JJ: I’m a little bit relaxed, I won’t lie, ever since moving to Ojai and deciding. And Doug’s daughter came to visit us two days after we moved in officially. I’m still living amongst boxes and I am tired. And so, I have been really taking it slow since Rachel has been here, and allowed lots of downtime. I had a facial today and a massage. And I feel very relaxed. Besides the difference of the room tone that you’re going to hear a little bit more echoey than normal, I just wanted to say that I’m very relaxed. And I would like to bring you on this journey, because part of manifesting anything that you want isn’t coming from an anxious, super hyped, super crazy energy, efforting kind of way. It’s actually more in the energy that I’m in right now, which is allowing and taking it easy and trusting and believing. Okay? So, it’s all of that.

So, anyway, today we’re going to talk about how we manifested our house. And of course, I’ve asked Doug to join me on today’s show because, well, it’s his house too, and because he was as involved in this as I was. So, anyway, I have a list of about eight or nine different points that I thought were interesting to share with you, and what I want you to listen for. So, if you’re listening to me for the first time, I do solo shows every so often. This is, of course, with Doug, so it’s not really considered a solo show. But I’m not interviewing him. We are telling a personal story. I’ve been asked the question, “How did you manifest Doug?” and “How did you manifest your house?” And I want to share the story with you because I want you to listen for the points in the story where I could, Doug could, you could, get frustrated, get turned off, get discouraged, feel like it isn’t working, feel not inspired. Because the journey from where you are to where you want to be isn’t a straight path, and contrast is necessary to clarify. So, when those things happen, really your relationship, and that’s what I’m going to teach you, both in the law of attraction mastery course as well as the boot camp… I had to deal with contrast. Because a lot of times, people just think if something goes wrong, they judge themselves, shame themselves, beat themselves up, and say, “Well, I did that wrong.” And again, the story isn’t over yet, so you’re coming in too quickly to judge yourself instead of letting the story unfold.

So, we’re going to tell you the story as succinctly as possible, with my notes that I have here, about how this whole thing started. And from start to finish, it probably took about two years. When Doug moved to California in 2018, we lived in a home in El Segundo that I had been renting with my ex-husband. I loved that house, but we got kicked out of that house. And many of you know that story because it happened on the podcast. And it was a little traumatizing, I won’t lie. So, we moved into a townhouse about less than a mile away from the house, and we didn’t love it. We were paying a lot more money, and we knew that it was temporary. So, we weren’t quite at that house for about two years. So, actually, this whole process was less than two years, now that I think about that, because we actually weren’t even in that condo for two years. So, it was around two years ago, Easter, let’s say. Doug and I drove up to Ojai. I had brought him here before. I’ve been coming here 21 years. I knew this was where I wanted to come. You get a little bit more for your money up here. It’s a different lifestyle. I had always wanted to buy a house here. So, I bring him up several times, and he likes it. And Doug is easy, so he doesn’t care. Let’s be honest. This is not a power struggle of, like, he has to have what he wants. He’s a very simple man. Right, babe?

Doug: Simple in a positive way, not simple in like a derogatory way.

JJ: Yeah. No. Like you’re just that kind of a happy-go-lucky guy.

JJ: Well, I brought you up here, and we weren’t telling anybody yet we were looking. I hadn’t engaged my friend who is a realtor, who I’ve known for 21 years. But we just came up. We put in Zillow… We looked to see what was on the market at the time. We pulled into a development, and we both said, “Ooh, I like this. Yeah, I would like to live in this development.” Now, the house that was for sale then, of course, we were nowhere near ready. We were just looking. And we weren’t telling anybody yet because…

Doug: What’s interesting is it was the first development that we even pulled into to think about an opportunity to move to Ojai. We hadn’t looked in a bunch of other places. So, this was the first place. And it’s so cool because it was the neighborhood we ended up moving to.

JJ: Right. So, we start there because we ended up here. And again, it was a fleeting thought. We talked about it, but we didn’t focus on it. We didn’t dig in our heels and say, “We only want to live in this area. We are only looking in this area.” We just said we really like it. You can walk to town. It has a nice feel. We like the homes. We had no idea what the prices were. We just said we liked it, and then that was it. And then we moved on. And then we were up here for a holiday, and Doug and I were staying at a hotel that’s literally five minutes away from here, and he went on a walk to have a phone call and came in the development from the other direction, not knowing it was the same development, and said the same thing. So, again, we just put it out there many times. And again, we liked the idea, we weren’t attached to it, and we definitely weren’t focused on it in a hyperfocused way. But again, it’s that fleeting thought of “Yes, I would really like that.” So, eventually, a couple of months later, we ended up getting more serious about looking. Now we’ve saved some money. I reached out to my friend, and he tells us how hard the market is up here, because people retire here. This is a destination place. There’s not a lot on the market. There’s not a lot of homes being developed.

