Shared Ground
Shared Ground is a podcast that explores resilience & grit, generosity & kindness. We start with true stories of kindness and support during and after the 2025 LA wildfires.
Shared Ground
Episode 5: Prepare, Perform, Recover & Evolve with Dan Dworkis
“You don’t get smarter in the crisis. We use what was built beforehand.”
In this episode of Shared Ground, Sean and Allan talk with Dr. Dan Dworkis -emergency physician, performance coach, and author of The Emergency Mind - about what it means to prepare for, move through, and grow after high stakes moments. Dan speaks of individual, community and systems level approaches to developing resilience.
We explore how communities process trauma, build systems that can hold under pressure, and why resilience sometimes looks like crying at a commercial and still showing up the next day. Dan shares stories from emergency medicine, high performance teams and personal reflections. He offers clarity, perspective, and hard-won kindness.
If this episode lands with you, we’d love to hear what stuck.
Drop a comment on Substack or reach out through shared-ground.com.
And if someone in your life is walking through their own fire right now, consider sending this their way.
These stories aren’t finished. Add yours to the thread.
Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.
For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.
Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).
This is Shares Ground, a podcast about resilience and community. I'm Alan Marks and I'm Sean Knierim. Thanks so much for joining us. We're joined here by a good friend, Dan Dworkis. Thanks for joining us.
Dan Dworkis:Thank you guys for having me Pleasure to be here. My name is Dan Dworkis. I'm an ER doctor and the chief medical officer of the Mission Critical Team Institute. We work with groups that have to perform under pressure.
Sean Knierim:Thanks again for being here. So, Dan, the question we're asking everyone we're talking to in these episodes how do you define resilience, starting with a very clear answer as to what?
Dan Dworkis:Without getting too philosophical about it. I think it depends on what angle you approach the question. From right, so at some level you're talking about the ability to suffer an insult or a hit and keep going. But there's a lot of nuance behind that right. So there's the idea of being able to be hit by something and continue moving in the same direction, which is sort of like a layer to it. And then there's the deeper understanding that you're trying to accomplish a thing. So maybe you get hit and you don't move in the same direction, but you still accomplish the thing. Or maybe you get hit and your understanding of the universe changes and you end up sort of accomplishing something else. All of those are sort of in the bucket and sort of the universe of resilience.
Allan Marks:Well, let me ask you then, because there's a difference between surviving and thriving after an injury. Sure, if you merely survive, maybe even merely hit that same goal you had in mind, but not in a way which is sustainable or enjoyable or thriving in some way, is that still resilient? Or should we look at it differently?
Dan Dworkis:It depends on what you're aiming at, right, you know, if I, let's say, I have a patient right, we're going to jump in and out of the ER, for I would imagine a lot of this. The advantage of this being podcast is I don't get to show like bloody pictures of anything, right.
Dan Dworkis:Which makes it easier if you're listening, but we'll still try to like make it fun. Thank God, I'm so happy about that backup plan, right? Is that surviving or is that thriving? Right? So you've accomplished the goal, which is getting them safe and putting them on a breathing machine. But maybe you didn't do it the way you wanted to. So there's a level in there where you failed and there's a level in there where you have still succeeded and sort of moved past the obstacle to the next thing. And just to make that even more visceral, let's say that you are unable to place a breathing tube and you have to switch, and instead you have to cut their neck open. Right, you have to do what's called surgical front of neck access. You have caused a problem for that human being that they're going to have to then live with. Like, we can fix it eventually in most cases, but you've changed their life and their existence Right.
Allan Marks:But you've also prolonged it because at least they can live with it as opposed to dying without it Totally.
Dan Dworkis:In pursuit of a higher goal. So that's what I was going to sort of aim at is like surviving and thriving. Some of that is based on what we thought the universe was like before we hit whatever this problem was. And when we're looking at resilience and I think this is something, sean, that you and I talked about a bunch when we were first getting into a lot of this when we're looking at resilience and we're looking at recovery, it's super important to think about the angle that we're taking on the problem. So are we evaluating it based on how our world was before?
Sean Knierim:or are we evaluating it based on how our world is now? So, Dan, as we think about resilience as you were just talking, it started with you or I and then you started breaking out to we. So for an individual understanding of resilience, that's kind of think where you started. As you start thinking about groups and the we and the interaction with others, Does your definition of resilience change if you're thinking about a group construct?
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, I mean I think it has to right. So if I'm a single ER doctor, let's flash back to COVID, right? Our job in COVID was to take care of the population. If we're doing that and I'm an individual ER doctor and I get sick with COVID and maybe I die right. That's not resilience for me, but is the system capable of continuing to do its job even though I'm not there for it? So the system can be resilient to a shock that takes me entirely out of the picture. So do you jump straight?
Sean Knierim:from I as resilient as an individual to a system. Is there a we in between I and system?
