3 Degrees of Freedom

In-Between Episode: Relationships are Everything with Derek Clifford

• Derek Clifford • Season 3 • Episode 157

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In an electrifying episode of 3 Degrees of Freedom, join us on a captivating journey with Derek, his narrative resonates with the episode's theme, "Relationships are Everything," as he unveils the transformative might of connections. Tune in as he explores the impact of the right mastermind groups, the truth that your inner circle shapes your trajectory, and the evolution of network resources into personal treasures. Discover the profound link between net worth and network, as Derek unveils the intricate dance between prosperity and relationships.  Join us for an enthralling exploration of Derek's journey, where relationships emerge as the bedrock of an extraordinary life.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-clifford-elevate-equity/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKXbN-BL3oO10pG5O-lssaQ
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dereklovesequity
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dereklovesequity/

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift
 
If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Welcome to the Three Degrees of Freedom Podcast, where we explore lifestyle engineering with our expert guests to bring you in alignment with your own three degrees of freedom, location, time, and financial independence. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another in-Between episode of the Three Degrees of Freedom podcast. Today is an important topic, which is relationships with other people before. Getting into this whole business thing. I never used to think that it was that important to talk about relationships and how to work with other people, because I was very much a lone wolf back then, and I always valued the important value of independence and being able to do things on my own and basically saying, I don't need anyone for anything. And that continues. To be a driving value for myself, but I also understand its limitations now because relationships is how things get done, and that's where real power comes in and has basically completely changed my life. And so I want to impart this wisdom onto you as well. And. I'm gonna do that by talking about five specific points. And I'm gonna try to be very brief in this so that it's short and sweet and you guys understand. But for those of you who know how important relationships are, that's great. I hope that you continue to foster them. But for the, those who don't, I encourage you guys to come at this with an open mind because I was exactly like you. I was looking at this saying, well, you know, I people let me down, and the only way to know that something is gonna get done is if I do it myself. And while that's true to a point, there's only a limit to how much you can do on your own. And so I'd want to encourage you to think about that. So please indulge me in this mental exercise as we move forward. First thing I wanna say about relationships is that you've gotta be intentional about getting around the right people. If the people that are around you right now are dragging you down, you gotta get new people around you so that they can support you instead and challenge you. You can't really have an excuse for any of this. If you don't know and you don't have people that are immediately around you, that are supporting you, you don't know who to tap into. You gotta start being creative. There's a lot of things you can do. The world is digital out there and there are lots of places where you can get guidance as if you were talking with people who have long since left this world. I forgot exactly who it was. I think it was Napoleon Hill in one of his books who was also passed and is no longer with us, for the last almost a hundred years. But he mentioned that. He listened or read biographies of incredible people before his time, you know, George Washington and, you know, people in the past that he looked up to, and Napoleon and things like that. Right? And what he envisioned was, He had a, let's say, a problem or some sort of issue in one of his businesses or in his life. He was at a fork in the road and he didn't know where to go because he had listened to so many, or he had read so many biographies of these great people. He understood approximately what these people's personalities were, and so when he went to bed each night with this problem, He pictured in his head with a visualization exercise, him sitting at a table with all of these great people, the spirits of all of these fantastic people at a round table, and he would bring the problem out on the table and listen to what his subconscious mind said that each one of these person people would say at the table to help solve that problem from all those different perspectives. I think that is awesome advice, and I've used it once or twice before and it's helped me get to some incredible breakthroughs. So being intentional about getting around the right people. Maybe you don't have them. Maybe there's family members that bring you down, and sometimes it's impossible to really escape those relationships, but I would encourage you to highly look at distancing yourself from them if you need to. It's a hard thing to do. I'm not saying to sever the relationship, but maybe start to look at it from a different perspective and instead choose proactively who you want to be engaging with because there are things called mirror neurons in our heads, and as mirror neurons work, people interact with each other and we start to take on the energy of the person that we're interacting with. That may sound like nonsense