Movers Showcase - with Jeff Visnick!

Well, hello, hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of The Movers Showcase. Round of applause for being here, and round of applause to the speakers of the Movers Collective who every quarter raise their hand and say, "You know what? I'm ready, or I'm ready enough. I'm gonna give it a go and I want to share. I wanna have the opportunity to share this message externally." And we have with us today the amazing Jeff Wisnik. Now before I go into telling you a little bit more about Jeff and everything that he's all about, I just wanna highlight something that is true of anybody who raises their hand and says, ready or not, I'm gonna step into the spotlight. There's a little something I like to call rejection resilience, because rejection is simply a part of what we do. My speakers and I were having a conversation recently about just how challenging it can be in this business because We are constantly auditioning for an opportunity saying, have I earned your trust? Have I met your expectations? Do you like what I have to say? What do you think of me? Is this gonna be great? Am I good enough? And it can be really, really challenging. So we have to build in ourselves a little bit of rejection resilience, a willingness to do it anyway. I like to call it show up anyway. We show up anyway, even when we know it might not go perfectly. It never goes perfectly. That's not the goal. Even when, uh, we don't feel totally ready, even when our confidence that day— confidence is simply a feeling, and I don't like to depend on it too much, blah— like, even if our confidence is feeling a little wobbly that day, we show up anyway. And we do that because every time we do, we gain a little rejection resilience because we build self-trust. And that is what this is all about. So the speakers we get to highlight here on the Movers Showcase are at all different levels of ready. They all bring expertise and insights and this is another opportunity to get their message out there and to practice a little bit of rejection resilience and build self-trust in the process. So that is what we do here at The Movers Showcase. And I'm so excited to have with us today, Mr. Jeff Wisnik. He is, he's got letters after his name, a bunch of them. Here, here, here, here are a bunch of them. A PE, And a PMP. And that means something. We'll talk about it after. He told me, but I already forgot. A project management professional. That was one of them in the P. I don't remember. Anyway, you know that he's good at what he does. He's got letters after his name. And Jeff is a certified Fearless Living coach and the director of electrical engineering at Thompson Engineering. And he has more than 25 years of experience in building design, which means he's led mechanical, electrical, plumbing technology teams across education, civic, cultural projects nationwide. He knows what he's doing. And he is the founder of an organization called Reclamation Collaborative. And as that, he helps architecture, engineering, construction— another acronym I've learned, AEC— he helps AEC professionals navigate stress, overcome fear-based patterns, which affects all of us, and reconnect with the meaning behind their work. Get back to the meaning behind their work. He is also the co-host of the Burnout Banter podcast, which I have been just privileged to be a guest on at one time. And he and his partner do really beautiful work there. And that podcast explores the human side of the AEC industry. That's what Jeff is all about. And he is presented at AGC TechCon, SMPS, PMI Mile High Symposium. I mean, the acronyms, there's a lot of acronyms in the AEC industry. Lean Construction, A4LE, LearningScapes, and I'm sure more, focusing on resilience, psychological safety, and the intersection of people and performance in this world that is becoming more and more technical and technologically dependent. So the human side of what we do is what Jeff brings to this work, and it is such important work that he does, and we are so excited to have him here. So let's give him a warm virtual round of applause as I bring him on stage. Here he is, Mr. Jeff Wisnik.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. I know a lot about rejection resilience because in the construction industry, our hit rate is about 20 to 25%. So a lot of, a lot of rejection happens when we pursue projects too. But today I'm going to talk about the stress of change. So I spent the first 5 years of my career building something that I was incredibly proud of. By the time I got my dream job, I was leading a group of 10 people. We were scrappy, we were underrated, we were trying to prove that we belonged. And prove that we belonged, we did. Over the course of the next couple years, we increased our staff size from 10 to 40, and we increased revenue accordingly. We were winning new work, we were hiring talented people, we were trying to expand our influence. We even had gotten to the point where we were rethinking some of the ways that we did our work and some of the technology that we used to help us, trying to position ourselves as best as we could for the future. But over the course of the next year, something shifted. Not all at once, it was gradual. Meetings felt heavier, conversations were different, decisions took way longer, and I— the energy within the office shifted. And by the end of that year, I had lost 25 of my 40 employees. And one cold winter morning In March, I walked into the office and I was led directly into a conference room. My boss was already seated there. HR was beside him. And if you've ever been in one of those meetings, you know what was about to happen. I knew what was about to happen. So I remember the cold sweat that broke out all over my body as I stepped through the door. The hum of the overhead lights in the space. And I remember sitting down at the table and the smooth, cold feel of the conference room table under