Confessions of a Former Skippy!

Welcome back to the real value blog, the blog about business, life, success; about finding value in anything and everything and about creating absolutely as much of it as you can with the time we have! Good morning my friends, my name is Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this, and every episode of the Real Value Blog and I’m so happy to speaking with all of my brothers, sisters, colleagues, comrades, and superstars like we’re old friends gathering each week at the old diner on the edge of town where the coffee is strong, the smell of bacon fills our nostrils, we know we’re in a safe place and Dottie, our favorite waitress, will treat us like we’ve known her our whole lives. I cant speak for you all but this is absolutely one of my favorite places to be every week! ​

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I really look forward to getting together with all of you each week as our little group has blossomed into a growing movement of motivated and uplifted individuals gaining momentum like the big rock ball in Raiders of the Lost ark. In fact, every one of you is just like Indiana Jones in that you’re on an adventure called life, you’re in search of your treasure, you’re constantly dodging snakes, blow darts, and certain peril around every turn, or so it can seem, but in the end you always get what you came for and more. What is also true about that comparison is that the adventure never ends. There is always a sequel and rest assured, it will be another amazing adventure. Life is what you make it and it can either be a daring adventure or nothing at all. In fact, let me read you a quote from Helen Keller, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” Helen Keller, if you’re having trouble remembering who she is, was the deaf and blind powerhouse and the first ever deaf and blind person to earn a bachelors degree. She was an author, a political activist, a teacher, a mentor, and simply one of those individuals throughout history who decided fairly early that what others thought she lacked were actually her strengths and boy did she show us! Security is mostly superstition, she said. It does not exist in nature and nor does it really exist in the world we live in.

Of course, thankfully we can feel safe in our homes and our daily travel, for the most part, but what she said is that avoiding danger, avoiding difficulty, avoiding stress, avoiding life’s challenges is no safer in the long run than outright exposure to it. She was poking at each and every one of us to push it. Expand your boundaries and eliminate the idea that you can ever be truly secure in anything we do in life. Security, for the most part is a myth. Just ask anybody who worked for a company for 5 or more years and thought they were safe before being laid off or let go for whatever reason. Ask anybody who’s pension benefits and 401K had grown to retirement security levels only to see them evaporated in 2008 and 2009. Ask anybody who thought they could work hard their whole lives and have the government take care of them for the remaining golden years living solely off of social security.  
  
Security is a myth my friends and anybody seeking it through the work they do is only fooling themselves into thinking that some day, some way, at some point I wont have to do this any more because I’ll have enough, somebody will save me, or I can eventually retire and live off of my savings and social security. Of course, we know what happens with that. The payout is fixed but the cost of living continues to rise. I am not saying you cant work smart, save, invest, and eventually be financially independent. What Helen Keller, and many long before and long after her, was saying and what I am simply reiterating is that safety and security is not where the marrow of life exist. There is no reward for sitting comfortably in your office waiting for the orders to roll in. There is no certificate of achievement being sent to you from the Arnold Schwarzenegger council of Health and Fitness for sitting on your couch eating Doritos and drinking beer. And there is no Brinks truck heading your way bringing the Publishers Clearinghouse million dollar check so the quicker we snap ourselves out of this fantasy and recognize that nobody is coming to save us, the quicker we realize results from our initiative and activities.

We’ve been talking the past several months about goal setting, tracking and measuring your progress, taking inventory of your skills, attitudes, and opportunities, learning how to recognize when you’re getting off track from the goals you’ve set for yourself, and even some tactical and practical steps to take to get more business. But not just any business, the kind of business that fits more of what you say you want. The kind of business that looks potentially different from the business you currently have. The kind of business that is as close to the opposite of the business you complain about at every opportunity. Remember our clarity through contrast exercise that I’ve talked about in several episodes but threw out in the last episode as a 30 day challenge to you? I hadn’t planned on doing it but its such a powerful mindset and strategy for reframing your thoughts that I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity when the thought hit me. If you didn’t catch it or recognize it when I talked about it, the clarity through contrast exercise is a simple exercise whereby you catch yourself every time you hear yourself using the words, ‘don’t, not, no, cant, wont, never, shouldn’t, and couldn’t’. Basically, anytime you find yourself speaking in the negative, an alarm goes off in your head that says, ‘oh, I just heard myself say ‘I’m not doing that!’, so I am going to now ask the question, ‘but what AM I willing to do?’ Or ‘what can I do?’. Anytime you catch yourself complaining about something and using any of the trigger words, we simply recognize that we’re caught in an unempowering and self defeating pattern of negativity that delivers us no positive or resourceful answers whatsoever, but all is not lost because without salty we wouldn’t necessarily know what sweet was and without the darkness we wouldn’t fully understand light. You see, we can use contrast to help us break through barriers in thinking, poor communication patterns, negative thinking patterns, and any bad habits that have us spinning in the same circle month after month and year after year.  
 
