Swatting Flies

Week five of the Shattering the Meme novena, explores the link between distraction and fear.   We derail our dreams without even realizing what we are doing as we load up our days with seemingly virtuous activities that deplete us. 

Thwack!  How did that extra meeting sneak into your week?  The planning for it is swarming around your head like a bunch of flies, an endless stream of issues to deal with.  It’s bad enough to cope with the constant distractions of a day, the ping of email (thwack), people walking up to your desk (thwack), and crises real and imagined that never stop rearing their ugly heads (thwackety, thwack, thwack, thwack).  All of these tasks add up to distractions that derail us from achieving the things we really value in our lives.  But while swatting all those flies, you might want to notice that you are the one who left open the screen door.

It’s done with the best of intentions (or so we think).  After all, big life goals are, well, big.  They take time to reach.  And today was exhausting.  This week is an endless stream of meetings, in between which are deadlines.  Better to think about what you need to do next week...month...year. Year!  That’s real time we are talking about, and deferring progress on achieving the things that will lead to your professional and personal fulfillment can’t wait that long.  What happens when you don’t make time for the things that will make you happy is that you begin to define yourself by the things that distract you.  The meme of virtuous distraction draws you in with task lists and deadlines, then starts pulling you ever downward in its spiral.  Other people validate this by demanding “responsiveness”  and instant attention to their issues.  The idea of setting any kind of boundaries seems downright unholy.  So instead of doing our life’s work, we spend our time swatting flies.

Business equals avoidance
Chores are one thing.  Departures from your life path are something else.  I want to define chores here as any of the things you have to do in work or life, whether reading your email or attending a meeting, or dropping your kid off at karate class.  Chores that can be delegated should be and the remainder of them done as efficiently as possible so that they do not consume all your time and sap your energy.  Your day itself should be about far more than the to do list, if it’s not, you have crossed the line into distraction.  Distraction is easy.  It gets your mind off of things.  It alleviates the pressure of seeking fulfillment.  It tricks you into thinking you are making progress all the while corroding your soul.  You keep so busy doing all these “necessary” things that you can justify procrastinating on the things that really matter.  I strongly believe that we make time for the things that matter to us and excuses for the things that don’t.  When we are afraid of what it will really mean to take the risks and do the work to accomplish our dreams, we decide that they aren’t nearly as important as all the busywork.  Resolve right now to add more structure to your day so all these duties and expectations occupy a smaller and more concentrated percentage of your time and  won’t keep pulling your attention away.  If you find that you go to the distraction zone when you feel stuck, it’s especially important that you have a routine that doesn’t allow you to run around with that fly swatter.

Stop settling
You go kind of numb inside and start to settle when you are in the business trap. You tell yourself that this is how life is.  You lower your expectations.  And you probably start to like using your fly swatter.  The mind craves action and will take it any way it can get it.  However, you did not become an architect so that you could respond to urgent emails about paint color.  Ask yourself what you would tell a high school student who was interested in majoring in architecture.  If your first thought was to jokingly give your condolences, you have settled.  Fix that by no longer accepting the premise that professional practice is defined by a whole bunch of chores.  Get in touch with why you love being an architect and resolve to do more things related to that.  Every time you think you have to put those activities on hold because you have too much to do, recognize it as fear of the unknown and make it a priority to open your schedule up.  Some of the most successful people are the busiest, and they never let that little fact stop them, do they?

The meaningfulness litmus test
We have explored the meaning of success in this novena, but you can’t be successful if you don’t pursue things that are meaningful.  Being your boss’s right hand might get you on her good side, but the rush you feel from that “attaboy” doesn’t last very long, does it?  Don’t mistake the stress response for actual creative energy, either.  Meaningful work feeds your soul, and leaves behind a trail of accomplishments that build on one another and take you closer to the things you want for your career.   Ask yourself where you want to be in ten years and whether or not anything you did today helped get you there. The things that did are actually meaningful, the rest was a waste of time in the larger context of your life.  Get a handle on your compulsory activities so you can make some space to freestyle.

Shatter the meme:
As creative people, we are often attracted to action and new ideas, but it’s so much wasted effort if you can’t see things through to completion, or lose sight of why you ever started down this path in the first place because you have stopped so many times along the way.  Nature abhors a vacuum.  Your life will fill up with a bunch of activities you didn't choose if you leave the space for them.  Along with those activities will come the expectations of others, and your own need to meet those expectations.  Swatting the flies of distraction can be exhausting.  No matter how many you kill, more will keep buzzing around.  Shouldn’t you redirect your energy in a more meaningful way?

Editing out the opportunity

It’s week four of the Shattering the Meme Novena.  Especially in a recession economy, which focusses on lack and limits, our focus must shift to releasing judgement of ourselves and others in order to be more open to the possibilities that come from less rigid thinking.

How well do you know yourself?  Your real interests and capabilities?  I bet they are in there buried down deep, disconnected from what you actually do for a living, expressed maybe as a hobby, or maybe not at all.  Today, I would like you to ask yourself why.  Why are you so disconnected from what you really love to do?  Go, on, give all your reasons.  I’ll bet you have some really good ones.  Masterful rationalizations, all.  So good in fact, that I bet you have never even attempted to set any of the things that would help you realize your dream life in motion.  Or maybe you did in a halfhearted way, since you didn’t want to take that much risk or invest that strongly in something that wasn’t going to work out anyway.  Yeah.

What you have actually done without even realizing it was to edit opportunity right out of your life, just as a surgeon would excise a tumor.  You never truly explored the possibilities or made many plans.  You just knew you couldn’t or shouldn’t go in that direction.  What an insidious meme, the one that leaves us subconsciously longing and always suppressed, all the while believing that we are better off just doing what life expects of us.

