The Rhythms and Habits of Successful UX Practitioners

hello and welcome to this live panel event my name is hawk and I'm really excited to be part of this session today so one of the reasons that we're hosting today's session is to celebrate the upcoming launch of our latest collaborative ebook which is called product projects and experiences you can't say that too fast in the Kiwi accent I'm joined today by three of the contributing authors laura klein dan look and we're done go and i'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with these guys they're really inspiring UX practitioners and i'm excited by for my own selfish pleasure and so that i can put to them some of the questions that we've been collecting from our community over the recent weeks for those of you that are watching live please send your questions through via youtube's chat feature and we'll get through as many of those as possible in the next 60 minutes promises but we'll do what we can before we start i'd like to briefly introduce today's panel it's the laura klein for this done with one uux in 1995 and she fell in wealth she's watched a successful career in Silicon Valley and these days she coaches product teams that want to get better at UX Laura's the author of you exfilling startups and bit of products and you can follow here on twitter at laura klein the insults been involved in the you excelled in hong kong for over 20 years and as well as being a published author dense co-founder of UX consultancy Epogen of UX hong kong and it was current passion making meaningful work and you can follow down on twitter at diesel jorge Arango is best known for designing systems that can people with knowledge he has been involved in the field for the past 25 years and these days he splits his time between his design consultancy practice lecturing writing and speaking and you can find out more about Paul Heyman's work at Durango comm for any more information about us speakers or the panel today make sure you visit our blog ux mastery comm there's lots of information there in really brief so that we can get to our questions so welcome panel welcome so much guys thank you for joining me today thank you for having us mm-hmm and those are you watching us the reason we've chosen these three guests from the fact that they are featured in a book is that they all have really well-established and enviable careers which have brought them only success but real satisfaction and today we're going to dig into some practical ways that we can begin to shape our own careers and explore our own locations more deeply so this will be enough for me we jump straight into the first question in that first question I am going to put to you Dan and you find my questions my first question so most workplaces today is still very much geared towards driving efficiency productivity and growth as a result people often feel that work is wasteful busy stressful or purposeless what would happen if we changed our mindset and allowed ourselves to choose projects that are both energizing and empowering Wow thank you for the question and thanks for having me today so I guess if we zoom out a little and we were to look at work as an environment and I realize that sometimes people use culture to describe environments so we we tend to use the term in environment where culture can be described as an instance of environment and then we start from the point of well what do we actually want our environment to be at work so that's in it's actually inferred in the question well it's not inferred it's very explicit in the question of how can we make meaningful work where work is actually happening within an environment if we were to split environment for the sake of today into two halves one half is what we call the exclusive half within the environment and that's where we often see the work at play which tends to be transactional it's things that are to do with the day-to-day delivery of the work and that's having an impact on people and the language that we use in that first half of work in reference to delivery is also having an impact on people and it tends to be to speak in more general terms it tends to be driven by still very driven by a significant amount of Industrial Age ways of working you know terms like you know some of the terms were even fond of agility and speed and velocity and productivity and this is these are these are

happening in the first half what we call the transactional and delivery there's actually a second half to the environment and that that's what we call it goes by different names we couldn't call it almost the healing part or the healthier part perhaps of work which tends to be the more implicit part and the part that's not made explicit enough and that part is where practices exist and practices are often hidden from view and so what happens in the second half of work is we're trying to be more explicit about what we call the learning mode the learning or the reflection mode now this is different to what we'd be described in agile as retrospectives this is really creating a larger portion of time at work for explicit learning and explicit reflection to happen whereby you can capture practices through what we call practice spotting so that people have the time not only to be doing the day-to-day production of the work but also equally to be doing the learning and reflection to determine in fact if they're doing the first half very well as connected to the second half and so I'll finish the the probing at that question with mindset and what do what it actually implies in everything that I've said within the environment is we have to it's we encourage people to think about the attitude as related to mindset that you bring into the environment and what that means is instead of which happens a lot at work instead of reacting to the environment you're able to hold on to specific practices to have a very specific attitude to have more intention in the work that you're doing it's not only to do with the delivery in the transaction or par but equally to do with the