Manifesting opportunities and success is a big part of progress. Setting your goals is the first part of achieving them. In this episode, Merrill Chandler learns about manifesting your goals with Monick Halm, the Founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. Monick shares how she started her path towards success via real estate, her way of manifesting success. Tune and learn more success tales from ordinary people who have found their way to the top.

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The Secret Weapon To Manifesting Opportunities And Success With Monick Halm

You cannot miss this episode. We have got some advanced affirmations about how to pivot in your life and our guest’s secret weapon on how to manifest opportunities and success. You are not going to want to miss my interview with Monick Halm. Make sure you start to finish. It is a powerhouse of an ending. I will see you on the inside.

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We have got Monick Halm here with us. This woman has been an inspiration to me. I’m only inviting superheroes to Women’s History Month about how they each have overcome their particular challenges, what obstacles they have been confronting, and how they have become successful in spite of it all. Monick, welcome. I’m so glad to have you here. Tell us a little bit about what you are doing now and then we are going to go back and see how you got here.

Thank you for inviting me. It’s such an honor to be here. Where am I now? I am an investor. Mostly what I do is syndicate, which is essentially to crowdfund real estate. With our investors, we have a little over 1,000 rental units across thirteen states. That’s what we are doing. On the other side, I have a business called Real Estate Investor Goddesses, where I teach women how to create passive income streams through real estate. I have a mission which was divinely downloaded to me but my mission is to help one million women create financial freedom through real estate investing.

I say yes to that vision. Isn’t it amazing when we do get some external positive and powerful download where it is crystal clear that this is my contribution to humanity, especially for women who may not necessarily have the training or the aptitude when they first start out? I’d like to go back several years ago to your early years when you felt that you wanted to stop doing whatever you were doing and start doing the things that led you to where you are now. What is your education or initial movement into real estate, business, entrepreneurial spirit, or empowering women, whatever tendrils those happened to be?

I’m a first-generation American. My parents are super supportive. They were always like, “You can be anything you want to be (as long as you are a doctor, lawyer, professor, or engineer).”

Isn’t that the first generation’s responsibility is to aim for one of those provisions?

That was what I was taught. If you do one of those four things, you are on a path to success, wealth, happiness, and all of those things. Of those choices, I chose law. I went to law school. I became a lawyer. I was working in the partnership track with a big international law firm and making six figures. I should have been deliriously happy.

To give you a little snapshot of how it felt, one Tuesday morning, I had been having this extraordinary abdominal pain. I went to the ER and when the doctor told me that my appendix had ruptured and I would be in the hospital for several days, I ended up being in the hospital for nine days. He said I’d have at least 30 days at home afterward to recover. My first thought when he told me that was, “Thank, God. I don’t have to go to work for at least 30 days.”

Everybody, if you are looking for the first evidence that something is not right, it’s that kind of situation.

That was a pretty big a-ha because my second thought was, “That’s bad.”

I’m living my life avoiding this thought.

If being in the hospital with a life-threatening, excruciating illness is better than being at work, there’s a problem, especially since I have done “everything right.” I followed the path exactly. I went to college, an Ivy League law school, and a big firm. I was doing the thing that I was supposed to do that would make me so happy but I was that miserable.

I want our readers to be able to reflect. We are setting up these dominoes and she’s showing us how she came to this. What’s that incontrovertible evidence that you have faced or you are facing right now that’s literally screaming at you, “Something is not right in your life?” A significant surgery and hospitalization are better than going to work, you can’t get more clarity on that.

It was a big sign. I remember being in the hospital bed and talking to some fellow associates in my firm going, “You are lucky.” I was like, “I know.” I was like, “Do I need a gallbladder? What is everyone doing?” I can get rid of my tonsils. I definitely don’t need tonsils. I had to find a different path and it was not a straight shot. Real estate came in by accident.

Tell us about accidents in our lives.

It came in through necessity. The only thing I’d ever been taught about real estate was that you buy your own house. My path was you go to college and grad school. You get a good job, buy a house and a car. You work until you are 65 or 70. You get the gold watch. You play golf for a few years and you die. That’s the American dream. That’s what we are supposed to do. Do you get that lesson? I got that lesson.

We will get into that when we come to alternative paths.

