The Power of Coaching and Mentorship

 Faisal: I would say for me, in my experience working with a lot of investors, I would say it's a lack of vision. And one of the first things that I do is go into vision with my clients. And I want to know why are they doing what they're doing and what is it for.

Because a lot of times they will start and go jump into an opportunity like Real Estate Investment World 

Michael: Faisal and Dr. Sheri, welcome to the show.

this is gonna be great. You guys are professional, high-performance coaches, and I can't wait to dig into what you have to share with us. Go, go ahead and introduce yourself just a little bit, and give a little background on where you've come here and what you're doing as a high-performance coach. 

Sheri: My name is Dr. Sherri Fluellen. I am a psychologist and a certified high-performance coach. Also been a real estate investor for almost well over 15 years. And I work primarily with real estate investors to help kind of with the mindset and just kind get their whole life organized in a way that supports the investing.

And where Faisal and I come in is we are co-owners of an organization that supports coaches to then support real estate investors and this organization. So this. This is gonna be a fun and amazing podcast session.

Faisal: I'm Faisal Ensaun. I'm a certified high-performance coach and a business coach. I jumped into this world, to be honest trying to figure out what the hell am I doing wrong in my life, because there were a lot of things going wrong in my life, by which I mean that I was struggling a lot as, as a young man, forget about financial success.

I was struggling in my relationships, struggling in who I was, struggling with connecting with people, and of course, that is struggling in my work business, all sorts of stuff. So for me, my mission has become to support others who are not moving forward. There are stuck points that they might have in their life and they might want to create a life of financial freedom, but there are a lot of areas that they have not explored yet.

And even if they get that financial freedom, they're stuck internally in their mind and they're miserable. They can't connect with the people around them. They are not living a life that's purposeful, and meaningful. And if you look at all those areas yes, we can support clients to go towards financial freedom, but also we ideally want to bring a life that's worth living.

And that's my focus usually, and most of my clients are real estate investors and entrepreneurs. And so I have a ton of fun supporting them to create a life that is full of freedom. Not just external freedom, but also internal freedom. 

Michael: Talk about why, so you became a coach because you felt it was a solution to issues and challenges that you were having.

And how has coaching, and I, I assume that you, you started working with a coach or several coaches. How has that helped you improve some or all of those areas in your life? Like what has a coach done for you? 

Faisal: Yeah, and that's a great question because most coaches if you talk to them, they, they started because they went through a struggle period in their life.

For me, I went through a period early on in my early twenties where I got into alcohol addiction, drug addiction, and depression that affected me for several years. And that was kind of a point in my life where I was like, you know what? Something is off. And I spent about a good decade after that trying to understand, not necessarily from personal development, Even though you can call it that, I got into philosophy in trying to understand history, trying to understand religion, trying to understand faith, and trying to see like, what the hell am I doing wrong?

And as I went through that journey, help me understand a little bit about myself and who I was. And it kind of gave me clues as to where to go. But what ended up happening the first time was I got a mentor slash coach who I didn't even consider. The first time a person believed in my potential.

Up until then, I was doubting so much of myself, but all it took was about, I think, close to six months of going through a process to help me dig a little bit deeper into my life, to figure out what my life was about, what mattered to me, where I wanted to go. Then completely blew open all the doors. And I did not expect that.

I just, so it was about a decade-plus of doing it on my own and about six months of working with somebody who was fully present and didn't have any other motive, other than to support me, to connect with my potential and what mattered to me. And, and that was a huge defense when I saw that, I'm like, holy shoot, why don't other people have access?

Why didn't I have access to those 30-plus years of my life? 

Garrett: So I have a question, but I've had coaches in the past at different phases of my life, and looking back on it, I'm like, you know, I actually, I hired a, a couple of coaches separately that just didn't have enough knowledge or experience in the space that I wanted to be in.

And it probably wasn't the best idea, but I was so desperate at the time. I was like, you know, I need this. Right. So how do you recommend that people go out and find the right coach for them and, and vet them to make sure that they don't run into a similar issue that I had? 

Sheri: As you say that it just reminds me of as you know, for syndicators we're doing the same thing.

We're trying to vet each other. And so it's really about my opinion. Some of the critical things are, you know, what, what is their experience having that deep conversation of what client kind of clients have you worked with and what do you help them achieve? It's that outcome because that's why, that's why we get into coaching, is for an outcome.

And so having that conversation with a coach of, well, what outcomes do you provide? What does that look like? And a good coach is gonna be able to describe it and explain it. Give some examples of other people's outcomes and what it looked like for them. But if the coach isn't able to verbalize that, Then they probably haven't done a lot of work, which means they're a newer coach, which isn't a horrible thing, but you just gotta recognize what you're getting.

