What's The Worst That Could Happen?

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 always sponsor free Real Value Podcast. So happy to be back in the dream lab, if you will. My special place to create content, learn, develop, grow, and, of course, record this podcast. Thanks so much for being willing to come back and listen to the show with everyone else this week, that really means a lot to me and I always take your willingness to keep returning to the show as a challenge on me to create compelling content for you, and, more importantly, content that adds some value for you, your life, and your business.

Of course, as you probably already know if you’ve been listening to this show for any period of time, just hearing the information isn’t going to really help you out all that much, you must become an implementer of the ideas to realize any real benefits from them and I will be your strongest supporter in implementing any and all of the ideas that might work for you. I am your biggest fan and will champion any efforts you make toward becoming better today than you were yesterday. Remember, that’s the whole 1%er concept. Tiny incremental improvements to your processes and procedures, whatever it is that you’re working on. It doesn’t matter if its weight loss, strength gains, increased mental well being, better business processes, attracting more and better business, you name it. Its not the monumental leaps and shifts that most people think are required to make change. It’s the tiny little efforts that aren’t real obvious at first that, over time, build up to what eventually reveals itself as positive change. The great thing about being a 1%er in that regard is that the changes are often so small and insignificant, in and of themselves, that you always have time to adjust, rethink, make changes, and see where the arc of activity will eventually take you.  When you’re always looking for monumental shifts and changes, not only might it keep you from making those changes since they appear so massive that you become overwhelmed, making massive changes all at once quite often has you missing the subtle opportunities that live in the small incremental changes.
 
When you walk along a wooded path casually, slowly, methodically, and with intention, you’ll arrive at your destination at some point in the future. When you do arrive at the end of the walk you will have had an experience, maybe good, maybe not, but an experience nonetheless. You will have taken in information through your senses on your walk and, by the end of it, can likely recall what that information was or is. You’ll notice possibly some small paths that lead off from the one you’re on at the moment. Maybe you notice the birds, the ground critters, the smells, particular tree varieties, the small creek to the left, the sound of the water, the smell of the water, and the feel of the dirt path under your feet. You can stop, look around, decide to go back if you’d like, maybe venture off on a new trail, the choice is yours and it’s a pleasant experience because you’re not taxed in any way on your journey. You’re there intentionally and you’re taking in the whole experience. You’ll arrive somewhere at some point in time but, since the time of your arrival to the end of this journey is not one of the metrics you’re tracking, you don’t really care how quickly or slowly you travel on the path. Conversely, lets take a journey on the same path but this time with one goal, beating our last timed run through this path. The goal is only the speed of the journey. You’ll still have an experience. You’ll still smell the smells and see some of the same sights. Not all of them since you don’t have the time, nor is sightseeing a goal of the experience, but you need your eyes to help you see the trail so you’ll definitely see something. You’ll smell some of the same smells, but probably not the same experience as the slow intentional walk on this path because, when time is the main metric for your journey, you’re having a different physical experience and a different stress response to that journey. Depending on your fitness level, you’re breathing heavier because you’re running, so you have to be more focused on controlling that part of your experience. You’re watching the trail with more intent so that you don’t roll an ankle, thus missing some of the view around you. You’re checking your watch occasionally to see where you are on your goal, this adds a different level of stress and new information about what is required of you, which may have nothing to do at all with your surroundings at the moment. And eventually you arrive at your destination and check your watch one last time to see if you hit your goal.
 