I was trying to follow the plan. I was still working as a lawyer but I had left that law firm. I tried different things. I was like, “That law firm sucked,” and I was miserable. I would say, “Maybe this other law firm is better.” I was trying to find my way within the law at this point to see where I could find a place to be happy. It turned out, there was no place.

I’m going to take that sheepskin and put it in storage because it’s not going to help me much other than the mental acuity that it causes you to sharpen a brain. Some of the very things that you are going through are facilitated by a sharp brain that was trained very clearly.

I have no regrets for any part of my journey because if it weren’t for those parts, I wouldn’t be here. We are connecting the dots. I’m super grateful for all of it, even if I spent ten years practicing law and was pretty unhappy. I was not quite as unhappy as that first law firm. I didn’t prefer to be in the hospital bed. I wasn’t quite so miserable but I wasn’t happy.

I want to remind our audience that we laugh at the absurd because it’s so terrible that instead of crying, we laugh to release the same amount of energy. I’m noticing how much we are laughing here because it is so sadly true and it’s absurd. We are not crying yet but there is another way.

There were no tears at the time but now I laugh about it. I won’t say there were no tears at the time. There were but now, I can laugh because all of it brought me here and this is where I am. The only thing I’d been taught about real estate was that you buy your own house, which isn’t an investment for those who have studied the Rich Dad Poor Dad model.

Manifesting Opportunities And Success: Mostly what we do is syndicate, which is essentially crowdfunding real estate investors together, larger commercial projects like apartment buildings and industrial projects.

An asset is something that pays you money every month. Liability is something that takes money out of your pocket every month. I was taught to get the house that you live in. That would be taking money out of your pocket. I went to do that and this was in 2005 in Los Angeles, where I live. Even back then, a starter home in a semi-decent neighborhood, not a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills but for a neighborhood where you are not likely to have a drive-by shooting thing.

Bel Air and drive-by shootings, everywhere in between, cost about how much?

Upwards of $600,000 and $700,000. That was 2005. I was making a little over $100,000. I didn’t have a bad salary but it was still a stretch. I couldn’t afford a house by myself. A friend of mine who was in a similar boat suggested that we buy a duplex together. The original idea was we’d get a duplex with two equal sides. He’d live on one side. I’d live on the other side. We could each afford half a house. We were like, “Let’s do that.”

Instead of finding a property like that, we ended up finding and falling in love with this old craftsman that had this larger downstairs unit and an upstairs two-bedroom apartment. It had a converted garage in the back. That was another one-bedroom unit. We each decided we would take a bedroom in the larger unit. We rented out the upstairs and the back house. We even rented out the basement. I started house hacking before I knew that was the thing.

You are already a landlord. Real estate investing, here we come.

These people are paying my mortgage and I thought, “This is awesome. This is great.” I did not think of it as a way of replacing my income. It was like, “I have gotten that house but now I have got this house.”

You slipped and fell into landlording.

When I met my husband, he had a duplex, and then we got a single-family rental together. 2008 happened and kicked us in the butt but we were able to sell one of our duplexes and then we started to flip houses when houses were on sale after the last crash. I didn’t realize how on sale they were but they were and it was a great time. I was like, “If I knew now what I knew then, I would have had all of these houses.”

I would have leveraged 10X to get 10X the number of houses, property, doors, etc.

Here’s what’s useful. I didn’t know about leverage. I knew about conventional loans or paying all cash. At that point, I was self-employed. I was working as a coach. I became a money coach for women. My husband was a self-employed graphic designer and we were flipping houses. With our income, it was hard to get a conventional loan at that time.

We’d sold the duplex and we had a lot of cash. We are buying these houses all cash, fixing them up, selling them and it was like, “No leverage.” I didn’t know about cash-out refinances. There was so much I didn’t know because I would have kept these freaking houses. I would have made money and been worth so much now but I didn’t know. When you know better, you do better but we were flipping. We did that until 2015, when houses were not so in sale. This gig is super competitive. Flipping is a job. It’s not passive income. We fix it up. You sell it. You make a project.

I did it once and said, “I am not that guy. I know how to acquire money to invest in passive because in active, there is no dice.” It was the worst fourteen months of miserableness in my life.

I enjoyed it when we could find the right deals and the numbers made sense. I love taking ugly ducklings and making them beautiful. That part was fun for me. If I had to do it again, I would have known about leverage and how to get fundable. I would have had several at a time, instead of one at a time and I would have kept them instead of selling them.

