You're Just Not That Good!

The title of today’s show…You’re not that good! What does it mean? Well, to explain what I mean by that statement I have to take you back 25 years to Chicago, Illinois when I was taking part in an intense leadership and personal development program I’ve talked about in other episodes whereby I lived in a martial arts and zen academy and studied Aikido and zen meditation full time for several years. I was just a 21 year old kid learning about life in a big city and how to manage an 18-20 hour a day schedule filled with lots of physical training, meditation training, traveling all over the city and suburbs teaching classes, and simply learning how to be a good student. It was a grueling schedule physically, but even more so emotionally.

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Part of a program like that, much like a military boot camp, is to break down the student in almost every way possible to strip you of your ego and expose your weaknesses. You might be physically very capable of lots of abuse throughout the day but after multiple 18 and 20 hour days of being pushed to your limit, eventually you crack and you reveal some kind of weakness. It might be a breakdown of attitude, an immature response to somebody or some thing in your environment, or literally a full on break down where you storm off the mat and break down emotionally in private. We saw this on a pretty regular basis when people were pushed to their limits physically, psychologically, and emotionally.  
  
I’m not necessarily advocating for or against this kind of training, by the way, just telling you the story of my experience with that kind of training. For me, it was absolutely what was needed for me at that time in my life. Not because I had any kind of discipline or behavior issues. In fact, I had already been living on my own in my first real estate investment for the past several years, was working in the family business, and generally had my shit together for a 20-21 year old. I was on a good path but what I hadn’t really experienced up to that point in my life was the ego shredding experience of what life in the Aikido and Zen program was about to deliver. 
  
What I mean by that is that many people go through life never exposing themselves to uncomfortable situations. Most people, just based purely on human nature and the built in desire to avoid pain and discomfort, will make daily, weekly, and monthly decisions to avoid truly difficult and potentially painful situations. It’s natural, typical, unfortunately all too common, and eventually those weeks and months turn into years and you look back as a 30, 40, or 50 year old and wonder where the time went. Not only that, but if you’ve never been truly tested in a variety of areas in your life, you never really know what you could have been or what you could have accomplished had you exposed your body, mind, and ego to the elements, to pressure, or to a harder life for some period of time. I’m not suggesting, by the way, that none of us have had or are having periods of our lives that aren’t tough or a struggle. I’m referring to consciously choosing to put oneself in uncomfortable positions or situations in order to grow, but also to put ones ego in check. 
  
If you ask most people what life in the future would look like for them they'd describe something that is easier than life today.  Meaning, they’ll talk about having more resources, more time, more enjoyment, retirement, boats, cars, jet skis, travel, etc. People don’t tend to hope that life gets harder each day and one of the reasons we work is to have a better future than our past, is it not? We work to make money, save some of it, invest some of it, enjoy life a little today but hopefully have enough to rest and enjoy later. Of course, we work to give our families that kind of life as well and support a particular lifestyle now.  
  
By the way, I’m no different in that regard. I don’t hope for a more difficult future than my present or past. What I mean by bringing that topic up is that most people kinda amble through life this way right from the beginning of their con Most will choose to move toward comfort and pleasure and away from pain and discomfort. Of course, if you were to talk to any appraiser on any given day you wouldn’t know this because most of them talk and act as if they had lost a bet at some point and ended up in the worst business ever having to deal with the worst people ever. You’d get the impression that they are clearly forcing themselves to deal with an immense amount of pain and discomfort on a daily basis. The roots of that kind of attitude and paradigm are exactly what I’m talking about because our attitude and personality are shaped by our life experiences. I’ve said before that our personal reality is shaped by our personality and vice versa. In essence, we’re the sum total of our life experiences. And how we remember those life experiences and the story we tell ourselves about those experiences has a big effect on how we see the world around us each moment of each day. It forms how we interpret the things we see and hear.  It determines if we see the glass as half empty or half full.   
  
