Only Way Out is Through

Lawladies

If this is your first time visiting, it’s a good idea to read these articles chronologically. This one will still be here when you get back.

You’ve heard a great deal about the time I worked at UNC-TV. During that time, I had two entire other lives going. My son was new, and I decided to attend law school. (I’m happiest with too much to do). I was very lucky, living where I did in North Carolina, to be near one of the very finest schools of Law in the nation. And that school has an evening program.

Let me pause to say that “finest” to me is measured by a few key features. 1. They educate people the legal profession needs to have in its ranks. 2. The faculty could teach anywhere but choose to teach there (see item 1). 2a. Faculty have been known to forego raises to keep tuition low. 3. They teach what’s needed and do it well. Naturally that puts them at odds with traditionalists, such as accreditors. People who prefer that law schools take “traditionally qualified” students and churn out cookie-cutter lawyers. Giving opportunities to folks who have the short end of every stick and may take more support to succeed goes against that grain. So it takes a fine school to walk that path, and the credit to the profession of NCCU’s many fine alumni tell the story. (For reference, they also take some folks like me who just have the good taste to attend an excellent law school or who are looking specifically for an evening program. Those are not available at the schools with more “reputation” in this area, since their target audience of “traditional” students can take a traditional path.)

I took my LSAT sitting in a sea of terrified ponytailed undergrads. Fun for me though. It’s much easier when you already have a job and law school is just something you think might be useful. Told my boss that I wanted to spend four years becoming a lawyer in order to be better at my job (true). Poor Carl must have burst something not laughing directly in my face, but many years as a salesperson gave him a poker face you won’t match anywhere. I was somehow lucky enough to be accepted. So I spent my (far more than 40 hour week) days doing my regular CIO job. My evenings, weekends, and I’m convinced some other time that just showed up to make me more tired, were all for law school. They didn’t issue time-turners if that’s what you want to know.

While there, I met impressive people. One, for example, already had a Ph.D. and was working as a chemist. While in this program she sat the Patent Bar exam while approximately 49 weeks pregnant, then had her first child. There were business owners, executives, and assorted brilliant and driven regular working people determined to make a change in their lives. I could probably put every person in that program and many of the professors on the “list of competent people I have known.” But I play favorites, and this is my story, so I’m going to mention only a few who can illustrate my points.

Pearla was a long-term Human Resources staffer in state government. She had served in the Navy prior to settling in North Carolina. To say that she has no patience for incompetence is to vastly understate the situation. Pearla is monumentally well-informed. She knows her business, and crossing her is a bad life choice. If you want something handled properly, take it to Pearla.

When we started law school, Mary had worked for several years as staff with the NC legislature. Nonpartisan research staff. Which means that she knew everyone at the legislature, and everything about how NC statutory law works. She knew all of it a lot better than the elected officials (mostly imbeciles, my take, not hers) who she supported and made look far smarter than they were. How she kept a straight face through all of that is still a mystery to me. Mary was fabulous to have in class because she had a very different view than most students or professors.

Shannon was on another level. She was a social worker who decided to go to law school while living on a far edge of this very long state. Shannon lived up in the NC mountains and commuted to the evening program in Durham. For four years. Shannon is the sort of person you would hope to find on the Supreme Court. No nonsense, with a broad understanding of almost anything that ever crossed her path. If we had her on the Court we would enjoy pragmatic, deep, and well-informed opinions. If I know anyone at all like RBG, it’s Shannon.

So what do these three have in common? Really, in common with most of the folks who make it through this program. There’s a trait you see in pop self-help writing quite a lot. It had a recent spate of “this trait is the end-all/be-all” and “how to teach your children this trait.” I think the pop writing has missed some nuance. Resilience is a wonderful thing. I’m pro-resilience. Whether it can make your toast in the morning and lead to all fulfillment is debatable. But it’s a key component of Competence.

The framing here, as Resilience manifests in Competent people, is a little different than the flashy “falling out of an airplane and surviving in a rainforest” kind. Nor is it the perpetual up-side to everything or “fake it till you make it” sort. Those are possibly-valuable ideas. You’ll find books, videos, training of all kinds to help develop those. It’s also possible that that sort of training could help you develop what I’ll describe here. Being able to keep going, or to stand up when knocked down, is the difference between success and failure. Whether you’re falling out of an airplane or managing a project well, you have to keep going.

So what is this trait?

Think about these three people. Working full-time. Law school, (which is considered by most to be a full-time occupation itself.) Families and other obligations. Consider the day-by-day of that. Every law school has attrition. It’s built in to the culture. You take hard classes up front and some predictable number of people wash out academically. Some people in any kind of school wash out when life gets in the way, law school intends that culling.

