Want to Give Thanks-Clean the Toilets!

Welcome back to the Real Value Blog, the blog about real estate, lending, appraising, life, success, relationships and well… how it all fits together! Good morning my friends, my name is Blaine Feyen and I am your host for this and every episode of the real value blog and I am so thankful to have the opportunity to hang out with such an awesome tribe of human beings! Thank you for giving me that opportunity and a big fist bump for being a 1%er! No, not a 100%er, although an awesome facebook group for appraisers, you’re in the top 1% of people who actively seek to make themselves better each day and look for educational and uplifting material to feed their minds, hearts, and souls and that is ALWAYS the group I want to hang with so thank you also for including me. 

​To listen to the podcast episode of this blog post, just click here...

---

Todays show is all about…you guessed it, the science of giving thanks! I thought this week a fitting time to get into this topic, what, with the holiday of Thanksgiving being this week and all. I have lots of mixed feelings as we head into the holiday seasons every year primarily because I’m a reader, a real reader by the way. The kind of reader and researcher that never believes the first thing I hear or read on a topic which sends me digging. If there was ever a quality or trait that could stereotype an appraiser it would be this one. We’re naturally curious and trained at digging after information from a variety of sources.  If one were ever to actually do this kind of research on any topic really, you would likely have a few misgivings about this holiday as well.  
  
The picture that is painted for us growing up and in all the children’s books that are read to us throughout our childhoods is one of a wonderful collaboration in the early 1600’s between the pilgrims of Plymouth and the indigenous people that were found there. The reality is much different, of course, as the history books are always written by the victors and conquerors in any story. What we can all be thankful for, of course, is that we weren’t the indigenous people living there back in the 1600’s or you would have either died of small pox, been killed in raids by the visitors from England, or shackled and placed on boats across the ocean to feed the slave trade. Sorry to taint your beliefs about this wonderful story, but reality is often much harsher than the later stories told.  
  
The Thanksgiving story you’ve come to know and celebrate wasn’t added to the national zeitgeist until 1890 (almost 300 years later) as one of many nationalistic stories created to make people feel good about their heritage. In reality, the prayer of thanksgiving that was given on the real first Thanksgiving back in 1673 was given by then governor of the colony of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, giving thanks for the safe return of a group of heavily armed colonists after they had just massacred 700 men, women, and children of the Pequot (pee-kwat) Indian tribe. Of course, by now you’re saying, what the hell Blaine, I thought this was all about the science of giving thanks?! You’re talking about massacres and made up histories! And you’d be right.  
  
The reason I bring it up is because I am a big believer in understanding where we came from in order to know where we’re going. And few things can help us along that path better than knowing the truth about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re headed as a result. I’ve found over the years of teaching people that quite often what inhibits somebody’s growth in a particular area or their ability to move forward is the stories they’ve been told about themselves, or the world, and how these stories become ingrained belief systems and then the software that runs our very lives. We often don’t even realize that this particular tape or software program is running in the background until we’re somehow made aware of it and then the software program is rewritten with new, more empowering information.  
  
I bring up the thanksgiving holiday because it’s a perfect example of a story that has been told that is simply bullshit. We’ve come to believe it because we trusted our elders, teachers, and authority figures and never had any reason to question it. It becomes part of our story and a belief we have about who we are as a people, a nation, and a species. Once you find out the real story, and by the way, there is a REAL story about everything and its almost never what you’ve been told, but once you start to learn about the real story of something you are faced with a dilemma. The dilemma is whether to leave the comfort of your current belief system or venture off down the rabbit hole of discomfort while your beliefs systems and the very pillars that have been holding up your daily routines are slowly dismantled. We’ve all seen or experienced this dilemma when confronted by some kind of information that doesn’t fit our own understanding or bias and we immediately brush it off as BS never looking any further for information to substantiate the potentially better facts that were presented. 
  
