You're Not An Appraiser

Welcome back to the real value blog, the blog 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 real value podcast and I thank you for joining me on this journey through life each week. I say journey through life because even though this is a podcast primarily for my appraiser brothers and sisters, we are not our work and we are not the titles we give ourselves. ​

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Those are just the many hats we wear throughout our lifetime and those hats will change many times. We wear the hat of student, brother, sister, sibling or parent. We wear the hat of mother, father, Grandmother or grandfather. We wear hats that say accountant, appraiser, marketing executive and plumber. But these titles and labels are not the real you, these are just things we call ourselves. They are simply masks that help us hide from exposing the real us that lives under the mask. The masks help to conceal our real hopes, dreams, and desires and keep us on the straight and narrow instead of just throwing in the towel, packing up and heading off to another town with a new identity and a simple plan to become a river guide, a ski instructor, a yoga teacher, or a fly fishing guide. Something simple and free and without the pressures and daily grind of working in the financial world and cranking out yet another appraisal that will just quickly fly through the hands of a dozen people on the journey to its eventual resting place inside a vinyl folder with all of the closing documents for somebody’s home.

That vinyl folder has a little clear business card slot in the lower left front corner with the business card of some realtor who, in 10 or 20 years will no longer be in the real estate business…heck, may no longer exist in this world. But she too had hopes, dreams, and desires and simply wore the hat of real estate agent at one point in her life. It was just a title though. A mask he or she wore for a period of time on this journey and we can all be quite confident he or she wore several other masks, hats, and labels throughout her life. But rest assured, these were just things that she did, not who she was. We know our parents and siblings as something different than the titles they have during the day or the masks they wear to go to work. We know them as our loved ones. People who know us deeper than most and have likely shared the most special times in our lives with us and we pay no mind to the masks they have to wear from 9-5 Monday through Friday or the eyes through which their boss or manager sees them. And they grant us the same. We know them in a different way because we’ve been on the journey with them. We’ve seen them at their best and at their worst and we know them as the human beings they are, not the labels they or somebody else has given them or they’ve chosen at some point in their lives.  
  
No, my friends, we are not appraisers. That is simply something we do during the day. We are t-ball and soccer coaches, model builders, tchotchke collectors, craftsmen and craftswomen, knitters, landlords, painters and sculpters, parents to our children, brothers to our sisters and sons and daughters to our own parents. We are Bob, Blaine, Jenny, Aaron, Francine and Mark. We are already yoga teachers, fly fishing and river guides, and ski instructors. We play hockey, softball, basketball and lacrosse. We skate, ski, ride, and race on the weekends. We teach martial arts, study philosophy, smoke cigars and ride motorcycles. We live life constantly taking off one hat and putting on another as we head out the door to score some goals or hit some doubles. The wonderful thing about this journey we call life is that we CAN do and be all of these different things and we can be them all at the same time. We DO all of those things but at our core we ARE who we believe we are and who we believe we can be.

Don’t be fooled by the mask you may be wearing today my friends. It’s just a mask or a hat that says ‘appraiser’ on it from 8-4 or 10-6 or noon to 10. It’s not who you really are at your core its just something you do and in a few years the hat you wear might say something else. And that’s ok because we’re here for a variety of reasons but one of the big ones, I believe, is to experience all that we possibly can in the short span of time we’re here. Don’t get caught up in the game of ‘this is who I am because this is what I do’ game. You’re not an appraiser, you’re Mary, Fred, Jim and Sandy. You just happen to earn your income currently as a real estate appraiser. When we tell ourselves this story that ‘we are appraisers’ we build up a backstory of how we got here and why we do this thing and we begin to wrap ourselves in that flag and identify with this thing that has its own set of rules and ways of being and then those rules and ways of being start to infect who we are as people and we start to become the rules and ways of being dictated by the title, the hat, or the mask we were wearing during the day. All the while forgetting who we really are at our core, somebody’s sister, brother, mother or father. When we start to call ourselves by what we do we venture into dangerous territory where we start to think that we are different from people who wear other hats during their day.

