Don't Fall Off The Cliff

Welcome back to the real value podcast, the podcast about real estate, lending, appraising, life, communication, relationships, and well… how they all fit together. Good morning my friends, my name is Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this and every episode of the Real Value Podcast and I’d like to give every one of you a big fist bump and wish you all hearty New Year! I trust you made it safely to this side of 2019 and are already off and running down the path that you’ve charted for yourself near the end of 2018. If you haven’t charted any paths yet for 2019, you’re going to hear it from me in almost every episode this year, its time to get on it. The difference between those who do and those who don’t almost always comes down to four things: thinking, planning, doing, and tracking or measuring.

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Your thinking has to be right, you have to plan for what it is you wish to experience, achieve, accomplish or whatever word makes you the most inspired to get to work on this project. You then have to plan for its attainment as in, how the hell am I going to get there. You have to get to doing it each and every single day, one small incremental step at a time. And then you have to track and measure each day, each week, at a bare minimum each month to where you said you wanted to be. I told you in the last episode what I felt about New Years resolutions but lets face it, we’re in the month of New Years resolutions. Many of you are probably a couple days in already doing, or not doing, some of the things you noted as resolutions. This is the year you’re going to stop eating so many damn cookies, or the year you finally get in shape and address your declining health, or the year you quit smoking, or the year you start business planning. The reality is that fully 64% of all New Years resolutions never make it to the 30 day mark.  
  
Gym memberships sky rocket in December and January and this is what they plan on. The whole planet fitness business model is built on your New Years resolution and I have some news for you, they’re hoping you quit soon. They only have room and equipment for about 300 hundred people at any given time yet they need 5000 memberships to pay the bills. If you all showed up trying to get on that elliptical machine at the same time they’d be screwed so they’re hoping you’ll do what most people do and that’s sign up fo the year, come 4 times, and then taper off to a no show for the remainder of the year. They have your monthly dues each month, which are small enough that you never really notice them coming out of your bank account so you forget to eventually cancel, and they only have to service a few hundred regulars on any given day. All gyms run this way, by the way. I ran a martial arts academy for 25 years and although I was always hoping the mats would be filled with 40 or 50 students each night, the reality is that if all 150 students showed up on the same night for the same class, we simply didn’t have space and the classes would suck. Nevertheless, our memberships always went up in December and January because of all the people with resolutions to start the year off right with some Aikido or JiuJitsu classes. Of the dozens that would sign up, we’d be lucky to see 5 of them by March 1st. Those are simply the numbers my friends and those people that signed up in January and quit in February, those people are you and me. Those people are the same people that live in your house, drive your vehicles and feed your cats. It’s us!  
  
We’re the same people that head into the new year with all kinds of piss and vinegar ready to tear it up and lose 50 pounds and by Valentine’s Day we’re digging into the chocolates and proclaiming how comfortable we are with our bodies the way they are and how losing 50 pounds was unrealistic anyways so why suffer. Here honey, have another jelly filled mystery chocolate! Those gyms and martial arts academies are filled with people just like you and me in January. People with the best of intentions, people who want more for themselves, people who are dead set on making some kind of change this year and people who are all but gone come march. What happens to them? Life happens to them. When I was running my own martial arts school and coaching other school owners around the country we would use the acronym CLIFF to teach school owners the red flags look for in the first few months of a new students journey. Each letter stands for a warning sign that a new student may be slipping in their commitment and may need some guidance. I’ve found the CLIFF acronym to be very useful when it comes to all of my businesses, coaching others, and helping keep or get people back on track with what they say they want in life, business, financial, health, and whatever categories they have plans and goals in. 
  