Doug: There’s actually no homes being developed. They didn’t have a moratorium on building, so it was only existing properties that are for sale, nothing new.

JJ: Right. So, he didn’t tell us what was happening, and we were up here hiking, and we had this conversation on the hike. “Who do we know? Can we just get a house from someone we know? Can’t someone just refer us to somebody who hasn’t put their house on the market yet?”

Doug: Yeah. I had purchased a property previously, about 15 years ago, that the only reason we got the house was because the agent that I was working with happened to be friends with the people that lived in the house, literally knocked on the door and said to them, “Hey, Suzy. Hey, Charles. You guys, you were thinking about moving. Well, I have somebody potentially that wants to buy your house.” So, I was thinking, “Man, what a perfect environment that is.” There’s no house on the market. There’s no bidding war, especially in an environment where there is a lack of supply and more demand. In this environment in Ojai, right now, over the last year, every time a house comes on the market, there’s 15 plus offers and they’re all above list price, and it’s a crapshoot whether you’re even going to get it. It’s nepotism at its finest here in town. And so, I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to walk into a place and say, “I like this place. Are you selling it? Oh, you are? Cool. I’ll buy it.”

Doug: No, it was a horrible environment. You have to sign papers. Every time you go in, you have to wear a mask. It’s horrible. You basically have no rights when you walk into a house during this particular time. So, we did not want that environment. Again, we didn’t focus on that, but it was something that if we focused on that, every house we walk into, we got to wear a mask and do that whole thing, we would have found a lot of houses that we needed to wear masks and go into. We did not want that to happen.

JJ: So, I just was getting the feeling, because every time I was excited, he would come back at me and be practical, and then say… Even one house I remember we looked at or we wanted to see, they weren’t even doing in-person showings. Literally, the house got sold online. Nobody went there. And I thought, “I’m not going to do that. I need to walk into a house.” So, again, all these different factors led to me being a little bit frustrated of not having a fun experience in my home buying experience. And I said to him, I go, “Look, I’m the person that gets the shit that people tell me I can’t get.” And I said it kind of flippantly because, again, in the market of searching for a rental… And Domino is at the door, in case you hear that, because she wants to get in, but we’re not going to… Doug is going to let her in. Okay, go ahead. When I used to rent places, I mean, it happens so many times where someone will say, “You can’t get that.” And over and over again, I get it. Oh, they’re both there, so Sugar is coming in too. Everybody wants to be where we are, because we’re talking about wonderful things.

So, with this situation, again, knowing that had I to do it over, or if I didn’t know my friends, I would have literally interviewed people who were more spiritual to work with. So, I said, “Look, I’m the person that gets the stuff that people tell me I can’t get. I’m just letting you know that.” But there was a part of me that doubted that because I’ve never bought a house before. So, you know what? It’s worked with my relationships. It’s worked with my rental properties. Rental meaning when I was renting. It worked with business. It’s worked with health. But I’ve never purchased a home. So, I said it, but I wasn’t completely sure. I know that is my track record, but again, I’ve never bought a home before. So, we asked him for referral for the mortgage company because we don’t have anybody that we know up here. And we end up using someone he has used for a while. And again, we have no allegiance to her. We don’t know her at all. We just start to go through the process, and she qualifies us for less than we can afford, because as entrepreneurs, we don’t necessarily want to pay taxes on everything that we could. And we, as business owners, I have a corporation and Doug has an LLC, we get to write off more things because we work from home and because, whether it be the car or some expenses that can be used for business, that’s just part of why you have a business, everybody. Because it’s easy for taxes, easier on taxes, and there’s a lot more that gets considered. So, because of that, we knew that we could afford more than we could qualify for. So, when we started working with this company, they gave us a number. It was pretty low, and we didn’t love it, but we went with it. And we just figured, “Well, if it doesn’t have a pool, we’ll put in a pool.” So, we planned on that.

