Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
another route to learning what I'm good at. And sometimes there's an overlap between
between what you're good at and what you enjoy doing. A lot of my learning about what I like doing and what I'm good at came from these personal experiments. Running UX goodies, doing talks on stage, online, building courses, mentoring people, content, podcasts. All the things that I'm experimenting with are kind of giving me new instruments for mirroring myself. They're giving me new angles in which I'm looking at myself and learning more.
Hello designers and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Anfisa and today we will be unpacking a very interesting topic. How do you learn and discover what you're good at as a UX designer? And before we jump into this topic, I just want to ask Anfisa how her past week was. Spoilers, I know she had a very interesting past week. I think
professional highlight. And I'm very excited to learn more about how that went. And then I will shortly go over my past week and then we can jump into the topic. So Anfi, how was your past week? Shortly is the key word, right? My week was actually extremely busy, one of the busiest weeks of the year. And it's because honestly, for some reason, everything happens in the last week of May. Literally every event I knew
in the world was happening last week. So it was very hard on energy. Luckily I wasn't sick, so I'm really grateful for that already. But yeah, there was so many things. Obviously the highlight you want to mention was my first ever talk on the stage. Yay. And I didn't faint and some people said it was useful. So I guess I can count it as a success.
Of course, when I finished the talk and I get down from the stage, the first thing like, oh my God, what was that? What happened? I don't realize what happened just now. And everybody's rushing to meet you and like saying nice things to you. It was really refreshing, really rewarding. So honestly, that moment when I get down from the stage, it was the highlight.
of the whole week and probably even my whole year it will be. So it was great. Plus my team was extremely supportive. Oh my God, my mentee came down with the flowers. It was like, oh my God, I shed a light or something. So, you know, it's this weird moment when you feel like what just happened. And so, yeah, it was definitely beautiful and I'm already excited for the next talk. We will actually also meet in Berlin for the Hatch Conference in September. Yay!
You'll find the links in the bio. But Hedge Conference, I'm looking forward to it so, so much simply because it's one of those most discussed, most amazing conferences from last year. I've heard so much great feedback. And it's happening in Berlin, in Europe. So you don't have to go to US if you're in Europe.
If you have a FOMO that everything is happening in LA, now you have to go to Berlin. Berlin is the place where you'll have a similar experience. And I'm so excited because we will also finally meet with Joanna there. Yay! But I guess we'll speak about it more in details in the next episodes before the event starts.
The rest, obviously, there are so many other things. I had a birthday. We had a lot of parties. My company had a conference when we were presenting the product I was supporting in the last two, three months. So many different things. I cannot even go through everything. So I will sacrifice this time and ask you, how was your week? So first of all, happy birthday live on air, because I, of course, also told you in our chats.
Happy birthday. May you have a great year ahead. And yes, the Hatch conference is also something I'm looking forward to and congrats on being on stage. I know that's draining and also very exciting. Sometimes I even had these epiphanies about life while being on stage. I think it's an interesting...
I wouldn't call it a fundamental life experience but it's a powerful life experience so yeah I'm happy for everything you've been doing I've also been doing some nice things which are more aligned with my plan to work less it's not going very well I still work a lot way more than I want but
I made room this weekend to go to Venice for the Art Biennale and it was very refreshing and it helped me think new thoughts, connect different ideas and themes and existential topics and just enjoy walking around through all the installations and pavilions and the entire vibe in Venice for the Biennale is amazing. Even the location is like
huge fan of giardini it's just the most beautiful idea in the world that countries decided to build houses in their like kind of architectural flavor and then display art there every two years it's just incredible the entire concept and so i was very happy to go see more art as our audience if we're listening to us often this is something that i kept saying that i want to do and i
doing it. Here I am. And now I also started drawing and writing poetry. And so it helped me connect to that internal function that I've been ignoring and to my detriment for the past couple of years. But maybe I will go back to being more creative and more artistic. I think we all have that little artist in us that doesn't have room
to exist because we're stuck in these day-to-day tasks and to-do lists and pressure and urgency. And then when can we be artistic? Which if you look at children, like when I look at Mia, my daughter, all children are creative. We are all creative. I think everybody should do more of that. My point is, but now let's jump into the topic for today, which is how do you
know what you're good at as a designer. Let's go for our typical path to unpacking topics. Anantisa, what was your experience so far in your career? Of course, it's still a work in progress forever. But so far, how did you discover what you're good at? How did you end up learning these things about you? What was your process? What was your experience?