We see people wearing their masks or wrapped in their own flag and we say, ‘they look funny! Look at that silly mask they're wearing! Why cant they look, act, and think more like us?...they're silly!’ When this starts, it is a downward spiral into a process whereby we seek others who are wearing the same mask we are wearing and wrapped in the same flag we are so that we feel better about ourselves. We surround ourselves with people who look, talk, and act like us and speak the same language we do. We start to exclude anybody who doesn’t think, talk, and act like us and we laugh at all of those other silly mask wearing frauds as they amble about their day doing something different than we chose to do. How dare they?! ‘How dare they make choices that are different from the ones I make and how dare they try to live without my blessing and without consulting me on how they should be doing it.’ We go to the meetings with people just like us and we laugh at the meeting going on across the hall because they look so stuffy in their three piece suits or wearing their blue collar work uniforms. We take the oath and signed the pledge of inclusion into our group and we wear the lapel pin and fly the flag proud. Anybody willing to cross into our territory and dare to expose us for the human beings we really are will have a fight on their hands! We become the mask we are wearing and anybody wearing a different mask or wrapped in a different flag becomes a threat. Why? Because anybody not wearing the mask we wear or flying the flag we fly forces us, at some deep level, to question all of our choices and we will defend to the death our right to call ourselves whatever it is we chose to call ourselves this week because that’s what we identify with and what we identify with has to be right, because if its not right then I’m not right and I will not tolerate being wrong so they must be wrong! 
  
In fact, we do defend to the death what we believe is our right. But not the ‘right’ you may be thinking of. Not like a right granted to you by birth like your right to pursue happiness. No, we defend to the death what we believe is our right to be right. When we start believing the myth we tell ourselves based on the hat or the mask we wear during the day, or maybe the mask we were born with like American, Black, white, Italian, or Mexican, we start to exclude others because they cant possibly know what its like to be us and they don’t fly the same flag or believe the same things we do, which has to be bad! Why? Because its scary when somebody doesn’t think, speak, act, or smell like you. It’s scary to let somebody who doesn’t think, speak, and act like you in because what if what makes them different infects you and you start to think differently? That could be bad! So we make sure that we surround ourselves with others like us who make us feel comfortable with the choices and behaviors we choose and eventually we have surrounded ourselves with so many other similar mask wearers as us that our views of the world gets a bit foggy and skewed. We feel safe, for sure! We have our people around us and our little army of those who think and speak like us and we’re now on the lookout for anybody who challenges what it is we believe and what it is we do.

The only opinions, thoughts, and ideas we hear are from those just like us because that’s the echo chamber we’ve chosen for ourselves and then the law of five starts to kick in. The law of five says you will become like the five people you associate the most with throughout the day. They will not become like you, you will become like them. It happens discretely and under the surface but it ensures your survival in that group and it guarantees inclusion. We are not appraisers my friends, we are human beings on a journey and appraising is simply something we do during the day or night to pay the bills. Nobody wakes up one day and says, “I was just born to opine value on site improvements to pieces of real property.” Your ethnicity, the location you were born, and the flag that inspires your patriotism is most likely simply an accident of birth. You had no choice whether you were born American, Chinese, Iraqi, or Syrian and you had no choice whether you would be Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or Muslim for the first 20 years of your life. Those were all given to you based on somebody else’s choices. At some point though, you get to make your own choices and you get to choose who you surround yourself with, what hat you’re going to wear, what title you’ll be given, who you’re going to allow in and who you’ll choose to exclude from your life because they’re different and wear a different hat, maybe speak and act a little different, maybe fly a different flag than yours. Slowly your life, views, and circle narrows. You identify as a conservative so you narrow your social group to primarily those who think like you. You identify as a liberal and so you hang out with your conservative friends less and less. You served in the military and you simply cant stand to have a discussion with anybody who disagrees with your views on US foreign policy, because, as you like to say, they just don’t get it and they don’t understand the world like you do. And since you call yourself an appraiser, you cant possibly hang out and have a discussion with a loan officer, a realtor, an AMC employee, or anybody who may have a different opinion or view on a topic than you. No, they’re the enemy!  
  
These are all simply choices my friends and choices we make each and every day. We are not appraisers and there is no reason to defend to the death your right to call yourself as such just because you wear a hat during the day that says you do this thing called appraising. You are humans on a journey and appraising real estate was simply a choice you made as a way to pay for the shit you like to eat, drink, and smoke. It’s simply a way to feed your family and keep a roof over your head. You’re not special and you’re not different. You get to choose how you see yourself and this affects how others will see you. If you see yourself as somehow different than everybody else, you will be different. But really only in your mind. Other people will see you as different somehow but likely because of the way you act as a result of how you see yourself and what you call yourself during the day. When you lay your head down on the pillow at night you are not an appraiser. You are a husband, a wife, a mother, a father, a sister, brother, cousin, friend and colleague. You are not an American, a Korean, Iranian, or Mexican. You are a human being with hopes, dreams, and desires for yourself and your family and that’s universal. 