my hands. And what really stood out to me was the deafening silence in the office, because our office was typically very vibrant. And I didn't know what had happened at the time, But I was being fired. And I, you know, looking back after, you know, after pouring my heart and soul into the company for 6 years and helping grow an office faster than anybody had ever grown an office and hiring a team that I thought was capable of accomplishing anything. And here I was being fired. And I really didn't know at the time what had happened. And if I'm being honest with myself, it was really easy to blame. It was really easy to blame the new leadership at the company, including my boss. It was really easy to blame the outside consultant that we brought in who was supposed to prevent this from happening. It was really easy to blame the economy. And if I'm being completely honest, it was also easy to blame the people who had left my side. When things fall apart that quickly, our mind looks for villains, and I can tell you I had quite a few. But I think there was something else going on in that, in that moment. There was something, you know, a question that I didn't want to ask myself. What if what had just happened had nothing to do with any of those things? What if I was missing something? And I didn't know what I was missing. I didn't have the language to even begin to describe what I was missing. But what I eventually learned changed the way I view leadership entirely. Because leadership is not about intelligence, and it's not about strategy, and it's not about technology. It's about something far more human than that. But before we get into that, I want to take a step back for a moment because we're experiencing a moment in history where change is progressing and accelerating at a rate faster than any of us have ever experienced. And most of us don't even know that it's happening. So for most of human history, technology has progressed in a linear fashion. If I take 30 steps across this stage, I've moved 30 feet. 30 years of progress meant 30 years of progress. But then something shifted towards the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. We crossed a threshold. There were microprocessors, personal computers, digital storage, networking. What we did is we shifted from this mechanical age that we've existed in for a long time to a digital age. And in a digital age, systems don't just scale linearly, they scale exponentially. And that's the shift that we are experiencing right now. So if I take 30 exponential steps across this stage— 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32— by the time I have taken my 30th step, albeit over a billion. And even though I'm an engineer, I am not gonna do math in front of you. So you're just gonna have to take my word for it. And that's not just faster, that's different. And that's what we're living through right now. So I don't know how many of you watched the show Survivor, but they just had their 50th season. And this challenge is one of my favorite challenges, and it's one of a lot of fans' favorite challenges. And was actually the final challenge for the 50th season. So what happens is you have one hand tied behind your back and you— they've built this contraption where the ball spins down and there's a switch at the bottom of it. And one switch takes the ball out on one side and then it switches and takes the ball out on the other side. And so you drop one ball down and you're tracking the ball. It's, it's manageable, it's predictable. We know where it's gonna go. It's gonna hit that switch and it's gonna go to the one side. And then we take the ball and drop it back in, it's going to hit the same switch and go to the different side. But what happens is, because they could do this forever, they start to add more and more balls. And I think during the, the most recent finale, they got up to 5 balls at a time going through this thing, and they're flying back and forth. And so that's, that's what exponential change feels like, right? We've gone from something that's really manageable to something that's completely unpredictable and unmanageable and really hard to track. You know, and we're not, we're not at the beginning and we're not at the end. We're kind of in that bend where everything feels out of control. And it's like a frog, you know, slowly bringing broth to boil in a pot of water. The temperature rises one degree at a time. Nothing feels urgent. Nothing feels catastrophic until it's too late. The frog never jumps out of the pot because the frog doesn't realize the point where the situation that it's in has become dangerous. And for many of us, that's what exponential change feels like. It doesn't shock us all at once. It slowly outpaces us. And by the time we realize that we're overwhelmed by what's going on, it's been going on for years and it's impossible to stop. So let's put this into perspective. When JFK was president, a computer cost $60 million and took up an entire room. Now, the phone that is in your pocket or your purse has more computing power, thousands times more computing power, is millions of times cheaper, and fits in the palm of your hand. The thing you use to check your email is more powerful than the computer system that was used to put the first person on the moon. A Sony PlayStation has more processing power than a supercomputer did in 1996 that was used to run Fortune 500 companies. The first Apple PC The motherboard for that PC could be placed onto a chip that is smaller than your pinky finger. And a teenager in sub-Saharan Africa has more global reach than the President of the United States did through the Pentagon 40 years ago. And that's just technology. Let's— or that's just computing power. Let's, let's talk about technology, right? All these companies that you're seeing on the screen did not exist 20 years ago. Companies that we use every day. The iPhone did not exist 20 years ago. It wasn't