I previously talked about my 5 Design Rules to Live By, drawn from the design mind-sets from Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Today, I would like to talk about Rule 4 – knowing it’s a process.

What is it?

“Knowing it’s a process” is being aware that you are on a journey. It is recognizing that the journey has many steps to it, and if you are aware of the steps ahead of you, you will not feel lost or frustrated or discouraged.

It also means you won’t give up as easily. The most popular reasons that people give up on their journey boil down to not having an understanding of the process involved in reaching their goals. They don’t commit fully to the actions they need to take, expect progress too rapidly, or aren’t ready to make the necessary adjustments when things don’t unfold exactly as planned.

Knowing we’re in the middle of a process gives us the courage to take action. If you clearly recognize the next step ahead of you, no matter how small, you will feel more confident to take the step. After all, the process up to this point has helped you be as well-versed and prepared as you can be, and committing to the next step has more to teach you.

We develop a better understanding of patience. Progress doesn’t happen instantaneously (usually), and there are often many steps and iterations of something before it reaches it’s final form. With the knowledge that the process is unfolding, we get better at realizing that time and patience are required to see what the result is so that we can take the next best step.

It helps us understand that things may not play out entirely as we expect, and that we can adjust and still get where we want to go.

We know that nothing usually happens instantly, and a project often takes many steps to show any kind of result. But if your goal is nebulous and there is no clear path forward, you are more likely to second guess every decision you make and get frustrated at the seemingly lack of progress.

It also helps you muster up the courage to take an action that might be especially intimidating or scary to you. Just like in the discussion around Rule 2, actions are the steps toward progress. Trusting the process you are in can help you in building the confidence you need to take the scary steps. “If I take this step, I will be continuing through the process that will lead me to my goal.” That is what knowing and trusting the process is.

What can I do?

Write down everything into what is essentially a pros and cons list. Hopes, fears, ideas, questions, feelings, and all of your short term goals and the steps you need to take to get there. Ask yourself, what would happen if you stopped going down this path? What would happen if you keep going?

I briefly mentioned that my husband partook in the Odyssey Plan exercise put together in Designing Your Life. This is probably one of the best exercises you can do to help realize the processes involved in not only one major goal, but three. The idea is that you create three detailed five year plans for yourself: one of the path you are on now, one of the path you would take if the thing you are doing now suddenly became completely unavailable to you, and one for the path you would take if money/image were no object. They encourage not only thinking of career, but family, travels, education, places you could move to, hobbies, and anything else you would want to pursue in those 5 years. They also ask you to rate each plan in four areas: do you have the resources to start down this path right now, how much do you like it, how confident are you in your ability to execute this plan, and how coherent is this plan to your “compass” (or your feelings on what is important to you in life and career). You then list three questions that each plan addresses. Building three well-thought out 5-year-plan complete with all the small steps you can take in each year to work towards your goal helps you realize not only what “the process” can help you accomplish with some forethought, but also all of the ways you can adjust your plans or change courses entirely if something doesn’t work out or if a step takes you in a direction you hadn’t considered before.

I have also found that indulging in the occasional mindfulness/meditation exercise can do wonders in helping you embrace the process. It’s one of the hot topics of healthy practices right now, and there are a ton of resources on how to find the practice that works for you, so I won’t dive into it too deeply other than to point out it’s importance. It has a slew of health benefits, but overall, it helps you to relax and live in the moment and accept that as things come to you you will be able to handle it. When you are trying to build trust in that every action you take will help move you through the process, this can be very useful.

How has it helped me?

Engineers like processes, so you’d think this one would be easy. And when tackling a technical problem, it can be.

The very energizing motivational speaker Anne Bonney was giving a talk at a conference I recently attended. I asked her how she handles overcoming fears when she’s about to take an action (Bias to action). She first outlined the “Superhero Pose” idea that was introduced by Amy Cuddy in her TED talk. But the second thing she told me she does I believe is much more impactful in the long-term; she relied on her logic by examining her plan, reassuring herself that she had in fact thought this through, and asked herself “What if I do this? What if I don’t?” She knew that by knowing she was in the midst of a process and that by continuing to take action and trust her preparedness up to that point, she would continue to learn and grow in wonderful ways that she wouldn’t if she just gave up and turned back.

For me, it’s about recognizing that my current career goals will take time and many steps to come to fruition, and that even as I work towards it I recognize that the outside influences are ever evolving and it could land me in a different destination entirely. I took steps to move into a role that better suits me in an area I have never even thought of before, and now I am taking steps to enroll in a master’s degree program that will help develop skills I know I will need moving forward in my new department.

I also had an experience with accepting that part of my process is dealing with failure and struggling through knowledge gaps. I needed to work on understanding what I need to do to fill those gaps. I came to realize few things about the process I was in the midst of: It was large, intricate, and there were a lot of sources of information that I had not adequately understood before I started. I had failed to focus on some of those information sources that were not immediately important but would be later, and I would need to double down on my efforts to stay attentive to those. I also needed to cut myself some slack. I was very disappointed with myself for struggling through a project at work. But I needed to remind myself that I had done what was essentially a career 180 only 9 months ago and I was developing a completely new skillset in a very short amount of time to try to be productive and useful for my evolving team, and I was learning as I go that my old plan wasn’t adequate. It was a completely new process full of twists and turns that I was still adjusting to. Of course I wasn’t going to immediately understand how to connect what seemed like sometimes multiple unrelated dots. But now I had had some time to form context and understand the different roles at play, and I would be able to form a more detailed plan and move forward. Parts of my plan include every week coming up with new questions to contextualize information from experienced members of my team, and creating a personal database to keep track of information about features I do not have full understanding of but knowing that repeated exposure and note taking will help me learn to connect dots more easily.