Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I think that nobody's expecting from junior designers, designers in the first five years of their career to know everything. People expect you to fail and that's great if you can fail in the first five years. So don't stress yourself. Think of failure as something that could teach
teach you something that could help you overcome the problem faster. If you're like protected yourself too much from all the problems and challenges, then you're not growing. And also you're not learning. And you don't want to be 10 years of kind of experience person with no growth. It's not fun. You know, you're just not going to be relevant.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next year or the next episode of Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and I'm talking today to my lovely co-host, Ioana. And today, our topic is our honest growths.
stories. So we decided to start this year unusually from kind of reflecting. So in the beginning of the year, you're actually planning, but somehow today we feel in a way nostalgic. We decided to just talk about our careers or journeys so far and kind of, again, being very honest on how we think we grew. I think there are two key aspects here, right? Soft skills and hard skills. So let's talk about this. Things such as imposter syndrome, people pleasing, feedback giving, receiving, all that stuff.
So we'll see how it goes. But as usual, we love to start our conversations by catching up. So how have you been, Ioana, so far in 2024?
Hi Anvisa, hi everyone, happy to be back in our regular conversations. This is one of the highlights of the beginning of 2024. I did pretty well. I'm surprised at how refreshing my holiday was and it makes it a bit hard to come back to work. Today was my first day after two weeks break. I managed to do a lot of things from my to-do list so I feel proud. I
When it started, I was just like, I'm going back to bed. I can't possibly do this. I can't possibly work again ever in my life. But I managed to push through it and also be productive. So here I am. Yeah, I'm doing well. Refreshed, new ambitions, new thoughts, new feelings. Everything is new. Yeah, I'm excited to unpack some of these ideas and experiences with you today. Just in a nutshell, I didn't answer the question, but...
The past two weeks were amazing. I managed to catch some sun in Spain on a short holiday. And then I took my daughter to the mountains where she took her first skiing lesson and I took my first snowboarding lesson with her. It was a very intense and lovely shared experience. And
Everything I did was very energizing and I feel refreshed and I feel like even learning something new. So my snowboarding classes gave me a very interesting perspective on growth and personal growth. Maybe I'll touch on that later in our conversation. But in a nutshell, yeah, just had a lovely holiday and now I'm back to work.
How about you? How are your past couple of weeks? Just like in the song, right? Lovely holiday. Yeah, my holiday, I don't know, because, you know, when you're on maternity leave, you don't have the same routine. You don't have the official classic break when you're off the computer. So for me, it was slightly different. I felt like, okay, my husband is not working. Fantastic. I'm going to work now. So
So it didn't feel like a break to be completely honest. But generally, yeah, it didn't feel like a big difference. Just a regular maternity leave weeks. So sitting with the baby half of the day, then in the evening, usually during the night, carving out one or two hours for myself. Honestly, dragging myself through everything. I don't feel refreshed. We also got sick because classically during the winter, you meet a lot of people and, you know, there are viruses, so we're all sick now. But
But fine, it's all fine, I guess. It's a part of the process. So when you say, I was traveling with Mia, I was even a little bit jealous thinking, oh, when will we grow up so we can also travel and go and do some fun activities together? Because I think this first half a year or actually year is just like all about sitting at home with the baby. It's
It's very, very hard to find time for yourself and get out of the house. And during the winter, it gets especially gloomy. And I'm just looking forward to some activities. But we'll get there. Well, now let's talk about our growth. And we're talking about career growth, but I think that comes with a lot of personal growth. So I don't want to talk only specifically about the projects we did, the hard skills we grew. But I really want to look back into our experiences and how we grew as people and designers.
I think we talked a lot about it in the past. Big part of being a good designer is being a good human and growing at it. So let's take the walk down the memory lane and think about our key milestones. And I will definitely start from you, Ioana. I feel like you have a lot to say already. It might look like it, but I have a completely frozen brain.
