Search Results for: fear
BREATHE
Photo Credit: kimiwerner.com
Have you ever seen someone with an incredible skill that you can’t imagine how it’s possible? We see these greats in sports – people who do the impossible repeatedly. People like the Michaels (Jordan & Phelps), Stephen Curry & Tom Brady. These athletes are usually quick-thinking and fast-moving and their stories are told every day through widely available video and sports networks.
Storytelling
One of the best gifts from social media is the storytelling of lesser-known but stellar people and their accomplishments. One of those people is a Hawaiian spearfisher named Kimi Werner. She is a freediver and can hold her breath for four minutes and forty-five seconds! She is a US National Spearfishing Champion, a chef, an artist, an environmentalist, and a speaker on the TED Talk stage.
Oh, she also rode a great white shark. In the wild. Without gear, a tank, or cage. If her diving partner weren’t there to film it, no one would believe this true tall tale.
In the Face of Fear
As a seasoned professional freediver and spearfisher, Kimi says that she understands marine animals and the importance of body language, so when the great white was swimming toward her, she knew that she had two choices: try to outswim the shark (we know how that ends!) or do just the opposite and swim towards it. And that’s just what she did. In doing so, she communicated to the shark that she was a predator and not a meal.
Slow Down
One of Kimi’s messages is summed up simply – When you feel the need to speed up, SLOW down. Learn to stay calm in stressful situations. Kimi learned from her father that the worst thing you can do is panic. Stay calm and think. Assess the situation, still your body, and figure out what to do.
Even in our regular oxygen-breathing world above the sea, it is easy to panic over situations from professional performance to personal conflicts. How much better are the outcomes in both when we slow down and think before we act? Breathe in. Breathe out. Ironically, breathing was not an option for Kimi while underwater, but the principles are the same. Override your fight or flight and take a beat – or two – before you react. Thank you, Kimi, for sharing your story and encouraging the rest of us to go towards what we fear, thoughtfully and bravely.
Do you have a story about staying calm in the face of panic? Share them with us. We learn from each other.
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Durable Goods
Lately, I have been thinking about durability – what lasts and what doesn’t and the things we hold onto versus what we should toss. Do you think about the word durable when you are shopping?
My wife grew up in a rural area of Wisconsin. She is a big fan of Carhartt and has owned some of their clothing for over twenty years. I had the opportunity to learn more about their brand while shopping for a gift on my wife’s wish list. Carhartt’s durability claim is justified – ask their 1.2 million followers on Instagram.
Not Durable – Failure
In interviews with more than 100 people at the top of their fields, Tim Ferriss found they all shared two habits: 1. They ask ‘absurd’ questions and 2. They deconstruct fear. In the article, Francis Ford Coppola says, “Failure is not necessarily durable. You can go back and look at it and go, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure. That was a key moment of my development that I needed to take, and I can trust my instinct.”
If failure is not durable, why do we hold on to it? When engaging in real open-hearted conversation, most people can quickly recall and recount moments of failure – so much so that it feels like failure is cataloged in our brains for easy recollection.
Poor Decisions
Failures related to poor decisions can be quickly rectified in a culture of honesty and safety. Bad choices lead to better ones when shared openly with a team dedicated to group success. The only thing worse than a wrong decision is making NO – the GPS can’t let you know that you’re headed in the wrong direction until you start moving.
Character Failures
I find that failures related to character are the hardest to let go of. When I haven’t lived up to my values or acted in a way that contradicts them – those failures cut deep. They happen in business and personal relationships. I don’t know about you, but I can readily recall those failures – I can feel them in my body when I think about them.
But here’s the thing – even those personal character failures are not durable, and there is no value in holding on to them forever. Once you do the personal character work – to reflect, course correct, and make amends for those failures – it is time to release them.
Past vs Future
Carrying around the weight of the past takes up personal bandwidth better used to serve your current and future purposes. Acknowledge past failures for the lessons they provided and move on. It’s easier said than done – but it is worth the effort.
What do you consider to be durable – important enough to keep? And what are you holding on to that is past its expiration date?
Let us know what you think.
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Multifamily & The Metaverse
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash
Multifamily & The Metaverse
Guest Post written by: Eric Brown
Times Are Good
It is undeniably a most excellent time to be in the apartment rental business. High occupancy, waiting lists, and solid collections are the norm now that most systems are operating in a more normalized manner. Yes indeed, we all look like geniuses after weathering the COVID Storm. My sense is that most apartment operators are focused on renting apartments, collecting rent, and maintaining the assets.