The C stands for “Cant find the time”. This is the most common excuse used by most people for most of the things they say they want to experience or achieve but never get around to. They simply cant find the time. I’ve used this one myself many, many times. I’ve used it so many times it hurts to even say it to all of you. In fact, in some of my own coaching sessions with one of my own personal coaches, I’ve used the same line that so many of my own students have used with me over the years; “I just don’t have the time man!” My coach, who is also a good personal friend and former business partner always catches me, in fact we catch each other using this same line. “I know I said I wanted to do this thing but I just cant find the time”. This warning sign comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, by the way. It comes in the “I just cant find the time” version, the “man, I’m so busy right now” version, the “there simply aren’t enough hours in the day” flavor, and the best one which is to blame some other entity like your kids or your clients. This one sounds like this, “oh man! Running those dang kids all over the place these days!” Or “holy cow! These clients got me doing back flips trying to keep them happy!” But they all boil down to one symptom and that’s that you haven't made the time important enough and its much easier to chalk the failure up to ol’ Father Time who just hasn’t figured out how to pack 25 hours or 8 days into the week so you can get it all done. The reality is that most of the things we say we’d like to accomplish require time, but nowhere near as much time as we think they will.  
  
By that I mean that people tend to get excited about the things they say they want to accomplish because thinking about their accomplishment is exciting. In fact, its one of the secrets to achieving period. The same feeling you have when you’re thinking what it would be like to fit into your old jeans again or take another week off for vacation or set aside some money for savings are the same feelings you should be consciously bringing forth every time you take action on the little steps to achieving that goal. The problem, of course, is that your goals are likely not written out so it’s easy to forget the feelings those goals conjured up inside of you when you first started thinking about them. If they're not written down anywhere and you’re not seeing them on a regular basis, you’re not activating those critical emotional components that are required to keep you heading toward that thing. We set goals not to have more money at the end of the month or year, we set goals to have the feeling associated with what having more money at the end of the month or year would feel like. We don’t set a goal to lose weight to look good naked, we set a goal to look good naked because of how that would make us feel and losing weight is one of the steps to getting there. And we don’t set a goal to have more numbers in the books at the end of the month or year, whatever those numbers happen to represent for us. We set a goal so that we can experience a feeling that has meaning for us individually and maybe having more numbers in the books gets us closer to having that feeling. But nobody gets motivated by numbers. They get motivated by what the numbers represent in the language of feelings, of emotion.  
  
If you’re using the excuse that you just cant find the time, you haven’t thought deeply about what that goal means to you and what kinds of feelings the goal represents for you and the goal isn’t compelling enough for YOU that it conjures up enough emotional power to propel you or to pull you constantly toward it like a tractor beam. Definitely think on this one. 
  
The ‘L’ in the CLIFF acronym stands for “lacking a plan”. If the first red flag is “cant find the time”, “lacking a plan” is THE most common reason that people stay where they are each year or get worse. Rarely does life get better on its own. Rarely does your car run better on its own without some kind of intervention and plan for its maintenance and upkeep. Rarely do you find yourself randomly ending up on a beach in Barbados sipping a Mai Tai. All of those things require some kind of plan and understand that the lack of a plan is a plan. It’s the no plan plan. You are building a legacy whether you know it or not. Usually, when I ask my students what they want their legacy to be they have to think a bit. They have to think a bit because its not something they’ve spent much time thinking about and because most people think legacies are only for rich and famous people like Andrew Carnegie, past presidents, and George Clooney.  No my friends, your legacy is being built right now and it will be whatever you leave for your family when its your time, which could be today. I’d hate to think that you listened to this podcast, got excited to start making some life plans, reached up to turn off your phone at the end of the podcast and BOOM! A semi truck full of bacon crosses the center line of the highway and sends you back to wherever we all came from. It will be a sad day for sure but rest assured that your legacy begins the moment the bacon hits your back bumper because whatever you’ve created up to this point is what your friends and family will be left with. What do you want it to be? What do you want them to say about you when you’re gone? 
  
One of the exercises we do in the mastermind group is to write our own eulogies. A eulogy, of course, is what the pastor, priest, or whomever presides over your funeral might say about you at the funeral. If I asked you to write your eulogy today, what would it sound like? What kind of person are you? What have you accomplished that is noteworthy? How have you treated those around you? How do you want to be remembered? Of course, almost everybody talks nice about you when you’re dead. But what would they really think and say about you with heartfelt meaning at tour funeral and how does it make you feel. You see, if you start with the end in mind you have a good spot to begin working backwards toward something more meaningful and compelling for you. I would strongly recommend doing this exercise on your own over the next week or so. In fact, if you want, write out your eulogy and send them to me. I’ll review it for you and take you to step 2 in the exercise which is to then have somebody ask you the all important questions of what steps need to be taken to have this be the real eulogy at your funeral if you died today. If you say that the eulogy you’ve written is true today and there’s nothing left to be done, I’d say you haven’t thought this through.

