My 10×10 Exercise: A Simple Way to Measure Your Own Resilience and More Part Two

Last week I wrote about my 10×10 exercise – making ten lists of ten things each as a way of remembering, in the face of ongoing struggles,  how much we’ve survived and to serve as some much-needed inspiration.

I covered: Dance, Travel, Safaris, Leaps, and Forged.

This week I continue with my other five lists: Fav Things I’ve Made,  my Top Ten Blog Posts, Feels like home, Tech Tools, Learning, and a bonus list: Laugh.

Again, Pro Tip 1: as you read through the lists, see which topics resonate with you and feel free to use them for yourself annnnd any other list topics you want. You be (deliciously and delightfully) you.

Pro Tip 2: don’t stress.  This should be fun.  Things don’t have to be in chronological order or detailed, simply things that cue powerful memories.: 

The Fave-Things-I’ve- Made List

1. Life Lenses®  
2. Transformative Trainers Academy that contains my L.A.S.T.I.N.G. I.M.P.A.C.T framework for designing and delivering learning
3. My ‘fortune teller’
4. My bio (seriously fun and interactive – scroll your mouse over my picture for a surprise)
5. My blog
6. The Learning and Development Roundtable I founded and have facilitated monthly for 13+ years 
7. The H.A.(n)D.S. feedback technique adapted from the Heath brothers
8. Discover your change personality survey
9. Laugh track I made thanks to everyone who participated
10. Discover your motivation style 

My Top Ten Blog Posts List

1. What we can learn from a butterfly’s struggle to escape its chrysalis
2. How y’all, youse, and you guys talk
3. Easy peasy activities to make your workshops more interactive, part two
4. Perception vs perspective: a slightly funny, slightly serious look at how we see the world
5. Where are you on the will and skill matrix?
6. What’s your tolerance for ambiguity, and why it’s key to know
7. No boo-hoo here: goblin tech tools for neurodiversity
8. My 2024 wishes for you, one for every month
9. Easy peasy interactive workshop activities, part one 
10. 4 steps to critical thinking via Edudemic

My Feels-Like-Home List

1. Mountains
2. Candles, and/or soft lighting (no cold, blue light for me)
3. Music
4. Books and lots of them
5. Food: Canada: blueberries, perogies, wonton soup, cranberries, frozen peas (I know, weird); France: baguettes, lunettes, chevre, dried fried onions to put on salads; Kenya: paneer, samosas, pizza bread, mange touts, mangos, paratha
6. Hosting dinner parties with diverse friends and making traditional Canadian Thanksgiving dinner (including maple pumpkin pie)
7. My hubs and my kids
8. Groups I’ve convened and communities I’ve built over the years: Dancing Queens, the Goddesses (we’ve been gathering for 18 years and counting), Wayward Women and the Membership Mavens
9. Being surrounded by treasures I’ve collected from my travels
10. Water – the ocean, lakes, rivers

My Tech Tools List

1. Flycut clipboard manager – the tech tool you never knew you needed; I use this multiple times  a day
2. Typeitforme text expander – ditto, I use this tool probably 30 times a day
3. Boomerang – returns emails into my inbox at prescribed dates/times if they’ve gone unanswered
4. Claude
5. Gemini 
6. Trello for managing my VA team projects
7. ActiveCampaign for sending emails
8. Thinkific for hosting my Transformative Trainers Academy (bonus: based in Vancouver!)
9. Zoom
10. ILovePDF for anything and everything I need to do with a PDF

My Learning List

1. A.C.O.A. – learning that it was a real thing truly blew my mind
2. Mind the Gap – fantastic, illuminating book with the best title ever
3. Growth mindset and fixed mindset from Dr Carol Dweck
4. Ambiguity and how we’ll make poor choices for ourselves just to get rid of uncertainty from Nonsense by Jamie Holmes
5. Online Memberships, all the learning that went into and continues to go into my own online membership, the Transformative Trainers Academy from Launch by Jeff Walker and from Mike Morrison’s epic Membership Academy
6. Popular Education, via Educating for a Change (how learning can and should lead to social change)
7. Life Lenses® – really, truly learning about how different folks view the world differently thanks to my husband, the inspiration behind one of the 8 Life Lenses®, the Mountain lens
8. Packing – packing up our house in France with Claude’s help by building an interactive, editable dashboard = chef’s kiss
9. That not all conflicts can be resolved.  A painful learning via a former business colleague.
10. Community. The importance of community, no matter where I am in the world. Period. 