Many of you have long held and well trained self communication patterns that live and thrive on the negative. You may not even recognize it within yourself but its there. It’s there if you wake up every day with a knot in your stomach and thinking, ‘shit, cant wait to see what those damn amc monkeys are gonna throw at me today’, or ‘crap, I gotta deal with those dumbass realtors again today.’  If you find that you’re stressed and anxious and don’t sleep well because you’re worried about the bills, the lack of business coming in, and the tragic end of the appraisal industry that you’re absolutely sure is right around the corner, then you’re one of the people I just mentioned. You’re probably a good person, you help out at the local soup kitchen, you feed stray cats, you’re probably tons of fun with a few drinks in you, and you’ll defend to the death just how positive you really are but there’s some internal dialogue and maybe even a fair amount of external dialogue with friends and colleagues about just how shitty it is out there, how great it was before X, Y, and Z, how so and so is effing everything up for us as an industry, and how its not long now and we’ll all have to get another job because we’ll be irrelevant.

My friends, if you can hear yourself in any of that description or you find yourself in discussions with your friends and colleagues that sound similar, then I am speaking directly to you! You are your own worst enemy and you are probably also the likely cause of some of your friend’s and colleague’s stress and anxiety because you feed off of it and you feed into it. Remember, any time you are giving time, attention, energy, emotion, and focus to the things you don’t want, you are actually creating more of it. One of the simplest yet most profound lessons I have ever learned in life and maybe one of the most powerful and rewarding lessons I have had the opportunity to teach to others over the years. You are what you think about and what you think about becomes your reality! We have the ability to take deliberate conscious control of our thinking and focus it in any direction we choose. The more you make the conscious or unconscious choice to place your focus and energy on that which you hate, despise, fear, get stressed about, want less of, and say you’re against, the more life and nourishment you’re actually giving it. Two things are always at play in the life of humans: you are always in a state of pushing and pulling. You are always, moment to moment, in a state of bringing something toward you while also pushing something away from you. You get to choose what you are pulling toward you and subsequently what you are pushing away from you. The secret is that you cant do both at the same time.

Whatever you are pulling toward you is simultaneously pushing its opposite away from you. You cant say you want to have more business, more money, less stress, more time, and more freedom and at the same time be bitching about all of the bad things going on in our industry or the White House or your marriage or the Middle East or…name your poison and choice of negative things you let your mind focus on daily. “But Blaine, all of that shit is really happening, are you telling me to stick my head in the sand and avoid all of it? I’m just being realistic. I like to tell it like it is!” Folks, any time you hear somebody half apologetically say, “I’m sorry, just like to tell it like it is. I just speak the truth and people cant handle that”, you’ve just listened to somebody share their opinion, usually uninformed and backed by nothing, but its simply their paradigm and view of the world, that’s it, nothing more. Yes, all of those things are happening in your world, I agree. And the more attention, energy, emotion, and focus you place on those things moment to moment, the more of that experience you’re going to get because you cant possibly focus on all that stuff and, at the same moment, be seeing the awesome shit going on behind you or maybe even right in front of your eyes! You cant focus on all of the things that give you stress and expect not to be stressed out and you cant focus on all of the things that give you stress and expect better things to come to you because while you’re focusing on that you are simultaneously pushing away all of the opposites of that thing. Anything that is the polar opposite of stress, anxiety, negativity, war, poverty, and hate gets pushed away to make room for the stuff you want to focus on because they cant both exist simultaneously in your world. You get to choose which one occupies the space between your ears and eyes and remember what I told you in the previous episode, you’ll only see what your mind can accept and believe. I said it in a slightly different way, I said you’ll see it when you believe it, not the other way around.  
  
