Why Who You Become Decides What You Achieve - with Mark Brower

We break down how setbacks, identity, and small habits create momentum you can trust. From finish-line heartbreak to aid-station grit, we show how outcome, system, and identity align to build a profitable, resilient property management business.

• setbacks as catalysts for growth not verdicts
• one foot in front of the other as core operating principle
• training reps and unseen work shaping character
• environment design beating willpower for habits
• pattern interrupts to rewire autopilot behaviors
• outcome to system to identity as the habit stack
• proximity to high performers normalizing bigger goals
• naming tradeoffs to create time for what matters

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Transcript

Welcome And Setting The Theme

Tony Cline 0:00

Welcome to the Property Management Success Podcast, where we interview leaders in the industry to uncover the secrets to profitability, efficiency, and achieving true freedom, whether it's your time, money, or lifestyle. I'm your host, Tony Klein, and I'm here to help you build a wildly successful property management business. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of the Property Management Success Podcast with the property management aid station, Mark Brouwer. Good afternoon, sir.

Mark Brower 0:29

Good afternoon, Mr. Tony Klein.

Tony Cline 0:31

What? I mean, you're already, I mean, look how sharp you look already. And then you throw up the guns pose here.

Mark Brower 0:38

I'm I I went to the gym three times in the last week. I'm feel I'm feeling I'm feeling feeling dangerous.

Tony Cline 0:46

I can see I can I can see the gym work on your body. I can see after three times, right? I mean, that's what we think as far as uh putting in the work. We did it three times. Obviously, you can see the results, right? Well, you know what?

Mark Brower 1:00

The the best results come from the best habits. And that's the best. I mean, the best results come from the best habits. You literally are, you as a person are literally your habits. Let's talk about it.

Setbacks, Doubt, And Resilience

Tony Cline 1:17

Let's talk about that. Can I can I take us on a quick detour first?

Mark Brower 1:22

Of course, of course.

Tony Cline 1:23

Okay. I want to share with you something that has been on my mind and on my heart the last, I don't know, two, three weeks, something like that. Bo Nicks was the quarterback for the Denver Broncos, and we were two plays away from advancing to the next round, the final round of the playoffs. Whoever won that game would go to the Super Bowl. He was two plays away and he broke his ankle on a silly play. It really wasn't a really physical play, but he worked all of his life for this goal of playing in the Super Bowl. He gets super close and something takes him out of the game. And I was having a moment there, I've shared with you some of the stuff I've got going on with my heart and some of the arrhythmia and the AFib and all of that that we're working on. And I was kind of in this slump. I was kind of in this poor poor me, why me. And when that happened, it snapped my brain out of it that when you perform at a high level, stuff happens. Like it just happens. He had been working, he'd been the quarterback now for the Broncos for a couple years. A lot of people around the league doubting his ability to perform. He takes us to where we're we're winning. I mean, we had a very winning season. Yes, some people said that we only won by three points or or less, a one-score game every game, but yet we kept stacking up these wins. So people kept coming at him as well, he's never really been challenged yet. He's never really faced any. So they kept criticizing him every step of the journey, and he just kept winning and winning. And he was so close to what he wanted to achieve. And then right before you get, he had this false summit where he gets close to achieving what he wants to achieve, the lifelong goal of winning the Super Bowl, and he's taken out of the game. And in at that moment, it it was bad for him, but it was great for me because it just helped me realize it snapped me out. When you're gonna try to do things, when you're gonna try to work hard towards something, you're gonna have doubters, you're gonna have haters, you're gonna have self-doubt. But if you just keep trying and trying, you're eventually gonna see some success. But even with that, life happens. Like to be the very best at something or to to achieve at a really high level, you have to expect that failure is a part of it, that success is built on the foundation of failure. Absolutely. The people who quit fail, the people who continue to get back up will eventually succeed.