learning and the nurturing and the healthier aspects of what we're trying to do with make meaningful work interested Laura Thank You Dean I'm interested in your thoughts especially around thinking about our audience and I've spent a lot of time with Dan talking through these things and have a really good idea of what he's referring to but for beginners or for young or an experienced uux as how can we put ourselves in the position where we are able to get into this mindset or even have the opportunity to be picky about the kinds of projects that we do choose do does anyone have some what's there oh go ahead no go ahead please I was gonna say um dan has clearly thought about this for more than I have was a great answer dan um here's my take on it which i think is a little bit maybe less well thought out I look you I think Hawk you hit on it when you're new at this or when you're maybe a more junior person just getting into it that's not super exciting and sometimes that stuff's just got to get done and sometimes the things that you know even I who even I you know who's more senior I've been do this for a long time still have to do stuff that sucks you know and that's why they pay me to show up right it doesn't work that's why it's working not hobbies that said the times that I find myself and that I've seen people really get burnt out or the times that I've seen people really feel disconnected were the times that people didn't get the why of what they were doing and they didn't connect like they didn't understand what the outcome was supposed to be and where they did and they didn't care um I for a long time had a rule that I won't work anyplace where my co-workers seem to hate their users this is and this is the thing I've definitely worked at places that were like what I would call user hostel and I mean I've seen teams like that and like they just seem to be in this antagonistic relationship with their users and you get into this point where you don't want to help these people you know and it becomes really oh these people are they're always asking for stuff and I don't I don't want to be there so if you care about the people that you're helping and if you truly feel like you're helping people and you truly understand how what you're doing fits into the greater scheme of things I think hopefully you will have a greater tolerance for maybe some of the things really learning opportunities or maybe just you know there was a thing that had to get done and it wasn't that great I mean God knows I've done you know my

sheriff data entry cuz it had to get done and I was available yeah I think one of the things that is implicit in this question is that you have some degree of agency and choosing the projects that you're working on right which for someone who is just starting out that may not be the case and I would say think about what you can do to create the conditions necessary for you to be able to have a greater degree of agency over the work that you're doing right so that then you can make sure that the work is aligned with your why right so it's have clear hierarchy of values which I think everyone has to some degree a clear hierarchy of values they just don't perhaps they've acquired them accidentally and haven't thought about them very clearly right and I don't think that you can expect that at the beginning of someone's career are going to be able to choose exactly the sort of work that you want to be working on but you can set things up in such a way that you gain a little bit more agency over time over that sort of decision so that you can have greater alignment yeah awesome and I guess coming full circle back to what Dan was saying is it's just about that mindfulness yeah it's a it's about whether or not you can currently make those changes because of the position that you're in if you're constantly mindful of it then you will come to a place where potentially you can yeah and knowing what the role is for someone who is just getting started my background is in architecture as in the design of buildings and that's a field that over the past hundred years or so it has become it has developed you know as an academic discipline that you can go to university and learn but the traditional way of learning design disciplines like architecture was by apprentice by being an apprentice to a master right and folks who are entering the field knew that they were coming in to work on stuff that you know might be more detailed or might perhaps less grandiose than the sort of things that the Masters were working on but they were there in part to learn and to become masters themselves right and there was this understanding that would happen over time yeah I think you know it also implies that is I think about when I'm not from an architecture background so I apologize for the crudeness of this reflection but when I think about buildings I think about the infrastructure of the building the scaffolding you know it's interesting in a Hong Kong people are people who visit Hong Kong always in or that they use bamboo scaffolding around buildings but bamboo is actually incredibly strong and what if the scaffolding implies is that you can you can stand on and feel safe in standing on it so I think when you think about people coming into any career I like this idea of scaffolding around people in the form of other people as well that allows them to feel that they understand and can be deep begin to articulate that hierarchy of values their principles and also think about from a maturity standpoint where they would like to get to over time because within you X and I I'm trying to say this very respectfully I think sometimes we have a really hyper focus on what I call the tools layer and the tools in the methods layer but there's not always they and there's a lot of conferences and books and great places you can go to learn about methods but I think sometimes what's lacking even amongst the more mature of our of us are places where we can connect with other practitioners to allow ourselves to feel in safe spaces to go even deeper and sometimes that's counterintuitive because what it actually implies is I might very well learn more from someone that's come from an architecture background that I might from someone that's within UX you know nice see ways that I also studied architecture and we've got a comment from the community from someone else from Louie who also studied architecture and says that there are lots of similar principles especially to do with ideation but another interesting comment from Matthew Oliphant going back to having those choices about the projects that we can take in and he says ideally we'd find a way to offer that option to

