing of the exit plan and starting with the end in mind and reverse engineering. That’s what the exceptional life is. You gotta have a plan of what is the exceptional life and what is it that you really want to be doing.

And what’s so funny about it is that, I interview people on a daily basis that want to join the program, want to be coached. And when you ask them [00:26:00] about where they want to be in life, and what’s their number one goal, everybody wants to retire and not work. That’s the human experience.

Why are we working? We’re working for somebody else we’re working for this, we’re working for that. At the end of the day, we’re working to retire to not work, right? And if that’s what the exceptional life is for you, the challenges in order to get there, you got to work really hard. And are you committed to doing that?

Why not instead look at your life in terms of, Hey, if I start today living the way that I want to, so that in 30 years, these habits that I’ve formed, it doesn’t matter whether I’m working or not. I just love my life the way it’s set up. Now, you’re fundamentally creating the life that you want and you’re just building upon it on a daily basis.

Mike: You talk about those habits. And one of the things I always talk about is mastering the repetitious [00:27:00] boredom.

Jason: That’s right.

Mike: Those seven or 10 habits that you do every day, right? You want to lose more weight, we’ll go to the gym every day, go off for a walk, go for a run, do something to build on that.

I remember one time, I was getting ready to train for a marathon and somebody said, Hey, look, you’re not going to run a marathon today, just get to the end of the driveway and back, and next week you’ll be at a mile. And I didn’t understand that concept, but before I knew it, I was running 20 miles.

It was like, Holy cow, I can’t believe this.

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: You build on those small fundamentals, you harness them, you celebrate the success and you continue to grow as a result of that. And I think that’s one of the principles that you really teach too, is how to do that, right?

Jason: Yeah. That’s right.

Mike: We just finished a program that you had, and it was called the 28 day exceptional challenge. Talk about that program a little bit and why that’s important in somebody’s life?

[00:28:00] Jason: Absolutely. And first of all, Mike, congratulations because you are one of the first people to complete the program. And for the listeners the 28 days of exceptionalism challenge is 28 minutes for 28 days and so dollar a day, so it’s 28 bucks. And the idea behind it is that for 28 minutes, you’re going to focus on four activities. Each activity is seven minutes long. So it’s reading for seven minutes, writing for seven minutes, meditating for seven minutes and physical exercise for seven minutes.

That’s your commitment every day for 28 days. And the idea behind it is really the mission is to help you see where you stack up in terms of your discipline. And that word discipline has a false meaning in people’s minds. People think of discipline as you’re getting spanked, you’re getting punished for doing something wrong, but that’s not.

Mike: That’s how most people grew [00:29:00] up.

Jason: That’s right. But that’s not actually what discipline is. Discipline the root of it is disciple, is learning. And the challenge behind it is the rigor and the overall commitment to persevere through that learning experience, because learning isn’t necessarily comfortable. And it isn’t necessarily easy.

It’s something that in order to grow both mentally and physically, you have to push yourself and that’s learning. And so when you apply yourself to the program for 28 days and Mike, you can tell the listeners how you felt afterwards and the experience you had. But the goal of it is that this is a very simple exercise that if you apply yourself on a daily basis, and each day you do it, you just try to do a little bit better, 1% better every day. 28 days later, you’re going to see at least 28% improvement in [00:30:00] yourself in terms of how you’re anticipating things, how you’re using your intuition and how you’re impacting overall, yourself and the world around you through these disciplines.

Mike: I’ll tell you one thing I anticipated was every morning at five o’clock, those worksheets showed up.

Jason: You were a classic, you were like, I’m getting sick of your emails.

Mike: Here’s the thing, right? So that wasn’t really out of the box for me. I exercise every day. I spend time meditating and prayer every day, I journal every day, I do those disciplines every day. What was different about it was now I was accountable to somebody.

And there’s something about being accountable to someone else about your actions. Hence, when I first started being coached by you, I had another coach, but I just felt that my business was not doing what it needed to do. And said, you’d coach me and we started working together.

And I immediately felt a change because, [00:31:00] Hey, you know what I’m going to do with this guy says to do, because I know he can help my business, and I need to take my business to the next level. So let’s follow the simple directions, let’s do what’s important to do. And I think that’s the big thing about coaching and accountability, right?

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: You helped me self discover what I already know. You suggest, highly suggest do this, and then you hold me accountable to it.

Jason: That’s correct.

Mike: And if I perform or I don’t perform that’s on me, that’s not on the coach. But when I do perform, and I perform it even a little bit higher level, or the numbers are different or the results are different, it makes a big difference in that coaching relationship because you build that trust, that accountability, that stretch. Okay, let’s go do more now.