to you, but if you do this every single day, right? If you take yourself, and let's say that you are based in the US and you decide to move to Japan, or you decide to move to Germany or decide to move to Italy or something, or Greece. Do you think that you're gonna still have American values over the next five to 10 years? Most likely your personality is gonna change a little bit because the culture and the people that you're surrounded around, right? So to some degree we pick up on that energy. And if you compound that energy over many years, it's a big deal. So you gotta surround yourself around the right people so that you can start having that compound effect work for you. In a positive way, and you can be creative with this by listening to podcasts or reading biographies of incredible people, or reading great books that are inspiring and positive, right? And drawing energy from that and spending time relating with that. So your mirror neurons are going to that specific content rather than working with someone who may be toxic or hurting you in the long run without even knowing, even if they aren't unconscious of it. Eventually, at some point you have to make a stand and you have to decide for yourself that this is not a healthy thing for you to do. Point number two is that you are the five people that you hang out with the most, I should say you're the average of the five people you hang out with the most. So as I said before, you need people around you who can challenge you and inspire you and lift you up when you have problems. If you hang around five people every day, Who were millionaires, right? And they were helpful and truly wanting to, because that's how they became millionaires, is that they trust other people. They wanna solve problems. They like challenges. They're curious people. If you find yourself in a network like that, guess where you're going to be? Soon? You're going to be in that level. I'm not saying that you're gonna be able to do that instantly. There are avenues, right? Like you can meet some people at meetups. And try to get, you know, a little bit closer to them or understand like what makes them tick. Try to add value to them first and try to get more time with them so you can understand their mindset more. Listen to things that they listen to. Read the things that they read, and try to build yourself up to a person that would fit in with that type of person. And then all these other things will start coming in. Alongside of it, right? It's kind of like this peer pressure thing because if you are with these five people, right, and your spouse is your biggest person, right? Obviously if your spouse is high level minded, you two are going to be at a similar level. That's just the way that it is mentally, because you spend so much time together and you've committed to them, most likely you're gonna be growing together or not growing together basically, or stagnating together. And so the best relationships are the ones where you challenge each other and you're positive with one another, and you're trying to bounce ideas around and you're supportive, right? Fitting in and peer pressure, that's a genetic need. By the way, guys, I don't know exactly where this came from, but I remember reading, somewhere or hearing that. It's in our brains to fit in like that. We are, we crave to fit in because, you know, growing up in early antiquity, the people that didn't fit in didn't belong in a group, and the people that didn't belong in a group were off by themselves and were probably, were probably killed by an animal or, didn't know how to treat a disease or didn't have any support. So those that got along well with others and stuck together as a group right. Those are the people that survived. And that need is ingrained in our psychology. And that need of fitting in, of belonging to the group is very powerful. We have so many people though, in the world now, right? And the group that you fit into, you start taking on the values of that group and that culture. So I encourage you. To understand that you're the average of the five people that you hang out with the most, so make sure that you're surrounding yourself around five people that you choose, not. That's just defaulted to you. Number three, point number three I wanted to make is that your network's resources eventually become your own resources. So if you have a problem in the future, Like, let's say you're going through a bankruptcy or you have, an issue with a financial thing, or you need support because your car broke down, right? If you have networks, those resources then can offer you help. They can give you a place to stay for a while while you get a job and get yourself up on your feet, or they can lend you their car, right, to get a job done. Or if you're looking for a tax. Professional, for instance, to help you with your taxes and you don't know who to go with because you're unsatisfied or maybe, they closed shop. How are you gonna find someone else? You can use the internet. Sure, you can do that, but you can leverage other people's ability and other people's experience and other people's knowledge and just get the job done way quicker, more efficiently without having the hassle of trying to search and do things yourself as a lone wolf. There's a book out there, that I'm lacking the name and maybe some of you guys can put in the comments what this is. It's called the Five Forms of Capital, or, something like this. I remember the book has a big tree symbol on the front, and if I think of it, I'll go ahead and post it out there for you, but they talk about all different types of capital. There's monetary capital, there's intellectual capital, there's social capital, relationship capital, all