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.

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.

Feast Day 2013: You are Unlimited

Today the Patron Saint of Architecture celebrates three years of helping bring inspiration and creativity to the forefront of what we do as architects.  What started as a personal need to affirm that architecture could and should be so much more than the professional opportunities that I was experiencing has now become a worldwide network of people who share that same purpose.  Each year, I build on the original intent and expand the content offerings; going from this blog to a facebook page, Pinterest account and, in this past year, a book.  As I challenge myself to experiment with new media and outreach efforts, I hope to not only build a community of creatives, but to encourage all of us to stretch outside of our comfort zone. 

I’ve come to realize that the comfort zone is a pretty deceptive place.  It’s what we know.  So we operate within a set of self-imposed constraints that limit our thinking about what’s possible.  Many of these constraints come from our education and professional experiences, and have permeated our understanding about what it means to practice architecture.  That’s why this year’s novena will be Shattering the Meme.  We’ll spend nine weeks exploring things about the profession of architecture that we just assume “have” to be that way and work to stop accepting the limiting premise of each one. 

In conjunction with this novena, I am launching my first ever series of teleclasses.  Based on my book, Career Crisis, which launched in April, the teleclasses begin next week with a free introductory session.  I am excited to bring the theme of applying your passion and purpose meaningfully to your career alive in an interactive way.  It’s one thing to read something, but nothing compares to actually being able to work through issues in a more direct way.  As architects, we often feel that we can and should be able to do it all, from graphic design to marketing to management, so it is natural for us to  think we can be our own coaches as well.  But coaching by its very nature is not a DIY endeavor. A coach can help you to understand your unique situation in a whole different way.  You need someone to encourage you to think beyond what you think is possible and challenge you achieve things that you really want (because that's the scary stuff you won't ever push yourself to do).  Someone who will tell you when you are allowing yourself to get distracted by being “too busy”  or when you are losing focus. 

You can begin to experience what it's like to work with a coach in the teleclasses, where we will spend an hour on each career theme and also do some individual “laser coaching,” where I will take questions from participants and provide targeted advice live on the call. 

If you want more, you can always work with me one on one in my career coaching program, which is a three week long intensive process.  I’m also pleased to announce a new coaching offering this year:  I Need a Quickie is specifically tailored to architects who really want to seek out coaching, but are still afraid to invest in themselves in this way.  While nowhere near as intensive as a coaching program, this new offering will let you buy an hour of one on one time with me to talk about career issues important to you.  I’m hoping that by offering this bridge to coaching, many of you will see how valuable it really is to work with me or another coach to up your game.  Wherever you are in your career, however much or little you have accomplished, you can always set your sights higher and achieve even more. 

We kicked off last year with the Change the World Novena, where I profiled architects who have taken it upon themselves to make the world a better place through the built environment.  Many of you viewed those architects as people who were somehow different from you.  You thought, “What they’re doing is great, but I can’t do that.  Who am I to think I can change the world?”  This year I’m not accepting that excuse- you are a gifted, creative, person, or you wouldn’t be an architect.  Who are you not to use that talent?  Get unstuck and shatter all those memes that are convincing you otherwise!

The Limiting Beliefs of Architects

As a profession dedicated to making our clients’ vision a reality, we do a lousy job of realizing our

vision for our own careers. Maybe that’s because so few architects have taken the time to have a career vision. They think they do, because they have embraced the thinking of their teachers, mentors, co-workers and friends. It’s a surprisingly pessimistic and monolithic point of view for a profession that prides itself on its creativity. As I was working on my book, and thinking about my career coaching sessions over the last few years, I realized time and again how much of the problem we have in getting fulfillment from our careers comes from limiting beliefs. These beliefs are so deeply a part of our “architect culture” that we don’t even recognize them. I teach people how to realize their passion, and the biggest challenge I encounter when working with them are these experiential lessons which are reinforced throughout our careers unless we break the pattern:

Competition is the path to success
We are primed from our days in the studio during college to compete with one another. To believe that there is a winner, and by default, losers. The RFP and interview process underscore this idea, leading firms to undercut one another in a race to the bottom. This commoditizes our work, which causes the design process and resulting building to have less value to both the client and society as a whole. It is a mindset of lack, believing that there is only so much pie to go around, and we better do whatever it takes to get our piece. It leads us to settle for less than we deserve in terms of compensation and design effort, to focus on bringing service instead of true innovation.
Danger of this belief: you feel your time has no value.
Overcome it by thinking differently about what you do and why. Don’t accept the premise of winners and losers, instead focus on the unexpressed needs you see in the situation and how you are uniquely qualified to meet them.