Speaking of getting ones ego smashed. My days living in the dojo were filled with constant physical and mental training, traveling, setting up and teaching aikido at various clubs and satellite schools, taking 4 hours of evening aikido classes with the senior teachers and Mr. Toyoda, and then the live-in students would have to close up the school at the end of the night, clean the dojo, finish up office work, and then cook for the rest of the live-in students and our teacher, Mr.Toyoda. This was typically between 10:30 and midnight most nights, by the way. But, It was at these late night sessions with our teacher, our sensei, that meant the most for the live-in students because we knew that we were part of an extremely small group of people having wisdom imparted to us from somebody who was regarded by tens of thousands of people around the world as one of the greatest living aikido and zen teachers of our time. He was not only a master teacher of zen and aikido, he was a great business man who had built a martial arts empire that stretched around the world. He had people on a daily basis clambering for his time and acknowledgment and we were the lucky ones getting to eat dinner and sip saki with him on almost a nightly basis. Regardless of how exhausted we were by that point in the night, we never passed up that opportunity because we knew it was something special and we knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.  
  
The thing about submitting yourself to that kind of unique training under a Japanese teacher, especially in martial arts and zen, is that you’ve accepted that you’re going to be treated harshly, spoken to pointedly, often times yelled at by the teacher, and you’re never going to get anything right, you’re never going to be able to juggle all of the responsibilities successfully, and, quite simply, you’re going to fail at a lot of things on a regular basis. Those whose egos are rooted in their own self importance were typically the ones who ended up breaking and quitting. If you quit the live-in student program, by the way, you were out for good! You were done with the dojo, done with normal daily training, never to come back as a regular student. You made a commitment to the program (minimum one year commitment with a maximum of three) and you were expected to finish at least that first year.  
  
But that was one of the main points of the program, for the teacher to see what you were made of and what he needed to expose within you so that your ego could be broken and rebuilt, and for you, the student, to be tested on a daily basis with unsolvable tasks, unending training, an unmanageable schedule, a never ending to do list, and to find deeper and deeper reserves within to keep pushing ahead. If your ego got in the way, you’d fail every time! As a live-in student in that type of program, you were up at 5 or 6 every morning, ice cold shower, morning meditation, morning aikido class, dojo cleaning, giving to others all day long, taking care of the teacher, teaching classes, cooking meals, running the dojo office, teaching more classes, taking classes from more senior instructors, and ending the day late at night still being pushed mentally and emotionally. Ending every day after midnight and having to start it all again early the next morning meant it was completely up to you to figure out how to do it and do it with your mouth shut and your attitude in check. There was no complaining about the schedule, or the training, or the physical beatings, or the injuries, or the treatment by the sensei, or the spartan living conditions, or the projects list, or the travel, or anything else that we signed up for. Why? Because it was chosen, and we were reminded all the time that this was a choice. We could quit any time. Having that in front of you every day was a good reminder to keep your ego in check, lest you let it goad you into quitting in a moment of weakness.  
  
You see, my friends, one of the main reasons for putting oneself through that kind of experience is to be pushed. To be pushed to your physical, mental, and emotional limits so that you could find your boundaries and expand them, but also so that you would have a new paradigm through which to view your world. We didn’t necessarily know this at the time, by the way. These are insights I’ve gained over the 25 years since taking part in that type of training. We were there because we wanted to be the best aikido instructors in the world and study under a true master of zen and aikido. What we got,  however, was vastly more. What we left that kind of experience with was a new relative view of daily life that allowed me to put things into perspective because we lived with very little. We were taxed physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and yet we were asked to find more, do more, and be more. And we chose that life! The magic that happens when you take part in something like that is that you realize how much you actually can do when you tell your ego to shut up and sit down. It’s your ego that tells you you cant do something and its also your ego that tells you your important, more important than you really are! When you can tell your ego that its wrong on both counts, amazing things start to happen because the true you can come out.  
  