people that are new rather than just say hey to that that's how it is and yeah and I agree yeah followed up by systems don't change if we don't allow that very true so I might throw another question out there now maybe this one for you Laura so our personal solutions are usually driven by our own strengths weaknesses and goals how can we explore these aspects about our personalities and of ourselves and make career vocation choices that drive us towards the success that is going to be this the person that we are yeah this is that's a really good question I have done a bunch of work with mid-career switchers people who are switching into UX from other things and one of the things that has been extremely successful for some of them is focusing on the skills that they're bringing into UX from other things even you know not necessarily been like to design related things I mean I worked with a women who wanted to do research and she had been a scientist and she wanted to do more user research and so she ended up doing a bunch of user research you know for scientists and it was incredibly helpful because she sort of knew how it worked so sometimes I think that part of it is just understanding that you have skills that might not be what you think of as UX skills or product skills or whatever you know you have skills that you bring to this and then also to recognize the difference between things that you're really good at doing and maybe things that you've been praised for doing um that's just kind of a an interesting thing that like things that you're actually good at that you enjoy doing you have to really find that Venn diagram of here is something that I actually enjoy doing all the time and that I do well and also that people will pay me to do and focusing on those I find that most people have so many skills and so many things that they are good at that they might not even know that they're good at so part of its just trying to recognize what you can do and accepting that so figuring those things out and then putting them together and you know finding the right place for you to do all the things that you're good at don't worry too much about weaknesses just I focus on like oh that's the thing that I'm good at and that I like doing I'm gonna do more of that and you know I I'll get better at some of the stuff that I'm not very good at if I have to it's harder yeah that's fun but focus on the thing that you're really good at and get really good at it other people really like the challenge of getting better at you know the things that they have to overcome but it seems way too hard for me too much work well AAHA why did you want to go first well yeah very briefly and another alternative is you know if you are clear on what your weaknesses are surround yourself with people who are complementary to you right and that's one way to overcome it I just want to stress again something that is implicit in the question is self-awareness right and having taking the time out to do the work of introspection and really kind of honestly taking a look at what you enjoy doing and don't enjoy doing and the things that allow you to fall into conditions of flow right where you're just kind of in the moment and lean into those somehow that's not gonna happen if you don't take the time out to really think about you know step outside of the day today and think about what brings you joy and what is more challenging yeah I think related we have something in our in the meaningful work story which is called a learning portfolio now we're not using the word portfolio in the UX portfolio design portfolio sense of the word were actually using the word portfolio more in reference to like an investment portfolio where you're investing in yourself and so it's really simple it's got two columns one column says what can I learn and it's got another column that says what can I teach and both of those have their challenges for people but

it's very to call and it's saying I'm keeping a track on where I feel I have some gaps in my learning and I'm also keeping a track on what I can teach and the way we think about teaching sometimes teaching is thought of or trained to be well I have to be an expert to teach it the way we're using it is just try something try and teach something try and write an article on something get your voice out there because when we talk about the second half but I spoke about an environment it's all practice anyway you know it's continuous practice so that's that's part of how I think about improving daily and I also think about it in reference to where I have those deficiencies but not in a overly negative way rather in a more opportunistic positive way to say well what can I continue to learn because the learning never stops it just never stops yeah I love there and I like the whole what can I teach concepts especially I've found that to be one of the tools that I personally use for combating impostor syndrome which I note that some community has mentioned because you know I've learned that in teaching myself I'm going down this track about the things I specifically think I'm trying to teach but then somebody else takes from what I've told them something really quite different that meets something for them and that's empowering and that gives me confidence and it's gonna hang on a minute there is something here that I have got off for other people and that's confidence building and I think that's a lot of the thing that that's