The Victory Of One More Step

Mark Brower 4:13

Um, well, Tony, this is um Yeah. I mean, last episode we recorded, I I said success is a persistence problem, and you corrected me, and you said, Yeah, well, you need to persist and actually learn also. I some I'm summarizing your words. Um, what you just shared with me reminds me of a moment in my first ever 50 mile trail race. I remember I got to a point where with like seven miles left, six miles left, maybe, I had to climb up this mountain, go around this mountain, and I had just come through this long section that was all uphill, really hot day that day in Arizona, unexpectedly warm for unseasonab for the day that we were running, and I was gassed. I was a hundred percent spent. You know, I remember I was in this aid station, and I just remember like I have, I, I, I have felt this way before because I had already done this, I had already gotten to that place once before where I thought I couldn't possibly continue. And I know this deeply resonates with you, and we're here in the property management aid station, so we can swap stories like this. And I remember thinking to myself, this is impossible. I can't go on. And then and then something clicked in my brain, and it said, and and it would, you know, like if if I never stop putting one foot in front of the other, like I just thought that thing one foot in front of the other. It does not matter how slow I go, one foot in front of the other. I staggered out of that aid station, and I I tell you, I I don't even think my feet were clearing the length of the other foot as they were moving forward as I got out of that aid station. Um, but that moment was the victory. That that moment was the glory. That moment was the deepest of all successes. That was it. It wasn't the finish line an hour and a half later. It wasn't the other races, it wasn't anything else. It was that moment that changed everything.

Tony Cline 6:27

What do you think it was about that moment? I have my own ideas and I'll give you my my thoughts about it. But what do you think your the reason that that defined the victory?

Mark Brower 6:36

It was the moment of transcendence over doubt. It was the moment that I decided that what felt like was impossible was possible. It was the moment when forever the perimeter of what was possible expanded in my mind. That I dared to act in the face of insurmountable uh fatigue and odds and whatever. It was victory against self. It was man versus man. Remember the conflict, the types of conflict in literature that we studied when we were in elementary school. This was elementary school.

Tony Cline 7:15

I didn't I didn't study that at all. I was I was probably looking at the girls, man.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I don't know. It was man versus himself.

Tony Cline 7:23

All right. It was man versus himself. Yeah. Um I would also add that it at that moment you made the commitment to take one more step. And you know, one of the things that that I say, which is very similar to you, is as we're trying to achieve something, one of our one of our common sayings on our running team is if I can take one more step, I will take one more step and I will figure it out from there. And then I will reevaluate. If I can take one more step, I'll take one more step. And it's they also say in the in the running community, it's that relentless forward progress. And that's all it means. Forward progress. If if you get knocked down or you stumble or you fall back, you stand up and you make some forward progress. It doesn't say how fast or how far. It's just if you don't stop making that forward progress, you'll eventually get to your goals.

Mark Brower 8:20

The the difference between non-movement and movement isn't the rate of the movement. It's everything. It's the it's zero to one. It's the the the the there's a massive difference between moving very slowly and not moving at all. Massive. It's much bigger than the rate. Much bigger. Yep.

Tony Cline 8:47

Okay. A second thing that ties to this, which is had just hit the headlines in the news, and I don't I don't know if you got a chance to watch it, or I don't I don't say it's a chance to watch it, but you posted about this. You're gonna talk about down the hills. Yeah, you're gonna talk about the downhill scare. Lindsay Vaughn. I love that so much that she at 41 years old still said, I am able to win Olympic gold, and I'm going for it. And she went out there, and while she's out there, she tears her ACL and she says, I'm not done yet. I'm gonna get that figured out, and I'm gonna line up at the line and I'm gonna go do it again. And unfortunately, she made a bad decision, cut a line a little too tight on going around a flag, and she hooked her arm, and it was about five inches too tight, and her arm hooked, massive wipe out. I think she was going like 70 miles an hour, and uh and she wiped out. And her post about it, it just still gives me chills because it makes me want to cry. It's the people that are like, I'm I believe in myself. I may need other people on my team to help me get there. I'm not gonna do this all on my own, but I believe in what I'm capable of, and I'm gonna go out and leave it all on the line. And it's people look at whoever did get gold, and I I unfortunately I don't know who it was, but uh people look at who do succeed and they look at those are the champions, but in my eyes, it's the ones that leave it all out there and go for it and take the chance. They're champions too.