Judge and Jury
When I work with coaching clients, this is often the biggest hurdle I find.  As a first step, I encourage them to do some very introspective work to get clarity about what they love to do and attach that to the reason they want to do it.  Then I ask them why they are not doing it already.  That is a profound question.  The answer, when you stop to think about, it is that you are not allowing yourself.  This lack of permission comes wrapped in all kinds of reasons that seem valid until you dig a little deeper.  Things like, “I have too many responsibilities right now to spend the money it would take to get set up,” or “The market for that is too small to really allow me to earn a living.” When I ask my clients how they know that those outcomes will occur if they allow themselves to explore a particular passion, they often have no answer.  They just know.  Because their conditioning (education, early childhood, work experience) told them so.  Before they even allowed the idea to be fully formed and vetted, all on their own, they shut it down.  Deemed it unworthy of seeing the light of day. 

Make the investment
It can be scary to follow your heart.  But you need to think about all the things you are losing by not doing so.  What is your happiness worth?  What does the stress you are experiencing right now doing work that doesn’t serve you cost in terms of your health and well-being?  What does the rat race do to your quality of life, or that of your family?  In economic terms, this is called the opportunity cost.  What you choose to forgo by playing it safe.  Playing is safe also prevents you from receiving the big payoff in every dimension of your life that comes from living with passion and purpose.  Clients, employers, members of your network, will all notice you in a much more positive way once you choose to invest in acquiring the skill and experience you need to do the work that you really love instead of the work that gets fed to you by default.  When you look at all of the costs of playing it safe (physical, mental and spiritual), it becomes obvious just how precarious of a position you put yourself in by staying stuck instead of making the bold moves towards living your true life’s purpose. Playing it safe isn’t so safe after all.

Beat back the lack
We can all fall prey to focusing on what we don’t have.  Especially in this economy, where we are faced with constant bad news, it’s easy to believe that we need to hold back instead of charging forward.  We want to conserve instead of expand.  To carefully guard our reserves, whether time, money or networking capital “just in case.”  Well, the rainy day is happening right now if you are anything but fulfilled and purpose-driven in your life and career.  The stress of trying to maintain the status quo is what makes you feel like you and what you have to offer will never be enough. Believing that there just isn’t opportunity to be had becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  What’s needed instead is to look at what you have to offer and to whom it will make a difference.  Sharing what you have to offer starting right now and making a difference in the world is far more important than holding back.  I liken this thinking to refusing to make a $20.00 donation to your favorite charity because you want to wait until you get rich and can give them an endowment.  It’s kind of ridiculous when you look at it in those terms, isn’t it?  Every little contribution you make does make a difference.  What’s more, is that they add up and propel you forward.

Shatter the meme:
The number one regret of the dying as reported by nurses who cared for hospice patients was that they had not lived a life true to themselves, but instead tried to meet everyone else’s expectations.  Allow yourself to think about who you really are and what you really want, even if it seems ridiculous or frivolous.  Play with the thought, get comfortable with it instead of immediately filing it away because you can’t see the path to achieve it.  In fact, banish all thoughts of “how” and just focus on why you have this dream.  The more you can get in touch with what motivates you, the easier it will become to not only see opportunities, but to fearlessly pursue them.  Then, choose to take action.  Once you do, you will be surprised at all of the opportunities that start to come your way related to your true life’s purpose.  It’s not a miracle, they were always available to you, but now you no longer have them painted over with wite out.

Pulling Open the Flower

On week three of our Shattering the Meme novena, we explore the concept of creativity.  Creativity cannot be forced, nor can it emerge fully formed from the depths of our minds.  Unlearning the idea that hours spent equals quality of output to force an outcome is the lesson of this week.

As creatives, it’s ingrained in us from our earliest years that we are somehow supposed to be masters of everything.  The image of the superstar sole proprietor who conquers the word is dangled before us and we’re made to feel as if we are doing something wrong if we can’t achieve it.  From those first weeks in studio classes, the all-nighter is introduced. The idea behind it is that we need to work hard, really hard, at being creative.  We are not taught techniques for collaboration, or pulling in ideas from other industries or arts.  We are not taught how to understand the needs of the people we design for.  No, Instead the message is that it all must come from within.  And if the great idea won’t just open up out of our mind and bloom, we need to start picking at the bud, much like an ant on a peony.

Sounds strangely logical, except that creativity doesn’t work that way.  The worst thing you can do is to put performance pressure on it, instead of letting it flow, to close down its sources instead of expanding its horizons.  This meme has never served anything but our collective egos as it takes our self-esteem on a perpetual roller coaster ride.

Stop the suffering
Because we have been taught the behavior pattern of hard work, it feels wrong when an idea comes too easily.  We analyze it, reconstruct it, over-embellish it, reject it.  All in an attempt to make the act of creation something that requires tremendous effort.  We need to recognize that what we have been conditioned to feel “right” about in the design process is actually only what feels familiar to ourselves and our profession.  It gets propagated as “the way.”  In fact, what really ends up being propagated is stress inducing behavior. So, we think that if we are not under stress, we must not be very creative.  This is somewhat like planting a shade-loving plant in full sun, assuming that your shadow as you constantly tend it will be enough.

Live in the now
Creativity is about being present, not trying to predict the future based on the past.  When you are in the zone and are in a state of pure consciousness, nothing except the present moment matters.  You stop imposing past limiting beliefs and letting fears about what might happen restrict you, and you just go with it.  No over-thinking, no judgement.  Just think what would happen if you gave yourself more opportunities to disconnect the outcome from possibility. You might even realize that what you or your client thought the outcome should be wasn’t the best way to solve the problem. Stop ignoring all of the other ideas flowering in the garden in your focus on the one plant that hasn’t yet bloomed.

Allow the unfolding
In our “I am enough” mentality, we believe that we can go directly from intention to outcome.  We think that we control the outcome solely through our efforts, and if we didn’t get the result we wanted, we must have either not worked hard enough or made some mistake.  Not only does this corrode self esteem, it sets us up to shut down opportunities that might lead us to an even better result. You can plant the seeds, and tend the garden, but the plant will grow at its own rate, take its own form.  Building the framework for your intent and ideas to grow and then letting them take shape organically will lead you to the best possible outcome.  Relinquish control of what the outcome needs to look like and trust that you have set the right things in motion.