I’ve seen it hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the personal and business development arena when somebody, or maybe a company, is presented with information about themselves they don’t like because it doesn’t fit the narrative and they willingly choose to ignore the new information in favor of sticking with what they have always known, thus choosing to never really grow. They’re never willing to ask the tough questions about themselves or their processes. Questions that may yield answers that, at first, are uncomfortable because they clash with the current belief systems but, if accepted, or at least entertained for a bit, will open their eyes, minds, and hearts to a new and better way of being or doing something.  
  
Knowing that Thanksgiving is celebrating something that didn’t really happen and, in fact, is most definitely the exact opposite of what really happened is one of those opportunities where new facts are presented and we’re faced with a question: do I stick with what I’ve been told about this thing because I like eating turkey and mashed potatoes, watching football, and eating leftovers for 4 days after, or do I accept that all is not as I once believed and then learn to reframe the situation, in this case the holiday, in a way that becomes a much more powerful motivator for me to actually live out the ideals that the holiday supposedly represents, which is giving thanks for all that we have. The thing with the Thanksgiving holiday in the US is that the story is not very compelling. At least not compelling enough to make me want to be thankful for everything always. I mean, c’mon, we’re taught that the holiday originated when a bunch of Indians and pilgrims got together and partied for three days to celebrate the wondrous bounty they all shared. I don’t know about you but that story does not make me want to sit down and write out a couple pages in my gratitude journal.  
  
The real story is a shocker that would make the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan look like a Disney movie for kids. It’s not pretty my friends. And its definitely not something I’m thankful for as part of our history. What I am thankful for, however, is that I do know the real history of real human suffering. I am thankful that I live in a time where I can literally have the knowledge of the world expressed to me within seconds. I am for sure thankful that I was not an indigenous person living in upstate New York or Massachusetts back in the early 1600’s and I am thankful for human progress. Did the real story of what happened back in New England at that time have to happen for humans to progress? I don’t think so but it happened and I wasn’t there so I cant go back. What I can do is know what actually happened, learn how and why it happened, learn the belief systems that allowed that kind of thing to happen and be absolutely sure I don’t hold any of those same belief systems about other human beings.  
  
Now, I’m not suggesting you hold court at the Thanksgiving dinner table this year and educate the family about the real history of thanksgiving. I’ve done it and it doesn’t end well, I can assure you! Remember, we love our myths and stories that make us feel good and holiday dinner is not the time to bust open those myths. What I am suggesting, however, is that we make reframing our reality a daily practice so as to live more authentically and, in the case of gratitude and thanksgiving, live healthier, happier, longer, and richer lives as a result. The thanksgiving myth is an opportunity to learn about truth and in doing so, actually be exponentially more thankful for where we have come and what we do have than the story of a three day party with the Indians was ever able to do for me and, I suspect, for you either.  
  
One Sunday afternoon back in 1992, I was sweeping the mat at the dojo where I was living at the time during our normal Sunday afternoon cleaning sessions. These were the times when all of the live-in students would get busy after all the days classes had ended and would clean the whole school, which was three stories, by the way. This was not a quick and easy task and would often be accompanied by some under the breath grumbling by a few of us who would much rather be somewhere else, anywhere else, than inside the dojo for yet another couple hours cleaning up after everybody else. It was on this particular day that my teacher came up from his basement office to help us. My teacher, at the time, was only in his mid 40s but he seemed much older to me at the time because, of course, I was only in my early 20s. Not to mention he was infinitely wiser than I at the time and had endured lifetimes more self induced struggle and training than I even now, after almost 40 years of training, have endured.  
  