Okay, great question to start from. I'm trying to immediately go through the whole kind of years of experience to figure it out right now. But I think I shared a little story and I'll bring this up again generally because for me, the break-even point was when I started teaching design. My whole story was that essentially I had a horrible imposter syndrome for the first about four years of design career. I had mentors at my university that was not very supportive and
And I felt constantly that I'm not good enough. They never would give me the feedback. They would have this silent, mysterious smile that gave me an idea that I'm not doing great and everything. So there was a lot of undercommunication in my early years and that impacted my self-worth. And I essentially felt like I'm never good enough. What do I know? I'm probably really bad. And my English was really poor to be very objective. So honestly, when I spoke and not everybody would understand what I'm speaking about, I could not really articulate my thoughts properly.
And while I was constantly learning, I guess I was falling into that trap of learning more than I can practice, even though I did my startups and everything, but I still felt like it's really bad. I need much more practice. Who am I even? I know nothing, all of that, right? So imposter syndrome was a huge part of my journey for a while. And until essentially I was invited to join this kind of program where I would teach design in the evening courses, traveling to Georgia. So from Estonia, I moved to Georgia. I started teaching in the evening courses. And of
obviously I was still very terrified. I thought, who am I even? And the first moment, just like with the stage, right? You enter that little room with 20 people sitting and staring at you. I think it was 99% males. There was one girl, I remember, or maybe two girls. And all of them were like 30 plus years already working professionals. And I was the only one who was 25, I think I was there or something. And so everybody's like staring at me and I was supposed to be a teacher. So I was going to speak about what is UX design, how do we use it and everything. Obviously a very terrifying moment.
And as soon as he started speaking and as soon as people started giving me the smiles, after like many years when my mentor was not giving me a smile and was never giving me any feedback, that reaction, that emotional sort of connection immediately helped me because they were very supportive. And they helped me realize that I know something. And they were asking me questions. They were supporting me, giving me nice feedback. And slowly, slowly, slowly, as I was presenting,
There were so many small parts that helped me realize and I know something, I have some words. Starting from the aspects such as, I know what to speak about for one and a half hours and it was never enough time and I could go on, go on, go on. Every day I had like, I don't know, two, three hour lecture. As I was speaking a lot, I realized, oh my God, I know so much. I just never realized I know it. And so for me, the realization moment was that I needed to reflect and I needed to start presenting it. So I stored the mess in my head, thinking that I know nothing,
When it turns out, I know so much, I just never really had an outlet.
to test or share my knowledge. So that was the first moment. And this like missing part in my journey was literally the reflection and ability to speak out, to sort the mess in my head, but also the people who would give me the feedback in a way. Those that were students or mentees, they were my mentors because they were giving me the feedback. They would give me this emotional reaction to whatever I was presenting to tell me what I'm doing right and what I'm not doing right.
and where the gaps are and because there was this loop of communication they were not giving me the poker face but were giving me the life reaction I started much faster realizing where I'm not going great and where I should go back and fill out the gaps because essentially I always had this gross mindset I really wanted to know more I really had to know everything it was important for me
But I never knew how am I doing because nobody was giving me that feedback. And I know we have talked a lot with Jojoana here in those Never episodes, especially in the first maybe like 50 episodes, we talked constantly about the role of mentoring, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the moment when I realized
I really, really need to have the feedback on what I'm doing. Plus, I need to speak more often to articulate my thoughts and start building that ability for people to understand me. Just like we're doing right now here. I feel like definitely this podcast was part of my growth journey to be able to be articulate and
Even some people are today who I worked with like five years ago are telling me, oh my God, Anfisa, you became so much better as a communicator. I think that became those like missing puzzles in my journey. But I know I've been sharing this story. So I actually want to hear your story and your part of the reflection. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing this. For me personally,
Well, I think the most fruitful route to understanding what I'm good at is, of course, obviously, self-reflection is a mandatory condition. So you have to stop, pause and think about things. Just make the room to analyze past situations. It's like the retrospective ceremony, right? In Agile, you have to have that.
And after every project, I sat down with myself and thought about what went wrong. Why did the things that go wrong go wrong? And what was good about it? And so doing these reflection exercises kind of helped me surface the patterns from one project to another. I realized that the things that went well were similar, were mostly the same thing.
