Podcast Episode 112 Transcript

Episode 112: Best Of Jamil Sayegh

Are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week, I'm meeting with outstanding and investors, highperforming individuals and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the prereal podcast. Welcome, everyone, to the Prereal podcast. We're joined today by Doctor Jamil Sayegh. Doctor Jamil, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today. I'm really excited to talk with you.

Thank you so much, James, for having me and for this opportunity to be with your community. And for everyone who's tuning in, thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, it's my pleasure and honor. I was wondering, in your position, is there must be a heavy burden. Do you carry this incredible level of responsibility? You're advising people, I would assume, in instances to make drastic life changes and choices based on what they're communicating to you, toxic people in their lives, toxic situations that they're in, where they're crying out for help, they're looking to break through or they're performing well. I'm a good example. We've had a lot of success, we've been blessed, we've done really well, but not nearly where I know I can and should be. So for me, a lot of it was about, hey, I'm playing small ball. I've been playing small ball, only small ball. You're doing $50 million deals. It's smallball. There's other things and places where I should be and where I want to participate, but they come with tough decisions. Does that weigh on you? Do you have that sense of responsibility as you're advising people through this? There's two things I want to share about that. So the first thing is, I want you to notice, and this is for everyone listening, this isn't just calling you out, James, because we all do this. Notice how we take things as a given. So you said once they make that decision, now they have this really challenging path ahead of them. And so notice how we make that. We just say that as if that's true. There is no such thing as a challenging path. There's a path and you can have a challenging experience of that path, right? There's no such thing as a stressful job. There's a job and you can have an extremely stressful experience of that job, but not everybody experiences that job the same. And so when we recognize that we make it challenging, it isn't challenging. That is a game changer because that changes the whole thing.
We look at it and go, oh, wow, how am I creating? This is challenging. Not just assuming it's challenging and living into it. It becomes that self fulfilling prophecy that was the first thing just went off in my head. I wanted to bring that up because a lot of people that are listening, and I probably do at a time, too, but now I practice it for so long, I catch myself, like, a second after. But we say something, we don't question it, and then we live into it as if it's real. So it becomes real for us. Like that quote I used earlier, a lie gets spoken and allowed enough times becomes the truth excuse me. Through the second aspect of what you shared. So I think that first, we have to get clear on the role I think that I play. And so for anyone listening, there is a distinction to be made between coaching and consulting and therapy and all these kinds of things. Consulting is more along the lines of advising. Consulting is like, hey, I've already done what it is that you want to do. Like, you want to do the 100 million dollar deals. I've done the billion dollar deals, right? And so it's like, I can help you navigate that path because I've already done that. I'm the coach for the Olympians, but I was a gold medalist in the Olympics. So it's like, I can help my clients get there because I've done it. That's the idea of a consultant. That's me telling you what to do. When I think of therapy, that's along the lines of something's happened, let's say, in the past, that is preventing you from being and doing the things you want to do now. And talking about it, releasing it, is helpful. Now, in addition to my coaching training, I also have some therapy background as well. And so that's why I spoke about what I did. But as it relates to the advising part, coaching is less about advising, and it's more about helping people understand how they see their world, how they create their world, helping them navigating their thinking and helping them find the answers within themselves. Because I can give a perspective of what I think you should do, but it's your life. I could be wrong, right? So it's less helpful for me to say, james, I think you should do this. And it's more helpful for me to ask certain questions to guide you to that answer that you'll come up with. And now you're fully bought into it because it came from you. If I tell you what to do, you might be resistant to that at some level because it didn't come from you. Right? And so, first and foremost, I think that needs to be spoken out. Second of all, it doesn't weigh on me, but I definitely understand the magnitude of the circumstances that people bring to me in their own lives and how important it is for them. And every person that I work with is a 100% commitment from me.
