This is the second part of two posts on fears in practice. The first post, The fears holding back architects and the profession, might be worth a read first.
When I was young I would stay up late and watch horror films until well after midnight. They totally freaked me out. It was hard going to bed, turning out the lights and getting to sleep. And yet I continued to stay up late for the horror flic’s. There was a thrill in the fear. A thrill and adrenaline rush in knowing I’d leant into it and overcome it. It felt like aI was better for it. I’d like to say I’m able to do the same with the more confronting fears I face in my work, but the reality is that sometimes they get the better of me.
We know consciously and unconsciously it’s fear often holding us back. Knowing if we were to defeat it we might crack that bigger, better project or client. We might find the work we truly love and want to be doing. The fear we often face is a fear of failure, of something going wrong. Usually the potential for failure is greater in the mind than in reality. Fortunately there are some useful questions we can ask in order to prepare ourselves, help us dance with our fears and put ourselves more at ease:
What is the best that can happen? (This is a very useful reframe and one to motivate you to let go of the fear.)
What is the worst that can happen? (Often the worst thing is nowhere near as bad as you think it might be.)
What can I plan to do if something goes awry? (Great! You now have a plan. Just in case!)
If something does go wrong is it easy to reverse and reinstate? (A reminder. Most problems aren’t terminal.)
Ultimately, fears manifest in different areas of our work and in a variety of ways. Here’s a few brief sketches of ways of defeating, reframing, or at the very least, dancing with some of these fears in our work.
Marketing
Many architects are uncomfortable with marketing. It feels dirty, pushy or immodest. My theory is that most think of it as selling and knowing most people don’t like to be sold to. If however someone is looking to buy, they do appreciate knowing what options they have available. Then, if you’re offering what they are seeking, your marketing becomes an act of generosity not of dirty selling.
What you tell people about your practice is just one side of marketing. Albeit the side that is considered to be all of marketing (by most marketers). The less considered side of marketing is people’s subjective experience of your practice. That experience might include how you interact with them: on a project, on answering the phone, in how you write and issue invoices, and so on. I note this because there’s typically no fear placed around these things. It might be worthwhile to get curious about why not and what you might learn from a consideration of these parts of practice. What might you borrow from this side of your practice and embed in how you market more fearlessly.
Alternate ways of practice
Architectural practice takes many forms. The traditional way of practice suits many, but not all. The problem is that we often see the finished product not what it took to get there. The finished product seems out of reach and insurmountably hard. So we don’t start building something new for ourselves. What is the opportunity cost here? It might be useful to start asking the questions in the introduction, starting with What is the best that can happen? and then start experimenting. By breaking down the development of your future practice into smaller experiments, the fear is similarly reduced into surmountable bites.
Trying to do it all
Letting go is hard. Delegating is hard. The fear of something going wrong is real. Maybe the fear of something going right is greater? Whatever the case, the benefits are far greater than the potential cost. Remind yourself of that. You build trust in your staff. Build skills and expertise. Freeing yourself to do the things you really want to be doing, those things that bring you joy – all of your choosing. Letting go is a choice and it’s a choice you can take. What’s the best that can happen? Write that answer down and stick it up where you’ll read it.
The question following, doesn’t apply to established bigger practices and doing multiple typologies successfully. It’s a question for those smaller practices fearful of limiting themselves by picking a special niche, a singular a specialist typology.
What might it look like to try and focus on just one typology for now?
To really drill down and get as good at it and as knowledgeable about it as you can. To build your expertise. What is the typology and specialisation that you can identify that has a minimum viable audience? If you can fully lean into that you might have the market to yourself, eliminating competition and charging healthy fees. That’s the dream, right? The fear shouldn’t be not having enough work, it should be not having the work you want and love.
Being more businesslike
From the previous post:
It’s not beholden on architects to run the business side of practice themselves, they might instead have someone do it for them.
When we have someone to hold our hand things don’t seems so scary. There’s fear around the cost of paying someone to do this, but what’s the cost of not doing it? Lost revenue, lost time and lost opportunity. I don’t know anyone that regrets engaging someone to help them with becoming more businesslike. The majority admit it made them money in the medium term. It’s an investment and the return on investment isn’t immediate, it takes time, like most investments.
Status quo
This is a variant of Alternate ways of practice. Overcoming fear of challenging the status quo, similarly starts by answering the questions in the introduction. There are other questions to start asking too.
Why do we do it this way and does it make sense? (One you see the answer to this, maybe it doesn’t feel so scary to challenge the status quo.)
What is the purpose and values of the architectural profession? Are they embodied in our work? Starting from these first principles what might architecture look like? (When we work with purpose and in alignment with our values often our fears become less important.)
Standing out by being different can be uncomfortable and scary. It’s also a form of leadership. By being the same, you’re just being a follower (See previous post under Leadership). Leadership is a choice. Will you make it? More on that following.
Losing projects
Losing work, not having enough, or not having enquiries, they’re real fears. It’s the reality of business, you work, you need income. It’s a constant temptation to take on work that does not align with your vision for your practice. There’s real risks here, either failing or not being happy. One strategy to adopt is to think of each decision as a bet. There are no sure bets in the same way that we can never guarantee the outcome of any decision. This reframe might help alleviate fears. There are definitely ones that are better to take than others and that way we can assess the risk as a bet and dissociate the outcome from the original decision.
It’s not a case of just betting on accepting or rejecting a commission, it’s case of betting on decisions that shape your practice. Bet on alternate ways of winning work. Bet on creating projects rather than waiting for them. Bet on creating work, more so than on addressing the fear of losing it.
As written above: The fear shouldn’t be not having enough work, it should be not having the work you want and love.
Feedback
Giving and receiving feedback is hard. The fears are indisputable. When I know I’m about to receive feedback on my work, my stomach becomes knotted and suffocates the butterflies. It can be good and bad and the question I always ask my self is,
How might I see this feedback as a gift? (It doesn’t make the fear go away, but at least it gives it purpose.)
Then when giving feedback, how might you help the recipient see the gift you’re giving them?
Leadership
I must be crazy thinking I can write something about overcoming the fear of leadership in one or two paragraphs. It’s a challenge I’ll accept as a position of leadership, to be meta!
There are no natural leaders. No-one is born a leader. Leadership is a skill. A skill that is acquired over time. There are few leaders who escape the feeling of fear at one time or another (or most of the time). Leadership takes courage. Yet when we recognise it as a skill we can then see ways of getting better at leading, which should help to alleviate some fear.
I think of leadership as being a bit like a Swiss Army Knife of human skills. Good leadership requires being good at empathy, listening, communication, trust, decision making, feedback and so on. All are skills that can be learnt. It therefore takes practice to get better. Better, breeds confidence and helps us to manage our fears.
Conclusion
We can perhaps all agree that most of the ideas I’ve outlined here are choices. We all have choices. We can choose to lean into the discomfort or we can choose to remain the same.
Picture by Marek Piwnicki [cropped]
