The Vital Bridge Between Average and Great for Appraisers!

​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. So awesome being back in the Real Value studios this week with producer Zero doing what we love to do which is to share information, hopefully add some value for you, and, lest you think that I just share the value and don’t get any myself, you’d be incorrect because one of the things I learned from my Aikido and Zen teacher, Mr Toyoda, is that if you want to know something very deeply you have to teach it so making notes for and writing this podcast each week helps me go deep with the information and strategies that I teach others and it simply helps me be a better teacher and business coach. For that I have all of you to thank because without all of you to help me refine my message and words and without your generous feedback, I wouldn’t have the same opportunity to grow myself. So to all of the listeners of this podcast and all of the current coaching and mastermind members, and, of course, future members, I truly thank you.

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A question I get fairly often from people, and I got this question a lot when I was traveling the world teaching Aikido and defensive tactics, is who coaches or teaches you? If you’re teaching and coaching others, at what point do you run out of stuff to teach or how do you keep advancing and growing yourself. I cant tell you just how much I love this question because it’s a question that indicates great insight by the questioner and its also a question about their future, even if they don’t realize it. When people ask that kind of question, they’re thinking about their own future and wondering what they’ll do when they get to the point where they can start teaching and coaching others. In essence, they are asking, “what will I need to do to keep growing myself once I start teaching others?” Do you hear it? The question isn’t really about me. I’m just the mirror reflecting back to them some aspect of their own future and they’d like a few answers and some guidance about what roadblocks or challenges may await them when they arrive at a similar place on a similar path. Being the trusted guide that I try to be, I can appreciate the question because I was asking the same questions many years ago of all of my teachers in whatever I was learning. And the answer is quite simple. You simply keep asking questions. You seek out people and opportunities to continue learning, never settling for the first answer and never believing that there is any arrival point in your journey. This was expressed to us often on the journey to earning a black belt in the martial arts. The teachers would often say that earning a first degree black belt is merely mastering the basics and simply arriving at some place you once thought was the peak, only to learn once you got there that it was merely a brief rest on a never ending journey on a long climb that never really ends. What you thought was a peak was simply a little outcropping on whatever mountain you’re climbing and you couldn’t see the rest of the mountain because of the angle of climb, the lack of eyes and knowledge to see it, and the cloud cover. Once you arrive at this little spot on your journey you’d look up only to see that the mountain is infinitely bigger than you could have ever imagined. As you look down to see how far you’ve come you realize that you’ve only climbed a relatively short distance compared to the rest of the journey ahead. And I can tell you from 40+ years in the martial arts and 30+ years as an entrepreneur that the first little outcropping on any journey is where most folks stop. The world is filled with millions of first degree black belts in a variety of martial and aesthetic arts. First degree black belt is like receiving your diploma for graduating from middle school, not even high school. It says only that you’ve mastered some of the basics, hung around for long enough, maybe paid enough money to the organization to be awarded this useless piece of cotton that means something to you, but likely not many others. There are fewer second degree black belts. Fewer still are the third and fourth degrees, and if the first degree black belts number in the millions, the fifth and sixth degree black belts number only in the thousands.
 
Any time one continues growing in anything they pursue they’ll be able to look back and remember all those who have decided to step off the journey before they did. For whatever reason; people move on, they lose passion for the thing, they only wanted to reach that particular level and then try something else, it was a bucket list item that got checked off, injury, boredom, you name it and the list is long and irrelevant. Whatever the stated reason for ending one’s journey on a particular path, one of the often unspoken reasons people leave a martial art, a sport, a job, a career, even a relationship is the lack of growth. When we stop growing we start dying. When we feel lost or stagnant we start to see just how green the grass is in some other area. It’s a normal part of the human experience to want to keep growing and continue to be challenged, to be held accountable, to be pushed through difficult times and learning experiences. And its normal to quit something when one feels they’re not growing anymore. I’ve done it, I know you’ve done it, we’ve all left something or someone because of the lack of growth and that’s not a bad thing. What I’d like to say about it, however, is that often we have it in our minds that continued growth and learning is mono directional or that it comes to us via something or somebody else. It is fed into our brains by somebody offering some kind of education. We may have to seek out the education but its always there in the form of a school teaching that very thing, a con ed course, or a teacher of that particular thing. We ask and it is given to us. But what if its not out there? What if there is no school teaching that particular thing? What if there is no identifiable individual teaching or offering education in that particular discipline? What if there is no con ed course? In the appraisal business we deal with this to varying degrees with the whole mentorship model. We assume our mentor knows everything we need to know until one day we figure out maybe they don’t know everything. We start looking around and asking some others on forums and social media only to found out maybe our mentor doesn’t really know squat and we’ve been trained subpar. We have the opportunity to take some courses, maybe learn from somebody else the technical aspects of our profession to be better appraisers, but we will always get to a point where the technical is no longer solving the problem. We start to realize that learning yet another way to extract market support for a bathroom adjustment is not feeding your desire to build your business, its not bringing in any new clients or better clients, the clients you do have don’t give a damn whether you can support your bathroom adjustment, and your family cares even less.
 
