Welcome to the Unshackled Owner Podcast. Your host is Aaron Young, a business owner, an entrepreneur of the last 34 years. You got to get clear on what you want out of your business so that it can actually turn into what you want. Get clearer on what you want and build a life that is fulfilling for you as it relates to business.
Listen To The Episode Here
On A Clear Day You Can See Forever With Aaron Young
Hey there. This is Aaron Young and welcome to The Unshackled Owner podcast. This is number three, episode number three. I’m so glad you’re here joining me and you’re listening in on these podcasts. They’re not in any particular order but it will interesting if you start at number one and progress all the way through. It will be interesting to see how the thing morphs as we get clearer and clearer on our message.
Here’s what I know for sure, that The Unshackled Owner podcast is designed specifically for you. To help you get the tools, the ideas, the anchor, the inspiration, to become unshackled in your business, to be in unshackled in your work, to be unshackled in a very positive and a very empowering way in relationships. That’s not to say to be single.
That means, to get clearer on what you want and build a life that is fulfilling for you as it relates to business, which is very much this podcast is about. It’s about how to build a business. You got to get clear on what you want out of your business so that it can actually turn in to what u want.
On A Clear Day: The greatest moments of clarity seem to happen in times of confusion and stress.
It’s amazing to me, if you think about it, you tell me what you think. I’d love to hear your response about it. It’s really weird that the greatest moments of clarity seem to happen in times of confusion and stress. A lot of times, we have to get into that place where things just suck. Everything is out of control, the bridge of the ship is on fire, all the lights are burning out and we’re in the wormhole and we’re swirling around and we think the whole thing is going to explode in space. You’ve seen that on the movies.
Here’s the thing. A lot of times, in our worst moments of stress, our worst moments of fear and confusion, boom, we get this beautiful flash of clarity. I had a time like that in my life. I’ll just tell you what happened, because people only hear the good stories about me and I’m happy to share my low moments.
As a matter of fact, I hope that by me sharing the low moments, it will give you some comfort. It will give you some feeling of, if you’re in a low spot, that you can get out of the low spot. I’m here to tell you, I’m living proof that even when you’re in a low spot, you can pop back out of that sucker. You can get back up on top.
Anyway we had a big battle with the government years ago. In the wake of that battle, which was with the criminal side of the criminal justice system, at the other side of that we ended up in a civil lawsuit or at least the threat of a civil lawsuit. It was a big threat, $5.9 million threat from the IRS. We were tasked with proving them wrong.
We engaged with them with an attorney and we started working at things. We started pursuing it. I’ll tell you what, these legal battles sucked a lot of money out of a young family. We were getting poorer and poorer. We had this house that had a lot of equity in it. We started borrowing against the house so that we could fight these battles.
Pretty soon, we were very deeply into what tiny bit of equity was left in this house, just basically nothing. Arguably, we were in negative equity. It was a boom time in real estate. This was 2006, 2007. We all know what happened in 2008 when all the banks collapsed, the currency just about collapsed and the home owner industry, the equity just fell out, crushed out of people’s portfolios. Everybody was upside down in their homes.
On A Clear Day: I had to take a pay cut. I had bigger expenses and less money.
We were no different. We were way upside down, over a million dollars upside down on our house. There was no end in sight at that time. There was no way that I could now pay these huge bills that we borrowed. Now the house was worth a fraction of what we thought it was worth just a year or two before. Because my company, Laughlin, worked specifically with small business owners, this economic crash had really hurt small business and we had lost millions of dollars a year in revenue. That meant I had to take a pay cut. I had bigger expenses and less money. We couldn’t manage this house anymore.
Like millions of Americans, we had to do a short sale. We’re in the process of doing that and I remember waking up every night and walking around the house at 2:00 in the morning going, “Where are we going to live? What are we going to do?” The kids were very engaged in showing horses, Tennessee walking horses. “Where are we going to put the horses? I guess we’ll have to sell the horses. Boy, just another disappointment to my kids. Where are we going to live? We built this big beautiful home and now I don’t even know if we’ll be able to rent some place because of this criminal record I have now.”
If you don’t know that story, I’ll tell the jail story someday. It’s well documented out there. The point is, I was really thinking, what am I going to do? How am I going to get another loan to buy a house? Who’s going to rent to me? Where am I going to move my family? What are we going to do with all this stuff? There’s no way in the world that we’re going to get back to where we are right now. What the heck are we going to do?
I was freaking out every night, freaking out walking the halls, being up during two, three, four in the morning just with fear and anxiety. Have you ever felt that way? Have you been there? When you just wake up in the night and you can’t go back to sleep and your mind is racing and you know, you know at the depth of your soul, that you’re screwed. You know that things are going bad and you’re going downhill and you’re probably just going to go down into some abyss of despair.
It was in one of the worst, worst nights, wandering the hall, after weeks and weeks of doing this, maybe months. I’m sitting there in my beautiful office, in my beautiful home that we had designed and built that I knew I was going to lose. I’m sitting there early in the morning. I remember thinking to myself, “Dang it, Aaron. You know better than this. You know better.”
I thought, I’ve been sitting here trying to think about what can I get, who will possible do something for me, who’s going to rent to me, who’s going to sell to me? What kind of crummy little hovel am I going to be able to put my family in and how am I going to feel about myself? Am I going to be such a loser and all that stuff?
On A Clear Day: This voice in my mind just so clearly said, “You know better.”
This voice in my mind just so clearly said, “You know better.” In that moment, I became aware I became conscious of what I was thinking about. My wife, who is a life coach, always talks about, pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. I was paying attention to everything bad. When I became clear, when I became conscious of the fact that I was thinking of everything bad, knowing this, my history, said, “Hey, buddy. Wake up. You know better.”