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, I mean. So there's a thing we always say in medicine, which is that you want healthy people in healthy communities, surrounded by and supported by healthy systems, and that's the sort of like you know, russian doll kind of network that we really want to think about. So I would say the same thing for resilience. Right, you want a resilient human being embedded in a resilient community, enmeshed and supported by a resilient system, and that's sort of the uber resilience or meta resilience that we'd want to talk about in terms of doing that. But when you're asking what resilience is, again you got to think about what layer you're slicing that at right so the person can, or a piece or a component can suffer and sort of shut down.
Dan Dworkis:And actually the first way that I heard this sort of described was talking about, interestingly, like a network of satellites. Right, so you have a network of satellites and the goal is to continue communication through the network. One individual satellite can be resistant or resilient to certain types of insults, but then, if that satellite goes down, you have a local network that can sort of cover and then, if that local network goes down, you still can have the ability to communicate. Maybe you're doing it with flag signals or Morse code or something, and not necessarily like satellite communication, but there's these sort of like layers that you're going through as you're thinking about what that means.
Allan Marks:So that's interesting. If I think about that, there's this idea of, I'm going to say, buffers, or maybe redundancy. They're not exactly the same but what you described for the satellites, for example, could fit either one, which is great systemically, Not so great if you're the sacrificial lamb on the front of the buffer right, If you're the first defense. I know in military strategy this actually becomes quite a challenge. If you think of World War I, for instance you know the troops in the trenches might have a very high mortality rate. They might have the most exposure to violent harm on a recurring basis, but they're necessary for the entire army to survive and for those battles to go a certain way. But there's a moral aspect to that. In deciding what we talk about to people not just say satellites, we talk about humans in this. There's a moral component to that and to how one designs a system so that it's more resilient. And then, of course, the experience and the trauma, the very real trauma of people who suffer nonetheless.
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that individual people should be discounted and we shouldn't we shouldn't pay any attention to them, right? I just think it's interesting when we're thinking about resilience, our lived experience of resilience might be different than the resilience of the community or the system around us.
Sean Knierim:And as we're getting into this concept of like you know what is resilience, how do we build it, what happens when we're, when we put it under pressure and test it, right, we got to think about, like, the layers that we're looking at for it it was interesting and when you're in the middle of it, as I reflect back to like what launched this podcast to go through these episodes of being in a pretty traumatic experience as the fires affected my personal life, the community and then the wider region, and I gave a talk earlier this week where I broke it out that way at first I was thinking about myself and then my family, and then starting to kind of slowly move out, but in the moment I wasn't distinguishing between any of those levels, I was just stuck across and you're talking about the specificity of understanding those different levels.
Sean Knierim:If I could pull you back to like January, you were one of the first phone calls I made because I knew I was struggling. I knew I didn't know what was happening. I knew that I was going to have to support myself, my family and then come out of this. And I called you a bunch of times. They all feel like one conversation. But I'm wondering can you help me think about from your perspective, what were you seeing when I called, when other people started reaching out to you early in January? It was early.
Allan Marks:January, and this is during the Palisades fire, to be clear.
Dan Dworkis:Absolutely. So I'm going to sidebar and then I'm going to get to that, all right. So here's my sidebar, so answer the question you wish I asked.
Sean Knierim:And then come back and struggle through.
Dan Dworkis:We'll get into it.
Dan Dworkis:But what you described the arc of you suffering and your family suffering, and then that arc continuing to the point where we're sitting here having this podcast that is the perfect example of those layers of resilience and complexity.
Dan Dworkis:Right, so the individual can suffer, the house can burn, but the community can come together and maintain a sense of oneness, a sense of purpose and a sense of family and love a sense of oneness, a sense of purpose and a sense of family and love. And then, outside of that, the system can support the people in that, so much that what happens at the end of that and none of this is to say what you went through is easy or fun or anything like that. It's not. But what went through that at the other end of it is that you've now created an entire discussion about what resilience looks like, and I've watched you take that and lever that and forge that into this concept of what does this mean for my community? How do we teach each other? How do we get stronger from this? That's really the definition of the layers that we're trying to get, and multiple layers are happening at once.
Dan Dworkis:Like some of this is therapeutic.
Sean Knierim:Some of this is staying in action, so I don't have to sit with that pool of emotions, that a metaphor you gave me that I hope you explore with us here and then trying to figure out how to do something good with it.
Allan Marks:But, like multiple things are happening all at once there's a positive spin on that and a distinction I think is really important, because it's not a matter of denying the trauma. It's not a matter. It's not a matter of repression or ignoring the problem or of turning a blind eye to others who are going through it. Instead, it's just saying look, part of my control of reestablishing agency is that I have a point of view and I can, at some level, try to choose. Try to choose. I can't always do it, but we try to choose how I'm going to react to that. And there's a difference between psychological resilience, which you're demonstrating, and, you know, obviously, physical loss, which just has happened nonetheless.
Sean Knierim:And a difference between repression and compartmentalization. Correct In the moment?