missing especially for young uux is starting out and speaking of the imposter syndrome object comment I'll just read out Northrup's thoughts which are about the master and apprentice relationship and how lacking their formal structure can sometimes contribute so the proven that's an imposter syndrome and I also note that I'm assuming markets from Australia or New Zealand because he spells impostor syndrome with an e as I do she was spelt with an O I felt insulin and he also says a really interesting thing what the notion of the journeymen notion the notion of traveling and learning from multiple masters and from multiple cultures and I think that that's something that's very easy to forget as well when we're doing our own singing our own bubble so what it was that premark about the journeyman is indeed where I think that is a really very astute and by the way hi mark and hi Matthew that's a very astute reflection I have lived really two lives one I grew up in Australia I grew up with in a ozzie community within Australia and a Jewish community within Australia I grew up with a whole range of nationalities at university and at school but when I came to Hong Kong for the last 21 years naturally I'm immersed in completely different cultures and predominantly Asian cultures and my wife and business partner Josephine is Chinese and she was born in mainland China and she moves to Hong Kong and when she was little I listened to Cantonese most of my days and so I think what marks touching on there's very important in reference to multiple perspectives I think it's really easy especially as we get older to be locked into these really fixed views about things and we get that we get sucked into our local vortex where we sometimes can't put our head above water to breathe and see other perspectives so in reference to learning junior mid or senior being able to have people around you who can give you multiple perspectives and challenge you to think in different ways is it's a very astute reflection and one that I fully support and embody alright should we move on to the next question I'm going to put this one to you Jorge well it can be difficult to translate important philosophical decisions and beliefs into practical outcomes how can we ensure that our career is moving in a direction that satisfies both our emotional spiritual as well as professional needs so I think that we've already touched on this to a degree right like this idea that you have to be clear on your why and I was part of a team a couple of years ago where we would periodically take time out from our work to kind of work on the work itself like work on our ability to do the work and that included asking the

question what are we in service to here and I think that is an incredibly powerful question to ask right I think that the word philosophy is a word that makes people anxious because they associated perhaps with academic philosophy you know they think oh my gosh are we gonna be talking Nietzsche or Heidegger or any of these things but really I think of philosophy as consider living a considered life right like what is the life that you want to live and if you have not thought about that and you haven't consciously set out to align the life you're actually living with the life that you would like to be living you're going to live a life that is not guided by you but somehow kind of riding along by on circumstances right so again I think that this notion of taking time out from the day-to-day the daily grind and doing the work of really sitting with these questions and clarifying what your values are I actually um pardon me I have a book I pulled out from my library that I was that was actually really helpful to me called the highest goal by Michael Rea and the key teaches at Stanford or used to teach at Stanford and it's a book about yeah he offers a process for you to sit with your values and just clarify by what they're about and I think that that's something that everyone not just in UX design but everyone should do yeah I agree and I think that we need to be encouraging our team members and and other people that come in to the industry to take that time and to to stop worrying too much about what were performing and making sure that everything that they do is visible and everything they do is contributing to you know every second of their day is contributing to the project at the detriment of mental health and of satisfaction and of general well-being of your organization yeah just add to that so yeah the exercise is the following and I think that this came up in Steve Jobs famous Stanford commencement speech right do it do the mental exercise of imagining yourself in your deathbed as morbid as that sounds right and it's like am I did I live alive that I'm satisfied with and folks who work in palliative care and who work with folks who are kind of at the end of their life report that that's like the number one thing that comes up for those people it's like the ones that have regrets are they're not regrets about not making enough money or whatever it's regrets about not having lived the life that you really wanted to live and you can't do it at the end you have to do it while it's happening you know yeah and so the question has come through along these lines so jump in today before we move on and it's how do we encourage sitting with these uncomfortable or challenging notions especially in environments sorry looks as I read especially in environments when we're having to explain the basic value of our work let alone the nuances so I guess a little bit of what I literally just said that we do need to encourage this kind of thinking and in stopping to take a breath but how do you think we can encourage that how can we we make that part of our daily routine for our team members or for our colleagues well we have a tool we've only got one tool currently but it's a tool that we put a lot of years of thought into and arrived at it called practice spotting and Joe and myself have predominantly researchers at heart so it's very much a tool that you can imagine it like a key it's a key that you insert into really any environment and you can also use it on yourself and with other people and what it's there to do is to help you observe and listen with intent about the environment to determine if that environment is indeed a fit for you and so I think that is something that everybody can continue to practice because not all environments are right for us and it's not a matter of being overly negative about the environments that are not right for us it's

