When was the last time you heard someone advise that you need to “fake it until you make it?” Does that REALLY work? What is the RIGHT way to be authentic while you are trying to make it? That belief is bull! People can tell when you’re being inauthentic, will lose trust in you, and can destroy your business. Cash Flow Expert, Chris Miles, boldly expresses his opinion on this commonly-taught belief, and how you can be authentic and prosper, no matter what stage you are.
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
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Fake It Till You Make It Is Stupid
I am excited today, not because we got great stuff, but life is good. I love it when the weather gets warmer and when you meet the right people. The right people show up at exactly the right time. It’s awesome. I love life right now. I love that I can serve you once again. If you notice, I went later into the week this week because I wanted to make sure it was good. I’m excited about our topic because it’s an important one. It’s the one that got me a little bit fired up.
As a reminder, if you have any questions or topic discussion that you would love to hear on the show, please reach out to me at Chris@MoneyRipples.com. Let me know what you want to hear. Let me know how I create value for you and serve you the best. I want to talk about something that is referring to a common phrase that you have probably heard many times, especially if you have been in business. You heard people say things like, “Fake it until you make it.” I’m here to tell you that is stupid. It’s crap. You cannot fake it until you make it.
I can’t remember which book this is in, but I remember Robert Kiyosaki, in one of his books, talked about a story where he got a fake Rolex. His rich dad said, “Come on, look at this. You’ve got a fake Rolex.” He told him, “Look at this deal I got. I spent only this much money to get this imitation Rolex. It looks like the real thing.” His rich dad said, “Toss it. It’s garbage. Get rid of it.” He said, “Why?” He said, “It’s not the real thing. It’s fake. It’s a phony.” He said, “Yeah, but nobody can tell that it’s not real.” He said, “That may be true, but you can.”
The point I want to drive home today is that when you try to fake anything and when you’re inauthentic, authenticity is this nice little buzzword, which is ironic because a lot of times, people aren’t being authentic when they use that word. People talk about authenticity. Being true and being aligned with who you are, aligning that you do what you say and you fulfill that, you practice what you preach. Lots of times, when people try to fake it, it creates massive inauthenticity. Whether you know it or not, people can tell. People know when you’re faking it.
Even if they can’t identify it, a lot of times, they will say, “There is something off about that person. There is something off about them that rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.” That comes from being inauthentic. It comes from you not aligning with who you are. You’re not aligning energetically with your message.
It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the outside world. People can see on the inside. You could buy the fanciest car you want, but if it doesn’t align with who you are, people will say, “This person is just flashy or showing off.” The thing is that you are trying to fake it. You try to make all this hype and hoopla about who you are and how amazing you are. I guarantee you. You’re going to create mistrust in people. People will say, “I don’t know what it is. I cannot trust that person.”
I have seen that a little bit lately. I have talked to people, and it’s always funny because every business owner I have been talking to, and sometimes non-business owners, when we sit down one-on-one or on the phone, they will say, “Chris, I’m embarrassed about my situation. My money situation is not as good as I think it should be.” No kidding, join the freaking club. You became an entrepreneur because you wanted more freedom and control. You wanted the ability to create your own destiny, especially when it comes to money. When you’re not at the place where you like to be, you might feel a little bit disappointed. That is ridiculous.
Practice what you preach. Many times, when people try to fake it, it creates massive inauthenticity. Whether you know it or not, people can tell when you're faking it. Click To TweetI see other people. Sometimes they bang their chest and do the opposite. Sometimes they are not even in a place to think they are amazing, but in reality, they are nothing. They are not doing squats. It frustrates me. The reason it frustrates me is that I had been inauthentic myself. As a financial advisor, fourteen years ago, when I started out, I was only about 24 years old. I was young.
When you have a baby face like mine, granted, as I’m getting closer to 40, that’s not so much a baby face anymore, but especially in my twenties, full head of hair and a baby face, my whole concern was with people taking me seriously. That came from the stem of my junior high school years, where I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be loved. I want people to be friends with me and like me.
When you carry that into your business, especially when you’re in the business of you, that amplifies because all of a sudden, you are in the spotlight, and those insecurities come out. I became insecure. I was already insecure, but now the insecurity has become more apparent. It’s funny looking back now in hindsight, thinking, “Maybe that’s why some people thought we’re weirded off by me because I was trying to be somebody I was not.” I try to speak in a big booming voice. You will have some people sound fake when they are talking. That thing drives people nuts. I’m sure I drove people away myself.
I had a client that was interesting. She was at a business event. She had heard me speak on several occasions. I appreciate what she said. She said, “Chris, it’s interesting. Every time I hear you talk, I like it more because you become more of who you are. You’re not trying to please us. You’re not trying to get us to like you. You’re embracing your dorkiness.” When she said that, it meant a ton. She was like, “The less you try to get us to like you, the more we like you.” Think about that. The less that I was trying to get people to like me, the more people liked me. It doesn’t mean I had to be a jerk because I’m not naturally a big jerk anyways, but it meant that I was willing to be who I was. If I was dorky and screwed up, be it.