Being the zen master that he was, Mr. Toyoda was constantly on the lookout for ways to teach each of us individually. One of his favorite ways to do that was to look for weaknesses within each of the live-in students. Maybe one of us was coming down with a cold, which was a sign of physical and mental breakdown of sorts, or one of us had forgotten a key task in the dojo that day or to dust a particular picture frame somewhere. We were always being watched and tested for something we missed which kept our awareness on level 12. Instead of pointing it out in the moment when he noticed something, he would often wait to see how we were going to handle the rest of the tasks for the day, whether or not we would notice the forgotten task or if our impending sickness would cause us to fall apart completely. In fact, if he noticed these things before evening aikido classes began, he would often use the class time and our role as the ones helping him demonstrate techniques to push us even further, treat us especially harshly on the mats, and point out some of these weaknesses in cryptic ways while pounding on you during demonstrations. He would say something during a demonstration of a technique that likely only you and the live-in students understood to be a reference to the missed office task, the dusty picture frame, or the student’s obvious cold coming on and then he’d apply the technique rather dynamically to make his point. You knew in that instant that you had failed in some way…again, and that the real lesson had just begun. The lesson being that you’re just not that good, not that important, and that that the world doesn’t give a shit about your excuses or complaints. The work either gets done or it doesn’t. 
  
It was usually while sitting with him late that evening at dinner that the topic of your failures would come up, or he would point out that somebody was starting to get sick, and then he would simply say, “that’s too bad Blaine, you’re just not that good,  Blaine, you’re just not that good”. And this was a reminder to all of us to keep our egos in check. It was a constant daily reminder that we were all a part of something bigger and that any one of us alone was not that important and that the world, the universe if you will, didn’t care that we were tired or upset or run down. If we were forgetting things during the day, missing office tasks, or even getting sick, we would be reminded that we just weren’t that good. Now I know this sounds kind of strange to the average person, especially coming from western education like we all have. This is definitely a unique strategy of developing leaders and a very eastern one. However, as we were taught every day in that program, egos are one the main reasons companies fail, businesses disappear, people quit jobs, relationships end, and people stagnate. It’s your ego that makes you think you’re more important in the grand scheme of things than you really are. It’s your ego that makes you falsely believe the world cares about your complaints, it doesn’t. It’s your ego that tells you, very deceptively by the way, that you’re better than you really are. And in the grand scheme of things…you’re not that good. 
  
Leaders who think they’re more important than those who follow them, managers who think they’re more important than the workers they manage, workers who think they’re more valuable than the tasks they’re asked to perform, those who think they’re beyond question, and those whose egos have fooled them into thinking they’re something special in a world of 7 billion special people, I’m sorry my friends, but you’re just not that good. That’s not to say you’re not good at what you do, but as soon as you start to believe you’re better at the thing than what that thing actually contributes to the world, you’ve let your ego blind you. Whenever you find yourself getting upset at something in your business, remind yourself that you’re just not that good and you’ll shift our mind toward how to be better. When you find yourself getting upset at a colleague, coworker, or client, remind yourself that you’re just not that good and you’ll find yourself looking for new ways to interact. If you find yourself complaining about the industry, the AMCs, the lenders, the government, the regulations, the White House, the fees, and all the so called ‘skippys’ in your market, get over yourself man, you’re not that good! In fact,  if all you’re doing is complaining about it, you’re showing to the world that you’re not that good because you’re obviously not able to overcome all of the things you’re complaining about! And that’s the point… in the grand scheme of things, you’re just not that important, the world doesn’t care about your complaints, and you’re not so good that you don’t need more work, more growth, more education, new perspectives, and new attitude.   
  
You see, the emphasis can be wherever you’d like it in the sentence but its really meant to remind you that you’re not good enough in any single situation to solve ALL of the problems, ever.  My sensei was saying it to remind me us that, regardless of how much we try to be the best at something or worse, THINK we’re the best at something, or even really good at something, that’s the moment that our egos are about to blind us to opportunities and solutions to unforeseen challenges and obstacles. And the moment we stopped to complain or even contemplate a situation, it was already too late! Action and intention were always the words of the day in the dojo. It doesn’t matter what it is my friends, none of us is THAT good at what we do or who we are being in any given moment. You’re not THAT good that you cant humble yourself, You’re not THAT good that you cant learn something new, You’re not THAT good that you can solve every new problem or challenge that comes your way, and you’re also not THAT good that you don’t deserve a little grace for not being able to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. You’re not supposed to and you’re just not THAT good at it anyways. I mean that in the most loving, yet humbling way possible.  
  