knowing which environments are conducive to us growing in healthy ways and which are not but being explicit with the practice spotting tool to insert that in and to be able to arrive at those practices within the environment people within the environment conditions within that environment values as hoar has been talking about that are right or not right for you also begins to perhaps with intention begin to define or design your own philosophy and I agree with Jorge I don't think we should steer away from philosophy as he said because it's seen as academic it doesn't need to be seen that way it can actually be incredibly practical driver in the way that we work and we live yeah awesome okay I'm gonna rain it back from the philosophical and to something into something significantly more practical I'm gonna throw it how am I gonna throw it I'm gonna throw at you Laura did you ever have a time in your career which we know you did because you told us before when you became bored or disillusioned with your work and when it happened what did you do to rekindle your excitement oh my god so you have to understand that when I say that I started with UX back in the mid 90s what I mean is I started doing some research back then since then I have been an engineer I have taught you X I have written books I've given talks I've taken time off to work on my own stuff I get bored I would say every couple of years it's not so much like do you get bored it's like do you are you ever not distracted by something shiny the answer is yeah I mean I very I know that I am the kind of person who needs to be in an environment where there is a lot of stuff going on and there are many different things that I can do and be involved with even like day to day I do much better if I've got a you know like yes it's great if I can get into like flow to work on a specific design but even at this point where I actually and the head of product at a company still occasionally we'll just do design work for four or five hours because I love that and also sometimes I'll do prototyping and also I'm teaching a class in May and I just really have to do a kind of a whole bunch of things or I get very distracted so here's the thing that's not gonna work for everybody in fact it's most people who what we like to call an attention span so if you are that kind of person you need to figure out what keeps your interest I think part of it though for me was realizing that not beating myself up over it because I would do this thing where I would kind of skip around and I mean if you I am the very traditional sort of job hopper when you look at my customer it's kind of all over the place and you know what honestly it's weird I think I you know might have done better had I actually been able to focus on any one given thing but I don't think I live the life I want it to so figure out what you're like live the life you want to live don't beat yourself up over and if you're not doing this sort of you know oh and then I went and I did this I got my MBA didn't or if that is the kind of person you are great do that but recognize what it is that you love and when you get distracted and be okay with switching to something else awesome yeah and I just want to jump in I'll ask you others as well the same question but I just wanted to mention I should have before I ask the second question and then the tool that you were talking about before if anyone wants more information on there I'll make sure that's included in the transcript which will post up a position afterwards so yeah so Jorge or Dendi do you have a response and how do you manage disillusionment or boredom in your career how do you kind of have it into something that's simulating yes so I can't say that I am ever really bored or disillusioned which I guess would make this a good answer for the question which is because I think I've discovered a way of beating that demon and it has to do yeah I got a boast about

something right and the approach is I think this is gonna sound a little euro of me but be open to serendipity right and what I mean by that is especially people whose job it is to design which is to make the future tangible we can have a tendency to over specify our own future and I think that if you are open to accidents intrusions into your perfect little plan you might be led down paths that might be very interesting I'll give you a small example just today I finished reading a very long book on the history of the Reformation in Europe that is something that is kind of way outside my professional area of concern I spent way more time reading this book than I should have given how busy I am and how many other things I have to read but I am coming out of that experience full of interesting I think ideas of how our time kind of mirrors that time and how some of the changes that those folks were going through can inform our own time and I feel little re-energized after that right so and that came to me completely accidentally I wasn't looking to read a book on that subject so just being open to serendipity I think can be helpful in this regard awesome have you got anything to add have you ever been bored or disillusioned in your life I was just thinking that Borden disillusioned be a great name for like a comedy stand-up comedy team you know good evening I'm bored and I'm disillusioned and thanks for joining tonight I thought I you know living in having lived into what might appear to be two very different cultures and I'm oversimplifying like a sort of a Western way of thinking and an East and way of thinking what I've learned