Navigating my brain freeze. Here's what's popping up in my mind when I'm taking this walk down memory lane. I feel that there were some personality traits in my life, and I think some of them were native. I was just born with them. Others were, let's say, survival mechanisms, coping mechanisms, just reflexes that I built to navigate the hardships that everyone had in their childhood or
growing up, like everybody had some sort of struggles, battles or things they had to deal with. And so I built some mechanisms. And then it's really interesting that those exact mechanisms that helped me cope with some difficult parts in my childhood were the ones that made me successful when I grew up. So this hypervigilance, the feeling that I have to be everything and do everything and just...
continuously prove my value and continuously convince people that I'm a great designer and I'm a great person and I'm a kind person. And so all these mechanisms that in a way they're toxic, in other ways, I mean, if you use them to build something or to do good in the world, they're not as bad, but they do come from a painful place, right? And so I built a career from these, let's say, personality tools and
And now, because I'm growing older and I'm turning 35 this year, so I'm in my mid-30s, I feel that I'm starting to ditch some of these mechanisms. They're not useful to me anymore. And I'm transitioning into what I feel will be the second part of my life and my career, where I'm driven by more authentic mechanisms.
and values and goals and aspirations. And so I feel like I'm in the middle of this very important transition, both personally and professionally, where I'm just leaving all the things that made me successful before behind me in a way. And
in a way, starting new as a person. And so I don't know if this answers your question, but my trip down memory lane, yeah, in the beginning of my career, I was extremely driven by FOMO, by imposter syndrome, by a feeling that I'm not good enough, by feeling the need to prove my worth and by lacking sufficient self-worth. And so these are things that feel in the past more and more
every day. I still battle some of these things internally, but it's much better and some of them don't feel necessary anymore. And so now I can finally be like I was talking about two, three episodes before.
I can finally be authentic and just do my thing and be in a way like, yeah, more relaxed, have less of an agenda professionally, personally, everyday lifey and just be me. And it feels amazing. And I might not be as productive as I used to be. I might not be as good. It might not be impressive. I might not convince people that I'm extremely valuable and a good person.
And that's fine because I feel like I'm ditching all those internal toxic motivators that make people successful sometimes. I wanted to, first of all, stop for a second here because I feel like this is interesting. You mentioned a lot of the tools, like you framed them as enablers. Many people would look at those tools, especially early stage in their career, as detractors or something that stops you, right? Formal detractors.
imposter syndrome, how we communicate with people. I was a people pleasurer as well. You know, those are the things we usually think of negative things, right? Something that stops you from progressing, but you look at them right now as the tools who helped you growing and enabling you. I want to unpack it a little bit more before I started talking about my things as well. Yeah.
cocktail. Thank you so much for moving the spotlight on this angle, because I think it's really interesting. It's valuable and it's an important point. I think it's part of the reason for which I ended up doing what I love and I ended up manifesting some of my goals and objectives and just being happy professionally and personally and everything. It's this continuous frame that I'm putting on the negative things. So I'm completely comfortable with suffering and
I understand that I have some detractor or like ineffective strategies or mechanisms or just reflexes, but I'm trying to use them in a positive light, use them as an enabler, exactly, as a catalyst for growth.
This is how I always looked at imposter syndrome, for example. I try to understand what's behind it. And OK, it's maybe not enough sufficient self-worth that wasn't built properly while growing up, stuff like that. Having to always prove myself, convince people, be a people pleaser. I'm a huge people pleaser, but I'm in treatment and I think I'm getting better at it.
as well. Yeah, imposter syndrome for me personally was the feeling that I'm not good enough. Why are all those amazing things happening to me? I don't deserve them. I'm going to disappoint everyone. Everyone else knows much more than me. And so those kinds of feelings. And then I continuously tried to sit down and go deeper into what's causing it. Like, what do I feel they know and I don't? And sometimes the answer would be something very tangible, like, I don't know, Figma. And then I would transform that into, OK, then learn Figma.
If you feel like this is what's holding you back, if you feel like this is what makes everyone else better than you, if Figma is the answer, just learn Figma. And so I perpetually sat down and did this exercise where I would essentially challenge these strategies and then understand how I can use them
And then this idea of fear of missing out, right? I want to be everywhere. I want to do everything. I want to say yes to every opportunity. I reframe this constant panic attack that I'm not trying and doing everything into, okay, maybe let's try and do everything.
You can afford a couple of years of your life where you're pushing your limits a bit, where you're maybe not as well rested as you should be, but it's something that you own. And it was my age of experimentation, right? So I have all these possibilities. Let's be everywhere. Okay, I have fear of missing out. Don't miss out.