In the appraisal business specifically, one of the big drawbacks to the typical business model is that once you go off on your own, you don’t have anybody telling you that you’re just not THAT good anymore. By that I mean, you don’t have anybody keeping your ego in check.  Your mentor isn’t there pushing you to grow and be better, or correcting your work, or catching your mistakes. You don’t have anybody telling you to check your attitude or look at things differently. You go out on your own, you get some business, you complete some appraisals, maybe you have some revision requests every now and then, likely you complain about them, but other than that, you never have anybody keeping you in check. This business, for a large part of the appraiser population, is a limited feedback business with almost zero leadership. I’m not saying there are no leaders in our industry, I’m saying that for most one to three person appraisal businesses there is little to no ego checking going on and no solid leadership. Running your own business, by the way, does not make you a leader. You may think it does, but it just makes you an independent business owner. In fact, being an appraiser isn’t even considered a ‘business’ by many accountants, investors, and true business owners. They consider an independent appraiser to simply be an independent service provider or salesperson. You have little to no equity in your business, nothing you can really sell, nothing of substance that can be leveraged, and is almost wholly dependent on you, the appraiser, to bring home the bacon each week. If you get sick or break your leg, the gravy train more or less stops.  
  
What am I saying? I’m saying that many of you have told yourself a story, a story built by your ego and fed by your ego. It’s a story that keeps telling you how good you are in a world that simply doesn’t understand or appreciate just how damn good or important you are. “They just don’t get it”, you say. “Why do these damn clients keep asking me for these revisions, or to add these comments, or to add these additional sales, or…or…or…” The bottom line is, you're simply not as good as you keep telling yourself every day. I mean, you’re a good appraiser, you’re just not THAT good that, for you, being good also means being able to handle all of the tasks of being an appraiser in 2018-2019 without complaining about them. You’re a good appraiser, you’re just not THAT good that you can also accept you may have to develop some other skills. Skills like communication, marketing, website development, speaking skills, management of people, dealing professionally with complimentary industries like realtors and lenders, and business development skills. You’re just not THAT good. And when you can finally get to the point where you can say that to yourself and understand it, you’re likely on the precipice of a personal and business explosion of epic proportions.  
  
Almost every martial arts dojo I have ever been in has a sign or poster somewhere that says something like, “check your ego at the door”. If every appraiser office had a similar sign, we’d likely be much further ahead as an industry. Unfortunately, they don’t, which means the egos run rampant and the opportunities for many are lost to those who have checked their egos at the door. The irony at the time of this recording in 2018 is that there are a bunch of other industries looking at appraisers and saying, “sorry, but you’re just not that good, we can probably do without you”. Many of those industries are the ones who currently pay us to do what we do. It’s only when we can say to ourselves, “you’re just not THAT good” that new questions get asked, new answers emerge, new partnerships evolve, new coalitions are created, and new opportunities appear. Take control of your personal and professional futures my friends. Every now and then remind yourselves like Toyoda Sensei reminded me, you're not THAT good and the world simply doesn’t give a shit about you and your fears, your concerns, your complaints, and your tears. Then call up a real estate agent and meet them for coffee. Call a new local lender and take them to lunch. Schedule a lunch and learn and teach some folks what it is you do and how you do it. Send out some thank you cards to 5 of your past clients. Reach out to an appraiser in your town whom you’ve never met and meet for beers. Maybe its that low-baller form filling jack ass skippy you seem to know so much about but have never met. Who knows, when you put your ego in check, you may just learn something. You may also have the opportunity to teach somebody something along the way. What I do know for sure, is that opportunity exposes itself to those with eyes to see it and egos willing to accept it.  
  
Thanks for listening my friends… there is bonus content for this episode,  by the way. The only way to get the bonus content is to register at RealValueCast.com or here, so if you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about how meditation helps keep your ego in check,  and your blood pressure down, head over to real value cast.com and let us know which email address you’d like us to send it to and I’ll send it to you personally. I also answer every email sent to me personally and love the interaction so thanks to those of you who have sent such nice emails, asked awesome questions, and offered your thoughts on the topics talked about here, I really appreciate it and please keep them coming.  
 
We’ll chat again next week! 
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