Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
I think maturity means leaving your ego at the door or just be aware that you brought it in the conversation. People are literally conflictual most of the time and navigating conflict is such a hard skill because you really have to separate your personality quirks, your vulnerability, your imposter syndrome, like all the things that are difficult for us as people. You have to really be able to take them out of the conversation to avoid that conflict or steer it in a constructive direction.
Hello designers and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm joined by Nafisa and today we will be unpacking the topic of maturity in design. What does it mean to be a mature designer? What are some traits that you want to hone as you progress in your career? Is maturity different from seniority?
And how do you show up at work as a person who is nice to work with and acts with integrity and is productive in how they collaborate and so much more. So this is an important topic because it can make a fundamental difference in your design career. And it's also something that we should strive for throughout our growth and journey as designers.
And I feel it also has that poetic aspect that I'm a very big fan of. So yeah, I'm very excited to unpack this. But before we do that, I just want to invite Anfisa to share how her past week was. What have you been up to? Yeah, just the juicy things. Juicy. Well, let's think. Okay.
Well, first of all, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the next episode. We are hoping you're enjoying the summer right now. It's so weird because we're recording this during the summer. And I think the last two, three years, we didn't record episodes during the summer. So it almost feels like unusual is something broken. So in my place right now, everything is doing pretty well. I think for the next two, three months, everything is like really in a good shape. I hope at least.
So yeah, working, my day job, I actually recently increased working for my day job from four hours a day to six hours a day. So I'm kind of testing my limits with how much I can actually take and work on while having a baby. And yeah, with the community, we're a bit slower right now. I think a lot of people are currently on the vacation, which is great. We took a little months off from the accountability groups. So yeah, people are taking time off. But
At the same time, I don't know if that's even interesting for anyone, but I just wanted to say that I've started noticing opening job trends picking up because a lot of the community members recently, they started looking for a job in the beginning of the summer. And now I can see a lot of people actually lending the job offers. So that's really exciting. And I feel like the UX industry is getting back on track.
with openings, with opportunities coming up our way. It's still not the full-on like it was in 2021, but I feel like it's a really good timing right now. And I feel like until the end of the year, a lot of people will actually find the jobs, given that, you know, by the end of the year,
A lot of the companies need to close their open roles before they needed a pitch for new budgets for the new hiring. So, yeah, by the end of the year, I think we're in a good place for the job hunting situation and a lot of community members finding the jobs, which is really exciting. Just last week, I think I've got four news from different four people about the job offer. Some of them got two job offers. Some of them got offers from really well-known companies.
Another guy got a job offer from Amazon and a few other companies that I want to review. But at the same time, it just feels exciting to finally feel like we're getting back on track.
So yeah, we're kind of like in a more or less good state and yeah, living the life, surviving with the baby, but it's okay. Baby is very active, so we're kind of managing somehow. How about you? How is your week or two? Yeah, so first of all, I'm very excited to hear that the industry is starting to pick up. I just had earlier this week this kind of poll on my stories and the question was, is everyone drained by tech?
Because most of the conversations I'm having with folks around me and not just designers, but product managers and just people generally working in tech for me, and maybe I'm projecting this, but it feels like there's this generalized drain and semi burnout that everyone is operating in. I think the last couple of years were very intense, and we didn't have time to properly recover.
One crisis on top of the other from the pandemic, then war, then economical crisis, layoffs, contracting market. It just feels like it's a bad couple of years for everyone. And I'm very happy to hear some good news. And I'm also kind of seeing that.
as well. Like I'm getting more reach outs from recruiters. I can see people around me starting to explore new roles. So I do share your optimistic angle, but I feel like it's one of the themes that keeps appearing in my life, not just professionally, but also personally for the past couple of months is this concept of ambivalence.
