Today, I’ve got a very special interview with a good friend (and neighbor) of mine in Florida.

His name is Gary Coxe, and you may recognize him from TV appearances on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsche and other shows.

He’s the author of a fantastic book called “Don’t Let Others Rent Space In Your Head” – and I’m happy to have him as a guest on Marketing Monday today.

Q    Gary thanks for joining us.

A    Dean thanks for having me.  I’m flattered and privileged at the same time.  I really mean that.  Thank you so much.

Q    Now where in the world is Gary Coxe today?

A    Today I am in central Florida – when I’m here.  As you know I travel quite a bit but I’m in Florida right now enjoying the weather.

Q    Perfect.  Well Gary I was mentioning your book “Don’t let others rent space in your head” and I appreciate you coming to maybe share some insights with us because there certainly is a lot of negativity and a lot of things, especially in the real estate world that we can let occupy our minds right now.

A    Yeah, there’s no question about it.  You’ve got the short sales and the foreclosures and all the stuff and if you’re not mentally set and right if you will, we’re going to unfortunately allow that stuff to affect our attitude and the danger in that obviously it’s going to possibly slow us down.  If it doesn’t slow us down we may want to just go to the point of totally quitting and if we can learn to focus more on a solution than the problem it will cause us to look for the right answers to keep going forward to becoming more creative and doing things that we have to do to really focus on getting results; not whining about “Oh no, what’s going to happen now?”

Q    You’ve got a very interesting background and how you came about making a life study of all of this. Can you just share a little bit about your background and how you came to be who you are here?

A    Yeah, I want to let people know and I want to let them appreciate that I understand what it’s like to have some rough times but I also understand what it’s like to really bounce back and keep going forward.  I’ve had a pretty interesting life I guess.  Early in the game I was very successful; like all the people listening to this and yourself I was an entrepreneur very early; I started my first business at 11, my second at 15.  As a teenager I was doing quite well making over $100,000 a year and then things changed.  I got married.  Shortly after we got married my wife and I we had a baby and then she tells me it wasn’t mine; hugely painful.  After this, my grandfather and step father died of cancer – in a time frame of all this my father was murdered, I had $30,000 cash in the bank, lost all that and of course my business that I had, I lost all this and this all happened to me Dean as you know, by the time I was 21 years of age.  I don’t share this with people to get their sympathy but I want people to understand that yes, there is somebody out there who has experienced similar joys in life and also similar pain.  So I come from a background that hey I know what challenging times really are but I also know specific strategies and what has to be done to get beyond those and keep moving consistently.

Q    It’s actually really timely right now because there are so many people who just a few short years ago were making hundreds of thousands of dollars and everything was great and now there are a lot of people who are really struggling to stay positive and to keep the train on the tracks.

A    Yeah, there’s no question about that and I think most people that are in business they know the importance of maintaining a positive attitude but unfortunately I think there’s a lot of misleading stuff out there Dean that people don’t quite understand how to do this.  For example, we hear a lot about positive thinking.  Well, positive thinking, as far as I’m concerned, really does not work; positive thinking is like spray paint on rust – it doesn’t last long.  Let me give you an illustration.  If I had a bunch of people over to my house and I say to them “Let’s bake up some cookies” and I bake up the cookies and they smell so good and I give everybody a cookie and everybody takes a bite and they look at me simultaneously and say “Gary, something just doesn’t taste right” and I look over to the counter and I realise “Oh my goodness, I forgot to put the eggs in the ingredients”.  No I don’t think we have to be professional chefs to know that not all cookies, but for most cookies to taste right, you have to have eggs in the ingredients so I take the eggs and I mix them up in the bowl and then I take your cookie back from you and I dip it in the raw eggs.  Now that’s pretty disgusting but did we not agree earlier that for the cookies to taste right, we had to have eggs in the cookie?  Well there’s a difference between having eggs in the cookie or eggs on the cookie.  Technically you know as well as I do for those cookies to taste right, we’ve going to have to start from scratch so positive thinking by itself is like raw eggs… by itself it’s pretty disgusting but with the right ingredients, that’s when things happen and we have to learn how to use those different ingredients together.  One of the other things that a lot of people will do – in fact you can go to the library and see books and books and books on this stuff; it’s positive affirmations.
I don’t know about you but I remember when I started to get into business more and learning more about personal growth, I got the idea or impression from other people that all you’ve got to do is say these positive affirmations and things happen.  Well I realised that it takes more than positive affirmations so here’s something that I think is very powerful.  I’ll say it slowly and I’ll repeat it so you really, really get this.  The more you say a positive affirmation, the less you believe it; that’s why you keep saying it.  Let me repeat that – the m ore you say a positive affirmation, the less you believe it; that’s why you keep saying it.  When you and I woke up this morning, I know that you and I did not look at ourselves in the mirror and try to convince ourselves by saying ‘I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man”.  We know that so a lot of times people are just trying to say things over and over just to convince themselves of certain things.  That’s a start and I’m not saying don’t use positive affirmations but what we have to learn to do and this is the key, we have to learn to convert the positive affirmation to an empowering belief and the purpose and the power of that is for every belief you act on, you get a result.  If we want to get more results or different results, we have to create new beliefs.  Positive affirmations alone in themselves are not going to do it; we have to convert them to a belief.  That’s when we start really making change and getting results and going forward consistently.