It’s fame or shame
I recently read an article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, where he makes the incredibly profound statement, “If you know it will work it isn’t creative.” How many firms actually embrace a culture of experimentation? Even the ones that do have a pretty low threshold for failure. No one thinks that a scientist working in the lab on experiment after experiment, each result building on the knowledge to improve the next experiment is a loser because it may take years, even decades to discover something. But in our “creative” profession, we grovel with our tail between our legs whenever the client or contractor finds fault with us. Paradoxically, we are always looking for the project and opportunity that will be our “big break,” while secretly stewing over the successes of our competition.
Danger of this belief: you are afraid to take risks.
Overcome it by taking a step back from the everyday steps in the process and start to look at the big picture. Ask why not more often and don’t be afraid to have, then fully vet, big ideas.

Being provocative means you are smart
No, it likely means you’re an out of touch pompous ass, who’s had a few brilliant ideas. Our “upbringing” as architects tends to reward those who are unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional. Maybe because we buy into that fame or shame mentality so much. The provocateur is usually trying to overcome the conditioned risk adversity by putting so much out there that people will start to feel that they are unenlightened clods trapped in conventional thinking if they shut down the ideas. Unfortunately, this approach only reinforces a negative stereotype and is rooted less in a willingness to help people think differently about their needs than it is about the provocateur’s desire to get attention.
Danger of this belief: solving the problem is not as important to you as making a statement.
Overcome it by investing more insight into your effort. I believe that big ideas are not only important but necessary. However, the idea needs to have relevance to the situation at hand and be tied to solving a problem. Even more important the big idea needs to feel inclusive and allow others on the design or user group team to build upon it.

You can’t get rich and be an architect
Oh, look how hard you’re working, you poor burned out thing. Procrastinating out of exhaustion until the rush of adrenaline at the eleventh hour gives you that flash of brilliance you need to triumphantly complete the task. This reinforces a competitive culture, where burning the candle at both ends is a badge of honor. There is a kind of nobility in being the misunderstood artiste engaged in a valiant fight against the system. The truth: All nighters were a bad idea back in school and they are an even worse idea once you enter the working world. Vision and clarity don’t visit the exhausted. What’s more, if you are working long, crazy hours, you likely are going off on your own instead of collaborating.
Danger of this belief: you believe that individual effort matters more than collaboration
Overcome it by working smarter. Engage your team both in and out of house. If someone else can do a task even 80% as well as you can, it’s worth delegating it to them. Be a mentor and seek out mentors of your own. You don’t have to do this alone, and the end result will be better than if you burn yourself out trying.

Our profession desperately needs to become a lot more introspective. We need to reposition ourselves for the future like we mean it if we want the relevance we so desperately claim to seek. So as you look over these limiting beliefs (and we are all guilty of all of them to some degree), ask yourself, “what’s holding you back?”
For a more in depth look at how you are limiting yourself and strategies to fearlessly pursue the career you really want, check out Career Crisis.  Let me know what you think and how it helps you unbind your creativity.

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!”

(Re)setting your Intentions

New Year's resolutions are something I have always viewed as pointless.  You either want to make a change or you don't. If you do, you begin that process at the point you set the intention, not some arbitrary time on the calendar.  However, there's no shortage of self-improvement advice this time of year, which inspired to write this New Year's Eve post because I felt that all of that wasn't enough- you need a lot more than retrospect on the passing year or self-improvement tips to help you have a successful year.  You need clear intent.