You see my friends, there are external limits to almost everything. We are limited by our physiology in that there are simply some things that will never be no matter how positive your thinking is. I will never be an NBA star as a 48 year old that stands 5’9” on a good day with my absolute best posture. I know there have been others like Spud Webb who were shorter and did make it to the NBA but the odds are severely stacked against me at this point in my life. Physiology plays a role to some degree. I don’t like to think that we are limited by our brain capacity, but the reality is that I was never cut out to be a physicist. In fact, I wasn’t even really cut out for college. I failed algebra three times in high school and they had to put me in the remedial math class which was aptly named, ‘consumers math’, where we learned how to count change in a cash resister till and balance a checkbook. I wasn’t stupid but I just couldn’t make sense of algebra so I got bored. When I got bored I tended to just give up and look for things that interested me more and that would lead to bad grades in some of those classes. Even today, trying to help my boys with their algebra and trig homework was a lost cause because my brain just doesn’t get it. I hate to admit it but it something of a limitation for me. I’m sure if I took a class now and really buckled down and studied I could pass an algebra class. In my 30 some years since high school, I’ve learned a very valuable skill and that’s the skill of learning how to learn. I’m sure they tried to teach me that in high school but I wasn’t listening so it was lost on me back then. All of those years studying something I was interested in, like martial arts and business, taught me how to learn like a pro. When we’re interested in something, learning comes easy because we tend to be excited about it. When we’re not excited about it it tends to be difficult and maybe even a tad confusing. One of the secrets to the skill of learning is learning to make things interesting and exciting even when we’re not excited about the topic. I talked in a previous episode called “when the passion fades, and why you don’t need it” about the difference between having a passion for something and cultivating a passionate energy for something. If we wait around for passion to show up, we will likely be disappointed when it doesn’t arrive. Its at those times that we have to recognize the difference between passion for something and being passionate about something, like learning. I realized that I didn’t have to necessarily like the subject all that much as long as I was passionate about learning. I’m not all that passionate about the technical aspects of appraising but, since I am passionate about learning and I’ve been able to tie in my love of teaching into my business model, I realized that learning the technical aspects of appraising backward and forward would, not only make me a better appraiser, it would help me be able to explain it better to my clients and potential clients. Learning the deeper technical aspects of appraising meant that I could break the concepts down into their component parts and then put them into the laypersons language to make the ideas more palatable and understandable to the average person. This is that curse of knowledge idea that I’ve been talking about over the past several episodes. We know something so well that we tend to speak to people outside of our profession in language that turns them off or makes it difficult to have a conversation with us so it behooves us to dumb down our professional vernacular to levels one or two so that its easy to understand. We don’t have to teach our realtors, lenders, homeowners, attorneys, and estate planners to be appraisers, they don’t want to be appraisers, that’s why they’ve hired us. They want to know the basics and what it all means for them.
 
