Building Resilience

In the beginning of the year we had a conversation with my manager about my yearly goals. Due to the nature of my current project and the newness of it, I felt the need to build more resilience to be able to deal better with changes. He appreciated my initiative, but also mentioned this would be something unethical to measure. I agreed with him, I do not want to measure it by putting an enormous amount of pressure on myself. But there has to be a way to build skills in this direction.

For the theory I watched a very corporate course on Udemy. My first takeaway was that I am in a much better shape than I thought I was. I do bounce back easily most of the time, and I am not affected by change and things going wrong. I recognized events in the past where people around me were scared of what is going to happen, but I was calm and knew that I can adapt to any of the outcomes. I also recognize events that were tough for me, but I took it one step at a time and kept an open mind.

There were also things that I was doing wrong, that this course helped me understand. I always thought I had a hard time asking for help. I know this is true to a certain extent, but I also understood that this is not fully on me. When the environment is supportive and I have trust in the people around me, I have no problem asking for help. It is, of course, also my responsibility to build trust. This is becoming increasingly difficult with remote teams, where the only interactions you are having are during work meetings, which often get heated. Add to this the personality of the average software developer dealing with computers only, having very limited people skills, and it's easy to see how communication can be more challenging.

Partly due to this distance from my colleagues in the past, I sometimes ended up feeling isolated and blocked. I remember having days when I could not get any work done and I did not know who to ask or what to do about this. Sometimes I stayed up late trying to refactor parts of the code to make things work. Sometimes I tried to sleep, but couldn't due to feeling guilty about not being productive enough. Then the next day I was too exhausted to get anything done, and the cycle continued until I felt burnt out and sometimes even got physically sick.

I did learn this time that putting in extra hours this way does not lead to better productivity. I need to switch off at the end of the workday and do my personal things as well. I also need to take regular vacations that help me recharge, so I can push hard again when I am back. This constant push and pause leads to the best outcome and the most productivity on a personal level.

I found another source for learning about doing hard things and increasing my resilience in the podcasts I listen to from time to time. It has come up in a few episodes of the Hubermann Lab that doing hard things is good for humans. There was this one idea that doing hard things strengthens the part of your brain that's responsible for your will to live. I find that idea fascinating. It is great that most of us are able to have an easy life, but we also have to understand that once it gets too easy, we need to create artificial hardships to give a workout to our brains.

Similarly, doing hard things makes doing slightly less hard things easy. So if you keep pushing yourself to do harder things constantly, your everyday life will flow easily.

As I am currently reading the book "The Comfort Crisis" of Michael Easter, after listening to the related podcast, I find myself thinking more and more about the idea of doing things that feel almost impossible. I already have a few ideas on how to challenge myself physically, but I also need to add mental challenges into my life. Running more marathons, or exploring new places still scares me, but I already know I am able to do all these. Similarly, building good software is something I know I can do, but I am still feeling challenged on the conceptual parts of coming up with complex solutions. Thankfully, my work gives me plenty of opportunities to do this, and I am not punished for failing.

As a next step, I am going to define challenges that push my limits. What this means, I do not know. I do know that I need to get out there more and do the hard things. And after doing the hard things, or failing at doing the hard things, I need to take a break. As Samuel Beckett said: “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.”