The Value Ladder- The Appraisers Climb Toward Success!

​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 and thank you for stopping by my little section of this planet this week, my little value café if you will, where I will gladly give you a double shot of value espresso and do what I can to wake you up to a new way of seeing and doing things that will hopefully lead to a richer life experience, a more profitable business, and most importantly in my opinion, a business that you enjoy waking up for each day instead of one you dread thinking about. I cant do it all though my friends, you’ve got to do some of the work. One of the the most frustrating things a teacher experiences in their career is when they see people struggling even when they’ve been given all the information they need to make positive changes. Changes that, if implemented, could literally be the difference between losing money on Monday and profitable by Wednesday, or not wanting to get out of bed on Tuesday to jumping out of bed on Thursday excited to take on the day and create the life and business maybe you imagined one day long ago but, at some point, gave up on. All of those things are a reality and the options run the gamut. All people, myself included, have the ‘don’t want to get out of bed’ days, that’s just part of the human experience. But not everybody has the ‘jump out of bed ready to take on the day’ days and they are possible, but they are a choice. If you have taken anything from this show, hopefully it is that life, business, those we surround ourselves with, they’re all a choice. No, you cant pick your parents or your siblings, or crazy uncle Earl, his wife Eunice, and their little nose pickers June Bug and Willie, but you get to choose who you surround yourself with and what kind of effect you’ll allow certain people to have on you on any given day. And by the way, you do also get to choose what you do for a living. Despite lots of emotion and snarling to what one would think is the contrary, you DO get to choose your station in life. In fact, wherever you are today and whatever you are doing today is simply in indicator of the choices you made yesterday, last week, last year, 10 years ago, or more.  That’s all it is. Whomever you are with, whatever you do for a living, the car you drive, the room you’re sitting in right now, those were all choices you made at some level. Positive change begins the very moment we accept that everything we are, everything we have or don’t have, and everyone who is in our lives at this moment is a choice we have made. It’s called taking responsibility for you. You don’t have to like it right now, you can be pissed off at your current circumstances, you can angry and upset at your current spouse or significant other, you can be frustrated that you might not have either of those, but you MUST understand at some level you’ve chosen all of this. And when you do make that shift, things begin to change.

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I’ll share one of our coaching secrets with all of you and it may seem a bit unorthodox initially but I’ll try to explain where it comes from and why we do it. My hope in doing so is two fold; first and foremost is to hammer home this point to you that your life, your business, your spouse or significant other, your house, your car, your kids, and your three legged dog are all your choice. ‘But Blaine, my kids aren’t a choice, I have to take care of them and I cant afford a nicer car and I cant leave my wife because she has good insurance’. Listen superstar, I didn’t say you have a choice whether or not to take care of your kids, we simply say that everything you are and have in your life was and is your choice at some level. You chose the person you’re with whether you like them now or not. You chose to have children with them whether you like your kids now or not. You chose your career path, your vehicle, the things you’ve spent your money on,  the money you’ve saved or not saved, the money you’ve invested or not invested, the cigarettes in your pocket, all of it was and is a choice you’ve made at some point. Some things you can change today, some things you cant. Not telling you to give away your kids. I’m telling you simply to begin accepting that EVERYTHING was your choice at some level. It’s only then that you begin to see the universe of choices available to you each and every moment. Secondarily, I’m going to share with you one of our coaching secrets in the hopes that it will get you thinking about these things in advance of reaching out to me hoping that I can fix your problems. I cant fix your problems. I can help peel away some of the layers of misunderstanding, maybe reveal some new ways of seeing things, offer some suggestions on things to be aware of and address in your life and business, but the fixing is and always will be up to you. So one of our secrets is what we call the ‘value ladder’ and we use it on our very first interview with potential coaching clients all the way through our relationship, however long that may last. The value ladder is a questioning and revelation process that helps both of us understand what the real issues are so that we can better address the real issues and not keep struggling with what you may initially think the issues are.
 