There's all kinds of superstitions and advice about what (or what not) to eat or wear or do to usher in good luck for the new year.   Some friends and I had a lot of fun exchanging our family good luck traditions on facebook, which led me to think about my favorite quote, "Luck favors the prepared."  You bring opportunity to yourself by being ready for it.  When you have a clear sense of who you are and what you want from your life, you become open to the things to which you can say yes, or no, on a daily basis that will usher in transformation.  No resolution will do that for you.

This chart perfectly sums up the open attitude
and clarity of purpose needed for success

Change, and the willingness to embrace it brings opportunity.  As a feng shui expert, I've been preparing for a new year by cleaning and clearing clutter from my life and will spend tomorrow re-setting intentions for the year ahead with my family.   I find this a good way to mentally let go of that which no longer serves me and make room for new opportunities. So don't drive yourself crazy trying to set all kinds of new goals.  Look within and take stock of how you have evolved.  Have you gotten sidetracked from your existing goals?  Do your goals from five years ago no longer serve you?  Are you complacent in your goals, or do you need to step outside your comfort zone to really achieve something big?

I invite you to do your own space clearing.  In the process of weeding out that which you don't need, use, or love, think about what the stuff you surround yourself says about who you are.  Place objects that affirm who you are or want to become in a prominent place.  Success is about your willingness to change.  You don't need more resolutions, just goals attuned to the person you wish to become.  Wishing you a happy and abundant 2013!  

See a countdown of the most popular Patron posts of 2012. 

What scares you as a creative?

Happy Halloween everyone!  Tradition has is that Halloween is the start of a transitional time when we are more connected to the spirit world- next stop is All Saints Day, when we look to our spiritual guides followed by All Souls Day, where we honor our ancestors, friends and mentors who have gone before us.

Keeping with the spirit of these three days, I wanted to take a little time as your virtual mentor to reflect on releasing the fears that hold you back, identifying your inspirations, and finding people willing to help guide you on your path to fulfillment. I love this infographic I found at Design Taxi for its humorous (precisely because it hits on some core truths) look at creative phobias.  That's the trick part- the way that we talk ourselves out of going for the things that we really want in our careers.

Now for the treat:  I am developing a series strictly related to mentoring and am looking for your input on the issues that are most important to you.  Please take some time to post in the comments section about your pressing career dilemmas.  You don't have to get personal or overly detailed (if you want to do that, please email me at thepatronsaintofarchitecture@gmail.com for a one-on one coaching session), just list some of the basic hobgobblins blocking your path to success.  Those career cobwebs' days are numbered.

I Am Not a Waitress

I have been absent.  Busy.  Eating too much pizza and not enough green vegetables.  The truth is, I’ve been feeling sapped.  The creative brain can often operate on hyper overdrive with more ideas flooding in that we can process.  We embark on myriad projects stretching ourselves in too many different directions.  My ambitious novena project has proved more difficult than I’d imagined to execute as finding then coaxing interviews out of built environment champions from all over the country has proved to be a bit like herding cats (you know who you are out there).  I’d like to also blame the flurry of events in my 3D life for why I have not blogged more in recent months (real estate crises, hectic work schedule, launching feng shui business, family matters), but this blog is about 3D life, not escaping it, so that’s not a good excuse either.  While I still feel guilty about not posting at my usual weekly pace, I’ve also come to realize that sometimes you just need...time.  We cannot flog ourselves into a creative frenzy, producing on-demand delights for the pleasure of others.  In short, I am not a waitress, and neither are you.  As creatives, we respond to, synthesize and process information to solve problems, but we will fail every time we try to follow orders.