And I feel that it's being reflected also universally at scale in the world, in tech, in jobs. And when it comes to design careers, some things are good, some things are bad. And that's how we navigate this, right? So to continue this line of poetry, I think it has to do with summer. I don't know. I spend a lot of time or more than usual in summer.
nature at the seaside. I was just in the mountains the last weekend. So I feel I'm more connected to this poetic side of existing both professionally and personally. And so this is how the topic for today came up as an extension of that. I
I'm very excited to unpack it because I feel it's a bit abstract and it can be very ambiguous. But if we manage to get to the core of it, it's very important and valuable and universal. Yeah, let's just start. I'm going to just share my thoughts around it just to set the scene and how I think about this thing that feels a bit hard to grasp. And it's not very tangible.
So what does it mean to be mature? From my perspective, and it's probably, again, a topic that I have because maybe I feel I'm not there yet completely. I don't know who can say that. I'm very mature. I'm as mature as it gets. I think it's never over. It's a progression. You can constantly improve yourself. I can't imagine a moment in my life when I will say, you know what, I'm done. This is good. I'm just going to stay still.
And avoid any growth and improvement. Yeah. So maturity as a designer is something that also came up in a recent conversation with very senior design recruiters. And they were talking a lot about this concept of maturity, which for them translated into things such as leave your ego at the door and just be a driver for conversations. Right. And I started thinking about what it means.
and whether there's a distinction between being mature and being senior. Are they the same thing? Can you be senior but not mature? And can you be mature but not senior? And if I think about it, and if I look back at the people I worked with throughout my career, I see a distinction. I think they're different. I think I worked with junior designers that were very mature. And when I say mature, I don't mean just personally mature, like
they've done therapy and they know themselves and they have good self-awareness. There's also kind of this professional maturity when you show up with not just integrity, but you're constructive, I think is the best word. So people that manage to stay constructive, under pressure, under tension, with tight deadlines, with conflicts around them, with difficult personalities that they have to deal with. If you manage to stay constructive,
And a junior can achieve that if they have the right instruments internally. But also a senior can achieve it and sometimes seniors can't achieve it. I saw people with 20 years of design experience that were unable to hold that tension, to navigate conflict, to show up in this, yeah, just constructive way. So I feel that maturity can occur to some extent because, again, it's a continuous journey of constantly becoming positive.
more mature, but it can show up at any stage of your career. So this is my definition. And just to be even more tangible, I think, and how I think about it, I think maturity, it means leaving your ego at the door, or even if you don't leave it at the door, because you want to bring it with you in the conversation, just be aware that you brought it in the conversation, like that level of self-awareness is okay, now I'm talking from this place where I feel
vulnerable, or I just want to prove myself, or I feel that this person is trying to dominate the conversation. And this makes me angry. So just this constant self awareness and introspection exercise is something that I mean, ego will be there, we all have it. And it's healthy, right? It's something that drives us is something that helps us stand up for ourselves.
I'm not saying have no ego, like we're not Buddhists here. And I think that even the most Zen people in the world have egos from time to time in different situations. So it's unrealistic. But I think the acknowledgement of where you're now showing up in the conversation from, am I from a place of I'm trying to be constructive and think about the problem or am I now hurt by this person? And it's not about the problem. It's about the other person who is wrong and is not actually
thing properly and I have to prove it to themselves and everyone else. And so just constantly being aware of where do you come from at any given moment. And that's one aspect of maturity. And then sorry for the stream of consciousness, but like it seems like this episode will be just a poem where we just talk freely about the stuff.
And then the other aspect is something that I think I wasn't able to do because I wasn't mature enough is invite feedback, not just like in a cliche way, like, hey, give me feedback on this. But if you build a muscle or if you build a system where you really want to invite different perspectives, you really want to make sure whenever you're making design decisions or explorations that multiple people are
taken into the conversation and you're taking them on that journey and you still make the decisions, but you're inviting other perspectives. In my junior years, I was like terrified by feedback. Like, no, no, not another critique session. I don't want people to trash my design. Why do I have to explain everything? And I don't care what they say because we are really, we're going to do what business says or whatever. So now I feel like I'm constantly inviting conversations. Hey, look what I'm thinking about this problem. Do you see something else? Is there anyone else you think I should talk to? Do you have a different?
angle. Does it dovetail into anything that you're doing? And so, yeah, just constantly having those constructive conversations. And then another aspect is just the aspect of navigating conflict. I feel that judging by the past years in tech, everyone, like literally everyone, and I think we don't talk enough about that. I mean, it's not just tech. Recently, I met a girl who left tech. She actually worked at UiPath with me in a different role, not a designer. And she decided to leave the tech industry and she built a coffee shop.
