The Two Things Appraisers Must Do to Upgrade Life and Business!

​Welcome back to the real value podcast, the podcast 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 Podcast. Thanks for stopping by again this week to hang out with me and share our most precious resource together. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing right now, hopefully its adding to your life in some positive way and I’m honored if I’m part of that value add in some small way. This show is all about value in some way, shape, and form. Whether its about adding value for your clients and customers, finding value where none seems to live, creating value where previously none existed, or simply recognizing value all around you via your daily gratitude mindset and practice. If you have yet to begin doing some kind of daily gratitude practice I highly suggest that you begin right now. In fact, turn off this podcast and begin it right now. We talk a lot on this show about focus. What you are focusing on, what you choose to focus on, what you give your focused energy to, and how the direction of your focus will determine the direction of your growth or decline. One of the fastest ways to harness and energize probably the most powerful of your resources is to shift your focus from whatever it is you may be focusing on directly to something you’re grateful for. I have recommended it in the past, strongly encourage it to all of you, and require it of my coaching and mastermind groups, that you have some kind of gratitude practice. It can be at a minimum weekly, but I recommend beginning your day with a simple 3 minute gratitude exercise. I’ll give you the somewhat complicated steps to doing this 3 minute exercise if you want to grab a pen and some paper to write down the steps. Alright, you ready? You take a piece of paper. You can use your iPad and Apple Pencil if you’d like. You place the paper on a hard surface at a 90 degree angle to your torso. The hard surface can be a desk, a lap table, a coffee table, a hardcover book, the dining room table, the quality of the material you’re writing on doesn’t matter that much. Place your chose medium for writing at a 90 degree angle to your torso on the hard surface. Get your chosen writing utensil and place it in your hand however you were taught to hold said writing utensil back in kindergarten. 

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​Oh! We have a question: ‘Blaine, can I type instead of writing? I’m not much of a writer.’ I guess, if you absolutely cannot hold a pen, pencil, crayon, or marker, you can type, but I do strongly recommend writing with your hands because it activates a different part of your brain than typing does. That’s why one of our other requirements is weekly handwritten thank you cards to friends, family, clients, neighbors, guests, prospects, lenders, realtors, and casual acquaintances. Putting pen or pencil to paper activates a portion of your brain that doesn’t often get activated in the 21st century due to all the technology we deal with daily. Nevertheless, yes, if it’s the absolute only way for you to get thoughts onto paper, you can use a keyboard. Ok, with paper or iPad at a 90 degree angle from your torso, your writing utensil in your hand, oh! We have another question: ‘Blaine, when you say 90 degrees from my torso, do you mean vertically or horizontally? Because I have to turn my paper at a slight angle when I write because I’m left handed and it’s the only way for me to get the words onto the lines straight.’ 90 degrees from your torso just means that its in front of you and sitting on a hard surface. You are sitting upright at an almost 90 degree angle with decent posture, the crown of your head pushing upward as if you’re holding up the ceiling with the top of your head, your breath is long, slow, and natural and located in the base of your belly right about where your belly button is located. You can turn your paper or iPad at whatever horizontal angle you prefer to write in, as long as its at a 90 degree angle vertically to your body. You take your writing utensil and bring it closer to the writing medium, whether that be paper, slate, a chalkboard, or digital tablet and then you… oh! We have another question, ‘Blaine, for the breathing part, does it matter if my belly button is an innie or an outie?’ Nope, you can have no belly button at all and still breathe long, slow, and naturally into the pit of your stomach around where the average human being typically has a belly button. The belly button isn’t a requirement though, its simply a guidepost for your breathing.
 