Let’s take off the mask, hang up the hat, shed the flag and just be who we really are at our core which is a human being having a very human experience. Speak to those around you and in your groups like they too have hopes, dreams, desires, and aspirations. If you’re as tough and bad ass as many of you like to speak and act then make the tough choices and hang out with those you say you don’t like because of the hat or the mask they too put on during the day. You’re a conservative and you think liberals are retarded? Grow up! Sit down and have a civil conversation with them but with the intention to learn something and not teach them a lesson. You’re a liberal and you think conservatives only care about war, money, cigars, and whiskey? Grow up! Sit down and have a civil conversation with them but not with the intention to break them of their beliefs. Have a conversation with them, not only to learn the hows and whys of their thinking and their positions but who they are as human beings, their hopes, dreams, desires, and aspirations. You might just learn something. Excluding people and narrowing your world based on false patriotism, a flag, a religion, a political view and, god forbid, something you happen to do from 8-5 to earn some scratch is childish and highly unevolved. It simply narrows your world and for sure narrows your experiences in life. Life exists in the middle of the debate and also on the periphery of the social circle where all of the ‘others’ are living their lives; the ones you don’t want to interact with because they look different, smell different, speak different, do something different than you do during the day, and maybe believe something different than you politically, religiously, or professionally. Growth as human beings begins when we take off the mask, hang up our hat, set aside our prejudgments, and become willing to listen to the world around us as it speaks very valuable lessons to us on a moment to moment basis.  
 
You’re not an appraiser, you’re a human being with friends, family, neighbors, and associates. Researching real estate and developing opinions of value on them is just something you do, like riding a bike, playing the piano, or picking your nose. We like to call ourselves by the things we do because we think it helps tell a story about who we really are but that’s not why we really do that. We call ourselves bike riders, pianists, and appraisers because of our innate need to belong to something and feel important. We identify ourselves based on the things we do because it makes us feel like we’ve chosen something or something has chosen us. Instead of just saying I play the piano or I ride a bike I MUST say “I am a pianist or I am a bike rider”, because we believe those things make a statement to the world and we’re letting it know just how important and special we are. Funny thing is, you likely don’t identify yourself as a nose picker as well. Those things, well those are the kinds of things we keep to ourselves or at least put a little distance between us and them. If asked specifically, I will confess that I occasionally pick my nose and I may just have been caught doing it in my car by the driver next me, who hasn’t? But I will NEVER identify as a nose picker when asked about who I am, that’s just gross. But I will surely say “I am an appraiser”, not because I am particularly proud of that moniker or the even the job. We say it because without it we would be lost, nothing, just a person doing something and not necessarily being something. It’s easier to identify with the work we do than to think about who we really are as humans. 
  
The moment you begin identifying yourself as something that you do you lose the ability to know who you really are and we tend to forget at times that we are all just human beings trying to make it through life relatively unscathed and better for the experience. The reason I bring all of this up in this episode my friends is primarily because, for some of you…many of you, the label you have adopted and the flag you’ve wrapped yourself in as an appraiser is likely going to change in the not so distant future. In a year or two you will be a member in a new facebook group, you’ll be wearing a new hat and a new mask and you will have wrapped yourself in the flag of another profession. You will have likely had no choice. The more deeply you have identified yourself in what you do each day, the more painful the removal of the mask becomes. For many of you, many of us, we have become so deeply embedded with the idea that we are what we do that to even consider doing something else means shedding a whole identity, a whole backstory, and a whole way of seeing the world and its all we know. It can be so painful and life altering that for some it simply will not go well. By identifying yourself as what you do, instead of who you are as a person, you have naturally become less flexible and your ability to adapt may have withered and atrophied. You’re not an appraiser. You’re simply somebody who does appraisals and appraising as a way to make a living but the person who does those things is also the person who has raised children, fought in wars, driven semi trucks and bull dozers. You’re a person who has run marathons, completed tough mudders, spartan races, and CrossFit competitions. You are a parent, a brother, sister, grandparent, and survivor of something and someone.  
  