So that would kind of be my initial thought. 

Michael: You guys are working with our organization. So we have a mentoring program for syn, syndicators. Mentoring to us means that there are a lot of skills specific to multi-family, and there are full-time syndicators that help people do their first deal and scale their portfolio.

And that's the purpose of a mentor, someone who's done what you want to do. A coach though is a little different. A coach may not necessarily be a multi-family syndicator, but what you guys focus on is the mindset. And so what we've found is that mindset is so important, but I'd like to know, I mean, not everybody in the world is successful doing whatever they want to do.

Do I mean weight loss or smoking or addictions or real estate investing or syndication? And a lot of people wanna do certain things and they want financial freedom or they want this or that, but for some reason, they can't do it and they might even try and give up or, or think they fail. And I'd be curious, what are some of the things that you're coming across where mindset needs work?

Like a few examples of the top three or four mindset issues that hold people back from succeeding. 

Faisal: And before that, I want to kind of combine both of the questions from Garrett and Michael, cuz I think it works very well. So one of the things that we're doing, so our organization, coaching Mastery Community, where our vision is to help kind of take the industry in a positive direction.

And it is a big job, but what you find is a lot of people call themselves coaches, but that might not be the case. Everybody has a different idea because the industry is not standardized yet. So we know clearly what a psychologist is. We know what you're gonna get when you go into a therapy session generally because, there are some regulations, policies, and stuff around them.

Coaching is a completely wide open world. It just has caught people by surprise. A lot like Uber. Nobody knew what the hell Uber was when it came in. The government stepped in, later on, to take care of that. But what ends up happening is that pretty much everybody calls themselves coach because it's become a hype board kind of thing, but they haven't gone through formal training, or if they have gone through training they've gone through has not been enough for them to support people.

And so that part needs to be, that's why whenever my clients come in one of the first things I ask them, like, have you ever gone through a coaching experience? Can you describe that? Almost always, they will describe to me sort of a consulting relationship that they've gone through. They've gone on a call, somebody has given them a little bit about, hey, they've trained them a little bit about around mindset and, and they said, oh, here, do this with it.

So they do some training and they give 'em a challenge to do that is not what, what we're what coaching is, and this goes to your second question and senses. A lot of people who don't create success might be stuck in an external validation mode. And I wanna kind of take people back. Robert Kosaki talks about this as well, and coming from real estate investors that were told how to be, we're conditioned on how to be in the world that might not necessarily be best for us.

So what ends up happening, for example, for an average person growing up in any home, especially in North America, is they're taught certain things to do in certain ways to be. And so they grow up thinking that, Hey, I'm, I'm gonna grow up, go to school, go after that, go to college, get a degree, and then get a job and do something.

And we all know real estate investors find out about 40 years into their life and like, Hey, this is not gonna give me the payoff I'm looking for. 

you wanna add something?

Garrett: I wanted to ask, so you, you touched on this a little bit, but. What is the difference between a psychologist and a coach?

Cause it's like you, I, I get what you said. It's like they came onto the scene and they're like, I'm just gonna make this up. And it's something, but there is real value in coaching. But I guess I don't know how that would be defined. And I've always been curious about that. 

Sheri: Well, Good news and bad news.

The good news is, I can give you my opinion. The bad news is that there is not a single great answer that everybody agrees on. But  I was a licensed psychologist for almost 15 years. I gave it up last year because I'm like, I don't need the license anymore because I do high-performance coaching and, and these other things.

A significant difference, just generally speaking. As a psychologist, when I would meet with people, they would come to me looking for a diagnosis. Because they had a significant problem, for lack of a better term, they saw themselves as broken. And so they were wanting me to tell them what to do to get fixed. Now if they didn't want to do what I suggested or what research shows is, is helpful, then they'd go to medicine or they would be a combination of both.

But it's very problem-focused. And in my experience, it was people wanting to become normal. Again, this is my perception of the work I did. Now as I did my personal development as a leader, and as a business owner, I grew a private practice as a, when I was a psychologist, I owned and grew one, and I recognize that I don't wanna be normal, I wanna be awesome.

And so there's a whole different group of people that wanna be awesome and that wanna have an awesome life. This is why we love working with real estate investors so much because they want awesomeness not just to be average or mediocre. And so coaching often it's, it's, there can be that backward-looking of like when, you know, what happens in your childhood, you know, that's the, the stereotypical psychologist is, tell me about your childhood and how your parents screwed you.

