Hello, wild one! I’m so happy to be back with you for Season 2.

This season, we’re back with 12 more episodes to inspire you, encourage you, and help you keep scaling your joy, your impact, and your income.

And when I say we, I do mean we! This podcast is the product of over 20 people’s efforts and insights — from my producer and his team, to my company’s marketing and admin teams, and the members of my podcast focus group who are people from all over the world who have generously committed to giving me feedback on every episode.

I could not do this alone, I wouldn’t want to do this alone, and I want you to remember that success often takes a village.

This season, I’ll be sharing more personal stories and lessons learned. You’ll get to know me and my journey better: my values, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, and my failures.

This season, we’ll also dive deeper into Kaneisha’s Coaching Business Cycle I taught you in Season 1 episode 2, so that you have clear action steps for growing a lifestyle business that allows you to work from anywhere, earn well, and do even more good in the world.

On the flip side, I’ll also be talking with you about why you might not want to start your own business, work for yourself, or be an entrepreneur. My friends and I will share the real deal about the downsides of entrepreneurship, and how we manage the sacrifices, compromises, and challenges we have faced in starting and growing our own businesses.

In addition to introducing you to more of my friends, I’ll introduce you to my mentors—both entrepreneurs and not—and we’ll be sharing about life, love, money, and problems.

So stay tuned for a great season, and if you have found any of the episodes educational, inspiring, enlightening, or simply entertaining, I’d really appreciate it if you left a short review and told a friend or two about the podcast.

Okay, it’s time for us to talk about Buyers Remorse.

So we’ve all heard of and we have all experienced buyer’s remorse: that sinking feeling of regret mixed with panic when you purchase something, usually something you can’t easily return, and feel that you’ve made a big mistake. I’m going to share my recent experience with buyer’s remorse – how I felt, what happened, what I learned, and how we can all deal with buyer’s remorse in the future.

Buyer’s remorse can get us over things both small and large. But it’s the big purchases, like homes, cars and professional services, that can incite the most panic, fear, and regret. Maybe you bought a new car and you’re experiencing buyer’s remorse as you read about other cars and see how much money you could have saved, or how much more horsepower, whatever horsepower is, you could have gotten with another vehicle. Or you signed up to work with my team at The Art of Applying, to apply to your dream schools and get our help with that, but now you’re feeling struck with fear and doubt and you are regretting taking the leap. You’re wondering if it will really work out and be worth it.

Maybe you like me, you adopted a dog during the pandemic. But now you have to go back to the office, and you feel overwhelmed with the responsibility of taking your little doggie to doggy daycare every day, walking her, taking her to the vet, training her, making sure that she’s, you know, progressing in all the milestones that puppies are supposed to progress in.

Whatever your flavor of buyer’s remorse is, this episode will provide a framework for moving through the feelings and moving forward with your life. So in preparation for this episode, I just re-listened to the opening of the last episode of Season One. So the opening of Episode 12, which was before I closed on my house, and I was really surprised to hear how excited and thrilled I was about the house, the neighborhood and my decision.

Why was I so surprised? Because after I officially closed on my house, I almost immediately started to experience extreme panic-inducing, anxiety-ridden, whole body, full spirit buyer’s remorse. It started after I signed my closing papers and the house was 100% for sure mine. And that buyer’s remorse I was feeling, it really got channeled into two main concerns.

The first was that I had paid too much for the house – more than it was worth and more than it took to win the house. And my second one was, the house was way too dark on the inside. So we’re going to call worry number one, the Overpayment Panic and worry number two, the Darkness Dilemma.

The kinds of thoughts I was having with the Overpayment Panic were the following – get ready for this dramatic reading of the inside of my zany, panicked brain. Okay, this is how I was thinking.

I overbid way too much on this house. I didn’t have the right information and the right guidance, and I paid way too much. I moved too fast without enough information. My realtor, she should have told me to decrease my bid! Why did she let me bid so much? I bet the second place buyer bid way less than I did. And I didn’t even need to bid as high as I did to win the house. Other houses in the neighborhood are going to sell for a lot less, and I will be the one underwater house in the neighborhood!