COVID hyper-accelerated certain technologies. Smart locks are smarter and opened the pathway to many changes in protocol such as self-guided tours. Smart home tech has dominated with gadgets that enhance our living experience. While multifamily has typically lagged behind on many technology trends, COVID brought many of these products to the broader multifamily market, enabling scale at warp speed. These new tools and platforms are now accepted by the masses who previously rejected them. That begs the question though –
What’s Next?
I am going out on a limb and exploring the Metaverse (which took me down a deep rabbit hole!) and the ways it may affect how people rent apartments. It is an unprecedented time to be in the apartment business and I feel like apartment operators, (not all, but many) are taking a breather and simply managing the properties. They are likely laughing at the whole idea of Metaverse IF they even know what it is. Yet, I strongly feel that in time, our prospects will be renting apartments from Bots, in a Virtual World, where AI (Artificial Intelligence) will control most if not the entire process. Property websites as we know them will be vintage and apartment operators will operate their business in this virtual landscape.
I stumbled onto something Paul Bergeron wrote recently. Paul has been writing about and studying multifamily for a long time and is a smart and seasoned guy. He is an Executive Editor, Influencer, and Content Producer for Thought Leadership today.
In a LinkedIn Post, Paul writes, “Crazy. Many attendees didn’t stick around, but those who did found out that their apartment community is already on the Metaverse, where it can be bought or sold. The audience at last week’s MF Social Media Summit was most “blown away” when speaker, tech reporter Jeremiah Owyang, explained this. He pointed to Earth 2, a futuristic concept for a second Earth; a metaverse, between virtual and physical reality in which real-world geolocations on a sectioned map correspond to user-generated digital virtual environments…These environments (including your apartment community) can be owned, bought, sold, and deeply customized.”
So – What If?
What if the Metaverse, which is map-based, became the place where our prospects rented? They can see everything around the apartments, just as in real-time, similar to Google Earth. Imagine that the digital space has evolved, every person has an Avatar, real estate developers have purchased property on Earth2, and the apartment community looks exactly the same in the digital metaverse as it does in real life. While this may feel like sci-fi to many, some of us were renting apartments before URLs and .coms. We used paper brochures. I can vouch that no one, or at least not many, had any idea how websites, as we know them today, would change the renter’s experience. So, every property management company in the land started building websites and scrambling to get the best URL. It was messy for quite some time.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (www) in 1989 while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world. And while perhaps not as exciting or immersive as some of the nearly 1.9 billion websites that exist today, it makes sense that the first web page launched on the good ol’ W3 was, well, instructions about how to use it.
Are We Blind to History?
One of my favorite authors, Aldous Huxley, quotes “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
Who would have dreamt that we would be buying Digital Art aka NFTs, with Cryptocurrency, aka Bitcoin that all lived on the Blockchain? But We Are.
Maybe The Metaverse is a real thing? You Decide.
Defining the Terms
NFT – A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital asset that represents ownership of real-world items like art, video clips, music, and more. NFTs use the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies, but they’re not a currency
Cryptocurrency – A cryptocurrency is an encrypted data string that denotes a unit of currency. It is monitored and organized by a peer-to-peer network called a blockchain, which also serves as a secure ledger of transactions, e.g., buying, selling, and transferring.
Bitcoin – Bitcoin is a digital currency that operates free of any central control or the oversight of banks or governments. Instead, it relies on peer-to-peer software and cryptography. A public ledger records all bitcoin transactions and copies are held on servers around the world.
Blockchain – Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding).
Metaverse – Digital Technology in a shared, realistic, and immersive computer simulation of the real world or other possible worlds, in which people participate as digital avatars.
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The Superfluous & Untouchable
Photo by serjan midili on Unsplash
The Superfluous & Untouchable
What does a 19th-century cholera epidemic have in common with businesses today? Both have problems that resist easy answers, and both need root cause solutions.
Cholera was a word that struck terror in the hearts of people throughout the world. Seven cholera pandemics occurred in the past 200 years, and it is still a problem in many parts of the world today. Left untreated, cholera has a mortality rate of up to 50%. It was rampant in places with poor sanitation facilities and the cause was unknown for a long time.
Cholera is an intestinal disease that can cause death within hours after the first symptoms. In prior outbreaks, cholera had killed tens of thousands of people in England. Most doctors and pundits believed that cholera was caused by miasma (bad air). With shared cesspools and raw sewage dumped in the river Thames, it’s easy to imagine just how bad the air must have been! Most people didn’t have running water or indoor plumbing and relied on public water pumps to carry water for cooking, cleaning, and bathing.