Great, two experiences along the same path. One faster than the other. Both experiences for sure, neither one better than the other. Both started at the same place, both ended at the same place. No need to judge one as being superior to the other, unless, of course, you had a specific goal to arrive at the end as quickly as possible. However, the slower journey would almost always be able to be recounted by you as a more enjoyable experience and one that allowed you to take in more sensory information along the way with which to judge each next step. On the slower journey, since there is no real destination goal, at least not a goal based on time, you can make subtle changes along the way, you can take side journeys to step into the creek, you can step off the other side of the path to pick some wild raspberries, you can climb a tree or walk along a the trunk of downed tree to test your balance. All viable options and only hampered by your creativity and thirst for adventure. Two different goals, the same general path. Again, not judging one as being better than the other, depending on your goals. However, to bring the main point of the story home, the slow, methodical, intentional journey is the journey of the 1%er in most instances. You don’t have to time your journey and beat your last best time every time. You’re constantly making small changes, getting feedback from those changes over time, assessing the feedback, and judging what step to take or try next based on the information received. If you want to take a little side journey and try something out, do it! If you want to go dip your toes in our hypothetical creek in this story, which hopefully you’re seeing is a metaphor for trying something new in your business or life, great! Go do it! Nothing ventured, nothing gained is the saying so you must venture. I am giving you permission to venture and to do it in small incremental steps, taking in all kinds of information and feedback along the way. Adjust accordingly as you receive feedback, but keep moving. The universe rewards action my friends, not necessarily speed. As long as you’re moving you can make adjustments on the path. If you’re not moving, any adjustment you make has no effect except in your view. Movement is the key my friends. Keep moving, make small adjustments and changes, assess the feedback, and keep moving.
 
On the topic of movement, I will be sharing with you shortly some of my personal experiences regarding movement, positive and negative pressure, and 1% changes over time, but I want to first share with you something from Ryder Carroll’s book, the Bullet Journal Method. You’ve heard me talk briefly about Bullet Journaling and that it’s the system I utilize the most for time and life management, albeit not without hiccups. It doesn’t matter to me what kind of journaling and time management system you use, or if you even use one at all, I just happen to need one or I’d be a wreck and, so far, the Bullet journal method has fit my style of note taking, time and task management, goal setting, idea logging, and so on. I’ll do an episode in the future about Bullet Journaling, but for now I only bring it up because its not necessarily how you use a system like this but instead why, and the whole philosophy behind it. For those who don’t know what the hell I’m even talking about, a Bullet Journal is a method, not necessarily a thing. You can actually go buy official bullet journals and all you’re getting is a nice hardcover Leuchterm journal book with a pre made index and some handy guides for using it to the letter of the method, which I don’t. But that’s the beauty of it, you can use any notebook you want and any combination of the methods and ideas behind it to fit your brain and the way you like to work. Its not like buying a Franklin Day Planner or a Full Focus Planner or anyone of the dozens of other time management systems out there, its a system you kind of create yourself. Nevertheless, the quote I want to share from Ryder Carroll, the creator of the formal Bullet Journal system and movement, is this: “You can’t make time, you can only take time. Happiness is a by-product of meaning. In order to be happy, you have to figure out what is meaningful. You figure out what is meaningful by putting in the time to cultivate your curiosity through setting goals. We accomplish our goals by breaking them down into small pieces because small questions and small solutions lead to big changes over time. Productivity is about sustainable improvement. In order to achieve that, you have to look inward to reveal a way forward. Dedicate specific times for reflection… and then prioritize what matters, discard what doesn’t. Failure is guaranteed if you never begin. If you try and fail, you fail once. If you compromise and fail, you fail twice as hard because you know you didn’t try. All you have to do is start!”
 