And she told me that three years into this journey, she has a pretty successful business, but she told me that the hardest, hardest part is working with people. And then I remember going in multiple places. Like I go to my cosmetic salon, I go to my favorite specialty coffee store,
People are literally conflictual most of the time. There's some sort of tension between people working together in any environment. So I don't think this is a tech problem. I think this is a human problem. So because it's human, it's one of the things that if you manage to become better at, it's going to help you in both in your personal relationships, but also in any industry you choose to operate.
in, right? So and navigating conflict is such a hard skill, because you have to really have to separate your childhood trauma, your personality quirks, your vulnerability, your imposter syndrome, like all the things that are difficult for us as people, you have to really be able to take them out of the conversation to avoid that conflict or steer it in a positive direction in a constructive direction. So navigating conflict, I feel it's just
such a hard skill to master and so many people struggle with it and conflict is so common and prominent and especially under a lot of pressure. And so maturity means knowing how to deal with it as good as you can. And yeah, and so my question is, what was your experience around maturity?
Did you have a moment when you felt, okay, now I think I'm better at this? Do you remember the immature stage? Did you have an immature state? And what makes you feel that that was immature? And now you're getting better? Like, what were the things that improved for you to feel not just senior, right? Because again, I saw so many senior designers with 20 years of experience that just didn't know how to work constructively, that had more ego that they had
in the early days of their career that were more opinionated in the negative sense, like just holding on to their opinions and trying to impose them on others. So it's not about seniority. It's about just being a constructive human being. What was your journey? Okay, so let's try to do this. It's definitely such a big and deep topic that I really hope we can at least scratch the surface by trying to unpack it.
My journey, so I really love a lot of those thoughts you throw. I did a lot of notes and I actually want to pick up on them after I share my journey because I think so many brilliant and important topics you have unlocked, but we need to still kind of structure them in a way to kind of make sense of everything we just heard from you.
My story personally started from actually working in the product teams, essentially joining the product company and starting collaborating with others. And that goes in line with what you were just saying about people, right? Understanding people, communication, your values, your growths with collaboration, conflict, et cetera, collaboration, I guess. A lot of the things are related to how we work with other people. And so if I look back and try to reflect on
on how I started growing. I have to be honest, my journey is divided into two key major stages, one being working solo and second one started in 2019 working in a product company, in a product team. So in the first maybe five, six years, I was working more like solo startup, jumping the projects here and there. And while I was able to kind of realize, not really in a mature way, but subconsciously
consciously realize some of my weak spots. For example, my inability to kind of face the criticism easily, which comes from, I guess, my art background, because I was drawing a lot. My parents are architects, so they were putting me into art school and blah, blah, blah. And that kind of affected the way I perceive criticism. So for me, maybe that was that weak spot. While I was working as a freelancer, maybe my safe space was like to jump projects and
and not being able to face those hard conversations. And so I was like floating around. I was building my personal confidence by just building different projects. And I felt like for me, the safer space for my mental health, honestly, was to just figure it out on my own without actually failing hard within the group dynamic, I would say. And once I built the basic foundation, basic confidence, I switched the context.
strongly, like 180% to the product teams. So yeah, again, five, six years I was working freelancing. Now five, six years I'm working within the product context, within the product teams. That's where I realized I had to become more mature in how I approach working together. Because if before I had a hard client, moving on, next one, next one. It was easy to avoid hard situations. Now I cannot. It's almost like you're committing to the company, to committing to the team, to the relationships, right? Yeah.