But then, at the end of last year, Doug and I did our profit and loss statements the whole of the year, and our taxes and everything, and so, for me, it was like a lot better. And when we put the numbers in for her, our number went down. And I was like, “What? There’s no way. I just doubled my income, and in your exam, I qualify for less?” And so, I got frustrated enough. So, here’s one of the contrasting points here. Well, besides the realtor and his sort of practical attitude and I wanted possibility. That was definitely a little disconcerting. But then the mortgage company was infuriating, actually, because I thought, “I’m not going to work with her.” So, I had gotten a referral from our friend Melanie Benson. You guys all know Melanie. She loved her mortgage broker, and Melanie is an entrepreneur, so she said she was great. I had already spoken to her one time and did a little pre-call, so I liked her. She lives in the South Bay, where I used to live, and didn’t know much about this area, but when we talked to her, she said, “I have closed 100% of the loans that I tell you I can get. I’ve never not closed a loan.” And she qualified us for the exact number I wanted. So, we were very happy. So, now we’re out and we’re looking, we’ve changed mortgage companies, and we’ve been doing this for a little while. It’s the end of the year. I’m looking ahead at next year, which is now 2021. I have a trip scheduled in Ojai by myself for a couple of days. Now, in between this, Doug and I did put an offer on the house. We considered it. It had possibility, but it had a bad foundation, and I just couldn’t look my dad in the face, or my lawyer at the time, and tell them that we weren’t going to fix it. And it was like $80,000, so I was like, “No.” It just didn’t feel right, so we let that go.

Doug: The fix was $80,000, not the house.

JJ: The house was not $80,000, but the fix was $80,000. And there was just too much to do to that house, okay? But it had an acre of land. It had a lot of possibility. The door was in the wrong place, feng shui-wise. It’s just one of those things that you pull back on. So now, we’re getting to the beginning of the year and I’m really starting to get anxious because we have the money now, we’re qualified for the right amount, and I really want to get a house. So, I have a reading with Christel. Those of you know Christel Weyerich, and she has been on the show many times. We have a special, if anyone is interested. She does tarot card readings very uniquely because she uses multiple decks. So, if you want to check that out, it’s jjflizanes.com/tarot to get a special deal through me for a reading with Christel plus one of her Healing Christel products. So, I have my reading with Christel. It’s like the beginning of the year reading. And we talk about the house, and she uses three or four decks to confirm the pole and the question and the answer, and she says, “Okay, I’m coming up with ones, so it’s either going to be January or November.” And I was like, “Oh, God, I don’t want to wait until November.” So, it’s currently January and I’m like, “God, I hope it’s this month.” So, I’m like, “Okay, it’s going to be January.”

So, I already have myself scheduled to come up here for a three-day work retreat by myself, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to be up there.” I told a realtor. I’m like, “I’m going to be here, so if anything comes on, I can get there in five minutes. Just let me know.” So, I’m up here and I’m literally checking Zillow and Redfin every hour. So, on the next to last day, it must have been 4:00, I refreshed and this house came on the market. And I was like, “Oh my god.” And it was moderately priced. It was well below what we could do. It had a nice backyard. It didn’t have a pool, but it was very workable for what we wanted. And it had shade, and it was on a cul-de-sac, and it was private. And I really liked it. And I didn’t even wait for him. I just got in the car and drove over there. The sign wasn’t even up yet. And I just took a look around, and I liked it. And it’s actually less money, and that must be really good, and then we could have money to put a pool in the back. So, I’m here by myself and I’m looking at this house, and I call Doug and I show it to him. And then panic set in because now I have to get into a bidding war. Now I have to go through calling him and saying, “I want to see it. When can I get in? When can we put an offer in?”

And I’ve never done any of this before, so I called my ex-neighbor from El Segundo. Shout out to Rhonda, if you’re listening. Rhonda and Jim got on Facetime with me, and we talked about… Because when you have a price that’s higher than what this listing is, I feel like I have wiggle room to offer a lot more to again get the house. But at the same time, you don’t want to offer so much more that the house isn’t worth it, and then it’s just stupid spending. And I was conflicted. So, I had our mortgage broker draw up two different letters. One was $50,000 over, and one was $100,000 over. And I was going to start with hoping that they’d come back and go back and forth. But I’m by myself. Doug is not even with me. So, I said, “Doug, can you come up on Tuesday?” That’s when they’re showing the house. And he couldn’t because he was busy. And I think this was a Thursday. So, I’m coming home on Friday, and he said, “Well, I’ll just come up on the weekend with you, and we can look at it then.” I mean, the outside of it, not the inside. So, I get home Friday, and the whole drive home, I’m conflicted. Thursday night and Friday, I’m not sleeping. I’m up. I don’t know what to do. I’m feeling stressed about the fact that I’m going to have to go into a bidding war. I don’t want to spend $100,000 over asking price and then have to put a pool in, because what if the house isn’t really worth that? What if this is all very inflated? So, it just concerned me, and I was talking about it, and I didn’t have a good feeling. But at the same time, I really wanted to move, and I wanted the house. It was a nice house. So, I come home Friday and I’m relaxing on the couch, and Doug and I have dinner, and we’re talking about it. And then Saturday morning, I wake up with a fire in my pants, and I said, “We have to go now.” And he was like, “Now?” “Yeah, let’s go now.” “Okay.” And I’m grabbing my stuff and heading out the door, and he’s like, “Hold on a minute. Are you going to eat first?”