Shatter the Meme:
Allow yourself to detach from the outcome and instead focus on the intent behind the work you are doing.  What opportunity for growth can you find in the problem?  What is really motivating your client to take action?  What kind of environments do people really need? By asking these questions of yourself, your team and your client, you are able to ensure you are solving the right problems and building the right framework.  Resist the need to be a control freak and remember that when you pull open the flower, you usually spoil it.  Step back and let things unfold instead of trying, in your impatience, to force the outcome.

What does Success Look Like to You?

On week two of our Shattering the Meme novena, we look at how to tell the difference between illusion and reality, especially when it comes to how we define our success.  Success is not a destination, but a measuring stick.  When calculating how you measure up, make sure you are being honest with yourself and using valid criteria, not other people’s beliefs and agendas.

Mirror mirror on the wall...the evil queen just didn’t get it.  To her, beauty was defined very specifically as physical appearance. The mirror had a very different definition of beauty, or maybe it just changed its mind (since we never do learn of the mirror’s evaluation criteria, it’s hard to say what it was that made Snow White suddenly jump to the top of the mirror’s ranking). Whatever she had been doing to be declared “fairest of them all” suddenly stopped working for the queen and away went the daily affirmation that she had become so used to receiving. The queen was stuck in one definition of success - beauty - that she built her whole life around. When it was taken away from her, she reacted by trying to restore the past. 

Why go on about a fairy tale?  Because I think many of us define success as some version of vanquishing enemies, being a hero and living happily ever after.  Success comes to be an illusion, built on living up to other people’s expectations.  What success is really about is knowing that you are living your life to your fullest potential.  That requires taking the time to discover your true gifts and find a way to live your life as an expression of them.  Some common success memes that get shattered right now:

Letting others define you
Do you attach yourself to heroes and tie your self worth to how much praise or attention you can get from them? The queen could have spared herself a great deal of misery had she taken the time to think about what it was about beauty that really mattered so much to her.  She might have discovered beauty was not a particularly important or necessary criterion for a good queen (pity Queen Victoria wasn’t around until later).  Instead, she let a mirror define her, without even knowing the basis of the definition.  Everything was right with her world until she stopped hearing what she wanted to hear.    Have you lost the ability to know what you want for yourself because you are so busy trying to be something you think others will value?

Trying to eliminate the threat
Change is the one thing you can count on, and you either get out in front of it or get left behind.  In the red ocean view of the world that so many architects have unfortunately adopted, competition is a threat because you believe that it’s kill or be killed.  The evil queen set out to eliminate Snow White, thinking that that was the way to put herself back on top.  She never stopped to think about what her competition might be doing differently or how she might express her own beauty more strongly.  How many times do you think you are doing everything “right” and stubbornly persist in the same behaviors, becoming more and more competitive and cutthroat?  Success is never a static monolithic thing that you can “set and forget.”  It’s a constant state of becoming.  Understand that you need to adapt your strategies for achieving success to the changing factors around you.

Using the wrong criteria
I don’t know if much can be said to redeem the archetype of the evil stepmother, but it’s highly likely that the woman had some other positive attributes besides beauty.  By being stuck on a single dimension of herself, she was in an all or nothing position, where failure at life itself was the only alternative to being the “fairest of them all.”  How many times do you hold yourself to a standard of perfection?  Of all that you are capable of doing, all the things that you are really good at, you focus instead on a single attribute and allow yourself to feel like a failure because you haven’t achieved the fullest expression of that yet.

Ineffectively seeking feedback
Success is not a destination, its a measurement of whether you are on track to achieving personal fulfillment.  That said, it does require some external measures. However, external measures are a bit of a garbage-in/garbage-out proposition.  Let’s look at our evil queen example again.  This woman had a magic mirror, for God’s sake.  It always told the truth.  That’s a pretty powerful tool.  You think she might use it to find out if enemies were plotting the demise of her kingdom, or if a famine was on the horizon.  Instead, she asked it whether or not she was beautiful.  That’s because she was so stuck on being successful in the one way she had defined it for herself that nothing else mattered.  She could have gotten all kinds of useful information that would have made her loved and powerful (which is probably why she thought being beautiful was important anyway), she wouldn’t have had to compete to be “the most” of anything, and could have had everything she wanted just being herself.  But she didn’t trust that she was enough.  Use your feedback sources, be they a mentor, a client, a friend, a list of accomplishments to good effect by not filtering the information you seek so narrowly that you miss the larger message of how well you are really doing.

Shatter the Meme:
Think about what you want to happen in your life in order to consider yourself successful.  Look at those things you think are necessary for success and ask yourself why you think they are important.  Did someone else tell you that they were the only way to “make it?”  Do you think that someone whose opinion matters to you will be impressed?  Are other people expecting that you do these things in order for them to value you? Who said that particular attribute even was important?  Was it your mother, or a professor you admired?  What do they really know?

 Don’t get me wrong, I believe that we need to constantly challenge ourselves, to move outside of our comfort zones and grow.  But when you allow someone else, no matter how well meaning, to tell you what you should value you start to take on an idea of what success should be that is not your own.  You could check every box on their criteria list and still not feel successful because accomplishing those things may not resonate with you.  Success is living the fullest expression of yourself.  It is not living out someone else’s dream.

Shattering the Meme

For the third annual novena at the Patron Saint of Architecture, I want to help you to see all of the unlimited potential you have and start putting it to work for you.  Novenas are an annual chance to look in-depth at issues that affect how we operate in the world.  In past novenas we looked at how we can truly make a difference in the world, and how to overcome the things that drain our creativity.  This year, we will center around all of the things that we may not even know are holding us back, so that you can shatter those memes and become all that you were meant to be.