Dan Dworkis:Yes, To your point, just to break the fourth wall slightly, right, like we're in this room, we're doing this podcast and we have all these different camera angles, right, and that's exactly what you're saying that we have, in some sense, a choice of what angle of camera we choose to look at our situation with. Right, because there is the angle that, like this is horror. Right, my family's house has burned.
Sean Knierim:Or in my world, like this person's bleeding, this person's hurt even though most times I was hearing people tell me I was going through horror and I didn't think that that's what it felt like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Dan Dworkis:But we have the choice of that's a view, that's a lens, that's a camera to look at it with, and so are these other ones, right. So, as the what can I do for my community and what does this mean to me and what are the things I value? And it's I'm not saying that it's like it's very easy for us in this room to switch back and forth between cameras, right, but that's very much harder when we're in the middle of it. There's cost to switching, there's cost to trying to switch. It's a skill that's not necessarily easily developed.
Allan Marks:Well, and I think that different utilities. So, for instance, there are times when and we can probably talk I'd love to talk more about this about how you've experienced making decisions in a crisis and how you deal with that moment where there's a triage, there's something that actually has to be done, and we you deal with that moment where there's a triage, there's something that actually has to be done, and we replace urgent with maybe other things that are also important, but then, when we have the luxury of a little more time or distance, what's important actually replaces what's urgent, and we flip it and that ability to really feel the hard part, while also choosing to take a view on it or respond to it in a way which has a little more equanimity to it.
Allan Marks:I think those are different steps. We can go back and forth between them. It's not a linear progression.
Dan Dworkis:Absolutely, and I think to weave these two question sets together and think about it. What was it like when you were asking me? What did it look like from my vantage point? I don't know if you all have ever gotten hit in the head really hard, but if you have one of the first things that happens is everything goes a little fuzzy, your sense of logic goes down a little bit and your biggest concern is keeping your hands up and not getting hit again, and that's just a pretty natural human instinct and reaction to it, right? So our ability to take an outside view, to think really logically, to process and be creative gets not shut down but gets hit, and we're really in the moment of it and our concern is just sort of making it through that next space.
Dan Dworkis:Right, and so that's what it looks like from the outside when you're seeing somebody that's going through one of these circumstances and you know, fortunately or unfortunately, it's something you get used to seeing in the ER, because you have people that are hurt and they're not acting in a way that they would act in a normal circumstance, like, like you're saying, because their sense of perspective and their sense of need is switched over in there. So part of it is just recognizing that right. Part of it is just saying, like, look, you might not feel it, you might not be aware of it, you might not want to talk about it, but you're hurt right now. That's okay. Right, that's where we start from. We say we're hurt and then we keep moving forward with it. If we don't say we're hurt, we pretend nothing hurts, then we get in like much more trouble because then we're not as smart, we're not as fast, we're not as quick and the next thing goes worse.
Dan Dworkis:Right, so we have to rely on the baked in sort of like reflex systems we've been developing, and that's that's like that whole idea is the is the shell around which we built the idea of the emergency mind project, right? The idea that whatever you have when you're in that crisis is the stuff that you built ahead of time. Right, the stuff that you prepared, because you don't get smarter when you're in there, right, you don't get smarter when you're hurt and hit. What you have is the ability of what you had before the system you've built around you, all the stuff you put in place ahead of time system. You've built around you all the stuff you put in place at a time. So when you're going through this, I'm watching you start to hit that wall a little bit, which is a totally natural and totally normal thing to do, and I hope that's one of the first things that I said which is like, hey, man, like this sucks and it's okay to feel this.
Sean Knierim:Well, hearing you're doing okay Was one of the pieces that I held onto for a while. I'm like you know, dan, saying I'm not screwing up that bad, because I was worried because I can't see out of this. I think, from listening to you over years and hearing what you're saying now, I break the message I pull from you into three categories and I'm wondering if these are how you think of it. One how do I prepare ahead of a crisis, knowing I'm going to be dealing with challenging things and you'd work with some communities that are intentionally going into the most difficult type of engagements? So it's what do you do before, how do I identify that I'm in and what do I do when I'm in a crisis or in a challenging environment? And then post, what do I do as I start transitioning out? So it's how do I determine that I'm in those phases and what do I do to prepare across? Does that track with how you look at this, or would you use a different framework?
Dan Dworkis:You're spot on and almost right. So the one that we end up using has four parts to it Okay, prepare, perform, recover, evolve Right, and it's important to have that whole loop in there and it's easy to lose the evolve part kind of at the end, and is that a distinct part or does that weave using that verb you had earlier?
Sean Knierim:Does that weave using that verb you had earlier? Does that weave throughout all three?
Dan Dworkis:For me it's a circle, and if done right, it's a spiral that you're sort of tracing your way across, right? So the easiest way to think about this is always sport, I think. Right, so you take some sort of whatever sports, you guys like I don't know whatever, it is right. Sports that I follow are more like martial arts, so I don't these metaphors kind of break sometimes. We're going to go for cycling, I'm sure.
