Minisode-Aligned investors are the most successful

The most successful real estate investors know what feels right and take action accordingly. In this conversation with Kimberly Gayle she shows us how to find that alignment through her work as branding specialist. It's all about knowing what's in alignment for you and showing up authentically. Here are theTop 10 Takeaways from this episode:

1. You can love the work and still feel deeply misaligned.

It’s possible to be excellent at something and still feel totally out of alignment. Don’t mistake competence for fulfillment.

2. Be your own hero. No one else is coming.

The most empowered decision you’ll ever make is choosing yourself—especially when no one else does.

3. The world doesn’t need another [insert job title]. It needs you, fully expressed.

You’re not just a title. You’re a purpose in motion. Don’t dim your impact to fit a role.

4. Misalignment shows up in the body. Pay attention.

Your body whispers before it screams. If you’re feeling off, it may be time to recalibrate.

5. We’re born whole. The journey is remembering.

You don’t need to become someone new. You need to remember who you were before the world told you who to be.

6. Living your values is the true measure of success.

Define success on your terms. Alignment is the new ambition.

7. Real change requires identity work.

Investing in real estate is just the start. The real investment is in who you become along the way.

8. Discomfort doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path.

If it feels hard, it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It might mean you’re finally growing.

9. Community is not optional—it’s survival.

Real estate can rebuild more than wealth. It can rebuild belonging.

10. You can create what you didn’t have.

Your pain can plant seeds for someone else’s healing. You don’t need a map. Just start.

Follow me on instagram @annreedandco
or ann.reed@exprealty.com

Here's where you can find Kimberly:

Instagram: @kimberlygayleconsutling
Website: http://www.kimberlygayle.com
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Transcript

Minisode Script S2 E19

 Welcome to a Few Good Doors, a podcast created to show you just how possible investing in real estate is for most Americans, and how it can be an incredibly powerful tool for creating wealth over time. Do you feel like it's too late or you don't have enough money? Listen up. If you can qualify for one mortgage, I can show you how to become a real estate investor once you embrace the how and the why. You can repeat the process. Acquiring four or more properties over the course of 10 to 15 years can and should have a massive wealth effect. I believe that everyone deserves to live up to their full potential, and having good people with money is what will change the world. I'm your host, Anne Reed, and my mission is to help you make the world a better place with a few good doors of your own.

  Welcome back to a Few Good Doors, the podcast that's all about creating wealth with intention, alignment, and a few good doors of your own. In this bite-sized episode, I'm pulling out the top 10 takeaways from my recent conversation with Kimberly Gale, branding coach, business owner, and someone who knows what it takes to walk away from a shiny, successful life that looks good on the outside, but doesn't feel right on the inside.

If you've ever felt like you're going through the motions, questioning whether you're truly in alignment or wondering if it's too late to pivot toward a life and business that actually reflect who you are, you're going to want to stay with me. These 10 insights are powerful, perspective shifting reminders that success doesn't come from the grind, it comes from alignment, from knowing your values, trusting your path, and building community as you go.

And if one of these hits you in the gut. In the best way, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to the full episode. Kimberly's story is real, raw and full of the kind of honesty that's rare and refreshing. So whether you're on a walk doing dishes or sitting with a journal, I invite you to take a deep breath and drop into these truths. This isn't just about building a business, it's about building a life that feels like yours.  

Top 10 takeaways for the empowered real estate investor.

You can love the work and still feel deeply misaligned. It's possible to be excellent at something and still feel totally out of alignment. Don't mistake competence for fulfillment.

So I was in my corporate career for about 12 years and I really, truly loved what I did. I did PR marketing, executive communication, executive communications, internal comm, like all of, you know, all of these different things.

And I loved, I loved it, I loved the work, but what I didn't love was the, the institution of corporate, the, the politicking. The, you have to be this certain way, and I questioned so many things all the time, and oftentimes I felt like  I didn't belong, right? I wanted to do things. I, I would see the problems.

I knew how to fix them, but yet you would have to go through 17 PowerPoint decks to get anything done. Mind you, you know, you're making so much money, right, right. Which is exactly, but yet you're like, and now I'm all, all I'm doing is putting PowerPoint decks together and   nothing's moving the needle, and we're not going anywhere.

And I'm not saying that that happened all the time, but I just bring that up because it's like, it's this monotony of like never really moving shit forward. And I just, I was like, I was like, God, this there. There's got to be a better way to spend our time. There's got to be ways to find solutions to these things and all of this.