If you’ve ever been in a conversation with somebody who is complaining about some aspect of their work or life, you’ll probably recognize some of the same thoughts you’ve had while listening to them and, hopefully, also recognize an identifiable thinking pattern within the person complaining. They’ll be complaining about some aspect of their life and you, being the good friend, either just listen or commiserate, which means to sympathize with or feel sorry for them. You might even jump in bitch right along with them. Nevertheless, if you hear the same complaints enough from this person, at some point you’re thinking, and may even say so out loud, ‘why don’t you do something about it?’ So, the value ladder is a tool that we use to wade through some of the thinking patterns and belief systems to give both of us a better understanding of how you got where you are, why you’re still there, where you want to go, etcetera. What I need you to imagine in the theater of your mind is a ladder, but this ladder is three rungs deep in a hole. Imagine a manhole cover has been pulled off of the sewer and the ladder is three rungs deep into the sewer. The bottom rung represents most people’s thinking about a variety of topics on any given day. Not that your thinking is always in the sewer, but the bottom rung represents your habitual patterns of thinking which keep the view around us fairly steady, stable, and undisturbed. It’s what allows us to operate without going off the rails on any given day because we are pattern seeking creatures and we like homeostasis, or balance, and so we keep our world views and beliefs close to us at all times to give what we see around us some meaning and direction day to day. This can obviously be a good thing because stability is what we all seek at some level. The problem, of course, is that often we are stuck in a loop or pattern and cant seem to see above the street level where the view expands and our options open up. So this image of the ladder three rungs deep below the street level represents our habitual thinking and action patterns day to day. When you come to us for coaching you fill out a questionnaire that asks you a variety of questions about your life, your business, your hopes, dreams, desires, problems, strengths, weaknesses, etcetera. This is all pretty standard stuff and nothing too out of the ordinary. The questionnaire, however, is the starting point for a further conversation whereby we start talking about all of your answers to the questions on the questionnaire. What we’re doing in this process is we’re starting on the first rung of the ladder and we’re starting the climb out of the hole and hopefully into the light. What the rungs on the value ladder represent are the steps necessary to peel away the layers of understanding, or misunderstanding, and, with the help of a detailed questioning process, we start to ascend the rungs of the ladder toward the light and a new view.
 
I wont go into detail all of the questions we ask as we ascend the value ladder because the point of this whole discussion is simply to point out to you the sometimes annoying process we put you through in order to get to some kind of enlightenment about what it is you truly want and where you want to be, and to let you know that you can do this process yourself. Its not easy to do by yourself because you typically want somebody more objective than the one stuck in the issue, but it can be done. People often start out saying they want one thing and they end up with something totally different. People also often say they want something but they have a whole host of internal struggles and issues that will never allow them to experience what they say they want and the value ladder helps us to at least uncover some of those internal blocks and sticking points. I said earlier that I was going to reveal one of our coaching secrets and its simply this: when we start out on the value ladder together we start with your answers to the questions on the interview form you filled out and then we take you through a process whereby we simply keep asking you the equivalent of the question ‘why?’. Kind of like a discussion with a young child who asks why the sky is blue. The parent gives an answer and the child says, ‘but why?’, to which the parent gives another answer, only to be followed up by the child with another, ‘but why?’ Anybody who has children knows this process and knows just how annoying and exacerbating it can be to have a child who is simply and honestly interested in learning and getting answers continue probing a parent who thinks they have the answers past their ability to explain or express an answer. The child keeps asking the parent, ‘but why?’, until eventually the parent says, “I don’t know why buddy, it just is”, or some other similar response. And in this example, the child is the real teacher. The child, not satisfied with the initial answer given to the question, pushes the parent beyond their ability to answer by probing deeper and deeper until eventually the parent has to give up and say, ‘I don’t know’. Now, a good parent, when pushed to the extent of their knowledge on a particular topic, will say, ‘that’s a good question, lets learn about this together.’ However, since most of these conversations take place in the checkout line at the grocery store, the parent gets a free pass since all will likely be forgotten once they get home.
 