And you kind of just jump ships easily. At least you have to have a two months notice period or something, right? When you're in Europe, we kind of jump ships easily now. And it's a safe mechanism for both companies to not like suddenly lose people, but also at the same time for designers to not lose jobs right away. The reason why this is important, why I'm bringing this up is because that's when I realized I had to face a lot of hard situations. Obviously, in my first place, I realized a lot of those, oh my God, like, and I was like,
putting myself into this corporate world right away. All the fun stories, like we have it typically in the office, you know, the series office. A lot of those situations were happening there. And this is when I realized, oh my God, I have to deal with all of those situations I've never dealt with. Oh my God, like how am I doing it in a mature and professional way? A lot of those moments when, you know, you have some people who are just doing it their way, they have strong opinions, they don't hear anyone else.
or other people who maybe are not very self-expressive. They could be portrayed negative while they could have still good intentions. And you have to like unlock all those layers while working and kind of trying to build whatever, deliver whatever you're working on. And so when I started facing those situations in the work environment, and we were still working in my one and a half year, I was working in the office environment.
So it was meeting those people face to face every day. It was fun, but at the same time, very challenging because you get to understand people much better. And sometimes uncover things that you don't like to see in front of you. And then I switched to the bigger company. I would say the design maturity was bigger there, but we had like a company structural issues with like dynamics between the teams and silos.
So it was a different types of group of challenges. But again, it's still much a lot about communication and power dynamic and hearing each other and collaborating effectively and doing things for the better, for the company and for yourself and not just protect your seat, right, in a company or whatever happens sometimes in the big companies. So you start realizing all those fundamental human problems and that gets you in this reflection mode, I would say. So that's the first time when I started actually making the reflection mode.
Before that, I was not in a therapy. I've never had this habit of reflecting and I've never really looked into how am I dealing with this situation, right? For the first time, maybe five, six years ago, I started making like reflection notes. This is what I've learned. This is what the situation happens. This is how I reacted. What are the worst way to react to this situation, etc., etc., etc.
And as I started having this habit of reflecting on the situations, it's not really like in a regular structured way, but like this situation happened suddenly, I'm going to write this down, right? When I see this insight, I'm going to write it down and I have like a little backlog of my insights that I hope help me progress in and how I think and change in my perspective, honestly. But it's a journey. And for the five last years, maybe I was kind of realizing a lot of those aspects. And it has to do with a lot of really human growth aspects.
And most of them were what you were actually mentioning, Joanna, right? It's starting from selflessness, humility, and ability to be open to listen to others. If I try to reflect on the things I believe right now are important for UX maturity, and I'm talking about human UX maturity, working in the product, in a professional environment, business, company, et cetera, like you said, it could be
coffee shop as well. I see there are a couple of layers of the UX maturity. First being, I think for me personally, fundamental is the selflessness and humility and being open. If you are not open, if you're closed by default, if you are really not into growing, it's so much harder to work with you because you can spend 10 years in the same position, not growing, not learning from your mistake because you're not open to do this, right? You can't be forced to grow. So for me personally, it's the fundamental. If the person is not open to growth, they don't have a growth mindset, it's very, very hard to work with those people.
And to me, it's something that rottens every company, every culture. If you don't have these open people in front of you working with you, I personally see this as the red flag. But it's only my perspective, of course. So that's the fundament. The second part is self-awareness, right? It's also hard to grow when you're not self-aware. You're not reflecting sometimes and trying to understand, here are my weak sides. Like I was previously mentioned, right? Maybe I was very sensitive to the criticism. How do I go about it? How do I put myself out there? How do I not afraid...
to face and have the hard conversations and confront sometimes. Because I'm avoiding confrontations by nature all the time. And only when I started working within the product teams, I realized, oh my God, I need to avoid this. Like, this is a weak spot. I cannot do this. It brings so much trouble afterwards when it's already not affecting just me, but the whole business. So this is a big problem I have to work with, right? And a lot of those things you have to spot on how you handle them. When you feel more stressed, more tense, these are the good
signals for you to look and kind of write them down somehow in a paper on the notes and realize you might have some place or opportunity to grow there. So self-awareness is another second, I guess, layer to the UX maturity in my perspective today. And then I think critical thinking, communication, integrity, those are all also starting to build up as we think about, you know, building UX maturity. So as you are self-aware about the problems you might have and you start spotting those moments and start changing your reaction, your behavior in these moments, you
then you might want to still... Okay, so sometimes the problem with being super open and super vulnerable for the criticism, it can take a toll on your confidence. And that sometimes also backfires on how you work and present yourself at the workspace. Because people with strong opinions are not going to go anywhere. So we still have to be very, very strong in what we have.
to offer, right? So working with self-awareness, but also self-confidence is a very important part of it. I would say it's a balance we have to always try to retain. If you have a good, strong manager, this manager, I actually have a very good manager in my previous job who's helping me to balance out my confidence, but also being open and being aware and trying to grow from all the areas where I still see the growth opportunities.
