Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Fulfilling commitments is no small feat, especially when illness strikes and life's unpredictabilities rear their heads. This week, I open up about my personal journey of prioritizing my word and the resilience it took to continue this podcast, despite the hurdles. Through the lens of my days running an insurance company in Florida, I reveal how my phone became a mental management tool that helped me stay accountable. Discover how turning my calendar into a 'religion' became my strategy for maintaining discipline and keeping promises, even when the going got tough. Inspired by Don Miguel Ruiz's "The Four Agreements," we dive into the transformative impact of being impeccable with your word, highlighted by the unwavering integrity of John D. Rockefeller.   Explore the essential role of trust and integrity, which are the true foundation of meaningful relationships and leadership. I share a candid experience of stepping away from a business opportunity due to my inability to meet expected standards, showcasing how honesty preserved that relationship. Learn why small lies can snowball into significant problems, eroding self-respect and confidence. Embracing reliability and consistency in commitments is not just a personal virtue but a powerful tool for building influence and opening new doors. Join me as we reflect on how these values can foster strong connections and turn life's challenges into opportunities.   💬 Did you enjoy this weekly drop? Tell us all about it in the comment section below!    ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford  ************* 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.   ➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.   ➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages.   *************   ✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:   Instagram ▶️ / thejohngafford   Facebook ▶️ / gafford2   🎧 Stream the new Weekly Drop here: Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9 Listen On Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283    *************   #weeklydrop #johngafford #Commitments #Illness #Resilience #Podcast #InsuranceCompany #Florida #MentalManagement #Accountability #Calendar #Religion #Discipline #Promises #DonMiguelRuiz #TheFourAgreements #JohnDRockefeller #Trust #Integrity #Relationships #Leadership #Honesty #SelfRespect #Confidence #Reliability #Consistency #Opportunities

From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift. This is the weekly drop with John Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe and comment. And now the drop. Welcome back to the program, everybody. Happy Thursday and welcome to the weekly drop from the podcast that gets you like I said, man, from where you are to where you want to be. And you know where I want to be right now today? Anywhere but here. Because I got to tell you, I'm coming off the end of yet again, a wicked, wicked cold. I just, I'm just sick, sick, sick, sick.

It's crazy how ill I have been this entire winter. It just, I'll get over one thing and then, and then some other credit. It's not even like I got like little kids anymore like what the kids were small They would constantly bring stuff home from from everywhere and it's not like that anymore it's just it's just me literally being sick and I thought to myself if I'm gonna go down there today and I'm gonna do this podcast and literally this is the only reason I Came down here today was to do this podcast and normally I'm ahead I'm ahead on the interviews, but I'm never ahead on the weekly drops because I like to keep them poignant

with whatever's going on at the time and with this one today I thought what a better thing to talk about than the importance of your word being your bond and the importance of how and why you should always honor your commitments to others to yourself and everybody else because today literally I am honoring my commitment Not just to me, but the commitment that I've made to all of you guys that choose to spend this 15 minutes with me every Thursday That you expect these things to come out and I want to make sure that I do them for you and they're here so You know when I think about keeping my word a couple of stories from my life come to mind

and things that I've done to make it important. And the first one is going to be a story of when I own my own insurance company with my sister in Florida. This was a business that we spun up in the year 2000. It was really successful. It did really well. We were selling Medicare supplements to old people in Florida, which as you can imagine is good business. And we had kind of come across this really good system for getting free medicine for old people. It was kind of a handshake agreement with the U S government with these drug companies that if they met certain income requirements that they would give them their medicine for free. And we went out and essentially would say, okay, you're paying $175 for your Medicare

supplement, but your drugs cost you $600. If you buy our Medicare supplement, which because you're a little older is going to be more expensive. Now it's $200. We'll get all of your medicine for free. And that's what we did. And literally it was handing out free drugs is what we did. That was the whole business model,