in work working and living in Asia is I find especially amongst Chinese I find they tend to at times thinking most of what I call multiples and so the idea of multiple Z's they don't necessarily always think of you know a linear way of this or it's bad or it's a or it's better it's black or it's why so boredom feels like one stream but I very rarely hear people say that they're bored I hear kids say that pit boards sometimes I hear adults say more and I think sadly that they're busy and I think we've all been caught up with busyness and distractions so I remember growing up in the 70s in Australia before gaming machines and mobile phones and I remember lying on my bed and spending hours just staring at the ceiling thinking about stuff and that was fine so I think my practical answer would be find the moments to not be thinking deliberately not be thinking about anything as a practice and use those moments the use the serendipity to be able to help you determine what is it that energizes you busyness to me when people say busyness sounds like they sometimes haven't necessarily found the thing that energizes them it's just that they're trying to find things to keep them busy because they're not necessarily confronting the things that they need to and boredom as another extreme sounds almost of a similar nature where they're just gotta kind of hump they're kind of motoring along so there again there's something to use Jorge's language is something inherent and that that's troubling to me I think see seeking more diversity in your practices and it's okay to be busy at times bored at times and look in the spirit of multiples look for every nuance in between those two states nice all right I'm gonna put a bit of a downer on this not quite as much of a downer can I add something real quick there ma if you find yourself being bored that's good right because there is awareness there of your state yeah that's tell your body's telling you something yeah that's coming back to that mindfulness that's not necessarily seeing boredom as a negative thing but as a cue to make a change right all right so yeah back to the downer and not quite as much of a downer as the deathbed conversation of previous questions but I want to put this question out there because it was asked by a member of our community on Twitter during the weekend I actually get asked a lot especially in our forums and I'm gonna put it to you Laura when do you

know that it's time to leave a company when is it time to go actually I'm gonna be brave you know so this is for me because I have left a lot of companies because like I said I hop around I realized many years ago and this is a hundred percent consistent that when I am driving into work sometimes if things are if things get to a point where they're bad enough I will I swear to God start fantasizing about getting into a small car accident that is just bad enough but I don't have to go to work I will just go in and quit because that's telling me is now my body is saying I would rather suffer physical damage don't go and deal with these people any longer and I this is a hundred percent sure it happens every single time I in some ways credit the fact that I have been at my current job for three years I'm - the fact that I work remotely and don't have a community more so I really have just no idea how to know when to quit but there is this I get an actual physical reaction I'm not like any I mean I say it like it's a funny thing it's not funny it's horrible at the time when I'm just like and it's a physical reaction where I'm just like I'm not happy and I don't have I mean I'm not the kind of person who's like happy all the time God knows you know I'm happy some of the time so it's not just like a little thing it's like I'm so unhappy that I don't think this is fixable I'm not optimistic it's not like a it's just a we're done here and I just and you know since I've been doing it for so long I've sort of figured out what that feels like to me again and the funny thing is I'm saying a lot of things about like oh it's just a feeling not really that touchy-feely of a person I'm not that in touch with my emotions which is probably why I have to imagine getting hit by the bus it's it really it does get to that point and here's the thing I actually I've talked to folks I know a lot of people who I swear they have gotten past that point they are so beaten down and they are so unhappy at their jobs but they are staying because they feel like they have to or because they I mean and I 100% get that some people have to because they literally have to they need the money they that and I have so much sympathy for them I am not there anymore and I am so happy not to be there anymore and I hope everybody gets past the point where they are but if you are in UX right now there is a good chance that you don't have to and so don't stay because like if you're feeling that sort of thing it doesn't have to be the bus but you know if you're feeling that sort of thing you don't have to stay because you're worried about your company or your product or your coworkers I mean those are nice it's great that you worry about that stuff but worry about you worry about the fact that you're honestly just so deeply unhappy that you gotta go also there are all sorts of other good reasons to leave a company like you get a better offer but I've never quit a job with another job lined up I honestly let it get hit by a bus and then I just understand what you're saying yeah animals you know I was gonna try and avoid jumping in with my own opinions yeah I in my answer to that question is when you actually start to have that thought when you start to think should I be staying in this job not necessarily jump straight out but just start to talk to your peers and network and start to kind of examine those feelings a little bit for two reasons one is because it does help you get some clarity about the things you love about your job and things that you don't and it helps you get some realistic feedback about maybe ways practical ways that you can solve whatever it is that's causing the problem and whis case scenario everybody goes hell you've got to leave and everyone knows that you're looking for another job and that's you know that that's an important next step people aren't going to offer you something if nobody knows you're looking so it's kind of when I've tried it before any carrots and suspicions involving buses will say this I think I