Let me pause. I say “life gets in the way” in the usual tidy-sounding phrase. As if we’re all on a pretty path and there are just rocks, and some people scratch their heads and give up on their pleasant stroll if there’s a rock.

Life isn’t that. Every day we have life come at us. We have energy and resources to deal with things. Whether those things are complicated, painful, relentless, doesn’t matter, life keeps throwing them. Some of them sucker-punch us. Relationships with friends, family, partners, co-workers require effort. You get sick, or depressed. Your car won’t start, or someone smashed the window the night before. The state of the world drags at you. People hurt each other on purpose or not. Computer does anything but print the paper you were up all night writing. Sometimes your dear people die. Some days we have to handle a sick relative at the same time a big project needs us and we have a law exam worth half a semester’s grade. Actual life, actually getting in the way. Making you want to quit, or just not know how to step even one more foot forward.

When I talk about resilience then, I mean a kind of ability to keep all of the regular stuff going, spinning those plates on their sticks by putting energy into the ones that slow down. But also dealing somehow with every other thing life throws. So whether it’s having a network to draw from to handle emergencies or provide help, or knowing exactly what to ignore and what must be handled right then and there. Having life experience to handle things faster or more effectively to keep the mess flowing while you get things done. Resilience for the Competent person is a kind of microcosm of Competence itself.

Looking at the people standing at the end of a four-year law program that runs concurrent with a full-time job, full of mid-career adults who also have an array of family and “life” responsibilities. Every one of them can handle shit. Packing an enormous amount into their day to do the predictable requirements, allocating or just finding resources to handle every unexpected problem and need. Most would give grace and credit to the people in their lives, to a higher power, or to just enough luck to make the difference. But without this “resilience” skill, it would never have been enough. For many people lacking it is the difference between all kinds of success or failure. If you stop moving toward a goal, you don’t achieve the goal. Simple.

I’m going to talk about “privilege” again. When I went through law school, I had an employer willing to make flexibility happen when I needed it. I had a ton of vacation available. I had a husband who always had more child-minding aptitude than I ever did. I had parents willing to provide childcare. I had enough income to handle things that could be handled with money. I had many friends willing to drop things to help me when I most needed it.

Some kinds of “resilience” come from advantages like mine. It cuts down on the number and difficulty of obstacles. People with Competence can function with fewer resources. They can make up for fewer financial resources with ingenuity, with a deeper sense of what is truly “essential” and what can wait or be ignored, with more tightly-connected friend networks who show up for each other because the success of one is the success of all. Competent people come from all walks of life, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that learned resilience is more likely to come from experience with fewer resources. But the hallmark to look for is using whatever is available, in a good way, to persist.

Thinking back to our examples, Shannon’s resources included a place to stay near school for a few days a week so she didn’t have to commute every day for class. A stubborn streak (another Competence feature) to handle things like bouts of sciatica that made driving an ordeal. Shannon is perhaps also the most pragmatic person I’ve ever known. She’s not one to waste energy on dithering. Either something matters and you dig in and deal with it, or it doesn’t and it doesn’t get another instant of wasted time.

Pearla brought exactly that same “what’s the bottom line here.” Is it important, and she’d need to learn it, arrange it, or deal with it? Or is it not. Whether her ability to see right to the heart of the matter came from her military background or her years of handling people’s BS in a human resources role, or she was just blessed with it, she was laser-focused on only the kernel of what mattered. The obscuring nonsense doesn’t even exist to her.

Mary is a bit more like me. She noticed all of the nonsense, and liked to put it all out for verbal target practice as stress relief. Complaining about things for humor is a way to make them bearable. Mary could also apply an extensive network to a problem. While her work at the time would invade her whole schedule, and law school schedule is not flexible, she kept it all going. When Mary puts her attention to something, it is never done just a little. It’s done to the nines. Problems are afraid of Mary.

The reason I picked these particular people to talk about is that they (and the brilliant patent-bar-sitting chemist I mentioned earlier) and I were study-group mates through the whole program. We had some other friends join us, and by the end our entire class of eighteen was one big study group. But these three were the ones I saw enough of to know well, and still am close with. I see how their traits make them successful now and it illustrates how they made it through those four years. So when I talk about Mary, Pearla, and Shannon’s ability to do something demanding over four years, and not wash out, and have some extra latin words on their diplomas in the end, I understand the DNA of each of these “Lawladies” and I think you can learn from it.