After that, I decided we were looking at how do we create passive income? The biggest thing I could think of at the time was to buy a four-plex and get it rented out. At LA, it was so expensive to get a four-plex and no cashflow. I will be spending $2 million-plus but make no money. I was so frustrated. A friend of mine and me were in a mastermind together. He said, “My friend, Robert Helms, he’s the host of The Real Estate Guys Radio Podcast is coming to LA. He’s done hundreds of million dollars with the real estate. Why don’t you come out to dinner? Maybe he has some advice.” I was like, “I’m sure he knows something I don’t know.”

It’s like, “I own five houses, all title free.”

At that time, we were like the one at a time. I was like, “We have two homes and this is it.” I went and in a ten-minute conversation, he changed my life. He was asking what I was doing. I was telling him about the flipping and why that wasn’t working so well for us anymore. We are looking for this fourplex. He said, “LA is a tough market. I always say, live where you want to live, invest where the numbers make sense.” I was like, “You can do that?”

Until he said that, I had assumed you had to invest where you could drive to your property and manage it. It didn’t occur to me that I could invest outside of where I live. That literally opened up the world to me. The little thing he said was, “You can buy that fourplex by yourself but you are limited to your own capital and credit. Alternatively, you could bring a group of investors together and you can buy a 100 or 200-unit apartment building.” He started telling me about the benefits of that.

It was syndication.

I thought you had to be a billionaire to do that. I had no idea regular people could have.

You are already in the top 1% and now we regular people, can do this too.

I was like, “What?” I had this whole body like, “Yes, I want to do that.” I want to be around people who think 200 units is normal because until then, everyone around me thought the fourplex was a big deal. I was like, “I want to be around people who think that’s normal and that’s what I want to do.” I went home that night. I told my husband, “There’s this thing that’s called syndication. We can learn how to do it.”

We went. That night, we signed up for a syndication seminar. It was on October 15th, 2015. We bought the tickets for January 2016. We went to that event and that year, we learned, we invested in our education and training. We invested a lot but it paid off. We started that year with two doors and we ended that year with 1,012 doors partnering with other people.

Think and Grow Rich

We will get to 2022 here in a second but this is amazing. To see this huge pivot, there’s literally about-face. You had asked, “Was I raised in that same environment?” You’ll totally get why I’m in fundability now because I was raised with a father who said, “You got champagne tastes, Merrill, and a beer budget.” I’m like, “No dice. I want a champagne budget.”

Leverage was an early play for entrepreneur leverage. It wasn’t early for me but I got the crap beat out of me through learning how to become an entrepreneur and how to leverage correctly. Given this about-face, share with us what was the internal experience? You are sitting there in the hospital bed and you are literally enjoying not going to work but what was it like to approach the other partners and say, “I’m out. Talk to your parents that you are doing this pivot.” People who are facing your very situation right now are like, “I can’t afford to do this but I hate my life.” What do you say to them?

I wish I could tell you that I was so brave. I had this big moment where I gave a speech with Jerry Maguire out of there.

Jerry Maguire is sitting there with his bag full of stuff walking out the door.

I did not have that. I had a gift but it didn’t feel like a gift at the time. It was 2008 and I was pregnant. It was a week after I told my boss that I was pregnant. I was working at a small law firm at the time and he called me into his office. I was expecting to get a bonus and/or to talk about maternity benefits. I was thinking we would talk about bonuses because I’ve been working so hard. I have been working until like midnight most nights, but instead, I got fired. I was pregnant and my belly popped out. I’d been looking fat and then, all of a sudden, I got surprised.

I was happy until I got fired. I was like, “Now, I look pregnant. Who’s going to hire me?” I decided I was going to wait until after I gave birth. I will take a short maternity period then I will look for another job. My daughter was born in late August of 2008. Within a month, the economy and the markets were in free fall. The job market disappeared. It was not a good time to be on.

It was the best gift because I probably would have gone back to the law, even though I was miserable. I wasn’t as miserable as I had been. It was like on a scale of 1 to 10, when I was in that hospital bed, I felt like my life felt like a two. When I was at that last job, it was probably a five. I was still pretty unhappy but I probably would have stayed because I didn’t expect to live at a ten. I thought, “It’s better than the two.”