Q    It’s interesting because you hear all this talk about positive affirmations and what a good thing they are so what would you do instead?  How would you use them properly?

A    Well I’ve heard so many people in all my travels Dean – and I think a lot of people can relate to this is they’ve used positive affirmations because so many people have told them to but nothing changes and they think something is wrong with them and they’re not doing something right.  I think we have to learn to distinguish what is just a positive affirmation as just a simple positive thought for example if you read a scripture or you read an empowering idea or thought, sometimes that just becomes a reminder; not necessarily an affirmation because we’re so bombarded with so many things that we get stressed out and when we read a reminder, we go “Oh, I forgot about that.  That makes sense” and it puts you back on track.  Also realise that when we say a certain affirmation if you will, is it something that we believe?  That’s the key.  A lot of times people will say these affirmations not believing them so how do you know that you can say an affirmation and you say it and believe it?  A lot of people don’t know the difference so I want to share with you how do you know that you bought a belief?  In other words, how do you know that you say an affirmation and it actually is a belief for you?  The way you know is that a belief is something that you feel.  When you say it and feel it, it becomes a belief.  If you don’t say it and can’t feel it, then it’s just positive words or positive thinking and what we have to do is we have to learn to take that affirmation to a belief.  Every time we use an affirmation if you will, ask yourself “Is this something I really believe?  Do I feel it in my gut?”  If you don’t what your goal is now is to get it to the point where you believe that.  There are several ways to do that; listening to programs like you offer is one, going to meetings, going to conventions, filling your mind.  It’s what you influence your mind with and these are the things partially that create those beliefs.

Q    So are there specific strategies that you can use then?  What do you advocate?

A    Yes, absolutely.  Of course the time frame that we have is quite limited to go into it in a lot of detail but what we have to do is start finding out what beliefs do we think would benefit us or what affirmations.  Then I’ll encourage people to write them down.  For example I went to an event that I was doing some time ago and the gentleman said that he keeps on saying he wants to make $250,000 a year.  That was his affirmation –“I’m going to make $250,000 this year, I’m going to make $250,000 this year”.  So I asked him and he was very honest in front of the entire group, I asked him “But do you believe that?” and he looked at me and he sadly said “No, I don’t believe it”.  What I had to do in this particular situation is we had to work on getting him to believe that and then to get him to believe that – which is something that you’re good at – is in this particular case; this is not the answer for all affirmations, it’s just this example, we had to get him to break things down.  So “What would it take for me to get to this point?”  “Well I’d have to do a certain amount of cold calls or a certain amount of this today and this would equate to this” and he had to become a little bit more logical with it and then once he started putting this all down, now it started becoming believable and real to him and as he looked at all this he said “Oh, this is do-able” and now as he says this belief or this affirmation at this point, now he starts saying “I’m going to make $250,000 this year” – now he can believe that because he sees it all on paper.  In this particular example he was using an affirmation but he didn’t believe it because he didn’t have it put down on paper.  In this particular case by him just chopping it up a little bit and seeing what’s involved weekly, monthly and so on, now that affirmation became very believable for him and as he started doing that he started seeing more and more results.
That’s a typical example but every example is a little different; every person is a little different but that’s one way that you can start making it more realistic but remember when you say it, you’ve got to feel it and if you don’t feel it, it’s a simple measuring rod to let you know you’re not quite there yet – you don’t quite believe it.  Your job now is to get to the point of working towards believing the affirmation then it becomes a part of you and then after a while you don’t even have to say it over and over again; it’s just ingrained into you now – it’s a core belief.