Try building a startup, try building a design school, try podcasting, try content creation, try full-time roles, try freelancing, try everything. Just don't miss out. If you don't want to miss out, don't miss out. I accepted that. I embraced it. Obviously, it helped me understand myself better, learn more about what I like, what I don't like, what I want to do, what I don't want to do. So it was a huge learning opportunity to have this FOMO in my personality toolkit. And
And now I know what I can miss out on comfortably. And I know it because I just accepted this feeling. And in a way, I let it just happen. Like I didn't fight it. I think that feelings and problems and stress in general becomes bigger if you oppose it, right? If you pain in general. If you fight it, then you make it bigger. If you just accept it, then it can actually work in your benefit. Yeah.
and imposter syndrome and FOMO, people pleasing as well. So people pleasing got me to be a person who pays a lot of attention to others in a very hyper vigilant way. I'm always careful in how I make other people feel and this also served me well, right? So I was able to network with ease and build relationships and make friends and be a good friend and get a lot of love from people which I'm very grateful for.
I think that the negative aspects or the experimental aspects or the mechanisms and strategies, everything that we have in our personality box can be used to do good or do bad. The only bad that I don't accept, and I'm going to finish here and let you introduce us into your memory lane.
The only thing that I'm not very happy about was my suffering during that time, like my internal constant turmoil, constant stress, constant drain, constant pressure. If I would do it again, I would be more chill. But probably to be able to be chill today, I had to not be chill for a long time. So
I think it's also part of growth. And I think nobody has the right balance or the right combination of elements and does everything optimally all the time. So I'm very comfortable with not being as effective as I could have been on just a personal level. So I think these are some of the things. I'm excited to talk more about any of them as we move on into this conversation. But I'm also very excited to learn what has been happening in your recent and not very recent history internally.
It's really amazing to see how you now speak from the place of power, from the place of confidence, from the place of seeing those challenges you had that made you stronger today. And I would say that I actually also feel the same sort of energy in a way, because experience and reflection really helps you to understand what you're good at, learn about yourself. And it's really good we have this conversation. I feel like those make us better as well. I think this is fantastic that
we today speak, like it was not a big deal, but it definitely was a big deal. If I look back into my history as well, a lot of those stressful challenges, and I will actually go through those challenges as I usually love to do, but a lot of those challenges brought the same, as you said, pains and experience that you go through. The lack of sleep, the anxiousness, when you stress a lot in the moment. I remember when I was doing the startup and there was an episode recently I did about the startup, I lost a lot of weight.
Actually, today I'm weighting like plus 10 kilograms from the startup because when I was doing startup, I couldn't sleep. There was every day another challenge, another problem, another everything. And I just remember being so worried all the time. And I had those eczemas on the skin and a lot of the things that you know that your nervous system is not able to cope with.
So today it's not a part of my story anymore and I'm happy that I overcame those. Obviously I grew a lot, but at the same time, I feel like those moments were growth journeys that those moments shaped us and helped us to be at the place where we are at the moment. It was an intensive growth, right?
Whereas I think that at the moment right now, I have like a slow growth, which is good for my age as well. But yeah, I don't grow anymore as much as I was doing it in the beginning. And I think that's just natural because in the early stages of your journey, you often see so many things. It's like you're being overwhelmed by how many things you have to learn and you can't stop. You keep learning, keep learning, keep learning. You just feel like you could never finish learning. So it's probably just a part of this process. Yeah.
But looking back into my challenges and things that led me grew, I would love to start my story from also saying that I'm also happy that some of my natural, like you said, tools or natural traits of the character led me to the design. I'm really happy I discovered this profession because I definitely feel I'm in the right place with the character traits I have. A lot of the things that are natural to me as a person manifest really well.
in this industry. So curiosity, being non-conformist, you know, early stage when you start working with the challenging clients, asking them hard questions. This is something I don't think many people do. So those things were really helping me early stage to grow and
as a designer and helped me. But at the same time, there were a lot of challenges that also were a part of my personality that I have to overcome. And I guess we'll talk later about overcoming those challenges. But things I can recall is first things first.
obviously the confidence. And I think this is a big part of pretty much every junior designer story. And it's a good thing because I feel like if you really know everything in the early stage, then it's not a good thing for you. But confidence was a huge problem for me. I think up until seven years in the industry, I felt like a huge imposter. Who am I even? Like you said, right? Why people listen to me? I was teaching design when I was practicing only like two or three years of design. And then I started teaching and I was like, why are those people should even be listening to me?
And I was like the woman teaching like 30 men in the room and all those men were like 30 plus and I was like 25 plus. And so for me, it was like, why am I even, you know, speaking in front of those people? Those people are definitely judging me. So all those confidence problems were a huge part of my journey.