Earlier this week, I gave a presentation at a networking group. There were some jokes I said that I know bombed, but the great thing is when you can play those off, and it’s like, “That wasn’t funny.” People laugh. It’s funny when you embrace it. It’s like, “If they accept me, accept me. I don’t care. That’s who I am.”
It’s amazing how much more powerful you show up in your life and relationships, especially with business relationships. It’s amazing how that shows up. People become endeared to you. I know a guy. He would be considered a very nerdy guy. He sounds like the dog Hanna-Barbera. He acts and sounds like that dog, and people adore him because he is a computer-savvy guy. The thing is, it was hilarious, and people love him. It was because he was not trying to beat somebody else.
You could still tell that energetically. You can tell that he is still trying to become comfortable in his own skin, but so are all the rest of us. We’re all on this human trek together. We’re all trying to grow. We’re all trying to do something to make an impact. We want people to like, trust and understand us. That is human nature. We all want those kinds of things.
When you try to fake it, you try to be something you are not, and you try to use stuff as a way to mask who you are. When you start to try to create this image of something that you’re not, people won’t trust you. It will drive people out of your life. You will wonder why you work hard for little. I have seen people. Even they make six figures doing what they do. I have still watched those people work way harder than they need to do that.
Sometimes people say, “You’ve got to buy a nice car. You’ve got to have a nice house. You’ve got to look the part.” I will tell you that, yes, people do judge your appearance. Whether you like it or not, people are going to judge you. Even if you dress nicely, you have a nice car or a nice house. There are going to be some people that still don’t like you. Stop worrying about it.
Somebody told me recently, “I can’t be taken seriously when I’m young. I can’t be taken seriously because of the car I drive.” I’m going to call bull crap on that. You do not have to have this nice $100,000 car. I did that. I remember buying my Mercedes back in 2006. I bought the Mercedes not because I wanted a Mercedes. I bought the Mercedes because I wanted something that was a little bit unique that not everybody had. I wanted something to be able to show off because my insecurities were there.
I had been in business for a few years, and I was struggling. People were telling me, “Chris, go back to college. You need to go back to school. You need to do this again. Stop doing this. Stop putting your family at risk by doing your own business thing. Go back to school and graduate. Get your Bachelor’s in Sociology. Get a job. In the business thing, maybe do that on the side. You don’t have to do it full time.”
I remember trying to prove to people that I don’t need to do that. Granted, I did have jobs on the side when I was first starting in business. It wasn’t that, but I was trying to prove people wrong, prove people that I could do it and I could make something myself. I was seeing them as devaluing me. When I started seeing money, and it was all coming in, I was like, “Let me prove it to you. Let me buy that nice Mercedes. Let me buy that nice $750,000 house. Let me show off my stuff and show you how valuable I am.”
The problem was I was showing stuff, not me. I still didn’t have value in me that still came across. It didn’t matter what stuff I had. I was still creating roadblocks for myself in my business because I wasn’t confident in who I was. I wasn’t confident in my own value. It took me losing almost everything to finally start to see that. Even then, it took me launching Money Ripples, going out by myself, not having somebody else who would be partners with me, but putting it all on me and saying, “Who am I?”
I was speaking so much. People were looking at me and I was like, “Am I good enough? Am I somebody that people take seriously? Are they going to think I’m credible? Are they going to trust me? Do I have to prove my point and over-prove it?” Those insecurities will create the opposite effect. The challenge to you is to stop being fake. Make true statements.
There's a difference between faking it and facing it. There's a difference between having faith and being fake. Click To TweetThere is a difference between having faith and being fake. Let’s talk about that a little bit of how you can do that because you’ve got to be okay with yourself. First off, accept the insecurity that you have them, and that’s okay. Secondly, try on that maybe the way you are is perfect. No matter what your age is, your financial status is, what you look like to say, “You are perfectly fine the way you are.” We’re all working to grow, improve and excel. You’re great the way you are.
When you start making statements and looking at a situation, go look at it. I had somebody asking me. They are interviewing me. They want to become a one-on-one client. They are asking me things like, “What is your net worth?” I had no problem telling him. I was like, “It may be less than yours, especially after a divorce, but I’m okay with that. My net worth was a negative $1 million. Being in the positive net worth territory is awesome. I’m happy with that because my trajectory is faster or greater than some people that had more net worth than me. Their net worth is going down because they are relying on the stock market and mutual funds.”
The reality is that even net worth doesn’t matter in value anyways because net worth is not the same as cash flow. Some people have great net worth, but they are paycheck to paycheck or not even paycheck to paycheck. They are asset-rich and cash poor. With that question, I didn’t care. It didn’t faze me. It was fun. You had to make true statements.