Ryder Carroll is talking about tiny incremental improvements as a way forward. Doing something. All you have to do is start. Failure is guaranteed if you never begin. So, on the topic of movement and starting things, I’m going to share some of my experiences and insights about just doing. I don’t like to pat myself on the back, ever, because I learned long ago that when you do that you stop growing. The ego takes over and makes you believe you’ve arrived somewhere and that you’re done growing. Nevertheless, one thing I am very proud of is my ability to move, try things, fail, learn, grow, and try some more things. When I look back over my 48 years I see lots of failure. I have failed businesses, failed investments, failed ideas, a failed marriage, failed relationships, etcetera. However, I’m only using the word failure to give context to the story and make a point. I cant honestly say where it came from, I suspect from my parents, my upbringing, maybe martial arts, but I never once thought of any of those experiences as failures. Not for one instant did I ever sit back and sigh and say, “shit, I really failed at that one.” In every instance where something didn’t go as planned I gathered up my stuff and was already on to the next lesson, project, investment, and business with the benefit of hindsight and experience in my pocket. I wont say I was proud of some of those experiences, but I never considered any of them to be failures. I recognized where I may have failed in certain areas, but that’s different than labeling something as a failure. I recognize the value of being able to say, “I really failed to understand the nuances of that particular market, or I really failed to be the best husband I could have been, or I failed to see the writing on the wall in that venture”, but that doesn’t mean I also needed to then label the experience as a failure. My marriage ended after almost 2 decades, that’s a fact, but who’s to say it was supposed to last forever. Only if you make the assumption that relationships don’t have an expiration date are you allowed to label something a failure. And then, what happens to the next one if it doesn’t work out? I lost lots of money in real estate investments in that time. Did I fail? Only if you pigeonhole the entire experience into a belief that there was only one goal and only one way to be successful and that would have been to keep it all. Who’s to say that I was supposed to keep all of my investments at the expense of something potentially greater, like my sanity, my happiness, and my health? I don’t look at the loss as a failure, I look at the experience and mine it for the lessons I was supposed to learn and grow from the experience, better as a person than I was previously. Again, I may have failed to heed some advice, failed to do some due diligence, failed to use good sense, even failed to pick the right partners, but that doesn’t make the experience a failure and to label it as such is to deprive myself of the opportunity to grow, to learn, to expand, to move forward, and to prosper from the insights and experience gained.
 
So lets talk about movement. The experience I want to share insights from is one that I had over this past week where I had the opportunity to speak to a group of appraisers at an Appraisal Institute chapter event and teach on one of my favorite coaching topics called ‘Digging Your Well Before You’re Thirsty’. This was an opportunity very graciously created for me by my friend and highly respected appraiser colleague, Rachel Massey. If you aren’t familiar with Rachel, her writing skill, and appraisal knowledge, I highly suggest you become familiar because she’s super smart, highly trained and skilled, and a great person to boot! Just google Rachel and you’ll find a wealth of information and her articles all over the place. You can also go to Ann Arbor appraisal. Blog and read Rachel’s articles and blog posts. So Rachel and I realized many years ago that we had a very similar background in that Rachel is also a high ranking and very long time Aikido practitioner, as well as an appraiser. She actually reached out to my 12 or 13 years ago and made the connection via social media that we had these similar backgrounds. She’s a listener of the podcast and a believer in the message that gets preached here every week so she put in a good word for me with the Great Lakes Chapter of the Appraisal Institute to have me as one of the speakers at this annual event. I was, of course, very flattered and accepted the offer. Up to this point in my life and my business, I have spoken to thousands and thousands of people in a variety of venues. From martial artists to law enforcement to military to salespeople to C-Level executives to consultants and several other categories. I have also spoken to lots of appraisers one on one, had breakfasts, lunches, dinner, and drinks with them, coached them in their businesses one on one and in small groups and weekend workshop type settings. What I have never done, up to this point, is spoken to what is often referred to as a ‘cold audience’. A cold audience is any audience that doesn’t necessarily know you or your message, has not interacted with you in any way, has not done business with your company, and is basically cold when it comes to what you have to say and what you might be selling. Of course, you all know me from the podcast by now so If I had a room filled with Real Value Podcast listeners or Value Syndicate members, I’m not opening or speaking to a cold audience, I’m now speaking to what is referred to as a warm audience. This is a group of people who HAVE done business with you or knows your message or has interacted with you in some way and that’s why they’re there.
 
