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

It’s been a hard stretch. For a lot of us, more than likely including you too. 

And when times get hard, we tend to do one thing reallllllllly well.

We forget how much we’ve already survived and even thrived.

So I create an exercise. 

Ten categories, ten items each, with the things that have made me who I am. Not a PhD thesis, not a resume, just lists. Simple, divine lists.

(Love my lists.)

Dance moments. Travel moments. Leaps I took. Things that forged me. Safaris. 

Here’s what I did, what I learned and how you can do it too.

By the time you finish this post, you’ll have a repeatable process for building your own 10×10 and a set of questions to run it through.

You’ll have a learning lens that turns nostalgia into evidence: proof of how you rise, and a chance to redefine what success actually means to you.

This is part one of two. Today’s lists are: Dance, Travel, Safaris, Leaps, and Forged.

Pro Tip 1: as you read through the lists, see which topics resonate with you and feel free to use them for yourself annnnd add 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.: 

Me at my ABBA themed 60th birthday party

The Dance List

Dancing is medicine for me.  I let my mind wander far and wide to come up with 10 top dance memories.

1. With abandon on the beach in Costa Rica and decades later on the beach in Diani under a Red moon
2. At a Stanford international development conference
3. At weddings, any and all of them, including my own
4. The first time meeting Irakoze, dancing in torrential rain which led to almost everyone leaving and then an impromptu private concert by him for us few that were left
5. UBC, the Pitt during my undergrad days
6. With my kiddo, once when he was a wee one, we were at a fancy restaurant and he asked me to dance. And another time when he asked me to dance to the tunes of a French street performer, on Granville Island
7. Dancing the cumbia in Cali, Columbia
8. The impromptu dance party outside our hotel at the UN World Urban Forum in Rio
9. My last Dancing Queens event in Nairobi, with Hope Irakoze who as he played “Time to say goodbye” looked at me and waved (cue my tears)
10. My 60th – dancing along to the Mamma Mia movie with dear friends and later at the ABBA Dinner party in London

The backbeat to my dance background:

You’ll see that on my dance list, tucked between a beach in Costa Rica and a wedding dance floor, sits a Stanford conference. I was there for an international development program, surrounded by other students who cared about the same things I did. And then, somehow, also surrounded by a cluster of frat boys who very much did not. Different views, different priorities, same dance floor. We danced together anyway. No shared language of ideas, no shared cause, just music and the willingness to move. 

The lesson: It taught me something I didn’t have words for yet: connection doesn’t need common ground first. Sometimes it just needs a beat.

The Forged List

Some lessons slip into your brain easily and some come forged out of grit and grace as they leave indeligible marks.  This is a list of life events that really left a mark.

1. Learning to live with fellow Katimavik participants (a former youth volunteer program) across Canada for 9 months and the resulting arguments, reconciliations, woes and wins and learning. Oh so much learning
2. The International Unit of the YMCA – discovering the world beyond the tip of my nose
3. Prepping for my dad’s funeral
4. The mind blowing ACOA (adult children of alcoholics) workshop I took as a teen
5. Health scares including my kiddo’s past illness and my SCA (sudden cardiac arrest)
6. Ongoing conflict with a family member
7. Doug asking me to marry him
8. Becoming a mom x2
9. Getting a university degree, the first in my family
10. Consulting for the U.N. and getting to work with UN staff the world over

The lesson: The foundation of forged – when my feet have been to the fire, and when I’ve really stretched myself, is often the time I’ve grown the most. Growth is not always comfortable, it’s sometimes downright squirmy.

The Travel List

Some 50+ countries have etched their way into my psyche thanks to my global adventures, so my 10×10 lists wouldn’t be complete without a top travel list.  

1. Trekking to see the gorillas in Rwanda
2. Camel safari in Tanzania
3. Camel safari in the Sahara Desert, Morocco
4. Driving all through France and Spain with the kids
5. Our honeymoon in Zimbabwe 
6. Maasai Mara – any and all times we’ve been there
7. Jokkmokk, specifically the traditional Sami festival there
8. Thailand, especially the Khao Sok jungle
9. Camel wrestling festival in Turkey
10. Self-guided Canal boat in the U.K.

The lesson: Other than ‘Wow, camels features prominently!,’ traveling is a window into my soul, the basis of so so so much learning and neverending awe and wonder.

The Leaps List

I’ve had a rather adventurous life, which has meant I’ve taken some wild leaps into the unknown.  Voilá my leap list.

1. College registration -I’ll never forget quaking in my shoes as I had absolutely no clue what I was doing
2. Katimavik – said youth volunteer program where I lived in three communities acrxoss Cacnada for nine months
3. Semester at Sea – going to university on a ship and traveling literally around the globe
4. 4Wd lessons and standard driving lessons – pushing myself to take my driving to the next level
5. Moving to Kenya – ‘nuf said
6. Moving to France – ditto
7. Marrying Doug
8. Becoming a mom
9. Quitting my job at the Y, where I thought I’d work til I retired, with no plan
10. Becoming self-employed – the lovely, unexpected result of number 9

The lesson: Big leaps have often temporarily taken the wind out of me, but fortunately, they’ve been worth it and I’ve learned to leap and grow my wings on the way down.

The Safari List

From my honeymoon, 31 years ago, to today, I’ve been on some pretty wild safaris.  

1. The first one – a walking and canoeing safari, where the lights went out on our safari vehicle on the way back to camp and an elephant walking through our camp, Zimbabwe
2. Just after we moved to Kenya, with a pile of new friends, and a hoard of kids around campfire, in the middle of who knows where, I knew we’d made the right decision
3. A hot air balloon ride over the Mara, Doug
4. Seeing a leopard, in the Mara, at dusk where she ‘posed’ for some 30 minutes or so
5. Elephants very close to us in the moonlight, Tsavo East
6. Lions walking through our campsite, Kenya
7. Camping safaris period
8. Seeing a baby elephant and baby giraffe, each some 10 minutes old 
9. Witness a cheetah kill, with our dear friend, the David Attenborouhg of Africa, Jackson.  (Cheetah then proceeds to drag her kill into the shade of our safari vehicle.)
10. Watching my kiddo with Jackson’s son filming at dawn in the Mara

The lesson: No brainer this one, watching mama nature in all her glory in Africa + open air + wildlife + good friends and family + camping = epic beauty, which is always good for the heart and the soul.

Enough of my lists, it’s your turn now.

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 that 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, part two drops soon: Favourite Things I’ve Made, my Top Ten Blog Posts, Tech, and “Home,” plus a bonus, Laugh.  Different facets, same lens.

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: Perception vs Perspective takes on how differently we all see the same moment, which is basically what happened on that Stanford dance floor. 
• 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

• You never know what’s going to happen on safari.  BTW those aren’t monkeys, they’re baboons.

Lead

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

P.S.

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