So this is the balance. And if you have a good design manager, that's where you can have the personal support in helping you stay in touch with yourself and doing your best job, right? The self-critical part, right? The confidence part. That's a very important part because if you don't know who you are and what you have to offer, and if you don't know your strong side, that even in the moments when you're failing and when you're still like maybe not so strong in some areas, you still know what you have to offer, right?
You still know, for example, you're good at your visual design. You can communicate things. You're a great business thinker. Whatever you are, right? You have those things to offer. So you're not a complete loser. You just need to remind yourself about that. And that's another part where you have to be able to talk with yourself to be able to keep doing your best job, right? And if we're not confident in ourselves, that affects our critical thinking. And sometimes we cannot push back
on some strong opinions, strong directions, strong things that might not even make sense for the business. And then everyone ends up in the place nobody wants to be in when the company or business fails, right? So yeah, keeping your confidence strong and sort of solid helps you to voice your opinions, even if you feel like your ideas are not very, very strong yet. Maybe you're asking stupid
questions. Oh, that's right, right? And sometimes you need to challenge the status quo and how the processes are established here in the company. You might still need to challenge that because it might not make sense or you have at least need to have an opportunity to ask the questions why things are done this way and it takes confidence to do that, right? So that's still another area for growths that
contributes to UX or just general maturity. And then again, another thing such as open, constructive, yet human communication. Communication is what a lot of people, me included, all of the people I know I've worked with in the past, it's the growth journey. Communication sucks in the beginning. And if you acknowledge that you have growth opportunity in the communication skill, it's so much, so much better to work with you because you can notice the difference in how people communicated before and after. And so, yeah, I think in one of the recent conversations, Ioana mentioned that it's
It's about remembering that we are all kids and we're just working with a bunch of kids. We all come from the childhood. We all had our tantrums. We all had our moments of showing the character. But in the cultural space, we are trying to have our professional space. But we are still having our tantrums somewhere inside of us. And the way we perceive them, in some days we can control them better. In some days we cannot.
And so communication is how you actually are able to constructively communicate important points, being able to prioritize the most important points, being succinct yet human. Communication is a bond. It's so important to really work on your communication. Like, for example, my area you might have noticed in the other episodes, my problem with the communication is that I can never shut up. I can speak and speak and speak and speak and rumble, rumble, rumble, and people cannot shut me up because I just can't stop going, right? So now maybe you're feeling this as well.
And that's the area for improvement for myself, for communication skill. And a few other things such as integrity. I don't know, like you said, managing conflict, etc. There are so many more things that come to my mind right now, but I'm actually going to stop and see if we can actually sort of reverse this conversation from how we understand it and try to think what are the ways for us to maybe grow and become more UX mature. So what do you think we should tackle next?
I would be very interested to explore. Let's say you are aware that you're not very mature, that sometimes you show up at work and you do something. And at the end of the day, you feel like, ah, that was my best moment. I could have handled that better. And I want to handle it better. So how do I operate next time?
Let's say you have the intention of becoming more mature and so more employable, better to work with and so on. So all the good things that stem from that. What would be some tips that you have for people who want to improve that aspect of their profession? How would you go about it? Or like, yeah, what are tips and tricks to becoming a more mature junior or senior or mid designer? Okay, I'll try to be brief and I'll take on this challenge this time.
