We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sonja Bales. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sonja below.
Hi Sonja, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
There is an inherent link between challenge and resilience. The most difficult year of my life was my sophomore year of college. Prior to that, I’d worked hard, gotten proportional results from those efforts, and generally sought after art competitions and high grades to challenge myself. But 2017 was a year of loss and grief. It became very apparent that I had some crucial choices and learning curves to confront if I wanted to survive somewhat intact. 5 people passed away within a year, each one a successive wave of newfound impacts in every layer of my life. Challenge was no longer bound to academics or to choice- it ravaged me completely. Many friends fell away, yes I wasn’t my best self, but that was a new experience for me and compounded the loss even further. When I needed support most, it was dissolving beneath my feet. Everyone experiencing the same losses were in a different state. Needing to express or repress emotions became unpredictable and anxiety attacks became a big part of my daily life. I sought help, but there was a 6 month waitlist for therapists on campus and “not enough demand ” for a grief group, so I did yoga on YouTube to cope. I was working 2 jobs, part of several student organizations, and had a full course load in film production atop that. Some of my professors gave me flexibility- some didn’t. Some of the other people who were affected by the deaths back home took time off school. I never saw this as a choice. I knew for myself that if I stopped the frantic scramble I would be consumed by the pain of it all, and my life line for any chance to live beyond those events was to keep surviving, working, and studying. A year later, I made a documentary interviewing the other grieving young women since I saw how little preparedness we have for supporting people in deep grief or to help others who were to feel less isolated. I got some of the highest grades of my whole college career during this year, ironically, but I quit a lot of the clubs and jobs which added to the stress of those months. When that year ended, my entire concept of the world, of myself, had been intrinsically altered, and the exhaustion from fighting through it all was immense. To this day, even on bad days, I know that I have gotten through very difficult things somehow, that persisting (and a sense of humor, albeit dark) is the key to being resilient on an individual level. Those times show you who your true friends and allies are, they show you ugly parts of your self and the world, and they force you to choose: do you reside in the past or slog through the present to some idea of the future that’s a little better?
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
For the past 2.5 years, I’ve been lucky to produce for NBA2K’s animation department and really focus on facial animation for the game. We just launched Sept. 6th for the most recent game, and I am most excited about the expansions to the WNBA feature and am immensely proud of my team for the facial animation work in the MyCareer mode!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Creative problem solving, time management, and humility. The best way to be a creative problem solver is to be an imaginative thinker in general. Don’t limit those silly or odd ideas that crop into your head, encourage and greet those with positivity. Being efficient about scheduling and anticipating time frames is crucial for production and really gives you those discrete steps towards completing a goal. I think planners, whiteboards, to do lists, whatever works for your brain to prompt questions and estimations about how long something will take is going to help you (and always add cushion of about 30% just to be realistic). Humility can be a struggle and sometimes in conflict with self confidence, but listening and accepting that you don’t know everything is so important in life. Not only does it help you learn, it helps you appreciate other perspectives and solutions to a problem because you are genuinely listening to others. If you feel like you’re saying ‘I’ too much or taking up more than 50% of a conversation, just check yourself on that and take a step back.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
If anyone is interested in donating to support an indie documentary, a film I’m a creative consultant for needs some love to get it through the last push of post production. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn and I shall send a fundraising link your way!
Image Credits
NBA2K
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