Mark Brower 10:32

Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely incredible. To me, what was so inspiring about that, and I'm like tearing up just thinking about it, is it wasn't what she brought to the sport, it's what the sport did to her. And it molded a character that enabled her, after all of that effort, and at such a high stakes moment, to come out the other side with gratitude and positivity, despite um, you know, objective failure. You know, um, she she had a tremendously beautiful and strong articulation about what that opportunity meant to her, regardless of the outcome. She and that and that is the heart of a champion. The heart of a champion celebrates and knows that the moment of execution on stage is a celebration of everything already earned. And the earning is the real victory, and she had already achieved that. It was beautiful.

The Hidden Reps Behind Success

Tony Cline 11:43

I love that. What what you talk about is I I think her uh ski run in that sport, I think is like a minute and 20 seconds or something like that. That's the point where she's on stage. But people don't see all the reps she put in in practice, and it's not what you're able to do in practice, it's who you become by learning how to put in the reps, get up when you're tired, you know, go go do things that you don't want to, study and improve. You know, for me, it's doing the stupid core workouts when I'm supposed to my coach has got me like, you know, we're training for a race. I don't like doing the strength training. Uh I still can't do a handful of pull-ups. It's just like, you know, but doing those things that you have to do, it's the stuff that you do behind the scenes that nobody sees. That's what forms who you are. And I think she was able to walk away from her, the the result of that race, not because of what she did, but because of who she became.

Mark Brower 12:46

Yeah. Um, this is gonna sound random. A couple days ago, um, near the latch of my front door, on the inside of the front door of the apartment I'm living at right now, I taped a multivitamin.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

I saw that post. And sorry, you're trying to be all serious, but I thought I'm hanging on being serious. This is goofy. I saw it hanging on your door, and I was like, what is this? Is he is this like drugs by by mail, or what is this?

Mark Brower 13:18

And my caption was how likely do you think it is I take this tomorrow? Guess what? I took that thing, I freaking took that pill. What about the next day? No, no. Well, and so this is a segue. All right. We are, we actually, we literally are our habits. We literally are our habits. The book Atomic Habits, which I'm covering in this month's Crane Book Club. See you there if you're in Crane. Talks about habits and it talks about uh so many beautiful concepts about habits. You know, ABC a few years ago, many years ago, had this like certain lineup of shows every Thursday night. And they marketed around this lineup of shows and they said, get your wine and your popcorn and get ready for whatever, whatever it was. Because they knew that if people physically altered their body and produced a sensation of joy while consuming their content, it would start this neurofeedback loop of positive energy. And eventually their body would remind them and get excited on Thursday that something was coming up. Hey, you know what?

Tony Cline 14:44

Our podcast comes out on a Thursday.

Mark Brower 14:48

Get your liquid death.

Tony Cline 14:50

Yeah, we need to tie a snack into this deal.

We Are Our Habits

Mark Brower 14:52

And your MMs and listen to the property manager aid station podcast. So the idea is we are chemical creatures. We are, we we can use some of the same science that the all the extremely intelligent people who have coded addictive hooks into social media platforms, uh, into advertising, into television programming, we can use some of these same uh principles to intentionally design our own lives. And isn't that the whole purpose? And isn't that great? So, one of the principles, and the reason I taped that vitamin up against the uh on the door is because they said when you want to create a new habit, one of the things that makes it more likely that you will do that thing is by making it visually apparent. Like when you see it. So I remember buying the multivitamin bottle in the store. I'm like, yeah, I should get, I should be more healthy. I should be more healthy. I'm 48 years old. Um, I should be more healthy. So I'm like, okay, let's get a multivitamin. And I knew past Mark, put the bottle somewhere out of sight, never happened. So I'm reading this book. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna take six of these, I'm gonna put them on top of this little jar that I have on my counter with a wood top that holds the sugar. I'm gonna put them on top of that thing so that I will see them every day, and that's more likely I'll take it. Three days go by, my daughter's like, why are these pills on this jar? They were still still on the jar at the time. Like thinking, oh, this isn't working. So then I taped it to the front door. That worked. So the point is if we if we want to do something, if we want Stephen Cubby said that 80%, and he was correct, I looked this up, 80% of the fuel used in a rocket on a round trip flight to the moon and back, 80% of the fuel is used in the first eight and a half minutes. What does that mean and why is that significant? Because overcoming the inertia of doing nothing to doing something to getting out into orbit with a habit requires a huge push. But then once we have that momentum, everything shifts. We have what is it? The flywheel has that has this momentum going, right? And it's just easier to keep it going. And the compounding positive impact of seemingly small, insignificant habits to absolutely revolutionize, transform, propel our lives forward in massive ways is real.