My perspective, it's something I already started talking about, is really spotting those moments, realizing the signals in the moment. Because even if you're not working, let's say you're a junior looking for a first job, even if you're not working yet, you have the opportunities around you every day with your partner, with your friends, with your student teams, etc.,
When you might feel some sort of tense way, you're not comfortable, you're tense, you're defensive, et cetera, et cetera. It's about spotting those moments, stopping for a second, make a note about it, look back into this note and try to start thinking, what are the other ways I can handle this situation? What did this person want to say and why did they react this way or another way? First of all, I think it's really about understanding where you have those weak areas. And it's not only about the professional environment. In professional environment, it's easier because it's very direct, but
you can still abstract and find those moments in your daily life and realizing them, but then starting to reflect on them and then starting modeling different situations or different ways of resolving the same problem next time better. And it's a iterative process. It's like just with design. It's never perfect from the first time, but realizing the moment is the hardest and most important fundamental part to start from, in my opinion, of course. So yeah, starting from yourself is always the most important part we have to do. But like,
If you want a more tangible example, especially if you're already working in the product teams, for me, it's about business.
being open to the change, to be very honest. And that's where I'm coming from right now in my current stage. Like if you're currently working in a product team and sometimes you're not comfortable with what happens around you, right? Maybe the PM is very complicated and not open to collaborate with you. Maybe the product leadership is changing. Maybe the design collaborators are not so collaborative or whatever happens, right? We all are different. And it's beautiful because we can find new opportunities for us to learn from. But at the same time, it could be hard in the moment when you really need to get this project going.
running and making something useful out of it. So it's about finding those opportunities in your workspace as well. Every time there is a change or hardship, these are the great or the best opportunities for growth. Like every turbulence brings a lot of growth. Every conflict...
brings growth. Every change, sometimes uncomfortable change, brings growth and possibly better alternatives. Every, I don't know, economic crisis right now, right? It brings growth. For a lot of businesses, they have to change the way they approach things. They maybe should have started being a bit more focused and structured and less laid back and started stop losing money and accumulate the resources instead. And so every turbulence is the growth opportunity, but it's about
changing the perspective instead of thinking, oh my God, everything is in hell. Nothing is working. I'm so tired. I don't want to do anything. It's about what if I change my perspective? And yes, it's hard. I hate it. But a few years from now, I will be able to handle so many more complicated situations. I will be able to overcome
more and more complex nuances and I will be going through them with ease. It's so much harder when you have real conflict and real problem in the workspace and it's so complicated and you really have no perseverance to go through this. But if you have small conflicts here and there, you build this muscle and it's easier to use this muscle in a future much more complicated situation. So
Yeah, it's about those small opportunities, finding people who are hard to work with, finding ways to work with them from your own perspective, realizing that some people are different than you. Like, for example, you're more sensing type, more intuitive type, but you're working with somebody who's very, very constructive, pragmatic, detail-oriented. While it could be hard for you to grow as these people, it's such a great opportunity for you to grow because you can start speaking their language. You can start communicating.
collaborating with them, hearing what they have to offer that you didn't do before. And that's a way for you to become a better collaborator and contributor, right? So yeah, it's about those moments. But what about you? What do you think are the tips people can think and use in their daily life today? If you've been listening to this episode for a while, you probably know that I'm a huge advocate of therapy in general. It's going to help you personally to see the things that you can't see. A lot of people say, oh, but I know my problems. I'm very aware of my problems.
What can a therapist tell me that I don't know? Because I'm just a very self-aware person. But most of us have this shadow aspect of things that we keep under the rug. We hide them from ourselves. And so therapy would help you surface some of the things in which you might not act ideally or you're very far from the ideal and making you aware of them. So acknowledging and yeah, just accepting where you in a way fail or I don't even want to call it a failure, where you're not acting as good as you could be.
Yeah, and just accepting and acknowledging. That's one thing. And so continuing with the advice of therapy, I think constant introspection is a bit like not frantic introspection and neurotic introspection, like constantly wondering, what did I do right? Is this wrong? Am I wrong? Who is wrong? So if you have an obsession, you will open the door to a lot of anxiety and constant self-doubt.
