Ep 8: Creating a Life that Lights the Soul on Fire with Dr. Elaine Stageberg

Join us for Part 2 of an awe-inspiring conversation with Dr. Elaine Stageberg, where she shares how she creates a life that lights her soul on fire.  In her work, she sees her calling as a soulful entrepreneur, building a company culture that is resilient to burnout and shame, and helping physicians obtain the freedom to speak up and stand up for what is right.  She also lives an intentional family life, in growing her marriage with her soulmate Nick and raising their children together.  She spends a lot of time out in nature, where she feels her best, and enjoys even those imperfect real life moments with her kids outdoors.  She always seeks growth through visioning, planning, reading and most recently adopted the practice of meditation.

She encourages all doctors to dream, even if their brains say it's not possible.  She says dream anyway. It is 100% possible. She is living proof that dreams are possible, and actualizing them will light a fire in our souls.

Learn more about Dr. Elaine Stageberg
On her website Black Swan Real Estate at https://www.blackswan.realestate/
Join her community at https://www.blackswan.realestate/connect

You can sign up for one-on-one life planning at Dare to Dream Physician (https://daretodreamphysician.com)

Transcript

0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the dare to dream physician podcast. In the last episode, we had part one of a breathtaking conversation with Dr. Elaine stock Berg. Where she shares her life story. Of going from being a child who grew up in an unstable home with very poor housing conditions. Two. Going to college, going to graduate school and going beyond what she thought was possible, which was medical school. And by the second year of her psychiatry residency at the Mayo clinic, she had achieved financial independence with her husband neck. And they did this to real estate investing. Dr. Elaine shares how she used the super power of visualization to help her actualize her impossible dreams. If you haven't yet listened to episode seven, which is part one of Dr. Lane's conversation please after you're done listening to this episode, make sure you go back to the last episode and listen to it because that is an episode you don't want to miss. In this episode, part two of our conversation with Dr. Elaine Steinberg, she talks about how she creates a life that lights, a fire in her soul. That includes her life as an entrepreneur. And her day to day life with her family. There are so many gems in here and I can't wait to share with our listeners. Let's dive straight into the interview now.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 1:30

it is a cultural shift away from the eighties and nineties of more and more gimme gimme materialism that our culture is shifting more toward really adding value and doing so in a way that's good for other humans. That's good for employees. That's good for the environment. Good business practices lead to profitability and they lead to happy employees and happy customers. But then also as I've leaned more into entrepreneurship, really having the belief that, we'll talk about housing since that's the area of entrepreneurship that I'm in, that someone has to provide housing, It'd be provided by someone and it might as well be me. And it might as well be with the values that I want to lead in business. And I have an opportunity to do that. And then as my business grew, I've developed more of a sense of I have an obligation to do this. This is for whatever reason, this is what I was put on earth to do, which is surprising because I've trained as a psychiatrist. And before that got a degree in business. And before that got a degree in biology, never would I have imagined that I would be a real estate investor in a real estate developer. But bringing together this unique childhood and seeing, the hardships with my patients in psychiatry, and then seeing the hardships that I see my colleagues and peers and medicine feeling trapped because they don't have passive income and they feel like they need to stay at their jobs and can't speak up for what is right, or just have to do whatever the administration says. And I'm at the center of this in a way too, to bring together investors who can create passive income and. Healthy and sustainable life giving way to communities and create great housing for communities and for people to live in and to do so in a way that allows me to create a business and to have amazing employees that I'm able to provide a wonderful standard of work for them. And I talk to them a lot about property management is tough. It's definitely not medicine. Medicine is an extraordinarily challenging profession. The property management, similar in that someone's always upset and the work never stops and there's always something to do. And I talked to them about how we will never have a company of a burnout culture. We will never have company of shame or hiding things or them feeling like they can't bring up their ideas or talk about ways to improve. And so seeing some of the dysfunctions that I saw in medicine and saying well, it doesn't have to happen. Someone can run a business and can provide, services and in this case, property management, but in the medicine world, service and medical services and do so in a way that's healthy for everyone. And so just leaning into entrepreneurship and the gift that it is to be able to create and to provide value and to bring together resources and ideas. And other people that's a big one of who, who can we get involved in this? How can we take this to the next level? Almost always involves a person.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 4:30

