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 de-read in a constructive direction.
Hello designers and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm Joanne Van Fisa 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 for your career?
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 that 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 to juicy things.
Well, let's think. Well, first of all, hello everybody. Welcome back to the next episode. We are hoping you're enjoying this summer right now. It's so weird because we're recording this during the summer and I think the last two or three years we didn't record episodes during the summer.
It almost feels like an usual is something broken. So in my play right now, everything is doing pretty well. I think for the next two or 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 where it's lower 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 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 are 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 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 to pitch for a new budgets for the new hiring.
So yeah, but at 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 for 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 few other companies that I want to reveal. 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 it's okay. Baby is very active. So we're kind of managing somehow 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. It's this concept of ambivalence. And I feel that it's being reflected also universally at scale in the world, in tech and jobs. And when it comes to design careers, some things are good, some things are bad. And that's how we navigate this.
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 are more than usual in nature at the seaside, which is 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'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 in 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 moment in my life when I will say, you know what I'm done. This is good. I'm just kind of 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 eco 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 your 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've 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 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 it 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 and think about the problem or am I now heard by this person. And it's not about the problem.
It's about the other person who is wrong and is not acting 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 working on to do what businesses 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 doffs hailing to 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 and 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 UI path 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 cosmetics salon, I go to my favorite specialty coffee store.
People are literally conflictual most of the time. There is 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.
Because it's human. It's one of the things that if you manage to become better at, isn't 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.
And then you have to be able to take that conflict out of the conversation to avoid that conflict or theory 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 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 onto their opinions and trying to impose them on others. So it's not about seniority. It's about just being 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 but 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 seeing about people, right? Understanding people, communication, your values, your growth with collaboration, conflict, etc.
I said 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 how we 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, the 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 realize some of my big 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 the weak spot while I was working as a freelancer, maybe my safe space was like to jump projects 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 build the basic foundation basic confidence, I switched the context strongly like in a 180% to the product teams. So yeah, again, five, six years, I was working freelancing now, five, six years and 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 a committee to the team to the relationships, right? And you can just jump ships easily, at least you have to have a two months notice period or something, right? When you're in Europe, we can jump ships easily now. And it's a safe mechanism for both companies to not like sudden lose people, but also 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 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 the 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 I'm covered 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 in 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 the 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 what the first time when I started actually making the reflection notes before that I was not in a therapy. I've never had this habit of reflecting and I've never really looked into how my dealing with the 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 West way to react to this situation, 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 happens 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 helped 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 you are now, right? It's starting from selflessness, humility and ability to be an open to listen to others.
If I try to reflect on the things I believe right now are important for your actual maturity and I'm talking about human-reacts maturity working in the professional environment, business, company, etc. Like you said, it could be a 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're 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 mistakes because you're not open to do this, right? You can be forced to grow. So for me personally, it's the fundamental. If the person is not open to grow, they don't have a growth mindset. It's very hard to work with those people.
And to me, it's something that rotates 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 right flag. But it's only my perspective, of course. That's the fundamental. 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 big sport. 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 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 building the 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, then you might want to still, okay, so sometimes the problem is being super open and super vulnerable for the criticism. And 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 always 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 that the balance we have to always try to retain. If you have a good strong manager, this manager actually have a very good manager in my period of job, who is helping me to balance out my confidence, but also being open as being aware and trying to grow from all the areas where I still see the growth opportunities.
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 and 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 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 the 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 and to be able to keep doing your best job, right?
And if you're not considering 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 is in.
So yeah, keeping your confidence strong and sort of solid helps you to voice your opinions, even if you feel like your ideas are wrong, 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 on 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 graphs that contributes to your acts 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 worked with in the past.
It's the gross 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 difference in how people communicate it before and after. And so yeah, I think in one of the recent conversations, you want to mention that 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 at 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 the bond is 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, and people can not shut me up because I just can't stop going. So now maybe your feeling is as well. That's the area for improvement for myself for communication skill.
And few other things such as integrity, I don't know, like is a managing conflict, etc. There are so many more things that come to my mind right now, but I am 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 other 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 are not very mature that sometimes you show up at work and you do something and at the end of the day you feel like 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's them 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 mint designer? Okay, I'll try to brief brief and I'll take on this challenge this time.
My perspective at something I already started talking about is really spotting those moments, realizing the signals in the moment because even if you're not working,
right? Say you're a junior looking for your 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, etc. etc. It's about spotting those moments, stopping for a second, making 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 it this way or another way? First of all, I think that'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 to model in different situations or different ways of resolving the same problem next time better.
And it's a narrative process, it's 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. So yeah, starting from yourself is always the most important part we have to do, but like if you want to have more tangible example, especially if you're already working in the product teams, for me it's about being open to the change, to be very honest, and that's where I'm kind of from right now.
In my current stage, like if you're currently working in the product team and sometimes your own comforts, it was what happens around you. Right, maybe the PM is very complicated and not open to collaborate with you, maybe the protocol 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 a 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 running and making something useful out of it. But finding those opportunities in your workspace as well, every time there is a change or hardship, these are the great of the best opportunities for growth.
Like every turbulence brings a lot of growth, every conflict brings growths, every change, sometimes uncomfortable change brings growths and possibly better alternatives. Every economic crisis right now, right? It brings growths 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 start losing money and accumulating resources instead.
And so every turbulence is the growths 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 then it's easier to use this muscle in a future much more complicated situation.
So 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 are more sense and type, more intuitive type, but you're working with somebody who is very, very constructive, pragmatic, detailed 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 collaborating with them here in 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. So yeah, it's about those moments. But what about you? What do you think other 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 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 really call it failure, where you're not acting as good as you could.
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 thoughts. But a healthy level of introspection, like once per month journaling and sitting down with yourself, taking them 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 constant 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.
And 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 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 hyper vigilance 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 what suggestions to improve stuff? He's the one who should be doing that.
So it was borderline ridiculous, somewhat abusive, 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 where you were not ideal in your workplace.
And he was forced to do this introspection, self reflection, exercise and maybe not even forced, but invited. So he was given the space and the right and the invitation to 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 that he took ownership for his behavior. And for me, three years later, it didn't even matter anymore. Like I was way past it and moving on with my life. So it's not that I needed any kind of a polish.
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, right, 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 immaturally five years ago, reach out to those people or or make it better. 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 want. And I know I wasn't a very good partner for you. So maybe can I offer something and return like a free audit of your website or a free kind of going through your product and helping you with improvement suggestions.
You can make things better retroactively. My point is and yeah, think about a moment 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. We're going to wrap up now. So thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope this abstract conversation did feel too abstract. I enjoyed it.
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 layer rest of the day.
We probably will see you together with you on a next time already in Berlin. So that's going to be the very first life 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, we should record offline on site, which you feel like would actually be a better representation of offsite energy and conversation.
And if you have any suggestions for our topics, please let us know because it would be really nice to know what you think we should talk about. Okay, and that will be it from our site. Bye everyone. Bye.