Memes, those ideas or beliefs that pervade our culture, are hard to avoid.  Like frogs in the pot, we don’t even know that they’re affecting us, they just seem to be the way it is.  As creative people we are especially susceptible to memes because there’s a certain voodoo around the act of creation.  When your work involves acts for which there is no right answer, you can only respond by evoking memes. The memes of a culture and its expectations, the memes of professional conduct, the memes of what a relationship with a client is supposed to look like.  But what if the meme is wrong? 

We can see the short-term effects of memes in viral internet content.  People get caught up in the topic, idiomatic speech may even be affected.  Then it passes.  Observing these micormemes allows us to see how something can be incredibly relevant due to factors taking place at the moment then pass away like a fad. I want to try to look at metamemes in much the same way.  That’s a lot harder to do.  Even if you can see that there may be something beyond, you might not see why it’s even in your interests to pursue it. 

Live outside the fishbowl
It’s important to realize that memes can operate on two different levels.  The horizontal level is what we absorb from our peers and other surroundings. Those memes can be, but aren’t always, easier to identify.  The more insidious memes are the ones that operate on a vertical level through cultural inheritance.  It’s what you learned about the culture of your profession from your professors and mentors, what your employers and co-workers have enforced, even what your parents thought.  If memes are all around us and have helped to form our beliefs about who we are and what’s possible in our lives and careers, that means we are not necessarily aware of them.  In this nine week series, we are going to bust through some common memes and shatter all of the limitations they hold.  I warn you, this will be both challenging and scary.  Your first reaction will be to disagree, but I ask you to sit with it and really think about why you might be unwilling to question a given issue.  We may not arrive at the same idea for shattering it, but just the realization that there could be a different approach is powerful.

Change the Equation
Believe it or not, most of us live our lives as if everything we encounter were a basic algebra problem.  We use the formulas we know to solve for x (ex. 6 + x = 10).  Unfortunately, solving for x means you have used a meme to eliminate the other variables, in our example that would be the number six or even the outcome, the number 10.  This very straightforward approach to problem solving often causes us to have tunnel vision about achieving outcomes.  If you have ever become frustrated about why you could be doing “all the right things” and still not get the desired outcome, you know what I am talking about.  I want to challenge you to think of things in a different way:  what do you really want the outcome to be?  Not the outcome you think you should achieve, but the one you really want.  Then, work backwards to see how you could achieve it.  Allow there to be more variables and less givens about the situation.  Use a little calculus, or even some differential equations.

Enter the World of Innovative Transformation
Innovative transformation is about challenging yourself to have a game-changing response to the opportunities in your life, instead of your automatic one.  How often do you start a new project the same way you start every other project?  I’m willing to bet you have all kinds of reasons why this is the best or only way to approach things.  You might be open to tweaking your process, but probably feel resistant to throwing it out wholesale.  But what if you did?  Silence all those limiting beliefs and just think about that.  What could happen?  Now think about all of the little things, the small and large decisions you make every single day.  Instead of making them on auto-pilot, start being conscious of them, and start asking yourself what assumptions are tied up in your typical actions.  Change your thinking and change your life.

For the next eight posts, I’m going to present common metamemes that we all deal with and give you strategies for looking at them in a whole different way.  I hope you’ll share your thoughts and experiences as you work to shatter each one.  The Patron community supports you and I know that you are unlimited.

What my house taught me

As an architect, it’s kind of interesting to me that I have learned several major life lessons from a

house. This structure was our family home for eight years. We bought it less than a year after relocating to Cleveland, OH from Phoenix, AZ in order to be closer to my ailing parents. Just the fact that we had relocated at all meant staring down some of my biggest fears, saying goodbye to a city we loved, good friends and professional opportunities, resigning from boards and commissions. So, I thought I’d done it. Made my big leap. But the house had more lessons in store for us. It seemed a pleasant enough house, cheerful and light-filled, with a big backyard and an attached garage. Built in 1942, it was a “newer” home for the community. But we passed it up, citing the too small kitchen and dining room. Only after looking for several more weeks and finding nothing did we come back to it after we noticed that its owners, long moved away, had decided to cut the asking price for their vacant house significantly. We bought it conditionally, with every intention of putting on an addition, adding central air, and on. Fast forward eight years, no addition or central air and we were faced with the need to relocate for work after spending several months unemployed. We put the house for sale in the worst possible market, it sat empty for a year, was broken into by a copper pipe scavenger, and finally became a rental. Two years after moving away, I think I have finally learned the final lesson I needed and am willing to let it go. This is a huge step for me because I want to at least break even, but know that whatever it costs me to be free of this house, it will be nothing compared to the cost of continuing to own it. What a great metaphor for all the things we hold on to in our lives. We are afraid of losing things we think we should want, but in truth offer us very little value.

Lesson one: Never, ever settle
We had become weary of looking. I let the fact that the house was “OK” and cheap due to the price cut lure me into saying yes to something when my gut had originally said no. I passed up the house the first time because it really wasn’t what we were looking for. Instead of having faith that we would find a great house, I almost felt obligated as an architect to transform this one. We had completely remodeled our home in Phoenix, I reasoned, so why not this one? Well, for starters, the level of addition we would have needed to undertake was not financially worth it, and even if we could have done it, we would still not have had the home we really wanted. While there are many life situations that require a little extra effort on our part, there is a difference between the effort to make a good thing great and the effort to improve something that even after being improved will never be what you want. We do this not just with homes, but with our jobs, even relationships. When you invest your energy in the “good enough” opportunity, you stop being open to receive the amazing one.

Lesson two: Place yourself in situations that bring you joy
Parts of this house just downright irritated me. I shudder to think about how much negativity I carried around. Every time I had to carefully open the dining room door to avoid hitting a chair or maneuver around the too small kitchen or deal with the lack of counter space in the bathroom, it annoyed me, if even on a subconscious level. Even though we bought new high end appliances and decorated and painted, everything about the home’s limitations subliminally said to me that my life had limits, had lack, had need. I might have realized it sooner if the situation with my ailing parents, raising two small children and having a stressful and demanding job had not been looming so large in my life. Given all those things, my home needed to be a positive affirmation and regenerative environment, and yet it was only reinforcing all of the other stress. What things in your life are you “putting up” with that are actually draining you? The things in your life should feed you and affirm not only the person you are, but the one you wish to become. Choose wisely.