Yes. That is such an amazing statement in so many thoughts in there that I think. So crucial. And I came into this because I started investing in individual stocks, my investing journey started with reading the white coat investor and just flipping my mind about wait, I can actually. Invest, I can be an investor because I didn't grow up in a family with anybody that invested either. And so I started with investing in index funds and then I thought you know what, let me learn about the companies that these index funds are holding. And that's how I started learning about conscious capitalism and really doing business for good and building a company culture. When you have employees that feel. Like they're aligned with the goals of the company that they contribute more. And I love that. That's what you're doing in your work and how you're drawing parallels to healthcare. What you're saying about that you don't want your company to have a burnout culture. When you said that, I thought she would be the perfect CEO for a healthcare company. I'm just, sitting here listening and I'm thinking I want to be her employee. This is because what you're building is you're building value for your customers, right? The tenant, but also you're building value for your employees. And you're building value for your investors because you have this magical. Combination of, having happy customers, having happy employees that's very good for the bottom line, because oftentimes in healthcare as physicians, we just keep hearing every decision is being made because of the bottom line. The reason why you have to see more patients, the reason why the the number of minutes for each patient is being decreased is because of the bottom line. And it doesn't have to be that way, because as the leader of an organization, You can do both. You can have a better bottom line, have happier employees, happier clients. When people are more energized by the leadership, it can lead to a win-win for everybody. And so that really gave me a lot of hope because oftentimes working in a healthcare system, it doesn't feel that way, I love that you're bringing that possibility, that vision to our listeners,

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 6:36

Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. I know for me, when I. When I reached financial independence, I was still in residency and I was very committed to finishing residency. So it's not like I really would have left, but I definitely had a different energy about me that when I saw something that maybe I didn't agree with or that I felt could be optimized or who may be ways that the resident experience could be improved because I was a resident or those sorts of things, I felt so much more comfortable saying it. And let's be clear. It's not like I was ever saying anything that was so controversial that I would be fired or anything like that. I, fortunately, I trained at a very good institution where there, there wasn't any, rampant abuse or anything like that. But there's just a lightness that comes from being very financially secure. And almost a slight laughter in myself of I can say this what are they gonna do fire me? And my hope is that as other physicians become financially secure and financially free and financially abundant, I think that's the steps along the path is security, freedom, and then abundance that they too will feel very empowered to say, I don't agree with that, or I want this to be changed, or this is what is, that the needs of the patient, or this is how we can really improve healthcare in this community or access or cost or whatever it is. It's not my vision that all physicians leave medicine. I'm grateful that there are physicians that love to practice medicine that are there for us, right? Like my daughter just had her appendix taken out and I am so grateful that there was a physician on the other end of my car ride to the hospital there to save her life in the middle of the night. I can remember seeing him in the elevator and I said, I want to thank you for saving my daughter's life. And he joked and said, oh, it's not that big of a deal. And I said, untreated appendicitis has a 50% mortality rate. You saved her life. You are a lifesaver don't you ever forget it? And that's a little bit of a tangent, but just to say that physicians have such a special role in society as caregivers and lifesavers and for, for reasons that are outside of a short podcast, we have found ourselves in a tough climate in terms of regulation and administration and politics and all of these sorts of things. And I think some of it, if I could say, just a ten second thing, I think some of it is that we, as a group left our entrepreneurial spirit behind in the eighties and we started trading our time for money and in doing so we lost our autonomy and. I think for a lot of reasons, big healthcare systems and big hospital systems make a lot of sense with how advanced medicine has become in terms of technology and resources. But that doesn't mean we have to continue to not have our autonomy. And if more physicians felt empowered to speak up and to feel very confident in the workplace. Yeah. To be a leader because they had that lightness in their heart of what are they going to do, fire me then perhaps we could reclaim medicine and it could become the, more of the really beautiful profession that it has been for the past many hundreds of years that has shifted in the last 20 or 30 years, but does not have to be a permanent shift. And it, in the grand scheme of things, that shift has not happened for that long. And so it's still very much within our grasp to take our profession back, but to do so, we need to have freedom and autonomy and a big piece of that puzzle is the financial piece.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 10:18