In that moment, I grabbed a pen and a yellow pad and I started writing down, what do I want? What do I want to have in a home? I want a home that’s got this many bedrooms and this many acres and a barn for the horses and whatever. I started writing things down. I got on to the internet and I started doing a search that met all this criteria that I’d written down on this piece of paper. Pretty specific, listen to those words, a very specific search. When I had everything in and I hit enter and the internet did it’s magic, one listing, one listing came up.
I read it and I thought, “Oh my gosh. This is perfect. It’s exactly what I want.” The next morning, I got on the phone and I called the number. I talked to what I thought was the realtor. It turned out not to be the realtor at all but one of the owners, the wife, this husband and wife that owned the property. I said, “You have a multiple listings number in there. Why did you do it?” She goes, “I just felt like I should write an ad.” She goes, “But you really got to talk to our realtor. Here’s the number.”
I called the realtor. The realtor said, “The house is great but did she tell you, we have a pull price cash offer on this house. We’re going to close very soon and this house is going to be unavailable. They’re certainly not looking for a rental. They’ve got a full price cash sale offer.” I said, “Oh, okay.” I thought, “At least I know now what I’m looking for.”
A few hours later, I get a phone call back from the husband. The husband says, “I understand that you talked to my wife and you talked to my realtor. Yes, it’s true that we have an offer on the house. But if you’d like, why don’t you and your wife come out, take a look at the place and let’s talk.”
The next day, we trucked out to this place, this little town that we didn’t even know existed that was about an hour’s drive from where we were currently living. We went up here and we walked all around the house and all around the property and got the full, the exclusive high end tour of the place. Then we went in and sat in the house.
I asked the owner, I said, “I really appreciate you bringing us out here but as I understand it, you have a full price cash offer on this house, that you’ll be closing in a few weeks.” He said, “Yeah, it’s true. But we don’t really like the person who wants to buy the house. We would rather sell it to a family. We’re looking for any chance to get out of this sale. Even though we’d love to sell it, if you want to do something, rent it for a little while and buy us contract or something, we would be willing to talk to you about that.”
On A Clear Day: The more crystal clear you are about exactly what you want, the more your brain will know how to get you there.
Anyway. The point is, we ended up buying the house. There’s way more to that story. Here’s the point for this thing. Clarity, explicit clarity, is power. The more clear that you are about exactly what it is that you want, the more crystal clear you are about exactly what you want, the more your brain will know how to get you there.
Because there’s all this stuff that goes on in your mind, all this stuff that goes on in subconscious, all this stuff where the universe can conspire with your brain to get you what you want. The clearer you are on exactly what you want and the more you’re willing to then not only write down in perfect clarity, but search for it and pursue it, the faster you will get to your dream, the faster you will get to your end goal.
Most of us don’t know what our end goal is. Most of us just are drifting. Most of us go through most of our days just doing what we always do, doing what’s comfortable, doing what’s easy, drifting along, lulled into complacency. It’s when we get terrified, it’s when that fight or flight instinct pops up, it’s when we don’t know what our future holds and it feels like death is imminent, even if that just the death of an old life, the death of a dream. If you feel that way, all of sudden you become wide awake, crystal clear.
It’s on those moments that you get those flashes. If you take that moment, if you ever get into that spot where all of a sudden you feel like everything is conspiring against you and the sky is going to fall and that everything is over, I want you to go, “Hold on. You know better. You know better.” Stop it. Let’s get clear.
Write down what it is you want. Not what you need, not what you think you can get. What do you want? What do you want? Write it down. Then look for it. Seek it. The clearer you are on exactly what you want, the more your brain knows how to get you there.
It’s really funny, it’s a true statement. This is the big takeaway. When you have clarity, when you have clarity, the universe conspires with you, works with you, to make that thing happen. It just always works.
On A Clear Day: When you’re a business owner, you’ve got to take on huge risks.
When you’re a business owner, you’ve got to take on huge risks. You’re jumping into the dark all the time. You’re doing things that you’re trying to pretend like you know what you’re doing, but really a lot of times you don’t. When you have clarity, when you know where you’re going and why you’re going there and you know you’re not clear on the path but you’re clear on the destination, it’s amazing how that crystal clarity will force the lights to come on and the path to become illuminated.
There isn’t one right path. There are millions of paths. What you do is, once you know the destination and you’re super clear on it, a path will open up. It’s happened to me over and over again. I’m promising you now that a big chunk of becoming unshackled is trusting in the fact that the clearer you are on your vision, the faster, the more elegantly you will arrive at the destination that you’ve always dreamed of.
It takes the guts and it takes the presence of mind to write down a big dream, get super clear on it, look at it every day, tell other people about it, announce it to the world, let the universe know. Whatever you want to call it. Let God know, let the universe know, let your soul know, let your mind know. Do something that says, “This is where I’m going.” You stick a flag in the ground and say, “That is the thing right there.” You will be blown away.
When you get clear, you will be able to see forever. You will be able to see all your dreams come true. That’s a gigantic lesson you need to adopt into your life to become an unshackled owner.
I’m Aaron Young. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re listening in. Tell your friends. Go ahead and like us, give us a rating, tell us how we’re doing. Ask me questions. Let me work on answering those questions for. This program, The Unshackled Owner podcast, is for you. I want to do things that are going to help you knock it out of the park. As a business owner, as a person, as a parent, as a sweetheart, as whatever it is that you’re doing. I want this to be a great place for you to get ideas, to get centered, and to really live the big beautiful unshackled life you’ve always wanted to live.
- AaronScottYoung.com
- The Unshackled Owner Twitter
- The Unshackled Owner Facebook
- Aaron Scott Young LinkedIn