Nevertheless, the point of that example is that the value ladder gives us a framework and a questioning process through which we can push, probe, and question beyond the typical answers that most are subconsciously trained to give. The first couple rungs on the ladder are the questions and answers that you have been giving to people possibly your whole life. So we ask, ‘what do you want?’, to which you reply, well I want to be more efficient or make more money or have more time. And like the child asking about the blue sky we probe, ‘why do you want that? What will that do for you?’ You’ll ultimately answer with something like, ‘well, that will allow me to do X, Y, and Z.’ To which we’ll continue probing, ‘and why do you want that? What will that do for you, what will life or business be like once you have that?’ To which you’ll reply something like, ‘well then I can take a few more vacations or invest a little more money or spend more time with family’, to which I’ll probe a little further and ask you, ‘and what’s important about that to you? What will having those things or that time do or mean for you?’ And we will go on like this until I am satisfied that I have worked through all of your subconscious guarding tactics and bullshit answers that even you don’t know you’ve been giving to these kinds of questions. We go through this process and from time to time I’ll catch you saying something or hear you say something in a particular way to which I’ll say, ‘hey, I just heard you say something that was interesting to me. Why do you think or feel this way about this particular thing?’ And we go on like this through the initial interview until I am satisfied that we both have a better understanding of what the real issue are and what is really important to you. Now, this may sound like a therapy session to you and good coaching often is helping someone unravel things and revealing to the person issues, views, belief and speech patterns that they themselves are unaware of. I’ve said it many times on this show that we operate daily based on subconscious programming and 95% of our decision making moment to moment is below the level of conscious thought. We don’t even know or realize we’re doing it. That means that only 5% of our daily decisions and results are based on conscious reasoning and true thought. This is what makes it so difficult to do the value ladder exercise by yourself because you often wont be able to see or hear your own issues and patterns which is what keeps you in them. It can be done. If you are a super self aware individual, extremely honest with yourself, and can hear and see your own issues and patterns, it can be done. Unfortunately, most people simply don’t have this level of self awareness and honesty. If they did, everybody would be solving all of their own issues, everybody would be making all the money they need, they’d be lean, muscular and healthy, they’d be working 20 hour weeks, taking 6 month vacations, and solving the worlds problems. We often don’t see our own issues nor the things that may be right in front of us that need work which is why an objective and unbiased friend, mentor, coach, partner, or whomever you trust to help you is often necessary to help move you beyond where you are to where you want to be. The really good ones often help you realize that where you thought you wanted to go, be, do and have are not really the things you seek.
 
The value ladder process is our way of moving you beyond the basic answers and the things you think you want to a place where new understanding can break through. That’s why the image of the ladder in the sewer is so powerful, in my opinion. The first three rungs of the ladder are basically in the dark. It represents stagnant thinking, limiting thought patterns, stuck ways of doing things, fear of change, and a whole system of protecting what is out of fear of the unknown. Once we move past those three rungs with the questioning and probing process we start to climb up and out of the sewer into the light and you can start to see a much broader view and possibly a new reality. I made this point in the last episode about working too much that the quality of your questions will determine the quality of your answers and eventual results. I say it often because it is one of the many issues that keep appraisers stuck. It’s the very things that keep most human beings stuck. They’re simply asking the wrong questions and so the answers you’re getting on a variety of issues are often just confirmations of what you already believe. This is called confirmation bias and it’s a sneaky little disempowering tactic that many don’t even realize they’re using on almost everything they believe. We see it most often in political, religious, and economic discussions. Somebody begins with a premise, they throw their premise into the middle of the ring to be challenged, they defend their premise with all of the news stories from their preferred stations and networks, they find all of the internet support for their position, and they will completely disregard, discount, and shout down any information that challenges their already believed premise. Dustin Harris did a great podcast episode on cognitive dissonance and that’s what we see and hear in these types of examples. Cognitive dissonance is when you hold so strongly to a belief or a stance that no amount of conflicting information can move you off of your stance, even if the information being presented to you is more factually correct than the information you already believe in. The mind wont allow two contradictory beliefs to occupy the same brain space because that causes pain and discomfort so, since we seek balance and comfort, we will tend to always move back to the belief system that we’re most comfortable with and we build up whole story lines, plots, characters; some real, some imagined, and support systems that also confirm for us what we already believe. If, for example, you get all of your information about the world from FOX news, you will be wholly unswayed by anything presented by, say, CNN or MSNBC and will use terms like libtard, snowflake, and leftist. And if you get all of your information about the world from CNN, you’ll simply laugh at the FOX news proponents for being mindless right wing drones. The reality in that scenario is that all of those networks present extremely biased views of the world that often don’t match up with reality at all but you feel more comfortable with one over the other and any conflicting information, however objectively and factually more correct than what you believe, will simply be tossed in favor or your own biases. This, my friends, is what keeps people stuck. In life, in business, in relationships, in their financial situations, in their friendships, and in almost any area of life that we all may struggle in. Not being open to information that, at first, may be unwelcome to you. Information that may challenge your long held beliefs and stances, be they political, religious, economic, industry based, relationship based, or simply beliefs about life and the way things are. Or at least the way you think things are.
 