Yes. Oh, I agree. Everything a thousand percent. And I think physicians as physicians, we are uniquely positioned to be advocates, to be the change makers, to be to keep speaking up and advocating because really, it's not even about our profession. It's about patients and what we think is the right thing to do is often just the best thing and the right thing to do for patients. And so I think that, it shouldn't just be a movie. With just physicians. So when we tell a physician, you need to get your finances in order, you need to, get on the offense and start investing and start pursuing financial freedom so that you can have the freedom with decision one, to practice medicine and to be more engaged than you would be if you weren't financially independent. And it's not just for the wellbeing and the sake of the physician, but it's really for the wellbeing of our society. Because like you said, we are all going to be patients at some points, a physician is going to save our life at some point, and we want that person to be there because they're engaged because they're doing their, they're doing what they think is the right thing to do for the patient, as opposed to, just following the system and just being there because they have to get a paycheck.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 11:29

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. I had an experience in my undergraduate years, I went to a very small private school in Western Pennsylvania at the time. I think it had like right under 1000 students and the president of the college had been a senior advisor in the white house. And I remember asking one of my professors one day, like, why is he here? Like he could be in DC or, doing something international or like, why is he in this tiny little town in Western Pennsylvania, running this college? And the professor said to me he's financially independent. He can do what he wants. And that was the first time in my life. I had ever heard those words because I remember saying, what does me the word independent means, but I had never heard the two words together. And the professor explained to me what that meant. And that was just a, I did not have a big aha moment or anything at that time, but it was a little seed was planted. I didn't know that the seed was being planted. I wasn't able to reflect on that for many years later, but that little seed was planted of this person could do whatever they wanted and they didn't have to worry about status or prestige or being well-connected or salary or any of that. He had a calling to run that small university because he had connections to that area for generations. And it was a private religious school and it had a faith-based reason for wanting to do that. And that seed just grew in me of well, if he can do that, then what can any of us do? If we reach financial independence and can shed having to do things for a paycheck or for the feeling of security, or I have to do this so that I can pay the bills or put my kids through college or whatever it is that, that we all go through. And instead, just wake up and say, what do I want to do today? What is it that I want to give to the universe? How do I want to contribute? And maybe I make money from it. Maybe I don't that isn't the main driver anymore. The main driver is what lights my soul on fire and makes me excited to wake up every day and excited to do the work that I get to do that day. And I'm just so grateful that seed was planted. I was so naive. I didn't even know what was being planted. But I'm able to reap the lessons of that experience, I'll have that. Let those lessons forever.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 13:54

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. And that goes back to the question number one in life planning which is, you are financially secure now, how do you want to live your life? What are your dreams? And I think this will be a nice segue to talk more about, you said that your family's important to you and how it's cause you have even though you're financially independent, you're working because that work is so meaningful to you. And I can hear that from, every sentence you've talked about so far. But tell me about the other aspects of life, because that's also helpful. I think, you know, what is that life that's, lighting the fire in your soul,

