Who Am I? Blaine Feyen's Background and History

Blaine Feyen Teaching

​Summary: Blaine discusses his background and history as an Aikido and Zen Meditation teacher, his experience living in a zen monastery, teaching defensive tactics to 1000s of students over the years, and his background as a teacher, trainer, coach, and mentor in 10 different industries. If you'd like to listen to the podcast version of this, just click here to listen to the Real Value Podcast-We're Back- The Podcast Reboot!  

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My name is Blaine Feyen and I am the owner of Real Value Group, which is a Real estate appraisal firm located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've been a real estate appraiser since 2001 and before that I was a mortgage originator for several years. Lest you think that my real estate experience begin and end there, before my time in financing, I was also a Realtor for several years and an investor in residential and commercial real estate. 


Now, I'd love to say that I had glorious careers in both the Real Estate sales and Mortgage businesses but, I guess if I had, I'd probably still be doing one of those things as a career. The reality, however, is that I was altogether average at both of them and, although I enjoyed certain aspects of both of them, I was 18 when I bought my first rental property, 24 when I started in real estate, and 27 when I became a loan originator, and quite frankly, didn’t know jack about sales or selling when I started my careers in those fields. Of course, I learned a ton while I was in those fields but, like almost everyone past the age of 25, all of the jobs we have from the very 1st lawn mowing gig or paper route, we learn what we're good at, what we're not good at, what we enjoy doing, and what we don’t.


For me, I realized a few things about myself while a part of those 2 industries which gave me a tremendous amount of respect for the people who succeed at them, which I'll address in a bit. But first, I want to share a few of my experiences prior to the real estate and mortgage gigs which I think will add some color to future podcasts and, more importantly, some important context to the things I plan to share in future episodes. As I mentioned earlier, I believe you need to know a little about the person speaking to decide if you want to spend any more time listening in the future.


When I started Real Estate sales in 1994, I had just returned from living in Chicago for several years where I was taking part in a very unique type of personal development training. I was living in a zen monastery that doubled as the Aikido world headquarters for one of the most renowned Aikido and Zen masters in the world, a man named Fumio Toyoda. I had been accepted into a very unique and intense multi-year leadership development program called which is referred to in Japanese as Uchi-Deshi, (uchi means inside and deshi means student), this is a very traditional live-in student program popular in Eastern cultures like Japan, China, and India, whereby the student makes a 24 hour commitment to training under a master in a particular discipline while living with, traveling with, studying with, and learning the business of, the master. In my case, I was living in this Aikido and Zen school primarily to study the martial art of Aikido and Zen meditation, as well as business and leadership, from Mr. Toyoda. (by the way, you can google all of this stuff if you’re interested in any of this. You can google Fumio Toyoda, spelled with a D, and learn about who he was and what the uchi deshi program is).


The goal of the program for the master is to teach and train a select, somewhat elite, group of students in order to eventually go out into the world and transmit the art so as to pass it on and keep it alive. The goal for the student, although somewhat different for every individual, is to take advantage of a once in a lifetime opportunity to study under a master of a particular discipline, get your ass kicked on a daily basis, travel with the master, learn business and leadership lessons from a master of both, forge your character and leadership skills by daily immersion in the culture, the grueling physical training, the mindset, being in the presence of such an individual, and just being around other like minded individuals who wanted the same type of hard core training and mentorship.


Now, why share this part of my life with you in this episode? Simple, I owe it to you to be completely transparent and open about my intentions and motives for this podcast. At the time of this recording, I'm 47 years old and have spent almost 40 of those years doing martial arts, with several of those years taking part in the uchi deshi program I just mentioned. I've been teaching other people since the mid 1990's as an Aikido, Zen, and defensive tactics instructor with 1000’s of students over 20+ years from the military, law enforcement, and civilian world. The lessons I learned about myself, about people in general, about hard training, about training the mind and body, about leadership, about breathing and meditation, about business and success, about linguistics and communication, and a host of other things we'll talk about at some point in future episodes, these are the things I intend to bring to the podcast since they’re the experiences that have formed who I am as a person, as a businessman, as an appraiser, father, partner, friend, teacher, mentor, and any other mask or role I may play at different times of the day.