Noam Chomsky has spoken many times and in many ways on this topic and once said,  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” John F. Kennedy said at a Yale University commencement address, “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” It’s about becoming comfortable with discomfort my friends. In fact, for the Value Syndicate members, if you received and listened to the bonus content about the 10 wisdom keys for appraisers, the 10th wisdom keys is this very statement. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Growth occurs when we put ourselves in uncomfortable positions. Most people go through their lives seeking comfort and will surround themselves with comfortable views, biases, beliefs systems, and the people who think, act, and believe just as they do. Just look around you at the people you have in your life. They’re most likely people who believe just as you do. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, we all do it to some degree as we gather around us those we feel most comfortable being around. But the people we tend to choose and surround ourselves with throughout life tend to be those that support our biases, strongly held beliefs, and thinking patterns because we tend to dismiss and push away those whose opinions and beliefs differ from our own. We may not even notice we’re doing it. Just one day we wake up and take stock of our relationships and see that all of our friends are republicans, or they’re all democrats, or their all catholic, or Mormon, or whatever your beliefs and biases dictate. My friends, we don’t grow that way. We grow by surrounding ourselves with a variety of people and experiences that challenge our beliefs and biases, even the ones…no, especially the ones that challenge those belief systems and biases. And a challenge is what I have for all of you. The value ladder is about discomfort and challenge because the process of climbing the rungs of the value ladder is one of challenging your answers with more questions. Digging through the biases and beliefs that have guided you to where you are today which, for some, is stuck. The only way to get unstuck is with tough questions and being willing to go through the uncomfortable process of being challenged. It’s how you would get in shape if you were out of shape. You need somebody to push you, challenge you, slap that piece of pizza out of your hand and hold you accountable to the things you say you want. Sometimes that person is you. If you’re strong enough and objective enough you can do it on your own. If you’re not, I would encourage you to seek out somebody who can and will challenge your long held belief systems and biases. Ask for honest feedback and be willing to accept it when it comes. In fact, you may have to push the person you ask for this kind of help to be more honest than they will initially because people who know you will be a bit reticent to be harsh and too honest with you. That can be the benefit of an objective and unbiased coach or mentor, somebody willing to hurt your feelings for your future benefit, as harsh as that may sound, where people who have their own motives and biases, like remaining your friend or spouse, may be a bit hesitant to tell you a painful truth.
 