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 14:31

Yeah. So the things that, that, just bring me a ton of passion in my life is my relationship with my husband, Nick. We've been married for 10 years. He is very much my soulmate. We were a love at first sight story. We made the decision that we would get married the day we met. And we said we probably can't do this today because no one would ever take us seriously. So we'll get married in a year so that people take this pretty seriously. And that's basically what we did. We got married about 13 months after we met I, I love being around him. I get so much energy from my relationship with him. And so we've created this life where we're able to run a business together which is, my dream come true. We get to spend, most waking hours together, running our business together during the day, and then running our family together in the evenings. We've been blessed with three children. We have a, five-year-old a three-year-old and a one-year-old. And should the universe provide, we would like to have one, maybe two more children. We have, we both have very small families. My, my husband's an only child and has never met his father and his mother's in poor health and it might not be with us many more years. And then I shared some of the struggles with my childhood. And so we're basically repopulating our family tree um, making it so that, so that our children have each other and who knows what will unfold over the generations. But if they each have a kid or two or three, or maybe they're crazy and have five kids like we want to have, then, they'll all have cousins and all of that. So again, going back to that visioning of what do we want our lives to look like 50 years from now? A lot of it, we can't control. We can't control how many children we get or what they decide to do with their life, or if they decide to have children or who knows there'll be living on the moon by then, but we can try our best. And the part that we can control is trying to grow our family. So we spend a lot of time with our kids. Um, We like to spend a lot of time outdoors, hiking, going to national parks. Even with COVID when we stopped traveling, we just started hiking in the little, trails around Rochester. That's a really beautiful experience of seeing my hometown. I've only lived here for five years. But even in my fifth year of living here, seeing things that I had never seen before, because we were forced to stay home for a year and finding little trails or just little, hidden areas of the city or little hidden areas of state parks that we hadn't been to before. I find that I am the best version of myself when I am outside and preferably outside for hours on end. In a perfect world that would be just quietly hiking through the woods with three young children. It's more like taking a few steps, stopping controlling. One of them can to continue along fixing a shirt, kissing a scrape to me. He, we cover mile in four hours, but we're still outside. And I just, I feel just most at peace outside. I do a lot of reading. I really enjoy that as I've gotten older, I've enjoyed reading even more. I think I used to have a nonchalant, I mostly read nonfiction. I used to have a nonchalant like, oh, I'll pick up this book and read it. And now as a creator and as an entrepreneur, I don't have a book of my own yet, but it's something, we'll likely work on maybe within the next six months or so now I see a book as I get to be inside of someone's brain and a heart. And yet to hold in my hands, their ideas, like what a privilege, or listen to it and an audio book. So I try to read as much as I can, again, with three young children that might be 10 minutes a day, but try to do that.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 18:01

Just as a side note, please write your book. Has, I will be the first one to go read it.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 18:06

I have some ideas for the book. We're not quite ready to share them, but suffice it to say it. Won't just be of a traditional recipe for real estate investing or financial freedom or that sort of thing, but more about like business practices and bringing value to business. Similar to the theme of conscious capitalism or soul centered entrepreneur, similar to that. And then recently I've started a meditation practice and I'll be Frank and saying, I'm not very good at it. It's easy to say, oh, I have this to do in that, to do in this thing to get to, and, five minutes between this appointment and that appointment or this, that, and the other. But I've tried really hard to wake up even 20 minutes before my kids do every day. And I live in a house with a basement. So going into the basement, it's just a little bit quieter, it's half underground. So just a little bit different acoustics and just sitting there and trying to clear my mind and really be in communication with. Different flavors of religions or philosophies call it a different thing, but my soul or my heart, or whatever word, clicks in, in listener's mind, and I have found that is it's similar to visioning is actually more peaceful. It's more calm. And we spend so much time with devices behind screens, with things beeping at us. And particularly if you're in a field of medicine, like you're in the Orr, you're in the ICU or something where there's a lot of beeping or stimulation or something, or you're going from patient to patient. And even when you're walking down the hall from door one door to a nurse, grabs you, or someone grabs you to ask you a question, meditation can be such an antidote to that. And I feel like I'm just on the tip of the iceberg of discovering this super power in meditation. But give it a try, like at the end of this podcast to just whatever you're doing, just spit for five minutes and just clear your mind. Like th there's nothing more to it. There's no fancy technique. You don't have to be super skilled. It's similar to the doing visualization and that you just do it. You just close your eyes and just do it. Not that has been really transformative and I've only been doing that for a couple of weeks now. But really look forward to deepening that practice and spending more time with that.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 20:16

Oh, I'm really glad you brought that up because meditation is one of the practices that is highly recommended by life planners. To be a life planner because when we meditate, we make a quiet space, and that allows us to have inner listening. Cause like you said, there's so many distractions in the world and I'll be the first to admit that, oh, I'm not good at this yet. And and it's hard. It's almost like if you have an exercise, for a few months, and then you have to get back into it, it's my mind just makes up like a hundred excuses on why I can't do it. And same thing I think with meditation, but it is a discipline that the more we do it, that the easier, the more we crave it, like exercise, if we haven't done in a while. And then we started again, we go back to it. Cause there is a neurochemical response as a result of exercise. But I also think as a result of meditation. So I'm really glad you brought that up.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 21:07

yeah,

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 21:08

So anything else about this dream life that the things that you do now in your day, your month, your year, that lights your soul.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 21:17