And then that's how I learned that from one project to another or from one role to another in my full-time roles, it seemed that I was able to be a good collaborator to people and help build clarity in places that had a lot of ambiguity or moving parts, just fog. And so I started spotting these patterns of what went well. And then I realized that maybe it had something to do with
what I'm naturally good at. And then, of course, you can also rely on external feedback. But funnily enough, I've learned that external feedback can sometimes even be contradictory. So there's also that subjective aspect. People are sometimes projecting some of the things. They only get a glimpse of you. And so when they get that glimpse of you, they tend to pick on cues that might mean something or might mean nothing. I got compliments for things that I think I'm not very good at.
And I also got sometimes criticized for things that I know I'm pretty good at. But of course, you still have to listen. Sometimes you can think you're good at something and then get the feedback that you're not. And so I might want to revisit that idea. But my point is that external feedback can also have this very subjective dimension. And you should always take it with a grain of salt and really think it through and see if it repeats itself.
from other people. And in case you're lost in conflicting external feedback, ask more people. It's like with research studies, right? You have some assumptions, you have some things you want to validate or invalidate, you need more data. And so just reach out to other people and try to see if those things stand out.
across multiple conversations and collaboration points. And then so this was in my, let's say, very professional space. But another route to learning what I'm good at, and sometimes there's an overlap between what you're good at and what you enjoy doing. Typically, we enjoy doing the things that we're good at because it gives us an immediate reward. Hey, look, I did this and it went well. Yay.
And so we avoid the things that we're not very good at, especially for the same reason, right? So it's just immediate punishment, like, oh, shit, I failed again. And that's also fine, because just by failing, you can make progress. So I'm not against doing the things that we're not good at or fear, but we typically tend to choose the things we're good at. And typically, we enjoy the things that we're good at.
It can also, in multiple cases, we're good at something and we don't like it or we like something that we're not good at. But let's say, generally speaking, right, keeping it in the majority of cases.
Where I'm leading with this point is that a lot of my learning about what I like doing and what I'm good at came from these personal experiments. Running UX goodies, doing talks on stage, online, building courses, mentoring people, content.
podcasts, all the things that I'm experimenting with are kind of giving me new instruments for mirroring myself. They're giving me new angles in which I'm looking at myself and learning, wow, this project really got me excited. Why? Or learning, oh shit, this went bad. Why? All the things we do are opportunities for having these mirrors.
So yeah, to conclude my personal journey, I've learned the most from my personal projects, like the side projects. It's in a way counterintuitive. And then the second most I've learned from reflecting, doing,
doing my jobs and projects. And then the third from other people, which you would imagine it's the first, but for me, it wasn't. I think it's mostly an independent. Other people's opinions are just another layer of data points, but the data points are very much available internally, if that makes sense. And so start from yourself and then try to see if there's a match between what you feel and you think is and what other people confirm or invalidate or whatever.
So yeah, that's my experience. You have brought so many great points. You structure things very well. I like that you mentioned there is literally three aspects. You're right. And at the end of the day, it's about you reflecting, you're being passionate or excited about something, plus hearing external feedback. Those three components will build the
picture for you that will make you definitely much more aware about your strong sides. But I also wanted to ask you, essentially, you mentioned a lot of those experiments you had with content creation, doing talks, doing podcasts, creating content, et cetera, et cetera. What would we recommend our listeners who are not interested in being public speakers or whatever, being public in general, how could they essentially experiment to understand their strong sides?
especially if they're like junior designers or transitioning designers who don't have the outlets to experiment as much. I love this question. And it was actually my second question for our conversation. How can people employ these techniques? If you're someone who wants to learn
maybe you don't have the same appetite for experimenting with things that aren't in your interest zone how can you still learn everybody has something they would be curious to do like that curious to do might not be i'm curious to talk on stage or and see how i feel i've talked to someone recently she was in a position to host a podcast do stage talks do all these things she
She said it's too uncomfortable for her. And I said, wow, that's exactly why you should do it. Like, just do it because it's uncomfortable. It's great. It's an opportunity. And then she was like, no, I'm just not interested. And it's probably that she's post rationalizing. I'm not interesting because I'm actually very scared. And that's also fine. But she had made a decision. I am not interested in this path. And that's fine. Like whatever her reasons,
Sometimes we just don't want to do something and we should enforce ourselves for the sake of personal growth. And so sometimes you don't want to do things, but there's always something that you would do. Maybe it's drawing and you learn from drawing sketches or just brain dumping your ideas and concepts. Sometimes it's, I don't know, listening to music or watching movies about design and thinking about learning from other people's stories. That's another way of learning.
consuming content, not creating content. And so I think that everybody is curious about something, even if sometimes when people ask me what I like, I'm like, do I like something? Do I have a hobby? I think design is my hobby. Is that a hobby? And so I don't have clarity on what I want to learn next and what I'm curious about. And I think many people don't have that. And they feel like maybe I'm not curious enough. Maybe I'm not interesting enough. Maybe I'm not interested enough. But
At the end of the day, if you look deep there, there's something that you would do that's sort of connected to your design role. And I would say that's an opportunity for learning something about you. It doesn't have to be the classic recipe, right? Take a side project as a UX designer and see if you're good at freelancing.