So learning to learn has become one of the most valuable skills that I believe I have acquired over the years because it means I am able to reframe almost any topic or situation in a way that allows me to listen for the key points, the vital information, the component parts, and the how it all fits together regardless of whether or not I like the topic. Learning how to learn is another way of saying ‘get over yourself’! As appraisers, our job to some degree is to strip the transaction of most of the emotion to see what really lies beneath it all and what the market says. As students of life and business, we must also strip the topics of most of the emotion so that we can see what the topic is really saying without our own biases, preconceived notions, and beliefs about a particular topic. When we label something as interesting or boring, we set ourselves up for a predetermined outcome before it actually happens. When we label something as good or bad, we close ourselves off to any other options that may lead to a deeper understanding of a particular situation or topic. When I teach on the topic of not labeling I refer to all of the options available to us like playing a card game with a huge hand of playing cards splayed open in your hands so that you can see all of the suits, the black and red, and all of the numbers on the cards. You have so many cards in your hands that you can hardly hold onto all of them and the playing cards represent all of your options and ways of seeing or framing a situation. When you label something as good, bad, happy, sad, salty, sweet, dark, light, or whatever choices you give yourself, you immediately collapse your hand of cards down to one card which is the card at the very front of the deck. You close them all as if you just lost the game and you are throwing your hand into the middle of the table. You close all of the other options you have in your hand of ways to see or perceive a situation or ways to respond to a situation. Learning how to learn means keeping your hand of cards splayed open so you can always see all of the options you have available to you at any given moment. You can choose one card, or option, and if that one doesn’t work well for you you have dozens of other options for how to see and label something.
 
Don’t collapse your hand of cards when it comes to learning. How this relates to the question I’ve been asked so many times over the years about how a teacher or coach keeps learning is really a simple one. The teacher has to keep learning, growing, and seeking out new opportunities to be pushed and its usually outside of the industry that one works in. I can tell you that, of course, I still learn from people within our industry. I learn from my friend, the Appraiser Coach, Dustin Harris, I learn from Phil Crawford of the Voice of Appraisal, I learn from many of you in discussions we have on topics, and I learn from a plethora of other teachers within our industry, mostly about the technical aspects of appraising. If you want to truly grow though, you must be looking outside of whatever industry you are in to pull in ideas and practices that other industries are using. Especially in the appraisal and real estate worlds where so many are just doing what everybody else is doing. If you want be different and you truly want to be a trusted guide and mentor, you must constantly be seeking knowledge from outside of your industry. Now, with that being said, seeking information and knowledge from outside one’s industry is only one piece of this puzzle of continuous growth and knowledge. There is one vital piece, the lack of which makes all the learning in the world almost worthless. Its not completely worthless, of course, because information and knowledge have their own benefits and payback. The missing piece that takes all of that information and knowledge to the next level, however, is accountability. Its easy for me to say that I love information and learning and I love to seek out and learn new things so that I am always growing. But if there is no accountability, no one that I am accountable to in putting the information and knowledge into play in my life and business, its really just taking up space in an already over filled brain space. Unless and until there is accountability in place, whether in the form of a supportive life partner, a group of people like a mastermind group or goal accountability group, or a coaching group you are investing your time and money to be part of, the information and knowledge you acquire throughout your journey likely stays in your head and does not get implemented in your business. Is it for everybody? Absolutely not! Not because everybody cant learn and be held accountable but not everybody is coachable. There are some who simply already know everything they think they need and they have it all figured out. They aren’t coachable. Many people grew up never being part of a sports team or a collective whereby you had to listen and be coached in how to do something the right way. There are many who simply cant get out of their own way or their ego’s way to let somebody else point out what they could and should be doing. No, coaching and mentoring is not for everybody and everybody is not for coaching and mentoring.
 
