AR2021-You Are a Badass at UX: Overcoming Impostor Syndrome (Megan Kierstead- Researcher and Coach)
—> Good morning, and talking about feeling like badass at UX research
—> The reality is that emotional health impacts the ability for us to do our jobs
—> At core, what is discussed today is where self-doubt comes form, how to change it, and how you can feel better if you can’t change your external circumstances
—> Focus will be on building emotionally-healthy, bad-ass researchers, product managers, and other design professionals
—> Our jobs as researchers is to influence and help people make decisions and empathize with people in world
—> We need to influence people, and that requires you to believe in what you’re doing
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Doesn’t mean you can’t have total confidence in results, but need to believe approach is valid, and that you bring valuable skills
—> Hard to do this when you are in self-doubt
—> And that self-doubt comes home with you.
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I’ve seen researchers constantly trying to prove themselves that their research is useful
—> This will naturally impact identity and your emotional health
—> Need to think of self-care that lets you do work that is courageous and useful
—> Way we experience emotions are on a huge high/low swing
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Due to motivation of external factors and feedback
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Your boss gives positive review/negative view either boosts you or destroys you
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—> This happens to people regardless of experience level
—> The goal is not to eliminate self-doubt but to mitigate the opinions of others on your well being
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UXRs need to speak truth, but can’t do that if doubting themselves
—> For me the emotion needed to be brave is “bad-ass”
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Makes me feel like I can do job very well
—> Bad-ass. means
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Vulnerable
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Brave
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True to myself
—> Bad-ass as term is rooted in masculine ideas, but for me it’s a feeling in body, that I can do this
—> Bad-ass can be different adjective or form of identify
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Think about what researcher, leader, human you want to be (as you can’t separate these things out)
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For example being an accessibility expert, or feeling compassionate
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—> No one will decide for you what it means to be good at something
—> I’ll now go into an explanation of roughly how brain works.
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We basically experience things as follows.
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You have circumstances (anything that happens that people generally agree on)
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Thought is what happens in your brain in response to circumstance
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Feelings are sensations in body that you give labels
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Actions are what people can change
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—> All of these phenomenon are contextual, and vary from brains, backgrounds, educations
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Everyone will respond to circumstance differently based on their unique brain
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You need to define what it means to be bad-ass at research
—> If you don’t change underlying thoughts and feelings, its hard to take actions from authentic awesome place
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Means that my work is focused on thoughts and feelings that drive action
—> So what is self-doubt? It’s when we think and feel things that make us feel insecure
—> Example of thought model
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Circumstance: See a job listing on LinkedIn
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Thought: I’m unqualified
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Feeling; Don’t have enough experience
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Action: Don’t apply, and edit my resume one more time
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Result: Don’t get a new job
—> Thoughts and feelings drive actions you got before
—> I will be very clear that circumstances aren’t just things you can measure or touch, and can include things like racism, years of experience, etc.
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The goal is to up/lower difficulty of believing a thing in a particular situation , such as feeling like you can’t get promoted because you are a women of color
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Not about feeling positive, but being intentional about context and experiencing the world
—> If you don’t feel like badass, it’s not due to circumstances. You have thoughts that don’t make you feel like a badass
—> No committee determines what is badass at being a researcher, raising a kid, as all of this is contextual
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You are the ultimate judge of whether something is bad-ass or not
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Informed by outside things, to help refine the definition
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—> Coming up with own definition and metrics of success
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Makes the work authentic to you, and what it means for work to be good
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Get to point where your brain is malleable and your story about yourself is what you want it to be
—> Have the ideal definition of what kind of person you want to be, and it follows you through your career, as opposed to meeting criteria for a job
—> So how do we make this change? We’re in luck, as brains are ridiculously malleable, i.e. neuro-plasticity and people can change wiring
—> One tool (out of many like mindfulness), is a self-assessment tool for situations you encounter
—> Ideal qualities are simple and straightforward
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Think of qualities you want to embody as colleague, researcher, human (no more than 10)
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Think of someone you admire and qualities you admire in them
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The more senior someone becomes, the less focus is on things like methodology and tool, and more on inter-personal qualities like empathy, bravery
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Rate yourself on 1-10 scale of how you embody the scale today
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The list is not what you are bad at
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List also acknowledges how awesome you are right now
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For each quality ask why did I rate myself number X, what would I nee dot rate myself as a 10
—> And how to practically implement?
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Do assessment and check-in regularly. Ideally numbers will increase over times, as you grow and mature
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1) Start paying attention thoughts, and seeing where they come from
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2) Seek opportunities to grow, where you are at the level of a 10 or a 2
—> So let’s have the example of client who wants to grow in career
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She talked about skill of disagreeing kindly
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Why did I rate myself a three?
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In situation, what would she think about herself that would rate herself as a 10
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—> Reframing things to your brain, to reshape identity as researcher and ability to influence things.
—> I have also heard concerns that you will lose a critical ability to reflect, if you stop doubting yourself:
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For self-criticism, you can questions quality of work, results, people, but you don’t question yourself
—> Self-doubt refers to the stories you tell yourself about how you are not valuable and useful.
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If you tamp down self-doubt, you will still be you, even if you have more confidence
—> If you want to be someone who has influence and impact, what do you need to feel like? And what do you need to feel to believe you are a superhero?
—> For further resources, recommend two podcasts shown in the slide
Q&A
- How do you recognize the difference between imposter syndrome (“I don’t have experience” when I actually do) and reality? (I actually do not have experience) And what to do about it? On a related note: pessimists tend to have a more realistic view of the world.
A: Comes from place of humility and accurate self-assessment.
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If you are doing good work, and humble, it will come out
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Risk is not having skills, rather not having self-belief
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Recognize that you need to have latitude to grow into role
- How can we create a more confidence-boosting environment in the workplace?
A: Support authenticity, and letting people themselves, whatever that is.
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Accepting people with different life experiences, and supporting individuality and authenticity in work-place