Elise Holtzman is the CEO of The Lawyer's Edge®, an executive coaching and consulting firm where she and her team have spent over 16 years helping law firms build thriving businesses by transforming lawyers into better business developers and leaders. A former practicing attorney, Elise brings first-hand knowledge of the legal profession's demands and a strategic focus on rainmaking, leadership, and visibility.
Elise is the creator of the Lawyers Making Rain® program and the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, both designed to help attorneys at all levels grow their impact and client base. She is also the host of The Lawyer's Edge podcast and a frequent speaker for law firms and bar associations. Her insights have been featured in Law.com, Law360, and other leading legal publications.
She holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she served as a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review. She is currently Vice President of the Columbia Law School Association. Before launching The Lawyer's Edge, Elise practiced commercial real estate law at Fried Frank and Morgan Lewis.
The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss
Leadership Lessons for Dealmakers with Elise Holtzman
Insights from Elise Holtzman on Developing Rainmakers and Leaders
Elise Holtzman joins The Dealmakers' Edge to share practical leadership insights tailored for high-performing professionals in commercial real estate and beyond. A former Biglaw attorney turned executive coach, Elise now helps professionals elevate their leadership, grow their visibility, and develop sustainable business development strategies.
In this episode, she and host Aaron Strauss explore how top performers can create intentional growth, avoid burnout, and evolve into impactful leaders. From rethinking productivity to building a culture of strategic delegation, Elise offers a powerful framework for dealmakers looking to lead with clarity and purpose.
0:27 – Meet Elise Holtzman and her journey from Biglaw to leadership coaching
3:32 – Common struggles high achievers face beyond technical execution
5:22 – Early signs of burnout and how they show up in professionals
7:10 – Using "act one and act two" to create presence and personal balance
10:06 – Lessons from mentors and models of sustainable success
12:47 – The role of self-awareness in avoiding burnout and staying aligned
17:16 – Shifting from doer to leader and learning to let go
22:47 – Why intentional reflection drives growth and innovation
Mentioned In Leadership Lessons for Dealmakers with Elise Holtzman
Transcript
Aaron Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, I'm excited to bring you a new style of episode. Usually, we focus purely on leaders in commercial real estate who are driving growth, creating value, buying a lot of real estate.
Today we're going to take a step back from the deal table to explore something just as essential, which is the mindset and habits behind top-performing professionals. Our guest, Elise Holtzman, is an amazing coach, a professional coach with over a decade of experience working exclusively with professionals, lawyers, law firms, helping them develop strategies and relationships needed to grow and lead with impact.
She's got tremendous experience in real estate as well because she used to work at big firms in New York. There are some very prominent dealmakers at Fried Frank and Morgan Lewis. She has her own podcast called The Lawyer's Edge. She went to Columbia Law and also holds a bachelor's in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She's a professional certified coach through the International Coach Federation.
So this is a really cool episode. I'm really excited about it. We're going to talk about what does work-life balance mean anyway? And here's a hint: it's maybe not what you think. How do you show up for yourself every day in a way that creates balance and intentionality? And how do you juggle the idea of being ambitious and successful while also being true to yourself every day so that you can show up for yourself and your team?
So, without further ado, here's the episode. I hope you all enjoy.
So hello, everyone. I want to welcome Elise Holtzman today to the podcast, who I have gotten to know over the past several months and who has a very unique background. Elise, I know you were a practicing real estate attorney for years at big law, took some time off to raise the kids, and then you re-entered the market really doing what I consider super important work, which is helping professionals, primarily attorneys, lead and cultivate visibility in their careers, sort of get out of their own way in connection with things like business development and mental health, which is really a fine line that a lot of supercharged professionals juggle with, and what it really takes to grow a meaningful, sustainable career.
So this is a different type of episode than we've had. The podcast is called The Dealmakers' Edge. Here we're going to focus a little bit more on the "edge" as opposed to making the deals per se, because they go hand in hand.
What I've seen interviewing all these different professionals in commercial real estate is that everyone suffers at some points from self-doubt, lack of self-awareness, imposter syndrome, anxiety: "Did I stretch too far in my career? Should I take a step back? Where am I going with all of this?"
So you've really coached so many high-level professionals, and I'm just excited you took the time. I really want to get into these topics with you today here.
Elise Holtzman: All right. Well, thanks for having me, Aaron. I always love talking to you. We get into some deep weeds and some important stuff, so I'm looking forward to it.