Anytime you can catch yourself saying ‘don’t, not, no, can’t, wont, never, shouldn’t, couldn’t’, you have something that you can find the opposite of, which is called contrast. I say I’m not going to do something, which might be true and just fine to leave it as is, but how much more valuable for me to follow it up with ‘ok, so what WILL I do’. I’ve clearly stated what I wont do but that gets us almost nowhere. The follow up statement is the initiative and action taking part of this clarity through contrast strategy and lifestyle. Catching myself saying something as simple as ‘don’t forget your keys’ and then remembering what I know about the human mind and how the subconscious filters out negative words like don’t, not, no, can’t, wont, shouldn’t and couldn’t and only leaves the rest of sentence, this reminds me to rephrase the statement in the positive so I change it to ‘be sure to remember your keys before you leave.’ If I say ‘don’t forget your keys’, the subconscious mind hears, ‘forget your keys’. Plain and simple. The subconscious mind has a very limited vocabulary and operates primarily via images and feelings and it reasons inductively which means that information flows from the specific to the general where the conscious mind reasons deductively, or it deduces things based on what it thinks are facts. Forget for a moment whether or not they are real facts, even if they’re not, the conscious mind will help you believe they are based on your own biases and belief systems Nevertheless, since the subconscious mind uses inductive reason to come to conclusions, when it hears your conscious mind and voice say, ‘don’t forget your keys’, it filters out the don’t part and goes from specific to general and basically says, ‘he must want us to forget his keys so I’ll make that happen boss’. 

Now, think about the ramifications of this when it comes to how you’ve been talked to and talking to yourself all of your life. Since the subconscious mind isn‘t fully developed until around age 20, imagine all of the crap that was thrown into your brain from age 3 to 20. All of your parents and grandparents crap, all of the religious guilt you may have been raised with, all of the lessons learned subconsciously in school like maybe you’re not as smart as the others, you’re not as athletic as the others, if you follow the rules people leave you alone, if you do what the teacher says, even if you’re not learning anything, you’ll get good grades and good grades get you love and adulation from teachers and parents. If you stay in line and don’t act out you’ll fit in and not be called out. If you never go up on stage nobody will ever laugh at you for messing up. If you mess up, people laugh and tease you and that’s painful so lets never do that again. If you do something bad during the week you can always just ask for forgiveness on Sunday, regardless of what you did or who it may have affected. And the list goes on and on. All of the subconscious lessons learned that you don’t even realize are controlling how you think, move, act, talk, and walk but represent roughly 92% of your brain activity. Only 8% of our brain activity is chalked up to conscious thoughts and reasoning. The remaining 92% is subconscious programming and likely from the information injected into your brain between ages 3 and 20.  
  
Fortunately, we can use that 8% of conscious thinking to program the 92% of subconscious but it takes some time and lots of cleaning. Imagine somebody coming to you and saying, ‘hey, I have a car I’m willing to give you for free but there is a small catch. It runs but it runs rough and you cant actually sit in it and drive it because its filled from the floor mats to the roof with McDonalds trash, pop cans, cigarette butts, pizza boxes, some red sticky goo that spilled on the seats, half eaten suckers stuck to the upholstery, the seat belts are stuck underneath all of the seats, there are some weeds growing up through the floorboards, some hooligans poured sugar in the gas tank, one of the back windows is cracked and the other one doesn’t roll down without some help, the antenna is still there but its bent a 90 degree angle, the headlights are so frosted that you cant see when you’re driving at night, and we think there may be a body in the trunk. But clean it out and get it running and its all yours to take you wherever you wish to travel.’ That is, in essence, the subconscious mind for many people. It is a vehicle that runs but it has sugar in the gas tank, its really messy, the radio reception is hampered by the damaged antenna, and the body in the trunk is the you that could be but has been neglected for decades. However, with some work, some effort, some clean up and weeding this vehicle could start running pretty nicely and take you wherever you tell it to and in grand fashion. You are the driver! That is the key takeaway. How you take care of that all important vehicle called the subconscious mind will determine how well, how quickly, how effortlessly, and how enjoyably you get there. The clarity through contrast strategy and lifestyle is one that is constantly and vigilantly on the lookout for any hooligans wanting to pour sugar in the gas tank and the sugar I’m referring to is any thought or communication pattern that gums up your mental engine and keeps you, more or less, grounded and not moving forward in a direction you say you’d like to go.