As was his nature, he started to drop some wisdom on us while we were cleaning by telling us some stories of his time living in a real zen temple in Japan. In fact, the zen monastery he lived in is revered as one of the toughest and most grueling live-in zen training temples in the world and has a very distinguished lineage of very hard samurai style training. He began explaining to us that in the zen world, work meant food. Meaning, you put in the work daily and then you can eat. This was not some kind of punitive punishment meant to shame one into working. No, this was a deeply ingrained belief system that a day without work is a day without food. The oldest monks and zen masters in the monastery never missed a day of labor lest they break the vows they’ve made to themselves to make the world a better place and be a living example to all about the value of work and the simple value of experience over contemplation. Living and doing is valued much higher than thinking and contemplation in the zen world. This is true in the martial arts world as well. In fact, I would say this is true in the business world as well. That’s not to say that contemplation isn’t valued, it is. It’s just that balance in life is valued even more so too much thinking accomplishes nothing so it must be tempered with physical pursuits.  
  
So a day without work meant a day that you would deny yourself food. It wasn’t necessarily that you would be denied by somebody else the pleasure of eating. It was that you held yourself to a standard whether anyone else was watching or not. That’s what a belief system is. And to make it easier to absorb and integrate this belief system into their daily lives, they believed that cleaning, well everything they did, but especially physical labor was an act of thanksgiving. This meant that when they were working hard in the garden, or building something new on the property, or cleaning the toilets, they were to always conjure some gratitude for their ability to be doing that thing. This was a way to reframe difficult and sometimes seemingly pointless work into an act that benefitted you and others simply because of the way you believed it to be. Your sense of gratitude about the work meant you were always in a mindset of enjoying, or at least accepting, the work for what it was, simply a way to give thanks for our mind, your body, the earth, the food that would be served later, your friends, your teachers, and the almost infinite list of things one would have to contemplate in order to live authentically in that belief system. If you grumbled about the work, nobody else would care. It simply meant that you didn’t fully understand the tremendous opportunity you had in front of you to be grateful for the opportunity to move, to be alive, to be in pain and experience what it means to be a living breathing human being.  
  
When my sensei said that cleaning is an act of thanksgiving, it was like a bomb went off in my soul. For 21 years, cleaning was simply something that had to be done or you were coerced into doing either by threat of firing or by the enticement of receiving your paycheck at the end of the week. Chores in the house were either something you just did to be part of a family or you were given an allowance to do so. Once the inducements and coercion lost its weight with you, the cleaning was no longer something that needed to be done. It wasn’t until my sensei said those words that it suddenly made sense to me. This wasn’t about work for works sake and it certainly wasn’t about getting paid because I was paying for the opportunity. No, this was 100% about how our minds, bodies, hearts, and souls work. This was science without the textbook. This was cutting edge technology developed thousands of years ago that has been carried on by mystics and monks since then.   
  
What he was saying was that we had to reframe how we looked at cleaning so that it wasn’t just about the physical work. That would never be enough. Nor would threats and coercion be enough because what happens when threats and coercion have no value for you. No, you must make it part of your belief system and it must be tied to who you are as a human being. The only way to do that is to be able to see it as something with much more meaning than just clearing the dust and hair from the mat or stains from the toilet. Allowing oneself to see it as something much bigger that literally has health and wellness benefits was one way to do that. Of course, he didn’t say to us, “hey, if you love what you do you’ll be healthier and happier”. He simply said, cleaning is an act of thanksgiving. He knew that was all he needed to say to send us down the path of learning what it truly meant to be thankful.  
  
As it turns out, science has learned more about what happens when we’re grateful and its quite enlightening. Gratitude is a thankful appreciation for what an individual receives, whether tangible or intangible. With gratitude, people acknowledge the goodness in their lives. In the process, people ten tend to recognize that the source of that goodness lies at least partially outside themselves. As a result, gratitude also helps people connect to something larger than themselves as individuals which could be to other people, nature, or a higher power. This was where work in the zen temple came in because it was one of the ways the monks could connect with nature. What people also tend to learn is that gratitude is something that can be cultivated and developed with practice. As human beings, we have a built in negativity bias which is a defense mechanism for survival. We tend not to trust, believe, or accept things on their face and we are generally suspicious. Again, this is just hard wiring that kept us alive when snakes, tigers, and our environment was a bigger danger than stress and cardiac disease is. However, we can consciously overcome this built in negativity bias by practicing the art and act of thanksgiving on a daily basis.  
  