Aaron Strauss: No, exactly. Likewise, I feel the same.
I mean, the bottom line is that this is an incredibly stressful time to be juggling so many things. A lot of people listening to this podcast are probably buying buildings, they're rising, they're syndicating deals. Maybe they're a broker, they're a young professional, they're in the service business, maybe around commercial real estate.
What do you think are the few themes you're seeing today as you talk to your clients that they're struggling with beyond just technical issues of "How do I execute on a transaction?" or "How do I grow my career?" What are those key mental health struggles that you're finding people are facing daily? And how are you working with people to overcome some of them?
Elise Holtzman: So the first thing I'll point out is I'm not a therapist, right? I'm not a licensed therapist. So when we're talking about mental health, for me, I'm not really working with people who are suffering from serious mental health disorders.
If I'm working with them in coaching, I always make sure that they're also working with a licensed therapist. But when it comes to kind of the everyday stuff that all of us are working with, what I see is that, particularly for driven professionals, they are always focused on, "How much can I get done today?"
There's so much flying around. There are so many things that they're trying to accomplish. Typically, ambitious, driven people are not just doing one thing at a time. They're trying to make it in the business world. They're trying to have a great life outside the office.
They're often doing other things like volunteer activities, or they're doing speaking and writing and getting themselves out there in lots of different ways. So it can become very overwhelming very quickly, even if you're someone who, at your core, is driven to be productive all the time.
So I think that for many people like that, you can typically get more done in an hour than most people can get done all day. Then you put additional pressure on yourself to do even more than that.
So what I find is that people who are ambitious wind up coming to us for coaching because they're trying to accomplish so much at once that they feel that they could use some support and guidance as they try to check off all the boxes.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. I think you're right. You give a busy person something to do, they're going to try to do that plus one.
Where does it end? And where do you create those boundaries? The topic of work-life balance, I think, is certainly one I'm not going to touch because people I know don't really have it. They're all in all the time. But at the same time, you can overextend.
What are those key signs for somebody listening today that maybe they've perhaps taken on too much? They may be facing—who knows—burnout. They're overstretching, and they need to find themselves coming back to a bit of a mean. Where do you think that fine line lies with ambitious, successful professionals?
Elise Holtzman: I spoke to the managing partner of a law firm yesterday who is unbelievably driven. She's been doing this work for a long time. She's in the process of opening offices, growing the law firm. She's still got her own legal work to do, supporting all the things that the firm is trying to do in terms of growth and success.
And she said that for the first time in her life, she's just feeling demotivated. That even though there are all these things she wants to do, sometimes she just can't get herself to do them. And I think that is one of the things that we see.
I also think that you see people struggling to sleep at night. They are struggling with personal relationships sometimes because they find themselves edgy and irritated and irritable, all of those things that they wouldn't normally be with people. But they've got so much on their minds that they can't let it go.
So I think a lot of ruminating, a lot of thinking constantly about, and I fall into this category as well because sometimes I get into bed and the lights go off and it's quiet, and my husband annoyingly falls asleep in a nanosecond every night for the last 33 years, even though he's got a very stressful job as well. He just has that ability. But I think that there's a lot of overthinking that goes on. I think it's exhausting for people.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. That idea of balance, somebody explained to me one time that they visualize their life as far as outside of the home, they're working. When they come home, they try to really, truly be home.
Somebody I was with recently said that they call it act one and act two. Act one is outside of the house. They're on the phone, they're on emails, they're on Zooms, they're in meetings, they're working extremely hard. But when they come home, they say "act two." And act two to them is more important than act one.
They try to put the phone away. They try to be present. And they try to give the same energy at home and in their personal space and with their loved ones, at least as much energy as they expended during the day.
I think a lot of times, people who are very driven kind of reverse it. The people around you can get the leftovers of a very high-driving performer, and creating that balance, when in fact we hold our offices in our hands all day and all night.
Elise Holtzman: It takes a lot of intentionality to do the former. I think most people who are driven are taking people in their lives for granted. That's not a criticism. I'm not suggesting that anybody's doing anything wrong intentionally. I think a lot of us do this.
When you consider yourself to be someone who's driven, you are trying to achieve something. Part of the reason you're trying to achieve it is to support the people in your life that you love. But we allow it to overtake us.
I think that there's something to be said also for the American culture. I think people in some cultures are much better at understanding that the life outside the office is more important than the life inside the office.
