Women Developer Academy: Day 2

Today has been a very inspiring and empowering day. In the beginning, Richard gave us an awesome talk about self-confidence and self-esteem. He told us quite a lot of things to keep in mind, for example, that no matter how hard we work on our talk/workshop, we will have some failures/we will think we could’ve done better and that’s ok. First of all, because we are human, we don’t have to know everything, secondly, because nobody will notice them — they don’t know how the talk is :P — so we shouldn't put that much pressure on us. He also told us about Impostor Syndrome and how it affected more women than males — but of course, it affects everyone! Some tips to overcome this syndrome he gave us some tips:

• Make a list with 10 accomplishments and 5 skills we have.
• Show your work to your support circle.
• Tell yourself your strengths. Really. It may be weird in the beginning, but saying them out loud makes the difference.
• Accept that you’re not perfect, and being good enough is good enough.
• Try to get out of your comfort zone: say yes, take risks. We’ve all been affected by the pandemic and our comfort zone is tighter than it was, but it’s our job to stretch it as much as possible.

The last part of today’s session was given by Kate. She helped us realize how important it is to tell a good story — she told us about storytelling, about finding the intersection between our passion, our experience, and our skills. We also grouped in 4 and practiced twice, once before telling us all of the previously mentioned and once after that. We introduced ourselves to the group, trying to do the best storytelling.

This session has planted quite a lot of seed for future personal work on self-confidence, self-esteem, trying to relativize more, and the most important one in my opinion: keep working, keep learning, but don’t let perfectionism stop you from doing things, done is better than perfect, and by doing things is how we learn.