assumed that people had high-speed internet until the last decade. And I can guarantee you that there were not very many of us during the pandemic sitting around talking about the impact that AI was going to have on our jobs. And now these things have changed the way we communicate, the way we market, the way we sell. The way we hire, the way we collaborate, and the way we design in our industry. And that shift hasn't taken 50 or 100 years. It's taken 5 years, 10 years, at the most 20 years. And our industry is not immune. When I joined a company 20 years ago, we did not have our own computers. We had a centralized computer station and you had to go check out time to go look at your email, and then you went back to your desk and redlined at a drafting table. You turned your stuff into a CAD department that had a few people. So it's pretty crazy to think that 20 years ago I worked at a company that didn't have computers. But how many of you 20 years ago were using Revit or clash detection or drones in the field surveying construction on a weekly basis, or people in the field with tablets having access to real-time data or point cloud scanning? Software that's sending information into live models that we're then using to design. And you know, what's, what's next in our industry too is, um, you know, AI-assisted design, autonomous equipment, predictive scheduling software, software that can do automated quantity takeoffs. And so on and so forth. And, and so, you know, technology is not slowing down, and it's only, it's only speeding up. But that's not the problem. So the problem isn't technology, that technology is increasing at the rate that it is. It's that our human operating system is not. So our nervous system is functioning on biology that was designed for survival on the savanna. Not AI-assisted project management or constant Slack and Teams messages or real-time predictive performance dashboards or client expectations changing constantly night over night. Our brain is hardwired to detect a threat and it sees exponential change as a threat, not because we're weak and not because we're resistant, but because we're human. When the speed of change outpaces our ability to adapt to what's happening in the moment, stress shows up and fills that gap. And when that stress goes unmanaged, performance drops. And this is what we're dealing with today. And that's what I was missing in the conference room so many years ago. And that's what most companies still are missing today. So if stress is so important, let's talk about it because stress is a word that we use constantly, right? I'm stressed out. This project is so stressful. My team is stressed. But what if stress isn't the enemy that we've made it out to be? What if stress is just information? Because the question isn't whether stress exists. The question should be, what kind of stress is it? And how are we helping our people deal with it? Because we act like stress is something to eliminate. But I have news for you. All the great things that you've accomplished in your life have been done with stress present. Stepping on stage for a big presentation. Lacing up your shoes before you step on the field for that state championship game, tuning your instrument before you step on stage to greet your fans, or hitting send on that big pre— that big proposal that has the ability to change the trajectory of your firm. Whatever is meaning to— meaningful to you, no matter what it is, stress has been there because there is a type of stress that improves our performance and it sharpens us. And it's called eustress. So it sharpens our focus, it increases our energy, it boosts our motivation, it tells your brain this is important. Eustress is challenge with capacity. In a construction environment, it's having a tight project schedule with a clear plan and a capable team. This type of stress drives performance. It drives growth. It drives innovation. But here's the trick. As I said, eustress is sufficient challenge without exhausting all of your resources. And that's a really powerful balance, but it's also a fragile one because as soon as our demand exceeds our perceived capacity, stress— that stress starts to shift shapes, and it shifts from eustress to distress. When workloads stack, when expectations escalate, when everything feels out of control, when your plan shifts constantly, distress doesn't help us clarify our thinking, it actually narrows it. So under distress, our creativity drops, our risk tolerance shrinks, our communication gets shorter, patience disappears, and defensiveness increases. This isn't a philosophy, this is neurology. When our brain detects a threat, it shifts from long-term thinking to short-term protection. But not all distress shows up the same way. So has anybody ever been pulled over by the police? If so, and I'll admit that I have, you've experienced the first kind of distress. It's acute distress. It's those butterflies that show up in your stomach when you don't know what's going to happen in a situation. But as soon as the situation has been resolved, the police car pulls away, you get to pull back on the road, everything kind of resets. Back to normal, and we just go on with our day. So that's acute distress. Anybody who's ever worked on a project in the construction industry knows what episodic distress is, right? We have a certain amount of time to do the project. We work on it, we work on it, we get towards the deadline, there's a big crunch, we push really hard, we get the deliverable out, and then we move on to the next project. We have some time, we work and work and work, So it's a cyclical type of stress that becomes very intense in moments. But the last type of distress is the one I really want to focus on today. It's chronic stress. So most of us think that stress is the enemy, but it's not. It's chronic activation. And that's what chronic distress is. When you're constantly putting out fires, you're