I was recently reminded of this at a client meeting.  Because I am a healthcare architect, many of the people I work with are physicians.  Brilliant, worldly, folks who often themselves have a passion for the arts and architecture.  Certainly people who are used to speaking up and being the authority.  In this particular meeting, the person in question was sure that she had the answer, suggesting it in the meeting and even pulling me aside later to press her point.  I personally always like to think through and interpret what people have to tell me about space because I can often gain a great deal of insight on how to best solve the problem.  However, in this case, we’d already explored that path and the suggestion had more cons attached to it than pros.  I bristled inwardly at being told how to do my job.  I marveled at the audacity and confidence of this individual at the same time I wondered why as architects we so often demur.  Those that don’t are deemed “arrogant”  and “difficult”  and had better have a hell of a lot of talent on their side to make up for the fact that no one really likes them.  It led me to want to explore further the fine line between creativity and collaboration, between clarity and conformity and when it all degrades to just serving up a requested old favorite from the menu.

Let’s start with a round of intention and purpose
If you don’t know what you want, there is no way you can get it (or recognize it when you have).  While we often think that pushing ourselves to work harder is the key to success, the real key is your passion for what you do. This passion is contagious and will fuel any project and actually foster more collaboration that being a sycophant ever will.  As my yoga teacher likes to say- “if it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.”  Truly words to live by, yet so many of us are caught up in life’s compulsories to the point that we forget what all those things were a prerequisite for. 

Next course: time and space 
While we often think that our best ideas come out of the pressure of the last minute, they are made possible by the fact that during periods of relaxation, something we negatively label as procrastination, we subconsciously form links between our problem and seemingly unrelated things out in the world.  If you can’t focus, there’s probably a reason and no amount of time at your desk will improve that.  The mind at play can recharge and see problems from new angles while the mind under pressure and a heavy workload reverts to reconstituting the last successful idea.

Send those negative thoughts back to the kitchen
The devil you know can be mighty seductive.  No matter how much we complain about all the things holding us back in life, we have a laundry list of excuses for why we can’t let them go.  These are your fears and they have no place in the successful outcome of anything.  Fear of failure prevents you from making bold moves, or causes you to sabotage the ones you do make too soon, leaving projects unfinished.  Fear of disapproval prevents you from voicing your thoughts or being an advocate for the expertise you have when you are challenged.  Fear of losing control makes us inflexible idea-hoarders, unable to collaborate.  When you play it safe, you stay stuck in a comfortable rut, all the while telling yourself you are making a wise choice (nice job, inner critic). 

Finish it off with a nice routine
When your creative process becomes automatic, you don’t question it anymore.  That makes it infinitely less likely that others will question you either.  Being creative is a constant work in progress.  You have to nurture your creativity for it to blossom.  Just like that never ending chore of cleaning the kitchen, creativity requires a daily investment of your time, and things quickly become a mess after a day or two of neglect.  Get in the habit of feeding your soul by making rest, exercise, and a ritual of creative tasks a non-negotiable part of your day.

Being an architect is nothing like waiting tables. We are in the business of providing our clients with something they don’t have today, of working with them to shepherd a vision into a built reality.  To do that, we are going to have to expand beyond literally writing down a list of criteria to satisfy. Our purpose in the design process is to work with our project team and clients toward defining the right problem and developing an innovative way to solve it, not delivering the daily special.

Superheroes of the Built World

Last week, I took trapeze lessons.  A group of co-workers have taken on a challenge to do extreme sports activities over the course of the year and sent an email inviting others to join.  I could not hit reply fast enough- what an adventure!  When I got up on that platform, my inner daredevil took over and it was beyond thrilling.  I only regret that I do not have the body of an acrobat, and thus could not do things like a catch and release (but I tried, I tried).  After I develop more core strength, I will go back again in the hopes of successfully completing this stunt.  My four year old self is begging for the opportunity. You see, this was a childhood fantasy come true; I loved going to the circus and, next to the clowns, the acrobats were my favorite. I wanted to be one when I grew up, causing my mother some bit of consternation. While I did pursue gymnastics lessons though high school, I never competed and by the time I was eight or so, I had abandoned my dream career in the circus for being an astrophysicist, then a teacher, then an artist, only finding my way to architecture late in high school. My time on the trapeze got me thinking about what our childhood fantasy careers are really trying to tell us about who we are.

