Patience Jones: Hello, and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms, buildings, and how both get built. I'm your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are talking about building up resilience, which I feel like is a word that we hear a lot. We're going to start by giving you the meaning of the word as we define it.
Brian Jones: Go for it.
Patience Jones: Resilience as we define it is the ability to withstand hardship and to come back. You fall, you get up. That getting up, that continuing to go, that's resilience. Resilience is not never having a bad day. Resilience is not never being upset or never disappointed or never sad. I hate those books and blog posts and everything else that equate resilience with eternal happiness that never wavers and responds not to any external forces. That's not realistic. It's not resilience. Why does being resilient matter?
Brian Jones: I think the biggest reason is that life is long, and work can be challenging, and it will be filled with both moments of being engaged and happy with the work that you're doing, and then there'll be moments where you're going to be faced with challenges or obstacles to doing said work. It's a critical thing to be able to navigate both the highs and the lows and continue and maintain and grow.
Patience Jones: Resilience operates sort of like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. So if you're somebody who somehow has managed to navigate life thus far without any disappointments or upsets, chances are you have a pretty low level of resilience because you don't know how you're going to be if something doesn't go your way. The more that you suffer any kind of setback and are able to come back from it and withstand it, the more you are telling yourself, telling your brain, "I can do this. I've got this. I will continue." We see people who've kind of not focused on, "Okay, this was a setback, and I'm going to go at it better. I'm going to be stronger." When you don't do that, and later in life, something happens, like a client lets you go, or a project doesn't go your way, we've seen people just crumble, quite literally crumble, and to avoid that, it's really important to work on your resilience. The jury is still out, unfortunately, on exactly why some people seem to be naturally resilient, and others don't. You put two different people in a crisis situation, they will act completely differently. The impacts of that will be totally different on both of them. There's some science that suggests that it's nature, what you're born with. There's some that suggest it's what happens to you by nurture and over the course of your life, the experiences that shape you, they help build up your resilience. Regardless of the actual catalyst for resilience, there are things that you can do to build up your own resilience without putting yourself in abject harm's way.
Brian Jones: The big one is to continue to stretch and grow and to accept the failure as it happens. So, getting to a point in a professional setting where you've done something, and it fails, and then kind of coming back from it, that's definitely an opportunity to grow.
Patience Jones: "Fail early" is what a lot of entrepreneurs will say. That sounds really good. It's hard to manufacture your own early failure. So identify things that you can try where the stakes are really low, that you're probably going to fail at, and fail at those things. And then keep doing that to kind of build up that callus of resilience.
Brian Jones: Setting goals is always a good one for that, to make sure that you have goals that you're aiming for. If you don't hit those goals, that's another way that you continue to strive for them and readjust and re-double your efforts to get there.
Patience Jones: Maintaining perspective is really, really important. Thinking about, "Yeah, this is bad, but I have X, Y, Z lined up," or, "These are the things that are going in my favor," or, "I remember 10 years ago when this other thing happened, and that felt like the end of the world, and it wasn't." Being able to reframe things is so important because our brains are designed to default to focus on the negative, which was a survival mechanism from evolution. You want to focus on the one lion that's coming at you, not the hundred lions that are indifferent to you. But that makes less sense in our day-to-day life when you're focusing on the one client who is irritated by something instead of the 12 projects that turned out really well and you got awards for. So maintaining that perspective is vital.
Brian Jones: I think it's an important opportunity to keep a running list of the things that are going in your favor. Because I think in those moments, especially when those setbacks happen, having something handy to look at to note that you have accomplished these things can be really important to regaining your footing and feeling like this is just one setback. It's not typical of something that's happening in a larger way.
Patience Jones: Write that list out with a pencil, and pen, and paper. Don't type it, because the act of writing it out actually helps imprint it more on your brain. Which brings us to practicing mental hygiene. Doom scrolling is not great for building resilience. It actually will erode your resilience. People are not talking on social media and news about, "Oh, this thing turned out so great. I thought this thing was going to go badly, and then it didn't." They are only talking about the things that went wrong, the things that are terrible, the terrible things that could happen, and we're not encouraging you to divorce yourself from reality, but wading around in that muck all day is not good mental hygiene. There have been periods of time where I've avoided murder mystery books because the thought of somebody getting butchered to death was just more than I could handle. Or, you know, violence in movies or violence in TV shows. It's not saying you're never going to expose yourself to popular culture again. It's just saying, be aware of where your head is at any point in time, and curate what you allow in based on what supports that.
Brian Jones: I like to think of it as being your own best advocate and making sure that you are putting in what you need to. It's like any good fuel, you know? It’s part of the ecosystem that is your person, and you want to create an environment where you have the best opportunity to thrive.
Patience Jones: Absolutely. And don't over-intellectualize. This is so, so, so hard to do, especially, I think, for professions like architecture, where the focus of the education is on solving the problem. Especially in times of feeling anxious or feeling like something needs to change, you default to that problem-solving mentality, and if you can just think your way out of it, if you can think your way through why this thing happened, and why was this client upset, and why did that project not go forward? Some reflection is valuable, but turning everything into some kind of academic puzzle that you can ruminate on and create a mental flowchart of, "Well, maybe this happened," or, "Maybe this other thing happened," that's not helping you. It's actually really hurting you. It's like a drug that you keep giving your brain, and you have to break out of that.
Brian Jones: Like internal doom scrolling.
Patience Jones: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
Brian Jones: Just like, no external, no internal.
Patience Jones: That's a really, really good way of putting it. Somebody much smarter than me said, "If there is a solution that can be found, then it's a problem. If there's no solution, then it's just a thing." So if something happened to you or to your practice, and there's nothing you can do about it, don't spend all of your time trying to pick it apart, and ruminate about it, and study it. It is just a thing.
Brian Jones: Yes.
Patience Jones: And the faster you move on, the more resilient you'll become.
Brian Jones: So big takeaways.
Patience Jones: I was going to say, be resilient. That's not helpful at all. Recognize that everybody, everybody goes through this, and the people that seem like they don't probably go through it more than people that seem like they do. The way to help yourself, and your team, and your practice is to work on building resilience the same way you would work on your posture or you would work on strengthening a muscle: little bits repeatedly. Don't manufacture disasters for your firm so that you can try to overcome them. That's a terrible idea.
Brian Jones: Yes.
Patience Jones: That's like going from nothing to 1,000 squats. But view things when they happen as, "This is an opportunity for me to build up my resilience," and over time, you will absolutely notice a change.