They get my full body, mind and soul. They get everything that I have whenever we're together, and even in between if they need me. And I'm usually thinking about them, and I might send them some messages and mail them some things that I think would really serve them, because when somebody's in my world, they're there to stay, and I want to do everything I can to help them get where they want to be. And so it doesn't weigh on me in a heavy sense, but you could say it weighs on me in the sense that I'm deeply aware of it. So you mentioned a few different components there of our overall well being and our ability to excel. Because at the end of the day, a lot of the folks who come on the show, again, they're top performers, and there's a lot to balance, there's a lot to juggle. What is the correlation between physical health, nutrition and mental health performance on the other platform, whatever it may be, wherever it is that you're performing, what is the correlation between the two? Oh yeah, there's massive correlation. And so one of the ways I represent this is I think about the work that I do as a triangle, and there are three sides to it. The base of it is success, which is your own definition, whatever that would look like. The other two sides are health and relationships. And when you have the health, the relationships and the success, you have an extraordinary life without regret. And when I think about the health component, to give an example, I know your background is in real estate.
My understanding, and a lot of your listeners probably are in the real estate space. And I've worked with real estate investors, brokers, loan officers, agents from around the world. And oftentimes I find that they ignore their health physically in pursuit of whatever their goal is. And so they're pushing, they're pushing. Maybe they're not sleeping well. They're burning the candle on both ends, and they're eating whatever they can eat, or they're not eating. And they hire me, and they hire me with the intention of they want to grow the business, they want to make more money, they want to do all that. And I figure out shortly into the work that they have brain fog and they're bloated, and they're not sleeping well, and their energy is always low, and they're asking like, is there a supplement I can take? Or what can I do? And I ask some basic questions about their nutrition, their hydration, their sleep, their environment, all these other I have twelve pillars for help that I take people through when appropriate. And for me, it's like you optimize these twelve areas, 80% of what you've got going on is probably going to either drastically improve or eliminate, like go away. And when we balance out the energy, the nutrition, the hydration, the sleep, and the others, they go, wow. Two weeks later, three weeks later, a month later, I feel so much better. My energy is back. My brain fog is gone. I can actually think clearly. But there's evidence to show, as an example, that if you're dehydrated and you took one of these neurological assessments, you would show up as a result as if you were functionally drunk. So now imagine you're dehydrated, which most of us are on a functional level. And the same applies when you're sleeping less than 6 hours a night, you're also functionally drunk. So I can't say most a large amount of these listeners are not sleeping enough. They're dehydrated, they're malnourished and they're driving. They're taking care of children. They're working on maybe multi million dollar deals, not realizing the deck is stacked against them. But they're the dealer. They're the one doing it to themselves, only not maliciously. They usually just don't realize how important it is. And so one of my friends actually told me not too long ago, he's like, I hate sleeping.
And I said, Why? And he goes, It's a third of my life. Like, what a waste. And I said, yeah, but if you do it right, it makes the other two thirds way better. But if you do it wrong, the other two thirds are not as good as they could be and your life won't be as long. And so just recognizing that, going back to like, am I happy? And things like that. How do I feel after I eat? Do I feel energetic or do I feel like I just like the stereotypical Thanksgiving kind of vibe where I feel bloated and tired, I got to take a nap and I will brain fog, trouble thinking when I wake up in the morning, am I rested? Do I have energy or am I tired? There's people who wake up tired and then am I consuming energy drinks? A lot of coffee, Red Bull, whatever you're drinking, these are crutches. And I don't say that with any judgment. I just say that from the perspective of in order for you to actually change anything, it goes back to what I said in the beginning, the first thing I said about self awareness. Take an honest look at yourself and get an assessment. Am I sleeping my seven to 9 hours? And keep in mind that sleeping isn't the same thing as being in bed. You could be in bed for 7 hours, but you only slept 5 hours and 30 minutes because you woke up four times. You couldn't get comfortable. It took you an hour to fall asleep. Not the same thing. You might need to be in bed for 10 hours to sleep for 8 hours. So the point is, am I getting to sleep? Am I taking care of myself? From a nutrition perspective, it's like your body lets you know, people say like, oh, what should I eat? Well, prior to me giving you anything specific, let's focus on what not to eat what's all the junk that we're putting in that your body is using to rebuild you. Your body is brand new. Every three to seven years, depending on the research you look at. You have a new skeleton, you have new skin, you have new everything. All your cells die and get turned over. What do you think they're being made of?