One thing they don’t tell us is to play it safe

Children crave the action oriented, things that serve an obvious purpose with a touch of adventure thrown in. They don’t dream of hours spent in mind-numbing meetings, being heckled by a bullying boss or playing office politics.  They don’t fantasize about the drudgery of overtime because of over-promised deadlines.  They most certainly do not aspire to being awarded some silly title that will pigeon-hole them into a constrained set of roles.  In fact, if you were to present any of these dismal (but all too real) scenarios to a child, they would respond by proposing some bold brash action to put the perpetrator of such misery in his or her place.

This visceral response, commonly echoed in comics, and even some movies, allows the hero to stand up for him or herself, indulging in the supreme satisfaction of defeating evil, telling off an annoying person, double crossing a backstabber  or ceremoniously walking away from oppressive expectations like a toxic job or relationship.  Many times this is coupled with  a physical act- literally vanquishing life’s villain.  We can’t legally do many of these things in real life, so we bury our frustrations and resign ourselves to our fate.  Kapow!  That’s the sound of me smacking you upside the head (virtually of course).  When you feel the urge to be resigned is when you should resign - literally - from whatever is oppressing your ability to be great.  Reconnect with your childhood self and your innermost passions- in other words, look beyond the ordinary career path.

What would Wonder Woman do?
As a child, you truly believed you could change the world.  What you may not realize is that you still can.  You don’t have to accept less than your expectations.  In career paths laden with compromise and nuance, our purpose gets lost.  This is a creativity buzzkill to say the least.  Choose to embark on a more adventurous route:

Lead a double life
No, you don’t need to have a secret identity (unless you want to), but you do need to have more than one dimension.  You can deal with the sometimes mundane aspects involved in being Diana Prince when you know that as Wonder Woman, you are saving the world.  Many times when I talk to someone who is frustrated in their career, they usually work at their job and that’s about it.  They have become flattened, so the consequences of the day to day effort involved in a project or interpersonal business relationships become all consuming.  If you have lost perspective in this way, you need to look for opportunities to live your passion outside of your job.  Volunteer in the community, apply to be a member of a board or commission- do something else that matters to you to expand your network.  It might seem counter-intuitive, but when you expose yourself to fun and inspiring activities (like trapezing), you actually become better at solving workplace problems and making career choices.

Be a hero
You are an architect, so why isn’t your city better?  People on the street may not cry out for help like they do in comic books, but it’s not very heroic of you to keep ignoring obvious need.  Heroes don’t let a purse snatcher get away because they’d rather wait for their archenemy to launch some diabolical plot.  They help wherever they are needed.  So should you. Take initiative and work to make a change. 

Confront your nemesis
What’s holding you back?  What are you too afraid to even attempt?  If you take the time to really think about it, these root fears of inadequacy or failure are the excuse you use not to pursue things that really matter  to you.  They make you risk adverse and keep you stuck in that rut you always complain about being stuck in.  Challenge yourself and remember, those elaborate plots to eliminate the hero were always foiled in the end (mostly because they were way too elaborate).  Your nemesis is really just you over-thinking everything.

Over the next few weeks, I am launching my second Patron Saint of Architecture novena (click on the tab at the top of the page to read last year's Breaking Points and Turning Points novena).  Change the World (an experiment), will profile cities as seen through the lens of the real-life superheroes who weren’t afraid to step outside their comfort zone and champion a cause in the built environment.  What they did made a difference, and you will get to hear their stories so that you, too can be inspired to use your powers as an architect for the greater good.   Before you shut down this idea by automatically thinking that you can’t possibly pull off a stunt like this, I want to share the most profound thing I discovered at my trapeze lesson: falling is truly no big deal.  It’s how you get down when you are done with your act.

You Can’t Get What You Don’t Know You Want

The art of being fully present is perhaps the hardest to master for architects, who are always referencing the past and planning the future (usually under some level of duress).  We get so caught up in achievement that we lose sight of why we’re paddling so hard toward that waterfall.  There are danger signs and people shouting to get our attention, and we don’t even notice them because we are so hell-bent on accomplishing- what?  As you ponder this and take a deep breath, consider this quote from legendary conductor Ben Zander on what it takes to deliver a transformational performance, "This is the moment- this is the most important moment right now.  Which is: we are about contribution.  That's what our job is.  It's not about impressing people.  It's not about getting the next job.  It's about contributing something."