And I, I guess I always kind of had an entrepreneurial spirit, right? Because I was like, wait a minute, I see this problem. I can fix it with this, and why don't we just go and try it and do it right? As long as it's like an affordable risk. And so I started to really look at. My life, and there's a whole story behind this, but I, I just, I started to really examine like, what, what, what are my values?

Be your own hero. No one else is coming. The most empowered decision you'll ever make is choosing yourself, especially when no one else does.

No one's coming to save you. You have to save yourself. You have to be your own hero regardless of what you've experienced. And I know people have  trauma and have dealt with lots of things, and so it's not negating any of that. But you know, you, you still, you still see people go through really hellish situations and come out deciding that they're going to make a great life for themselves. You know? So all of these things in li all of these things are choices. And I think a lot of people feel as if they don't have a choice because they haven't seen what's possible, right? I mean, I didn't really feel like I had a choice. I, you know, I just did what I had to do to get outta that situation.

The world doesn't need another insert job title. It needs you fully expressed. You're not just a title, you're a purpose in motion. Don't dim your impact to fit a role.

But the interesting thing is, what my moment was, I was taking a course. Because I kind of like identified like maybe the grind of being a realtor isn't, isn't the way I wanna live my life entirely. And so I was taking this course and one of the exer, one of the first exercises they did was, you've probably heard of that Ikigai, where they take like, what are you good at?

What do you love to do? What can you get paid for and what does the world need? Absolutely. And I was like, 1, 2, 3, all in alignment. And then I got to that, what the world needs. And I was like, does the world really need another like realtor? I don't think so. Like, you know, and the list on that was all, you know, it was like social justice.

I mean, it was so not. Anything having to do with a realtor.

Misalignment shows up in the body. Pay attention. Your body whispers before it screams. If you're feeling off, it may be time to recalibrate. 

Like if I look back at my situation, I was successful, but I was miserable. Like my body was starting to fall apart and you know, the body keeps the score, right? That whole thing, like the body keeps the score and most people don't listen to their bodies, right?

So all these pent up emotions. All of this sort of dis-ease with living the wrong path and all that kind of stuff comes up in the body. If we don't listen to that, we just keep, you know, coping and, you know, adding food or alcohol or sometimes over exercise or whatever the heck it is, people do, and we don't listen to all of those things, right.

But if we start to listen to those things, we start to listen to our body and we start to define what success is for ourselves. We can start to say, well, maybe I can achieve this on a different path. And yeah, it, all of these things are, are big, big things that people go through to make some of these big life changes.

We're born whole. The journey is remembering. You don't need to become someone new. You need to remember who you were before the world told you who to be 

I actually think we're born. We're born who we are, right? But the world just takes hold of us. And so, what we're doing, and I think we talked about purpose, is that we, we literally like this every single time we examine everything and reflect and make these leaps. It's like it's getting us closer to who we truly are and what we should be doing in this world and how we help people and how we show up.

And you know, and whether or not people are on an entrepreneurial path or whether they're an employee or an investor or whatever it may be. I mean, this is it. It applies in all. Yes. Yeah, it applies in all to everyone. So how am I measuring up? I mean, on the daily I feel I feel good. There's still many, many things that I wanna do.

There's more people I wanna help and all of that. But I live true to my values and when I'm not, I. Quickly realize it because I feel it in my body.

Living your values is the true measure of success. Define success on your terms. Alignment is the new ambition.

How do I wanna feel on the daily? And I wanna feel, I wanna feel peaceful. I wanna feel calm, I wanna feel free. I wanna feel in control of my own schedule. I wanna feel like I'm making a difference.

I want to feel like I help other people see their potential, see their value, all of that, right? So for me it's like. And that to me is success. Like I feel if I feel like that on the daily and I'm doing the things that I can help other people with in their life, then I am successful whether or not the money is there or not, right?

And so, but I think if you, if you, if you know your own measuring stick and you do all those things and you know how you wanna feel on the daily. You're, and you're providing value and you're taking care of people and all of that, the money comes, right. The, that, that's a result of doing all these things.

And so, you know, how am I, well, I mean, on the daily. I do live true to my value.

Real change requires identity work. Investing in real estate is just the start. The real investment is in who you become along the way. 

 I do work with people making these big leaps and it is really, really, these things are, these are identity shifts.

Yes. And I think, going back to my story, it's like really understanding who we are, like when we're young, you know, when I was young. You never focused on who you are. You just exist and you do the farm work, and you go to school and you live in this situation, and you just do the same thing over and over and over every single day on the hamster wheel, and you do it because that's what you have to do to survive.