Some of those conversations happened briefly, but it's always to the benefit of moving forward towards goals, towards a richer life and so it's much more front and forward facing. 

Michael: A lot of people want these things. They want a more fulfilled life. They want success, and they want certain things, but yet they can't seem to do it.

So what are some of the reasons that you find that people are stuck? 

Sheri: Well, as Faisal was starting to talk about is that we grow up with these frameworks of the way the world works and the way that we work in the world, but that's not always serving us in our actual life. And so It's being able to kind of take a step out of the way we've been conditioned and the beliefs we have about the world, and evaluate them to see if they're working for us and if we want to change the beliefs.

And so a lot of times what gets people stuck in moving forward is they don't believe they can, or they don't believe that they're worthy of it, or they don't believe, you know, something is getting in the way. You know, if I, if I don't believe that I can fly, I am probably not gonna jump off the roof. If they don't believe that they can have success, why try?

But they don't, they're not always conscious of it. 

Michael: So that's one of 'em, I think. I think that's early on. You're, you're absolutely right. If you don't believe something, why would you ever take a step in that direction? Is that fundamentally, is that really what you're finding for people who just can't get unstuck?

Is that the number one reason? 

Faisal: I would say for me, in my experience working with a lot of investors, I would say it's a lack of vision. One of the first things that I do is go into vision with my clients. And  I really wanna know why are they doing what they're doing and what is it for?

Because a lot of times they will start and go jump into an opportunity like the real estate investment world and the way they jumped into it because somebody talked about it or somebody said something about it, but they're not actually clear as to how this is gonna support them. The only thing they're thinking is.

This is gonna get me to financial freedom, but they don't actually specifically know why that really, truly matters to them. And usually, clarify going deeper into that. They find out a lot of things there. They want financial freedom because they want a certain quality of life. They want financial freedom because they want to connect better with their spouse, and with their kids.

They want financial freedom because they want to go toward certain things that they're passionate about. They want financial freedom because they feel like that'll make them feel better in their life. Now as we explore all this stuff, they find out, holy shoot, there are a lot of things that they can deal with right now while building their financial freedom.

So in their mind, if they get financial freedom, then they'll be better off. But they don't work on that stuff. And this is usually a stuck point for a lot of investors too, that they start, but as soon as they get started, they get distracted with something else because another opportunity comes up. After all, they don't have their vision and their goals or are not focused on them.

Long term and they don't know their strategy for going there. So a lot of the stuck points is, is a huge lack of clarity in there at least more of the problems. 

Michael: Yes. I know. I noticed some similar things. Would you say that the lack of clarity and lack of vision, which are related is the first step?

Is that typically the first step to try to get clear on the vision before tackling the, I can't do this or I can't believe I can do that? Is that the precursor? 

Faisal: My experience is I wanna know what they're trying to do. Because if we're trying to solve problems in relation to what you can solve, for example, you can give somebody a million dollars, will it solve all their problems?

It'll solve some problems. But we also know that there are enough studies at this point to know that people can lose money fast. Why do they lose money? Because they have other problems. 

Michael: so how do you help someone with that? And so someone says, I want financial freedom. And you know, they try to do it on their own or they sign up for some program and nothing becomes of it.

Is it because they didn't go deep enough in their visioning? What do you do with them to try to help them? Get past that phase. 

Faisal: Part of the reason why I think high-performance coaching works is there's not one facet of somebody's life. Vision is a grand part of everybody's life. And I kind of like focusing on that.

Not all coaches focus on that, but part of the process that we know is that people need to get clear about their life. So one of the first things I will do is I will wanna find out if they are clear about their life, and what matters to them. And then once we become aware of that, then we try to find out stuck points.

What are the areas they might be stuck in? So, as Dr. Sheri might say, that said before is that they might have certain beliefs that stop them from moving forward. They might feel like they're unworthy, they might feel like they're not good enough, and these are a lot of the subconscious they might not even be aware of.

And then we find out, like, for example, our relationships are incredibly important. So somebody might jump into the investing world. They join a mentoring program. They might be stuck not because of what people might think they might. We, so somebody who's like yourself, who is running the program, they might think that, oh, well they need to know, they need to get more mentorship.

But what they might be stuck with is at home they don't know how to communicate and get that support from their spouse. They don't know how to communicate that. They're constantly in conflict and the spouse is thinking that you are neglecting us because you are already busy and now you're taking on this other thing.

And they don't know how to share that vision. And because they're stuck with it, a lot of their energy is going into conflict instead of focusing on what matters, and they don't have the social, so they feel alone and disconnected. They feel like nobody understands them and if they go into the real estate world, they will get started in it.

