Part 4 of 5 of my origin story.
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Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you 10-minute lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
Yesterday I talked about part three of my origin story. Here’s part four.
So I just talked about in the last episode that I was going to quit my job at the Pentagon to go back to school. The pentagon is just a regular office building. Nothing really cool goes on there for most workers. So I just quit my job and it was going to take me a year and a half to get my degree in Economics. At first, I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D. in Economics so I could focus on combining public health with economics. I went to a couple of colleges to figure out what I should do and once I was going back to school and visiting colleges, it seemed to me that they were in the same bureaucratic nightmare as when I was in the Marines and as a federal employee. I also didn’t do very well on my GRE and these things caused to go down a different path.
Once I quit my job, I started to listen to podcasts about business and I came across one called the foundation. They were talking about how they started their businesses and I was interested. So then I started to listen to more podcasts and I can across one with Hal Elrod and his Miracle Morning. I love processes and he talked about his acronym called SAVERS which stands for Silent (Meditate), Affirmations (Positive Self Talk), Visualization (Get a clear picture of what your day is going to look like), Exercise (get the heart rate elevated), Reading (reading 20 pages), and Scribbling (writing in a journal). I started following this for the past six years and it has changed my life. I also started to listen to other business podcasts to see what their tips would be to start and got me thinking about what I should do.
Since I was overweight as a kid and was able to get fit as an adult, I’ve always wanted to make being healthy a goal and I thought about becoming a health coach and personal trainer. Since I needed a job, I decided to take the course work to become a health coach since I had my public health degree. I took the course and I passed it but I didn’t know how to make it as a health coach. So then I decided to get a personal training certificate as well. I should have just gotten the personal training certificate but these are mistakes that we make. This took a backseat while I was going to school and I did a white house internship, but once the internship was over, I started as a personal trainer at a local gym in DC. I did not know what I was doing when I become a personal trainer at first. Then I just keep seeing clients and I got better. I tried to find my own clients outside of the gym but I didn’t do a very good job marketing myself. I should have done YouTube Videos and sold kits but it’s a lesson learned for now. This helped me get better at sales because I had to convince people to sign on with me as their personal trainer. I didn’t like the hours of becoming a personal trainer and it’s a hard business to get people to work out with you.
So while I was finishing up my degree, I was looking for jobs to become a financial advisor. I even took a CFP prep course on top of the school work I was doing. I think money is important because it can be used as a tool for freedom and that you’re not stuck. There are three things you need to do with your money, earn it, grow, it, and keep it. And when I was interacting with my friends, I noticed they didn’t know the first thing about their 401ks or investing. So I decided to make the leap into financial advising. I spent some time looking at a couple of firms and decided to go with this one firm which I stayed at for 4 years.
By this time I’m still reading, and my goal is to read 36 books a year because that’s the number a CEO reads and I make sure that I’m working out. When I interviewed at different financial advising jobs, they are looking for agents to help them sell products. I didn’t really understand what this all entailed but I wanted to get in this field. I had to study for the test on my own without getting paid. I also didn’t get paid while I was going through the training which was two months. I had savings so I was fine until I was actually able to start seeing clients. This was a sales job where my job was to get clients. I had no clue what I was doing as I was stumbling from meeting to meeting trying to make sure the meetings were going well. It was a lot of good training to cold call people and ask them to see if they wanted a financial plan. The company’s sales training was also good in the fact that they gave us a script to follow and I saw selling things that people needed to give them the financial freedom that they wanted.
When it comes to financial advising and any sales job really. The turnover rate is about 90%. This means that a lot of people leave the business after one year. I knew this and I wanted to be successful at this job so I can get more freedom in my life, but the next four years were some of the hardest times of my life and I’ll go deeper into that in the next episode.
I want to thank you for listening to today’s episode.
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