Understanding your Why – How to have the strength to overcome any obstacle

Many people dream of achieving financial freedom, having the power to leave their day jobs to pursue their passion and ultimately enjoy a long and comfortable retirement.  However, getting to this point takes more than just dreams, it takes a lot of persistence and determination. It sometimes means you have to change your approach to how you see new opportunities and how you handle setbacks.

In the case of property investment, it is a long-term commitment and a long-term strategy that many people have used to achieve financial freedom. To be a successful property investor you have to know that you can rise above any challenge that tests your commitment along the way. Many people who start investing in property do not achieve their property investment goals because they give up when:

1. They face a hurdle or a challenge along the way (which will undoubtedly happen);
2. They don’t see results straight away and they get impatient, and/or
3. Their family and friends criticize and/or judge what they are doing because they don’t understand it themselves.

To keep this from happening to you, you need to understand your ‘Why’ — also known as your deep underlying reason for wanting financial freedom, your reason for wanting more in life, the reason you want to make more money and be more successful. I am not just talking about the superficial things you want – like the new car, the annual holidays and the ability to quit your job. I am talking about the deep, deep emotional reason why you want these things and how they will make you feel. If you hit a tough situation and are having a difficult day, it’s not enough to simply know what you want. You need to understand the deep underlying reasons why you want it. Otherwise, you will never stick to your path.

To help you determine your true values and reasons for wanting to build wealth and build a property portfolio, I like to use the 7 Levels Deep Method to find your deepest reason ‘why’. I hope this exercise helps you as much as it has helped me and so many of my clients.

When you begin the exercise, you may think that your reasons for wanting to build wealth centre around money and materialistic objects but in my experience, money and/or materialistic objects are never the real underlying motivators. It’s not that you want the boat, it’s how the boat is going to make you feel. It’s not that you want a nice car or a nice house or even a holiday. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the feelings we get from the things we have, and the feelings that we get from who we become in the process — and that is part of the journey of becoming a person that believes you can shape your future, and becoming a person that is confident in your ability to make decisions and make the right choices.

In the case of property investment, an investor’s initial reason for starting to invest in property might just be because she wants more money, but then the question is — why does she want more money? Why is that important to her? The answer might be: “It’s important to me because I want to be able to be able to pay my bills on time without feeling anxious every time.”

Then the next question becomes, “Why do you want to be able to pay your bills on time?” It’s about drilling down at each level until you’ve asked yourself seven times over, and you uncover the real, deep, underlying reason as to why it’s so important to you to stick to this plan.