Q    What do you think the role of action is in this?  Do you think that part of the strength of an affirmation or a belief is that you’re going to take action on a belief?

A    Yeah, that’s the bottom line.  Saying that we’re going to make this or do that gets us nowhere.  That’s just the positive thinking affirmation stuff so yeah, the law of action says it all.  Using affirmations – what’s great about them, it kind of keeps the metal detector on but if you’re not willing to move the metal detector around to look for the goal that’s underneath there, it’s never going to beep.  It takes more than the affirmation.  Yes, action is everything and one of the things that I encourage people to do is always remember no matter how bad it gets, you must, you must take action and one of the laws that I share with people is the law of inertia.  What it states is things that move want to keep moving.  It doesn’t say it has to move fast.  As you know Dean, it says it just has to move so one of the things that I tell myself no matter how bad things can get is that I must take action.  I’ll be very upfront with you – there are times that I’ve been in tears because things have been so challenging but while I’m in those tears, I will do something consciously to tell myself “I am moving forward”, whether it’s mail something out, get ready to make a phone call, start writing some copy; do something.  A lot of people – we’re so programmed to be a slave to our feelings so when things get bad, we feel a little a discouraged and how do we usually reward that?  We reward that by just throwing in the towel for the next couple of hours or the next couple of days, waiting for something good to happen to excite us.  Now we’re just being controlled by external stimuli; we’ve become like a kite in the wind and that’s just no way to control our lives.

Q    When you were talking about saying an affirmation that you don’t believe, I’ve heard other people saying you want to go somewhere but building the belief is almost like looking at the map and seeing where that is and realising where you are and how do you actually get there and knowing that you’ve got some direction.

A    That’s so true because a lot of people – especially if they’re new in business and new in personal growth – they’ll grab onto these affirmations, keep saying them over and over and nothing will happen and again, like I said earlier, they’ll think something is actually wrong with them but what you said makes so much sense is that you have to have clarity, you have to have a specific road map.  I’ll give you a great example – we’ve all been to seminars and there is something that happens when we’re at a seminar; most people after the end of a seminar usually feel pretty jacked up, bullet-proof, unstoppable and for that moment their mind starts thinking “take action, take action, I’m going to do this, going to do this, going to do that” and then something is happening – they don’t even realise it’s happening, that’s causing them to feel bullet-proof and if they knew exactly what it was they could duplicate it consistently.  Because they don’t know what it is after their event, maybe on a Saturday or a Sunday, something comes around Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday and they no longer have that bullet-proof feeling and because of that they’re no longer willing or able to take consistent action as they thought they were going to do after their event or right at the event.  There are just basically two things and two things only Dean that cause us to have the desire and motivation to attain anything.  Number one is having a value or placing a high level of importance on our success and number two – a belief; value and belief.  Here’s what happens subconsciously when we go to an event and we start getting that really excited bullet-proof feeling, the external stimuli that we’re not exposing to, the music, the speaking, the colleagues that are also being successful;  you see them getting recognition and awards.  What’s happening without us even realising it’s happening is our value and our belief starts to increase and as these increase it creates more drive and desire and the ability to take action.  What we have to learn to do is learn how to change all this consciously but hey at least it helps us out a little bit for a temporary period of time but because most people haven’t learned to master these two things consciously, when they leave the event now, right after they left the event, those values and beliefs are really high but once they start hearing about the economy or the foreclosure or somebody says “Oh you need to go find another job”, before you know it one or two of those things change.  It doesn’t have to be both of them; one or two of them start to decline or descend and now you’ve lost that drive and motivation and that all affects your ability to take action.  When we learn to master those two things we become very consistent when it comes to taking action.  It’s very, very powerful.   It’s a great feeling to have and there are times when you can’t master that consistently then when I can’t I jump back to the law of inertia – no matter what happens, take action, take action, take action.

Q    It’s funny that you say that.  We would do big events all over the country and have hundreds of people and there was definitely that feeling when people were there that you could see… it was a three day event – you could see by the middle of day two their beliefs starting to shift and they were feeling things, they were seeing things, we were talking about things, thinking about things, they were hearing other people right there in the same room talking about how things worked.  It’s almost like they could touch somebody who had actually made it happen and I guess that proximity and that full immersion of being around and in that kind of environment really shapes the way people have that experience of believing that something is possible.  You’re absolutely right, yeah.

