What are the signs telling you? Pre-incident indicators of success and failure!

I say it every week and almost every episode that one of my favorite things to do and favorite places to be is right here in this studio hanging with all of you and I mean it! One of my favorite things to be doing is sharing, helping people, solving problems, watching and helping people grow, building businesses and helping others build businesses. Its taken me 48 years to figure some things out, but two of the things that I’ve figured out is that my passion is in building profitable businesses and in helping others do the same. I’ve heard it said that if you figure out what your passion is before you die, you’re in the top 1% of 1% of all human beings in that regard. Of course, there’s no real way to quantify this and, in reality, it doesn’t really matter because the sentiment is that most people never figure out what they’re passion is in life so, if you find it or figure it out, you’re one of the lucky ones.

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I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones in that regard because I’ve figured it out. One of the great things about my particular passion is that I can manifest and realize it in so many different ways. If your passion is cooking, for example, well, you have lots of options too but they have to be revolving around cooking. If you have a passion for gardening, for example, you have lots of options too but they’re somewhat dependent on location, weather, and, well, gardening. When you realize that your passion is in helping others, the whole world is your playground and a universe of possibilities opens up to you! When your passion is helping others you can apply that to every aspect of your life, your business, your hobbies, your career, and every other aspect of your life. You could, if you wanted to, create a business around your passion, but you can also simply find ways to volunteer your help all over the place and in a variety of ways. One of the ways I recommend people pursue, or even try to find their passion or passions, in fact, is to start by helping others in some way. If you already know what your passion is, I strongly recommend adding a volunteer component to it simply because you open up a whole new world of growth opportunity for yourself when you’re helping others. If you don’t know what your passion is yet, sometimes helping others unlocks what that is for you. Just my two cents on helping others and finding your passion my friends and if I, or this podcast, are helping you find your passion in some small way then my purpose is being fulfilled and, for that, I thank you for the opportunity!
 
I think I mentioned in a prior episode that one of mine and Jolene’s passions is adventure, and having experiences instead of things, and a few of the ways that we do that is travel, skiing, and mountain biking. I know I shared with all of you my eye opening and, in some ways, life altering mountain biking experience in the mountains of North Carolina over spring break this year and, by all rights, I should not be back on a mountain bike. Nevertheless, as is my nature and personality, after healing up a bit, I looked at my accident as a challenge that was kind of laughing at me and taunting me not to try it again. Almost like a 6 year old saying, “I dare ya chicken!, try it again! You’re too chicken aren’t ya!”, and, of course, my ego says, “I’m not chicken, you are!” Seriously though, I learned a long time ago while living in the dojo, studying Zen and Buddhism that life equals suffering and there will be rough spots. It’s the first Noble Truth in Buddhism, life is suffering and most of our suffering is rooted in attachments to desires, wanting things to be a certain way or simply wanting things at all. Quite often, those rough spots in life inform us to change direction or pivot and gain a different view, and other times the rough spots simply challenge you to get back up, dust yourself off, and see what you’re made of. I’ll be very honest with all of you, I have been in some very sticky and hairy situations in my life. Working down at the ghetto grocery store, riding with and training law enforcement in two of the nation’s most dangerous housing developments at the time, Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor homes in Chicago, traveling the world and training with some simply crazy people over the years and in some dangerous places and countries. Yet, I don’t remember ever being as spooked by any of those experiences as I was by going over the handlebars while mountain biking. May sound strange, especially considering I have been around hostile gun fire, I’ve been stabbed in the arm trying to break up a fight, I saw a guy get shot in the mouth and through the neck just two feet from me at another ghetto grocery store (he lived, he’s just fine, and is now a real estate investor, by the way), I’ve had my own gun drawn and seconds away from pulling the trigger on a few occasions, and a bunch of other very scary and high stress situations. None of them, however, freaked me out as much as this accident and I think its because of the control component. In all of those other scenarios, I felt oddly in control of my actions and the outcomes, to a large degree, and fairly confident in my skills and abilities at the time. Weirdly, I enjoyed those kinds of highly adrenal situations and being able to maintain some semblance of control and found that my mind got very clear in those situations. Its like all of the extraneous BS of life falls away in those moments and you either become very clear or you freeze. This is the fight, flight, or freeze response that is built into all of us and you simply don’t know what you’re going to do in times of high stress until you’ve been put in a particular scenario and have those responses tested.
 