And what will end up happening is that they'll distract themselves because they don't have the confidence that they will do it. After all, they don't have social support. And this is a very human thing. Now, are there exceptions to that? Some people are able to override. But on average, can everybody do it?

Probably not. And this is why part of your mentoring program has some social support in it, which I love. 

Michael: And, as you said, most people aren't even conscious of what's going on. They're trying to do something and you gotta peel back, the onions, the layers. 

Sheri: And I think the word that a, or the experience that a lot of people will get is just this feeling of overwhelm.

Like. There is just too much, too, you know, and they don't even, like you said, they don't even know what to label it or, or where, what is too much, but there's just too much going on. I'm not making progress. I'm overwhelmed. And then, they quit and stop. But being able to dissect as Faisal is saying, you know, the overwhelm may not be coming from the real estate investing in and of itself, it may be all of these other things that are sucking the energy out of what could have been put towards a real estate investing and deal finding and all these things. And so it's looking at everything and helping people sort out where is your energy going. Where do you want it to go, and how do you make that shift?

Faisal: I, I wanna give a concrete example around this and from the real estate investing world and, this somebody who was in a program, in a mentoring program. And he's trying to move forward. When I asked him if he was analyzing all these deals, and one of the sessions that we had around I think it was around energy, but it came down to this, as he was sharing with me that he's focused on analyzing these deals and he's trying to move those forward.

What he was doing was he would analyze the deal, but he wouldn't finish them. He would not finish it. And I asked him like, why do you feel like you're not finishing it? He was scared to finish analyzing the deal, and this is very common and this might be a self-sabotage process. And I asked him like, do you have anybody that would, is this a confusion in terms of deal analysis?

That was not the case. The guy was smart enough to do that. He was scared. And we had to deal, walk through what he was afraid of. And it took a couple of sessions for him to kind of get unlocked. And what ended up happening for him is that all of a sudden now he is building up a social group around and whenever he has deal analysis, he's stuck and he's afraid he will reach out to people now.

And that's, that's a stuck point. Now, somebody could be there for a year, for two years, for six months. There are investors that I've known, who have listened to podcasts. Your podcast Rod, or whoever, for like three plus years, they haven't done. Why is that? 

Garrett: So this is another thing. This kind of goes in the long same line of thinking. I strongly believe that if you have heavy conflict in some other area of your life, that takes up all your energy, right? So when you run into that, How do you guys navigate, let's say they're having an issue with their spouse or something else that's outside of the real estate? I would assume you're not becoming the, you know, the coach on that side too, relationship coach, but how do you guys overcome that to help people get to kind of the next phase professionally?

Sheri: So, I'll answer that in a couple of ways or two different perspectives. One is within the mentorship program, the way that it's structured, the group coaching, like I'm not gonna ask somebody to share some of the deep personal secrets about, you know, their, their conflict with their spouse that they're not willing to go into or, or, you know, are a little embarrassed about or whatever.

But as a high-performance coach, my label may not be marriage coach. But it is absolutely part of the content which we address, we talk about the connection as vitally important as a human, and so how do we improve connections with other people? And of course, if somebody's married, that marriage connection is one of the most important connections in their life.

And so there are all of these, what we know are important aspects of being human that we can bring in and help people look at. And another kind of aspect is prioritizing. You know, if somebody's marriage is falling apart, and this is a decision I would make, this is what, these are questions. A coach asks really good questions.

They don't necessarily give the answers. Now they can give their opinion, but it's more about asking good questions. And so if I'm working with somebody and their marriage is falling apart, I might ask some questions around, What is most important right now to fix or, to put your energy into, and maybe it's putting the real estate, investing on pause for just a little bit so they can manage and figure out how to, you know, how to get their marriage back to where they want it to be.

You can't do everything all the time. You kind of have to pick and choose at times. And, but sometimes again, people feel so overwhelmed, they don't even recognize that they have a choice. 

Faisal: So I have a concrete example around this that might be very helpful to explain. Dr. Sheri's point. In my case, I'm, I'm a little bit direct with this stuff because I feel like if your family unit is not working out, you're gonna struggle outside as well.

And then I focus a lot on that area. So often when I'm going into events, when I'm speaking, this is very common. Somebody will come up to you. He's like, it's always the wife who needs coaching. Of course, my husband needs coaching. Like, okay, well I, I'd love to support. Tell me a little bit more. And they're going on, and as they're talking, you can tell that they're not taking responsibility for that.