My Bonus List: Laugh

I’ve been writing a blog and newsletter for decades now, and I always try to include a little something funny.  I’ve curated a lot of those videos here in this list (from the “Laugh” section below).  Enjoy!  And please, laugh along with me.

Enough of my lists; it’s your turn now.  And in case you didn’t catch it in part one, I’ve repeated the process below for you to follow yourself.

Go ahead with your listicles.

How to Build Your Own 10×10

Here’s the process, so you can do this too.

Step one: build your own categories. Pick ten categories that call to you.  Don’t overthink it.  Feel free to borrow any of mine that resonate and make up your own. 

Yours might be Small Talk = Big Impact (when a small comment makes a big difference), Sidelines (when you didn’t feel included), Deadlines (self-imposed and otherwise), Goodbyes, etc. 

The category names matter less than making sure they’re specific enough to jog real memories, not so broad that you write the same three things under every heading.

Step two: fill each list with ten. Don’t overthink the order. Don’t rank them. Just write until you hit ten, or until you run out and have to sit with the empty space for a minute, which is its own kind of information.

Step three: run each list through the learning lens. This is the part that turns a nostalgic exercise into an actual tool. For each list, or for the items that snag your attention, ask:

• What does this show me about for example, how I’ve risen before?
• What does this teach me about resilience, mine specifically, not the textbook definition?
• How does this change or confirm how I define success?
• Is there anything here I need to reframe, going forward, now that I’m looking at it with distance?

That last question is where I think real work lives. Because it’s easy to look at a list of ten dance memories and just smile. It’s harder, and more useful, to look at a list called Forged and ask what it actually taught you, not what it took from you.

The Payoff

If you’re the kind of person who read this and immediately started drafting your own category names in your head, great! That’s the point. Build your ten, fill them, and sit with the learning lens questions for a week before you decide what any of it means. Resilience doesn’t reveal itself on the first read.

And if you’re the kind of person who immediately wonders if this is for you, great!  Sit with it.  Perhaps try out a list or two and see how you get on.  No pressure.

Regardless, I hope you’ve found some insight and inspiration from these two posts and my 10×10 lists: Dance, Forge, Travel, Leap, Safaris, Favourite Things I’ve Made, my Top Ten Blog Posts, Tech, and “Home,” plus my bonus list, Laugh.  Go on now, let loose and ‘list.’

Take Action Now – go on and learn, laugh, and lead

Learn

• If this kind of reflection is your jam, a few posts from the archive sit right alongside this exercise: Where Are You on the Will and Skill Matrix is a good next stop if the leaps list has you thinking about what you’re actually capable of versus what you’ve just never tried.
• What’s Your Tolerance for Ambiguity digs into why sitting with an unfinished answer, like the success question above, is a skill worth building on purpose

Laugh

• An oldie but a goodie.  Don’t send a man to the grocery store, regardless of the list.

Lead

• After reading the Ambiguity post above, measure your own tolerance for ambiguity here

P.S.

• Aiming to amp up your teaching/training skills? Next week’s Transformative Trainers Academy Master Class is all about how to actually make learning engaging and sticky (often through the most surprising activities). If you’ve been considering becoming a member, now’s the time to join!

Since 2009, I’ve been writing weekly posts across five topics. Click into whichever one makes you lean forward just now … you’ll find everything I’ve written on that topic waiting for you there.

• Working Better Together – communication, conflict, creativity, collaboration, change. The so-called soft skills that turn out to be the hardest ones.
• Learning and Development – practical tools and fresh thinking for your own growth … because you deserve the same attention you give everyone else.
• Training of Trainers – if you’ve ever been asked to teach, train, or share your expertise with a group, this one’s for you.
• Tech Tools – not the scary kind, I promise. The kind that saves time, cuts overwhelm, and makes you look and feel like a rockstar.
• Life Lenses® – because the lens you look through changes everything. Posts on perspective, perception, and the Life Lenses® framework for understanding why we all see things so differently.