Nevertheless, I’ve had my body literally thrown around thousands, probably tens of thousands of times while doing martial arts, more specifically Aikido, so being tossed about, having your feet leave the ground and to be inverted in mid air and then land relatively softly and ready to do it again is a learned skill and one that leads to being very comfortable in those odd positions. The irony of that kind of skill is that, while technically not in control of your body, I mean you are flying through the air, you learn how to be in almost complete control of your body. You’re in control while out of control. In the case of the mountain biking accident, it happened so fast and without warning that I truly felt out of control. It was as if I had no control whatsoever of what was about to come and what eventually happened to me. Of course, I was in some serious pain and have been, although to a continually lessening degree over time, since the experience, but the scariest part was feeling like it came out of nowhere. Fortunately, I was wearing a GoPro on a chest rig so I caught the whole experience on video, at least from that particular angle. I’ve watched the video dozens of times and slowed it down so that I could go frame by frame at the moment of the accident to see exactly what happened. Not so I could relive the experience but so that I could analyze what I did wrong and how I could avoid it in the future should I ever decide to get back on a bike which, for the past 4 to 5 months was, a hard no for me. What this allowed me to do was see where my hands were, get an idea of where my body was positioned on the bike, see what happened as I came up too fast on the rider in front of me, and basically analyze every second of the incident as I headed into it and came out the other side. What I realized as I watched the video frame by frame is that a whole host of things were stacking up against me and heading me straight into this painful experience. For one, we were all extremely tired, which is a bad thing to be when you’re mountain biking, driving, or operating anything where you or somebody else could get injured. I was going too fast for my experience level. I was having a blast flying down these mountain trails but I was simply going too fast for what was about to come. I wasn’t familiar with the bike as well as I thought I was. On most bikes in the US, the left hand brake lever controls the front brake and the right hand brake lever controls the back brake. These were hydraulic brakes which means you can operate them literally with one finger and stop the bike with no problem pretty quick. It also means you’d better be really aware of which brake you’re pulling on because hitting the front brake too hard while going downhill can send you over the handlebars rather quickly. I know this, of course, since I’v been riding bikes since I was a kid and the brake setup has always been like this so that wasn’t anything new. However, frame by frame I could see just how things came together at this one crazy second to unfold as they did. What I saw in the frame by frame was that I was going too fast, I came up too quick on my son’s bike, I was too high and forward on the bike because I was standing on the pedals and leaning into the decline, and then as I tried to brake too quickly I went into a little dip in the ground and I can see frame by frame my left fingers squeezing the left brake, which is the front tire, thus exacerbating an already crappy situation, and sealing my fate.
 
Fast forward to about a month ago and Jolene and I went into Northern Michigan to a popular tourist spot called Mackinaw Island where there are no vehicles. You take a ferry over from Mackinaw City, 20 minutes and you land on the island, and a popular thing to do is either bring your own, or rent bikes and then ride around the whole island, which is about 8 miles round trip. There are a bunch of beautiful lookout areas and spots to stop, you can go swimming, which we did in the rain, you can go bar hopping, shopping, tour the old colonial fort on the island and watch hourly cannon firing shows and just do all kinds of activities on the island. So we rented bikes and rode around the island. This was the first time I had been back on a bike since the first week of April in North Carolina. And of course, it was just fine. We had a blast riding in the rain, swimming in super cold water, and just making our own little adventure on this island. What the experience did, of course, was reinforce for me what I already knew which was that my accident was almost completely my own fault and was likely avoidable had I had more experience, better awareness, wasn’t so tired, had a little more control on my speed, and a few other minor, but not insignificant details. That experience on Mackinaw reminded me just how much I loved riding a bike and how in control you can actually be if you have some awareness. Needless to say, it was only a week or two after that that I invested in a mountain bike that I had been eyeing since before the accident in North Carolina. It’s a gorgeous carbon frame, full suspension mountain bike with tubeless tires, a hydraulic dropper seat, hydraulic brakes, the whole nine yards. And, by the way, since I too follow a budget, I didn’t pay full price. I actually got it for less than half of its retail cost because it was a tester bike that the bike shop uses to let people try out that brand. We took Jolene last weekend to invest in her new mountain bike and we tested them both out on some pretty gnarly trails on Saturday and just had a blast. We’ve been riding all around the city near us and really enjoying being back on a bike and under our own power.
 