They're being made of what you put in. And so if you're putting in what I would call garbage or suboptimal food, that's what you're building your body with. So what happens when you take that and you try to compete with that in the world? You try to compete with that in whatever market you're in. You try to compete with that against the people that are doing what you're doing. If they're not doing that, if they're optimizing their health, they're going to win. And so I look at it from the perspective of how do I optimize my health? How do I optimize my relationships from the perspective of how do I communicate my relationship with myself and my relationship with my intimate partner, if I have one, and my relationship with my personal and professional life? And then the success component, what do I want? What life would actually be fulfilling for me at the end of my life? There's a quote I heard not too long ago that sent chills down my spine. And the definition of hell is, on your last day on this earth, the person that you became meets the person you could have been. And now imagine the visual of there you are at the end of your life, whatever the age is. Maybe you only have like an hour left. And you did everything, by your own estimation, wrong. You lived in fear. You played small. You never took a chance. And you're kind of miserable at this point, but you buy into the story. It's because of the way I grew up. It's my parents fault. It's like the economy, all the things that the ego is using to almost, like, cushion the blow and take care of itself and not own what it did because that's painful to own that. And then you meet this version of you who walks in when you got five minutes left, and they're just radiating in every possible way, like they're living the dream. Now, you don't really have an excuse at this point because that's you. So it's like, how did they do that? And you ask them and they tell you, oh, you know all those times when you want it to go right, but you went left, I went right. And you do that. It compounds over time. You start eating healthier today, you're not really going to see a massive difference tomorrow, but you do that every day for the next five years. Your whole body and your energy and how you feel in your body will be night and day difference. You think about your relationship if you're in one and you think about, am I being the partner that I'm capable of being? Am I being the best version of me that I could be for this person and for myself? And if the answer is no, start doing that again. You won't necessarily see massive change tomorrow, but you will if you keep doing it. Same thing with success in every way. It's one day at a time. It's baby steps, like you said. But I love to hike. And as an example, I've done the tallest mountain in Arizona and a bunch of mountains in that southwest area. And if you were to look at these mountains from the bottom, you're looking up going, oh my gosh, how am I going to get up this thing? And you're thinking, it'll take me 4 hours, 6 hours to get up. But that's not ideally what you do. Ideally, you go 1ft in front of the other, and you just focus on that next step. And you look at the scenery. Maybe you're with someone. You have a great conversation, and next thing you realize you're at what they call the saddle. You're like halfway up and you look at the view and you're like, oh my gosh, we made such progress. And it went by so quick. And then you get all the way to the top and you go like, we did it. But if you're on the bottom looking up thinking, oh my God, that's so far away, then you discourage yourself. And courage comes from court, which is Latin for heart. And so when you're discouraged, you're disheartened. And when you're disheartened, you think, what's the point? And you give up. That's why there was a Steve Jobs talk that I saw that he gave with Bill Gates on YouTube a long time ago, and he basically said, people say it's really important to have passion for what you do. And Steve Jobs says and they're right because if you don't have passion, you'll quit because you're sane and it's hard. And so it's going to be challenging. There's going to be roadblocks.