But we have this frontier mentality in this country, which, because of the way that our country started, I think that most people outside the U.S. view people in the U.S. as complete workaholics. And that many of them try to have a more reasonable life.
So I think that part of it is it's built into our culture. Part of it is it winds up being built into people who are ambitious and want to create something. I think that a lot of people aren't ambitious just because they want to make more money or just because they want to see their name on the side of a building.
They're ambitious because there's something inside of them that wants to create something and wants to leave a legacy and wants to make a difference and wants to accomplish something, not just for oneself but for other people.
Again, it can be really hard to turn that off. So for people who are intentional about it and do their best to have that act two be just as important, if not more important, than act one, they're doing something different. They're doing something intentional.
And intentionality and being proactive about achieving what it is that you want to achieve, regardless of what it is, I think, is really important for driven people to remember. We kind of get sucked into what we're doing, and we forget that there are other things that we may want to accomplish.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. I'm guilty of that. Again, I think everyone who has a lot going on, by definition, is guilty of that all the time, and to find that unique balance.
When you were practicing big law, you were working on high-stakes commercial real-estate deals, hundreds of millions of dollars, you didn't know yet that you were going to be an advisor to professionals and help them through mental and career struggles but did you see early in your career the traits of various successful dealmakers that found the way to balance that intensity but also on a personal side, being able to have some gap between who they are and what they do?
Elise Holtzman: Yeah, that's a tough one because I think the people that I worked with, many of them were so driven. And so I started my career working for John Mechanic, who many of your listeners may know or be aware of. He's a very driven guy, he always was.
And I remember back in the days where we had fax machines—and I know I'm dating myself here—but back in the days when we had fax machines, I mean, his wife told a story of pushing the fax machine into a closet in their apartment because it was going off at all hours of the night. Because he was doing international deals. So he was in Japan, and he was in London, and we were in New York, and things were coming in all the time.
So there was not a lot of balance there for him, but he loved it. And he did have support in the home, so he was able to make that happen.
I do remember, though, somebody that I worked with at my second firm, Morgan Lewis, he was much better at turning it off. He was very much on the introvert side. He sat in his office, he did the work, he was very, very good at what he did, but he closed the door, he did his work, and then at the end of the day, he went home.
We weren't talking every night on the phone and all of that sort of thing. He seemed to have decided that it was okay if the deals were a little bit smaller. It was okay if they had fewer zeros at the end of them.
We did sophisticated transactions, but he somehow had a way of not having it take over his life. He enjoyed it, and he drove success for himself and his clients and the firm, but he did have a way of not letting it subsume him completely.
Aaron Strauss: That's a great segue to my next question about subsuming completely. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people who are just off the rails.
It's who they are. They like to run a hundred miles an hour and everyone else be damned. And sometimes that's okay. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this saying, "You know, I've got to go acquire this amount of real estate. I've got to achieve this. Unless I have this in the bank, I'm not successful," etc., etc.
For people who kind of just decide that their lifestyle is driving that proverbial race car all the time—and everyone hits their bumps—what are some of those messages you could talk through with people in advance to avoid those items of either regret or imbalance?
How do they buffer that against the reality of no one needs to be going 100 miles an hour all the time forever?
Elise Holtzman: The biggest thing that I encourage my clients to do is to have as much self-awareness as possible.
Why are you doing this? Is this something that drives you and excites you and makes you feel alive? Or, at the other extreme, is this something that sucks the life out of you and that you feel like you "should" be doing? There's a big difference between those two things.
So for me, personally, I know that even though I sometimes complain that I'm doing it, and listen, nobody's doing it to me. I'm doing it to myself. I think this is another thing to be aware of. Many of us do this to ourselves.
But for me, if I weren't doing this sometimes to an extreme, I wouldn't be happy. Because this is just part of who I am. This is how I'm wired, and I love it. You know, even if I'm exhausted, most of the time I'm loving it. When I see that I'm not loving it, then I know that I'm getting too deep into it.
But who are you? Is your identity wrapped up in this stuff? There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you're self-aware enough to say, "You know what, this is really who I am."
This running, running, running, and this drive to constantly achieve, and "What's the next thing?" and "I've got to check off the boxes," and "I love driving things across the finish line," and "I love seeing these deals done," if that's who you are, then embrace it. And just make sure then that you're building in some time so that you don't collapse and fall apart at the seams.