Doug: Life with JJ.

JJ: “Are you going to eat first?” I’m like, “No. We got to go.” And he’s like, “Well, I have to eat something.” I’m like, “Ugh.”

Doug: I have a lot of food scarcity.

JJ: I was like, “Do you have to eat now?” “Yeah. Can I just eat?” And I was like, “Okay, fine.” All right. Now, this is important. It’s not just a funny aside. It’s important because we’re down to the fact that everything that happens from now on...

Doug: Every minute.

JJ: Every minute now counts.

Doug: Every minute that’s added or taken away would completely change the sliding door…

JJ: And the outcome.

Doug: …that you’re going to walk through, and the outcome.

JJ: And the outcome. So, he has his breakfast, and of course, I’m tapping my toe because I’m waiting for him to be done so we can get on with it already because Ojai is about 90 minutes north of El Segundo. Luckily, I noticed that we had an appointment that we were also going to be missing, so I rescheduled it because I hadn’t changed the appointment in the book. So, now we’re on our way to Ojai. We get there. We go to the property. Doug says, “Yeah, I like it. I could live here. If you like it when you see it, sure, we can put an offer in.” And I was like, “Okay.” But we just drove 90 minutes to look at the outside of the house. So, I said, “Well, why don’t we look at a few more things while we’re here?” So, we go look at one property that’s listed, and we drive by, and it’s way too smashed into the other houses around it, and it’s a little too high for what we have been approved for. And then I realized, “Oh, my realtor had sent me a text with a couple other properties that were coming on the market.” They weren’t there yet. They were being worked on. And one was on a street called Shady Lane, which is actually in front of this house, and the other was on a street called Oriole. So, as we’re sort of heading out of town, I said, “Oh, wait a minute. Let’s go see one of the ones that are coming on the market, in case we don’t get the other house.” And I told Doug the name of the two streets, and he said, “Oh, Oriole.” Do you want to tell them about Oriole?

Doug: Well, Oriole, I’m from Baltimore, so Baltimore, Oriole. My brother, who is no longer with us physically, he was a huge Oriole fan, and I thought, “What a fitting name for a property.” It’s almost like moving into Baltimore Lane or something like that, or Maryland Avenue. So, Oriole Lane or Oriole Drive seemed kind of cool, so I thought that that would be nice.

JJ: So, we pull up to the house. I immediately don’t like it. I don’t like the way it looks. It has a decent backyard. It’s being worked on. It’s not even about the paint or anything. It’s really more about the shape. So, I wasn’t crazy about it. And then we’re looking in the fence in the back, at the backyard, and again, don’t love it, don’t want it. But because Doug is insisting on looking in the backyard, and we’re hanging out a little longer, this guy comes up to us as we’re sort of looking at the house, and he says, “Hey, are you guys looking to buy this house?” and we said, “Well, yeah. A realtor told us that it was coming on the market in about a month, and we were just looking at it.” And I said, “Well, I don’t really like it.” And he says, “Oh, well, do you guys have kids? There’s really great school systems around here.” And I think he might have asked another question or randomly told us something else. I don’t remember everything. But then he said, “Well, the reason why I came over is because I’m actually thinking of putting my house on the market. Would you be interested in seeing it?” And we were like, “Uh, yeah.”

Doug: He was like pointing behind him, his house. He came out just to talk to the gardener for just a moment, gardener doing work on his property. If we hadn’t been there at that particular time, he would be inside his house and we would have had no clue that the house was even potentially up for sale.

JJ: Jim was not somebody who spent a lot of time outside. He worked at a desk inside the kitchen.

Doug: Facing the backyard.