There's going to be stumbles along the way. If you're not doing you. If you're not living your version of life. If you're not happy with what you're doing. If you're not hopeful of what you're going to create. What you're going to build. The impact that it's going to have. It's meaningful for you. Then you're probably either not going to stick with it or you'll stick with it and kind of muscle through it. But you'll be miserable along the way. And so to me, it's like, I don't believe it's worth it. I know I expanded on you. Ask just about health, but ultimately massive correlation because you're not just a brain. You're the whole system. It's interconnected everything, feeds everything else. And I look at it as a mind, body and spirit, and you want to optimize all three of those and if you're living on one of them or two of them, you're going to notice it's almost like a car. I think it's drag racing. Those cars that they shoot out and then like a parachute shoots out in the back and they need that. Otherwise the brakes can't do it by themselves. It's like the same thing. You're like trying to run, you're trying to fly and you've got the parachute behind you holding you back or you've got like anchors changing your legs and you're wondering why you can't really get airtime. And it's because you're not optimizing all three sides of that triangle.
So I think the exercise of envisioning, like you said, the last hour of your life and having to confront, if you're being honest with yourself, the person that you could have been, that's pretty powerful stuff. You have a free ebook and an audio version as well. 20 Steps to Your Next Breakthrough that I want to point the audience to. And the information will be below. Folks, could you just give us a couple of minutes on what they can expect in that book? Absolutely. One last thing before that. When you talked about you, imagine that version of you if anyone has read or seen A Christmas Carol, the book or the movie right there's, that story of Scrooge, Ebenezer Scrooge, and he has the three spirits to visit him. And long story short, starts as a pretty miserable dude, finishes overnight as the most joyful, loving, happy guy you can imagine, with the biggest heart, like in the whole city. And it's like, well, what the hell happened? He got confronted by these three spirits of what his past was like that was pretty happy to a certain degree until the girl left him. A traumatic experience happened that he kind of latched on to and then used this kind of justification to be miserable. And then he partnered with somebody, continued being miserable. No one around him liked him. And then the clutch on it, the straw that broke the camel's back, metaphorically speaking. He sees that spirit from the future who shows him life after he dies. And everyone's like happy about it. And everyone's like robbing his stuff. And he sees his tombstone and he realized that his life didn't matter, it didn't mean anything. And he's begging this spirit, depending on what version you watch, but he's begging this spirit of please give me another shot. This can't be. And he thinks he's done. The spirit is going to take him to the afterlife or something. And then he wakes up and he's in bed and it's been like 8 hours. And now he's like the happiest dude ever because he realized, I have another shot. Bringing it full circle. Every day I woke up, my dad was still alive. I've got another shot. He might not even be alive the whole day. And on his last day he wasn't. But he's alive right now. What am I going to do about that? I'm alive right now. What am I going to do about that? Like, every day is your Christmas morning as Scrooge waking up, if you let it. And so with the book, I wanted to create something that would be practical, powerful, and very easily accessible for people. There's books that I've read that are 400 pages, 800 pages, 1000 pages. There's a lot of people that won't pick something like that up, because it's kind of intimidating in the size of it. And so I purposely made this very small. It's like 74 pages or something like that. Every chapter is one to three pages. Every chapter has something actionable. It's got an exercise, it's got something that you can do to get you from feeling stuck to feeling in momentum. And so at the start of our call, when you were asking me, what can people do? And I shared with you a bunch of questions to kind of journal on. Absolutely. Do those. And if you're open to it, read the book. I do think that that book can really help, because I wouldn't call it the End All, be all. It's definitely not everything that you need, but it's absolutely if you're at level one, it gets you to level two, it gets you to that next level of I'm in momentum, and I'm not just sitting on the couch. And I do think that for a lot of people have been very helpful. Has been very helpful. And if I can share one exercise from that book for the listeners, if you'd permit it. Sure, yeah. Something that I found to be very useful, I think it's in chapter one, maybe chapter two, and it's this exercise of oftentimes we get held back because of the phrase or the thought, what if it doesn't work right? And so what I put together was a really simple exercise where it's called Goal, Challenge, solution. The