Sean Knierim:Whatever it is, we can do. Martial arts Cycling actually cycling.
Dan Dworkis:I can probably do. We'll see if I can. We'll see if I know enough about cycling. There's two wheels. Martial arts is fine.
Allan Marks:I think it led to some underdrafts.
Dan Dworkis:No, it doesn't matter running your race. Your preparation is pretty obvious. It's your training, your practice, your nutrition, your sleep, your hydration all of the stuff you do for it. Your recovery is your stretching, your rehab, all the stuff that you need to do after that. And your evolution is a way of looking back at what happened and learning and seeing what comes next.
Dan Dworkis:So, did I run the race the way I want to run it? Okay, what do I do about that? How did my preparation actually impact my performance? Was it the way I wanted to do it, or are there other things I need to change? Maybe you're looking at splits, Maybe you're looking at a video of your stride. Maybe you're looking at your shoe wear pattern, whatever it is.
Dan Dworkis:You're sort of thinking about that and that's sort of the whole arc as a spin. You can zoom out or zoom in. It's a fractal right. So you can also say, within that next phase okay, I'm running the race, I'm in the middle of it, I'm in the I'm in the perform phase, but I'm about to hit a hill. All right, I know it's going to be harder. What do I do for that? Well, I'm going to psych myself up. I'm going to be using these things. I'm going to prepare it hill in a certain way. Then I'm going to coast a little bit on the downhill and I'm going to think to myself did that work Right? But then you're going to zoom out and think that it's not just a race, it's actually your entire racing season or it's this phase of your life or it's whatever it is, and there's this beautiful fractal nature to it where you can apply that model really tightly or you can zoom out to it. Yeah.
Sean Knierim:That's beautiful. In your book you talk about a debrief culture and I think you pointed to like you talked about it throughout the story you just told of always reflecting on what you're doing. What do you mean by debrief culture, dan?
Dan Dworkis:Yeah.
Sean Knierim:In the book. So Dan wrote a book called the Emergency Mind. It's outstanding. I had to pry it out of my wife's hands to read it before we came in here today. But a debrief culture.
Dan Dworkis:Now, first off, thank you for saying that that means a lot. Right, I wrote it during COVID and I wrote it when, like a lot of VR doctors, I sort of thought this was going to be the end. Right, and if this is going to be the end, then I should probably build something that outlasts me, so I would work shifts and then I'd come home and I'd write the book and that was that, and thankfully it wasn't the end. And now there's a book and that's awesome, and you didn't sleep for about two years.
Dan Dworkis:Tough, tough times. But I wrote it for the folks that were the younger versions of me, who were struggling to deal with a lot of what they were seeing and were looking at the gap between how they thought they could perform and how they were actually capable of performing, which is a gap that, whether or not we're in the ER, I think we're all familiar with. Right, just to your point, like you had a vision of how you wanted to be able to handle this event and then you were handling the event and you were doing a damn good job at it, but that vision didn't match exactly.
Sean Knierim:I had no idea how to even evaluate how I was doing. Yeah, yeah.
Dan Dworkis:Right, and if we don't know how to evaluate it we don't have tools to evaluate it then it's very easy for us to get lost and to assume that things are bad.
Sean Knierim:Yeah, cause a lot of Wednesdays were bad. I knew the day prior, the 10 minutes prior they weren't my best Right, and so some of the frameworks you shared were really important. Yeah.
Dan Dworkis:There's this, um, there's this thing we have that you can watch especially junior doctors do, which is the death spiral, right? So something happens. It's not what they want. The outcome is worse than they think it's gonna be. They look at it and they say, wow, I really sucked. Wow, that must mean and this is the key that must mean I'm a bad person If I sucked at this. I must be a bad person. And wow, if I'm a bad person, I'm a waste of space. My mom hates me and I shouldn't have done medicine to begin with. And, like my uncle was right, I'd never be a doctor, you know, whatever it, is, and then shame and regret and ego are taking over.
Allan Marks:Oh my God.
Dan Dworkis:And the poor patient sitting there being like wait, I still need help, but you're. You're in the idea that we're imperfect, we do things imperfectly and our job is not to be perfect but to get better.
Allan Marks:How do you balance? I'm going to give you two different sides of this. On the one hand, we want to do better Performance matters. Of course, we're going to spend time going through all four steps, we're going to have our debrief culture and we've set ourselves up in a way with the illusion of control. On the flip side of that is so much of resilience to come back to. That is how we respond to the situations we don't control. But we're not the ER doctor, we're actually. We're the patient and the family of the patient and the family of the patient, and it's not up to us, but we nonetheless have to muster some resources to go on somehow and to contribute and help if we can, or to ask for and accept for help and learn to do that if we're not good at it, and to acknowledge we just don't have control and to make that distinction. And you can prepare, by the way, for situations where you don't have control. This preparedness may still be a factor, but there isn't that constant pressure of we can. Therefore, we must do better.