JJ: Facing the backyard, with no window to look out of. So, there is no way that, again, that would have happened any other way. So, it was the perfect timing. We came into the house with him. He has the biggest lot in the entire neighborhood. He has a pool and a hot tub. And when I had my mastermind in Santa Barbara in November, I had seen this amazing pool cover that I had never seen before. It was one of those automatic ones. And the pool was really beautiful. And again, it was sort of like a newer pool. It wasn’t new, but it was newer than the old pool I had at the house in El Segundo. So, I was like, “Oh, I really like this pool, and I really like this cover. I want this.” I said that to Doug back in November. So, we walk into this guy’s house. Now, the house isn’t awesome, meaning there’s some things I want to change and do. It had wonderful, nice wood floors in the main part of the house. It had really nice tile in the kitchen. So, there were things that were really good. A nice bay window, really nice wood doors. But it was really going to the backyard and seeing… We have a half of an acre with fruit trees, with a pool and a hot tub in the pool, which, by the way, is the best, because if you like to help your lymphatics drain more, and you like to do cold plunges, all you got to do is roll over the wall, and you go from the hot tub to the pool, and back to the hot tub to the pool. It’s awesome.

Doug: The other thing that’s really nice about… Certainly, that’s a great feature of the house, but getting back to the process of the sale for just a second, the previous owner of the home is not the kind of guy that I would say would be attracted to staging. So, the idea of going through “I’m going to put my house on the market. I’m going to stage it. I’m going to update the fixtures. I’m going to change all the bulbs. I’m going to paint it in neutral colors,” all of that stuff probably was not something that he was looking forward to. And to run into somebody literally across the street, ask him if he wants to check out the house, and within five minutes, I mean, within one foot of me stepping into the garage of the house, I just knew, without even seeing the inside of the property. And then, when I got an eyeball on the backyard, without even looking inside the house itself, in less than five minutes, I was, “Okay, where do we sign, and how do we do it?” and “Let’s get this going.” I didn’t care. I saw beyond all the clutter and the piles of stuff and everything else that was around the property.

JJ: Well, he wasn’t going to use a realtor. And I asked him, “How much are you listing it for?” and he said, “Well, I talked to three or four different realtors, and I gave them a price.” And the price was about $50,000 more than we were approved for. And when he said, “I really would rather not use a realtor,” well, here in California, that $50,000 is basically the realtor’s commission. So, when you remove that, the top of our possibility was really kind of what he’d be getting anyway. So, we talked about it. We were in touch with him that night, and then the next day. And then, when I came up to make an offer on this other place… So, we still made an offer on that other place because I didn’t want to be left without a house. And again, that place had 14 offers on it, and we put a bid in for $50,000 more, and the realtor who sold it, he did a double dip there. He had the client and the selling and listing. And so, they end up taking an offer for less than $50,000 over. But it was still over. And it was amazing to me…

Doug: Showing that we were not going to win, no matter what. Unless we were a client of that agent, we were not going to win.

Doug: Correct.

JJ: Which, at that point, didn’t matter because then that house might not be worth… I mean, the house that we’re in right now had equity when we got in here, and we could flip it tomorrow and make a couple hundred thousand dollars because of the demand here in Ojai. And the realtor who ended up working with us, who wasn’t my friend, he was the guy, the owner of this house originally. He’s like a pal. He’s a realtor, but he did a favor, and he did it for a lot less than normal. And basically, that realtor liked to tell us that he has cash buyer ready to take over this property if our deal fell through. And I kept saying, “Robin, the deal is not going to fall through.” So, I knew that, and I know the demand. So, here’s the thing. We got everything we wanted. I didn’t get a house that I could move into and not do anything to. That price point would have been a lot higher than what we could afford or could qualify for.

Doug: We see those houses come on the market now for around $2 million. It wasn’t happening.

JJ: Right. Yeah, that just wasn’t going to be… But we got the main things. We’ve got a half an acre of land. We’ve got a pool and a hot tub. It’s literally a blank slate in the backyard. We’ve got grass. We’ve got a view. We’re on a cul-de-sac, kind of like a little cul-de-sac kind of deal. We’re in this development. There was no bidding war. This house never even made it on MLS.

Doug: And right across the street from Oriole.

JJ: Yep, and right across the street from Oriole. So, it was an amazing story, and I remember just actually doubting a little bit. I’m like, “Why is he selling us his house?” He could get a lot more. He could get $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 more, possibly. Well, he would have had to fix a lot of things to get it to that level, but…

Doug: He wanted to sell the house as is, and get out, and just not have to deal with any of the hassle. And that’s what we provided. We provided a hassle-free experience for him. Well, as hassle-free as it could be when you’re mortgaging a property.