And honestly, every next job I was gaining also had me challenged my confidence. When I was working as a startup, I was working in the crypto, which I had no idea about. Like, oh my God, that was definitely not helping me with the confidence. When I was working in American enterprise where everybody was native English speaker, I felt absolutely bad because I had
no idea if I'm making sense, if people understand me. Or if I'm working right now in a scale up, I've never been working in such a vast space and they're hiring world-class people and I feel like, am I even good enough for this company?
So a lot of those things, those are the challenges with the confidence that I keep trying to work with. I can never understand if I'm good enough. It helps a little bit better right now because when I was working as a freelancer, I had no one to compare to. I was like this single fish in the ocean and I didn't know if...
I'm good enough. But now if I'm sitting in the room full of designers, at least I can know what are my good, strong sides, right? If people choose me to work with, then probably I'm good at something. So that definitely helped me with the confidence. But for a very long time, it was a huge, huge problem that I had to work with.
Another thing is once you gain the confidence, then there is this problem of not being too confident in who you are as a designer, right? So there is this balance that you later need to start retaining. There is a difference between balancing out the
the self-worth, so you know what you're good at, but at the same time being open and preserve this humility, right? Being able to listen to the people, being open to their feedback, but at the same time getting a buying, convincing people and all those stuff. This is still a challenge to be honest, to me, balancing out this humility and confidence things.
Another problem I definitely had, and I feel like this is a part of the confidence, is the negative feedback and the lack of trust. It took me a while to overcome this because honestly, when you are not confident in yourself and you always, always feel like your design doesn't make sense, it's a horrible design, you have a lot of room for growth. And then you see this negative feedback from whatever users, stakeholders, it definitely crushes you a little bit. But the more you embrace it, the more you expose yourself to this negative feedback,
It helps you to grow as well. It helps you to become a person who sees negative feedback as the room for opportunity, for growth, and something that helps you to also become a better designer. And the more you embrace this mindset, the more you grow, of course. So I feel like I started feeling that the challenges we are facing are the biggest growth enablers for you and for your personality.
There are a few more things such as, I don't know, I feel like I was always non-conformist. I never like to do what everybody else is doing or lack of trust. I felt like if I don't have the trust in the room, I don't know if I can collaborate effectively and stuff like that. So a lot of those things keep sometimes happen, but I feel like today when I'm looking to them, I think those are the opportunities and that's the, I guess, the sign of the growth as well. But there is, I think that
as long as we live, as long as we practice, as long as we challenge ourselves, there is always a room for more growths, even within the same challenges.
And I speak so much about those challenges. I also want to ask you, Anna, if you can think of the ways you overcome those specific challenges, maybe something specific that could help our listeners to deal with those. Because we spoke a lot about our abstract problem. We overcame them. We became better people, blah, blah, blah. But how about tactical advice? What did help you in a moment overcoming those challenges?
Is there any advices or tips that you can reflect and think of that could help our listeners? Yeah, I'm going to try this exercise of concentrating all my life lessons into a couple of tips. I think I touched on some of them. For me, the main revelation or the most important thing that worked was just to accept these feelings. I think it sounds exciting.
extremely basic. It sounds like it's common sense, it's basic hygiene, but so many people fight them because we feel they're wrong. Because pain, suffering, self-doubt, all these things are not comfortable stuff. You want to get rid of them. You want to get rid of them as fast as possible. Like in the US, I think so many people medicate to not have to deal with bad moods or self-doubt or anxiety and things that are natural for people.
our brain in the modern times. So I would say, even if it sounds like a very basic piece of advice, it's very hard to nail. And I just want to repeat it. Just embrace these feelings, accept them, just let them exist. But maybe, maybe add some guardrails to not have them become debilitating. So sometimes I felt like,
I have higher anxiety than usual. And then I started doing grounding exercises. Like this is a very practical tip. Grounding exercises were things such as like journaling, like writing down what's causing anxiety. Why am I so stressed out? What's the exact thing that's on my mind actually? Because many times,
I sort of did this psychological trick we all do where we worry over something that's more comfortable to worry about when in fact deeper we're worrying over something else. And so I perpetually done this internal challenging. Is this what I'm worried about?