When you get right down to it, that is the essence of who we are as architects.  It’s the essence of who all people are and we function in our highest and best states when our work has meaning and makes a positive difference in the world.  Cool-eh?  Easy, not so much.  That’s because to be fully present requires trusting that the outcome will be OK even if we don’t worry about it.  To be fully present means that you have clarity about yourself and your purpose in the world and everything you do is about realizing that purpose.  It’s kind of like applying the principles of Lean design to your life.  If you never pause to plan, to ask yourself what you really want, your life’s purpose will get lost.  Here’s how to set the right goals for yourself so you can get on with living your truth:

Restore balance
If you’re experiencing dissatisfaction in your career, but can’t figure out how to jumpstart change, it’s most likely because you have lost sight of your goals, or maybe never really had any in the first place.  I’m not talking about the expectations others have for you or the things you feel you “should” be doing.  Aspirations are not true goals.  Take some time to get to know yourself better and identify what moves you as an architect:

1. Read something inspirational about the built world each day.  You get to decide what that is, whether it’s a favorite blog (ahem), news item, or article.  The only rule is that it has to be uplifting, not anything that will upset or irritate you. Hint: It does not need to be “official architecture press.”  After a while, notice the patterns in your choices.
2. Try to spend one hour of each day in silence, uninterrupted.  Getting off of the treadmill of what you do all day with all of its disruption and conflict allows your thoughts to settle and you to become more conscious of them.
3. Begin each workday by sitting in stillness and set an intention for the day.  I know, I know, you’re busy, but jumping right into the fray deprives you of being able to see how the tasks before you can be used to nourish you and help you realize your goals.  Otherwise, they will create stress, which will deplete you. When you have clarity, you will express it in every action you take, which will reinforce and feed your creative identity.

Start asking
It’s hard to ask. It feels funny.  You could get turned down.  But I think the hardest part about asking is that you would have to know what you want or need and be able to clearly express that need.  We’d much rather stew about what we don’t have than figure out how to get it.  Most of us live in a haze of half-realized thoughts and our brain ping-pongs through them as we form judgments and assumptions about life.  We don’t even clearly realize our intentions much less put them out there. Do you expect others to know you well enough to just lay opportunities at your feet?  Worse, do you expect some fairy-godmother type mentor to tell you what you should do at every turn?  That passivity will at best get you what others feel is convenient for you to have, according to their purposes.  There’s a difference between saying “I want to be recognized, be a partner, win awards, get published,” and “I want to design spaces that make people better.”  One way will actually get you there.

Focus on who you are and what you bring, living in the moment taking time to know yourself and your identity as an architect and you really will change the world.

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!

Mentoring and Modeling: What Architects can Learn from Montessori

Both role-model and tutor, mentorship is an awesome task.  We all want a mentor, and certainly flatter ourselves that it would be great to mentor someone else.  But what does that really mean?  Having sent my daughter to Montessori school, one definition I would offer is the concept of re-teaching.  According to the precepts of is founder, Maria Montessori, teachers are guides and classrooms are set up with children at three different grade levels.  Children master a skill by having it introduced by the teacher an then re-teaching it to their peers.  Passing on their newly-acquired knowledge enables the child-teacher to learn as much as the one receiving the lesson by reinforcing the previously learned concepts.  What a beautiful thought: to teach is to learn.  Through learning comes mastery, through mastery comes confidence, and through confidence comes leadership.  And so it is with mentoring.

We are all learners
Whether apprentice or master, we never stop learning.  Implicit in this is the idea that everyone has something to teach.  Even that intern. By drawing out the knowledge of the person you are mentoring, you help them to better understand themselves, what they know, and what matters to them. This allows you to coach them in pursuing activities and professional roles that will lead to their fulfillment.  It also allows the mentor to get a better understanding of his or her own professional values, and to question established ways of doing thing by asking “why.” Learning is a lifelong mission of acquiring knowledge and categorizing it in a way that makes sense and is useful to us. Growth and change are requirements for relevance.