Ugh, I should have done more research on the percentage over asking houses in this specific neighborhood we’re going for. Why did I know more about how to use Redfin before I was buying a house? It’s going to be a decade before I see the appraised value of my house meet what I paid for it! Oh, I’m trapped in the house because the market is going to cool down, and then I won’t be able to sell it without losing money. I’ve made a terrible, expensive mistake!

That’s, that’s what the inside of my brain looks like sometimes y’all, sounds like. Whoo! That was kind of scary, right? So I was obsessively checking Zillow and Redfin to see what my house’s estimated value was. And I also was scouring the sold listings on Redfin to see how much the nearby houses were selling for.

I was obsessed and upset. And here’s another dramatic rendering of my thoughts. These are the kind of thoughts I was having with the Darkness Dilemma.

Oh, my goodness, how did I never notice how dark this house is? How did it have so many windows, but it’s still so dark inside? Why didn’t I pay more attention to natural light when I was viewing the house? Natural light is the most important thing to me in a house! Why did they paint the inside of this house such a deep gray color – or greige, whatever greige is. Who wants dark walls inside an already dark house? Why did they install such dark brown floors on the first floor? They had all the choices in the world and they decided to spend 1000’s of dollars installing super dark floors.

Why did the previous owners install these bulky shutters on the windows? They creak when they open! They take up so much space when you want to open them? They eat up all the natural light that actually is even able to come in! And these trees in the backyard. Why would you block all of your sun by letting your trees grow so tall? And even if I get my trees trimmed, the back neighbor’s trees will eat my sunlight. I wonder if I can write them a nice letter and ask them to trim their trees… I wonder if I can bribe them and offer them money for me to pay to trim their trees?! Oh, they’re never going to agree to that. They’re gonna think I’m crazy. Am I crazy? I’m resigned to living in a dark cave I overpaid for in a red hot real estate market, I’m a fool. End scene.

So as you can see, I was in a T-I-Z-Z-Y tizzy about this house. My buyer’s remorse lasted for about two frantic, excruciating anxiety filled weeks. Thankfully, my buyer’s remorse did end. It at first slowly faded, and then lifted completely like an ominous rain cloud being blown away by the wind.

So what happened? Well, I went through my process of accepting my decision. I don’t yet have a cool name for it, but I’m sure by the time this episode comes out, I’ll have come up with some sort of pithy title. For now, we’ll just call it The Seven Steps of moving through buyer’s remorse.

Step one, I felt my feelings. I didn’t bury my feelings or try to silver-line them. I went into, as you just heard, full feelings mode. I felt grief, panic, regret, shame, fear, anger, confusion, hope, all the feelings. I didn’t tell myself, Well, Kaneisha, you bought the house. Let’s just find the bright side right now.

Instead, I let all the feelings out. Now, notice, I’m just feeling my feelings. I’m not taking a bunch of action. I haven’t taken any actions. I’m just feeling my feelings.

Step two. I opened myself to feedback. I remember that during one of my buyer’s remorse venting sessions, Tyler said:

Tyler: Kaneisha, you’ve got to trust yourself. You bought a beautiful, wonderful house. No, the house isn’t perfect, but we can figure out how to improve the things you are concerned about. And yes, you maybe paid more than you absolutely had to. But we’ll never know. Because we don’t know how much the second place bidder bid. Past you bought this house for a reason. You didn’t make a terrible mistake. You wanted this. I freaked out big time when I bought my house too. This is normal! I love you.

Kaneisha: I love you! And so rather than isolating and shame and regret, I talked about my feelings with Tyler, and other trusted confidants.

One person I actually reached out to is my friend, Laura’s dad, Pat. Pat is an experienced architect and he is a very sweet, comforting dad. And he had already been helping me throughout my home buying process.

He would help me understand the challenges of dealing with contractors. He also would look over my inspection report, because remember, I had the first house and this is my second house I went under contract on. And so he would read through the inspection report and help me understand what the things in the inspection report meant.

And he was just very helpful in addressing my concerns – what I could do, what I couldn’t do, what would be very expensive, less expensive to address my concerns about the natural light. And so step two is that I opened myself to feedback. I gathered information.

Step three, I considered my options. If I really had bought the wrong house, or bought a house I shouldn’t have bought, what could I do now? Well, I could sell the house. But no, I didn’t want to do that. I wouldn’t recoup my investment selling the house this quickly. So that was a no-go.