Tony Cline 19:30

I think the the other thing to look at when you're talking about habits is which habits are we gonna create? What are we adding? But what uh what I've learned is you can't add things to your life without taking something away. And and so what are you willing to sacrifice? So if you said, I'm gonna work out for an hour a day, well you only have 24 hours. So what are you not going to do? What are you willing to sacrifice in its place? What are you trading out? So are you trading out an hour of family time? Trading out an hour of work? Are you trading out an hour of TV? But you've got to be willing to also identify that. Otherwise, the pressure pushing back will be too hard and you won't ever say, well, this is the hour I have available to do that.

Mark Brower 20:24

Beautiful. Big rocks, first things first.

Pattern Interrupts That Stick

Tony Cline 20:27

First things first. So let's talk about one of the things that I know from experience is you have to create a pattern interrupt. You have to, because we are creatures of habit. I can, I'm not a uh Mark GPT where I can just remember like all the quotes I've read from which particular book on which page. But uh I do remember from a book where they're talking about if you want to change a habit, you you change the environment. You have to create a pattern interrupt. A certain amount of your actions every day is just done out of habit. And very little of what we do on a day-to-day basis are we consciously choosing to do. It's just that we've already done it so many times this way that we're acting out of habit. And so to change that habit, we've got to create a pattern interrupt. So if I were to ask you, so Mark, let me let me ask, are you a sock, sock, shoe, shoe guy or a sock, shoe, sock, shoe guy?

Mark Brower 21:30

Sock, sock, shoe, shoe.

Tony Cline 21:35

Sock, sock, shoe, shoe? Okay, number one, we're I'll I'll come back to my point, but that makes no sense. You're you're moving this foot up, putting a sock on, putting the foot down, putting the other foot up, putting the sock, put that foot down. I know you're going back to the other foot and putting that shoe on. And so, number one, it's a lot of wasted effort. Number two, it just doesn't make any sense. What if your house caught on fire and you had to run outside, you'd be running out in your socks?

Mark Brower 22:02

Tony, you might have just changed my life.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

I think I'm I think I'm going about about to.

Tony Cline 22:06

But okay, so let's let's say that I bet you a thousand bucks that you couldn't change to be the other. You couldn't change to be a a sock shoe, sock shoe guy. And if if you did it right, if you followed that pattern and changed your habit for 30 days in a row, I'd pay you a thousand bucks.

Mark Brower 22:28

100%. I'm there. I'll do it.

Tony Cline 22:30

It'd be it'd be worth it.

Mark Brower 22:31

I'll find the whole thing, I'll live stream it every time.

Tony Cline 22:34

If you screw up one time, you don't get it. What would you do to make sure that you change that habit?

Mark Brower 22:43

Oh, I've got it. I've got it. The night before I decide which socks and shoes to wear, and then I put the sock in the shoe, and only one shoe goes by the side of my bed and the other one's on the top shelf of my closet. Okay. How many pairs of socks do you have? I don't know. Over 10. But I bet you don't have 30. I don't have 30.

Tony Cline 23:11

So at some point you're gonna wind up having to do laundry and forget that that's what you decided. So here's what I would do. I would back it up. What's the furthest we can go back to change the pattern?

Mark Brower 23:20

So at first I thought, well, that's birth is the furthest we could go back.

Tony Cline 23:24

Whose birth? I mean, we're gonna go way back. No. Uh so when when somebody first uh proposed this to me, I said, Well, that's easy. I would just turn my socks inside out.

Mark Brower 23:37

Because it pays you a thousand dollars to do this.

Tony Cline 23:40

Yeah, do you wanna pay me? I'll do it again. And you pay me a thousand bucks, I'll do it again.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

I need that person's phone number.