Mentoring is not a relay race 
So often, we view mentoring purely as knowledge sharing, a ritual passing of the baton from one generation of architects to another.  That assumes that the mentor has all of the knowledge and power and that their career path is the “right” one.  It also assumes that our profession is static and that knowledge handed down will always have value. Especially in today’s culture, career paths are highly individual.  Mentors should be guides, asking questions not imposing rules. 

Mentoring is multi-directional
There is a common myth that mentoring requires a level of experience or specialized knowledge.  At some fuzzily defined point, we “cross over” from being mentored to mentoring.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Why do you think there are so many executive career coaches?  We all need an outside party to help us view ourselves from 35,000 feet and take stock.  Someone to challenge us and help us set new goals.  We grow by teaching others, learning from them and seeking out new knowledge and paths for ourselves.  No matter where you are in your career path, you should seek out mentorship.  The AIA has some valuable resources on its website http://www.aia.org/professionals/mentors/index.htm for helping you make professional development and learning a key part of your firm’s culture.

In your career path, who has inspired you?  Who can you work with today to get that kick in the pants to keep on growing?  Who can you reach out to, drawing out both their passion and purpose and your own?  Please share your experiences both as a mentor and being mentored.

Obstacle or Opportunity?

You did it!  This is week nine, the final installment in the Breaking Points and Turning Points Novena.  Thank you for taking this journey and exploring the issues that affect your very identity as an architect and creative person.  This week, we focus on recognizing what are often considered necessary evils as the true roadblocks they are and eliminating them from our path.

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. 

Yes, there are times (daily) when we have to suck it up and deal with life’s messy surprises, but we shouldn’t have to deal with permanent or recurring frustrations as any kind of rite of passage.  In your quest to find and enriching and fulfilling career as an architect, there are only a few true rites of passage.  I have separated them into three groups:
The Quantitative Rites - the attainments - are the prescriptive things you have to do to be considered an architect from a literal perspective. All architects complete these rites.
1.  Graduate from an architecture program with a professional degree
2.  Qualify, through proper work experience, to take your licensing exams
3.  Successfully complete exams
4.  Maintain license in good standing, including continuing education

The Qualitative Rites - the judgements- are the milestone achievements that gain you recognition in the eyes of your peers, clients and consultants.  Most successful architects complete these rites.
1.  Specialize in an area of design
2.  Publish or have articles published featuring you or your work
3.  Receive an award for design or professional merit
4.  Be sought out for your expertise and asked to participate on a board, committee or panel

The Influential Rites - the impacts -are the transformative moments you have where you bring your knowledge and experience to bear to positively influence the world around you.  Only truly great architects complete these rites-but all of us could-if we stopped viewing obstacles as challenges and wasting our creative energy.
1.  Inspire someone to see the world differently
2.  Contribute, through design, to the welfare of others
3.  Mentor others to help them achieve their fullest potential
4.  Be a voice, through supportive environments, to those who cannot or do not know how to request what they need
5.  Advocate, through the person that you are and the way you live your life, all the ways that design does matter

Notice how none of the rites of passage involve any of the following “challenges” I like to call the Seven Deadly Sins of Architecture:
1.  Endure abuse by clients, co-workers or superiors
2.  Manipulate clients, co-workers or superiors
3.  Overstrategize every action in an attempt to stay one step ahead
4.  Seek credit and recognition for accomplishments
5.  Blame others (even when deserved) for unfavorable situations or outcomes
6.  Overpromise or overcommit to projects, organizations or events
7.  Undercut perceived competition both in and out of the office

That’s because none of these things make us stronger or better in any way.  They frustrate and aggravate us and suck up all our creative energy. Far from being challenges, they are obstacles (many of them self-created) and the sooner you recognize them as such, the sooner you can overcome them and focus on your true architectural Rites of Passage.

I recently saw a photo of the destroyed Berlin Wall spray painted with the statement “We are the wall.”  Nothing could be more true.