these other things, right? Out there that's not just monetary capital and if there was an apocalypse or anything like that, right? Money obviously is no good. Resource capital, right? Like having food and water that would make you wealthy. But if you have an intellect, if you have the, if you're a doctor and you have the ability to heal people, do you know how valuable that would be in an apocalyptic society? Or if you have social capital, because you're so well connected, right? You don't have that knowledge. But you know, people who do. That's really important also. Or if you have relationship capital where you are, you have such a deep connection with some other people that the relationship is strong. That's another form of capital because it can be leveraged into other monetary, intellectual resource capital as well. So the bigger your network becomes, the more information you have access to. And the more resources you have and the more inspiration you can get, and the more ideas and the more recommendations, everything just gets better when you have a bigger resource network or a bigger network, right? You have more people to be able to tap into. So relationships are big. I, you know, there is a caveat to say that you don't want to build a whole bunch of platonic relationships that don't have any substance to them. And I'm not saying that you should go out there and just try to actively network and get a whole bunch of shallow connections that don't mean anything. It is about connection here, and I'm talking about how important it's to build the right relationship with the right people because those people also have relationships that they can very easily recommend to you. And that actually has been. One of the best ways for me to build my wealth over a long period of time was warm introductions from a very ni, like a good connection with someone that I really understood, had the same values, and really appreciated and trusted and use their recommendations and borrowed that person's reputation to get me a service that I otherwise would have no access to. For instance, a property manager, right? I knew an investor in a market. And when I connected with this investor, I said, Hey man, like we should do something in the future. But in the meantime, do you have someone that, I can reach out to for property management services?'cause I'm looking to try to grow in a neighbor market in a neighboring market or something. And I said, absolutely. Here, use this person And this person ended up being my property manager for many years after trying and going through so many on my own, looking for other people, right. And doing it on my own because good people. Only refer good people. It's this five people. You hang out with the most type of strategy that really is important. So your networks become your resources. So strengthen those relationships that you feel. There's a good connection and a great symbiotic type of relationship there where there's help, you can provide them, they can provide help to you, and you just enjoy being with the person. That's really, really important here. The fourth point that I wanna make is super brief, but it's a corollary that your net worth is your network. So I could make an argument that most people who have big networks have large net worths, and there is a book out there I think that even made the claim that if you tell me the number of people in your network, at a certain, you know, like layer of the onion, so to speak, like whether you're inner circle or you know, your middle circle, or just your acquaintances, If you give them those numbers, they'll be able to tell you within 50, within 10 to 15% what your net worth is. I thought that's super interesting, but it makes sense to me because over time, if you stay within your network, this peer pressure to take on the same values and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, maybe, you know, in Richard Branson's circle, it is not acceptable to have a net worth under a million dollars. Because he's a billionaire. So to some degree you have to be in that sphere, right? You have to have that type of mentality where it's just not acceptable to have, like, it's not in my value system to be at that level or to treat people a certain way or whatever, right? You name it, X, Y, z. It's whatever number of values, not just the amount of money you have, but it's the way that you, interact with people. Like, do you tip waiters? Do you thank people that you don't know? Those types of things, those values and attitudes start spilling out, and the people that you hang out with naturally start gravitating towards the average of your own net worth as well. Unless you're making an extreme effort to try to move yourself up into a different tier or move sideways or move in a different direction, then most likely the people that are around you have a relationship that's in within a degree of magnitude. Your net worth also. The last point I wanna make here is the Jim Roh quote, and the quote is, your success is directly determined by the quality of your communication. Your success is determined by the quality of your communication. That stuck with me for quite some time because I never really understood what that meant a long time ago, and until recently, I still didn't understand what that meant, but what he means by that. Is that the better you get along with people, the stronger your network is, and the stronger your network is, the stronger your success is going to be. So it's a corollary that if your communication is good, then your network starts building up and you start building connections and people around you, whether they're customer connections or their peer connections, or their