Читать книгу The Top 1% Life - Kathleen Black - Страница 9

Chapter 1

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

Remember that time you hustled to make it to your family dinner on time? Usually, you’re late or miss dinner altogether, but you were determined to make it to this one. You hustled to get there only to be glued to your phone, constantly excusing yourself for calls, emails, texts, and personal messages. The frustration was mounting for everyone. You couldn’t help but feel the shame of a business that was so “successful” it was out of control.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when things moved from working so hard to build your business, to making enough to support your family, to getting to a place where you just want a break. How does it shift so quickly?

I remember meeting with clients on New Year’s Day in a snowstorm. It was my first year in the business. Mark and Nancy really needed a place to live. They were desperate, scared, and worried. They had a family and house to look after. They had little children and were going into a brand-new year that should have been full of what all New Year’s days should hold: hope, excitement, and anticipation for the beautiful gifts a fresh start would bring. Instead, they were paralyzed with fear, and I was feeling the pressure. They were given very little notice to leave the rental home they lived in for several years and were never confident enough to buy. They just got by financially with the rate of rent and family expenses. Now, they had no choice but to move, and without the resources to buy, they would once again succumb to a rental market where rates skyrocketed. They would now be further behind with less monthly cash flow.

Here I was, driving through streets void of cars or people, hoping their vehicle would make it through the snow, that we would find them a place to feel safe and rebuild; and that I could be enough to solve their problem, take care of them, and figure it all out. If this was year two in the business, I would not have been there. A single mother myself with two young children, I knew the pressure of having to make one minute into two. I knew how to get by with not quite enough, and my heart went out to these people. In year two, I was no longer the woman I was in year one. I built better boundaries. The world knew Mark and Nancy needed help, and the world brought them to me. In that first year, in that moment, I could help them. And I did.

I had this small window where I could help them rebuild, to feel safe, to move forward. And when I did, I completed a cycle that they did not even know existed. This time, I got to be the guide. Last time, I was the desperate one, needing but lacking a guide for myself. I never entertained the thought that I needed a guide, though. Why wish for gumballs without quarters? The desperate do not dream as much as they hustle. Dreaming requires time without urgency or a calm in a storm when you have finally broken from carrying all this world has asked of you. A break in time or a break in spirit—that is where dreaming lives. While some dream of gumballs, we collect change on the floor. Magically, eventually, we have quarters.

I was relieved to end the cycle I knew so well. Relieved that I got to give back. That is what I believe we were all brought into this world to do. We have moments and experiences where things are taken from us. Sometimes, the cruelest experiences can be out of your control, and life will rip your most delicate gifts from your hands. The loss of time, people, and circumstances carved my life. I have a feeling loss carves the best of us, and it carved the best of my clients that day.

I did help them find a lease, and once we had a break from the urgency of the situation, I connected them with the resources to build the dream of owning a home of their own. I so wanted them to have the power to choose, to carve out the life that was just beyond the horizon waiting for them. I so wanted them to know that they were worthy and capable. That they, too, could morph from this experience into people who cast a light for others. A gift they gave me.

A few years later, I would find out that Mark was sick. He was battling cancer and had to step away from his job and income. I would discover later that they saw the decision to lease as a saving grace as they could not bear to find a home only to lose it and have to walk away. Nancy shared the heavyweight of their lives before the illness. She shared the tight rope that was the journey of keeping a broken marriage together to house their children without the means to do so on their own, apart from each other. Nancy would eventually leave Mark after he was well, back to work, and they were on their feet again. She rebuilt in the end. She eventually even bought a home. She caught the same strength to make big changes at a rare, quiet moment. She told me that she had to make a leap exactly when she knew she was strong enough to go. Leaving was a glimpse, a fraction of a second when her mind, body, and soul found resolve, and she took that moment of calm, and she jumped. It was the perfect timing for a change. She clawed her way back onto her feet and she found a way to get out of debt, so she would have enough to make her own choices.

I did not tell Nancy how much we had in common. I was a successful real estate agent. I made more money than I ever made before. I helped forty-five people buy and sell homes in my first year in real estate. I signed thirteen beautiful people to work with me exclusively as buyers in my first month in the business. But just months before I helped Nancy, I had a dirty little secret. I was showing up at the office. I was helping my clients. I never missed a meeting or an appointment. But I was not living in my own home anymore.

I was sharing a room in my mother’s and stepfather’s home with my two children. I would answer ad calls in the hallway, feed my children McDonald’s on the go, and buy a small toddler bed to sit on the floor beside me when Children’s Aid Society (CAS) said it was too dangerous to let my 2.5-year-old daughter who nursed for over two years and co-slept with ease, sleep in bed with my son and me. I still resent that part. CAS stayed on me and kept my file open for two years as I desperately tried to navigate the path out of marriage into separation and, after five long years, finally, a divorce. But they stayed on to support me. They knew I needed someone to help me decipher what was happening. How do you go from building a small empire, with retirement in sight within ten years, being dubbed the “no money miracle” of investment acquisition, leaning into sweat equity with every fiber of your being, to frozen accounts, locked doors, and restraining orders?

You force yourself to continue despite the storm.

This situation got me back into my family home for now. It allowed me to find some sense of normalcy while I ramped up my energy into my real estate business. I would be the breadwinner now. There was no financial support. There was no help.

Nancy’s situation happened months later. Helping them brought up my own sense of protection for my children and family. It all felt too familiar. So, I moved myself. With two weeks’ notice, we packed our home, found a rental, and moved into a house.

Why do we lean so hard into building successful businesses? Because we know life happens, and we want to be prepared. We want to be more than prepared for that next surprise around the corner. We get stuck in the feeling of needing to build far beyond the point of financial security. So, we answer the call. We reply to the email. We miss the birthday party. We sit in the living room during holidays while our minds sit far away in the office. We hope no one notices, and if they do notice, we hope they understand. We hope they can see the sacrifices to feel safe, capable, and well-resourced. We hope they know we are well-intentioned in never wanting them to go through what we did, ever again.

So, it makes sense that we fail to notice the shift. It makes sense that we are so conditioned to jump and react, to fear the day we do not hear the phone ringing or have a client that needs us, leaving us to sit in mental scarcity without noticing the world shifted around us.

We fail to notice the bank accounts growing, the clients referring, and the time sliding away from us. We miss the moments when we dreamed of making this much. No champagne. No celebration. We were naive when we set those goals, naive to think this would be enough to risk pulling back or slowing down.

So, we forge on. We set new goals that we never acknowledge achieving and consistently feel it is all so very short of what we need, what we want, what we expected. We tell ourselves we still do not have enough—we still are not enough to fight the dragons if they were to ever show their faces again. So, we save more, do more, and give more. We beat the odds, we laugh in the face of statistics, and we sit in glass houses wishing they were concrete. We sit wishing our houses were dragon-proof while simultaneously believing we are fighting the dragon just one more call, one more client, and one more paycheck at a time.

The eye of the storm is when you have moments of clarity that provide windows into how to act in life and business. When you feel pressured for answers, the clarity that you have will give you a brief moment to change. Those moments change your life. They are a brief glimpse into what could be despite the noise. They are portals to the future. If you get one, take it.