and it worked exceptionally well. Well as we grew, we started scaling to other markets, you know, we added some people and started adding people to the company, and we grew into Tampa, Florida, from North Florida, and my salesman down there, now obviously to make this work, we've gotta buy leads off of mailers and just all this stuff, and the leads come in, we've got the salespeople,

salespeople set the appointments close the deals and that's how it worked. Well my number one guy as far as sales goes was in Tampa and he was doing very very well and all sudden I noticed like he was blowing off leads and like going to play golf as soon as he started making good money not giving the business the attention that it needed and as the owner of the business I didn't really have any choice even though this guy was the best guy I had to fire him and the problem with that scenario is the guy was me because I owned the company and I was I was I was the CEO the CMO the head sales guy and everybody else so how do

you fire yourself you can't so I decided at that moment and this was a growth moment for me was I had to get some mental management in my life. And how I achieved getting mental management was I just decided that my phone, which is every one of you has this tool in your pocket, my phone was gonna become my mental management. And if it went into my phone, if it went into that device, it happened.

It did not matter what it was. If I put that I had an appointment, nothing else mattered. It did not matter if, you know, I got free tickets to Superbowl. I was going to that appointment. If it said I was going to the gym, I was going to the gym. If it said I was doing this, I was doing that. So my, my calendar became religion to me. It was everything that I said I would do, went into that phone, and

then got done. And the reason that this is so important in that aspect is because, you know, when you talk about being honest and keeping your word, you know, keeping your word to yourself is so incredibly important. We've talked about it many times on this podcast, but like the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz talks about being impeccable with your word in that book. If you haven't read that book again, I could not recommend it more, but being impeccable with your, with your word as a key principle. Because when you honor commitments to yourself, you build trust with others by because your actions are more important than what you say you're going to do. You look at guys like John D. Rockefeller,

who the only reason he survived the Great Depression, believe it or not, is when everything went to absolute hell in a handbasket with his business, because he always did what he said he would do in business. He was able to pull lines of credit and survive those financial hardships when everybody else couldn't, because he understood that trust was his primary currency.

You know, another story for me, a couple of years ago, many, many moons ago, like 2017, I got brought in to start a property flipping hedge fund with a guy that I knew. And we went out and raised, he said, we got to raise X amount of capital. And it was a pretty decent chunk. And I went to my friends and family and raised $750,000 in for our end of, of the seed money into this, into this fund wound up being a much larger raise. But I raised 750,000 from friends and family into this house flipping fund. Now, needless to say, you know, look, I win more than I lose, but this thing was a loser and it lost. And it left me with an abandoned, a partner that abandoned me,

hit the literally hit the bricks and fled the state, left me sitting on several lawsuits of which hopefully my lawsuit against him will come to fruition very, very soon, but hit the bricks, left me with lawsuits, left me with issues, left me with all kinds of things. And I made, I made a commitment in that moment. I sat with my wife and you know, you're discussing this investment and we were very clear to all everybody that invested friends and family that look, this could have upside, but it's an investment like anything else. It could, it could go to zero and we both agreed that it was

incredibly important because I plan not to flee the state and go to Texas I plan to stay right here and continue doing business that it was very very important that we make everybody whole and over the course of the next call it seven months some people got paid faster than others but over the course next seven months, I made every single one of those investors whole. And I say that as a matter of pride. And I say that as a business lesson because nobody out there can ever say that they invested money with me, that I guaranteed that I did not make right. I, you know, if you, I would rather see somebody that shows me that tells me that story and shows me that proof rather than somebody that shows me a

20% return because yeah, everybody hits the lottery once in a while. Projects go good. Things happen. Markets are good. But what happens when the market's bad? What happens when things go to hell in a handb basket? What happens? That's what I want to know. And that is what the currency that that trust is built on. It's worth so much. And if that's not enough, you got to remember that your word defines your character. You know, reputation is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. And one of the worst things that you can ever hear about anybody is that dudes all talk or, oh yeah, they talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, then I'll do anything. And sure, there's times in business and there's times in your

life when you're going to get to a place where, man, maybe you got up, maybe you do have to let somebody down. Maybe you can't perform at a level you wanted to do. And what I found, I'll give you a great example, Pace Morby, who I love Pace, I love Jamil, I love those guys, this whole team. They came to me and they wanted to spin up a national title company. I said, okay, cool. I got to do some research. Let's get started on this. And I started working on it.