Like all of you, what we do or what we call ourselves; Appraiser, realtor, lender, teacher… these are not the real you and I, these are just parts of who we are and what we identify as. All of our accumulated life experiences are the real you and I, and for me, I may call myself a real estate appraiser from 8am to 6pm, but that’s simply one of the things I do. In fact, If you google my name you'll find that I did, in fact, go on to open one of the largest and most advanced Aikido, Zen, and Leadership development centers in the midwest. I modeled the school after Mr. Toyoda's and had full time live-in students and well over 150 monthly students studying Aikido, Kendo, Zen meditation, judo, jiu jitsu, MMA, yoga, japanese language, massage therapy, and a host of other disciplines. I traveled the world teaching Aikido, defensive tactics, and leadership principles for 10 years or so while I was also learning the disciplines called real estate sales and loan origination.


So what does all of this have to do with Real estate appraising, real estate sales, lending, or investing in real estate? Nothing and everything! (count that as your first zen lesson!) The new Real Value Podcast will be primarily for real estate appraisers and real estate professionals but its important for me to share with you who I am if I'm going to ask you to take time out of your busy day to listen to me. In my years studying Aikido, Defensive tactics, Zen meditation, and leadership I learned to study other industries and disciplines for best practices and then bring back what works and implement those practices into my life and business. One of the areas that Real Estate salespeople, and even lenders, are much better than appraisers at doing, is constant and continuous training and professional development and also learning from other industries. One of my intentions is to bring that spirit to the appraisal industry via this podcast, as well as build a network of like minded individuals to learn from and share best practices with. If that’s you and you'd like to be part of that network, the cost is absolutely free and I have only one simple rule: add value. And by ‘add value’, I don’t necessarily mean add value to me or to the podcast, I simply mean to start shifting your thinking to adding value in everything you do from this point forward.


I’ll end this episode with a quick story about adding value. If you’ve never heard of the book Significant Objects or the Significant Objects Project, this is the perfect time to introduce you to it. There are links in the show notes if you’re interested in learning more, and of course, you can google it. The gist of the book and the project is about narrative and the power of story.


The authors of the book, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, set out to test a hypothesis about how the story of a thing can influence how you feel about a thing. Of course, we all know this subjectively because we all tell stories everyday about things that mean something to us. We tell stories about our grandparents, parents, lessons we learned growing up, we tell stories about things in our closets, sometimes as a way of justifying keeping the things in our closet when we should be selling them or maybe donating them to goodwill. Stories help us give meaning to things.


The authors of Significant Objects set out to test whether or not you could measure objectively those things that have value and meaning subjectively. They did this in a very unique way! They went to flea markets and second hand stores and acquired, for, on average about $1.50 per item, little things that, at first glance, had almost no value. These were tchotchkes, knickknacks, small things that had virtually no meaning or value. They then asked other authors, journalists, and writers of various sorts to write up stories about each of these items with the intent of selling the items on Ebay. What they found was unbelievable from the standpoint of verifiable results. On average, the increase in value, based simply on the story created about the item, was some 2700%!! Items purchased for $1.00 sold for $50, $70, over $80! All because somebody added slime meaning to the item by telling a story about it. I highly encourage checking out the book, its filled with some very interesting stories! If nothing else, the marketing value gleaned from many of the writers of the Ebay ads for these knickknacks is brilliant. What you leave with is a greater understanding of the power of story, the immense strength that words, placed together in a certain way, can have on all of us.


I challenge you all to take 15 minutes out of your day today and think about your story. What is it about you that makes you you, that makes you do what you do, and that makes people want to engage with you. So, to borrow the ending line from one of my favorite filmmakers, Levi Allen of Left Coast Media, Life is Better When You Make Stuff! So go out and create something of significance today and strive to be a person people when miss when you’re gone.