Harvard studies have shown an extremely strong correlation between the daily practice of remembering past events in a positive light, writing thank you notes to people you feel are deserving of them (and looking deeper for reasons they might be deserving of them), and some kind of positive contemplation routine like mediation and/or prayer for the religious. A specific 10 week study showed a marked improvement in the overall emotional well being of the study group when they did this while there was little to no change in the control group. The awesome part is that there were also verifiable improvements in blood makers of the gratitude group meaning there overall physical health improved as a result of the practices they were doing. As a happy side benefit, the gratitude group began exercising on their own because they simply felt better and wanted to keep the good feelings going. This, of course, lead to even greater results in the health category because that’s what exercise does. However. Even before the gratitude group began exercising, the researchers were noting increases in the pleasure hormones dopamine and serotonin and a stark reduction in the stress hormones of cortisol and adrenaline.  
  
Ok, so we know that the story of thanksgiving is a lie and I’m telling you to clean the toilets. Nice one Blaine! Look, I apologize for bursting the bubble that was cranberry sauce and stuffing for you but there is good news! The good news is that we have the ability to change everything. We can change it because we’re the only thinkers in our own world and we create our reality based on the way we think and the beliefs systems we hold. We are a walking talking chemical factory with the ability to be toxic, on our own, or be massive pleasure spreaders with the ability to reduce the suffering, anxiety, depression, and angst in the world by simply believing you have that ability. There are a few practices that can help you along this path though and, for many of you, you may need to start trying some of these. The appraisers listening especially since this group is somewhat prone to that negative bias I mentioned and our world tends to be filled with a lot of anxiety, fear, frustration, and stress, much of it self induced by the way. 
  
So lets end this one with a few practices that I’d like to challenge you to try for 33 days. Why 33 days? Why not? The first one is to start a gratitude journal. In fact, call it whatever makes you feel good if gratitude journal is too fluffy for you. Call it meat if you want to but what you write in that book every morning and/or evening are 3 things you are grateful for. Start with the obvious ones like a spouse or significant other, other family members, a home to live in whether you rent or own, food in the cupboards and fridge, and wherever low hanging gratitude fruit you can think of. You don’t have to stop at 3, that’s just the minimum, the MGR if you will, the minimum gratitude requirements. What I would challenge you to do once you’ve written down the easy ones is to start looking in your daily routine and environment for not so obvious ones. I’ll share with you one that has helped me out tremendously since appraisers and realtors can spend a lot of time in their vehicles dealing with traffic and other drivers. It’s very easy to get frustrated and angry when somebody cuts you off, drives too slow in the fast lane, or is just generally not driving to your standards. When I find myself being triggered, if you will, by traffic or a particular driver I immediately go into a gratitude mindset whereby I say to myself and the other driver that I am thankful for them making me aware again of my own driving and what I am doing on the road. I also give thanks to slow drivers and drivers who cut me off for saving me from something horrible up ahead.  
  
Yes, you heard that correctly. When I’m cut off or somebody is driving to slow and I’m trying to get somewhere I flip into my internal script that basically says, “I don’t know what is going on up ahead but I am thankful for this person slowing me down and saving me from certain doom”. Now, this may sound funny to you but I cant tell you how many times I have said this and have passed a waiting police office up ahead watching for speeders of which I would most likely have been one of had I sped around the slow driver. On the instances when there is no cop, I still hold the belief that this person has simply changed the future for me by slowing me down and saving me from that one car that may have sped through the stop sign. Whether true or not we’ll never know but the belief system allows me to live more peacefully and stress free as a result. If it is actually true that I’ve been saved from certain doom, well than my gratitude is justified. Either way, I am the recipient and benefactor of my own empathy and they don’t have to endure my finger gestures and heightened vocabulary in the process. 
  