Lesson three: Know when to walk away
When the time came to put the house up for sale, I knew the market was bad. While I was willing to price the house aggressively, it was important for me to be able to at least break even from the sale. Although it would have been well below comps, one realtor I talked to suggested pricing the house at about $2000 higher than we owed on it to really make it move. I chose the realtor who suggested that we list at only $15,000 below our original purchase price instead (that the house had lost that much of its original value considering all of the improvements we made was shocking enough). I had tapped out all of my savings and was fearful of getting into debt. Two months in, we dropped the price another $10,000 and still nothing. I was hemorrhaging money. Debt, the thing I had been so afraid of, began to pile up. It was not sustainable to have two households, especially when one of them was vacant. Finally, a year into this ordeal, we were able to get renters, which covered the cost of our mortgage. However, it’s hard to manage a property in a city far from where you live and our maintenance costs for their months in the house have exceeded that of the entire eight years we lived there. Operating from that place of fear, I considered my self lucky we at least had the mortgage covered. What I now realize is that even if we had sold the house at a $10,000 loss and had to be in debt in order to pay off the outstanding portion of our loan, we would have been so much further ahead financially. What seemed like practical and sensible thinking was really fear in disguise. Fear costs you so much more than the risk of losing. It traps you in a situations where you can never win.

Lesson four: Question your assumptions
I had an epiphany the other day. I don’t want to own this house any more. It’s that simple. There is no value to me in being a landlord. I need to let go. I started talking to realtors and learned that the Cleveland market is starting to turn around and that people are actively home shopping again. My fears had caused me to make assumptions about the market, based on the past. Making a fresh inquiry brought me facts. While property values are still abysmal, the market is moving along briskly. I can list this house and I might actually break even or come out just a few thousand dollars ahead on the sale.

I’ve moved on in my life to a great new career in a city I love. No need to be tethered to anything that might limit me. The sales agreement will be my diploma. It’s time for my house to teach a different pupil. Lessons learned!
You don't always have to learn the hard way.  My new book Career Crisis helps you to uncover the fears and assumptions you may be making in your own life so you can unblock them and move forward to what you really want.

What’s your Mountain?

How is being an architect like scaling Mount Everest?  I always read accounts of climbers with a sort of sick fascination, part of me wondering what would ever possess anyone to take on this task.  You can’t even see very far from that high up, and your body is so ravaged by the lack of oxygen and extreme cold that you can’t hang out up there and enjoy it.  As someone who is not athletic and is proud of myself that I attend yoga class three times a week, I don’t have a refined appreciation for the physical.  Especially an extreme sport like mountain climbing. I didn’t see the appeal of putting your life on hold for nearly a year to train, then scale this mountain.  Why, why, I thought would anyone risk their life like this?  Why would they make themselves so uncomfortable, put their bodies through such a grueling experience?  I recently read Mark Inglis’s story of how he scaled Mt. Everest as a double amputee. Mark’s account helped me to see that it was about more than just the ego. 

It’s easy to take the concept of scaling Everest as a totally literal pursuit.  The man vs. nature plot at its finest.  But that would be getting it wrong.  You don’t climb the mountain to conquer the mountain.  You climb to conquer yourself. It’s about setting a challenge and devoting yourself single-mindedly to meeting that challenge with every resource of your physical, mental and spiritual being.  If you are going to climb Everest, you cannot let anything stand in your way, especially not yourself.  You clear out your life to train and then make the climb.  And then you let go, you work with, not against the mountain.  You respect its seasons, weather patterns and above all the advice of your guides.  Depending on the year, you may not make it up and the fact that by waiting, you live to make the attempt another time has to be enough.

So back to life as an architect.  What’s your Everest?  What big goal do you have that you would devote yourself to achieve?  What matters so much to who you are that you will make the time and the space to realize it?  If you don’t know, or came up with some wimpy goal like “get a promotion,” you are not alone.  Maybe just thinking along these lines made you feel slightly depressed because your career is so NOT going the way you hoped it would.  You may even be rolling your eyes right now and thinking that having a goal as big as yourself is as ridiculous as it is unattainable.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not.  You can have a career that is life-affirming because it reinforces your sense of purpose in this world.  But first, you have to be deeply in touch with what that purpose is.  You have to have a personal mission statement and a plan that includes steps you can do today that align you with that purpose.  You have to clear away all the fears and all of the rationalizations that are holding you back.  Like the mountain climber, you have to eliminate all the waster activities in your professional life that are not directly moving you towards your goals. 
As a reader of this blog, you aren’t content to have just an average career.  You want to make a difference.  You want to operate as an inspiration to the world.  And I want to help you get there.  In addition to my blog posts, I offer career coaching services that allow you to work with me one on one on your individual career quest.  I’m also so excited to announce that I will very shortly be publishing my first book, Career Crisis.  This book contains many of the strategies I use with my coaching clients, but it let’s you use my techniques and act as your own coach.  It’s not very long on purpose because it’s not meant to dictate, but to guide you.  You have to do the work, but if you do, I promise you’ll be amazed at the transformation you see in your career and in your life.

Find your career mountain and know that you can get to the top.  Get ready to challenge yourself to your greatest potential, to concentrate your efforts to a single purpose, to push through hardships, and finally, to stand up on that summit and say, “Yes, yes, I did it!”

Power to the People: Unleashing User Insights

Patient centered design has been around for a long time. From Planetree, to LEED for Healthcare  and Evidence Based Design, the importance of the environment to outcomes has been advocated, documented and linked to design and operational decisions. The Beryl Institute is devoted solely to the cause of improving the patient experience. It’s great to have all of these resources. Even better as an architect to have healthcare clients embracing the needs to address the issue. But something gets lost in translation as we go from intent to implementation. Healthcare environments tremendously impact their users, who often have little opportunity to control them. We need to know we are getting it right, not just designing and building attractive surroundings based on precedents.