That is an amazing insight. “I’m at a two but I never expected to live at a ten.” How does that feel? That dissonance inside of you to be like, “I’m willing to accept the two. I’m miserable but this is what my path is?”

A two is hard to accept. That was unacceptable. I did leave that job a two, it’s like, “Five.” Five is a dangerous place because I know it could get worse. Five is like, “It’s not the two. I’m not happy but it could be worse. I have been worse and this is better than the two.” I might’ve stayed there because I didn’t expect much better. I was like, “I’m a lawyer. Who’s a happy lawyer?”

Five was an improvement. I was the major breadwinner. I earned more. I probably would have gotten another job and if I was lucky, I would have been at a six but I didn’t expect to be at a ten. It was a gift that I had to leave and I was not able to go back there because my identity was tied up with being a lawyer. I had that identity. I’d done three years of law school and ten years of law practice. I went thirteen years with that identity. When I was forced to find something else, it opened me up. It was the greatest gift. Real estate was there and we fell into the real estate. I loved it. Now I have a life that feels like it’s a 10 and I can appreciate it so much because I have had the 5 and the 2.

To circle this whole process is, wherever you are, there is the Jerry Maguire version where you make a stand for yourself. You guys all know my perspective. We are powerful enough as souls to give us reminders. Mine was, I left Lexington Law Firm because I had been arrested and in prison is when I discovered fundability because I was doing my research and homework. Sometimes we are literally spoon-fed gucky. They say, “The roses have to have the fertilizer or they don’t flourish.” You know what it means to be a two. Even a five can be worse but, “It’s okay.”

I feel worse for the people that are at 5s and 6s. It’s hard to leave that but it’s important to remember that we are not meant to live there. The longer you are there, the worse it feels. It was a five. Now it feels like a four and now it feels like a three. That comfort zone does get very uncomfortable because we are not meant to be there.

One of my coaches, a woman, says, “We get to design a life we love living.” That always reminds me, “Is this going to make me enjoy my life more?” I’m an older, distinguished gentleman at 61 years old. I got to make choices based on my end game. What’s going to lighten my load? Tell us then, what are you doing now? On a scale of 1 to 10, you are living at 13 or 14. How do you now nurture and take care of yourself? A 10 can slip to an 8, 7, or 6 if we stop and don’t keep growing. What is your intention and what suggestions would you give our women readers? Where do you go from here?

I have “BLISSIPLINES.” It’s what I call them. To live a life of bliss requires daily actions. It’s very easy for you to let them go and your life’s going to slide away from the bliss but there are things that I do every day that helps keep me on track every day and every week.

Share with us some of those if they are not too private so our crew and tribe can ping those things and see how they resonate for themselves so they can start implementing blissiplines.

One of my blissiplines is I started doing the Miracle Morning. I’d always had a morning ritual, for those of you who were familiar with Hal Elrod. It’s the acronym for what you do every morning is SAVERS. There’s a period of silence. For me, it’s meditation and prayer, affirmations. I do something called afformation. Instead of making a statement, it says a question.

My brain is like, “Why is my life getting better and better every day? Why are we so easily and effortlessly bringing in $1 million of income every month?” You say it as a question. The V is visualization and visioning. I see the outcome that I want and I spend time envisioning being in that feeling place of it. E is exercise, so movement. R is reading a positive book and then S is scribing. I write every day. That’s part of my blissipline practice.

I want to share a little deeper dive on the genius of asking a question instead of the affirmation because I did an entire show on inquiries and questions and created a vacuum. We all know by the Third Law of Thermodynamics that nature abhors a vacuum. If you ask a question, you’ve set a negative space that has to be filled, and if the question is, “How is it so easily that we are attracting all these great opportunities?” The only answer is, “It’s because it is easy.” This is brilliant.

I did not make this up. There is this book called The Book of Afformations. It’s by Noah St. John. I’m a big reader. I’m always reading a book.

That’s part of your R of SAVERS.

That’s part of my blissiplines. Read books and glean other people’s wisdom.

Think of it as sales to the universe because what you are doing is you are asking an open-ended question that the answer is inherent in the question. It’s like, “It’s because it’s easy. Why is it so easy? Because it is.” I don’t want to say quick tips because these are deeply meaningful movements in one soul. Any other things that are part of developing your bliss every day, your rituals, I call it grand rising instead of good morning. What are some of the things that create this open-ended, open-hearted, and open-minded experience that you are?