So what’s the point Blaine? What’s the metaphor in all of this? Well, for me its one of the things that I preach all the time on this show and in coaching and its about how we frame our life experiences. I just did an episode called Its All Your Fault where I talked about people who believe and act like life is happening to them instead of because of them and how to take radical responsibility for everything that occurs in your life. I realized that, at some point, if I was going to address my fears about what had happened on that day, I was going to have to put the whole situation into a perspective that would allow me to take control of the memory of the events, even after it happened, and reframe it in a way that would allow me to make sense of it. What did I do? The first thing I had to do was to stop referring to that situation in terms that made it sound like it was something that happened to me, instead of something that I did. If I continued to talk about it in terms of an incident or an accident that just came out of nowhere, like I wasn’t responsible for it, then I’d forever push away every opportunity to change it and learn from it. I obviously cant go back in time and change the physical event, but I can change the memory, the power, and the future effects of that event to ones that are empowering for me instead of ones that instill fear, pain, anxiety and limitation. Now I know, some of you might say, ‘c’mon Blaine, it was little accident, it happens all the time to mountain bikers! Get over it!’, and you’d be absolutely right. That is one way to look at it and move on and I’ve taken that approach with many things in my life. Just brush it off as an accident that happens and move on. The reason for using this example is to simply share a personal scenario where I too have to implement the lessons that I teach, preach, and believe in lest I be a hypocrite and fail to learn from my own mistakes. I truly believe in taking responsibility for everything that occurs in my life, even the things that are seemingly out of my control, because by taking responsibility for them I give myself the power to learn from every situation, adapt to the world around me, and identify all of the things that could be leading to a similar situation in the future. This means I’ll either be able to see much further ahead in the future to avoid a similar scenario OR I’ll be far more prepared to handle and take advantage of a similar situation in the future. This, by the way, has nothing to do with mountain biking. I’m talking about life, business, relationships, marketing, advertising, investing, you name it! The principles are the same and the lesson crosses all boundaries. If you listened to last week’s episode I said one of the techniques of a master is to be able to go from the general to the specific, which means being able to take the general lessons from one area of our lives and make those lessons transferable to all of the other areas of our lives. The opposite is also true. A valuable skill is being able to take specific experiences and extend them across all areas of your life. We take the general lesson we learned about mountain bike crashes, apply a little radical responsibility, extract the lessons from the experience, and then apply those lessons across the areas of our lives that seem to have nothing to do with mountain biking. I learned an extremely valuable, albeit simple lesson: it was my fault! It was my fault! It had nothing to do with the terrain, the bike, the weather, the company, the speed, the brakes, the tires, the handlebars…all of those things were perfect that day and those were all simply externalities that one is supposed to consider when doing that kind of activity. It was me! I was the common denominator no matter how I sliced the scenario up.
 
You, my friends, are the common denominator in everything you do and everything that happens in your life and your business. You, nobody else. Until I was able to remind myself that valuable lesson, that I am the common denominator in that scenario, I wasn’t able to make sense of it and it haunted me for a few months. It seemed to come out of nowhere but I know something. I know something that many people don’t know and I’ve actually been teaching this principle for many years in the defensive tactics arena. It’s a principle called pre-incident indicators. First taught by a man named Gavin DeBecker in an awesome book called ‘The Gift of Fear’. I’ve talked about the concept on the podcast, I’ve explained the concept in interviews, and I’ve taught thousands of people how to identify the pre-incident indicators that leave clues and lead up to an event, an incident, an attack, a robbery, a rape, a shooting, an assault. Just as many motivational speakers and teachers have said over the years, ‘success leaves clues’, so does failure. Both success and failure leave clues because life leaves clues all around us. We’re either awake and open to their message or closed off and certain that there was no sign something was going to happen. If I retrace my steps, or pedals, back a few hundred yards, or maybe even a few miles back, or maybe even the days and weeks leading up to the incident, I can clearly see the pre-incident indicators leading up to an incident where I go over the handlebars, or hit a tree, or go down an embankment or some other similar situation. There were clues and I can either be open to learning from them or I can rest with a story that it just came out of nowhere and BOOM! Off I go. Nope, not going to do that my friends. That would be resignation and limiting myself to an uncontrollable scenario that just happened. There are situations in our lives and businesses where things seemingly ‘just happen’, but not really. There are always pre-incident indicators that leave clues leading up to a situation. The only thing in question is, were you awake and aware of the clues or were you asleep at the wheel and will be one of those people that just simply complains about all the externalities that caused your downfall?
 