But a healthy level of introspection, like once per month journaling and sitting down with yourself, taking a one hour walk where you think about, hmm, how did I behave at work for the last couple of weeks? What were the moments where I felt most tense? Where were the moments where I felt like my emotions are taking the
best of me. How did I respond to that? Did I just let them be? Did I observe them and just acted from a place of conscious decisions? Or did they just take over and I acted in a way that was almost uncontrolled or just random? And so reflecting on the things that you experienced for the past month with this welcoming lens, right? So not trying to spot where you fail or just none with an internal critic eye, but
With curiosity. I think that's the key. Just be curious about yourself. What's going on when I'm in a tense situation, right? And to your point, these tense situations tell us what we feel or what we stand for, what our boundaries are. And if boundaries have been crossed, I mean, anger is healthy. Getting angry
angry with someone at your workplace might signal that they're crossing your boundaries and that's a healthy emotion to experience but just observing at some point taking time to observe and then my last piece of advice is actually constructed on a story it's never too late to revisit behaviors that you're not proud of or moments in your career where you did less than you should have
done or you wanted to do or there's this aspect of making things better, even if you can't fix them or you can't rewrite them, but making them a bit better. And the story I want to share is I had a manager that was not very nice to me. He had a lot of ego,
problems. He was very anxious and very stressed out by a lot of pressure from leadership. And he was in his first manager role, and he really wanted to perform. And he was just constantly in this hypervigilance tense mode. And that reflected on how he behaved with others. And I had a pretty hard experience reporting to him. He was always very stressed out at why am I doing things autonomously, like he has to check everything and he has to know what I'm doing.
Why do I have ideas? Why do I come up with suggestions to improve stuff? He's the one who should be doing that. So it was borderline ridiculous.
somewhat abusive, a very not nice environment for me. And anyhow, I switched jobs. And then two years later, I think, or three years later, he invites me for a coffee chat. And he tells me that he was in this kind of leadership camp or some sort of thing where you're forced to introspect, you're forced to reflect on when you were not ideal in your workplace. And he was forced to do this introspection, self-reflection exercise. And it
maybe not even forced, but invited. So he was given the space and the right and the invitation to, hey, just think about these things. And he had an epiphany and he felt genuinely sorry for his behavior. And he reached out to me and he told me, I know I can't make things better now, but I'm extremely sorry for the way I behaved. I was afraid. Then he took ownership for his behavior. And for me, three years later, it didn't even
matter anymore. I was way past it and moving on with my life. So it's not that I needed any kind of apology. He wasn't doing it necessarily for me, but he was doing it because it was the right thing to do. And because he honestly acknowledged that he made mistakes and he wanted to at least acknowledge them in a shared conversation. And that was extremely powerful. And I immediately regained
respect for him and I saw him as a vulnerable person a human being that had a bad moment in their life and they're not a bad person they strive to be better they really try to make things better when they wronged someone so it was very powerful yeah I think the gist of this story is the concept of
It's too late to do something right. If you feel you acted immaturely five years ago, reach out to those people or make it better. Or if there was a project where you treated it with a superficial approach and rushed it and didn't do a great job for one of your clients, reach out to that client and tell them, you know what? I was under a lot of pressure back then and I was rushing to make a lot of money or get as many clients as I wanted. And I know I wasn't a very good
partner for you. So maybe can I offer something in return, like a free audit of your website or a free kind of going through a product and helping you with improvement suggestions? Like you can make things better retroactively. My point is, and yeah, think about the moments that you're not very proud of and maybe reach out to those people and tell them and
Yeah, I think this is my last idea. Ooh, we're going to wrap up now. So thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope this abstract conversation didn't feel too abstract. I enjoyed it.
So there is some value, I think, to it. And yeah, don't forget to rate us on your platform of choice. Don't forget to submit topics for episodes. We want to talk about things that are interesting. And yeah, I don't know. Just everyone have a very lovely rest of the day. And the summer. Yay! We probably will see you together with Ioana next time already in Berlin. So that's going to be the very first live episode we're doing actually together in the same room. So that would be very interesting.
So yeah, by the way, if you have any suggestions for our topics that we should record offline, on-site, which you feel like would actually be a better presentation of off-site energy and, you know, conversation, do let us know because it would be really nice to know what you think we should talk about. Okay, and that would be it from our site. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.