Ok, we’re almost there. You have your pen, pencil or digital stylus and you are about to start writing. Here’s what you write on the first line; you write the words ‘I am very grateful for:’ followed by the number 1. ‘Blaine, do we write the word one or the number 1?’ Either one is fine. I am very grateful for, followed by the number one. Right after the number one you write one thing you are grateful for. On the next line below the number one you write the number two, or the word two if that’s what you prefer, and then, right after the two, you write a second thing you are grateful for. You with me so far? Then, and this is a critical step, on the very next line, you write either a number 3 or the word three, and you write a third thing that you’re grateful for. ‘Blaine, what if I don’t have three things I’m grateful for?’, then you need to put in extra time and write six things you’re grateful for! Do you see how complicated we can make an extremely uncomplicated process? I turned a 3 minute exercise into almost 10 minutes by being a typical egotistical human being. We let our egos get in the way of most things we try to do and the ego will keep you from trying new things just as quickly as it will goad you into thinking you can smash all 10 of those flaming Sambuca shots your friends lined up on the bar for you. The ego is a funny animal and when you learn to identify its behavior and its tendencies, you can begin to control it a bit and focus it in a direction that benefits you. The 3 Minutes of Gratitude exercise is as simple as it can possibly get, despite your ego’s attempt to make it difficult. ‘Blaine, what if it takes me 4 minutes?’ That’s quite alright! In fact, the longer you stay in gratitude, the more powerful your energy becomes and the more things to be grateful for will either come into your life or will reveal themselves as things that have always been there and you didn’t have eyes to see them yet. We made it the three minute gratitude exercise because when we used to teach the 7 minute gratitude exercise people would grown and huff and cross their arms and whine! ‘Ugh, 7 minutes we have to do this? Who has 7 minutes? That’s almost 10 minutes!’ So we fooled everybody, we bypassed the brain’s natural resistance to doing anything for 7 straight minutes and we cut the time by 58% to a meager three minutes. Just spend three minutes every morning doing this exercise and see what happens. Do it for 30 days straight, I challenge you all! If your time starts creeping up to 5 minutes, 7 minutes, 15 minutes that you find yourself spending in a mindset and emotional state of gratitude, good for you! The longer the better. But for those of you who are so busy that you have to get right to the desk and start writing reports, get an egg timer, set it for three minutes and start writing. When the egg timer dings, you’re done! If you couldn’t think of three things you’re grateful for that morning, you can make up things that haven't happened yet. You can write, ‘I am very grateful that I’ll be taking a much needed vacation in a month’, or ‘I am very grateful that I am in the process of getting my shit together.’ You see, it doesn’t matter so much what you write my friends, it’s the state of mind you have to initially force yourself into for that three minutes to train your mind, body, and soul to actively look for things to be grateful for. In fact, I revoke my challenge. Instead, I dare you! I don’t challenge you, I dare you to do it!
 
Alright my friends, enough of a segment I call ‘let’s see how complicated we can make the simple things in life!’, lets get to the meat and taters of this week’s episode. Last week we talked about the expert pyramid and how the levels get sorted, so to speak. How the bottom of the pyramid is filled with novices and even the skilled at what they do and the fees tend to be the lowest, the competition the most fierce, and the mindsets tend to the most negative. Not everybody at these lower levels on the pyramid are negative, its just that many at these levels have been there for years and are jaded, maybe burned out, tired of competing, and/or simply negative people, which is why they haven’t climbed the expert pyramid any higher. They’ve been rejected by their markets, their potential clients, their potential peers at those upper levels of the authority and the expert due to their attitudes, their practices, their mindset, the lack of communication skills commensurate with those upper levels of expertise, and maybe their value offering. Don’t get me wrong, many of the people in the novice and skilled category are great people with great attitudes. Many of them are working their way up the pyramid. Where most get stopped out, however, is at the upper levels of authority and expert status where the biggest shift is not in technical skills or understanding. The upper levels of authority and expert on the expert pyramid are primarily mind, heart, belief, communication, and attitude shifts. I’ll give you an example from my previous life. When I was running my martial arts and leadership academy, we had a handful of instructors that were subcontractors teaching other martial and aesthetic arts throughout the week. We had Brazilian Jiu Jitsu teachers, Japanese language teachers, a lady teaching a course in massage therapy and shiatsu, a lady teaching the Japanese art of Bonsai, miniature tree trimming and cultivation, yoga teachers, and a variety of other teachers coming in and out every day throughout the week to teach some kind of art form. We offered the classes at our facility, we handled the front office and admin for them, we promoted them in our city wide color brochures each month, we did almost all of the marketing for them and then we would have some kind of revenue split arrangement. What we also did for them was have regular meetings to teach them how to grow their business, do their own marketing, in come cases we’d help them build their own website, we’d help them make promotional videos and video courses to market, and we’d teach them about leadership and self promotion. All of this in an effort to give them way more value than their fee split was paying for and help them evolve and grow. We ran the very real risk that we would help them grow so well that they’d eventually leave us and head out on their own. And, in fact, that is exactly what happened in several cases.
 