Afformations®: The Miracle of Positive Self-Talk

This one’s private but I will tell you. I’m an open book but this one is unusual. My real secret weapon is using orgasm. I have a process with my husband. When you are in orgasm, you are at your most attractive. Not good-looking attractive but Law of Attraction, there’s that energy there. That’s even talked about in the book, Think and Grow Rich. There’s a whole chapter on sexual transmutation.

You asked about the blissiplines. This is it. We have a morning date where we meet in orgasm. The other part will say something. The person will speak it into the orgasm, what they are creating. We’ll be in orgasm and it’s like, “$10 million.” If anyone gets nothing else from this, it’s like, “Never waste an orgasm.”

Multiple cultures and disciplines all affirm the power because we’re most soulfully beautiful, attractive, and open. We are so open that the experience of orgasm is like a laser, instead of a sun shining that warms us, of intention. It’s every focused soulful part of us. It is literally exciting. I love that you broached this because I’m a firm believer. It is an opportunity to declare because we are in the middle of a grand mystical experience. Why not exclaim a grand mystical opportunity for ourselves?

We call it our orgasmic manifestation practice every morning in bed and we do this. Obviously, it’s great for our marriage to have that. There’s no downside to that practice. If you don’t have a partner, you can do it alone.

A partner is not required. Thank you for being willing to share this, not about you but the principle itself. My questions are designed for, “I don’t want the surface stuff. I want the deeply moving things that have taken you as a woman from this massive world of expectation.” Your real estate group is Real Estate Investor Goddesses. How do they get to show up in the fullness of their power, beauty, grace, and manifestation capacity? I don’t know where we can go with this interview after that.

We have known each other for years and your group truly is inspiring. I’m going to brag for a minute. It doesn’t happen often but every once in a while, Monick will have gentlemen speak to her goddess investors because she wants goddesses to inspire goddesses. Every once in a while, they need Apollo in there.

I’m honored to have been a part of your group, being able to inspire and empower this divine awesome energy inside of you. Thank you for your vulnerability and your willingness to share the truly transformative things that work. My tribe learned it here first. If you’re part of Monick’s tribe, then you learned it there first.

If you could put down into a few steps or things, priorities, or values, what would you encourage, invite and challenge our readers, especially our women goddess readers? What would you invite them to think, feel, explore, notice, etc.? What would be the 3 to 5 things that are like, “Do this and then email me the results?” What are those final words that we can depart on?

The first thing is to know that you are meant to live at a ten plus. Get a sense for yourself of what that means to you. It’s very different. My ten is different from Merrill’s ten and it’s different from yours. What does that look like in each of the areas of your life? Get that clear. Get it written down if you can and start taking daily actions towards it.

Start doing blissiplines. Find rituals that will work for you so that you can stay in a higher emotional state. Whatever we want, we want because of how it’ll make us feel. I did law school and I went to become a lawyer because I thought it would make me feel successful and happy. The other thing I would say is to do things every day that make you feel that way because if the journey doesn’t feel good, the destination won’t either. You can have an unhappy journey and then the destination is not going to like it. Even law school was miserable and I thought, “It’ll be better when I’m a lawyer.” It was like, “No, it’s not. It does not give me happiness.”

The journey is a hint of what the destination is going to feel like.

Life is a journey. Every day, do those things that make you feel how you want to feel and the destination will feel that great. The journey of life will feel like that as well. That’s the advice I would give you.

Monick, thank you so much. It is once again, a treat to be with you. I’m glad that you’ve joined us. Everybody, I’m so glad you were here for this amazing episode. You better be writing shit down and then implementing it because this is coming from the place of one the biggest pivots you can do in your life. Here we have had a precious and perfect example of somebody who is willing to do so even if they slipped and fell into real estate investing. You can slip and fall into your ultimate ten-plus life and I encourage you to do so. Thank you so much, Monick and I will see you next time when we come back to the show.

 Important Links

• Monick Halm
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• The Real Estate Guys Radio Podcast
• Miracle Morning
• The Book of Afformations
• Think and Grow Rich

About Monick Halm

Monick Halm is the founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. She is an educator and advocate for female real estate investors, and has a mission to help 1 million women achieve financial freedom through real estate. Monick is herself a real estate investor and syndicator, and owns, together with her investors, over 1000 rental doors across thirteen states.