yeah. I would just end on a note that I just absolutely love the name of your podcast dare to dream. To the listener whatever you have in your heart, whether it's something small, like maybe you're listening to this in mid-afternoon and you're thinking I really want to have a nice dinner this evening, or maybe it's something really big. Like you have a 50 or a hundred year plan for your life or for your legacy, wherever it falls on that spectrum, it's possible for you. It is 100% possible. And if your brain tells you that it's not, your brain is lying, your brain is a device that is designed to keep you alive, to keep you away from the bears and away from the poisonous berries. And it lies to us all the time. And that's okay. It's a beautiful device that is capable of so much, but it's also a liar and we can use the higher levels of our brain to say, Thank you brain for telling me that, I learned that as a psychiatrist in dialectical behavioral therapy. Thank you mind. Thank you mind for telling me that I don't need that thought or I don't agree with that thought. I'm going to believe that this is possible. I'm going to believe that night I can have the best dinner ever or get to a relaxing walk or whatever it is for the listener or this, 50 or 100 year plan. And if maybe you're listening and you think that's not possible for me, or yeah, but, or, whatever your mind is telling you. I think that the universe is a beautiful, loving place and the universe has crossed our paths today so that I could be a conduit of the universe to tell you that it is possible.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 23:08

Wow. Yes. So well said. And your life story in your young 35 years is proof of that.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 23:19

Yeah. And just whenever, I don't want to get too much into the tyranny of the how, because that kind of wraps up into our minds of that. Yeah. But if your mind's telling you something's not possible, or that sort of thing to think of who it is possible for, and just model after that person, for me, running a company, being a physician, having three young children, I'll often feel like I don't have enough time. And then I will think if someone can be the president of the United States, I can probably run a company and have three children and be a physician. And it's almost like laughing at my own mind. Okay they can be the president, but I can do this carry on.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 23:57

Yes. Yes.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 23:58

so find the people, even if it's someone you've never met, I've never met the president, any of the presidents, but I can still use them as an example of what is possible.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 24:08

Yeah. And I would say for me and the reason why I started this podcast was because I've listened to podcasts, hundreds of episodes. That's changed my life because I didn't think a lot of these things that I was thinking were possible. And that's why I started this podcast. So listeners can hear and start believing that this little voice that they have, that it is possible. And and and like you said, Elaine, if not me, then who? Yeah. Thank you so much. this has been amazing and you are just such an inspiration.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 24:44

Thank you so much for having me. I have loved having an opportunity to record this with you and to connect with you in our preparation time for this podcast. And the pleasure is all mine. I hope that it's been enjoyable for people to listen to and. Um, Perhaps there has been, maybe an aha moment. And if not that maybe just a seed, maybe just one of those seeds that maybe that seed sprouts a day, a week, a month, a decade from now. But that's my hope for our time together here today.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 25:11

wonderful. And so can you tell our listeners if they want to learn more about you or even be an investor in your company how they can find.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 25:22

Yeah, absolutely. So our website is black Swan dot real estate. There's no.com or anything on the end of they're just black Swan dot real estate. You can sign up for our newsletter. That's black swan.my kajabi.com backslash connect. We do a weekly newsletter. We have a video that we give as a part of that kind of describing how we've built our ideal life and what tips and tricks other people can do to move closer to their own ideal life. I have a Facebook group single-family at scale, so you can find me there. I try to stay pretty active there. And then I'm just always reachable on social media as well.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 26:00

wonderful and I, if I remember correctly you have a course to that on single family investing.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 26:07

Yeah, we are putting together a course right now. We are going to call that single family to scale, to, to cover all the way from single family to large multi-family projects. And I anticipate we'll release that probably sometime in September. So we're working on putting all the modules together, recording the videos. We're going to have a pilot of beta testers, or really excited about that. I'm just trying to reach as many people as possible. And so many people have asked for kind of our recipe or our playbook for investing. And this is my way to get it out to as many people as possible. So that'll be coming in the fall.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 26:42

Get on her email list so you can be the first to know about that.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 26:46

Yep. That's right.

audio_only_1_16778242_Weili_Gray 26:47

And I'll put all the links in the show notes. And I hope that we can have you back in the future, because everything you say is just full of wisdom and inspiration.

audio_only_1_16779266_Elaine_Stageberg 26:59

too sweet. You're too sweet. I think what you're doing here is amazing and I'm happy to be a small part of it. Thank you.