The first Steps
In October of 2016 I met an amazing human being with the vision to help people.
Before flying down to Italy to attend #pragma conference, I was going through the list of speakers and stumbled upon Rikke.
I started reading her blogposts where I came across her idea “Steps”. »Steps helps people overcome social anxieties with fun and progressive challenges.« was how she described it. I continued reading about Steps, fell in love with the idea and was eagerly looking for the app on the App Store.
If you are a regular reader of this blog you might know that social anxieties play a big role in my life, determine every single of my actions and hold me back from being myself. So back then I felt disappointed having to find out that Steps doesn’t exist as an app I can use. Not yet at least.
I know that I am not the only one suffering from social anxieties. It’s actually one in four who is being held back by social anxieties and many people aren’t even aware of that they have anxieties themselves.
I feel that Steps has the potential to actually improve my life and the life of others — so I had to talk to Rikke while being in Italy. I waited until the conference was over, so afraid had I been. Everybody was getting ready to leave the conference venue and after having walked in circles for minutes thinking about what to say I stopped her as she was about to leave and just said hi. It was a big challenge for me :)
After some weeks of emailing, I again asked Rikke about Steps as I was so keen to get into this project. She got back to me and asked if we could make Steps together which made me super happy!
Steps is all about overcoming everyday fears such as talking to somebody by actually doing it. This method is called exposure therapy and turns out to be the most effective one when it comes to overcoming anxieties.
Steps is an app with which you can practice exposure therapy by doing small challenges.
We started working on Steps in November 2016, shipping the first beta on December 28th 2016 and are going to launch the first public version soon.
In January 2017 I moved to Copenhagen to work closely with Rikke and work full time on Steps as for us this is the only way to do it right.
It of course feels super scary not only because I’ve moved to a completely new country but also because everything is so uncertain at this point. Who knows where we’ll be in a few months from now.
I am very excited!! :)
Read more about Steps:
