WEEK ONE
Is It Me? Crazymaking in the Creative Workplace Are you underperforming, or just being undermined? As architects, we
define ourselves through our profession. For us, it’s not just a
career, it’s a vocation. An attack on our job performance therefore
becomes an attack on the way we define our core being. Since our work
involves evolution of ideas through criticism, are you being resistive
when you feel that the criticism doesn’t ring true?
WEEK TWO
Boom! And the Aftermath What do you do when the bottom falls out of your world? When things in
your personal life have sent you into an emotional tailspin? You have
to move on and keep functioning, but it’s not likely that your current
state of mind will equip you for your high stress, creative job. We are
often so demanding of ourselves that we don’t give our psyche the time
and space it needs to recover.
WEEK THREE
What's Disrupting You? What’s your excuse? We all have one, “I could do more if...” We blame
our busy schedule; stress, the fact that we needed to do a load of
laundry, on why we aren’t making time to be our creative best. The
trouble with seeing your job, energy level, or other commitments as
roadblocks is that these things are just never going to go away. If you
stay stuck in this thought process, you will never achieve your goals,
never advance your career. So, if we have to accept a certain amount of
life to get in our way as a constant, how do we contain all those time
and energy demands so that they don’t drain us?
WEEK FOUR
Halos and Horns: How being Bad makes us Good Designers For architects, every day is Judgement Day. We constantly measure our
work and ourselves against everyone else, endlessly critiquing, even
sometimes feeling threatened by others’ success. We style ourselves
after our heroes and forget to be introspective enough to build our own
true, original identity. How many personal armageddons have arisen from
pure ego and a desire to “make it” getting in the way of true happiness
and success?
WEEK FIVE
Be Your Own Stage Mom Ah, the stage mom, militantly advocating for her child’s success. While
we might feel the poor kid being pushed into the spotlight is a bit of a
train wreck, admit it, wouldn’t it be nice to have someone that
enthusiastically putting you on center stage and showcasing your
talents, fighting tooth and nail to get you noticed? Well, go look in
the mirror. You are your very own self-promotion machine.
WEEK SIX
Livin' Large Life is what happens to you while you are busy making plans. No matter
how much you think you know, how hard you have worked towards a specific
outcome, there is often a curveball. That’s a bad thing only if you
lock focus on how you didn’t get what you thought you wanted, aka the
conventionally defined career. Convention, being the gross
generalization that it is, mostly proves inadequate to achieving
fulfillment.
WEEK SEVEN
The Possibility of Transformation As architects we have to believe in the ability of things to be
transformed. An empty parcel of land becomes a building, an old building
gets a new lease on life, an interior space is remodeled for a whole
new use. What we do is centered around seeing possibilities in existing
circumstances and bringing about a change that goes beyond what our
clients can imagine. Tell us something is impossible, and we view it as
a challenge to find a solution. This is an amazing talent. Too bad we
don’t see it that way. It’s time to start designing your career and
bringing to bear all of the same creative skills you would to a creaky
old building on a difficult site. Be your own next project.
WEEK EIGHT
Because Someone Had To: The Flawed Thinking of Being a Trouper How many times have you found yourself faced with a problem for which
you were ill-trained, understaffed and poorly equipped and just muddled
through and made up a way? Woe to anyone who dare criticize the final
product, means, or method, so proud are you to have accomplished the
task. If you feel like an innovator in situations such as these, you’d
be right, but only in a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees kind of way.
WEEK NINE
Obstacle or Opportunity? Way up there on my list of thoroughly annoying turns of phrase is the
application of the word “challenging” as a euphemism for everything from
the truly problematic to the downright irritating. It is my belief
that people who use this term are tying to force themselves to be
relentlessly positive in the face of a negative situation. In other
words, they don’t know the difference between an obstacle and an
opportunity.
Is It Me? Crazymaking in the Creative Workplace Are you underperforming, or just being undermined? As architects, we
define ourselves through our profession. For us, it’s not just a
career, it’s a vocation. An attack on our job performance therefore
becomes an attack on the way we define our core being. Since our work
involves evolution of ideas through criticism, are you being resistive
when you feel that the criticism doesn’t ring true?