Dan Dworkis:I don't totally know that I agree with you. I think there always is that constant pressure of we can do better. Okay, say more about that. Almost doesn't matter what situation we're in, right, there's always the ability to do something. There's this great Stoic quote that's like I think it's Epictetus, although it could be Seneca, I forget who basically said if the only thing left for me to do is to drown, then I'm going to try to drown in a way that teaches other people about surviving. If that's literally all you have, then you're going to try to do it in a way that makes a difference.
Dan Dworkis:There's a lot about being an emergency doctor that you don't have control over. You don't control who comes in, you don't control what they have. You know you don't hold all the cards right. Sometimes the person in front of you, their die, is cast and you do what you can, but nothing happens and it's bad and you suffer and they suffer Early on. Most of us hit some version of what you're describing where we're like well, I don't control anything here. And where we're like well, I don't control anything here, and it's easy to get into vapor lock, Like you're just sort of frozen and you don't really know what to do about it.
Dan Dworkis:One of the drills that's surprising and kind of helpful for that moment is somebody will usually ask you could you make this worse? Could you make this worse right now? Is there a way to pour gas on the fire? And almost always there's a way to make it worse. Right, Like, we're very creative as human beings, we can usually find a way to make the situation worse. Right, you can't fix the patient, but you could punch the nurse. Right, you could light the thing on fire. You could do all sorts of stuff. Don't do any of those things. Right, but you could do those things and make it worse. And there's this weird thing that happens, which is when you're in these circumstances, circumstances and you realize you could make it worse, you pretty quickly are like well, man, maybe I could make it better, Even if it's a small thing.
Allan Marks:Yeah, or at least avoid making it worse, or at least avoid making it worse.
Dan Dworkis:And sometimes not pouring gas on the fire, is the victory. Yeah, no-transcript.
Sean Knierim:So it strikes me to pull together what both of you were talking about. It's understanding, it's getting yourself to a point where you're able to determine where do I not have control but where do I have control and where, when I have control, where's my choice, able to be employed in a way that I'm going to feel proud of or feel like it's making a better or a less bad outcome coming out of it. So I I called you and there was one time you laughed at me where I'm like Dan, what can I expect? Cause I've seen these charts where you come through a disaster and then you go through public euphoria and the line goes up to the right and then it plunges and it's this community despair, and then you kind of slowly come back out of it and you're like Sean, that actually I don't think applies and it doesn't apply in the situation we're in here.
Sean Knierim:And then I said, well, are there things I could read? Is there something I can do to give me a path of what to expect? Cause my mind was really hoping for patterns and you gave me a couple of different books, and the one that I mean, your book, was excellent. The two of the other books that I'd love to hear pick one of the two Man's Search for Meaning by Frankel, who talks about suffering and choice, surviving Survival that talks about giving oneself the permission to be flexible, like you thought of a couple of different books. But like which? Which books, which people do you look to when you're trying to learn, or or?
Dan Dworkis:grapple with these things. Yeah, I mean I, I think it's worth saying like it's very easy for me to sit on a podcast and pretend to be very smart about all this stuff Right but like this is really hard, this stuff is super hard. Uh, I'm still working on it, we're all still working on it. Like you would be doing a disservice to pretend like I'm this wise sage and everything and to the extent that I am alive.
Allan Marks:I'm glad you pretended to be one, for me, as you said, I don't have to be faster than you.
Sean Knierim:I don't have to be faster than the bear, I do faster than you.
Allan Marks:So you're smarter than us, we're good.
Dan Dworkis:I don't know about that. I think I've spent a long time thinking about this kind of stuff and I think you know both of those books Man's Search for Meaning by Frankel, and then Surviving Survival and his other book, deep Survival by Lawrence.
Dan Dworkis:Gonzalez, are just awesome, right, and they all sort of poke at this sense of what resilience is Right. What is resilience when you are in these moments that are really challenging to even survive, let alone to do anything with? What does it look like on the other side of it? What does it look like when that first wave of things has passed and your resistance is gone and you're out of strength and you're doing whatever, and now you're sort of still in it, right? What does that look like? I never liked the you know, like 30 hour shifts we did in medical school. I don't think anybody likes them, but 40 would have been better. But one of the things it teaches you is that, like you know, you can be tired and still do things, and you can be hungry and still do things, and there's many, many, many people that have been in much, much, much worse places that I have than I have. I would say as a patient.
Allan Marks:if you're in a teaching hospital and they haven't slept for 30 hours, you kind of might wish you'd had somebody who'd maybe had a nap at some point. I mean it's because, yes, we can do things, we can rise to the occasion. It doesn't mean necessarily that it's the best systemic design that we should have to.