That’s why I was excited to read about a project recently launched by Penn Medicine in conjunction with the Wharton School of Business. Called “Your Big Ideas Challenge,” the effort reached out to staff throughout Penn Medicine’s system to present their innovative ideas for improving patient care. The top ten will be selected and presented at a town hall meeting. There were many compelling ideas, but what I was most interested in was the process. By empowering staff to think about how they can better serve patients, they were free to do more than air grievances or whine about needing more space. Instead, they could influence the change. Just think about how powerful this process could be when it’s time for the next design project:

Unlock information
There is only so much time at traditional design meetings and only so many staff usually allowed to attend. When you couple that with the fact that most of these people are not adept at reading plans or processing the information we present, counting on meeting feedback is actually a very bankrupt model for design. Instead, after discussing goals for the project with stakeholders, we should frame those goals in the form of questions back to a much more comprehensive cross-section of staff and empower a little innovative thinking that can lead back to either discrete design decisions or the development of design elements that will support an operational change. For example, if you develop a project goal that you want to create a less stressful environment for families, you might ask staff about how they would address commonly encountered family issues or complaints.

Cut a wide swath
Many times, we develop “departmental myopia” on our projects. We forget about just how much impact related departments or core process (lab, housekeeping, maintenance, food service, social services) or groups like infection control and facilities have on a space. Make sure to get the insights of these staff as well. The interchange of things that we don’t even realize happen in a space is often the area most ripe for a design intervention. These extra-departmental folks can provide the lowdown.

Re-integrate Information
So if you follow these suggestions, you now have a bunch of data. Hopefully, you also have a lot of ideas germinating as well. The last and very crucial step in getting the most innovation (and generating the most value) possible, is to re-integrate it back to the project. Invite key players from the extra-departmental group and a more robust sampling of staff from your departmental group to the next design meeting. Provide a recap of the results and how you are planning to use them in design. This allows the innovations to give way to some collaborative discussions, which will give the design team the most useful feedback possible going forward.

Liberation: six steps to set your creativity free

Does your thinking always default to “fault?” Are you trapped in an endless game of “gotcha” with yourself?  Have you imprisoned your creative spirit in a cage of self doubt? As someone who expects perfection out of myself I can relate to the fears and desire to overachieve and exceed expectations that hold creative people back.  I recently read an excellent article on letting go by Tony Schwartz that got me thinking about how we can set ourselves free of things that don’t serve our highest self in order to make room for the things that do.  Sounds like a scary proposition- but it’s not.  What it is is nothing short of liberation.  Just as fear of failing can immobilize us and keep us stuck in a rut, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good causes us to aim low, and apologize for taking chances.  It causes that judge and jury in our heads to consistently level a guilty verdict. This is my list of six common creative prisons and recommendations for breaking out:

Shackled to the past
Maybe it took you a while to really get the hang of model building, or a design program.  Maybe you got some harsh criticisms of your work.  Maybe that first internship was a bit rocky as you learned the ropes.  Maybe, just maybe you learned from all of this and are now competent.  However, you got used to viewing yourself as inexperienced and mistake prone.  That self-image no longer is a true representation of the architect you are today.  Like the person who’s conquered a lifelong weight problem, and can’t stop seeing themselves as fat, you are locked inside your initial years as a fledgeling architect. Re-write your resume, update your LinkedIn profile, do something to affirm the architect you are today and keep celebrating that in order to change your self image so that you can feel empowered to make decisions from the point of view of who you are, not who you were.

Confined by busywork
No one ever says on their deathbed that they wished they’d worked more.  If anything they probably wished they’ed enjoyed life more and made more of an impact.  No, you can’t blow off deadlines, but you can prioritize.  Are you letting your to-do list be your excuse?  Whether it’s deadlines at work or personal projects, not giving yourself permission to move forward is not only silly, but it makes you feel so uninspired that you probably won’t actually get all those tasks done anyway.  You eat a pie one bite at a time.  At the beginning of each day, look at what parts of your life goals you can accomplish on that day.  It may be a single task and that’s fine because it advanced your agenda.  Contract, distill and excel.  When you say no to the expansive opportunities before you in order to scratch off some (insignificant in a global view) task, you are really saying no to your own expansion.

Locked into Entitlement
Do you brood about what’s not right or not fair in your career?  The client who treated you poorly, the promotion you didn’t get?  Do you beat yourself up over every real or imagined misstep?  The root of those feelings is an unyielding and harsh view of yourself as all or nothing.  Like a teenager, you believe that you deserve certain things and that life is lived at the extremes of always and never.  As your mother probably told you then, “life’s not fair.”  She was right.  Life’s not just about you.  The people you interact with have their own motives- you are far better served when you focus on understanding them because what really matters is the result and how you respond to a situation, not all the things that happened along the way to cause it.

Energetically in Isolation
You might think you took the high road by not telling your boss off, or giving that unappreciative client a lecture on the value of your service.  But you are still holding on to the resentment and it colors all of your future interactions not only with the individual in question but with others in your professional and private life as well.  Realize that by being non-confrontational, you are choosing to make yourself invisible- no wonder you aren’t on these people’s A-List.  Think about your passion for what you do as a ball of energy that lives at your core.  The more expansive the energy, the further out the glow extends.  Other people are attracted to that glow and want to work with you.  The greatest architects have such expansive energy that people will crowd into lecture halls to hear what they have to say, buy their monographs and wish they could work for or with them.  When you can’t let go of all of your resentments or regrets, you diminish your energy.  Think about that glass-half empty colleague or friend  How drawn to that person do you (or clients) feel?  Then realize that, at times, we are all that person.  Choose to be aware of when you are letting your anger, doubts and fears diminish your energy.  Then take steps to let go.  Stop suppressing your emotions and instead think about whether you actually made your point of view heard.   Calmly and with an open mind approach the person and ask them to recount their decision/actions from their point of view.  You may be surprised at what you learn.

