Resilience

During a webinar this week I heard a great quote about resilience. Resilience can be defined as toughness, or the ability to recover quickly from difficulties, a key strategy as we put the pieces of our dreams together. In fact, without resilience, not much of significance is accomplished towards our dreams or in the rest of our lives. But this quote went further, in a way that helped me to understand and apply the concept at a deeper level. 

Resilience is the ability to absorb high levels of disruptive change while displaying low levels of unproductive behaviour.

Now there are a some things that we need to unpack in this quote. First, disruptive change means change that is not your idea.  It is change that does not meet your expectations. We respond to change that is our idea very differently than change that is not our idea. It is encountering an unexpected traffic jam on the way to an important meeting. It is discovering that, after a building inspection and fire code inspection on the rental property that you are looking to purchase, unexpectedly, you still need an electrical code inspection. 

Second, recovering from disruptive change is linked to managing our non-productive behaviour. That should give hope. While we are not responsible for what happens to us, we can be responsible for our reaction to it. We can be mindful about what has happened. Often, our first reactions to disruptive change are out of perspective and lead to bad decisions if we act on them.

Some time ago I read about the history of strategy. What I remember was that the word strategy originated in a military context. Strategy was the approach taken by one side to convince the other side that they would lose anyways and should surrender and avoid the costs of defeat. In effect, strategy was about getting the opposing side to admit defeat without having to engage in a battle. 

Resilience is a strategy to avoid defeating ourselves. It means that we don't allow ourselves, even in the face of the difficulties we experience, to convince ourselves out of continuing to engage seriously in the pursuit of our dream. 

Learning Environment

The last few weeks have involved a whole lot of new situations for me. Together, my wife, my mother-in-law, and I are pursuing an investment in real estate for the first time. Offers to purchase, cap ratio, inspections, zoning, fire code, legal conditions, asbestos, tax implications, tenants, wiring and plumbing, commercial, residential, boarding house... Wow! 

I love complex systems and strategies, but this time I know enough to know that I don't know enough to make a good decision, yet... I have a lot to learn.

On the subject of learning, I am fascinated by how people learn individually and how groups of people learn together. I read recently that there are three important components for creating a learning environment - that is an environment that facilitates deep learning.

Freedom to express ideas and opinions

Freedom to make mistakes

Freedom to invest time in learning

So let me tell you how this is challenging me...

First, am I creating an environment for myself that allows me to learn? Many of the constraints that limit me are self-imposed. Do I listen to the ideas I have and give them room to develop? Do I impose conditions on myself so there can be no risk in an idea before I consider it to be acceptable? Do I rush myself so there is no time to understand and master the new things that I want to learn?

Second, am I creating an environment for others in my team to learn? Do I value other's opinions and ideas and make room for them to develop? Do I graciously take a chance that other's ideas may result in what I consider to be a mistake, knowing that I regularly make mistakes of my own? Do I allow others to go at the speed at which they learn, neither holding them back or rushing them along?

Back to real estate investments, we make a good team, the three of us. We definitely move at different speeds and have a different tolerance for the chance of making a mistake. We spend a lot of time talking things through and, at times, move too fast for some and too slow for others. I think that each of us has a different idea even of what success looks like. But we are all learning together and that is a good thing.  

You and your Box

What's your relationship with your box? We all have one. You know the one we stay in when we are focused on something that is important to us or we are comfortable. The one we leave when we are bored or get in a rut and need to be exposed to something new. As you put your dream together you will need to spend time in both places - in the box and out-of-the-box. 

Being inside the box gets a lot of bad attention these days. We are all encouraged to be out-of-the-box thinkers, positioning ourselves for those eureka moments. But recent research shows that many well known creative people actually had a daily routine or creative ritual that looked pretty much the same from day to day. People like Picasso and Beethoven and Freud. Being inside the box is actually a good place for structured and disciplined creative work, especially for those who are constantly starting things but not finishing them. One quote I heard was that creative work requires both inspiration and perspiration. Inside the box is the perspiration part. 

But something happens when we have been inside our box for too long. There ceases to be sources of new inspiration and the healthy collision and recombination of new ideas and perspectives. The 'new' things we produce start to look awfully similar to what we have produced already. That is when it is time to get out of the box for a while.  Some creative people recommend taking a year off to cultivate new ideas. I wish...? But that is not necessary. Just try getting out of your routine, doing something you have never done before like reading a book on a topic you know nothing about or getting together with somebody and learning their story. You can even do this by observing through new eyes the things you see every day. I guarantee you that there is a rich array of details that you never noticed before. One overlooked aspect of being out-of-the-box is capturing the inspiration, the ideas, so you can recall them later. The moment of inspiration can be very fleeting and creative people often have a place to collect their ideas, never knowing when one of them will move onto the next step of the creative process. 

So where are you at with your box? I am definitely at the need to get out-of-the-box stage. And I need to challenge myself to capture the ideas as they come. For a while anyways...

Hidden Opportunities

It is easy to be encouraged by things that have gone well...the highlights. But how often do we view the things that have not gone well as one of our greatest opportunities? Most of us view problems as obstacles in the way of our dreams. We may grumble as we deal with them and resent the time and energy that we could be using on more productive pursuits. But problems can be opportunities for the creation of value, if we are willing to see them through different eyes. 

We create value when we solve problems. 

We tend to view our own problems as exclusive to ourselves, with unique circumstances, like somehow nobody else has to grapple with them. That is far from the truth. In fact people all around us are like likely facing the same problems.  And where there are a bunch of people dealing with the same problem, there is opportunity to create a solution. 

There are numerous examples of this. Some people start an organization to help others deal with a tragedy they have personally faced and battled their way through. Others were working on one type of invention and a 'mistake' they made yielded a product that was more promising that what they were hoping for in the first place, like penicillin and popsicles. Some people have even started successful companies out of experiencing a poorly made product or poor customer service and figuring they could do better.

Waste, when brought into the light and air, makes fertile soil. Look in the areas of your life that you consider wasted for key opportunities and strategies. You may find that the wall your dream is running into is actually an opportunity to refine or change your dream into one that is more meaningful and has more impact.