Nevertheless, we knew from the beginning that our main goal was to help people grow, and that included the teachers who chose our business and facility to teach in and who had the great fortune to cross paths with us. That’s what we believed and that’s how we ran our business. Of course, some teachers were quite happy doing what they’ve always done and charging what they’ve always charged and they would take whatever advice and leadership suited them at the time and discard the rest. The ones who did aspire to grow and evolve would listen intently and follow our advice and the advice for growth was almost all related to communication, belief’s about the value of what they were offering, the value of their years of experience, how to express that value and be a leader in the market, and how to promote themselves instead of hiding in the shadows of their own teachers or in fear of some bigger organization making the rules, or so they thought. It was really no different than what appraisers deal with daily. The biggest growth and evolution for those teachers who truly wanted to grow was experienced when they started to develop their communication abilities and their beliefs about their abilities and their value in the marketplace. It didn’t happen over night my friends. In some cases, these were multi year evolutions with meetings every month, books suggested for reading, podcasts suggested for listening, educating them on basic accounting, tracking, measuring, and commanding some greater level of expertise and authority based on their behavior, instead of demanding it based on their rank and made up authority within a particular martial arts system. We watched and actively participated in the growth of several businesses that still exist and are still growing today, almost 20 years later. I watched as they’d get up the nerve to take my advice and raise their monthly fees.  I watched as they’d eventually work up the nerve to get all their students on autopay each month so that they didn’t have to chase down students for payment each month. I watched as their confidence grew and their belief in themselves grew, which was only bolstered even more by the students as the instructor’s attitude and belief systems evolved. It was what we call a virtuous cycle. We would hound the teacher about upgrading their belief systems, believing in themselves and encouraging them that they were worth more than they were charging, encouraging them that there job was to pass on their experience and knowledge and not chase down money, encouraging them to believe that, learn the script, and pass that on to the students with no crack in your voice or hesitation in your words. And that only comes when you truly believe your valuable enough not to wallow or beg for something.
 
When you believe in yourself and what you’re doing, offering, teaching, or delivering, you ask for what its worth and then shut up. You don’t explain why its so expensive, make excuses for why somebody cant pay, justify why its ok for somebody to take your time, knowledge, and expertise and then not pay on time, and so on the value education went until eventually they began to believe it. And something magical happened. They would use our words, our scripts and language, and everything we had been teaching them and they’d ask for what they believed they were worth at the time. In one instance, a really great BJJ teacher was charging $40 per month and teaching 4 days per week. I was charging $90 per month for Aikido instruction and $150 per hour for private instruction, and this was 10 and 20 years ago. He was charging $40 and easily worth $90. The problem was, he didn’t believe it. He knew he was extremely good at what he did and had tons of experience. He knew he was a good teacher, he just had some kind of financial block where he couldn’t believe he was worth more than $40 per month and he had also told himself a made up story that people seeking out what he was teaching wouldn’t pay more than that in our market. This guy was literally the best there was at what he did. I’ll admit, it took me several years of constant hammering him on his belief system before I was able to breakthrough the mental barriers he had built up regarding his own value. We’d meet for lunch each month, we’d go out after his classes occasionally, and many times we’d just sit in the dojo office after his classes and I’d do my best to get him to start believing more in himself. Eventually, and somewhat exasperatedly, he relented and said, ‘fine, I’ll do it!’ And this was only because we was fed up with how little money was coming in from his efforts and how much he hated having to ask the students to pay him each month. He raised is fees from $40 to $50. He was quite sure every last student would quit and he’d be broke. What I constantly explained to him was that some will leave you. But those who cant see you as any more valuable than the $40 you’ve been charging need to go out into the world to have their value filters reset. I’d ask him, is there anybody out there as good as you where that student can get the same education for $40 per month. The answer was a hard no! Ok, then let them go for now. They’ll either be back and willing to pay your new fees, or they’ll keep trying to find something to fit their budget. What will happen however, is you’ll attract new people willing to pay your new fee and they see you as being worth $50. Your job is deliver more value than you’re charging and they’ll gladly pay. Then, when your classes get full, its time to charge all the new students $65 per month. Give your current students the grandfathered fee of $50, and every new student is charged $65. If a $50 student quits or takes a leave of absence, they come back at the new fee. This is as much about funding your growth as it is about funding an increase in your belief system! Every time you quote your new fee and a student says ‘great, how do I sign up?’, your confidence will grow and your belief system grows with it. That new student is happy to pay it and they want to milk every ounce of value out of their $65 dollars so they show up more, they train harder, they tell people about it, and they value you more. That’s the virtuous cycle of value.
 
Fast forward to today, this gentleman has the biggest martial arts school in town, charges $110 per month, $100 for a half hour private lesson, has 20+ instructors teaching for him, offers classes 7 days a week, and has 150 steady paying students per month. Not a bad evolution I’d say. He left his old job long ago and makes a nice living doing this full time. Now, could he make a decent living charging $40 per month with 150 students? I guess, if that’s what you want to live off of. The bigger point is that he wouldn’t have 150 students if he was charging $40 per month because at $40 per month his thinking wasn’t big enough to attract 150 students. He didn’t value himself and there was simply no way the market was going to ascribe more value to his offering than what he himself believes. I can tell you from experience in this area because the same lesson was taught to me by Mr. Toyoda. I also know from first hand experience regarding paying for martial arts because after selling my martial arts school to focus on other things, I eventually started doing Brazilian jiu jitsu with a real live Brazilian master who just happened to have a school about 3 minutes from my home. His classes are $175 per month and you’re only allowed one class per day, even though they offer 3 or 4 classes per day. If you want more classes with him, you pay more. How do you think I feel about those classes? I didn’t want to miss any because of the fee, for one. More importantly, the work of assigning value for what I was getting was placed squarely on my shoulders, not the instructors. He has to provide value, for sure! If he doesn’t, people leave. But when you’re paying for something you believe to be relatively expensive, your brain goes out of its way to find the value in that thing and you appreciate it more. It’s a subtle shift in thinking but one that is absolutely necessary to move you to the next level on the expert pyramid. It has almost nothing to do with technical expertise, although in the martial arts examples I just talked about, both of these gentleman are true experts in their field. The difference maker for both, however, is their belief systems and attitudes. They both believe they are worth every penny and more, but not just for their technical expertise, they believe it because of the value they provide over and above the fee, the friendships they cultivate, the way they treat their students, and the leadership they exhibit and inspire within their respective schools.
 