JJ: So, go back to my friend who was a realtor. I had to tell him, and I cried because I was really sad that we were not going to use him and he wasn’t going to get any money from this sale. But I did say, “Well, I told you I get the stuff that you tell me I can’t get.” He’s like, “Oh my god. It was magical, what you did.” And even Doug was in shock the night we came home, and he’s like, “Oh my god. I can’t even believe this happened.” Because again, it hit every box in terms of what we wanted that we didn’t… We focused on it, but we didn’t. We didn’t demand that we only look in an area. We didn’t wait for someone that we knew. We weren’t annoyingly asking everybody we knew, “Hey, do you know anybody?” We didn’t do that. We just thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice to have that?” And then here we are. So, there were moments in time, if it wasn’t for the first house I saw, if it wasn’t for my reading with Christel that had me looking on the MLS, on Zillow, and then on Redfin every hour when I was here, and then finding the other house, and then being concerned that Doug wasn’t going to like it, so much to bring him up here on Saturday when I’d just come home on Friday. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have met Jim and we wouldn’t have this house.

So, I want you guys to… When you’re thinking about manifestation, when you’re thinking about law of attraction, it’s a story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. And when you hit the contrast, that is not the end. The contrast is the clarifying pivot in the road, where it’s telling you to go somewhere different, because if you go down this path, you’re not going to get what you want. It’s going to lead you somewhere more uncomfortable. So, let me direct you. This is the big rock in the boulder in the path that says, “Go the other way.” And I know a lot of times, people focus on the frustrations and then give up. This market is not fun. And if we had focused on that, I didn’t even think I would honestly get a property with a little bit of equity in it because of the bidding wars that are still happening now. You cannot find a property here unless you know somebody or you meet someone who’s thinking about selling their house without 14 offers, like Doug said on that house that we put an offer on. And that’s terrible. But we were able to make this happen. And I think it boils down to I wasn’t going to move.

Here’s my thing about my own financial… He and I have different financial relationships, right? And I know part of it is astrological, part of it is upbringing and family and what you get taught about money. And the reason why this is my very first house is because I didn’t want to live in a place that I could only “afford.” Here in California, rents aren’t cheap, houses aren’t cheap, but I knew and believed and trusted that I would be able to get what I wanted one day. And if you told me, “Well, here’s all you can afford right now. Why don’t you go buy a house and a place where this is what you can afford?” I’d say, “Because I don’t want to live there.” And my day-to-day life experience is more important to me, because I know and trust that I’ll be able to make the money. Money is energy. You can make more money.

And for those of you that would like to make more money, for those of you that have jobs, I’m thinking of a few of you in the Inner Circle Membership who are looking for extra money to come to the boot camp or to take the course. Here’s the problem with, I think, some of the education that people have in business and in work and in life. You’re taught to save. You’re told to save. And it’s almost like dieting, where you should be doing it, which feels restrictive, which is why most people then eventually sometimes just spend money they don’t have on things, because they don’t feel free. And the problem to me is that it’s the wrong emphasis. How about “Can I teach you how to make money? Can I teach you how to not only manifest it randomly, but can I teach you how to make more money?” I mean, doesn’t that feel better? My father would always say, “How are you doing with money, JJ?” and I’m like, “Dad, if I need more money, I’ll go get another job.” I’m going to live where I want to live and be happy, and then manifest the ideas and the inspiration, the connections, and divine timing to take me to the next place, because I trust that that’s what’s going to happen. And if it doesn’t, guess what? I had a fun time along the way, and I wasn’t living to save, and I wasn’t living to penny pinch so that, hopefully, when I retired, if I’m still alive, I could be free, but I might die along the way out of stress from saving so much money. And again, I’m not saying don’t save money. That’s not the point. The point here is that I know that when it comes to manifestation, for some of you, you don’t know how to think outside the box because someone else told you you can’t do that. And the moral of my story and this story for me… I wrote down some things about Doug having resistance to things. Along the way, Doug, did you have any, like, “We can’t do that” or “That’s not possible”? I mean, did you have any disbeliefs?