Tony Cline 23:46

So what I said was, I need to remember not to just go into habit and just put my shoes on and do sock shoe sock shoe. I need to go in and remember I'm going to do this differently. So I thought, well, the way I would do that is I would turn my socks inside out. Uh and then I would remember, oh, my socks are inside out. I can't go right into my habit, my subconscious, just putting them on to turn it inside out. When I turned it inside out, I'd remember, well, it's inside out because I have to put them on in a certain order. There you go.

Mark Brower 24:17

This is why people tie pieces of strings around their finger. Okay. So you disrupt the pattern.

Outcome, System, Identity

Tony Cline 24:24

Okay. But then what I realized was I have to remember to turn my socks inside out every day before I go to bed or whatever. So I thought, well, actually, the way I change this habit is above my washing machine, when I'm or my dryer, when I'm taking my socks out, I turn them inside out then. That way they're already, I batched it. So where can we batch things to create those habits? And so every time I take my socks out of the dryer for the next 30 days, I would turn them inside out so that they were already set so that I'm removing the friction of having to remember to do it. So I'm streamlining and making things as easy as possible to take the right action.

Mark Brower 25:09

I like this. I like this. Okay. Can we go deeper on habits? I want to go deeper. Let's do it. Okay, there were three layers in the book, Atomic Habits. Top layer, layer one of habits is um objective. So we want to achieve an object objective. We want to go run. We want to take the vitamin. We want to read a book on a regular basis. That's the objective. It's easy to write down this is the habit I want to achieve. These are the sorry, not objective, outcome. This is the outcome. Oh, for outcome. This is the outcome I want in my life. Recurring outcome, habit, right? That's layer one. Layer two system. Do I have a system that will produce the outcome? You're talking about this SOC system that you came up with. It makes it way more likely that you will do the the behavior, the habit, if you have a system that supports the outcome, the objective. The deepest layer is identity. Here's an example. If your goal is to run five days a week, or just you know, run. I want to run. Okay, well, that's a that's a really vague objective, not very good. I want to run every day for 30 minutes. Ooh, uh maybe too much. Okay, five, five days a week, I want to run for 30 minutes. Okay, interesting. Now that we've cleared the objective, what's the system? Well, the system is I know when I'm gonna run, I know where I'm gonna run, and I have my shoes and socks and outfit by the door waiting for me, you know, to go on that run. That's part of your system. Or part of your system is I hired a coach that gives me runs, prescribes them to me. And that's gonna create some kind of social pressure that if I don't do this and I'm paying for it, I'm gonna feel stupid. You know, whatever your system is, right? But but let's go to identity. What is the identity of someone that creates that system without fail, that does that outcome without fail? How do they see themselves?

Tony Cline 27:28

I can tell you you don't say that I run, you say I'm a runner.

Mark Brower 27:37

That's it. Yep. Now you have the identity that makes not having a system of running intolerable. You have an identity that makes not running intolerable. You have attached identity to this. I think this is a beautiful concept. If we want Go ahead.

Tony Cline 28:11

Once we've latched onto an identity, it's so easy for us to justify our behavior, good or bad, because subconsciously our mind is creating things, actions, beliefs, viewpoints that support that identity that we've now accepted.

Surroundings That Redefine Possible

Mark Brower 28:31

There is such a deep, deep um lever. There is deep, deep leverage toward action when something becomes attached to identity. I once heard an actual CIA field agent describe the process of turning a spy, a foreign asset. And it was extremely intentional, extremely deliberate. And what they would do is they would they would use their charisma to get so close with this person that they would find out what the core of that person's identity was. Perhaps it was being a good father, perhaps it was, you know, whatever they attached their identity most firmly to. And then once they identified that, they would use that deepest form of identity to something and get closer and closer and closer to them. And then, and then one day, in a very abrupt, in a very abrupt, aggressive manner, slam their agenda down against that identity with some statement that was really harsh, really critical, really disruptive. And it would shake them and cause them. And I'm I'm not doing this, anybody that knows this better than I am, drop, drop a comment in the comments. But what it would do is it would rock their world, in so much as they would actually put their own lives at risk and their families' lives at risk, to then um do something that that was consistent with our identity, even though at great personal risk and peril. So what I the point is, whatever we attach, firmly attach our identity to um starts happening, period. And this is this is why I'm gonna tie this idea to one other idea real quick. This is why when you intentionally surround yourself with the people you want to become, and you put yourself in the rooms and in the conversations with those people on a regular basis, and it starts shifting your self-perception, your identity starts changing all the systems and all the behaviors flow naturally because you start seeing yourself differently. This is such a very deep, leveraged, leveraged activity. This is like the the core of the highest leverage transformational. Like you want to do the most good you possibly can do in your business. Change your identity by putting yourself around the right people, and everything will flow from there.