So the first one is starting a gratitude journal and the second one is becoming mindful and aware of situations and scenarios that would have, in the past, made you angry, frustrated, increased your blood pressure, and generally set you off swimming in cortisol and adrenaline. By the way, the traffic example is an easy one too because it happens on a daily basis. What I would challenge you to do is to look for the things that don’t seem real obvious to you but get you frustrated. One could be your kids and having to drive them all around or get up early to get them off to school. This is one where you write down the words Kids and getting up early and then follow it with “I’m so thankful for the opportunity to spend time with them because it wont always be that way”. This could be true with parents and annoying siblings as well. Another one is chores like laundry and dishes in the sink. I live with two teenage boys who are constantly throwing their dirty dishes in the sink when we have a dishwasher and we talk every week about them washing their own dishes so I don’t have to be their maid. However, I am the only one who can control how I react and respond when I see the dishes in the sink so independent of what I may have to say to them to get them to wash them, I challenge myself to find some gratitude for the situation which allows me the opportunity to benefit from the frustration. One of the things I say to myself when I see dishes in the sink is that I am thankful for the fact that we have a nice house with nice things and my boys are well fed and I didn’t have to cook for them today. I also remind myself how lucky I am for the opportunity once again to have a chat with them about responsibility and gratitude and pass on the lessons from my sensei. If it wasn’t for the dishes in the sink or their messy bathroom,  I wouldn’t have the same opportunity. I get the wonderful opportunity every week to teach my boys how to be responsible men of character and be good room mates, not to mention teaching them the value of keeping their personal space clean and clear for a clean and clear mind. This is one that I am often guilty of not keep up my end of the bargain.  
  
When its time to clean the toilets you can be thankful for indoor plumbing, again that you have a toilet to clean, and the fact that we have clean water to drink and clean ourselves with. These all may sound a bit odd to you but I assure you that when you take the time to find ways and things to be grateful about and for, you’re literally changing your brain and body chemistry and you’re altering reality from that moment forward. Learn to be grateful every single day for all the little things and the big stuff and you don’t need one day a year to remind you. 
 
If you’re not familiar yet with the writings of great stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, I strongly suggest you start because the stoics have much to say about gratitude, hard work, and doing more with less, which, of course, leads one to more gratitude for what it is they do have. In Seneca’s Moral Letters, he says, “Its in keeping with nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement, as if it were our very own. For if we don’t do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure us”. What Seneca was challenging all of us to do is to first get out of our own heads and desires for personal gain and instead get into the success and well being of others. In essence, get over yourself and into another’s progress instead because what we give to others is far more valuable than what we try to gain for ourselves and is far more enduring.  
 
Marcus Aurelius said, “all you need are these: certainly of judgement in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way”. Although I am a big fan of most of Aurelius’ writings, I’m going to alter his recommendation a bit: the last sentence should instead say,  “all you need is an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for everything that comes your way”. Marcus Aurelius said for anything that comes your way but my challenge to you is to have that attitude with EVERYTHING that comes your way. 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude”. If you missed the most important part of that saying I’ll put a spotlight on it for you. It’s the last sentence, “and because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude”. All things, not just the things we may judge as good based on our current beliefs. Look at everything and find a way to turn it into good and you are on your way to mastering gratitude.  
  
My friends, please have a safe and happy holiday and may this year be the most thankful and grateful you have ever been for all of the things we all have to grateful for. I am eternally grateful for you and I take very seriously the time you invest with me each week. I love you all and am so thankful to be learning from you as much or more than you may be learning from me. Thank you for listening,  I hope I have been able to add some value for you this week but it is ultimately up to you what you do with the return on your investment of time. Go add some value for those in your life with no expectation of return and watch what happens. 
  
My name is Blaine Feyen and I look forward to chatting with you all next week…I’m out! 
 ​