constantly reacting, you feel like you're playing catch-up all the time. And we do that without rest, recovery, or decompression. So burnout is what happens when this stress becomes chronic and our recovery disappears. It's what happens when our nervous system stays activated for too long without a chance to downshift, without being in an environment that's psychologically safe. Or without having a chance for our system to reset. And when that happens, our cognitive capacity declines, engagement drops, turnover increases, safety risk increases, and innovation slows. And that doesn't happen in this loud, really obvious way. It happens quietly. It happens through people disengaging, through people withdrawing, through people trying to protect themselves. And that's what I was seeing in my last year at my company. It wasn't people not performing. It was people under high levels of strain. So I think the thing though, that most companies miss is that there's two types of stress that we're dealing with. I think most of us think that stress that our people are presented with or dealing with on a daily basis comes from external sources. Deadlines, clients, technology, market pressure, scope creep. I'm not going to deny that this type of stress exists. It absolutely does. I have lived under it for 25 years. But I think a lot of it is outside of our control. And as much as I would love to sit here and say that we could, we could change that with a wave of a magic wand, we're not going to be able to. But I think There is another kind of stress that our people are dealing with that we are not paying enough attention to, and it's much more damaging to them. It's internal stress. Fear of incompetence, fear of status loss, fear of irrelevance, fear of being left behind, fear of being exposed. So we have two types of stress. So we have the internal stress, right? If, so if I have this internal stress level and it's up here, and then we have the external stress level that piles on top of it, that often throws us over the top into burnout. But if we have dealt with this internal stress and have lowered it, we have capacity when the external stress shows up to deal with it and to perform and to tap into that type of eustress that, that we all benefit from and do great things under. But if we're not dealing with the internal stress, there's not much hope for us. So technology in and of itself doesn't cause stress. It triggers identity threat, it triggers competence threat, it triggers control threat, and our nervous system responds. So when external acceleration meets internal threat, stress shows up and performance suffers. Not because our people don't care, but because their nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And this protection can look like a lot of different things. It can look like micromanagement or withdrawal or, um, resistance, blame, So if we treat all stress like it's external stress, the way that we've dealt with that in our industry is to put systems in place. But these systems are failing our people because they're not helping them deal with the internal stress that they're actually dealing with. And so if we are able to recognize that internal stress is having a big impact on our people, then we can change the way that we lead. So what does this type of unmanaged stress look like in our industry? Because if it exists, we should be able to see it, right? And we can if we know what we're looking for. So let's take a software implementation as an example. It looks great on paper, but it fails in practice. How— has anybody ever been a part of something like that? Right? The vendor felt very confident about what was going to happen. Trainings were scheduled. The investment was made. But adoption stalls. And adoption stalls not because the tool is bad. It stalls because our people feel overwhelmed, threatened, exposed, and behind. We're not just asking people to implement new software. We're asking them to challenge the way they've built competence in their careers for the past 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years that they've been doing things the same way. So anytime we're asking them to adopt a new technology, right, we're essentially changing workflows, we're shifting authority, and we're redistributing expertise. And when people are threatened in that way, they're going to turn to protection. And that protection can look like resistance. But I want to be very clear that their resistance is not to the technology, it's to change. It's to the threat. And this is where we need to be honest with ourselves, because we don't have a technology adoption problem. We have a human problem. When people are threatened, they don't collaborate, they don't innovate, they withdraw. They don't stretch, they fight to survive. So in the 20th century, efficiency was the name of the game. If we could standardize, we could control, then we could maximize output. But in the 21st century, with speed increasing, uncertainty increasing, and complexity increasing, Efficiency alone isn't going to save us. Our advantage in this century is going to come from being adaptable, and adaptability is something that is biological. If we want to improve performance in an accelerating world, we need to have a team that is capable of adapting in high-pressure environments, and this requires leadership that understands stress. Because if we ignore the human element, whether it be in a technology adoption or in any other aspect of running a business, our performance is going to erode, and it's going to do so quietly and expensively and predictably. Because the companies that are going to win in this next era aren't just going to be the companies that have the best tools. They're going to be the companies that have the best tools and help their people deal with the type of stress that they're facing. I'll probably leave it there, Sally, just because that's a good stopping point, I think.