Of course, that's a more tangible opportunity for learning if you're good at freelancing. And so you're validating, you're learning about a big, important, clear assumption. Otherwise, you don't have these assumptions and you're just learning freely by doing things, by taking a walk.
I think it's very much about tuning in into what you want to experiment with and then seeing what are the lessons that are available there. And sometimes there might just be that there is no lesson. So you just do something for the sake of doing it and just for the enjoyment of it.
And yeah, maybe that enjoyment is also a data point, right? Why are you enjoying that? And so this is just perpetually questioning the things that you expose yourself to. And sometimes I even get that feeling from personal relationships, right? So sometimes I realize that I just navigated a conflict with so much maturity and grace. And I'm like, you know what? I think maybe this is something I could use in my job as well. Like this energy, this kind of function I surfaced here in this
conflict, why don't I take that at work? And then I realized that, yeah, maybe I'm a good navigator of stuff.
I think there are opportunities for knowing ourselves everywhere. We just have to look at things and ask questions. What would be your tips? So many thoughts. I'm just like trying to organize my thoughts and not jump into everything. I'll start from the fact that you mentioned this point about consuming, right? If you're not a creator, it's totally okay to be a consumer and learn from this because not everyone from us like had this need to be out there, to share whatever they know. And this is like a little side story, but still I needed to bring this.
I remember, maybe like five years ago, but I had this horrible belief, again, a part of the imposter syndrome or something, that, okay, I'm a creator, so I should not be consuming the content. I should constantly, constantly create the content. I should constantly be out there. There was this hustle culture. We just recorded an episode about that. You know, there was this Gary Vee who would say, yeah, you have to be always recording everything, sharing everything, you know, because you're wasting your time if you're not doing it.
Well, there were a lot of moments when I was like very proactive and I would share a lot of things. And there were moments when I felt I could not. There's nothing I can share. I'm empty. And today I'm realizing, oh my God, it was such a... Sorry for the word, but bullshit. Because honestly, you have to go outside to learn something. You cannot always...
create from outside of you because you are not the internal reflection machine. There are always experiences you have to go through to learn something or resources you have to read, listen, reflect on to be able to produce more content. So I believe that there is a lot of beauty in consuming the content today, which I was not
a big believer in the past. I always felt like, oh my God, I'm a bad content creator. I'm taking two months breaks to learn something, to read books or whatever. But there is only that much amount of time in front of you. So you should be very smart about sort of filling that time with learning and also sometimes using your learnings to share, right? There has to be this loop, at least for me. But also, if you're just a consumer, it's
so great as well. I think like if you're definitely the person who feels like you want to take the content slower and you want to learn it and you want to take your time and to process it, most likely you're a more deep person than me and you understand the information much deeper than many people do. And so it's totally, totally okay. And I feel like we have to just be very...
aware about the beauty of it as well. A few more things that you did mention before I jump into the tips, which I feel like we also need to mention, is that this is also on the line with the consuming content. I think that there are so many things that you can even learn from reading, even from other people. So just medium articles. One article that came into my mind, which maybe is a practical advice if you want, is the article by BuzzWallet that I actually took into my job hunting strategy course, which is called...
which of the million UX roles suits you the best, a personality type analysis. And he basically took an inspiration from the 16 personality test, which still is not scientific, just for disclaimer. But he took the idea from we are learning and expressing ourselves in different ways. Some of us are more extroverts. Some of us are more introverts. Some of us learning by sensing. Some of us learning by analyzing, etc. So he took this information that he took these principles of the 16 personality test and mapped it
down on the current state of UX market with all those different areas where you can blossom better. For example, more analytical, more, let's say, like Ioana said, navigating the conflict. Maybe you're a moderator. Maybe you're somebody who can facilitate alignment, facilitate different situations at the workspace, right? Different conflicts, et cetera. So you can literally reflect on what are your strong sides.