So, up to this point, all of my audiences have been more or less warm audiences in some way. Of course, it should be noted that all of the audiences that I speak to in my market and surrounding area were, at one time, cold audiences because they didn’t necessarily know me. They may have seen my name on some appraisals or had an occasion to get a call from me, but we likely had not met up to that point. Now, 10 years later, and I have met so many Realtors and lenders at my talks that its virtually impossible to go speak or teach at an event and have a cold audience. Of course, every talk or class has new agents and lenders that I haven’t met yet, but the room will always have people that I can now count as fans of mine, strategic partners, people I now call friends, and people that I can refer to by name, or maybe even by an actual deal or scenario that we’ve had together, and that brings tremendous value and, more importantly for me as a teacher, it brings credibility to any of the audience who may be ‘cold’. I said in last week’s episode that I do not consider myself to be a speaker. I don’t get paid to speak, I have really no interest to just go speak to people, and its not top on my list of things to do with my time. The main reason being that I love to interact, add value, and I thrive off of the energy in the room and the interaction so the more of that I can conjure during my talks or classes, the more enjoyable it is for everybody and the more I learn too. I say it also as part of my opener to a cold audience that ’I am not a speaker, I am a teacher and also one of you, so please, my friends, uncross your arms, uncross your minds, yell out like it’s a tent revival if you have something to say, and lets all grow a little bit together today.’ The audience I spoke with last week for 2 hours was, very safe to say, a pretty cold audience. I knew Rachel and I got to meet the wonderful Beth Graham and the great Dan Johnson, but I was virtually unknown to the rest of the audience. I think I asked at one point, by show of hands, how many listen to the podcast and 3 hands out of the whole group meekly raise in something of a half mast hand raise. This was, by far, the coldest room I have opened and taught in over 10 years.
 
Now, the point I want to make by sharing this experience with you is that I had completely forgotten what it felt like to go and speak to a group of people who didn’t know me, like me, or trust me yet and the work that it takes to try to get there. I had forgotten what it feels like to sweat up in the front of the room wondering to yourself, ‘are they even hearing or understanding anything I’m saying? Are they laughing inside at the message and what I’m teaching?, are they ready to string me up?’, I didn’t know. This was a new old experience that I had almost completely forgotten about because by now I have honed my talks and classes, my message to those specific audiences, I know what their motivations, hopes, and dreams are, and I’ve more or less hand picked my audiences because they were the ones I wanted to educate. I’ve built up a name in my market by being this resource and that’s a big part of our business model. Speaking almost always to Realtors, Lenders, and business people, or to appraisers who already know me, like me, and trust me because we’ve worked together or I’ve helped them grow and refine their business. However, I realized leading up to the talk I gave at the AI event last week that for me to grow, expand, and get better as an appraiser, a teacher, a business and personal coach, I had to find uncomfortable situations to put myself into. I’ve talked in other episodes about how that became something of a personal drive for me to constantly put myself in uncomfortable situations that would force me to grow and expand. That’s what lead me to apply to live in a zen monastery, travel the world learning and teaching aikido and defensive tactics, that lead to work with law enforcement and the military, that lead to opening my own dojo and leadership academy, that lead to me getting involved in the commercial real estate world, that lead me to getting into the appraisal industry, that lead me to running a large residential and commercial appraisal firm, that lead me into the world of commercial and industrial development, that lead me into starting my own firm, that lead me to training others, that lead me to developing programs and business coaching, that lead me to getting into podcasting in several different industries, that lead to, that lead to, that lead to… and so on. Each and every one of those moves and ‘lead to’s’ was a moment of discomfort. A moment where I questioned, “do I have enough experience, do I have enough knowledge, can I do this, will they laugh, will I be embarrassed, what if I go broke, what if I fail‘, and the list of questions and emotions is long and very familiar to every single one of you because you’ve been there and there are areas of your business and your life right now where you’re asking those very questions.
 