feel like you have to have some optimism there has to be some optimism left that whatever's broken can be fixed because like I said that stuff's sometimes you have to do stuff you don't like it's work sometimes not everything's gonna be great that's fine you have to have some optimism that the thing that is upsetting you is going to get better and that it realistically could get better in that there's something you can do to make it better and that it is gonna get better on some timeline that doesn't involve you know just giving up entirely before that so that's important and I think the times that I'm feeling that way are times when I'm just kind of like it's not like it's that moment when your body just goes this isn't getting better isn't this is never gonna be this is just how it is now I need to go I'm just thinking that this is where it's helpful to read about things like 16th century Europe right because you have choice folks back then you know if you were born a serf basically you did not have a choice as to what you were going to do with your life and these questions about does it align with my values do I like my co-workers like it was had two mouths living basically right so we you my friends who are watching this are incredibly privileged to live in a time when we don't have to do things for reasons other than you know this is the thing that I want to do with my life and you have the privilege to be able to reach old age feeling satisfied with the way that you've spent your time here make use of that I didn't mentioned that should we go into another Christian all right yeah to see who feels the need to jump in but one of the questions from the community is what are some key things that you guys believe that you've done to get you where you are today and I think by they mean in a place that you are confident and comfortable and enjoying your job enough that you can it be philosophical about it and you can give guidance so yeah what was it what was a key a key aspect of your career that's kind of helped you to get to this place mmm I'll mention three I think quick ones and one is read I think more people I know don't read than read I was never an avid reader as a kid I've had to practice and teach myself to read I read every day so and I'm trying to diversify what I read I don't just very actually very rarely read UX related materials now so read to surround yourself with great people this is this call the community that's listening in we're UX is really lucky it's predominantly made up of really fantastic people you get a couple of exceptions there sometimes but mostly it's made up of really lovely people and we're really lucky in that respect and I would say the final one is I'd like to think that with in user experience there's one this idea of care it implies that there's a people aspect still within user experience although I perhaps another discussion that I feel like it's being degraded over time but it implies people it implies care so seek people out who give you the opportunity to try things out and seek feedback in that and again I come back to the spirit of continuous learning I have them so there's a single thing that I did that I actually can trace I think sort of all of my like later success too and that is I started writing about stuff I knew about and that's it like I what and I had what I had to do that is I had to realize that I had something that I knew that nobody else knew and I actually had to be told that by somebody I was like everybody knows this no very few people know that oh okay so then I started writing about stuff and I was like I know things and I can share them with other

people and then that has over time turned into again you know the podcast and the you know teaching and mentoring and all of these things where I just I do know things and putting it out there there's it has created for me I think hopefully I always I'm afraid to jinx it when I say this but it is created for me somebody told me once that there was a difference between job security and career security job security is when you feel like you know you're at a job and like that job as safe and like they're not going to fire you and career security is where like well if they do fire me I'd be fine and I feel like I sort of moved to more of that career security where I do things I am good at things I put them out there people see that they know who I am and they you know sometimes want to work with me based on what I put out there the other great thing is that if you write like I do some people read and go oh no we don't want to work with her and it's a great filtering it's a fantastic filtering mechanism so be yourself and the people who really like you will want to hire you and work with you and the people who don't you'll never hear from and it'll be great but really it is huge just having that recognition that like there's a thing that I could teach somebody so I'm gonna do that I'm gonna put myself out there and I'm gonna get feedback on it and put more of it out there yes I love that distinction Laura it wasn't mine by the way it's cover your security and well wherever it came from right but I will add to that job security does not exist you have to work on career security right for if for no other reason for the reason that Dan brought up at the beginning of the call which is that the construct that we know as job security is something that comes from a different era and it's an era that is going away and you have to work on career security first and foremost and working on career security is going to make you better at your job so that falls from that right and putting putting yourself out there's also a lovely point I