Great job, great job.

I—

wait, hold on, I have a fun applause button that I like to do. We'll do this. Applause, applause! I don't know where it went. Applause! Well, actual applause. Actual applause. Amazing. Thank you, Jeff. I was totally sucked in, like, um, and I know a lot of that science myself, but your, uh, ability to articulate it and articulate the stakes so compellingly, I was like, dang. The exponential steps across the stage. I was like, what? What? Oh my gosh. So, thank you.

It adds up quickly. A lot quicker than any of us realize.

I guess. I guess. Also not a big mathy person over here. I'm sure you're more of a mathy person than I am as an engineer, but truly, I felt that really deeply, the acceleration of change and our very natural resistance to it as humans. And I think that is so, so important and powerful for what you're doing. And I had a question for you, if you're okay, if you can hang with me here. My question is about, um, Let me see if I can find it. Okay. This is what I would edit out if we weren't live. As I was standing here trying to remember this. Okay, beautiful. Okay, you're talking about sufficient challenge. Overcoming Our Perceived Capacity. And you use the word perceived capacity, and I think that is really important. Can you just talk about the difference there? Because when we talk about capacity, it's always actually perceived capacity. Yes.

Yeah, it is. Um, and I say that intentionally because we all have this idea of what we're capable of handling And depending on, you know, the day that we're in or the week that we're in or the month that we're in and things that are happening, you know, in an outside of a work environment, our ability to, or our, what we think we can handle changes every day. And so I think, you know, it's important to realize that, right, that when we're leading people, their capacity may seem that it's okay at this level, but it's really not. Or, or that, that, you know, they're maybe have more capacity than, than what they think they're even capable of. But I was just talking to somebody online and, you know, she's handling way more than what she should be because her company's not supporting her. But for her company, she's handling it.

Right.

And so their perception of her capacity is different than her perception of her capacity.

Absolutely.

And her perception of her capacity is having impacts on her health and her wellbeing and everything. But because this fear has shown up and say, don't show weakness, right? She's just handling it and sacrificing herself while she's doing it.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I, I was just having this conversation with, uh, a friend of mine, a fellow entrepreneur. I was like, I don't know if I'm doing too much or if I'm doing just the right, what I need to be doing, or if like, I literally don't have a sense of what, um, what capacity actually is for a healthy, busy entrepreneur. I'm like, 'Cause I just keep doing more. So I just keep kind of stretching my capacity. Can't do that forever. And I think that's one of the rubs is we are, we feel this push to do more, respond to more. And we're like, I can, but at what cost?