Doug: Not in the big picture. I think in the big picture, when you said that you want to move to Ojai, I was accepting of that. And I think I look at things maybe uniquely in that I first set the big vision, and then I work backwards and try to figure out what’s it going to take in order to achieve that goal. I would say there were things within the search that I was resistant to. I remember looking at that property that we came back up over the weekend, that weekend, and I remember seeing things like that, the neighboring houses that were around, and I said, “I don’t really think that I like that.” But I’m not going to let that stand in the way of me looking at the bigger picture of “Oh, well, this is the only thing I’m going to be able to afford, so I should stop to look right now.” I think that we probably would have gotten used to that environment, that other neighborhood. I didn’t want to. And so, I still had the feeling of “Okay, we’re going to do this. At some point, we’re going to move into this area. I’m going to ignore the fact that this particular house is not ideal for us.”

So, I think money, that was the resistance to part of the down payment, where we were getting that down payment from. I had some resistance to that. But I was open to other options, and I just reframed the way I had an investment that I was thinking about cashing in. And as I was looking at the investment, I thought, “Well, I’ve saved in this investment vehicle for now close to 30 years. I don’t want to give up this investment vehicle.” Until I realized that buying a house was not spending money. Buying a house was actually an investment of its own. And if I looked at the return on the investment, the return on the investment of my money in the property is better suited for the property than it was to the investment vehicle that I’ve had for 30 years. So, yes, there was resistance originally, but then I thought, “Well, maybe if I just lower my window of skepticism of this investment vehicle enough to see it, maybe there will be something positive.” And that’s exactly what happened. As you know, I was then no longer resistant to that investment vehicle because real estate is a great investment. You can’t go wrong with real estate over the long run.

JJ: Right. And especially here. Yeah. There was one other thing you had which I have to say because in terms of manifesting… So, I’ve never bought a house. I’ve never gone through this process. I don’t know. Doug has been through it three times.

Doug: Credit and other things, and all of those things.

JJ: Right. And he’s a lot neater and more well-put-together in that department than I am. But once we started the process, I think I felt like, “All right, well, I run a business. If I get asked for papers or numbers, okay, I can produce those. That’s fine. I don’t know what the big deal is.” And Doug was like, “Ugh. I hate the mortgage process.”

Doug: I hate the process.

JJ: So, once we started the process, the offer has been accepted, we go through all the jumps through the hoops and stuff, then I think he, in his mind, was waiting for when it was going to go awry, like when there was going to be an issue.

Doug: Yeah, because I was in the mortgage business and there’s always that one issue that kind of is that thing in left field, and I’m like, “Oh, there’s no way the issue was going to be me. The issue is going to be JJ because she doesn’t care.” It’s like all of these things, all of the stuff that you need. You need x credit. You need x dollars in the bank. You need to have x history of being self-employed. All of those things, I checked off every freaking box. I mean, positively. And when it came down to it, this whole mortgage process, last year when I filed my taxes, it was just easier for my accountant to file it through paper rather than through e-file. So, he filed it. And COVID hit. And when COVID hit, the IRS basically shut down for six or eight months or something like that, so they’re still in a backlog of processing all of these returns. So, when you go to look and see if I had filed my returns, of course, I filed my returns because that’s the kind of guy I am. Of course, I paid the amount I owed in tax liability because, of course, that’s who I am. And you go to look at the IRS records online, it’s like, “Didn’t file your taxes. Didn’t pay. Didn’t do any of this.” I’m like, “What? That’s crazy.” I called in the IRS, discovered that they are taking over a year now to process the returns that were filed by paper just as we were heading into the COVID era. So, I’m like, “Oh my god.” So, had I just filed electronically… So, I was the reason why we almost got denied, we almost got screwed up. And I’m thinking, “There is no way,” because I am like Mr. Pristine when it comes to credit history. I’ve been self-employed for 30 plus years, show probably more income than I need to because I’d rather do that.

So, when it came down to it, it was like JJ knew exactly what she was doing. She knew that she was going to get the property. It didn’t matter what her credit was. It didn’t matter how much money she had in the bank. It didn’t matter how long she’d be self-employed. She was just rolling right through the process, having the feeling before the reality actually happened. And me, I knew I was going to get it, but at the same time, I was thinking, “I’m not going to be the reason that got us held up.” Focusing on that, of course, law of attraction, you’re going to get exactly what you focus on, positive or negative. And I got it. I got a kick in the pants saying, “Probably could have done it differently.”

JJ: So, he said, “I knew there was going to be a problem, but I thought it was going to be you.”

Doug: Yeah, very true.