A lot of the world and a lot of culture in our society says that's what you do. That's what you do. You just run on the hamster wheel and you just do the thing and you don't question, and you work your ass into the ground and then you retire. And hopefully you can still do something after that. Right?

And so I grew up with that and I'm thinking that is just, that's, that's not living. That's existing. Yeah. And so I found myself doing that in corporate and I'm kind of like, I, so my moments, and these are the, these are the hard things to share, but I do share these things. While my career was working, nothing else was working in my life.

Discomfort doesn't mean you're on the wrong path. If it feels hard, it doesn't mean you're failing. It might mean you're finally growing.

 Every, every people would say that. Especially when I started to make my change. People are like, you're crazy. I'm like, well, you know what? Maybe, but I'm miserable, so I have to make a change because I'm the only one who can do that in my life. But yeah, things were falling apart for me. And I could go into more of that, but it wasn't a good situation and I thought, if I don't change something.

I'm not gonna get the opportunity to live a long life. And, I started to have health problems and all of that. And so the only person who can change anything is oneself. So I had to get really real with myself, but my, like, I was in such distress that something had changed because I was living so, so out of alignment.

And here's the thing about your value system. When you, when you identify what your value system is, you are feeling fulfilled and free. You are, you are feeling positive and all of that when you don't know your value system. But it exists, right? We all have that. If we don't know what it is and we're violating our own values, we start to see anger, frustration, dis disease, we start to see all of those things.

Things start to shut down, but most people just, you know, cope with things and, and, and just keep on going because I make six figures and I have a family and a mortgage and everything else. And so I saw a lot of stuckness.

Community is not optional. It's survival. Real estate can rebuild more than wealth. It can rebuild belonging.

Community I love that so much. When we started looking into this nonprofit that, that we're doing That's a shared housing model. I was talking to different, you know, community members that, that come across people that need housing. And one of the things that stood out to me is so in line with what you just said, she said,  people don't it like homelessness, which we have a lot of in our communities.

They're not on the streets because they ran out of money, they ran out of people so. If you think about how that Yeah. Isn't that like so mind blowing and it's so true because you think about like right now, and this ties in exactly what you're saying. If you or I lost all the material stuff. Right now we have relationships and it's like, mom, can I go sleep on your house?

Or you know, on your couch or you have a friend or whatever. And I think when you look at people that way, which clearly you do, mm-hmm. Suddenly when you see people on the streets or you know, somebody comes into your tap house, you see them in such a different. Light because, and and it also goes back to what you were saying about saying earlier about ultimately we're all like just love.

And at our core we're love. So if you can look at the world and look at people, I look at, this might sound very out there for some people, but I truly look at other people as souls. So if somebody's hurting or being mean, or, I mean, think of the worst of the worst people. It's like. They're just hurting right now.

Like people don't, people that are in love and in community don't act like that. You know, they don't do those things. So I think that is such a huge, you know, and think about if everybody was just doing like a little bit to create more of that in their world.

You can create what you didn't have. Your pain can plant seeds for someone else's healing. You don't need a map. Just start. 

 So first of all, I went to get some help, within the school system, which luckily I was able to find one person, right? When we go back to, we need people, and I went to that one person and I was able to get some help in perspective. I mean, I was like 11 and 12 years old. I mean, I don't even know how, I don't even know, but I was like, I don't have any help and I'm in over my head.

I remember thinking that, and I need. I need somebody. So that guidance counselor did help me. And how it came to be, I created a, a group in middle school  for girls who were hurting because I remember thinking, and I think he helped me think through this, these, these girls have to be hurting. They have to be. 'Cause why would they keep doing this to me? 

Yep. 

And so I created a support group for young girls. Like me going through things and and I invited one of my bullies and she came, but one of the, one of the, there were tenants, right? So basically it was like, okay, you know, first of all we, we got to get out of a class a week, so it was cool. So we could still, yeah. Class. 

Always a draw.

That's a whole nother thing. I questioned all of it. I was like, this is boring. Okay, so we got outta class, but, but the biggest thing was if you are part of this group, nothing can lead this group. There is no judgment. Everyone's the same.

Everyone's on is everyone's equal. And we get to talk about all the things that are really, really painful at home and you know, all that stuff. And we would work together on all that stuff. And I invited one of my bullies and she came, I. And she, and, and you know, things subsided and it's like, and I carried that group throughout middle school and then I, once I got into high school, I organized it with the high school guidance counselor and I created the group in high school for girls.

And we would meet, and I had the help of adults of course, at that time. But it was honestly like life saving for me. And also for. Girls who would come because we needed community. We needed being with other people like us to move through some of these really difficult times. And a lot of it stemmed from home life and all of that.

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