or is it like something completely different or something deeper? And then journaling, writing down my fears, writing down my assumptions, writing down my convictions, like here's what's going to happen. How do you know that is what's going to happen? How do you know you're going to make a fool of yourself when you go on stage? Maybe you'll be successful. And many times I was, but like just having to deal with these thoughts, just grounding yourself through writing, through walking, sports. The experience I had at snowboarding recently was like this experience of
learning something for the first time. And if you're learning something for the first time, you really have to be present because you have no idea what you're doing and you have to stay present. You can't start thinking about your next talk or your next post or your next, I don't know, project. You really have to focus on what you're doing with your body and be fully present. So I think it's something magical in learning new sports. I'm not a very sporty person, but I'm starting to become one because of the
psychological benefits. And so this is very similar and transferable if you want. I can completely relate to my personal and professional life. If I'm present in whatever it is I'm doing and I'm not worried about something that will happen three months from now, everybody wins. I'm doing my present tasks
better. And then I have three months to prepare for whatever dangerous thing will happen in three months from now. So grounding myself in present and being present were key during these years. And also, yeah, just like I was saying, another part of embracing and accepting the feelings was using them. Like I can describe it. So what I have in mind when I talk about these things
is a big surf wave. So it's a wave of water that comes like an unstoppable force. It's dangerous. It's scary. It's not safe. And it comes full force towards you and then you can ride it. You can just ride it. You can let yourself go and say, okay, what can I do with this wave? I can ride it. What can I do with this fear? I can learn from it. I can let it guide me into what's the thing I have to learn next or do next.
or solve next. And so my last point, so journaling, sports, walking, self-reflection, sleep, doing things that you enjoy that are not work-related, just getting your head out of all this world and so on. But then the last point I want to mention
It's therapy. So what really helped me was to speak with someone who is a specialist and trying to unpack all these fears, ground me, give me the tools, the mechanisms. I've been doing therapy for 10 years now. Also, the people are fascinated when I say that. I don't know why, because for me, it became just my like normality. And I don't get it. What? Doesn't everybody do that?
Is it just me? But I've always benefited so much. In a way, I think we are doing therapy with this podcast session. I'm doing therapy every time I have a personal conversation with someone in the professional space, I open up. So I'm doing all this exercise of self-reflection and growth and dealing with stuff and reframing
events or situations or worries or pain. But therapy has really provided a structure in which I could continuously do that. So it was really helpful. It really put the mirror that I needed to make the most out of these things. And my therapist actually continuously encouraged me to
Look at these as opportunities. My people pleasing as an opportunity to build relationships quickly and be honest and be vulnerable and be a very nice person. That's okay. Just be a nice person. It's not bad if you want to be a nice person. Like if you sacrifice yourself on the way, sure. If you're unhappy and you're doing things you completely dislike just to have someone like you, that's bad. But like some doses of imposter syndrome,
And this is an important word, dose. In the right doses, nothing is bad. Everything can be valuable. Imposter syndrome, in some dose, I think it's natural, it's healthy, it forces you to learn, to grow, to not say, I know everything, I'm good at everything, I can do anything, I'm done. No, you can still grow. You should grow. You should always grow. And to your point, the
the pace can change. I'm not growing as much as I was in my 20s, of course, but I'm still growing. And the past year for me has been a professional explosion. I completely reshuffled who I am professionally and I found my niche in AI and I'm talking about it and I'm passionate about it and working in this field and so on. So
Yeah, I guess my point is therapy and then also the right doses of everything. Some anxiety is healthy. Some exhaustion is a sign that you need to start resting. Play with these things without going to any extreme and it will help you surface things about yourself and get to know your limits and get to know your potential and get to know who you are, what you like, what you want to do. I hope this is tangible enough. I'm going to pass it over to you. What are some pieces of advice that come to your mind?
Yeah, no, definitely it is helpful. What are you talking about? And I'm sure everybody finds it very inspiring to hear from you. I actually, when I'm looking back into those challenging moments, and I think that the part of overcoming them is learning how to cope with them in a healthy way. And you talked a little bit about it, right? With the word doses. Because I think the worst thing is that you keep challenging yourself so much that it becomes unhealthy. You're just risking to either burn out or
or, I don't know, have some health issues and stuff like that. So it's just not healthy to constantly be under challenge, under pressure, under stress. And the way of coping with it, first of all, is just looking for those ways that help you to go through these challenges, right? And to me personally, if I think in looking back into what
helped me tactically. The first and foremost was actually surrounding myself with the people that helped me bring back my best self, that helped me to be the best version of myself, even though it sounds very cheesy. Those people who actually reflect on who you are and help you remembering this in the moments when you feel yourself as a very low, like I just don't know anything, I'm very bad, who am I, blah, blah, blah.