JJ: And I said, “And look what you manifested. You manifested the problem, and it was you.” In the most interesting way too, because it was something that we couldn’t have foreseen. But anyway, so watch what you focus on. If you believe it’s going to be a problem, you’re going to manifest the problem. I didn’t believe there was going to be a problem because I’ve never done it before. I have no frame of reference. And why would there be a problem? I was just following. I had no preconception of this whole process. And so, I just thought it hilarious when Doug said, “I knew there’d be a problem, but I thought it would be you. Didn’t know it was going to be me.” So, lesson learned. What you focus on expands, and you’ll absolutely get what you believe. And I did believe that I would get what I wanted. In a way, I kind of joked. Not that this house was a deal. I mean, it was in today’s market, but I thought, “Ooh. In order for me to buy in California, I need to have a natural disaster in order for me to get prices that are lower.”

Doug: We need to be right on the Northridge fault line.

JJ: Well, we had a natural disaster… Well, it wasn’t really natural, but we had a disaster, but it didn’t affect prices in Ojai, except it affected the demand. So, let’s go through, just finish up with key lessons. It does start with a belief system. It does start with that you have to believe, or you have to not be attached to the answer. Because sometimes when you want something really badly, you put resistance up because you feel like you can’t live without it, and therefore, you block sort of the natural ebb and flow of what’s going to happen. And for this house, I mean, we’re very happy with everything that’s happened. And it’s going to keep getting better because we have all kinds of work going to be done to the house, and we keep improving it. And I don’t want to be doing it forever. I think I want all work to be done within a two- to three-year period, because I just like to live in it, and just live here and be here, and not have to be doing things. Anyway, that’s our story about our home, and it took about two years, a little bit less than two years, when we really started looking, when we were really ready. But it took about eight months of preparing psychologically, financially. I mean, I definitely was working on my credit and saving money and doing all the things. I qualified. And in fact, my 2020 tax return is actually what qualified us for the house. Thank you, Doug Sandler.

Doug: Thank you, JJ.

JJ: But again, that couldn’t have happened two years ago, you know?

Doug: Also, just know that when you are looking at law of attraction, “Is law of attraction working for me?” Well, obviously, you know that law of attraction is going to work for or against you. It’s always happening. Always, positive or negative. But know that also, when you were thinking about it, law of attraction is not solely based upon vision boards and visioning. It’s based upon vision boards and visioning and taking action steps. Without the action, without you putting the action behind the things that you want… You just can’t say, “I wish I had a million dollars. I wish I had a million dollars. I wish I had a million dollars,” and it lands in your lap. What steps are you taking positively to help you get there? Who is in your life? Surround yourself with those people that are believers also in the things that you want. When you can surround yourself with people that believe in the things that you want, there is no stopping you. JJ has told the story many times about the positive influence that the environment that she…our relationship, that it’s the fertile ground that the positive results happen from. It happens because you surround yourself with the right people. So, action items, visioning, wanting it, environment, your community, your education, the support that you work with. When JJ talks about things like becoming a part of the manifestation challenge or getting into the boot camp, as JJ says many times, you’re not investing in JJ when you go to the manifestation boot camp. You’re investing in yourself. You’re investing in your dreams, the things that you want. So, I would highly encourage you to get around the heat. That’s where you get hot. And so, you remove yourself from the heat, and that’s when you cool down.

JJ: Well said. So, if you want to start the process, again, you can join the law of attraction mastery course happening June 1st. It will be live for four weeks on a Tuesday, 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, for about 90 minutes, recorded. And if you’re hearing this after the fact, it will be available to purchase in July, without it being live. But again, the key point here is if you want to be a part of it live with me and get Q&A for you specifically, because that will not happen again, this is your one and only chance for that. And then, of course, the manifestation boot camp. You guys, if you’re not a part of the Inner Circle Membership or you haven’t been to an event before, it really is the fertile ground to really be who you are, and be seen and be heard and be understood, and connect with like-minded people that you probably don’t have the amount of people in your life that you could just be yourself with, like your true self. And I promise, when you come into my environment, with the team of people and the community that I’ve attracted, there’ll be a newfound freedom and elevated levels. And again, this law of attraction conversation and game, so to speak, has several parts, and we’re going to be working on it in both those events. So, please, go to jjflizanes.com/mastery or jjflizanes.com/bootcamp. I’d love to work with you. I’d love to see you in something soon so I can help you manifest what you want.

Doug: All right. I think we’ve shared this story. This is a good one. I’d love to hear more stories like that. Just reach out to JJ. Let her know what you have manifested in your life recently.

JJ: All right, guys. See you next week.