Jason: That’s correct. That’s correct. I want to point that out, Mike, that is essentially what coaching is. And so [00:32:00] many people misunderstand it. I’m gonna use an unfortunate example that I just had to let go of a client because they looked at me as being the product that was supposed to make them successful. And I said that’s not what you purchased. And they said, I believed in you and you were supposed to be there as my support and all these things.

And I said, here’s the difference in the perception that you have of me and the perception I have of me, and I have a view. I want your success and whether or not we part today, or tomorrow or never, it doesn’t matter. My goal is your success. How I work with you is that if this is the last time we ever connect with each other, I’m leading you in your success.

So tomorrow you don’t need me. [00:33:00] You can use me as a coach and you’re going to get the same message in the same discipline from me. But the value that I’ve given you today is all you need to go forward on your own. The reason why you come back is exactly what you just said. Once you see results for yourself, you want to come back and say, Give me more.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: And it’s more of the same thing, but it’s still more.

Mike: Right.

Jason: Because it doesn’t matter what type of coach you are. And I always like to use track coach because it’s funny. I never ran track a day in my life, but I learned from watching people and talking to coaches, how fundamental attract coaches to every type of coaching.

Because if you talk to any track coach, the last thing they try to do is teach you how to run. The goal of attract coach is to inspire you to understand that running is [00:34:00] something that you don’t just do. It’s something that you take on and that the more that you’re applying yourself to running and the mechanics within yourself as the more that you find within yourself, the ability to run faster and more effectively. And a coach’s responsibility is that as you run and you have a challenge, you say, okay, when I’m running, this happens and they say Are you turning your ankle or your knee or your wrist, or are you moving the right way?

Are your mechanics exactly sound the way they need to be for you to get maximum effort and maximum performance? And so all we’re doing as coaches is we’re asking the right questions to figure out within you, you are the machine. And so it’s no different than a mechanic in the fact that, whatever the problem is, the old joke that when a woman walks into a mechanic, she says, I hear this sound.

And he says, okay is it this sound or that sound? And she says, it’s this sound? And he takes out a [00:35:00] sledgehammer and he taps the side of the car and the sound goes away and she says, Oh, you fixed the sound. He said, okay, here’s my bill under $300. And she says, $300, all you did was tap the side of the car.

And he says, yes, it was $10 for the sledgehammer, it’s $290 for my knowledge.

Mike: That’s it.

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: So that was good. That was really good. Coaching is good though. So listen, we’re getting pretty close to the end here. One question I want to ask is, if a new investor was coming into the marketplace today because this show Insider Secrets is Insider Secrets in the multifamily space for the multi-family investor.

If a new investors coming into the marketplace today, what type of mindset should they have? Should they grab onto to help them do business, move their business forward, stay engaged, grow?

Jason: Yeah. Great question. So growth mindset is absolutely something that you have to [00:36:00] have.

And it’s also about presence of mind. Both of these really come from experience. There’s a great book by Carol Dweck called “Mindset”, that’s just for everybody out there. Carol Dweck obviously gets a free plug from me. Mike, you have a book, I have a book, we can plug them at the end, but Carol gets a free plug.

In any case, the other thing too is to understand that getting the right people around you and another Stephen Covey principle is your circle of influence. And this is preached by any number of people, Jim Roan, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, finding the right people around you, surrounding yourself with the right people as an age old adage, it does not matter what your business is.

And one of the best ways to do that is coaching, because when you find a coach and understand that finding the right coach for you, it’s really understanding who you are and finding somebody that’s going to work with you on the [00:37:00] things that you have weaknesses with, number one.

But also knows how to get the results from you because of personality, character. So you have to talk to people and you have to find out, not every coach is right for everybody. I say it all the time. I’m not right for everybody. I have a very intense personality because I am so driven. I have a very good sense of humor as well, but it doesn’t always show unless we’re getting results because until we’re getting results that side of me is not going to come out. For other people, they start with humor.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: And that’s one of the things is you have to understand who you’re working with and how they work. So in, in your case, you even said it before you had a coach before, but what was the difference with me?

You were looking for somebody who really pulled that drive out of you, that you naturally had. And I even told you how impressed I was with you because me being a very driven person, I saw your work ethic. And I was like I don’t have to worry about you. Work ethic is one thing you got down straight.

And so for people who are struggling with work ethic, [00:38:00] I might not be the right coach for you because if you don’t have a great work ethic, I have no sympathy for you.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: And that’s one of the things that people have to think about. So getting back to mindset, you got to have a very open and very resolute idea about what it is that you want for yourself and go after it that way. And you also have to have a willing to be disciplined.

Mike: That’s that clarity, right? You got to be crystal clear. Once you’re clear, everything else tends to move forward. You can go right where you want to go, but it’s that clarity. And I think a coach, a good coach helps you get crystal clear on the why and where it is.