If its ok with you, I’d like to share a personal story about my own struggles with identity and how painful it was to learn this extremely valuable lesson. As I have talked about in many episodes, I have a long history of martial arts training and teaching. As a 20 year old kid I packed up most of my earthly belongings and moved from my hometown in Michigan to the big city of Chicago to begin a grueling internship as a live-in student under a renowned Aikido and Zen master. This became my identity for a long time. I wrapped myself in that flag, I spoke that language, and I dove head first into this world of Zen and Aikido and I wore the pin proud. After graduating from this program I moved back to my hometown and built my own following of students and developed my own teaching methodologies in the manner that my teacher had taught me. I built one of the biggest martial arts and leadership academies in the Midwest at the time and had a full dojo of live-in students and daily students in a variety of martial and aesthetic arts. We were, by all measures, a very successful business and I was the founder. Much of my identity was wrapped up in that whole world. I spoke the language, ate the food, walked the walked, and had the belts and the following to show for it. In fact, my dojo was such a success in my eyes and I was so identified as a martial arts teacher and founder of this big leadership school that the only place I really ever wanted to be was at the dojo. At the dojo I was the king! People made my tea, got out of my way when I walked in, they scurried about to make sure I had everything I needed while I was there. I had a handful of personal assistants, a team of volunteers, a bunch of live-in students who hung on my every word and, although I never took advantage of the situation or them as human beings, I took advantage of that place as a place to escape to because it was a place where nobody could tell me what to do and where I might be wrong or lacking.

I had built up my own echo chamber and my own palace filled with pretty much whatever I wanted in terms of adulation and respect. In fact, whenever things weren’t going well at home I would simply escape to the dojo. In fact fact, now that I have had some distance and perspective over time, I have come to realize the sad fact that one of the reasons things weren’t good at home was because of the time I spent building that business. My wife at the time and business partner in that facility knew that I was, in fact, married to the dojo and not really her. My identity was as a dojo and leadership development center founder, owner, chief instructor, leader and teacher of people, high ranking aikido instructor, and on the list went of flags I had wrapped myself in and masks I wore. They were masks that made me feel important, successful, and accomplished. They were flags I flew proud because It allowed me to garner instant respect in a very small world that existed in that place and in that very small niche of Aikido around the world.  
  
My commitment to the dojo, (those are the words that I used), was so strong that I was willing to sacrifice almost everything to make sure it ran properly. That’s what I told myself anyway. It wasn’t until my marriage was in serious trouble and my little family unit was being threatened that I had to face this harsh reality that I had become the dojo, it couldn’t survive without me, or so I thought, and I was faced with one of the most terrifying feelings I had ever experienced up to that point and that’s saying something because, I have been around gun fire, seen people shot, I was stabbed in the arm breaking up a fight, I’ve been chased down and chased by bad folks both in the ghetto grocery and while training military and law enforcement folks in their element, and I have been in more than my share of very scary physical altercations where the outcome was in question for a bit. None of those experiences, in my mind, compared with the experience of having to contemplate selling the dojo and not doing this thing that I had so strongly identified with for the past 20 years or so. I would rather have been staring down the barrel of a gun and contemplating my next move than have to consider shedding all of the masks and flags I had wrapped myself in up to that point. The idea of not being called sensei by these people, of not having this sanctuary to go to, and of not knowing what the hell I would possibly do with my life without this identity I had created was the most terrifying feeling I could ever imagine. That was the ultimatum I had been given at the time. My wife or the dojo and I was seriously contemplating choosing the dojo over my marriage.

After all, I had really been married to the dojo all this time without really knowing it and it never talked back to me, did whatever I asked of it, had tons of people in it who loved me and respected me and I had a posse of committed people I could call on a moments notice that would meet me anywhere for drinks and cigars. I had basically built a huge traveling party and entourage that would go anywhere I traveled to teach Aikido and we traveled! This is what I identified with and this is what I was married to. This is, by the way, a very common problem in that industry. The divorce rate is extremely high for martial arts school owners because of how committed the owner is to this baby they’ve birthed and nurtured. It becomes the place we escape to and the people we’d rather be around than our families in some cases. This is a problem my friends! My marriage did eventually crumble and it turns out the dojo was just a symptom of a bigger problem but it certainly didn’t help that I wasn’t able at the time to identify as a good husband to my wife or good father to my kids as much as I was identifying with all of the other people whom I believed needed me and that the work I was doing was more important than them. Thankfully for everybody involved, we have come through that period of growth and re-identification better people for the experience. Not that you need to know this part but my ex and I are much better people alone than we ever were together and we quite successfully co-parent our two teenage boys without issue. I passed the dojo on to my top students and I eventually had to shed the flags and take off the masks of supreme leader of that thing I had created. It was time for the next evolution of Blaine Feyen and learning the painful lessons of who I really am and who I’m not has made me better for the experience. I’m not so sure my ex would say the same thing and that’s part of the lesson.  
  