mentor connections, whoever, right. As soon as your communication starts getting better, then so does your success because of your network, they start pouring in and the relationships start building. And then as the relationships of the people that you admire start getting closer to you, you start gravitating towards the people that you admire and you become more closely fitted towards your ideal self. So again, Your success is determined by the quality of your communication. I never understood what that meant, and even though he probably explained it in his videos, I just wasn't in a place to be able to understand what he meant by it. But now I do understand what that means, and it's very crystal clear to me that if you can communicate well enough to be able to work with teams and work with people that you like and trust and people that wanna work with you, and there's like this relationship that's starting to build, then. Networks start growing, and yes, you do have to help other people, but they help you too. And so it's this value of trust. It's this big circle of trust, and if you can become a bigger person and get more people within your circle, that would be in your corner and you would be in theirs, then the more power there is in that, because trust is what it's all about. That's the basis of human communication and relationships and true power. So those five points. Number one, being intentional about getting around the right people. Number two, you're the five people you hang out. You're the average of the five people you hang out with the most. Number three, your network's resources become your own. Number four, your network worth is your network. And number five, your success is determined by the quality of your communication. How do we develop all of these? What are some actionable tips? Well, One of the first things that you can do is what I did for myself, which is audit who you're spending your time with and start distancing if you need to. It's a tough, brutal exercise. I alluded to it in one of the points above, but I'm not saying you need to cut people off completely. I just think that there needs to be a healthy amount of boundaries set up between you and the people that are not bringing you up anymore, because if you consistently hang out with someone who is shutting down your ideas, it's like poison. You're allowing poison to enter your system. So instead, what you need is you need to distance yourself away from that so you get less doses of it and you can start surrounding yourself around people who can give you healthy things to work with. And over time that will compound into even more healthy things. And then you start giving back, and then that give back, then creates more, give back. And it's just a, a great, you know, a fantastic cycle for you to move up into. The second thing I would say is, Know what your objectives are in trying to expand your network and try to build relationships out. Like understand why it is that you're doing it. Because if you know that, then you can start saying, okay, maybe I'll start with just podcasts. That'll give me an action plan. So this point is all about the objectives, which is how to get it implemented. So if your objective is to find a job right, then that means that you can start taking a relationship point of view with going to meetups, right? And trying to build relationships around people who are searching for software jobs or things like that, right? So be honest about what it is that you want to do with it and expanding your network and try to find something that will help you deepen, get deeper relationships or get more relationships in general. And then the last thing is, As I mentioned before, just be honest about what you like and what you're curious about. So knowing the objectives is good, but also knowing who you are and what works for you the best is probably. A more prudent approach if you go and say, I, I don't really like to be around people a lot. Well, eventually, you know that most likely should change because there are people out there that are just like you, that think the same way and you guys would actually get along great. So there is someone out there in the world for you to build a relationship with, whether it's romantic or just friendship, or business partners or whatever it turns into, or intellectual curiosity, whatever. There's people out there that you can build relationships with that allows you to leverage things, right, and grow your net worth and grow your resources between the both of you. And so be honest about that. If you know you don't want to be out there, then listen to podcasts, right? And find some incredible personalities online that you like to listen to, and get some great autobiographies out there, or biographies of incredible people who you look up to, right? So, I hope that was helpful, and I just wanna leave with the final note to say thank you guys for listening all the way to the end of this podcast. And wherever you're listening or watching this, please make sure that you like, subscribe or comment. Just engage with us because I wanna see whether or not we're providing incredible value to you. That's helpful. And. I just wanna thank you for being a f a faithful listener to the podcast we've been running for. We're coming on three years now almost, and it's been quite an evolution over the last three years. And, I couldn't have done it without your guys' support and comments, and your likes and your thumbs up and your ratings and reviews on iTunes and also on YouTube and everything. So, Thank you guys once again, and I'm really looking forward to coming back next week to talk more with you. And, until then, keep crushing it and we'll see you next time.