And I realized very quickly that based on where we were within the scale of our company, there was no way that I could pull this off for them at a high level. Because at that point, that was the first time we looked at some of the states that they wanted to be in. And we just knew that the lift was going to be too great for us at the size of our company. So rather than just let it fizzle and kind of go on the vine, I was very honest. I just said, Hey man, I can't perform at the level I think this is gonna need to be done to make this work They end up doing with somebody else. I'm not mad about it. I couldn't perform

Now I could have squandered around I could have spent a year of telling them it's coming We're working on it. Things are happening whatever else but as soon as I knew that we could not pull it off I got out and my currency with those guys my relationship Currency is still good. My credit is still good with those guys because Yes, did we fail sure? Did I not do what I thought we could yes

But I was honest about it and I allowed them to pivot as soon as we could, which is what you have to do. So many people just let the situations draw out and just drag out and that's what causes those problems. Now that's a very big promise, right? Hey, let's start a national company together with some really heavy hitters. That's a pretty big promise, but even the small promises matter. The small things matter. And my kids, when they were little, I would always tell them this. Even they would tell these little white lies. And when I was a kid, dude, that was, I don't know if it was a defense mechanism or what

it was for me as a kid, but I was a kid that, man, I told a lot of mis- I was, I was a liar as a kid. I told some just fabricated wild stories because I thought that was the way that I would keep up with the Joneses. That's how I would keep up with the Joneses. That's how I would keep things going was to be dishonest about stupid shit. I mean things that were just silly that you would say. And I got to tell you it's such a dangerous slope when you start telling little fibs like

because it becomes a habit like anything else. And if you can be dishonest about little things then you'll be dishonest about big things and it becomes less and less of a deal. We've all known people that are dishonest in their life or dishonest with people and tell just a bunch of nonsense and you know who they are. And you got to figure a couple things. Number one, it just makes your life so much harder, so much more difficult because you got to keep track of too much stuff. I mean, what was it? I don't know who said it, but I said if you tell the truth all the time, you don't have

to keep track of anything, which makes life so much easier because when you tell the truth consistently, it's going to build self-respect for you because it's you're staying true and aligned with yourself. I mean, people who consistently honor their commitments, they develop a stronger confidence and because they have discipline and discipline builds character, which builds confidence. Now, the next thing I would say is if you don't see like a lot of opportunity rolling down the street, right into your, into your lap, maybe it's because of people don't see like a lot of opportunity rolling down the street right into your lap,

maybe it's because people don't think of you as reliable. You know, when people think of me, I want them to think that A, if you need something for me, if it's hell or high water, you know, they see those quizzes all the time on Facebook, where it was like, if you had to call somebody at three o'clock in the morning to do whatever, who would you call? I love the thought of being that person for somebody I love that I'm so reliable they just know I would show up and if I said I would do something I would absolutely do that that is one of the keys again how to win friends and influence people talks about

consistency and trustworthiness are fundamentals to influence and leadership which they are. If you want, if you think people are ever going to follow you and they can't count on you, you're nuts. If you have any aspiration to build a team, a business, a company, you've got to be somebody that does what they say they're going to do. So as we wrap up today, this Thursday, so I can get back to bed, just remember, I'm here right now because I made a commitment to myself every Thursday to be here with you guys.

Now hopefully you guys will take a little bit of motivation from the rough shape that I'm in today and start keeping some promises to yourself. We'll see you next week. What's up everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list, but do me a favor. If you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review, give us a share, do something man, we're here for you, hopefully you'll be here for us.

But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.