When we identify so strongly with what it is we do instead of who we really are as human beings, we tend not to care what damage it does to those around us, those we speak to, and those we come in contact with because we tend to feel righteous in our indignation as this person who does this thing during the day or night. To be honest, I don’t know the extent of the damage my identifying more as a sensei than a husband had on the mother of my boys but I suspect it was fairly substantial. We’ve never talked about it because it’s a sensitive subject and there’s really no point now. We have separate lives and only our children connecting us but as I think back over the experience, although changing how I thought of myself back then wouldn’t have saved my marriage, but it may have saved some of the pain and suffering it possibly caused others in the process. Let me save you some time, some pain, and maybe even some money my friends. You’re not an appraiser, that’s something you simply do to earn a living and, for some of you, its not even that good of a living from what I hear. You are so much more and can be whatever you choose to be at a moments notice. Some of you may have already begun the process of shedding the appraiser flag as you contemplate what you will call yourself next.

​Hopefully the process for you hasn’t been as painful as it was for me to realize I wasn’t an Aikido teacher or a dojo owner, those were just things I did, and now I do something different. And tomorrow I may choose to try something else to see if I want to add it to the long list of things that I do as a human being to have experiences. I don’t tell people I am a skier, I now say that my partner and I ski a lot in the winter months, I no longer say I am a drummer, I simply tell people I used to play the drums. And I never say anymore that I am an appraiser. When asked what I do for a living, I simply say that I appraise real estate. This leaves open the discussion to talk about all of the other things I do and who I really am. My suggestion for you from this day forward when you meet a person for the first time and the question comes up, “what do you do?”, you practice answering with what you do and not by saying “I am an appraiser.” The more important part though is when you ask them what they do and they respond with an “I am…” statement, like “I am a banker, or an accountant, or I am a truck driver”, you respond by saying, “that’s really cool, but that’s not who you are, that’s just what you do! What else do you like to do?” It’s a great ice breaker at networking events and when you’re walking in to meet new potential clients at banks and Real estate offices. It says immediately to the person that you aren’t interested in meeting them just because of what they do for a living and it says you really want to know who they are as a human being. You’re not an appraiser my friend, you’re in the business of relationships and solving value problems but you’re so much more and everybody you come in contact with is so much more than what they do to pay the bills.  
  
I want to thank you for hanging out with again this week my friends and I challenge you all to take a deep and serious look at what it is you identify with and how enmeshed your job and your identity are with who you are as a human being. I am challenging you to ferret out all of the areas of your life where you start sentences with the words “I am…”, like I am a father, I am a drummer, I am an Aikido teacher, and I am an appraiser, and then start to rephrase some of them by adding a few extra words like, “I have two boys, I play the drums, I teach Aikido, and I appraise real estate”. They don’t sound that much different but when you start to identify as simply a human being that does all of these different things your world opens up and you become infinitely more flexible in how you approach the world around you. You can be somebody who tries new things instead of somebody who says “I’m not adventurous”, “I’m not a public speaker”, “I’m not good at networking” or “I am an introvert”. Whenever you use the words ‘I Am’, whatever follows those two words is what you become, good or bad, and you close down all other possibilities of what else you could do or be, at least in your mind. You’re not an appraiser my friend, you’re simply somebody who appraises real estate just as Bob is just somebody who sells real estate and Nancy is just somebody who provides financing for real estate. When we take off the mask we are free to see others as simply human beings who have chosen to do these things and not identify them in terms of what they do. Open up your world, see each other as human beings and you will find that your luck changes more often from bad to good. Meet me back here again next week my friends and I promise to do my best to add some value to your lives and your businesses. I appreciate you spending your most valuable currency with me again this week and that is, of course, your time. Go make the best use of the limited time we all have left on this earth and remember that everybody is somebody’s somebody and we’re all here sharing this experience as human beings.