Tony Cline 31:18

I want to drive that point home. Uh I've shared this before. I shared it from the NARPAM national stage when I did a presentation. It was called From Zero to 240, Achieving the Impossible. And it was sort of my journey through running, but I tied in the keys to success and brought it back to business. And one of those points that I made was I had never run 50 miles before. And I was wanting to figure out how to do that. I didn't even know that 50 mile races existed. But once I figured that out, I'm like, I I want to try to do that. And the the number one key for me, I think the reason that I was successful my my first couple of times out that I did that, where I ran 50 miles, was I realized if I want to learn to run 50 miles, I need to start hanging around people who run 100 miles because it normalizes it. And their goals and what they were achieving was so much bigger than what my vision was that their vision and their presence and their input pulled me through the 50 miler to where I only did that twice before I said, my vision is now bigger than this, and I'm now going on to the 100 and then the 200 and the whatever. But it was because I put myself around the right people that were willing to support me, believe in me, but even just being in their presence helped me change my identity of who I was and helped me to believe that I was possible of more.

Close, Encouragement, And CTA

Mark Brower 32:54

100%. Yeah. Habits are about becoming. Habits are about identity and who we believe we are, if it's firmly deeply rooted within us, we will move heaven and earth to do the behaviors and to create the systems that support that self-concept, that that identity. Moving ourselves into relationships and out of relationships that level up our sense of self. Um, I was with a was I was with a friend last night and they were talking about like I will, and they said something like, I will never make that kind of money. They said they well actually actually they said, Mark, you're not gonna agree with this, and you're you're you're not gonna like what I'm about to say, but I will never make that kind of money. And I said, you know what, you're you're right. You're a hundred percent correct. Wow and they're like surprised. And I said, Because you just decided you never would. Like it is mind-blowing how how much good people can do in the world if they free their minds to believe it's possible and to dare to become the person that can achieve it. And that happens only when we surround ourselves with other people that normalize that that level of living.

Tony Cline 34:18

Absolutely. Amen.

Mark Brower 34:21

All right, all right, get out there.

Tony Cline 34:23

Let's wrap it up. Uh we got some great stuff for you in the next one, in the next property management aid station. But for now, come on, come on, let's keep moving.

Mark Brower 34:33

Let's keep moving. You got this, man. What like one foot in front of the other? I mean, 2026. We're man, we're a month and a half into this thing. Let's all right. Let's go. You're doing great. You're halfway through first quarter. The next aid station is just six miles up there. You've got hydration, you've got little pep talk here. So get out there. Uh, enjoy the fullness of the joy of every present moment. Don't get wrapped up in the future in the past. Every footfall that lands squarely beneath you, let it let it ripple uh joy throughout your being.

Tony Cline 35:10

Okay, and one more thing. We need an official snack. We have talking about aid stations, we're talking about giving people food. We're talking about having people change their their physical being.

Mark Brower 35:23

Should it be salty potato chips? I mean, you gotta get it's gotta have salt in it.

Tony Cline 35:27

You know, I just bought these, these are you know, I have to do gluten-free. I just bought some gluten-free pickle-flavored pretzels.

Mark Brower 35:36

Oh my gosh, that's terrible.

Tony Cline 35:38

So for those of you who don't run crazy distances, pickle juice is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

We'll save that for another time. It's the thing for sure.

Tony Cline 35:49

It is the stuff of sorcery.

SPEAKER_01 35:52

Yep.

Mark Brower 35:52

All right, all right, get out of here. We'll see ya.

Tony Cline 35:58

Thanks for tuning in to the Property Management Success Podcast. We'll be back with another value packed episode to help you level up your property management game. If you've got something valuable out of today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss out on future insights and strategies and tactics. Until next time, here's the your success.