My friends, we’ve talked a lot on this show about the power of questions and the power behind the type and quality of the questions you are asking. Yes, I was asking all of those questions somewhere in the back of my mind. But at each one of those points in time, I found a way to answer all of those niggling little questions with a two word answer that I’ll share with all of you today. The most powerful two words to me in those moments and the two words that have lead to more opportunities, more income generation, and more damn fun in my life are these, are you ready to write them down?... The two words are ‘so’ and ‘what’, as in ‘so what?’ Anytime that little voice popped up and said, ‘are you even qualified for this? So what?!, what if it doesn’t work out?, so what?!, what if you fail?, so what?! What if they laugh at you? So what?! What if you go broke doing this? So what?! What if you fall on your face on stage? So what?! What if they all keep their arms crossed? So what?! What if they stand up right in the middle and all walk out? So what?! I’ll have a funny story to tell. You see my friends, If you want to grow, if you want to expand, if you want to evolve, if you want to move through the crowded lower levels of the novice, the skilled, and even the specialist that we’ve talked about on the episodes on the expert pyramid you have to always be forcing yourself to move. I said this was about movement. The movement doesn’t always have to be forward movement. There are times when you assess and move laterally or even backtrack over your prior steps, but movement is the key. Keep moving and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. Whats the worse thing that can happen? Are you going to die? I’ve been in situations where that was a reality and I probably should have asked some more questions but I was young and that was the business I was in at the time. I didn’t die though and so now everything that pops up and stirs that frightened little voice inside of me gets a ‘so what?!, are you going to die?’, and the answer is always no. The worse thing that can happen to you and I If we go call on some lenders, realtors, attorneys, and estate planners is that they’ll so no, so what?! The worse thing that could happen if you put on an hour long talk at a real estate office is that they’ll sit there with their arms crossed and not say a word, so what?! The worse thing that can happen to you if you switch from paper and pen to a tablet and stylus is you’ll slow down and get frustrated for a minute, so what?! Don’t let the scared little kid inside of you dictate and control what you do and don’t do in life. Get out of your comfort zone and push yourself into uncomfortable situations in order to grow.
 
I’ve said it many times and I fully believe it; the marrow, the juice, the meat, and the full experience of life exists beyond our comfort zones but its absolutely up to you to push yourself beyond it. Put yourself in front of a bunch of cold audiences my friends. Get out of your caves and safe zones and push yourself to do something you’ve never done before because you didn’t know how to use those two little words, ’so what?!’ Every time you hear that little voice telling you something negative, say ‘so what?!’ and then move forward. Every time you hear somebody in a forum spewing doom and gloom, say ‘so what?!’, and move forward. Saying ‘so what’ is something of an idiom. It’s a turn of phrase that connotes not caring, a cavalier attitude, maybe not thinking before leaping. But that’s not how I’m using it. I’m using the phrase, ‘so what?!’ as an anchor question and phrase to knock me out of my fear and frozen state. The ‘so what’ that I’m teaching you to use is still a question, use it as one. So what? So what are you going to do then? The world is ending? So what? What are you going to do? The industry is being taken over! So what?! What are you doing to evolve yourself and your business? Are you standing around a virtual facebook water cooler and bitching about stuff but not doing anything about it? So what?! So the lender did something stupid, so the agent was an asshole, so the underwriter stipped you for some stupid comment, so what?! What are you doing to grow your business? What are you doing to be better today than you were yesterday? What are you doing to be more profitable? What are you doing to have a better quality of life? Push yourselves my friends. Push yourself beyond your comfort zones and do something next week or next month that you’ve been putting off because of some irrational fear. Ask yourself why you haven’t done it yet and then say, so what?! What are you going to do?
 
I’d like to thank you my friends for investing your most valuable currency in yourself again this week and taking time out of your busy lives to be a little bit better. Spread the message, help somebody else out today. Help somebody else see where they might be limiting their experiences due to fear and help them say ‘so what?!’, whats the worse thing that could happen? Help somebody else out of their comfort zone and see what happens to yours. Dustin Harris went skydiving for goodness sake! If Dustin Harris is willing to hurl his body out of an airplane after asking the question, ‘what’s the worse thing that could happen?’, then you, my friends, can do something small today, tomorrow, and next week that will push your business and your life forward just a little bit. It doesn’t have to be a huge leap, like jumping out of an airplane, you can actually die from that, it just has to be a little step forward. Put in on the calendar, commit to it, make the post cards, schedule the room, send out the invites, write the speech, and show up on that day. What’s the worse that can happen?

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