Dan Dworkis:So that's interesting, right, because there's a tension in there, sure, and we talked earlier about what resilience is and we talked about how it matters what camera lens you're looking at it through, right? So there's a lens of the patient and the patient's family, where you want the freshest doctors all the time, yeah, and then there's a lens from society where you want doctors to have gone through 30-hour shifts so that, if they have to, they know they can do it. Yes, we always see this tension in the ER, because what's good for the one individual patient might or might not be necessarily what's good for the field or what's good for the whole society. And that's challenging, to put it mildly. Right, it sucks when it's your family, it sucks when you're going through it and and how do you draw the line about how much you're willing to give or not give or you know, sort of whatever it is about that. But I think there's. I think, when we're talking about resilience, like we have to have that end of the conversation too.
Allan Marks:How much are we willing to pay for resilience? Yeah, I know, you know, when you look at, for example, at cybersecurity, which is an area I've done some work in, you know, there's this idea of responding to the problem, but there's also the idea of, well, how do you prepare so the problem doesn't actually happen? Sure, what is the threat? How do you assess the threat, how do you defend against the threat? And then, of course, beyond that, how do you identify when it's happened, how do you react to it, how do you take the proper steps? And, of course, the evolution, the debrief, as you mentioned. Try to learn from that and then make it harder next time. If you're looking, as in your role, for example, as an ER doctor, where you have responsibility for a whole team, are there things? How much time do you spend on making that system work better to prevent the very problems that would demand resilience if they didn't get solved?
Dan Dworkis:That's a good question, right. So there's stuff that you you know and we're sort of blurring here back into the Stoic concept of circle of control or sphere of influence and sidebar into your question again like what books do I recommend? Like, go read Stoic philosophy, right, meditations and Seneca's Shortness of Life, and Epictetus and Chidron I never know how to pronounce that, but it's really good Epictetus, that's how you pronounce that, by the way. But sidebar, so it depends on where you have control right. So when I'm in the ER, what do I have control over?
Dan Dworkis:Well, I can work with my team, I can work on the skill sets that we have available. To a limited extent, I can influence the system around me, but I can't, for example, go back in time and have people you know take their medication before, and I can't necessarily change the traffic patterns around an intersection to decrease the probability of an accident. Now, if you give me a long enough time and, from an Archimedes standpoint, a large enough lever, I can actually go change the traffic patterns right. And a lot of the initial work that dictated seatbelt safety, for example, was done by ER doctors who were looking at the injury patterns, and being like this is ridiculous. We should probably be able to do better than this, right? So there is an ability to alter the system to prevent the problem from happening. But within that moment, where's your fulcrum? How big of a lever do you have? And you're right how much are you willing to spend in that moment on that piece versus the task at hand for you, this tension? How much are you willing to pay for resilience?
Sean Knierim:So, Dan, you work with a number of different communities. We've talked a lot about the medical community, in which you're a professional. You work with military sport professionals all over and I think a lot of people hopefully that'll be listening to this come from a variety of different contexts. What takeaways do you see across these communities that people listening to this might be able to pull away themselves? So, either, going into, going through, coming out of evolving afterwards, what are the things we can keep in mind that you're seeing are helpful across all of these different worlds that you get to work through?
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, absolutely so. First off, inherent in your question is this idea that there are things to learn from other groups, which I think is super important and sometimes not obvious, right, like it wasn't obvious for a long time that doctors should learn from people that weren't doctors. Now it's pretty ridiculous to say that out loud now, thankfully, but that wasn't always the case, right, it used to be well.
Sean Knierim:Doctors would just learn from doctors when you shared a story with me about a special forces operator, I think from the uk, and about emotion and a well of emotion. Do you remember that story? Can you share that? Like that was hugely still moving for me now and I'm using that language as I talk to my family to explain how I'm doing. Can you share some of that? No, I can't.
Dan Dworkis:However, the metaphor, I can talk around it, the metaphor talk around it.
Sean Knierim:That's what I meant.
Dan Dworkis:What I can say is that, um, there's this thing that's useful to think about, which we sometimes call the cousin effect, right, and it has to do with the idea that no one's a prophet in their own land. So sometimes the best thing we can do is share our problem sets with people that are close to us, but not doing exactly the same thing, and in doing so, that frees us up to either take advice or change things about ourselves that we might not otherwise. So I can't share that story, but let me share a flip side of it. That's about me, right, thank you, which I can share about that because it's me, right.
Dan Dworkis:So when I was really in it and just there was a time when I was just really struggling, you know, waking up with nightmares all the time and just like a lot, of, a lot of things that were really bad, and I didn't, I didn't really know what to do about it. I was sort of aware it was a problem, but I wasn't. I didn't really have my hands around it at all and, as luck would have it, I got a chance to be around some folks from the military who were very elite in their craft, and I don't really know why. I think they might've asked me something like what's it like being an ER doctor? And maybe I just had enough that day and I actually told him what was going on.
