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Too Scared To Invest in Real Estate? End Big Money Deal Anxiety Article Image

Too Scared to Invest in Real Estate? End Big-Money Deal Anxiety

What holds most people back from investing in real estate is the anxiety that surrounds closing their first big-money deal. The conversations happening in the minds of those new to real estate investing feed anxiety like a hungry beast. In this article, you’ll learn how to overcome being too scared to invest by starving the voice that’s spreading doubt, fear, and anxiety while feeding the voice of opportunity, growth, and confidence.

Turn your anxiety about investing into an advantage!

Stifle the voices to stop the stress

The voices in our minds that cause hesitation, indecision, and self-doubt are referred to as “self-talk.” The better we become at managing these mental conversations, the better control we have over making the right decisions. This is because the conversations we allow to take place in our minds create our emotional state.

Take for example an investor who is beginning to doubt a deal. This person is allowing conversations to take place in their mind that support the belief, “This might be a bad investment.”

This conversation is healthy, important, and necessary. However, this conversation stops serving us when emotion begins to enter the equation. Feelings such as stress and anxiety can shift the conversation from one of logic and due diligence to one of irrational and immobilizing fear.

It’s important to remove emotion from the equation while finding a balance between the voices that support–or do not support–the strength of a big-money investment. The smartest investments are based on financials, market forecasting, and are free of emotional attachment.

Making a decision under the influence of stress and anxiety? You’re more likely to crash and burn. It’s natural to feel stress and anxiety when investing, but there is no reason to make hasty decisions in these emotional states.

How stress and anxiety affects decision-making

Stress and anxiety have the power to influence the decisions we make and actions we take or don’t take.

In an emotional state of joy or happiness, you’re more likely to give, share, and help others. This is why you’ll often see happy and successful people spending more time giving back.

Joy and excitement feed our decisions and actions in a positive manner. Things begin to shift in a state of stress and anxiety.

While in an emotional state of stress and anxiety we trigger the fight, flight, or freeze pathways of our brain. This can cause us to be too scared to invest by influencing our behaviors in the following ways:

  1. Fight – Aggressively underbidding with our offer.
  2. Flight – Walking away from deals too quickly.
  3. Freeze – Overthinking, hesitating, and losing deals.

Your emotional state influences actions and decisions, but your thoughts influence your emotional state.

Where are you placing your focus, energy, and attention?

Focusing your energy and attention

Your focus, energy, and attention are your most valuable resources, so you should manage them properly to overcome being too scared to invest so you can make more money as a real estate investor.

Where your focus goes, your energy flows. This, in turn, is what guides your thoughts.

Imagine focusing on why a deal is risky. The thoughts highlighting the risks will freely and effortlessly come to you. With those thoughts come the feelings of stress and anxiety which are in alignment with the energy you’ve created through thought alone.

This example reveals a cascade of events that are critical for you to understand as an investor:

Your focus influences your thoughts, which influences your emotions, affecting your decisions and, therefore, your results.

Understand this concept and you will understand the power of your mind’s ability to influence your investment decisions.

Let’s now focus our attention on what makes a deal great. Shift your focus to validating the opportunities within a deal and you’ll find them as well. If you look for reasons to buy, you’ll find them.

You control your mind, so become better at guiding it where you’d like it to go. Use a balanced and emotionally self-regulated approach to investing and you’ll see your investment portfolio grow more rapidly than you could ever imagine.

Moving your body reduces stress

Stress is energy that has accumulated and must be released. One of the most effective ways to do this is through physical movement. Moving your body is critical because emotions do not exist in the mind, they reside in the body. Your body houses stress and the key to removing stress to overcome the fear of investing is to unlock the front door.

Here are three physical actions you can take to remove stress:

1 - A Quick Workout

You’d be surprised how underutilized and powerful a quick workout can be for reducing stress. Twenty jumping jacks, 25 pushups, or even some shadowboxing is enough to shift your focus and relieve stress.

2 - A Long Walk

Walks are the road to reducing stress while gaining clarity of thought.

One of the ways Charles Darwin was able to envision evolutionary theory was through daily sand walks. He had a sandy walking trail he would take laps on until a thought came to him or a problem’s answer was revealed. This works like magic! Some of the best decisions you will ever make as a real estate investor will happen free of a smartphone while on a long walk.

3 - Breathwork

Your breath has an immediate impact on your stress levels. You’ve heard it before, but maybe aren’t using this technique as often as you should.

My favorite technique is the physiological sigh. The physiological sigh is something we used constantly as a newborn to reduce stress and it works just as effectively as an adult.

To perform a physiological sigh:

  • Take one quick big inhale.
  • Stack on an additional quick inhale.
  • Finish with a quick full exhale.

Thanks to neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman for turning me on to this powerful and effective technique. Three to five repetitions seem to work best.

Move your body to burn the pent-up energy of stress and anxiety and feel more relaxed.

Use the power of acceptance to relieve stress

There’s one thing that’s for certain for all of us. A lack of certainty is often a source of stress. Imagine if everything in your life were certain–you knew exactly what would happen every hour of every day for the rest of your life. The stress of uncertainty would diminish, however, your desire to wake up every day would be non-existent.

Uncertainty is a gift and can inspire us to feel excited, motivated, and alive. Not knowing who will win the Super Bowl gets us excited to watch it. Our excitement to go on vacation and see places we’ve never been before is based on uncertainty. The excitement of a first date is fueled by uncertainty.

When we shift our perspective on uncertainty, we shift what was once defined as “stressful” to now being viewed as “exciting.”

Visiting a new property for the first time becomes exciting. Proper due diligence in determining whether a real estate investment is smart becomes exciting. Our fear of investing is quickly replaced by feelings of joy, curiosity, and feelings of excitement.

The reason why a simple shift in our perspective has such a powerful impact on reducing the stress around big-money deals is based on our physiology.

The difference between stress and excitement is much less great than you may imagine. The neuronal pathways fired off during stress are the exact same as those fired off with excitement. Our heart beats faster, our palms get moist, our breathing becomes shallow.

The way our body acts while feeling stress is the exact same as how it acts when feeling excitement. How we choose to define our physiological experience is based on how we label it. We determine this label.

The lens through which we view any given situation determines our interpretation of it. Nothing has meaning until we give meaning to it. Start managing the meaning and perspective you choose to place on things. When you change the way you see things, the things you see change.

Next Steps: Overcome Being Too Scared To Invest For Good

If you are too scared to invest in real estate, there’s hope. The key is to change your mindset and start looking at big-money real estate investment deals as being exciting! Let this excitement reach your spouse or your team to bring them into alignment with your vision.

Choose a perspective that fuels this excitement. See the opportunity in all the big-money real estate deals that come your way.

Once you’ve identified investment opportunities, challenge your excitement with proper due diligence. Lean into the illusion of fear when it appears and discredit the false narratives surrounding it. Challenge the story with an equal and opposing story supporting the property.

Now go get that next big-money deal!

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