Another option is I could rent out the house after a year of living in it per the terms of my mortgage. So if you may remember, from my first house I went under contract on, when you get a residential mortgage, as far as my understanding is you need to live in the house. You can’t go get a residential mortgage and then immediately rent it out. And so I could rent out the house, but I would still have to live here for a year first.

And that idea didn’t make me feel better either. I’d still have to find another place to live. I’d either end up as a renter or be in the position of having to save up for another downpayment and buy a second house. Y’all know I’m about that bougie life and I would love to have two, three houses, but not immediately, right? So I didn’t want to sell the house, nor did I want to rent it out.

My third option was that I can pause, breathe and work to solve the problems I was concerned about. And so that leads me to step four.

Step four, I started problem solving and experimenting. And this is where Tyler was really a goddess-send, he was confident that we could solve my concerns about the natural light in the house, with a few small changes, and eventually, some big ones.

Big changes were things like getting the interior of the house repainted, getting new flooring installed upstairs to replace the old dingy carpet. But big things would have to wait at least a little bit, because contractors were extremely in demand, really hard to nail down (Pun intended!) for consultations and contracts.

So we decided to start with small things. Tyler hypothesized that a fair amount of natural light was actually being obstructed by the dark screens on the windows. I was doubtful, but hopeful. So one evening, I helped him remove all the screens from the first floor of the house. And then we went to bed.

The next morning, I was blown away! With the screens removed, the first floor of the house was so much brighter.

Then, Tyler started removing the fancy but bulky shutters that each of the windows had on them. And so while he worked on that, I removed the second storey screens carefully and excitedly. And I was delighted with the result.

It turns out my house had plenty of natural light, so much so that the original owners of the house had to put on dark heavy screens. And then the next owners of the house added on heavy window shutters to keep out all of the sun. Because there was so much sunlight coming into the house!

So I actually ended up with almost an opposite issue, is that rather than a dark cave, I lived in a sun drenched hotbox! So that then meant that I then needed to spend more money to get the air conditioner system working better.

And I also did eventually find and choose a company to do some of those bigger things. To retexture the bedrooms upstairs, they had a lot of damage to the walls, a lot of different weird patches that had happened but hadn’t been retextured.

So we got the upstairs, bedrooms retextured, we got all four bedrooms repainted. And we also got a company to install beautiful light colored flooring upstairs – which actually Laura’s dad, Pat helped me pick out.

And all of that made a huge difference to the inside look and feel of the house. So the Darkness Dilemma that I had, that was feeding my buyer’s remorse, that was one that to my great surprise and delight was fully resolved.

Okay, and that then brings us to step five. Step five, I accepted the very real trade offs I’d made when I bought this house.

While my darkness dilemma was resolved the overpayment panic remained, I did – and still do – think that I overpaid for my house. I think I paid more than I needed to win the house, even in this hyper competitive market here in Austin, and that I paid more than I could easily sell it for if for some reason I wanted to or needed to sell it a few months from now.

Now, I completely understand that accidentally overpaying for a house is such a rich, privileged-person problem. I can like feel, and like hear, some people’s eyes rolling into the back of their head, I get it. However, I want you to plug into the larger idea.

The idea that overpaying for something that has both market value and emotional value is a challenge that any of us could run into. An example might be someone who earns a graduate degree in a creative field that they love, but that doesn’t pay highly and they’re feeling like oh my goodness, I overpaid for that MFA in Creative Writing, or I overpaid for that Master’s degree in biology.

And so rather than trying to deny that my overpayment panic had any merit, you know, I didn’t try and completely discredit and push down any credibility of my overpayment panic. Instead, I acknowledge, I acknowledged, and I acknowledge now that I likely overpaid for the house.

And I acknowledge that it is a trade-off. The trade-off of buying a house in a fast moving super hot real estate market, with mid-to-low to no transparency, is that you might accidentally overpay, pay more than you needed to, pay more than the appraised value of the house, pay more than you could easily sell it for immediately.

But the trade-off is that I did get the house! I own a house, which is what I wanted. I have somewhere beautiful to live. And in my case I can easily afford the mortgage even with the so-called overpaying situation.