For myself, I have several coaches, some that I have spoken about on the show, some I’ve never spoken about, but the point of having them is to have somebody who will be brutally honest with me and tell me what I’m not doing but should be. There is no point in having ‘yes’ people surrounding you if you want to grow. The better plan would be to surround yourself with ‘yes, but…’ people; people who will say “yes, but what if” or “yes, but why aren’t you doing this” or “yes, but what the hell are you thinking?” I have seen people leave coaching and mentoring programs because they simply didn’t like being told what they should be doing or holding them accountable to certain standards. Worse are the people who say they want something or help with something and then, when held accountable for their actions or goals, come up with all kinds of reasons why it cant be or isn’t getting done. Accountability is like the gas in the engine of growth. Without it, you could still push the vehicle and get it some where but it would be extremely difficult and you wouldn’t get very far. You could roll it to the top of a hill and let it coast down the hill but what happens when the excitement ends and the hill bottoms out? The vehicle stops and now you have to try and push it back up the hill. No, accountability is the fuel my friends and its one of the huge elements missing from the appraisal industry. At least in a real estate or lending office you have work mates, brokers, and bosses willing to hold you accountable. In most appraisal offices there is little to no accountability because they’re mostly one or two person offices just doing what they did the day before. Its not unlike dieting and working out. Until you commit to a gym membership you are unlikely to get off your ass and do anything. If you want to go to the next level in your physical fitness, you commit to a personal trainer that will hold you accountable. Even then, its not guaranteed because you can simply not show up to your training session or cheat on your diet plan. Nevertheless, until there is accountability, You’ll always be pushing up hill. Most people simply don’t have the discipline to hold themselves accountable when the shit hits the fan and things get difficult, busy, or not fun. I’ve been coached and mentored by some of the best coaches in the world in the real estate and mortgage industries and the thing that makes all the difference for the people in those groups is accountability. We spent lots of time on learning scripts for every scenario, time management techniques, prospecting techniques, money management strategies, wealth building concepts, people management strategies, marketing techniques and tactics, internet strategies, letter mailing strategies, and a plethora of other things, but the groups that accomplished the most and were the most successful, hands down, were those of us that were part of the personal or group coaching programs where you had either the coach him or herself calling you every week, or you had accountability partners following up each week and if you hadn’t done what you said you were going to do done by the time they called, there were consequences. Sometimes they were monetary, like donation $100 to the groups favorite charity, and sometimes the consequences were more severe, like being put on notice that another missed assignment and you were out of the group. Some of these were groups that cost upwards of $20,000 to $30,000 per year to be a part of and there’s no refund on your money when you get kicked out. Fortunately, for me, I always got my stuff completed and who do you think reaped the benefits from completing the action? Me! Of course! The group doesn’t benefit from my success other than to see that the activity works and to then be motivated to do it themselves. Of course, in a group like that, it becomes a mastermind group so the success of an individual raises the collective success level of the group and everybody feeds off of that success so, in a way, my success did benefit the group, but all of their successes helped to raise all of us up so it’s a win win.
 
I have some good friends in the real estate industry who run a very successful brokerage in my area and they are all about training and accountability, with themselves, their team, their staff, and everybody who wants to work with them. They are members of a very elite coaching program run by a man named Ben Kinney. If you aren’t familiar with Ben Kinney, its ok, lots of folks outside of real estate won’t know who he is unless you live in Bellingham, Washington where he runs several super successful Keller Williams brokerages and teams, among several other businesses. He puts on an annual conference called ‘Win, Make, Give’ that is a not to be missed conference if you’re in real estate and want to grow your business. He also runs a very exclusive personal coaching program that is one year long and only allows 20 people at a time. The cost is around $30,000 and you have to fly out to his location 4 to 5 times per year to meet in person at his house. You have assignments to complete, you have to submit your P&L statements every month, you have to submit progress reports every month, you have books to read and report on prior to the next meeting, and, if you don’t show up or complete the assignments, you’re out of the group, money lost, and somebody on the waiting list takes your spot. You can imagine, when you’re paying that much money, in addition to flying out there 4 or 5 times per year, putting yourself up in a hotel for 3 days, and investing that much of yourself into something like that, you’re likely not to walk away. I can tell you from meeting with these two friends of mine fairly frequently that they have said on many occasions that it has completely changed their lives and their business and they’re sad its ending after a year. They’re hoping that he creates an advanced course that lasts another year so that they can continue on the trajectory that began with that first commitment to his elite coaching program. Joe Polish and Dan Kennedy, two great marketing teachers and coaches both have business coaching and accountability programs that run between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. Rick Ruby, a well known real estate and mortgage industry coach has a coaching and accountability program called The Core that runs $35,000 per year and is responsible for making somewhere in the neighborhood of 400+ millionaires in the real estate and mortgage businesses. I’m good friends with one of the top coaches in the country for this program and one of the key pieces that he always talks about when we discuss it is the accountability piece. “Without it”, he says, “the training is more or less optional. People could come and go. The coach still gets paid and the people can do with the information and training whatever they’d like, but when you add in accountability to agreed upon activities for each day, week, and month and have to report on those back to the coach, the whole world moves in favor of the person doing the activity. They don’t want to disappoint themselves, their coach, their team and partners, and they want to get the most out of their investment and the only way to do that for the 99.5% of people who simply aren’t good at holding themselves accountable is to have somebody else hold them accountable”.
 