I’m telling you to put yourself in the pews at your funeral. Imagine the feeling, hear the sniffling, smell the terrible perfume that aunt Edna always wears to family gatherings, see the casket up front in the pulpit, you can see your nose peeking out and maybe your hands crossed resting on your belly, which is a bit bigger than you’d hoped because, of course, you didn’t have time to get to planet fitness as much as you’d hoped. There is a bouquet of flowers resting on the casket and some organ music playing a hymn. Lots of tissues and tears, hugs and thank yous from family members as they greet all your adoring fans apologizing for your untimely departure.  
  
What I’m saying is really get into this exercise! Close your eyes and go through this. If you can do this exercise then you can do the same kind of work for planning your life. They say that most people spend more time planning their yearly vacation than they do their lives. Your vacation is for one or two weeks, your life is hopefully for 80-100 years. Take some time to plan it the way you’d like to see it play out if the choice was truly yours… because it is! 
  
So cant find the time and lack of a plan. The ‘I’ in the CLIFF acronym stands for ‘ignoring your own commitment’. This one doesn’t need much in the way of explanation because, again, we’re all guilty of it in some area of our lives. We say we want something or to achieve something, maybe we even write down some goals for its achievement and then we simply set it aside. What happens? C and L! We cant find the time and lack of a plan to see it through. We fall back into our old habits and ways of dealing with things and we’re no further along on that path come December of this new year when we’ll be doing this all again. If you are willing to take the time to go through this process, maybe even do the ‘write your own eulogy’ exercise, then make a commitment and stick to it. Simple as that. If your goal isn’t compelling or exciting enough for you, change it! It’s your goal for goodness sake, you’re in control! You wont know that though if you don’t write them down somewhere and then check it frequently to see if you’re on track. If you find yourself looking at your goals regularly and not doing the steps necessary to get you there then it likely isn’t a compelling enough goal.

If it’s something you really want to achieve but you’re just not keeping your commitments then add that to your eulogy and have somebody you really care about be the one saying it about you. It will sound something like this: “She was such a good friend, always there when I needed her. She would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it. She always had a kind word to say. She didn’t accomplish much because she never really made plans to achieve anything and, now that I think about it, she wasn’t really good at keeping her commitments, at least not to herself. She always talked a big game but never really took the necessary steps to achieve what she say she wanted. I’ll really miss her but it’s probably best that she’s at rest now because she wasn’t going to really do anything anyways, she’s was really just repeating the same year over and over, and as we all know, without a plan, wherever you end up is ok because you weren’t going anywhere anyways. Let’s bow out heads in remembrance of Sally Mae” 
  
Of course, I kid somewhat with that eulogy because the eulogy exercise really is valuable if you can really imagine the scene and feel the emotion of a moment like that and do what many psychologists say is next to impossible and that’s to contemplate our own non-existence. I didn’t say contemplate our existence, I said its next to impossible to contemplate our non-existence, the state of us not being here.  The ‘write your own eulogy’ exercise is a great way to bring some recognition to the fact that our time here is finite and our days are numbered.  There is a beginning, a middle, and an end and they may not all be of equal lengths. We may have 30 years left or 30 minutes. Once you’re gone, your legacy is whatever you’ve done and said up to that point. The good news is that, if you’re hearing my voice right now, you still have time to add to that legacy, maybe change it if you aren’t happy with what people are saying at your imaginary funeral and create the legacy that YOU want instead of one that’s being haphazardly thrown together based on the lack of a life plan and the inability to keep your own commitments. So that’s the ‘I’ in the CLIFF acronym, the ‘inability to keep your own commitments’. 
  