even personality-wise, even from other transferable backgrounds, such as in a psychology or marketing science, really looking back into your background and how your natural skills, things that you want to mention earlier today, such as what you're interested in, what you're naturally good at, as well as what people are telling you from the outside, and use that
formula to create your own, I love to call it, your personal pizza from different ingredients, where as soon as you start reflecting and add that force component that I also brought in my story, having this loop of a feedback and reflection and practice and collecting feedback and reflection and everything, you start building that
confidence and fundament based on which you can always go back. And if in a moment when you feel, oh my God, I'm so bad, I didn't do this and this, go back to that fundament and remind yourself about your strong things that yes, you cannot be great at everything. Obviously, there are psychological traumas from our past, like I did had from my mentors and
But there is still something that you could be really great at. And you have to leverage that. And you have to remind yourself that. And so sometimes you can also remind that to others by doing the work you're really good at. So people will recognize you by being great in other areas than this particular area.
Obviously, there are other tools that you can use. For example, in my community, we have the tool that is called Job Hunting Strategy Workshop. Seven to ten people join this workshop every month, and we go through exercises from my current skills, my past transferable skills, things I'm interested in, things I'm good at, things I'm not good at, and all those things, and how that maps into the
company that you are most interested in. So basically we're reflecting all together, we're sharing our stories and then we build our sort of pyramid of strategy where I should be intentionally applying to. So that also is one of the tools you can use. You don't have to use the community workshop that we run but you can just do this for your own selves using similar exercises if you are more
comfortable doing it on your own. And yeah, I feel like definitely you still have to think what other people are telling about you. So for example, what your partner will tell about you, what your friends will tell about you, what people you collaborate with in other areas, maybe your side projects, your interests, what do people tell about you? If you were not in the room with your personal branding and that's, I guess, the fundament for your strong sides and a sort of reminder for you about your strengths.
I remember you mentioned, Ioana, also very briefly that when people are telling you something, maybe this is a good sign. If people repeat telling you about this, maybe that's a good sign of what your strong sides are. I wanted to add a little sort of bias here or something that I had as a problem. Maybe some people could feel the same, but I personally have this weird bias that if somebody is telling me you're good at something, I guess it's this distortion from their childhood or
prove something to someone. But I have this feeling that somebody tell me I'm good at whatever, I'm going to go on and prove them I'm good at whatever. And I will go all in into this. So be careful about those biases, because sometimes you can take them too literally. For me personally, what I would do today is write it down. If it repeats, great. But I don't want to go and prove this. But I used to have this pattern very strongly in my past. And
today I have to be very careful with not proving it too much, you know, which is, again, another side note. But yeah, I guess we can start wrapping it here. Anything else you want to add here? Any tips that we need to go over? Just quickly wrapping up. So to understand what you're good at, use your internal...
assumptions and feelings and directions and thoughts and analysis data points, right? So analyze by doing self-reflection, milestones, checkpoints throughout your career. These can be in the form of drawing, sketching,
just revisiting conversations from your projects i don't know it could be whatever you feel is giving you information on how you've managed and what was good and what was bad about everything you've done a feature a project a collaboration a job and so this internal or independent analysis and then also look at other data points available in other projects and try to match them say
So at my job, I was doing well this thing. Did I also do that well in my freelance project? Or does this reflect in my podcast conversations? Or does this reflect in the content I'm creating? Like, make sure you're cross analyzing between multiple things that you're doing and then match everything with external information, which
comes from other people. And don't be afraid to ask for feedback. Take it with a grain of salt. Again, it might be just somebody projecting something. But if you intersect, it's like in journalism, you need three sources to believe something, right? If it intersects and the points where it intersects, it overlaps. You can be confident that there's something in there. That triangulation, right? Exactly. Data triangulation. And also your gut feeling is really very...
valuable and I used to not listen to it because I thought it's just emotions running wild but it's emotions with like something from the subconscious which is knowledge not implicit not conscious knowledge so trust yourself and you will know what you're good at in time by experimenting and observing I just like how we always arrive to the same conclusion like you x your whatever it is the key word right you x your confidence you x your job hunting you x your this you x your that
Again, we arrived to the same conclusion. UX your confidence and strength.
And I think we can wrap up. Thank you all for joining. If you want us to talk about anything specific, submit your topic on UX Goodies, on Amphisign Instagram page or on Honest UX Talks Instagram page. We also have a LinkedIn page now. Make sure to follow it and yeah, submit topics. I think also Spotify has this feature. Rate us to support this conversation. Thank you for listening. Check out past episodes. Stay tuned for future episodes. And thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye.
so