Catch yourself every time you use the words don’t, not, no, never, can’t, won’t, shouldn’t and couldn’t and rephrase the sentence with its more positive opposite. You’ll never be able to stand up in front of a group and speak? Ok, but what WILL you do? Will you speak to 2 people at a time? How about 5? What is your definition of a group? If a group is 10 or more, will you stand in front of a group of 9 and answer questions happily? Is it the 10th person being added to the mix that has you falling to the ground and curling up into a ball? You see, catching yourself in these negative communication patterns and then reframing, rephrasing, and then rethinking things will eventually turn you into an unstoppable powerhouse because eventually, you wont have to catch yourself using those words. You will have rebuilt your whole communication system so that your subconscious mind catches you even before the negative words come out of your mouth. Pretty soon you’re having an internal dialogue with yourself that is constantly asking, ‘so what DO I want, so what WILL I do, so what CAN I have for lunch, so what SHOULD I do instead of smoke this cigarette, so what COULD I be doing to get more of the business I want and less of the business I don’t want?’ 
  
The reason I bring the clarity through contrast strategy up again this week is because I threw out an impromptu challenge last week to try and catch yourself using the negative words and communication patterns we’ve been talking about thus far and then replace them with the phrase, “so what DO I want or what CAN I do”, etcetera. I am very proud and extremely delighted to say that I have heard back from a bunch of you and we are only one week into the challenge. Nothing but positive results from every single person who has messaged me about there results. What I’ve heard the most of from all of you who have reached out to share results is just how surprised you are at how many times you are catching yourself throughout the day. In fact, a few of you have expressed just how exhausting it can be at first because its almost every other thought or sentence that you’re reframing, rephrasing, and rethinking. Listen, this is no different than if you came to me to learn self defense, or aikido, or have me personally train you into shape. I would sit you down beforehand and give you a stern but honest talk about just how painful this is going to be at first. I would explain how tired, how sore, how many thoughts of quitting you’ll have, how you wont be able to see the benefits for a while but how, if you stick with it and follow my instructions, I’ll steer you through the shit and walk you out to the other side where the benefits become more clear. It’s up to you to commit and stick with it through the shitty part if you want to reap the rewards. Remember Joseph Campbells quote from last week, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Nothing worthwhile is easy my friends and rarely are the easy things worthwhile. Thank you to all of you who have reached out and shared that you took me up on the challenge and also shared your early results. It’s a 30 day challenge so you have 3 weeks to go but stick with it and I cant wait to hear from more of you and hear what some of your results and insights are after doing this. Feel free to hit me up on facebook messenger or you can email me at Blaine@realvaluegroup.com. I’d love to hear from you sometime.  
  
Believe it or not my friends, that wasn’t the show. That was merely the opener and the strategy portion of this episode. I like to always fill the shows with value and stuff you can use and wanted to hammer the clarity through contrast exercise and give a little insight into just how powerful and resourceful you all are if you can tap into the source of the programming which is the 92% control center called your subconscious mind. No my friends, as the title hints at, todays episode is a revelation, if you will. It’s a confession of sorts and an opening of the heart to share with you all something that may just have you unsubscribing and looking for greener pastures. You see, I came across this term ‘skippy’ within the last couple years as a result of membership in some of the various and varied appraiser forums and groups. I had never heard the term before but after hearing it I completely understood what was being conveyed by the term. A skippy is somebody who is or was poorly trained and mentored, is maybe what we would call a mere form filler and a number hitter, meaning they go above and beyond to always hit the lenders desired value, and is a nameless, faceless caricature of somebody doing the kind of appraisal work that we all likely despise. They underbid the good and more expensive appraisers, they fly through the work with little research and support, they're maybe cranking out reports way too fast for any ‘real’ appraisers to believe the work is credible and they aren’t explaining any of their rationale in their reports, if we can even call them that. This is my understanding of the definition of a skippy. Maybe I’ve added a few things that don’t necessarily fit your understanding of this term but you get the gist of the moniker. A Taco Bell employee as they are sometimes referred to. Somebody who has little to no education and will take almost any dollar amount to complete an appraisal with the standards mentioned before.  
  