Having been a martial arts teacher for almost 30 years now I can tell you from personal experience that accountability is one of the main things people who come to a martial arts class keep coming back for. They may say it’s because they like the training or that particular style or the physical benefits or what it does for their mind. But I can tell you from developing specific courses over the years and from having live in students participating in very grueling multi year leadership programs, and having done it myself, that the fuel that drives the engine of growth for everyone of those people was the accountability they had subjected themselves to by committing to the program. It is obviously much easier for a live-in student in my Aikido school to show up to class than the student who has to drive 40-50 miles each week to get there, but the student who drives each week can decide on a whim that they don’t want to come in tonight. Maybe they aren’t feeling it after work or traffic is too heavy or they’re too hungry. The live-in student who has committed to being at every single class and has signed up to be coached, taught personally by me, take part in special trainings for live-in students only, and be held accountable by all of the other live-in students grows at an exponentially faster rate and at a much deeper level than the student for whom training is optional. But even those who drove in to the dojo each night for class, they’re ultimately showing up because they very quickly become part of a collective and a family of people on a similar journey. They may all be at different points on that journey but they all share one thing in common beyond the actual training and that’s accountability. They tend to hold each other accountable for showing up to class and giving it their best effort. When somebody doesn’t show up they have a plethora of others hitting them up on social media and text message asking if they’re ok and where were they. This breeds a feeling of camaraderie and respect and enhances the commitment the missing student made to, not only growing themselves, but showing up because its not just about them but about everybody else that benefits when they’re at class. Pretty soon, thinking of missing class becomes a real inner struggle because of the feeling of letting oneself down based on their own personal commitment and goals they’ve set, and also because of all the others that are holding them accountable and for whom they’ve committed to also hold accountable. When you don’t show up to class, not only have you not held yourself accountable, you cant hold anybody else accountable for their training and goals so it becomes a double loss in the accountability column. Obviously, there are legitimate reasons people cant show up from time to time but what we’re talking about in this episode is the big picture accountability piece that is missing from so many people, not just in our industry, but all throughout the business world.
 
The big problem with accountability in our industry is that so many of you are one and two person appraiser shops and the only real accountability is that which you feel to the arbitrary deadlines and turn times imposed upon you by clients and AMCs. That, my friends, is not accountability. That is an externally imposed limitation that is placed upon you by the client that, if missed, has ramifications that could effect your business in a negative way. The accountability that I am talking about is internally imposed accountability with a sought after external component like an accountability partner, coach, or mentor that has ramifications that will most certainly effect your business in an extremely positive way! In fact, without it it is very unlikely that you’d be able to hit the levels you’re ultimately capable of because most people simply wont put themselves through self imposed pain and struggle regardless of the goal. Some of you will. I know some of you personally and you do this on a daily basis with some of your personal and professional activities that push you beyond the you that you were yesterday. And then there’s the expansive middle called the average or mediocre who are pretty ok with where they are, what they have, where they’re going or not going, and no real plan to change that. This is not the group that wants to be told what to do or held accountable because doing so would mean work and self reflection and they’ll be damned if anybody else is going to tell them what their issues are. Of course, there is a group below this but there is no need to discuss this group because giving them attention, energy, and focus only validates their negativity. These are the zombies and the undead I talked about the last episode.
 