goal is what you want. You write down the goal, maybe you have one, maybe you have 50. It doesn't really matter. You write down all of them for the challenge. The question is, what could get in the way? What could happen that would either stop me or slow me down? And then you'd write down for each goal, maybe you have one challenge, maybe you have three, maybe you have twelve. And so the goal is, I want to put muscle on and I want to lose £12 and I'm going to go to the gym. That's how I'm going to do it. What's the challenge? The gym closed, or the gym is not open that day, or I broke my leg, or what else? Anything that you could possibly imagine that would be a challenge to you, getting what you say you want. And then solution is, if that were to happen, what would I do about it to still get what I want? What could I do about it to still win. The beauty of the process is if you really be with it again, you come up with multiple challenges for each goal and then you come up with a solution for each challenge. Now. You're not going to think about everything. But the more you do this. The better you get at predicting what could potentially get in your way. Because there's only so many kind of patterns of things that are going to show up and eventually it gets to a point where life typically doesn't go the way you expect it to and the way you plan it to the T exactly right. And so if you can count on anything, count on life not going exactly the way you think it should, but if you can anticipate it and then you can plan ahead, and then when it does happen, you go, oh yeah, I figured that might happen. And then you know what to do. So there's no discouragement, there's no loss of heart, because when the challenge presents itself, you go, oh, that's already part of my plan. And in a way, it makes you unstoppable no matter what's going on. And there's so much power in the exercise, it sounds really simple. But again, what holds us back, what stops us to such a large degree, is, oh, I'm going to do this and it's going to work out like this and it's going to be great. And then you do this. It doesn't work out like that, and then you get discouraged and you stop. But if that was already part of your plan, you stick with it, right? And so I definitely recommend everyone to pick that up. Again, as James said, you can get it for free. It's on the website jamilsayegh.com. And James has all the links and there's an audiobook version as well for I think, like $7. And so you can get it on there as well, if you choose. And so that is what I'd like to share about the book. So doc. Incredibly powerful stuff. And folks, if you're feeling stuck, or if you're not even feeling stuck but you're looking to take the next step, I went ahead and picked the book up. It's got a lot of powerful, simple but powerful actionable. Things that you can do today, no excuses, things you can do today to start taking that next step. I highly recommend it. Doc, what's the best way for folks to reach out? Thank you, James. I appreciate you picking it up and giving it a read. I hope it serves. And so for anyone who's listened, anyone who's sitting there thinking, this is great either, if you're looking for other content, I have probably 500 something videos that have been on social media now for a couple of years. And just like the book, I purposely make them short. So most of them are a minute because I wanted it to be. What's one thing I can share with you in this moment that you can take with you today and it can change the whole course of your day. And I've been really fortunate and blessed to have people tell me that it has done that for them. Hopefully it does it for you. You can find that on my social media account. So Instagram is just at @drjamilsayegh and then my name, Facebook is just Jamil Sayegh. Feel free to check out the content. Shoot me a friend request message me. I'd love to hear if something stood out to you in this podcast and or if you check out my other stuff if it stood out, I'd love to hear what that was like for you. And if this has resonated and you're thinking like James said, either I'm not as happy, fulfilled, or at peace as I'd like to be, or maybe my life is going pretty great and I have a goal, and instead of ten years down the line, I'd like to get that in ten months. Then let's have a conversation. In that conversation, like I mentioned earlier, we get really clear what do you want? We get really clear on what's in the way, what holds you back? Why don't you already have it? And that's going to bring up a lot of stories that you're going to be sharing with me about, oh, for this reason, this reason, and this reason. And then at the end of that conversation, if it feels like a good fit for both of us, we move forward together and we make some magic happen for you. And if it doesn't feel like a good fit, at least you have some more clarity around what's going on for you. And then if I can point you in the right direction, I do that too. And so you can book that on the website as well, and James has the link for that.
Folks, all the information, as always, will be below. Dr. Jamil Sayegh, thank you so much for the time today. Thank you again for the time. Really appreciate you. Thank you, James. As always, folks, please stay safe. Bye.