On the chain gang of Trying Too Hard
Are you trying to make your clients like you more by practically wiping their noses for them?   Score points with your boss by being a workaholic?  Being a doormat diminishes your expertise and loses any respect people will have for you.  A project is a partnership and all involved have to understand their roles and responsibilities.  Decisions and directives (or lack of them) have consequences.  Don’t try to sweep client driven issues or office problems under the rug and cheerfully try to compensate by doing others work for them.  So often, we try to just make our situation work and do it all. You never want to put yourself in a position of being held accountable for an outcome in an areas where you have no responsibility. Your boss and your client’s main objective is to have a successful project.  If they aren’t giving you what you need to accomplish this, the greatest service you can provide is one of coaching them on how they can help make the outcome a success. 

Rotting in the dungeon of the Status Quo
What’s good for General Bullmoose is not necessarily what’s good for you.  If you are trying to live up to the expectations of your family, co-workers, society, you are engaged in conformance.  Conformity erodes creativity.  I am not suggesting that you have to be an angry, angry artist who rejects the world in order to be successful.  I am telling you that you need to know yourself and make decisions because they are right for you.  Unfortunately, we’re all likely to hit cruise control when we feel that our lives are basically going in a good direction.  It usually takes some disruptive event to create a breakthrough.  Why?  Because being shaken out of your status quo stupor makes you refocus on what really matters to you.  In the disruptive state, you reject limits and question rules.  Make bold, purposeful moves in your life and you will fail, but you will also succeed beyond your wildest dreams.    When you take actions with purpose, not just because you can or should, miracles can happen.

Who caged your creativity? Who cares?  What’s important to remember is that you hold the key to your own creative freedom. Unlock your own liberation.

Be your next restoration/preservation project

“Creativity is as much about restoration as challenging yourself,” I thought one Sunday morning while feeling utterly weighed down by a bunch of stuff I had to do.  The creative mind is just not built to slog, yet as creative individuals we often get ourselves dug in so deep with our big ideas or constant ideation that slog we do.  I posted my thought on the Patron facebook page  and twitter the following day and was a bit surprised by how much that statement resonated.  In an interesting bit of synchronicity, I also happened to read posts on three other blogs that I follow with a similar theme.  Apparently it’s been a long spring.  I know it has for me.  Since February, I have been so busy between work, blogging for both this site and Urban Times, getting feng shui certified, and general life management (taxes anyone) that I feel as though I can barely come up for air.  So in the interests of opening the collective windows of our minds to let a little sunshine in, I have listed my top six personal restoration projects:

Recognize the difference between struggle and effort
As architects, we're no stranger to long hours.  But there is a difference between the creative effort that flows from us and the stuff that feels way to much like work.  Working in "the zone" can be incredibly energizing.  Feeling oppressed by your to-do list is a depleting struggle.  When we are in struggle mode, we feel that we have to burn the candle at both ends just to keep on top of things. If you are struggling, you are working hard, not smart and you should stop that right now. 

Fun is inspirational
Sometimes your best idea for a project may come from observing a food vendor at a carnival.  Not only does having fun provide us with restoration, it also gets our brains channeled in a different way- which is the very essence of creativity.  Here's how it works:  When you are noodling a design problem, you never really stop thinking about it, it lives in the back of your mind.  When your thoughts stop flowing (struggle mode) and you try to force them, the brain gets locked into a nonproductive static loop.  When you go do something else, your mind is free to play and suddenly you find yourself seeing parallels between the problem you are trying to solve and all kinds of (seemingly) incongruous things.

Put yourself on the schedule
Haven't had a haircut in months, got a knot of tension in your neck that you've been downing Advils like candy to work around?  You are ignoring self care.  Just as a building needs to be maintained, so does your body, mind and spirit.  When we put ourselves last, we operate from a mindset of depletion.  This restricts access to our creative flow, impacting the way we relate to our clients coworkers, even friends and family.  Grumpy, energy-sapped you is not necessarily even going to want to attend that industry lunch, let alone be a networking superstar who walks away with a pocketful of business cards.  Some of your best contacts can be those casual ones, like the woman you see each week at yoga, the manager of your salon, your dentist, the mother of your kid's play date.  Seek out and frequent restorative care and activities of all stripes and take the time to invest in your relationships there.

Abolish prerequisites
Perhaps it was the experience of taking college courses that got us here.  We so often feel that we have to choose between the things we would like to do and all the required activities of life. Chores (both at work and at home) are NOT a prerequisite to any other activity.  When it comes to work/life balance it's not "either/or", but "both /and." I personally struggle a lot with this one.  I find that it helps to plan to reward myself with at least one thing a day in order to keep my energy levels up and to try and take a break and switch gears whenever I catch myself getting stuck in the struggle.    

Ditch the victim within
When you feel diminished and small, that telegraphs in your actions and interactions.  Being expansive allows you to have a positive outlook, and channel your creativity.  It also draws others to you like a magnet.  That interaction with others in turn leads to more creativity.  Walk away from Victimville, home of oppressive depleting tasks and unrecognized effort and choose to empower your efforts.  Get the help you need to slog through the tasks that deplete or depress you, be selective in your commitments, seek out and ask for what contributes to your life and career goals.  Are you doing the work of your draftsman?  Ask yourself why you feel you need to do this: lack of trust in their work (fire or train them better), perfectionism on your part (done is better than perfect), or a way to avoid your own fears or hesitations on taking on creative challenges (take the leap).  If you truly find yourself drawn to chores when faced with a big project or challenge, think about why you are subconsciously choosing to be a victim of busy work instead of giving yourself permission to shine.  Then go do something fun instead of scheduling those fixtures. 

Be outcome focused
In a perfect world, we'd all live with such clarity of purpose that every action we took would be advancing that purpose.  In real life, we get distracted.  It's a lot easier to put effort into an activity when we understand how completing it will contribute to achieving a long or short term goal. Staying result-focused helps us get through the tedious work, because we can see where it ends.  It also helps us to trim the unnecessary activities we often take on because we assume we have to, but haven't fully thought through why. When you are outcome focused, you honor your own effort and the efforts of others.