Ok, so you get it, there is a missing piece in your business that can easily be filled and I want to give you some ideas on how to fill it if you wish to grow in some area, change in other areas, have more of something and less of something else. I want to be clear that the point of accountability is not necessarily always to grow your business bigger than it is now. I’m working with one of my coaches right now on working less in my business than I already do. I’ve said many times on this show that my work week, at least as it pertains to a very busy appraisal office, is between 30 and 40 hours per week, at most. I’m not ashamed in any way whatsoever that I work that little compared to some of you, yet have a very busy appraisal office that could easily suck up 80-90 hours of my time each week. With self imposed limitations on my time in the business and on the business, I have been able to find efficiencies in my work flow, my business processes, and my mindset so that I can do other things with the additional hours that have been freed up. I’m in the process of trying to shave off another 5-10 of those hours so that I can maintain the same level of production and quality or more in 25-30 hours per week so that I can devote more time to some of my other pursuits. Is it easy? No! Is it worth it? Absolutely! So, for me, its about gaining more time and more life without sacrificing significant income or quality in our product and service. Its also about doing it without adding overhead. In fact, in going through some of our processes, we’re figuring out ways to cut some of our already limited overhead which adds dollars straight to the bottom line with no increase in effort on our part. Whatever it is for you, it can be done, but will likely need an accountability partner to help you. So how do you do it at little to no cost to you? Here’s a couple strategies for you.
 
First, you’ve got to get very clear on what it is you want to do. We talk about this all the time on this show that without some kind of plan for some future achievement or, at least, daily or weekly activity, many of you just kind of take it as it comes in. When its not coming in, there’s a flurry of activity and angst on social media about the impending end of the appraisal business and then, when it ramps back up there’s a flurry of activity and angst on social media about just how swamped you are. Unfortunately, theres also a whole cohort of you who justify this by saying, “yeah, that’s just the appraisal business, its feast or famine. Gotta make it while the sun is shining because you never know when its gonna end”. This is complete and utter bullshit my friends. In every market we’ve ever worked and coached in there is business going on and being done by somebody regardless of market conditions. Whether its being done by you or not is all based on the choices you’ve made or avoided at some earlier point in your career. Nevertheless, its there and it needs to be completed by somebody and, rest assured, there is an appraiser swamped when you’re crying famine. We see it in almost every state in the country and in almost every market. So the first thing that needs to be done prior to asking for accountability help is to get clear on what you want. Without it, no accountability partner can help you. Its one of the first vital things we make all of our students do is fill out their goals, dreams, limitations, roadblocks, past success and failures, beliefs about a variety of things, and their plan for daily, weekly, and monthly activity so that there’s actually something to be held accountable for. Prior to having at least some kind of vision and plan, theres nothing an accountability partner can do for you except to keep asking you if you’ve finished your goals and plans. I can assure you this will get quite annoying for both parties fairly quickly, not to mention fruitless and pointless for both parties. So get to work on at least the beginning of a vision of what you’d like to be doing, being, and having. It doesn’t have to be a detailed business plan. It can be as simple as saying, “I want to work no more than 50 hours per week and here’s my plan to do that.” Once you have at least that, then you can seek out an accountability partner to share some of these things with. I would not recommend a spouse or life partner, by the way. I talked about this in a previous episode and the reason is fairly clear, separation of roles. I don’t recommend asking your lover to also be the one cracking the whip on your goals and plans. It can taint the relationship a bit for both parties so I’d avoid that if you can. I recommend a friend that you really respect and preferably somebody who you perceive as more successful in some regard. If the person you’re thinking of is less successful than you are in some area of if there is some aspect of their life that you don’t regard as being buttoned up, this can come into play later on if they have to lay down the heat because you’re not keeping your commitments. So pick somebody you have respect for and you will listen to when they tell you something has to be done.
 