And often I will just book a call with them. And, recently I've had a client that was the case. He wanted to quit his job, his career, a very successful, lucrative player. He wanted to jump full-time into the real estate investment space. He didn't know one, he didn't know how to communicate that and he thought that his wife was holding him back.

But as we've gone through the conversation, as we've gone deeper into it, he just didn't have enough confidence in himself to take the leap. And share that vision clearly with his wife so she can support him now. It took a couple of conversations for him to go there and he even asked me to have at least one conversation with his wife, and I ended up doing it.

Having that conversation, I could clearly see the wife was not the challenge. She was waiting for him to take the lead and he was coming up with all these analyses of this is what's gonna happen, that's what's gonna, that she didn't care about. She just wanted to hear that, hey, I'm confident that this will support our life in a better.

So within about a month, of that conversation, he quits. His job goes full-time, and he was sitting with that. And here's the crazy part, he was sitting that for a year and a half, he didn't have any sleep cuz he was trying to run both his job and business. He couldn't see his kids. Every time I saw him, his eyes were kind of bloodshed.

I'm like, what's going on? He's like, I haven't had sleep for months, Like this is not as, as simple as, Hey, what's, what's wrong with the real estate? Well, they're, everybody has these stuck points and it's not just in the relationship, that's just one part. 

Garrett: So you're, you kind of, you kind of have to bring some people back to normal, right?

So it's a little bit of a combination of getting them to a normal level, plus helping them grow, into something bigger. 

Sheri: Yeah, there's, there's still crazy in real estate, don't get me wrong. 

Garrett: Yeah, of course. Should you ever hire someone that hasn't done when succeeded, at whatever it is? So like they, I, I forget the analogy exactly, but it's something like, you don't eat at a restaurant with a, a skinny chef or something like that, you know?

Sheri: So are you asking As a real estate investor, should I hire a coach who hasn't invested in real estate? Is kind of that the specific question? 

Garrett: Pretty much. 

Faisal: I'm not into real estate, so yeah, that's great, so I'm a not yet, so I, of course, I'm attracted to it because I see the potential for it.

But part of the reason why I do this is that I'm so deeply passionate about this, And I'm deeply embedded in the world of coaching. And even my second company, I started Coaching Master Community with Dr. Sheri. I love that because that's what I feel aligned with. But interestingly, I call myself the adopted child of the multifamily investing world.

I'm not a multi-family investor, but most of my clients are multi-family investors, so I think the question can be reframed as coaches don't need to be successful in a specific area that you're doing. They need to have battled their success path. So if they are not diligently going, for example, working on their business, on their craft.

That is a problem. If they're not dealing with their relationships it doesn't mean they didn't, they don't, they need to be perfect. God knows I have a lot of problems in my life that I'm dealing with. So they need to be battling all the things that they will be challenging clients to go to.

So it, it's, it doesn't mean that you find a coach who is built the best thing ever, but they need to be somebody who's been in that process for a while and they need to have some kind of training when it comes to coaching. Coaching has some foundational principles that you need to follow. So instead of bringing themselves and projecting their own life onto another person, they're stepping in as more of a guide to help the client figure out their path and their life forward.

Rather than putting, bringing themselves and their subjective experience into that consistently. I hope that helps. 

Michael: Yeah, it does a lot. Actually. 1 of the reasons that we're talking about this right now is that we've, we've found that mindset is so important and it's not just mindset. It's actually the person's entire life.

Like your relationships, how, what does that have to do with real estate investing? Well, apparently a lot. And so we've discovered over the years that there is that missing link. Sometimes it's not sufficient to arm, to pair you with someone who's got 3000 units to help you navigate a multi-family deal.

You gotta work in the mindset as well, and that's why we're working with you guys. And so the mindset is, in my opinion, as important as the actual subject matter, whatever that is. And this has been great. How can people find out more about you guys? 

Faisal: You can find me anywhere. Faisal Ensaun,  you can Google me, you'll find me, or FaisalEnsaun.com

you can also find us as an organization, coaching mastery community.com. If you're interested in the coaching world, we have access to a lot of coaches, a lot of great coaches that we can con connect you to. So we'd love to support you there. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. 

Sheri: Same. Same with me. Dr. Sheri Fluellen.

You know, easy to find on the internet, and yeah, we're here to support the organization and any of the folks, the listeners that are listening to this, that are like, I could use a little bit of that. 

Michael: It's been great working with you guys to complement our program as well and get people over the hump and successful.

So thanks so much for being on the show here today. 

Faisal: Absolutely a pleasure. 

Sheri: Thank You 

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