So somebody once said to me, "Elise, the way you do things is you run, run, run, run, run, collapse. Then you rest up a little bit. Then you run, run, run, run, run, collapse and rest up a little bit." I thought, "Well, that's actually pretty accurate." Could I be doing it a different way? Probably. But that also might be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
So I think knowing who you are, knowing what drives you, then knowing how you recharge is really important. You know that I, in addition to the coaching work I do, or as part of the coaching work I do, I am master certified in a set of personality tools, and I use personality tools.
So I use something called TypeCoach, which is a competitor of the Myers-Briggs. So people listening may have taken a Myers-Briggs or a TypeCoach over the years, and you get these four letters, and it kind of describes who you are, how you naturally show up.
So how you naturally show up is important. If you can use how you naturally show up and work with your inborn strengths instead of working against your strengths, it's going to be a lot easier for you. You're going to enjoy what you're doing more.
So for me, I knew this before I ever learned what my personality type is, but again, I am so driven. I am super extroverted. I love talking to other people. I love being with other people. It energizes me.
So yeah, sometimes I'm exhausted and can't get off the bed, but I've enjoyed what I'm doing. So if you feel that way, it's like, "Yeah, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Sometimes I just feel like I'm going to pass out," then maybe that's okay, right?
And that's a conscious decision that you make, that you say, "In order for me to enjoy what I'm doing, I'm going to roll with that and I'm going to run with that, and I'm not going to let people tell me what work-life balance is supposed to look like."
On the other hand, if you're doing these things and you find that it is really sucking all the life out of you, that you're not enjoying yourself, that you're pushing super hard for something, and sometimes you're wondering why you're even doing it and it doesn't align with who you naturally are, then that's an opportunity to, again, take that self-awareness and then say, "Well, what's next for me? Am I working against who I really am and want to be? And if I am, how can I shift it so that I can be more of who I'm meant to be?"
Aaron Strauss: Well said, Elise. Very articulate as always.
I want to talk for a second about some of the softer skills needed for leadership today. There's a lot of talk about people in the professional services—whether they're accountants, lawyers, whoever it is sort of servicing the transactions—there's no question that AI today and AI tomorrow is going to take over more and more of what I call the technical delivery of documents and different aspects of service.
So obviously, people talk about leadership skills, they talk about having empathy, they talk about being the type of person who can connect in relationships to advance success.
The leaders you're talking with, you're coaching, you're talking to on a regular basis, what are those soft skills that they're saying are today absolutely needed to thrive in this more modernized professional world we live in, even above five, ten years ago?
Elise Holtzman: Well, as a lead-in to answering your question, I would say that even if we weren't grappling with the implications of AI, it would still be important to think about leadership.
We've always needed leaders. So what I would first say is that typically—this is not true for everyone—but typically, as you become more senior, as you grow in your career, your job over time becomes less about the individual contribution—the doing, doing, doing—and more about your ability to marshal people and resources to make something happen.
So you're not necessarily the one drafting the documents or even hanging out with AI and getting AI to draft the documents. You are the one who is at the top of a group of people, a team of people, making sure that all of the things that need to get done in order to make things happen get done.
In order to do that, you need to do a number of different things. One is, the overall view for me is simply growing into the best version of yourself, making sure that you are growing.
I don't think people can lead others unless they have a growth mentality. The idea that I can't simply rest on what I know and what I've done so far. In order for me to be effective, I need to keep growing.
So sometimes I ask my clients the question, especially the ones who are growing into leadership or the ones who are more senior, "Let's talk a little bit about what you have to do, but let's talk more about who you need to be." I'm not suggesting turning yourself into someone you're not. I'm suggesting growing into the best version of you. How do you need to grow? How do you need to evolve?
So many times we're talking about simple things—well, they sound simple, they're not so easy in practice—but things like being willing to let things go and let other people do the job that you hired them to do. Delegate to other people. Let them show up with their core genius and do something that you shouldn't be doing.
So recognizing what those things are and giving them to other people to let them succeed so that you can open yourself up for the highest and best use of your time. I think many leaders have to understand, "What is the highest and best use of my time? Is it drafting the document? Probably not."
It may be more about strategizing. It may be more about making sure that the people that are coming up behind you and that are on your team are properly trained, have the judgment, have the gravitas, have the opportunity to get out there and be in front of clients.
A lot of this is really about your own growth. All of the other things that people talk about in terms of leadership are really important. You mentioned empathy, emotional intelligence, understanding how to motivate other people, being willing to let them take center stage sometimes.