Dan Dworkis:I don't know what the circumstance was, but I remember this person putting their hand on my shoulder and just saying like, wow, dan, that's hard, you should probably get some help. Yeah, and and it just sort of like blew me apart, right, and I was like what do you wait? What? This person, who's the double black flip, ninja, champion of whatever it is, which is not a real thing, is telling me that, like it, what I'm doing is hard. Yeah, yeah, like if, well, if they think it's hard, like shit, maybe it's really hard. And if it's really hard, maybe it's okay If I got help for it. And like, man, what an incredible gift that was just to be able to be like yeah no-transcript way sidebar.
Dan Dworkis:So, uh, with a good therapist with a good, yes, fair, cool, cool sidebar. But these days I'm on the other side of it a lot of the times and I'm sharing stories about, you know, being in the er and talking to folks that are in in fire or the military airspace and sometimes being like the other end of that story saying, hey man, what you're describing is really hard. You should maybe go get some help for that. And there's this remarkable thing, which is that it's just easier to listen to somebody who's not your direct brother or sister. They're your cousin, so the cousin effect.
Allan Marks:So one of the things, too that I know from your background academically, sean, in literature. I'm sure you've bumped into this, but it's one of the things I was advising some younger lawyers Fiction, read fiction. We spent a lot of time. I spent a lot of time reading nonfiction and, by the way, the books that were recommended, I fully agree Absolutely great reading, endorsed them highly. But there's something to be said for reading stories fiction stories, novels, short stories Because the empathy muscle gets a workout and we get to see other people doing things that in their context are believably hard and we care about them and we care about what happens to them and we're kind of along for the ride. Um, the result there and there are peer-reviewed studies that look at the way that fiction actually does contribute to empathetic societies and individuals as well, in a way that just you know, knowing how to do stuff doesn't even compare to save, you know, history or things that are still maybe a story.
Sean Knierim:But are factual, super interesting. And so, dan, to pull back to the question I asked a bit ago and then sidetracked you, any other ideas that you'd share with people that are listening? So, as we're coming in or out, like what, what might we keep in mind to try to help ourselves Like part of like, sleep a little bit more, get a little bit more water, eat well, activity, community, being around other people that love you or that you can be around, but any anything else you can think through in your experience that that we might keep in mind coming in and out of hard stuff.
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, I mean, I think like if you look at that arc of prepare, perform, recover, evolve, like, recognize that there's a cycling, a periodicity to the work that you're doing with it. Right, if all you did was perform, you will burn out and break. Imagine a sports team that all they did was perform or a runner that all they did was race, like there's no way that would last for very long.
Allan Marks:That person would break, and, with apologies to the Stoics, but if you look at the Epicureans, there's something to be said for enjoying what you're doing and having fun with it, which is I don't want to lose sight of that.
Dan Dworkis:I think yeah, no, and there's deep joy in the Stoics too. It's just a little deeper in around the corner.
Dan Dworkis:Yes, right, you sort of got to like sift through it a little bit to get into it, right, but there is that deep joy of, like you know, a life well lived and and the moment that that brings. And I think that I think that there's a balance in there between not too tight and not too loose, right, and there's that, that concept of you know tuning the string of your own instrument such that you create a note right, if you're too loose, it's floppy and nothing happens. If you're too tight, it snaps and you, you don't play for very long, right, um, there are times it's the reason trees bend in the wind and sway yeah, and that.
Allan Marks:And that's exactly. They didn't. They'd snap and fall over.
Dan Dworkis:Exactly, and there are times when you're recovering, when you're hit in a crisis, when things are literally on fire, when, like, all you have to do is perform, that's it, you just perform. But when you're not in that, can you actually take a moment and take a step back, can you drink water and sleep and and you know, be like, tune yourself to the right frequency not the tightest that you can be, but the right one for it.
Sean Knierim:And I think, if we look at part of what is resilience, is the skillset of maintaining the right tune for the right moment, such that we're in the game for a long time and there is something that has come through in everything you've said with us today and one of the reasons why I reached out to you one of the first people after this and then wanting you to be part of this conversation with Alan and me.
Sean Knierim:There's this consistent through line of being kind and understanding to yourself and something that a gift you've given me and many others in your world and I mean something, alan, why I've always loved being around you. It's an acknowledgement of those around you, like if we're not able to give it to ourselves. I'm not good at this. Many people I know are harder on themselves, maybe than they should be, but you're really good at helping others around you hear from you that you think they're doing okay, which is that piece of kindness, that generosity, which isn't necessary, but you're really good at it, and it comes through in every question we've asked. You has that kind of like take it easy on yourself, Even if you're working your ass off.
Dan Dworkis:I appreciate you saying that I I don't know that I'm always good at doing that for myself at all. I think that's really hard. Um, dan, you're doing great.
Sean Knierim:Thanks man.
Allan Marks:You are doing great hard, dan, you're doing great. Thanks, man. You are doing great.