I have two suggestions for everybody listening to this episode with regard to the expert pyramid and elevating your belief systems about what you’re worth based on more than just technical expertise. The first suggestion is to really ponder this idea that you are currently getting paid exactly what you are worth and what you deserve. The market is simply a mirror reflecting back to you your own belief systems and their belief in what your value is worth to them. Don’t blame them. Don’t blame the student who only wants to pay $40 for what you’re teaching, you taught them that that’s what you’re worth. Don’t blame the student who leaves you when you raise your fees to $50. You taught them that you’re only worth $40. They need to be able to see on their own that you’re now worth $50 and then they can come back to you, if they choose. Its not their fault that they don’t see it, its yours. People will always fade from your life when you upgrade your internal software system. They see you as one thing and now you’re changing. Welcome that change and bless those who fade from your life quietly. They were there for a reason and only a season. Relationships cant last forever and most aren’t supposed to. The second suggestion I have is to ponder the crowd you hang out with. You are the sum total of the 5 people you congregate with the most. I said it in a past episode, a quote from the great Bob Sutton, author of the No Asshole Rule, who said that you will become like the people around you, not the other way around. Meaning, they aren’t going to become like you, you’ll become like them. By congregate, I mean hang out with whether online, in person, or however you assemble and gather with others. Its not just referring to your immediate friends and family, it’s the people you allow some influence over you and many of you allow people, their ideas, and their attitudes some influence over you that have no business with any influence. I’m referring to the ones with bad, limiting, or negative ideas and attitudes. For you to upgrade your thinking and belief systems, you will have to upgrade the people you hang with, its that simple. I didn’t say get rid of your friends and family. I simply said that if you’re going to upgrade your thinking and belief systems then you absolutely must upgrade the people you hang with. This goes for every level of your life and thinking. If you want to start charging more than $40 per month for your martial arts classes, you need to start hangin around somebody charging $50, $60, or $70 per month to see what is required and what the mindsets, belief systems, and language is at that level. If you are making $50,000 per year and want to make $75,000 or $100,000 per year, you need to hang with people making that or more to see what the difference in mindset, belief systems, and language is at that level. If you’re making $400,000 per year and want to go to $750,000, the rule is the same, find somebody making $1,000,000 or more per year and hang with them. One of the big problems in the appraisal industry is so many of you work from home and don’t force yourselves to be around big thinkers. You may not want to go from $100,000 to $500,000, but maybe you want to learn how to go from $100,000 working 70 hours per week to $100,000 working 40 hours per week and that requires seeking out people doing it and those who likely think bigger than you.
 
I’ve been extremely lucky to learn this lesson early on while studying with and learning from Mr. Toyoda. Nobody was too big, too smart, or too successful for him to seek out and partner with on some project. He knew that if he wanted to grow to another level in business, he would have to befriend somebody who had experience at that level and offer them some kind of value exchange. I watched in awe as a 20 year old kid how he so successfully sought out, attracted, and managed relationships with people that were far more successful than he was at the time and how meticulously he took notes, asked questions, and let some of their success juice rub off on him. If you want to grow, an upgrade is in order my friends. First you have to begin updating the software of your mind, heart, and soul, and then the quality of people you surround yourself with and let influence you. Remember, what you have and who you are right now is exactly what you deserve and a reflection of your current level of thinking. If you’re happy where you are, cool, nothing to do. If you’re not, and most people aren’t, its time to upgrade the software!
 
Thank you my friends for tuning in again this week and hopefully taking a little bit from each episode. I really appreciate all of you and and your investment of your most valuable currency, your time. I’m still on vacation this week but that doesn’t mean the podcast is on vacation. As always, I encourage all of you to take some time for reflection, remodeling of your life and business, and time to recharge. Life is short, life is fragile, and time once spent can never be retrieved so spend it wisely my friends and on things that bring value to your life and the lives of others. Everything else is a waste of that most precious resource. Let’s meet back here again next week, same time, same corner of the world, and grow a little bit more together. I’m out…