So I'm working with a managing partner of a law firm in Canada. He started his firm about 20 years ago, and he's absolutely fantastic at not only setting up his folks who are coming behind him to have relationships with his own clients, but to teach them and to nurture them and to grow them.
So these are some of the things, but again, it requires intentionality. Because what happens for most people, understandably so, no criticism here, is that when we're successful, we figure, "Oh, well, what I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to keep doing the same thing I've always done."
That's actually the opposite of what we need in order to assume leadership and to grow in our careers. Who wakes up in the morning at age 40 or 45 and says, "Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I've been really successful thus far, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take everything that I've done and I'm going to throw it out the window and try something else."
I mean, no rational person is going to do that. But there is a piece of us that needs to be open to doing that, because the concept is: what got you here won't get you there.
So it's all about growth. In fact, the things that you're doing that you've done so successfully until now might be actually some of the things that get in your way as you try to become more of a leader.
The simplest example is going back to drafting documents. So in my world, as you say, I work primarily with lawyers. The partner, the biggest rainmaker in the firm, the managing partner of the firm, is not sitting up at three o'clock in the morning drafting documents. That's not the highest and best use of his or her time.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. I think that ties into good cultural alignment too.
So I guess the idea is, how often are you supposed to take a measuring stick to your sort of balance, and measuring what you should be doing, what you should be doing less of?
I guess people are always reevaluating. But I mean, to build a great team as well, I guess you need to continue to almost remove yourself from the step you're doing before, and everyone else has to kind of come up in lockstep around you, and have a chain of other people coming up behind you.
But in practice, it does become very hard. People tend to stick and lock in with what worked before. "This is how they've acquired this building. This is how they work with that client. This is the way it's always been done."
How do you kind of break through this "this is the way we've always done it," "we've always raised this amount of capital," "we've always worked with this individual"?
How do you create that intentionality around kind of breaking that mindset of "this is the way it's always been done," and we need to find a way to think creatively, to do things differently? How do you create that creativity when you're stuck in your ways?
Elise Holtzman: I believe in scheduling time for yourself. I know people hear that and they go, "You don't understand, Elise. I'm so busy." You are so busy, and yet you also have the same 24/7 that everyone else has.
So if you think of somebody that you admire and think of somebody who you have seen grow, whether it's in the real estate industry or anywhere else, that person has the same 24/7 that you do.
So it's really a matter of how we invest our time. I don't think it's a luxury for people. I think it's a necessity if you want to continue to grow, to set aside time, you might call them "power hours," or even a day or a half a day—quarterly would be amazing—but even doing it twice a year, where you sit down and you evaluate as dispassionately as possible.
This is not time to beat yourself up or say, "Gosh, I should have done this thing," or "Woe is me," or all that. It's just time to look at it with clear eyes and say, "Am I going in the direction I want to go in? Am I surrounded by the right people? Who's the roadblock here?"
Like I know for many of the things in my business, because I'm a small business owner, I'm the bottleneck, right? I'm the one who sometimes is standing in the way of things getting done because I've decided that I have to have decision-making authority over certain things.
When I'm able to sit down and recognize where the opportunities are and where the bottlenecks are and where the challenges are, I can look at those somewhat dispassionately—I mean, none of us is completely objective—and say, "Okay, for the next quarter or the next six months, here are my goals."
So I think chunking it down and sitting down and trying to think about this stuff without beating yourself up about it, as I say, and without beating other people up about it. Also know for yourself whether it's worthwhile for you to do this with other people, or whether it's better for you to sit and have some alone time.
So if you are a strong introvert—if you're an introvert and you're someone who needs time inside your own head to recharge, if you're someone who doesn't really think as well out loud as you think inside your own head—schedule some time for you to sit quietly and come up with some questions that you're going to ask yourself every so often.
Then be honest with yourself in answering those questions, and come up with a little bit of a plan, even if you just shift one thing. Sometimes we think that when we get strategic, we have to go shift 27 things at the same time. It's simply not true. A simple question you can ask yourself is, "What am I going to start? What am I going to stop? And what am I going to continue?"
And if you just start with those three things, you're actually going to do some pretty decent inquiry, right? What's working, what's not working, and what goals do I have? What's getting in the way, where am I the bottlenecks?
And just going back to personality type, if you are somebody who, like me, does much better thinking when you can bounce ideas off of other people, like if you put me in a room to think by myself, I can do it for about five minutes and then I get completely de-energized. I need someone to bounce my ideas off of because I'm a strong extrovert. If that's what you need, then make sure that you have somebody who can sit in a room with you and talk things through with you.