One reason we mythologize Resilience is that we all know it’s huge, but it’s so hard to pin down. It’s hard to pin down because it’s an attitude, it’s a range of skills, it manifests to fit every unique situation. We sense that some people have a lot of it and others don’t. But if you look at any situation and person dealing with it, how they do it will be different. I could write a whole series of articles analyzing it and barely scratch the surface. I’ll leave the deep details to the many authors trying to nail the formula for resilience.

If you’re a manager looking for this trait, on its own or as a flag that might signal a Competent employee, try looking for success at long-term goals. College degrees, Americorps or other long-term difficult volunteer work, challenging personal circumstances (you can’t ask, but if someone has multiple children or a caregiving situation and they’re making life happen, that’s a good sign). Those things are obvious, but maybe also consider the effect of consistency. Someone who performs consistently at any job over long periods is someone who can tamp down the effects of disruptive events. Someone who can stretch to handle difficulties. Again, don’t ask, but if you happen to know about a candidate’s chronic health problem, and they perform at high levels at work, they are going to have superhero levels of resilience. Snap them up. Easy lives don’t necessarily mean a lack of resilience, they just don’t tell you anything. You’ll have to look hard, think sideways to see it or rule it out.

I can’t deconstruct resilience in a single article. What’s important here is that Competent people persist successfully. Doing difficult things over long periods of time, handling big and little obstacles in the way of specific goals and in life. I think it’s important to remember, and the massive self-help avalanche should be that reminder, this is a learned skill.

Learned skill usually means failures. You may find folks who have had wash-outs and epic failures…who have learned from them. Competent people may be a lot of things, but “born that way” is not one of them. People who try to do hard things and fail are often the ones you want. Competent people might learn that way. Or they may instead be slow and steady, accurately measuring their capacity, deliberately acquiring skill, using it in careful measure, and not failing much at all. Mastering skills and taking on tasks within known capacity is another legit way to achieve successful persistence skills, resilience, and ultimately perhaps Competence.

What kind of persistence is needed for the role where you want Competence? Might be a good question to ask yourself. Do you need the bullheaded go-getter who runs full-steam into an enormous challenge, and gets knocked back a few times, but then dusts herself off and charges again? Do you need the painstaking “measure twice, cut once” person who can smoothly handle tedium and long-term detail and never get it wrong? Do you need MacGyver, with a dizzying array of skills and knowledge and creativity to handle unforeseeable challenges in unexpected ways? Or the team-builder, who can multiply their effectiveness with cooperation? Competent people can manifest all sorts of resilience. Your particular work may require “zero failure” so you need the multiple-measurement persister. Or it may be about creating new things and failure is expected so you need the “tackle, bounce off, stand back up cheerfully” persister. Or you may have a massive complexity and need someone who can keep enough good people operating together that the whole thing won’t fall apart for lack of shoulders to the wheel. One is not another.

When it comes to retention, I’ve found that people who have these skills need to exercise them. The ones like Mary who can put out fires and keep astonishing amounts of detail about people and situations in their heads need to be called-on to use those details. They need demanding work with enough urgent situations to keep them on their toes. I’m certain that Pearla would say she actually doesn’t need to be supporting multitudes of people making poor life choices at work, but she chose HR when she could do almost anything. It’s nice to be the sharpest tool in the shed. Shannon became a Professor, and a parent. Seeing to the needs of others always presents challenges. When your Competent person finds herself to their right situation, provide the challenges they need to feel.

Early on I described Competent people as the ones others go to when situations are bad. Among the many other traits, this ability to handle bad situations is key. If someone has no track-record, if you can’t just sense that they can handle what you’re bringing them, you won’t bring it, and the bad thing may fester. That ability to handle others’ Bad Things exercises resilience traits. Shannon’s work as a Social Worker helped a lot of other people, but it gave her exposure to and experience “fixing things.” I’d be astonished if she didn’t put that to use on the daily. Mary is a networker. She knows people, knows their skills, their interests, their motivations. She helps her people with their bad situations, and her people would help her too. Pearla can apply cutting through the BS to any aspect of life-obstacle. She finds the path and keeps walking it and things had just better get out of her way.

Consider your own resilience. Do any of these patterns resonate, and can you make them resonate more? Can you focus on cutting through to what matters in many situations? Can you be a better friend, even to people you barely know and create the potential for success in your circle? Can you practice difficult things to expand your ability to handle challenge? (Try law-school, that’s a doozie.) Every goal not achieved is because someone had to stop for some reason. Learn from those, so the next time the same obstacle comes flying at you, you’ll be ready!