Now, the title would imply that I either have a guest coming on that will reveal from behind a black curtain with their voice disguised just what life was like as a skippy in the appraisal world OR maybe I have been sent some damning and reveling confession that will give all of us some insight into the mind of this dastardly part time cheesy Gordita chef but no my friends, no special guest and no anonymous letters. The skippy I am referring to is me. I am the skippy confessing today and like all good 12 step programs I think its important to follow the first step to recovery which is to admit your failing to everybody. Good morning everybody, my name is Blaine Feyen and I was a skippy. There, I said it. And now your job is to say ‘welcome Blaine’ and then we’ll hug afterwards and the healing begins. I don’t mean to make fun of 12 step programs, by the way, but I am being slightly facetious regarding the skippy revelation because there are 95,000 registered real estate appraisers in the US. Break out some of them who aren’t active, maybe just retired, some commercial, and you’re still left with 10s of 1000s of appraisers, not all of whom can be the pinnacle of Appraiser knowledge and procedure. In fact, just based on sheer numbers and what we know of the mentoring process, as well as the number of advanced designations for appraisers in the US, the vast majority of appraisers in the US will likely fit some of the definition of a skippy mentioned previously. You see, most of us came up in the industry the same way. We met somebody who was in the business, maybe they needed help or talked you into the business, they took you out on a few site visits, showed you the basics of measuring and taking pics, showed you how to make some adjustments and you’re off to the races. You learned from having your mentor correct your reports, maybe share some insights along the way, but ultimately there came a point where you figured, ‘I got this’. Over the years you learned via osmosis and from the lender revision requests and maybe an occasional CE class or elective that you took. In fact, I’ve basically just described my own training and introduction to the appraisal world. 
  
My mentor went with me to 2 observations, had me measure both, and then handed me off to a variety of appraisers in our busy office at the time and told them ‘train him’. Now, I was being brought in to help managed and grow the operation so my education initially was just intended to give me a decent working knowledge of the process and maybe have me help with revenue production while we were growing. Of course, as all initial plans tend to change and new opportunities arise, the plan changed a bit and I was a full time appraiser within a fairly short period of time. I was developing the business, building a new business model, changing some of the existing business structure, getting new business, writing a comprehensive sales and marketing manual, and a bunch of other projects but I was essentially a full time appraiser. I am what I like to think of as a fairly smart and resourceful guy but you don’t know what you don’t know and, especially in a bigger organization, you tend to believe the veterans around you know everything there is to know about the task in front of them. The task in this case was that of appraising homes using the software and the forms provided. We were and extremely busy appraisal shop doing primarily lender business with a large and thriving commercial department as well. We had runners, expediters, schedulers, researchers, interns, a full accounting department, an IT department, one whole room dedicated to servers and another room dedicated to commercials printers, large blue print machines, map books, file storage, the whole nine yards. And we ran, and ran, and ran for years and years and years with no issues whatsoever. We were producing what I thought were a great appraisal product, we had very happy clients, we were super busy with residential and commercial work, in fact our commercial work took the commercial appraisers all over the country. I learned from everybody in the office how to enter orders, inspect the homes, the art and science of pulling comps, data entry, making adjustments, writing comments, the files would be quickly reviewed by my mentor who would circle some things in red, write a few comments and then, after correction, he’d sign the reports and we’d send them off.

Of course, I had to go through the standard con-ed cycle every two years and take some classes. At that time, I had to take most of the CE classes in person, which I preferred because you could as questions and learn. And it was through this 2 year CE cycle and process that you learn some things maybe you didn’t know before. Every now and then you or somebody in the office would bring back a question from a class they took and they would say, ‘hey, are you doing this on your appraisals?’, and we would say no, why? ‘Well, I heard in my class that you better be doing this or that or you could get a violation and the state will come after you’. So, we would all modify our future reports with the new info, we’d share new comments we’ve written, new disclosures and disclaimers got added to reports and off we go smarter and better appraisers than the week before.  
  
What happens next to almost everybody? You go off on your own and hang a shingle. Appraiser for hire! Now there is no mentorship except that which one seeks out themselves. The problem is an age old one though and its called unconscious incompetence or maybe, if you're lucky, you know you’re not fully competent and that’s called conscious incompetence. You know that you don’t know everything but you don’t necessarily know what you don’t know. Before that, you simply didn’t know that you didn’t know. Unconscious incompetence is rampant in the world and rampant in the appraisal world my friends. The reason I bring it up in this episode and share with you my own unconscious and then conscious incompetence is because its not intentional when it happens. That’s why its called unconscious incompetence. It’s wholly unconscious. It wasn’t until I started my own company after about 4 years of building somebody else’s organization that I was in a new position and that was the position of become ultra conscious of what I don’t know. I’m somebody who is always asking the question, ‘what don’t I know’ anyways so I like to think I’m pretty aware of some of my blind spots but, again, the very nature of unconscious incompetence is not knowing that there is something you don’t know.