Dr. John Snow
John Snow was an obstetrician and anesthetist in London. In 1884, when the cholera outbreak occurred in the Soho district, Dr. Snow believed that contaminated water was the real source of cholera. In one area, there were around 600 deaths from cholera in just ten days! Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down and map the cases to nearby homes and businesses. He also investigated groups of people in the area who did not get cholera and their sources of water. In a remarkably short time, Dr. Snow knew the precise pump that was spreading the illness. Thanks to Dr. Snow, the Broad Street pump was shut down and the cholera outbreak shuttered. He is credited as a pioneer in the field of public health and his work is a beautiful example of root cause analysis.
Root Cause
The principles of root cause analysis hold true for problems far less severe than the tragic cholera outbreak referenced above. When your business is faced with an event that results in an undesired outcome or a problem that seems entrenched, performing a root cause analysis will help you better understand the true source of the problem. Is the root cause physical, human, environmental, or organizational? There are many tools available online to help you put structure to your analysis. The Five Whys is one methodology and is explained in this video.
To get to the heart of the matter, start with identifying the problem. Next – triage – take swift action to correct the immediate issue. Then – ask questions, listen carefully to responses, and dig deeper – ask why again and again – getting past the many symptoms to the root cause. The five whys help you get closer and closer to the real source of the problem and allow you to craft a better solution than a surface-level fix. Once you know the real source, then look to other parts of your business. Does this same root issue create problems elsewhere? Faulty practices, communication, and beliefs are contagious. So, don’t quit the investigative process too soon.
Final Notes
When conducting your root cause analysis, it is important to create psychological safety. Without it, people may be less likely to speak openly out of fear which will impede your efforts. Second, look for the superfluous and the untouchables. In the category of superfluous are things like manual reports that were needed once but are no longer necessary however the requirement to create them was never dismantled. Superfluous debris is found throughout even the best organizations. A periodic review is essential to prevent them from building up and choking the time and bandwidth of your workforce. The untouchables are trickier. Untouchables are those closely held beliefs that something or someone is not to be questioned. Those beliefs will go unchallenged for as long as you allow them to. Untouchables can spell the death of an innovative culture. Identify and dispel the belief in untouchables early and often.
When you build the practice of root cause analysis into your culture, your team members learn that it is safe to dig deeper, ask questions, and challenge both the superfluous and the untouchable. That just may be the foundation of a team empowered to innovate.
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Superpowers & Disabling Ableism
As I dig into this week’s topic, I first want to encourage you to watch or listen to this week’s episode of Collective Conversations featuring TEDx Motivational Speaker Alycia Anderson. Born to an able-bodied identical twin sister, Alycia has a congenital disability that requires her to use a wheelchair for life. Alycia’s passion for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility makes her a profound advocate and expert. She is an inclusion superwoman and brings her expertise to the uncomfortable topic of ableism.
What is Ableism?
Ableism is defined as discrimination and social prejudice in favor of able-bodied people based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. It is so prevalent that we don’t even realize it exists. Ableism occurs when we look at someone with a disability as needing to be fixed in order to be whole or we define them solely by their disability and miss the person altogether. Saying “You don’t look disabled” as though it is a compliment or “You’re too beautiful to be in a wheelchair.” Those and so many other dehumanizing comments happen regularly throughout the life of a person living with a disability. Some disabilities are easily evident by the use of a wheelchair or other assistance device. According to accessibility.com, an estimated 20% (or more) Americans live with invisible disabilities.
Bold Strokes
Listening to Alycia share her experience, it quickly becomes evident that she brings significant talents to the table, some of which were honed because of her disability. A longtime member of the multifamily community, Alycia tells in her employment story that she never told a potential employer that she would arrive to the job interview in a wheelchair. Some time after she was hired, she asked her boss about the decision to hire her and he said, “I knew you had to be a planner. You had to plan how much earlier to leave, how to navigate the obstacles to arrive here on time for the interview.” He saw the skills she perfected because of her disability in addition to her formal education, experience, and infectious enthusiasm.
Anxieties into Assets
All of us have things we are insecure about and an internal story we tell ourselves about our limitations. Shifting your mindset to turn those anxieties into assets is a skill we can all take away from Alycia’s story. I think that also applies to how we engage with people who live with disabilities. I encourage you to move past any fear of saying or doing the wrong thing and engage human to human, laying aside any preconceived ideas about ability or inconvenience.
I will close with a call to action that we do the work to make accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion the pathway to developing the superpowers of those around us. It is fundamental to our businesses and in our work as providers of housing. Serving people. It’s what we do.
Let’s work together to flip the switch and disable ableism.
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