Once you’ve created some clarity about what you want to realize and you’ve given some thought to whom you’d like to ask to be an accountability partner, its time to have a discussion with this person and also make an offer. If you’re paying an accountability coach or part of a more formal coaching program, you don’t have to make any offers to reciprocate because you’re paying for the coaches mentorship and guidance. That’s the trade. But with a free accountability partner, it cant be a one way street. There has to be a fair exchange or one person will always be giving with no return, which can also place a strain on the relationship. Your proposal should be framed as a two way street proposal for you to hold them accountable to something they’d like to achieve and they’ll do the same for you. Almost everybody has something in their life that they could use help by being held accountable to. They may have let some things sit on the back burner because they know that they’re not capable of holding themselves accountable alone so they just haven’t undertaken them. This is where you can help. It could be a weight loss goal, a physical fitness goal, a savings goal, a business goal, or anything else that you decide together would be a valuable exchange of accountability. From there, the next and very vital step in this process is to decide what the accountability looks and sounds like. Are you going to call each other daily, weekly, monthly? Are you going to meet up in person to go over financials or activity plans? Are you going to go on walks together or go to the gym together? Will your partner send you pictures of their scale as they lose the weight? Will they have to text pics of meals or workout plans? You’ll have to lay out the parameters of the accountability relationship ahead of time so that both people know exactly what is expected of them in the relationship. From there, the next vital piece is repercussions for failure. I hesitate to call it punishment, but the reality is that there has to be some kind of negative repercussions if there is a failure to do what you said you’d do. I’ve seen a variety of methods on this topic and have used a variety of methods to get compliance on peoples stated goals and activity plans, but you’ll have to decide what is painful enough for each of you to make you act on what you said you wanted. This is where most informal accountability relationships fail. They may start out great but if there is no real reason to complete an activity beyond the shame or scolding from a friend, theres no real incentive to complete the process. One method often used is money. Failure to do what you say you’re supposed to do means a certain dollar amount is put into a jar to be paid to a charity of choice, the other party, or even somebody the person really dislikes. I saw this last one in a coaching group where the person committed to putting $50 into the jar every time they failed to meet their activity goals and the money was given to their ex-husband at the end of every month. Guess what almost always happened? You guessed it, he rarely got a dime! Whatever it is, it has to be something that is painful to you and you have to commit to it with your accountability partner. If it’s a fitness or weight loss commitment, maybe its 10 burpees for every activity missed. If you don’t know what burpees are, look them up, everybody hates them universally because they suck! I’d definitely hit my daily activity goals to not have to do burpees, even though we do them in our workouts from time to time.
 
From there, the last part of this accountability partner exercise is to have an end date. If you set out to undertake this project and its open ended, it can lose some steam so I strongly recommend setting either monthly or quarterly meetings and deadlines for each project. Ask your accountability partner for a month or three months of their time and commitment to this thing and agree to review at the end of that time frame. This gives both parties a definite end in sight for both people’s goals and activities. One thing that can easily be grafted on to this exercise is the mastermind group. A mastermind group is a larger group of individuals, typically two or more, of similar mindset and with some kinds of goals and plans for their achievement. I don’t necessarily recommend starting out this exercise by starting a mastermind group because it can be difficult to corral all of the different goals of each member of the group and then decide how accountability will work. However, I have seen many a mastermind group blossom out of Individual accountability partnerships. Two people start an accountability partnership and somebody in their friend or professional group sees the benefits being achieved and wants to be part of it and a mastermind group is birthed. So long as the mastermind group adds to the benefits of all members and doesn’t detract from any individual accountability relationships then more power to you.
 
As always, thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to hang with me in this informal mastermind that we’ve created together called the real value podcast my friends! I truly value your time and hope I’ve given you some things to think about again this week. Accountability is, in my opinion, a dying art and one that can be revived every time somebody steps up and first takes personal responsibility for their own actions, their own growth, their own success, and their own failures. After that, it takes seeking out another person trying to achieve something and then stepping up as a leader and offering yourself as an accountability partner to help them reach their goals. When you do that you’ll be helping another person achieve their goals, dreams, and plans. When its time for you to need some accountability, the right partner will arrive at your doorstep with the right message. As they saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. It has always happened in my own life, even if I had to look back on my life to realize who the teachers were and why they arrived when they did. We may not always recognize the teachers in our lives as such when they’re in front of us. But just knowing that everybody is teaching us something is a good place to start being open to recognizing these people in our lives and also in how to become one to somebody else who may need it. Go find somebody to mentor and guide today my friends, and at the same time, find somebody to be accountable to for some of your goals and plans, and I’ll check back with all of you next week to see how that has turned out. Until then, I’m out.