Hey, let’s shift gears a little bit. Let’s ask a few fun questions. I got a couple for you. I know you’re in up New York, off long Island. Favorite tourist attraction?

Jason: Favorite tourist attraction is the statue of Liberty.  It’s for a very different reason that, and this is what I say to everybody is first of all, don’t go on the statue of Liberty tour, [00:39:00] take the Staten Island ferry.

It’s a much better way to see the statue of Liberty. And the reason why I say that my favorite tourist attraction is the statue of Liberty is because you don’t really get to experience the awesomeness of New York, unless you go in New York Harbor, the Harbor itself. When you imagine the history of this is where so much of America was formed and some incredible battles during the revolutionary war were fought in the Brooklyn Harbor.

But the other thing is that you don’t really get to experience New York tourism and the way in which tourists are until you go down to where the statue of Liberty is, and you see all the different people and the different tourists and just what’s going on. And that for me is so much fun when I bring people that are visiting New York.

And I say, come on, let’s go to the Staten Island ferry and see the statue of Liberty. They’re like, Oh yes, I always want to. It’s yeah, it’s not about the statue of Liberty itself. It’s about all the people. And the [00:40:00] fact that everybody’s like just wide-eyed and goofy and it’s a lot of fun. For me it’s always good to take people there.

Mike: So it’s an eclectic kind of view.

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: How about the best book you’ve ever read?

Jason: Oh, wow. Man that’s actually a really tough one because I have read some incredible books. If you’re talking about novels, I would say that my favorite novel of all time is “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison.

Mike: Okay.

Jason:  Self-help books, I got to tell you that even though I literally just read it, Napoleon Hill’s “The Richest Man in Babylon”.

Mike: Oh.

Jason:  Yeah. And it’s funny, I’ve read all of his books and I finally read the richest man in Babylon and I’m just like, this book is awesome.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: Because it’s all the fundamentals that you need to know as an entrepreneur.

Mike: Yeah. That is a great book, “The Richest Man in Babylon”, and it’s not that big, a couple of days and you can get through that a couple hours actually.

Jason:  Yeah.

Mike: Okay. So this is probably a [00:41:00] question I’ve never asked anybody at my show, but because of your background, favorite MTV video?

Jason: Oh, wow.

Mike: Back when videos were MTV videos.

Jason: Yeah. This is gonna sound really silly, but “Sir Mix A Lot Put ‘Em On the Glass”. It was absolutely an insane video. It was genius to me.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: So it was a really funny video. And at that time it was the tenacity with which they decided to make that video and market it.

Mike: Interesting. Yeah. Mine was, “The Cars Shake it Up”.

Jason: Okay.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. That was a good one.

Mike: Yeah. You wonder whatever happened to some of those people that were in those videos and that, I think about that once in a while. Hey, Jason, thanks for being here today. Great information, great knowledge. I know that you’ve done well with me over the last several months. What I’d like you to do tell people how they get ahold of you. And I think you have a book that you’d like people to grab a hold of too.

Jason: Yeah.

Mike: Talk about your book and how [00:42:00] they get ahold of you if they want to pick your brain a little bit.

Jason: Absolutely, so the book is “Winning With Exceptionalism”.

You can go to the website, winningwithexceptionalism.com for the book. My company has exceptional results now, that’s also a website and go to exceptionalresultsnow.com. You can also reach out to me directly,jasonsafford.com. So those are the three websites.

And yeah from there just send your email address. We’ll get in touch with you, whatever your question is. And Mike, so grateful to be a part of this today, as well as the opportunity to coach you. Thank you so much.

Mike: I appreciate you, Jason, thank you very much. And for all listeners, Jason’s contact information and notes will be in the show notes as we put this out.

I just want to say thanks for being here. Thanks for listening in. I know there were a bunch of people on and off on line this afternoon. We’re on Facebook live. This is Insider Secrets. Insider Secrets normally goes live, new episode every Tuesday. Today, we decided just to do something a [00:43:00] little bit different because this won’t come out for a couple of weeks, but we wanted to get this out and get it out into the mainstream today.

So here’s what I ask, help us out a little bit, go like us, love us on Instagram and Twitter and all the social media platforms. Subscribe to us on YouTube, that’s My Core Intentions. Get some information there. We have a ton of great guests and a bunch of great information out there for you. So thanks for being here and I certainly look forward to seeing you all next tuesday.

Jason: Thank you, Mike privileged.

Mike: Jason, we’ll talk soon.

Kristen: Thank you, Mike, and thank you for joining us for another great episode of Insider Secrets. As always, Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Join us on social media and visit mycoreintentions.com where you can get expert coaching on all things, multifamily investing and property management.

We’re looking forward to having you back again next week for more [00:44:00] Insider Secrets.