Part 1 - Origin of the Start Now Project

How it came to be

A couple of years ago, I was 13 weeks out from graduating from my Fine Arts degree in interactive and visual design. I had been working for a digital eLearning design agency for just over a year and had recently discovered the realm of User Experience. At the age of 22 going on 23, and being a female in the male-predominant tech industry, I was experiencing (what I didn’t realise were very normal) anxieties about who I was, what value I had to offer the world and where I should be going in life. Having experienced a fairly deep depression in 2012 after returning home from a gap year in Switzerland, my fear of returning to that debilitating mental state was like adding fuel to the already growing fire. These anxieties were exacerbated and propelled forward by my lack of ability to understand the difference between the “thinking mind” and the “observing mind”. What would start as an anxious feeling about my future, suddenly became a crippling panic attack after panic attack about having “anxiety”.

After attending a week long leadership camp run by Rotary called RYLA, and a workshop on enhancing productive creativity by Denise Jacobs at my first ever UX Australia, I began to realise that I needed to make a change. I had been playing victim to my emotions, allowing them to control my behaviours in ways that weren’t productive. Living on autopilot wasn’t working for me.

Both RYLA and UX Australia were incredible experiences that shifted my view on life and instilled an unparalleled motivation in me to be a better person. I would recommend them to anyone. What both of these experiences lacked, however, were the tools and support going forwards to turn my motivation into action and keep the momentum going. Soon, I found myself in a slump again. I wasn’t sure how to take the next step towards getting to where I wanted to be or even believe that I could get there.

Around this same time, a colleague of mine shared a few articles with me on Imposter Syndrome. It was then that something clicked. I was experiencing something that many people experience; an unwarranted self-doubt that often prevents people pursing their goals for fear of failure.

Cue my graduation project. The task was to showcase our skillsets through a project of our choosing that would be displayed at an exhibition designed to expose us to potential employers in the industry. Cue even more anxiety. I won’t go into detail about the emotional meltdown I was having and the various emails sent to my lecturer about my lack of ideas up until this point… but trust me, they were there. It was only when we had a guest speaker, Indiana June, encourage us to listen to our inner voice and draw inspiration for our project from activities we enjoyed and problems we wanted to solve that I came up with an idea!

I enjoyed the immersive experiences that events like RYLA and UX Australia offered and the process of designing experiences (both physical and digital), and the I wanted to solve the problem of people not pursuing their passions as a result of anxiety or self-doubt. My proposed concept for the exhibition was a conference package designed to educate people on how to overcome Imposter Syndrome, pairing it with an app to build a supportive community and physical journal to create a structured approach for progressing goals and passion projects.

On the evening of the exhibition I was presented a Business Acceleration Award which entitled me to 5 days a month, for six months, at a co-working space so that I could progress my idea further and turn it into a reality. Reality, however, was that I had designed the Start Now Project for myself, and I had no idea where to start or how to progress it forward.

So, I did what I always used to do when I didn’t know what to do: procrastinate.

I spent the best part of the next year:

• researching Imposter Syndrome,
• learning about agility, facilitation techniques, and positive psychology
• reading about motivation, personality development, mindfulness therapies like ACT, shame and vulnerability
• listening to lectures on anything related to personal development, lifestyle, health and wellbeing.

Until eventually, I found that anxiety no longer ruled my life. Sure, I still have the normal human experience of hearing the critical voice in my head saying “you can’t”, “you shouldn’t”, “you’re not good enough”… but it’s no longer so loud and overbearing that it controls my behaviour.

So that leads me to where I am now… sitting in Barcelona where I have been residing for two months, after having worked up the courage to quit my job and travel abroad, trying to figure out how to take everything I’ve learned and share it with others in a way that will help them live a proactive, engaging and full-filling life that isn’t hindered by Imposter Syndrome.

If you’re interested in finding out what I’ve decided on… keep an eye out for Part 2 of this post: what it is now, and how you can get involved.