remember what she said to him. She said something very, very profound that shifted the way that I looked at the world. She's all you know, being bombed and experiencing the devastation of the explosives that happened one time in your life, but ever since that time, you've been mentally recreating that you have a war in your own mind. So consider that a lot of times, this is what we do to ourselves when we worry about a recession, is we're creating the worry in our own mind worrying about something we're fixated on something that isn't actually here. You see, there's a difference between a healthy awareness and an unhealthy preoccupation. So what we want to have as it comes to recessions, we don't want to put our heads in the San Jose. Oh, recession is not going to happen. I don't need to worry about it. No, that's another recipe for disaster, right? We don't want to be worried and anxious about it and making fear based. Fear based decisions when it comes to how to powerfully hold ourselves through economic challenges. And we also don't want to put our heads in the sand and pretend like everything is going to be prosperous in the future and we can just rest on our laurels. Both of these are recipes for disaster. Both of these involve a certain amount of unawareness. So what we want to have, and what I want to encourage you to have, is what I call a healthy awareness, meaning we understand that recessions are going to happen, and in the rest of this episode, we're going to talk about the steps and things that we can do to make sure that we're not worrying about a recession, that we feel confident. Now, number three problem is, when a recession happens, or there's economic tremors, or projects get put on hold. The problem or the challenge that we can fall into is freezing. This goes along with the front the freezer, flee, fight kind of response that we have. It's a fear response. So imagine that a car is, you know, you step into the road on a car's rushing down at you, you're going to have one of several responses. You're probably going to jump out of the way, hopefully you might freeze, which is a terrible thing to do, because in that case, you're going to be the victim of an accident. So this is what happens when we're faced with difficult challenges. We can our nervous and our nervous systems our body can go into these automatic responses. Now, these responses are automatic. They're things that we don't consciously have control over but when we are aware of them, we can then begin to impact them. So one of the challenges during a recession is freezing, and I'll explain what I mean by this. When I was when I was laid off from my for the practice where I was working in Houston, Texas, back in late 2008 moved to California and was working side jobs, you know, earning, literally $5 an hour throwing newspapers, and then I would go and I would earn, you know, $20 an hour working as a sub school, school teacher. And then in the evenings and sometimes days that I had off, I was networking, hustling, architectural services. I. Yeah, and I remember at that time that because I didn't have the skill set, I didn't know actually what to do to build a pipeline. I had no clue about how to let people know about my services. I had no clue about how to vet clients. I had no clue about how to qualify clients and make sure that I was working with the right people. I didn't know anything about this. I remember there were many times when I would just freeze. I would be there at home, and I would be in front of my computer, and I would just have this feeling of anxiety that would come over me, and just this feeling of helplessness, like complete helplessness, not knowing what to do, and just basically freezing and hoping that the phone would ring. If you can't guess, this is a horrible strategy for building a business. The fourth problem that I'm going to mention here as it comes to recessions, is, as an architect and as a firm owner, making drastic slashes to your operations, pulling back and trying to save money by cutting things that give your firm life. For instance, maybe you have a marketing expense, you're like, Oh, we're going to cut that. That's superfluous. Maybe you have some other expenses. You cut those. What we don't want to do during a recession is cut the things that give us life. This is one of the mistakes that so many architecture firm owners and business owners make, which is cutting the very things that are keeping their business alive. So what's the possibility here, in the face of recession? Have you considered that the possibility for you as an architecture firm owner, a design firm owner, a landscape architect, is to move into the face of recession, the face of economic uncertainty with per your personal certainty intact, having peace of mind, knowing that you are well suited to be able to not only just survive, but actually thrive during recession, actually, knowing that The recession is going to be your day, that you thrive in winter, that you're a gladiator, that you know that when the winter comes, you will be ready. That instead of waiting for things to happen to you, instead of getting frozen in a fear response, you're proactive. You're out there ahead of the eight ball, you're taking action. So what should you do instead of worry about a recession? What have you considered that the principle here is number one, focus on what you can control. If you're the average person, business owner, you probably have little control over macroeconomic economic policies. You don't have the ability to influence the United States government, the UK Government, the Asian countries, any of these countries around the world that are powerhouses and make making things happen in the world. You and I, we don't have a lot of agency with that, right? We're existing in the greater milieu of economic forces that are outside of our control. So what can we do? We can focus on the things we can control. Now I'll tell you another quick story. As you may have heard, I talked about on the podcast, two years ago, I started training jiu jitsu just for fun with my boys, something to do, and it's been great with my boys. We go down to Jiu Jitsu. It's fun. We train two times a week. As a matter of fact, there is an architect there who had been following the podcast, who approached me, aren't you Enoch Sears? I'm like, yeah. He's like, I I went to SCI arc, and I'm working for this firm now, and he kicked my butt in Jiu Jitsu. So it was, it was quite fun and quite humbling at the same time. But one thing that I love about jiu jitsu is I'm not very good at it, so it's a new skill set that I'm learning, that I'm developing. And, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to get disappointed, get frustrated and get upset when I get beaten, I feel like I'm not good. I feel like this is never going to work out, and I'm focusing on the things that are outside of my control, right? Like I can't control what my opponent's going to do. I can't control the next move my opponent is going to make. I can't control how aggressively my opponent engages with me, if I worry about those things, or I try to focus on those things, I'm just kidding myself. What can I control? I can control how much I practice. I can control how hard I practice. I can control whether I reach out to the leader of our of our studio, and I ask him to give me private lessons. I can control how diligent I am during practice. I can control if I do any conditioning outside of practice. So as you see, there's a lot of things that I can do to make myself better at Jiu Jitsu. So principle number two here is, instead of focusing on the recession, just get better. When we focus on the things that scare us or the things that could impact our business negatively, this is where we get caught into the worry, the fear, the anxiety. So the challenge I want to have for you today is Don't, don't worry about the recession. Yes, be aware that recessions happen, but get better, acquire the skill sets that will help you thrive while other practices are struggling. When I was in high school, I tried out for the soccer team. This is the story of my life, trying out for things. And as I was trying out for the SOC team, I was a junior at the time, and they were doing a scrimmage. So scrimmage is where they put you on the field, and they want you to run back and forth, and you're competing in a game. And they're trying to see who the best players are, because they're going to figure out who's going to be on the team. So there was, I was basically competing to be on the junior varsity team at the time, and I did the stupidest thing. You've probably heard of this story before, if you've listened to the podcast, but I'm sitting there, the game's halfway over, and our offense is great. They're keeping the ball down at the other end of the field. So I'm a defender. I'm just getting bored, and it sounds stupid now when I say it, but I literally crouched down on the field. Now, in my defense, this was, this was almost like an automatic pattern or habit that I had gained from wrestling. So in high school and even in junior high as a wrestler, I wrestled USA, wrestling, and wrestling a lot of times you'll crouch down because you're listening to the coach or you're waiting for your opponent. It's like an, it's like, just a thing, you know, in practice, when our coach would talk to us, he would be, he would be in the middle, kneeling on his knees, and we would crouch around him. So it's just like, you know, as a wrestler, you're kind of in this crouching position, so whatever. So I'm here crouching on the field. That's, can