We talk about the changes in the real estate, appraisal, mortgage, banking, and regulatory worlds all the time. We talk about them in forums and groups, we talk about them in magazines and on radio shows. We talk about them in podcasts and around the water cooler. If you’re lucky enough to be talking about something, or even just hearing about something, count that as one of your pre-incident indicators my friends. Don’t be one of the people who life happens to and all of the sudden you’re blindsided by some big change. Learn to listen to the indicators and take from them what you need to in order to protect, pivot, promote, and prevent in your life and your business. Guaranteed, there will be many in the coming years who say they never saw it coming. “Saw what coming Blaine?”, change my friends, massive change in every area of your lives. Its happening every single day in a thousand small ways that, once you have perspective on and are able to look back over say a 5, 10, or 20 year period you’ll be able to say, “of yeah, look how things have changed!” Things are changing now my friends, are you? Are you developing new skills, a new vision, new directions, new products, new ways of offering existing products to your existing market, new ways of offering existing products to a new market, even looking for new markets, maybe a new way of doing things, a new way to structure what it is you do and how you do it, trying new methods, trying new technology, stepping outside of your comfort zone and expanding your awareness? What are you doing to take advantage of what the pre-incident indicators are telling you about how things are changing? Are you blaming the world around you? Are you blaming the AMCs? Are you blaming legislators, regulators, the president, congress, and your state senator? Are you blaming the IRS, the government in general, the second amendment and all those damn liberals? Are you blaming those damn conservatives? In essence, are you blaming the trail, the tires, the bike, the handlebars, the brakes, your speed or lack of speed, for what is about to happen to you? Or are you taking notes, expanding your flexibility and awareness, pushing through some of your developed rigidity, thinking like a young person again and setting yourself up for success regardless of the external circumstances? If you end up going over the handlebars because you weren’t aware enough to see all the indicator leading up to big changes, will you have the flexibility to get up and say, “yep, that ones on me!”, or will you tell yourself that you never saw it coming and continue blaming all of the external circumstances around you? The choice is yours my friends. The choice is all of ours, always.
 
Learn to take in all of the information swirling all around you and make sense of it. Listen to what it’s telling you and use it to make smart decisions. I know many of you do that already because I’ve been hearing from a fair amount of you after some of our recent episodes and you are making some changes. I heard from a bunch of you after the episode called Pay Yourself First saying you’ve got all your accounts set up and now its time to start figuring out your percentages to allocate to each account. That is simply the sweetest music I could possibly ask to be hearing! The fact that so many of you are taking advantage of the information from this show and actually acting upon it. You are truly the 1%ers my friends and I commend you on taking action. For the level 2 and 3 coaching students, we’re getting close to the end of the month so you should be starting to gather your financial information from the past 28 or 29 days and applying that info to your hand written family budget and Profit First P&L sheets for our first of the month success call. If you still need help with those, of course, don’t hesitate to reach out to me and we can walk through them again. Even if you’re not in any of our programs, you should be well aware of your numbers at this point in the month and some idea of how you are going to allocate your revenue into your specified accounts next month. If you aren’t doing this, you simply are not aware of the trail you are on, how fast you’re pedaling, and how quickly you might go over the handlebars. Know your numbers my friends! Know your numbers, have a plan for each dollar, have a plan for your clients, have a plan for your marketing, have a plan for your retirement, have a plan for your next business, have a plan for how you’ll take advantage of market changes, and have a backup and contingency plan for when the trail suddenly changes in front of you. Stop blaming the circumstances and get control of your life, your business, and your money my friends, your legacy depends on it!
 
I want to thank you for investing your most valuable and precious currency with me again this week my friends, and that is your time. Time is one of the things we simply don’t get back once spent. Make each one of your moments a valuable investment in your life or someone else’s life and start taking responsibility for everything that goes on in it, as well as what will go on in the future. Look around you and see if you can identify some of the pre-incident indicators that are always swirling in the air. I know the word ‘incident’ has a somewhat negative and ominous tone to it but that’s because of how events get labeled after they occur. Take the recent 800 point drop in the Dow Industrial Average a week or so ago. If you follow financial news you would have heard that, of course, the sky is falling and the world is about to end. The Dow dropped 800 points based on what? News. It dropped based on adrenaline. It dropped based on fear. Fear of what? Fear of a recession. I know, something of a black swan event occurred that many analysts had been howling about for years which is something called an inverted yield curve which is where the yield on the 10 year treasury note drops below the yield on the 2 year note. This has always signaled signs of a recession in years past and apparently recession is a four letter word used to scare people. I’ve seen people in forums screaming about recession for 3 years now with absolutely no clue whatsoever what the word recession means. In case you don’t know, a recession is, quite simply and as the name implies, a receding of things, in this case, the economy. Its not nuclear war, its not locust filling the skies, its not the end of life as we know it. Its simply when growth is negative for a couple quarters and the economy as a whole starts to recede. You wouldn’t know that if you just read the headlines or listened to some of the genius economic forecasters that lurk in appraiser forums, most of whom have been calling for the downfall of the appraisal industry for 30 years or more. My friends, all of these things are indicators of something, this is true. But they’re all just information with which to help you decide on which direction to plan, save, and invest. No need to flee, freeze, or even fight, its just information. Do you know what people who plan, save, and invest do when a real recession hits? We buy shit up at great deals! When everybody else is selling all of their stuff in a frenzy, those who know how to take in information for what it is just sit back and let things get as low as possible and then we buy. Thats how wealth is created my friends. Take the information that is all around you and learn from it. Success and failure both leave clues. Study the past, live in the present, look to the future for what opportunities lie ahead my friends because they are vast. By the way, the DOW was up 883 points yesterday…I guess the sky really isn’t falling.