How many appraisers out there do you think are in the same position where they have the best of intentions and simply don’t know what they don’t know? I know it doesn’t make it any better when you’re being undercut by them or reviewing their work and see what utter crap is out there but the point of today’s episode is to simply point out that we all start out this way to some degree. We all go through a skippy phase just as we all went through a phase where we couldn’t walk, talk, or feed ourselves. But we grow, we learn, and if we’re lucky we have good mentors along the way and good leadership that steers us in the right direction. For some of us that may come later in life while, for others, maybe it happened right from childbirth. Whenever and however it happens, it typically takes some poking, prodding, a tragedy, or some really good guidance from a positive mentor to show us the path toward conscious incompetence and ultimately on to the final stage of unconscious competence, which is where we can do it with our eyes closed and don’t have to think about it.  
  
Thankfully, I had something of a shitty appraiser mentor when I came into the business but I got lucky in that I have a good network of appraisers around me from that early experience and we have all grown together to a large degree. I have had the opportunity in the past 14 years since going out on my own to take lots of classes, review thousands of appraisal files of others, see and hear a variety of methods and processes that, when applied over time, have made me a much better appraiser than I was in the first few years. And the thing is that the learning never stops. Thanks to the internet I can now take all my CE online but I can also take any elective courses I want and I do fairly frequently. We can take AI courses, meet and learn from great teachers while sitting at your desk and basically become better and better each week and each month once you have been made aware of what you don’t know. Over the years, as I have mentioned in many past episodes, we command some of the highest fees around, we handle complex appraisals, we do lots of non lender and legal appraisal work, we get referred daily, we speak and teach courses regularly, and we are still learning and growing every day.

​I don’t say that stuff to brag, I say it simply to point out that for every skippy out there, the vast majority of them are simply people who don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe not all of them, but a good portion of them. I’m not telling you that we ever have to tolerate shitty work but I would suggest some compassion and recognition of a potential opportunity if and when you ever come across one of these people’s work. I believe we all have an obligation to lift up the people in our own industry and that means first not tearing them down. No industry benefits when there are people in it doing crappy work for low fees but I can assure you that there are many appraisers out there today whom you would probably toss into the skippy category based on very limited information. Take some time when this happens to reframe, rephrase, and rethink the situation and instead of bitching about it and them, which is a recognition on your part that you are powerless to change the situation, grab your power back and start asking better questions. Ask questions like, ‘what CAN we do about this person’s appraisals?’, or ‘what CAN I do about the quality of some of these reports I’m reviewing?’. You know, somebody with a little ingenuity, a little motivation, a positive attitude and a desire to help instead of bitch will come up with a business opportunity. With the internet and social media as prevalent as it is in our lives today, some of you smarter than everybody else appraisers should put your smarter than everybody else heads together and develop and online appraiser academy for all of the skippys out there who want to learn more, who want to be better, who want to develop better reports but maybe are out on their own and don’t know where to turn or who to learn from.  
  
My friends, you’ll never get low quality and low fees out of any product, service, or offering. That’s simply capitalism and the free market. But what you can do is decide what role you want to play in the development of others and the leveling up of those around you. Are the people in the car or the room with you right now getting better because of your presence and attitude or are they staying the same, or worse, becoming less competent, motivated, or inspired because of you. We all start out more or less the same and we for sure all end up the same. The part in the middle is where opportunity and value is created and nurtured. Next time you catch yourself saying don’t, not, no, can’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, couldn’t or calling somebody a skippy, ask yourself, is this really the most positive use of my frontal lobe? Am I really helping by denigrating one of our own? And then go on to ask, what could I do to help? What would be a better use of my personality and leadership skills? Maybe this person could use my help and guidance. Maybe I could reach out to this person and have a conversation. Who knows, maybe this person you’re calling a skippy today could be awakened to become one of the most competent appraisers, teachers, mentors, coaches, and leaders in the industry today. Who knows, maybe they’ll start a podcast and try to help other appraisers on their journey. Who knows… 
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