By the way, the ‘write your own eulogy’ exercise is just one of the exercises I have coaching clients and our mastermind groups go through and its only step one. There are several steps after that like writing legacy statements from the perspective of how you want the key people in your life to speak about you when you’re gone and a couple other very powerful steps that, when embraced and done, unlock some amazing thoughts and ideas about where you want your life to go, your business to go, and how you want to plan for whatever time you have left. I strongly urge you to take some time to do some of these things. If you need help with any of it, just reach out to me and I’m happy to guide you a bit on the process. I’ll be doing some bonus episodes of Value Syndicate members only on some of these exercises so be sure you’ve signed up to receive those if you’re interested. Nevertheless, I do my best to add value for everybody, not just the Value Syndicate members so please take some time this weekend or next and do the ‘write your own eulogy’ exercise and see if it doesn’t stir something primal inside of you to, as Tim Robbins is famous for saying in the great movie, Shawshank Redemption, “get busy living, or get busy dying”. The choice is completely up to you. 
  
The first ‘F’ in the CLIFF analogy stands for ‘frustrated’ as in you get frustrated with your initial results. This one is super common and one that I find myself coaching people past continuously because of our natural tendency to want things to happen quickly. In the episode called “Dig your well before you’re thirsty”, I talked about some of the things I think you should be doing to build a network and the prospecting activities you should all be doing to build a solid business built on work that is somewhat calculable and predictable. What inevitably happens when my students start doing some of these activities is they have a few one off successes, some good interactions, a few good conversations, maybe even a little business from their activities. Then things get quiet and they get frustrated. From their initial success they think they’ve just turned on a faucet that will just continue to spew business at them and it just doesn’t work that way so they get frustrated with their initial results and then say, ‘aww, this shit doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to my old way of doing things’.

Consistency is the key my friends. We’re all guilty of the lack of it at times but consistency is the key when it comes to business building, life planning, networking, and building a business that gives you more life instead of one that just takes it from you. Learn to recognize this frustration and turn it around by saying this phrase, ‘perfect, everything is going just as I planned it”. Don’t say, ‘everything is going just as I figured it would’ because that becomes a passive aggressive and sarcastic way of diving into the pit of doom that some of you like to live in. It’s a 9 year olds  mentality of picking up your toys and going home when you don’t get your way. No, grow up, put your big girl and big boy pants on and say, ‘perfect, everything is right on track and going just as I planned it’, and then get busy doing more of what got you the initial success.  
  
If any of you have ever heard of Murphy’s Law, its an adage or saying that if something can go wrong, it likely will. In any of my work in the defensive tactics and tactical operations world, that saying is on almost every blackboard in every training room in every language you can imagine around the world. It’s one of the foundations of planning and training because things rarely go as planned which means every plan is to have multiple back up plans, typically called contingency plans, in the event that plan A goes pear shaped. If that happens, we can quickly and tactically move to plan B or plan C. We also actively trained a principle first developed by the British SBS (Special Boat Service) which is called the Dislocation of Expectations. Dislocation of expectations is a training principle that identifies the tendency of people to have a predetermined outcome for events in their heads and when the outcomes to those events differs from their expectations they tend to have a massive psychological and physical drop in performance and sometimes a complete breakdown. They’re fight, flight, or freeze response is triggered and they quite often freeze, which is deadly in those types of situations. An example of this would be having a unit do a ruck, or a hike with heavy packs and full equipment load out and they’d be told it’s a 10 mile hike. They’re orienteering and rucking through some heavy terrain and they get to what they believe is the final checkpoint only to then be told they have another 5 miles to go.

You can imagine what this can do to morale when you’re tired, sore, hungry, sweating or maybe freezing, you’ve been hiking through swamps, heavy forest, and dirt trails with 70lbs of gear and getting excited to reach the end. You’re dreaming of a hot meal, warm shower, warm bed, great sleep, and maybe a massage at the end, only to be told that you’ve basically just begun. All of this designed for one purpose: to get them used to this dislocation of expectations feeling. The feeling that you’re confronted with when your expectations haven't been realized and you’re confronted with brain freeze, negative emotions, and a feeling that you just want to give up. You cant give up though so you have to have a tool to quickly bring your mind and attitude back to the task at hand and one way to do that is to have a phrase that triggers your mental state back to an already anchored emotional state of ‘never give up’. For some, it’s a simple word like “good” or “perfect”, and for others it’s a phrase like, “excellent, everything is going just as I’d planned”. These anchor words and phrases helps bring the mind and attitude back to a state where they feel in control again instead of the out of control, dislocated feeling.  
  