Those people will bring you back and those people will remind you what you're good at. Those people will notice things that you're doing great. Even if there is a room for improvement, it's not that you're a complete failure if you failed one small thing. There is definitely a lot of things that you're good at. It's just somebody has to be kind and, you know, good enough to point out and help you with that. And the story comes to my mind.
that when I was working at Citrix, this is like a second enterprise company I worked at, I was surrounded by extremely, extremely beautiful and nice people. And I mean, I don't want to offend anybody, but I think this is the environment where the people were really the nicest. And it helped me so much to grow, even though the environment was super challenging. Like I felt like a complete imposter because I was working on the backend tools for developers. And I'm not a developer, so I have no idea.
And for me, it was super hard to design for them. And I felt like a complete imposter. I couldn't be a good designer. And there were always those people, like I had a PM who early on, I just joined and this PM would just reach out to me and say, "Hey, I'm also super bad at this. So ask me anything. I've been here for like one year. I figured out a lot of things. Let me just tell you in my kids' words what this and this and this means." And it was so nice of her. She really helped me to bring the best version of myself.
And then I had this other design manager who I almost felt like I had not just like a weekly catch ups, but it was literally a design therapy because this person, I could trust them. They built trust. They wanted to learn who I am. They didn't want me to just talk about my professional experiences and blah, blah. They really wanted to learn who I am. They said in the first meeting, oh, tell me about yourself. Open the map. Show me where you lived. Show me the places. What is your city? Show me the street you lived at. They really wanted to get to know me.
And that really helped me to build a trust. And the trust is something that very soon after I've learned that this was always this most challenging component to me because I always felt like, I don't know if people trust me, if I can trust people. There was always this sort of animosity in those, especially big companies when everybody has to stand their ground and fight for something and blah, blah, blah.
And it's just like so great when you have people who you can trust. And so for me, one of the key things that helped me and something I've learned very soon after is that it's very important to build trust early on as soon as possible and not trust like, hey, great design, you know, like just superficial stuff, but really trying to understand the people, joke around, drink beer with them and stuff like that. That really helps because when the hard moment comes and every time you work in a challenging environment, the hard moment comes.
you need to be able to speak in a way that people will hear you, not just be defensive immediately, but hear you and want to hear you. And the feedback will be tailored
personally, right? And so it's very important that you have the good relationship with the people. I guess this is my key tip here is that surrounding myself with the people who I can trust, who help me bring in the best of me if I feel low, but also challenge me and give me the honest feedback in a moment when it needs to be, it's a key to me because not always you and your internal demons can...
work around the challenging situation. Sometimes we are overreacting, sometimes we're underreacting. It's very important to have the healthy check with people who are working next to you, close to you. The second thing that also helped me a lot was something that you mentioned as well, which is the writing down my experiences a lot.
some sort of journaling, bullet journaling, whatever it's called today is reflecting. That also really is a very, very good way of coping with complexity, with overwhelm, with things you're not sure, like you're overwhelmed, you don't know what to do or to start from, or you feel like you failed, why it failed. It makes sense to put it all on paper so that you can start
It's almost like with the design challenges, right? With brainstorming, you start from obvious things. You start from the things that happened. You write down the facts. And as you start writing down the obvious, you start having more ideas, more spark. And the next things brings the next things. And it all starts exploding. And it just helps you to unpack a lot of this weight of what you have been carrying out through the experience. So writing down definitely a huge pain reliever is for me.
And then I think the other thing that really helped me personally was to have debriefs and retros, but with the condition that you do those retros with the people you trust and with the people who can and not afraid to tell you an honest feedback. It's not easy to do, honestly. I think that not every environment is able to provide this honest feedback tools.
Very often it needs to be in a room when everybody is vulnerable and open, and it has to come from leadership. Leadership has to show the good example, lead by example, right? I've been very rarely in environments where people could do a very good debrief or retro to learn.
from the experience. Very often it comes down to just like, hey, we did X, Y, Z, let's not do this anymore. Let's do better meetings and stuff like this. Very often it comes down to just organizational stuff, in my opinion. But the good debrief, good retro is something that includes personal aspects, something that includes sharing how people felt, sharing how they felt we could have done better, where everybody takes responsibility for certain things.
own it and be kind to themselves and to other people. So debriefing and having retrospectives could be a very powerful tool, but only if you are in a team which enables it, which is always the biggest challenge and unfortunately not always easy to plug.