Yeah, and later on in the talk, I talk about expectations And so there's this idea of what we should be doing as entrepreneurs or as employees or whatever. And that can get us in a lot of trouble. And even when you look more holistically at like the American dream, right? The American dream tells you what you should be doing to achieve the American dream. And I think it's really important that people step outside of that and look at what success is for you and define it in those terms because then you can check in with yourself and say, am I doing what I want to be doing in order to achieve what I want to achieve? And it's not predicated by what you should be doing, right? Yeah, by whoever says we should be doing it. And sometimes it's even us that says we should be doing way more than we should be.

100%. It's a lot of untangling in your work. Yeah, like, where did this come from? Where are these beliefs coming from that we operate under, mostly unconsciously, most of the time. So I know that's part of your work, is really getting to making the unconscious—

getting a little bit of light on it.

Yeah, yeah, because shedding some light—

because you can't stop a reaction. All you can do is recognize that you're having the reaction, and then you get to decide what you want to do with that. But yeah, there is no stopping that fear part of our brain that's hardwired that says, yeah, you got to do more, you got to do more, right?

That, that threat response I think is really, really helpful. And I always think it's such a powerful reminder that stress is not all bad and that it's like essential to get us going. The need to do something— I feel a need to do something— that, that that is stress technically. We don't think of it that way. And so I, I, I always like how you're— you give just a little bit of extra love over to stress. Like, actually, we need, we need it.

Um, yeah, if we didn't have it, we wouldn't accomplish anything.

Oh yeah, I mean, I have 3 teenagers, and every once in a while I'm like, I think we got to up the stress level. I think we need to like dial up the stress a little bit more, get people going here.

Yeah.

Oh, I— that makes so much sense to me. Beautiful. Well, before we wrap up, do you want to tell everybody a little bit about what Reclaim Me, your Reclamation Collaborative, is all about, what you do, and how they can connect with you?

Yeah. So it's all about helping people find alignment, whether that be alignment between their professional life and their personal life. Or maybe it's alignment between your company and your employees. So a lot of dealing with stress and burnout and communication and things like that where fear shows up and gets in the way. And while I know that the word fear doesn't resonate with a lot of people in the construction community, it's present for all of us and we all have it. And so, yeah, and we all have it.

We all have it.

We can deny it, but we all have it and it shows up just in different ways for each of us.

Yeah. Yep. And I think you're such a great messenger for that as somebody who has been in the construction industry for so long and you are kind of a construction guy. If you've ever met Jeff, he's like, yeah, I don't do ties. You got your, you know, you just, that's Jeff. You got Jeff.

That is me.

Here he is, here he is. And you are like so many people, I think, in that industry. And so for you to be the messenger of this idea and say, yep, we all have, we all have fear, and we're gonna, we're gonna actually go into the human side of things. As engineers, we may not feel comfortable in that space or spend a lot of time in that space, and and you're like, I used to feel that way, and now here we are. We're diving into the human side of things.

And I have fear every day, even though I talk about it every day.

100%. Yeah, 100%.

So you can, you can get a hold of me, you know, on LinkedIn, connect with me, or, uh, my website's reclaim-me.org.

Beautiful. And all of that info is here on the screen for them. Uh, let's one more time, a big round of applause for Jeff Bisnick. Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you for being here.

So glad to have you and excited for you and how important this message is. You've been— you've had this message for a while and it just feels right now so essential, so essential given what's going on in the world. Getting back to our humanness is, is how we're gonna be able to move through it.

Yeah, our latest, our latest episode of Burnout Banter is talking about all the threat that we're under all the time. And so it's not just from work, it's coming at us from all directions.

For sure, for sure. Oh, awesome. Okay, well, now I'm gonna go listen to that episode. Thank you so much, Jeff, and thank you to everybody who was able to join us. I've got Jeff's information right here if you want to connect with him. We so appreciate you stopping by and learning a little bit more about the incredible speakers here in the Movers Collective. And we'll be back next quarter with highlighting some more speakers who have raised their hand and said, I have something to say and I am willing to put myself out there to say it in service to that message. And we applaud them for that. So thank you for being here to support them and everything that they do. And we will see you soon. And as I like to say over on my podcast, This Moved Me, Movers, This Moved Me. What is moving you? Thanks so much, everybody.