think the UX community again generally is a nice supportive and caring place to be able to do that putting yourself out there comes in different forms articles presentations workshops podcasts it's a way of when you move it from outside your head on to another medium something changes in that it's you're able to if you can reflect on that moment that it shifts from your mind to your head and then be able to talk about it with other people it's a very useful thing and I have to say as I'm made perhaps handing back to hawk that you know UX mastery is indeed one great to do that so how's that for a segue yes that's you but I agree with you and what I'm hearing from all of you is read as write put yourself out it as network as make your voice heard as build your reputation and all of those things and currently help you get to a place where you have the confidence to be able to make choices that you might not have had the confidence or other resources to make before tonight and I love that and you're right then you're accept that your it's mastering me so much of the reason that we do what we do is to kind of help the community and help new uyx is not just find their way into UX but to start to have a place to make their voice good and so yeah for anyone listening if you've got something to write about or share Hennis up she has an email or go to our website because yeah we're always keen to hear your new voice is enough and if we can do something to help you in yep it's ellicott but enough marketing I am going to read out a couple of book recommendations from Louie who says read much horowitz's the miracle Club which segues into the previous conversation about finding who you are and hero's journey so maybe give those ago alright another question we've got six months ago and I'm aware that we need to end at the top of the hour so I like this one how do you consistently stay aware of what brings out the best and other people how do you create a space to bring out the best and the people that are around you and to help bobster them into this place that we're talking

about trying to get to what can we do to help with people that we work besides to support them a legend any of you I'm gonna go for whole ham I mean the first thing that comes to my mind here is teaching right that's something that is very big for me and teaching requires you to be very conscious of how you respond to the things that are being presented to you by folks and how their perception of who they are and what their level of ability is either reflects or doesn't reflect on the work that they're showing you right so it that calls for knowing how to create the space to give feedback in a way that is constructive and that allows folks to grow in positive directions right and I can tell you that it's for at least for me not easy it's something that I have to work on but it's I think very important and being in a teaching context where I'm like formally you know teaching students is a way of exercising that particular muscle which I appreciate tremendously wasn't oh I'm terrible at this I mean we've been talking about like being software I am not good at this I just am not the one thing that I have gotten feedback from students of mine that the one thing that I do right and this is I think useful is that I in for many people not for all of them they can tell that I care deeply about them as a person so even if and that I will often try to figure out what their superpowers and how like what they're good at and just feel like great you're doing that so I very much let people kind of like run with stuff but in general it's a really hard thing to do I tend to limit myself to working on small teams people who are really good at certain things that I am not necessarily good at so I can kind of go like great you're in charge of that and I'm in charge of this and let's work together on this thing because I know that that's important and I do care deeply about the people well when they can tell if that's not true but so the if you get feedback or if you give you know any kind of negative feedback as long as they know that you love them they will take it better and Roxy right just about courage to put ourselves out there and go hey I'm not very good at this oh [ __ ] I mean I really struggle it which kind of gives other people on a swarm which gives other people the opportunities people the opportunity to go and hell you know all the time and making it a safe place to talk about those feelings I think is there's often a good way to support Dan do you want to add something you've got two minutes can you do it sure yes I can there's the me in the way within an let's do full circle we're back to the environment is the me and the we're on a call right now we're in a call that's an environment in itself there's Laura this whole hey there's hawkers then there's some there's someone behind the scenes and there's four people listening in so it's not just about you it's about the we so I have found I have a habit of reading articles and sending articles to people to read but if some of the people listening on the call know that I do this whether they read it or they don't read it I'm not entirely sure but the act is to give so it's about them in the way it's about giving it's about creating a security and a trustworthiness within community and I would say to hand back to you Hawkeye come back to the notion of UX master is one place where of a number of places globally in reference to UX that is explicit and intentional in community building and that's a great thing thank you again what's the mall hey that is the got it go but thank you all so much I really

enjoyed today it was it was good fun and I learned a lot and thank you to those of you that were out there listening and sharing your questions and your thoughts so we will compile this transcripts and post it on our blog next week and also keep an eye out for the book because if you guys thought that these guys are good today weight swing really understood they need to say cool thanks thank you thank you thanks a lot bye