I think the last thing I mentioned, but I think this is also something that you already said, was having external things to do. So having sports that you're doing or going to any other sort of extracurriculum activities, maybe singing if somebody likes to sing or reading books, hiking, etc., etc. I think this is really, really helpful.
I really like the keyword sport, something that you did mention, because I feel like sport has a lot to do with tech industry in general. I feel like sport has a lot to do with like teamwork, with how we overcome challenges in our work, with how we fight with our demons, how we push the limits and stuff like that. So I think that sport can definitely teach us a lot. And I like that Joanna brought it up as your recent experience. And I think that would
be it on my side. I think like we have touched a lot on our personal big challenges. Anything you would like to add before we wrap this episode up?
I'm afraid that if I start adding things, I won't stop, but I will do it anyway. So yeah, I just want to add that choosing things is growth, being uncomfortable, getting out of your comfort zone. But like being uncomfortable means just accepting the negative parts of anything or just the negative emotions. That's part of growth, continuously researching yourself. That's very interesting. Like
There's also this piece of content that's circulating throughout the industry, like design yourself, apply the UX process on your career, apply the UX process on your personal growth. But I think that there's a lot of truth to that. So I think that we should continuously inquire what's going on inside of us. Are we happy? What's missing? What do we feel less confident about? What do we feel more confident about? What do we want to do more of?
Continuously having these internal conversations is the sure way to growth.
And I feel that if I would do things differently today, I said it again, I just want to say it like a mantra or like my takeaway or my recommendation to everyone out there, like go through the pain, go through the bad parts, go through the negative emotions, but just be more chill. Don't stress so much. Like there was this thing recently or last year, I don't know when I saw it, a while back. I'm already 10 years in the design industry. I can't believe I can say that.
It's crazy, but it's true. At some point in my career, I stumbled upon this article written by some design lead from an agency that said, hey, we're not surgeons. We're not saving lives. We're just building products. We can make mistakes. What's with all the pressure? Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? And yeah, this is like, I think growth is important, but also what's important is just enjoying all of this.
Like being chill. If that makes sense, being authentic, being yourself, embracing the good parts, the bad parts and having fun as much as possible. I think it's all underrated. Fun is underrated. For me, what changed in the past couple of years is this framing also around having fun at work. I mean, conversations are fun. Mm.
unpacking problems is fun. It's just an interesting process that I think we forget to enjoy. And I think growth also comes from enjoying things, being present and being in a way grateful that you get to do them. And yeah, being curious and interested. And now I'm saying all the cliches in the book.
Well, look at us. Look at us. We're talking like a grandma. So you guys have to be more fun. I totally feel a grandma. I completely feel a grandma. I don't know when that happened. Here I am. I'm the grandmother of UX.
Wait, wait, wait. There is still way to go to reach the Norman. No, I'm done. This was it for me. Yeah. Anyways. All right. So...
First of all, I agree with you. I really like this phrase that we're stressing out too much. I think this just comes from our nature of kind of being perfectionist. Most designers are by nature perfectionist and that just adds a lot of pressure. But I totally agree with you. I'm on the same page.
grandma wave of we need to have more fun. Yeah, I think that nobody's expecting from junior designers, designers in the first five years of their career to know everything, to be almighty, to figure it all out and be the smartest people in the room. People expect you to fail and that's great if you can fail in the first five years. So don't stress yourself. Think of failure as something that could
teach you something that could help you overcome the problem faster. If you're like protected yourself too much from all the problems and challenges, then you're not growing. And also you're not learning. And you don't want to be 10 years of kind of experience person with no growth. It's not fun. You know, you're just not going to be relevant, right? We're talking a lot about AI right now. So...
I think it's just good when in the early stages you're exposing yourself to the challenges, but also don't worry too much because nobody's expecting you to be the smartest person in the room. And I guess I will leave it at that. And with that being said, thank you so much, everyone, for joining us again. Or if you're first time here, thank you so much for choosing to listen to us. We are very happy and excited to have you here with us. If you have any ideas or challenges that you want us to talk about, feel free to submit those. You will find an anonymous link
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