They may not even need to have the ideas. They might not even need to know your business. You can do it with a friend. You can do it with someone in your team that you trust and you're willing to share deep dark things with. You can do it with a coach. There are lots of people you can do it with, but for somebody like me, sometimes you just need somebody else in the room so you can hear yourself talk.
For introverts, they'll often report that they have someone in their life who will say, "Hey, Aaron, can I just talk to you about this thing?" And blah, blah, blah, "Ooh, never mind, got it," because it's like that process of talking helps you think things through.
So whoever you are, whatever works for you, again, going back to self-awareness, create some time in your schedule, and it's not a waste of time, it's not a cost, it's an investment of time.
Aaron Strauss: Well said. I was having lunch with somebody who's very successful. He's a partner at a big firm in New York. We had a brunch recently and he mentioned he got into meditation a number of years ago and he saw that his practice, his success, literally tripled over, I mean, a few years.
And you can say it was as a result of taking 15, 20 minutes of deep breathing exercise in the morning or not. But the fact is, he was convinced that it was absolutely tied into his ability to step back in the morning, like you said, evaluate constantly what's working, what I want to continue, what I want to stop.
For people whose brains are going all the time, that could be very, very challenging. But have you been an advocate of meditation, deep breathing, visualization with clients, or is that something that's very specific to the individual?
Elise Holtzman: So let me be as clear as possible on this. Nobody could have been more against meditation than I was. I am very type A, maybe type A plus. For anybody who knows Myers-Briggs or type coaching, I'm an ESTJ.
What that means is that my brain is working all the time. The idea of sitting somewhere and being quiet and having like some weird mantra or something like that, I could not have been less open to. Unfortunately, it was just a place where I had to grow. The idea of meditation actually stressed me out, as ridiculous as that sounds.
What I've now learned is that, again, this goes back to knowing yourself, also, I think being open-minded, and that's a very strong piece of leadership, I needed to be open to it. A few years ago, I actually was experiencing a lot of stress and I actually went and I took a course in transcendental meditation and started using it.
Not all the time, I'll be honest. I don't do it exactly the way they tell you to do it. You're supposed to do TM like 20 minutes twice a day, which I have never found works for me, but I've learned to use it because it just quiets the mind. It quiets the clutter.
So if you need your mind to be quieted and decluttered a little bit, finding some way to do that, whatever that is for you. It can be going outside and sitting in your backyard with the trees and the birds. It could be doing transcendental meditation. It could be doing some other kind of program or simply sitting quietly and as thoughts come into your mind, just sort of, without judgment, moving them out of your mind.
It frees your mind up to do some of its best thinking. So I suspect that's where your friend and colleague found the value, which is that if his mind is moving all the time, there's almost no time for any kind of other thought other than "What do I have to do in the next 20 minutes?" And that's where I think that, look, if you set aside some of that time for a power hour with yourself or some kind of strategy session with yourself, a good way to clear out the clutter is to do something like this, to do meditation or to listen to music or whatever helps you clear your mind out a little bit, gives your mind a little bit of a break so that it can then do its best work for you.
Aaron Strauss: Well said, as always. Fitting again, this is a unique podcast episode. We usually bring in just pure dealmakers, buying this real estate, financing this building. But I wanted to focus today more on that edge. Because anybody who's successful, pretty much, all the work first happens in their mind, and then they actually go out and do it.
I really love the way you said, work every day to become the person that's sort of worthy to do the activities that you like to do. Don't only focus on achieving those activities per se, but what type of person, mentally and physically, and emotionally, has to show up to be able to execute on those bigger goals.
You shared a lot of amazing things today. I really appreciate our time together. I'm sure listeners took away a lot. People can also find you online, Elise. I know you're giving coaching to professionals all around the world.
Again, I want to thank you for today. Hopefully, people have taken away from this that they need to show up for themselves so that they can show up for others, and to constantly work on ourselves in a way that's holistic and that matches our intention and our ambition. Elise, thanks again for being on. I really appreciate everything you do.
Elise Holtzman: Thanks so much, Aaron, for having me. This was fun.
Aaron Strauss: Thank you for joining The Dealmakers' Edge. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Please give us a five-star rating so more people can follow the conversation.
The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss highlights the stories, successes, and struggles behind major commercial real estate investors. Each episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at commercial real estate leaders and their unique edge.
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