So when you’re feeling frustrated with your initial results, adopt a similar phrase and tell yourself that everything is going perfectly, just as you planned it! And then keep moving! Keep doing what you're supposed to be doing. Keep hiking, keep running, keep working, keep planning, keep networking, and keep looking at your goals daily, weekly, monthly.  
  
So we’ve made it to the last ‘F’ in our CLIFF acronym and its one of my favorites. The last F stands for ‘forgetting why you started in the first place’. This is one of may favorites because its one of the easiest to fix. Some of the others can be difficult to do the work on, especially if you’re not used to doing that kind of deep personal work and planning. Many of you will simply write all of this off as nonsense, not because its valueless but because its too hard for you. Some of you are victims of your own success. Some of you have done really well in the last 10 or 20 years, and by well I mean you have earned more than you ever expected and that was good enough for you so why work envy harder to grow, expand, diversify, plan, save, etcetera. Then the crap hits and its all elbows and assholes and ‘this work used to fun’, ‘this business used to be great’, ‘this industry sucks now’. No, my friends, you’ve just experienced your dislocation of expectations and have no framework or training for recovering and adapting to the change. And do you know what the other industries we work with our saying about your attitude and your plans to get out of the business? “Perfect, things are going exactly as I planned them”.  The question isn’t how to make something like it used to be, the more empowering question is how to make your mindset and attitude just like it was back when things were how you liked them. The reality is that back then when you say everything was great, you were probably still bitching about something not going the way you wanted it. It’s only in your nostalgic recalling of events that you can say today, “things were so much better back then”.  
  
The Japanese have a term called Shoshin, which means beginners mind. In the martial arts we’re always imploring students to keep a beginners mind since one of the diseases in that kind of training is to always be thinking there is something more important you’re supposed to be learning. The reality is that once you reach first, second, third degree black belt in whatever discipline you’re training in you see the reality that everything comes back to that mindset of being hungry for learning the basics. There are, of course, advanced techniques and concepts that require a foundation of beginner techniques before moving on but once you learn the advanced stuff you realize that its merely a circle bring you back to the basics and back to a beginners mind.  
  
So there you have it my friends, 5 little letters to help you from going over the CLIFF when it comes to your plans and goals. Once you’ve taken the vital time to write your life plans and start to set some goals for yourself, its super important to be on the lookout for the red flags that you might be getting off track and we’ll be having this conversation again next January. Be on the lookout for the excuse that you just ‘Cant find the time’, you’re ‘lacking a game plan’ that motivates, inspires, and informs your movement forward, you find yourself ‘ignoring your commitment’ and falling back into the same old patterns of the past, you’re getting ‘frustrated with your initial results’, and you’ve ‘forgotten why you started on this journey in the first place’. Remember my friends, you didn’t get fat overnight and you wont get fit overnight. You didn’t create what you have today overnight and it won’t change overnight. Things take time to evolve but know that when you set your mind, write out your plans, look at them daily, and then take some small action on them, the world moves, it simply has to.

Follow these steps and I guarantee that when we talk in July or August, or maybe December of this year you’ll be saying “Blaine, you were right, it took some time but look how far I’ve come”. When you’re in it, it never looks like you’re making progress. It’s only when you look back at how far you’ve come that you realize what you can accomplish. If you have no plans, the view from the front or the back all look the same. It’s only when you plan for a tomorrow that’s better than your yesterday that you begin the alchemical process of taking control of your legacy and what you create becomes deliberate instead of haphazard. Don’t wait my friends, now is the only time.  
  
I want to thank you for investing your most valuable currency with me again this week my friends, and that is, of course, your time. I take very seriously your endorsement of this hour of fellowship we share each week and its important that I am adding some value for you. This podcast is part of my legacy and my goal to reach a million people with my words before I expire and you’re all now part of that legacy. Something I am extremely grateful for. Ultimately, it is up to you to  mine the value from these episodes and put them to some good use in your life and business so please, take some action today and start deliberately crafting your legacy. Hey, how about we meet up again next week, same place, same value, same growth, maybe bring some friends along, we’ll do this all again next week. I’m out…