A    Yeah and what’s being shaped are those two things; value and belief.  Those two things are being shaped and influenced tremendously and it’s when they leave the event they allow other things to change that influence and that’s where the value and belief start to decline.  A lot of people – and you’ll hear this at events also too – belief is everything.  You have to have belief, belief is everything. Well that’s a lie.  Belief is half of it; value is the other half.  That would be like me giving you a beautiful brand spanking new Maserati – let’s say it goes zero to a hundred in five seconds, whatever – and I say “Here Dean, you can have the Maserati, it’s beautiful but there is no engine inside”.  Well basically the Maserati, just its body alone, that’s the belief but if it doesn’t have an engine you’re getting nowhere.  You have to have both of those two things; belief isn’t everything but what you have to have is belief and value.  Value enables you to take action on the belief and when you have those two things you can be so consistent that you can just be incredibly unstoppable.

Q    Where would people start?   If you could say the best strategy or the best advice that you could give to a realtor right now who’s maybe stuck with all this negativity in their minds, they want to turn things around – what would…?

A    Well number one is we have to admit it and it’s not bad to admit it.  You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.  Let me repeat that – you cannot change what you don’t acknowledge.  Once you’ve acknowledged “Look, I’m letting junk get in my head” and it’s okay, it’s not being negative, it’s being realistic.  It’s like when I take off in an airplane as I add the power, I say out loud “Be prepared to abort or lose an engine”.  I’m not being negative; I’m being realistic, things happen, I want to be there and be on top of my game.  If you can acknowledge that you’ve got a lot of this junk in your head the next thing now is to identify the limited beliefs, the limited junk and literally put them on paper; write down what is on paper right now – all the stuff on paper, I’ve just pulled out of my head is creating this bad, negative attitude.  Then and only then can we start changing it but a lot of people won’t even get to the point of acknowledging that “I’ve got junk in my head” because that’s not a positive thing to do but that’s ridiculous.  How are you going to change it without a diagnosis?  I think that’s the first thing – acknowledge that we’ve got some junk in the head and then start pulling specifically what are those thoughts because for every belief you act on you get a result whether it’s a negative belief which will cause a negative result or an empowering belief which will cause an empowering result.  So identify all the negative trash and put it on paper, listen to what you’re saying, see what it says and then also understand that information that’s on that paper is what’s giving us that negative attitude.  Then we can start focusing on working towards changing that and that can be in several ways as we discussed a little bit – books, CDs, being around the right people and of course there are other deeper mental barrier ideas and strategies if you will that you can work through and change them quickly as well.

Q    Speaking of books, I would highly recommend everybody reading your book, “Don’t let others rent the space in your head” – are there any other resources that you have or any other things that people could take advantage of?

A    Yes, I’ve got everything from programs on persistence, programs on self-esteem – I have one program “Secrets that my millionaire mentors taught me about business and success” and what this program does Dean, it enables you to listen in to some of my millionaire mentors as you learn from them some of their thought processes and their strategies and also marketing ideas and strategies.  The thing about these programs it just gives you a lot of specific practical answers.  I’m not into the pump up “rah, rah, you’re great, you’re wonderful, you can do it” stuff because that doesn’t last long.  I like to share with people specific ideas that changed their behaviour.  That’s what we want to do, we want to see that “hey this is a track that I want to keep mastering.  I want to make it better” or “here’s a track that’s not doing too good that I’m on – I want to change that but I want to change it quickly” so that millionaire mentors series program is pretty good because you really get to gear in and listen to the minds of some very successful people on how they think, also everything about marketing and really unique, out of the box thinking ways to market and attract customers and create a huge amount of loyalty.

Q    Where can people find out about that?

A    That program is “millionairebizsecrets.com/videofree”

Q    “millionairebizsecrets.com/videofree”?

A    That’s it.  And then of course I know you archive a lot of this but at present I’m doing a promotional tour and if I’m in a city nearby, let’s say somebody is listening to this and they’ve got a meeting coming up with a group of their team, I’d be more than happy to come in and try to make it work and if they’re interested they can go to “garycoxe.com/workshop” and you’ll get a bunch of details on my promotional tour that I’ve got coming up.

Q    Perfect. Gary thank you so much for spending some time with us and I look forward to seeing you when I get back to Florida.

A    Very good and thank you for your time and remember between now and the next time we talk or see each other, you too should not let anything or anyone rent space in your head.  I really appreciate it Dean.

Q    Thanks Gary.