Other trade-offs I made in buying this house that I didn’t feel so panicked about, but they’re still trade-offs, is that I no longer have access to the beautiful pool and gym that I had at my apartment that was included in my rent. I’m further away from the action of the city than when I was when I lived in my apartment.

I’m also responsible for knowing what home maintenance needs to be done, finding someone to do it and then paying for that service.. Or doing it myself, which really just means hiring someone because I’m not about that learning how to install the toilet by watching YouTube life.

So there are real trade-offs. And step five of the process is I accepted the very real trade-offs I’d made.

Step six, reflect on lessons learned. After accepting the trade-offs I made to buy my house, I also took time to reflect on the lessons I learned and I still am learning lessons.

One big one for me is that even if I’m ready and able to over bid on a house, there is such a thing as over-over bidding on a house. And that, this overpayment problem, it can actually happen in other competitive scenarios where I actually have more cash available to me to use in a negotiation than I need to use to win.

That means that if cash isn’t my constraint, other variables and information need to factor into my bid besides just, Oh, how much money do I have? Put it all towards winning the negotiation.

So take time to reflect on the lessons learned. This has not been all for nothing. It’s not a big unrecoverable mistake. There are lessons to be gained, lessons that could save you a lot more money in the future or help you make much better decisions in the future.

And the last step, my favorite step, is step seven: turn buyer’s remorse into decider’s delight. So I just made up that phrase, but I wanted something punchy to help you remember!

So decider’s delight is when you’ve made a decision to do or buy something, and then you find reasons after you have already made the decision to help support your brain in believing it was the right decision.

It’s the opposite of beating yourself up for a perceived mistake. It’s bolstering yourself and your decision after the decision has already been made. Ways that I have cultivated decider’s delight when it comes to my house, is buying myself lots of big plants to fill my house with! Tall, luscious plants that would have crowded me out in my former apartment.

I also cook all the time in my kitchen, which is so much more enjoyable to cook in because it has better ventilation. I like to cook on high heat. And I also have gas versus electric, which makes me very happy.

In my apartment I used to set off the fire alarm all the time, and I definitely still have fire safety in my house, fire alarms, all the things you should have, but I just don’t set it off as much because there’s just much better ventilation.

Also Tyler and I host friends for dinner over fairly frequently. We host people a lot. We have a guest bedroom, we’re waiting to have our first overnight guests really excited about that.

I lounge in the backyard and journal while Zadie chases squirrels. Tyler and I ride our bikes around the neighborhood, and this neighborhood is so much more enjoyable, and scenic, and easy to ride in than my former hilly high traffic neighborhood. And I just feel so happy every time I make a mortgage payment, and I see my big mortgage balance go down just a little bit, and I get to see how the house is slowly but surely becoming a little bit less the banks and a little bit more all mine.

So after doing all of that, I do still have a few nagging feelings of what could have been. And I still feel tempted to check Redfin for recently sold homes in my area to see what they sold for to be like, Oh, that house is just like mine – did it sell for around what I paid for? Did it sell for more than I paid for? A lot less?

You know, looking for evidence to make it be that I made the right decision. And it’s still a guilty pleasure for me to check Zillow and see how my zestimate has gone up. And to just watch it go higher and higher and hope that this zestimate actually means something and it’s not just Zillow, tricking me into feeling good about the value of my house.

But all in all, I am immensely happy and grateful that I made the decision, trusted myself, maybe made some mistakes along the way, but that I bought my house. Dilemmas, panics, and all.

And my hope for you is that the next time you experience buyer’s remorse, you revisit this episode or come read the show notes at ScaleYourJoy.com/13 and get the tools and encouragement you need to turn your buyer’s remorse into deciders delight.

Alright, it’s time for our Joy Work, delightful dudes and dudettes! I want you to scribble, scheme, and dream on the following question: Am I currently experiencing buyer’s remorse for a recent purchase? Or am I still experiencing buyer’s remorse for a long ago purchase? If so, what would working through the seven steps of processing buyer’s remorse look like for me at each step?

All right, goalfriends. This wraps up today’s episode. I hope that this episode provides you with some comfort, confidence, and peace of mind. Until next week!