You don’t have to answer every question people have. You don’t have to open up and say about all your problems. Trust me. You annoy us when you do that on Facebook and social media. We don’t need to know about it. If you have something you’re going through and you struggle with, sharing that is great, but you don’t have to share every intimate detail of your life because we don’t want to know to be honest. Even for your best friend, there are probably some things in your life we don’t want to know. That’s the thing.
When it comes to your life, being aligned with who you are and being truthful, you’ve got to make sure that what you’re saying and doing aligns. For example, I told you this story before, in another previous episode, when I was going through my big financial mess. There are collectors calling me multiple times a day. Sometimes it’s the same company, more than once a day. When they call me, they say, “When are you going to pay us?”
I had to rephrase that. At first, I was like, “They are calling me.” I wouldn’t answer the phone. I would ignore their calls because I hated the fact that they were calling me. After a while, I said, “Let’s change my attitude about what this looks like. What if I were to look at this from a different perspective?” I started referring to them as ‘I love you calls’ because, think about it. They care about me so much. They will call me once, sometimes twice a day, to see how I’m doing and see if they can get their money back. They wanted to know what was going on in my life and when I could pay.
They would call more than some of my friends. Some of my friends didn’t remain much of my friends. After I started going through some financial difficulties, they disappeared. At least these collectors are calling me. They call me out as far as like, “How is it going?” They are like a normal friend. I’m like, “Good.” They were like, “This call is an attempt to collect a debt.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know. I’m working on it. You just called yesterday.” They were like, “Do you know when you are going to pay us?” I’m like, “No, but I’m going to pay you back, but this is going to take a little time. Here is what is going on in my life, but I’m working on it.” The collector calls are going to keep continuing, “Yeah, I hope so. I keep following up.” I’m like, “Call me next week. I love to talk to you again. That’s how the conversations went. It’s amazing how much easier these conversations were.
Let me ask you, which is truthful? Which was a true perspective, the perspective I had with them or the perspective that I had before, where I was ignoring the calls? They were both true. Both of them are true from that perspective. Ignore the calls. I hated it. The collectors call me. They wanted money. I didn’t have money. That was a depressing thing. I looked at it from another angle, “They’re calling me to check up on me. They want to know how I’m doing. They want their money, but they are checking up on me. They are great friends.” Still true.
Maybe they didn’t know who I was. Maybe they weren’t true friends, but still, that perspective was truthful. I was excited to talk to them because they were checking in on me. I was able to give them an update. That’s it. Maybe you are paycheck to paycheck. So what? I get people to tell me all the time, like, “Chris, it’s horrible. We’re barely making ends meet. It’s miserable. We don’t ever get to do extra things as a family, especially as we see on Facebook. I get depressed. I get on Prozac because I see what they’re doing.” Part of me was like, “Stop whining.” They were like, “We can’t even make ends meet hardly.” You are surviving.
Instead, you should be saying, “How grateful I am that I can pay my bills. Do you know how many people are in the world who can’t pay their bills that figured out other creative ways?” You’re like, “It’s horrible. I can only afford two cell phones this month. I want to be able to buy all the holistic food that I want.” I’m like, “Me too.” They were like, “Yeah, but it’s so hard.” Good, buy it. The fact is you could buy it.
I had another person that told me, “It’s horrible. We can’t even pay for all of our kids’ college education.” I’m thinking, “Who said it was your job to pay for their education?” They were like, “We want them to have a better life than we do.” I’m like, “Isn’t your life already better?” They were like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “What are you whining about?” They were like, “I want them to have more.” I’m like, “They have great. If you’re in America, you’re in a place where you could even help them with their education, living expenses, or whatever it is. That’s great.” They were like, “We don’t have any retirement left.” I’m like, “You spent your retirement on your kids. That’s a choice. Congratulations. Make this truthful and look at it from the right perspective. That’s amazing.”
It’s funny how we got all emotional and all worked up. A lot of times, that insecurity, those kinds of things come out because we think we’re not being enough, don’t have enough, or whatever it might be. The truth is that you don’t have to fake anything. It’s crap. Be who you are. Be true to yourself. You will be okay with your current situation and say, “It’s great. The trajectory we have is going in a better direction.” If it’s not great, there is still more to go. There’s still more you can do. That is perfect. That’s my whole point here.
My point is that you don’t have to fake it. Have that faith. Understand that you’re getting somewhere. You are where you are, and that’s perfectly acceptable. You are not where you were. You are sure the heck you are not where you want to be, but that’s okay because you are not where you were. That’s perfect. Be okay with that. Accept it and have faith that things are improving and will get better. Look at it from that angle. You will find out that your problems and your perspective are in your own head. Your head gets in the way. Your own emotions and where you think you should be is crap.
Be okay and be grateful for where you are. You’re growing and improving, and things are getting better. That’s it. I have preached enough to you guys. I appreciate it so much. This is key. Your mind is going to trip up your business more than anything. Control that. You control your mind, business, and money. Have a great prosperous week, everybody. We’ll talk to you later.