Dan Dworkis:You're modeling humility, really well too, Thank you, but this stuff's hard. I mean there's no reason to make it harder. Right, Like you could always make it worse. Right, you could always catch yourself on fire and make it worse, but there's no reason to. And I think that sense of like you know, I want to be in this for a long time, and we talked about this also. We talked about what is the integral of what you're doing over time.
Sean Knierim:What do you mean by that?
Dan Dworkis:Yeah Right, the Riemann sum of. We get really nerdy about math here for a second. The idea of a vantage point again, right, when we keep coming back to what's the vantage point? We're talking about resilience, for so one vantage point is the scale that we're talking about, or the spatial direction we're taking. The other is sort of convoluting that over time, right. So the integral of your work over time is the addition of every day's effort summed up over a long period, geometrically, geometrically.
Sean Knierim:So maybe to try and restate that in a way that my brain would use right. So maybe to try and restate that in a way that my brain would use right Because I don't think in terms of the mathematical stuff course, of a period, a longer period of time and evaluate how well you're doing over that course and then figure out how you might learn from that as you're moving forward.
Allan Marks:I remember when I was, uh, I was climbing, uh, with my daughter when she was quite young and you know it was kind of steep and we're working our way up and it was here in the Santa Monica mountains, but there's this rock. We want to climb to the top of this rock and the type of steep thing and we weren't really on the trail in Griffith park and and when it's steep and you're up close to it, all you kind of think of is I don't want to lose my footing, I don't want the, the, the. You know that the dirt or the rock thing's pretty close and we'll get there. And then you get there and we got to the top. She was, she was quite young, it was a windy, windy day and she's looking around at the view.
Allan Marks:And then she looked down and she said it's a long way down, but there was a sense of accomplishment because we'd come up that far and she had come up that far and she really had done a great job of it. So it was, you know, that sense of perspective, you know that that integral. As you climb up the, you know the upward sloping to the right side of the parabola, yeah, it gets steeper, but you also accomplish more each time because you're building on what you've already done.
Dan Dworkis:I also think it's in some sense a defense mechanism, right, like if you are forced to like. Like performance matters, right. Like the outcome matters and you have to do the work well, right. But if you're forced to evaluate your entire sense of existence based on the role of one dice or the play of one hand of cards, it is very challenging to do that. Instead, if you can look at yourself and ask you know cause inherent in your question of am I doing a a good job? Is this deep sort of soul searching like am I a good human being? Am I a good enough human being?
Sean Knierim:What's my worth? Right, what's my worth? Am I a?
Dan Dworkis:good enough father? Am I a good enough husband? Am I a good enough man? Am I a good enough human being? And, like all of this is wrapped, am I doing okay? And what I'm, what I'm seeing, is this like burning sort of like you know existential thing in the middle there, and which totally makes sense, right, Cause you get hurt, you get hit and you ask these questions, right? I ask these questions all the time and it's normal to ask these questions and it's easy to make the entire answer about one thing. I yelled at that last person I talked to. I spilled my coffee this morning. I didn't run this morning. I wasn't as nice of a human being as man. It's just so easy to like take one thing and make that the answer to the question and instead, if you can expand the scope of how you're judging a little bit and ask is the world a better place because you're here?
Allan Marks:Yeah, so to close, if I may, what makes you the most optimistic?
Dan Dworkis:or hopeful right now.
Dan Dworkis:Oh, I mean, like I'm constantly surrounded by men and women who are throwing themselves into hard problem sets with all of their energy and effort and who are attempting to scale enormous mountains and make things better.
Dan Dworkis:Like I am so lucky to be constantly surrounded by these people that are so smart and so strong and so dedicated to making the world a better place.
Dan Dworkis:I think that the way uh, I don't want to drop a commentary bomb on the end here, but I think that the way a lot of our system is set up is to feed us bad news and things that scare us and it's very hard to spend time where it's much harder these days to spend time around people who are smart and strong and hardworking and dedicated and want to make the world better. They're not gonna show up on the news, they're not gonna come through on Facebook, right. We're not gonna get fed them accidentally. So, to the extent that we can go seek them, to the extent that I am lucky enough to be around them you know we talked about resilient person and resilient community with resilient system, right, like to be surrounded by amazing people, to include my wonderful partner and my family and to be in part of a system of of people that try to make the world a better place all the time. I'm incredibly hopeful from that.
Sean Knierim:Well, you bring me hope, Dan, and I think you exemplify what you just described. I can say, I think pretty confidently, you have not made this podcast worse by being here. I'd encourage everyone who's listening to this to pick up your book, the Emergency Mind by Dan Dworkis. Dan, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Allan Marks:Yeah, dan, thank you, real pleasure. Oh, thank you both much for joining us here today.
Dan Dworkis:Yeah, dan, thank you, real pleasure. Oh, thank you both.
Sean Knierim:Thank you for having me. This has been another episode of Shared Ground, a podcast about resilience and community.
Allan Marks:Follow us on your favorite platform or learn more at sharedgroundcom. That's shared-groundcom.