Nevertheless, the challenge for you over the next few weeks is to seek out these kinds of people and experiences and seek out opinions and information that may, at first, be unwelcome to you or challenge your current worldview. I dare you! It’s not a challenge to go out and get into debates on abortion or your particular brand of politics. It’s actually the opposite. It’s a challenge for you to ask questions of those who will be willing to give you an honest answer, an honest opinion, an honest view about you, your beliefs, your patterns, and your views. Don’t speak, don’t respond, don’t defend. Ask more questions. Regardless of how painful it may seem initially to hear these things about yourself and your long held beliefs and biases, keep probing, keep asking questions. Listen, learn, grow. What the value ladder helps me do is get to a point with others where we both have a better understanding of what is truly important to the person, often things they didn’t even realize were important to them, and past the basic pat answers the person is used to giving. If any of you are familiar with Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, Maslow was a psychologist who developed a theory of human motivation in the 1940’s and evolved it into an explanation of how human beings are motivated to make decisions. If you’ve ever seen Maslow’s hierarchy in picture form it’s a pyramid with the base representing the lowest level of human motivation. Maslow’s theory states that human beings have to satisfy the lowest level of needs before moving to the next level. Each successive level of motivation and needs must be met before ascending to the next level. So the lowest level of human motivation is physiological, which is often translated as food, clothing, and shelter. Basically, the theory says that nobody gives two shits about love, self esteem, and self actualization if you’re starving and cold. The next level after food, clothing and shelter is safety and shelter, then belonging and love, then self esteem and finally, at the apex of the pyramid is self actualization. The value ladder somewhat follows Maslow’s hierarchy in that we are seeking the highest level of need at the top of the ladder through the questioning process. We want to get to what is truly important to you as an individual, as a business owner, as a human being, as a parent, spouse, sibling, or whatever is truly important to you. The only way to get there though is to start at the bottom rung and work our way through food, clothing, and shelter, which is the way most people start out their answers. They start with basics and then we help move them through the basics ultimately attempting to arrive at the top of the pyramid , or in this case the value ladder, with a bunch of answers to what is truly important to you as an appraiser, as a business owner, and as a human being.
 
It’s a very enlightening process and one I would encourage you all to put yourselves through. I would highly recommend that you grab a pen and a pad of paper when you do this exercise because you’ll want to relieve your brain of the answers that bubble up lest you get bogged down trying to remember what was important to you. By seeing your answers on the page, it tends to also trigger other emotions and thoughts, some you’ll later laugh at just how unimportant some of those things really are to you once you’ve moved beyond the basics and into what is truly important. So just start by asking yourself what you want from, or out of, your business. Write down the question and then write out your first answer right away. Don’t think too long and hard about this one because we want to capture your first thoughts on the question. This can be a revealing first step because your initial thoughts may surprise you when you see them on paper. This step alone can trigger you to start reevaluating what’s important to you and what you truly want. Once you have your first question written and answered, the steps of the value ladder are simply questions stemming from that first answer. Whatever your answer to that question is, simply ask question number two which is, ‘what about that is important or valuable?’, or ‘why are those things important to me?’, or ‘what would having those things mean to me?’ After you ask that question, see what bubbles up and write it down. And then you simply keep climbing the ladder up and out of the hole its in by continuing to ask ‘what and why’ questions. ‘What about that is really important to me?’, ‘why is that important to me?’, ‘what would having that thing mean for my business or life?’ And so on. You just keep pushing yourself to continue examining your answers and stripping away the layers. What I’d like to challenge yourself to do is move through seven levels of ‘what and why’ questioning. So you start with your first basic question and then keep peeling with what and why questions until you’ve got seven answers. The reason the number seven is important is because the first three answers will take you through conscious and subconscious programming. These are the answers your ego has told you were important and the script you have told yourself for a long time. The next 3 or 4 answers are the real ones that get to the truth of what is truly important to you and your business. The last 3 answers, answers 5, 6, and 7 are the ones you want to focus on when making changes in your life and business because these tend to be the ones that give you the most insight into what your values are, what’s important to you, and how you want to structure or restructure your life and business to match those values. Push yourself to the top rung of the value ladder my friends and your view will be completely different from what you have now.
 
I’d like to thank you for hanging out with me again this week my friends and investing your most valuable currency, which is of course, your time. I really appreciate you spending that valuable time with me and, more importantly, having the courage to do the difficult work of asking questions the answers to which may at first be unwelcome to you. Just know that if the initial answers you get are at first unwelcome to you, they make you uncomfortable and feel bad, it’s a sign to listen. Be comfortable with being uncomfortable and be willing to throw away old views, beliefs, and opinions that have no support except that which you’ve been using to prop up those opinions with which may have no factual basis whatsoever, they just make you feel good. Use the value ladder to help you climb out of the hole and get a better understanding of who you are, where you want to, what you want for your business, and who you want to be. Until then my friends, I’m out!