Just like a building, our figurative paint can peel, our mental light bulbs need to be changed and our air needs to be circulated to keep from breeding mold spores.  We can also find that upon closer inspection, we need a little remodel of our lives to keep on track with our higher purpose.  Take on your life as your next project without fear of bold moves- making space is what you do.

Are you an Architectural Luddite?

Do you cling to the comfort of the way things are “supposed to be” as you compulsively align the objects on your desk?  Are you made uncomfortable when new practice paradigms are introduced, choosing first to disregard, then criticize them, only grudgingly adopting them when your clients say you have to?  On the innovation curve spectrum  you would rank as a laggard.  But you probably don’t see yourself that way.  You think that you are being smart by not jumping ahead as an early adopter of the latest trends.  You grouse about how the market is changing and everything is so much more competitive.  You really have no clue how to survive in this changing market, so you double down on the old way of doing things, you stay in your comfort zone and maybe feel really clever that you are making the same old presentations and decisions, but using digital technology.  Like the Luddites  resisting mechanization during the Industrial Revolution, you are futilely fighting change.  Is the new the predator of the old, or simply its evolution?  

The emperor has no clothes

Skills are transferable, habits and routines are not.  A creative mind set free knows no limits.  So ask yourself, are new paradigms that challenge your comfort zone really bad, or are they threatening to expose your own fears that you aren’t creative enough to handle the change?

A small reward is better than none

Sure in a red-ocean, highly competitive environment, there are still winners and losers.  In fact that’s the point- to eliminate competition at all costs.  But that also diminishes you because it undercuts the overall value not just of an old paradigm, but of who you are and why a client should work with you at all.  The next time you feel the urge to smugly declare “winning,” just think of Charlie Sheen.

It’s the new normal

This mindset, now pervading our culture, is just pathetic.  To think that you have to settle for living up to less than your full potential (and by transference your work and the effect it has on others) shortchanges society as a whole.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of a future that doesn’t have to happen.  If you find yourself just settling, it’s time to start asking why you are holding on to processes and paradigms that are clearly not serving you.  No one can be innovative if they aren’t passionate and accepting a bleak fade into the abyss is hardly inspirational.

A great piece by Thomas Fridstein for Design Intelligence, “Adapting for Success in the New Practice Environment” exhorts us to embrace the opportunity that comes with change.  His tips for blowing up the old way we practice involve evaluating everything we do with fresh eyes:

1.      Look at the context of practice much as we would analyze the context of a project site

2.      Adapt for success by being, creative, client-focused, competent (and yes even with new technologies or design methods, Fridstein specifically mentions sustainability and BIM), cost-effective, collaborative and global.

3.      Design the design firm by looking at ways you can serve clients better while inspiring and nurturing your employees more.  Last century’s model with its pretext that you are lucky just to be working doesn’t cut it anymore (yes, he does bandy about the term “the new normal” to express the fact that change is here to stay.  I am choosing to forgive him for that because otherwise it’s an insightful piece).

As my friend, life coach Jane Scott Ashley once told me, “Life isn’t what’s happening while you cling for dear life to the trapeze you’re on.  It’s what happens when you let go so you can reach the next one.”

Getting Out There: Keys to Being Published

So you’re flipping through the latest copy of a design mag and you pause to look at a project and think- “I could do that. Actually, I DO do that.  How come I’m not in this magazine?”  Good question.  Talent is but one facet of fame.  Doing good work and hoping to be recognized via a “stumble-upon” strategy is therefore a very poor marketing strategy.  In case you don’t happen to live in New York, Chicago, Miami or LA, network with influential industry movers and shakers, and have exceptionally famous clients commissioning you for seminal projects, you will need some help getting discovered.  Save the spiel on how you don’t care about such shallow things as recognition- that’s archispeak for “I want to win awards and get published but I don’t know how.”  Do read on for some tips from my friends in the business of sourcing and writing about architecture:

Be a compelling source

Publication writers are always looking for a story that will resonate with their readers. Whether it’s a design issue, technology innovation or insight into the practice of architecture, how has something you are doing changed the equation?  Even something you have attempted and failed may be a more thought-provoking story  than the firm that plugged along successfully with the status quo.  Remember, being “good” is not the same as being “interesting.”

Be source-able

You don’t need a PR agent to tell your story.  Too many architects believe that they can be passive, letting some guru outsider observe their genius and turn that into a press release that gets actual press.  What they need to be doing (as I have advocated in many, many previous posts) is clarifying their vision and purpose as a firm and developing a mission statement for each project.  Not only will this help clients to be on board and the design team to stay aligned with the project goals, but it differentiates your firm- its product as well as processes.  Now you can write a press release, or social media blurb that really says something and that allows architecture and design media writers searching for a particular topic stream to notice you. You may even get attention from more unlikely sources that deal with very broad (say New York Times) or very niche (say green urban planning) markets.

Be a source that’s sorted

Take some time to compile a list of all the publications that cater to what you do.  These can be local and regional publications, or national broad-based and niche magazines.  Get a copy of their editorial calendar.  If, for example, you know that Architect is planning to feature healthcare in its October issue, time your press release about your paradigm-shifting ED to coincide with their schedule so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle or tragically just miss the cutoff for that year.  Tailor any press releases to align with the individual flavor of a publication.  Consider different angles like highlighting building materials, design process, client management, or technology in order to be relevant to them.  It also helps to be aware of what has been featured previously.  If your project or topic is too similar to one that was published in the last two years, it’s not likely to garner much interest; but if you can build on the theme and present a new twist, or can tap into the overall goals of the publication itself, you might just get some traction.  A lot more traction than a generic broadcast of a press release.

Please share your publishing experiences: what worked, what didn’t and what you’re about to try next.  Here’s to seeing all of you in print soon!