Roberta Dombrowski
Redefining Leadership and Thriving at Work
In this brand new episode of Brave UX, Roberta Dombrowski invites us to rethink success 🌱, tune into our intuition 🧘, and lead with intention 💫—sharing how mindfulness, healing, and self-compassion can transform the way we work and live.
Highlights include:
- The Challenges Facing UX Researchers Today
- Being a Transracial Adoptee and Finding Voice
- Lessons from Anxiety, Burnout, and Slowing Down
- Mindfulness, Somatic Work, and Coaching Practice
- How to Navigate Red Flags in Hiring
Who is Roberta Dombrowski?
Roberta Dombrowski is a certified leadership coach and experience strategist, dedicated to transforming the way people live, learn, and work 🌿.
She is the founder of Learn Mindfully, a coaching and training company she launched in 2022. Since then, Roberta has supported hundreds of leaders from companies such as Adobe, Instacart, ServiceNow, Zapier, and Zoom 🚀.
Previously, Roberta was a Research Partner at Maze, where she helped clients maximize the platform’s potential. Before that, she was VP of User Research at User Interviews, where she built and scaled the research function while tackling the meta-challenge of researching researchers 🔍.
Roberta is also the author of Consciously Crafting Your Career Path, a self-reflection and career planning workbook designed to help people shape fulfilling and intentional careers 📖. Her insights have been featured on podcasts like Lead the People and BLOC, and at events such as Rosenfeld Media’s Advancing Research conference.
Transcript
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I think it looks like everyone is given the opportunity to succeed in the way that they believe is success to them. I've been in so many work environments where I'm being told that metrics growth, these are the values of the individual leaders, so then they have to be my values. But can't we just honour people for who they are? Let's give them the space to define leadership for themselves rather than telling them what a leader looks like or doesn't look like.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who want an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting our field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Roberta Dombrowski. Roberta is a certified leadership coach and experienced strategist dedicated to transforming the way people live, learn, and work. She does this through Learn Mindfully the coaching and training company she founded in 2022. Since then, Roberta has supported hundreds of leaders from companies like Adobe, Instacart, ServiceNow, Zapier, zoom, and many others.
- Most recently, she was a research partner at Maze where she worked with clients to help them get the most out of the platform. Prior to that, Roberta was VP of user research at User Interviews where she built and scaled their research function while taking on the meta challenge of researching researchers.
- She's also the author of Consciously Crafting Your Career Path, a Self-Reflection and Career Planning workbook designed to help people intentionally shape thriving careers.
- Her insights have been featured on podcasts like Lead The People and Block, as well as at events such as Rosenfeld Media's advancing research conference. And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Roberta, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here, Roberta. And before we get into all things coaching, I understand that you're a cat mom of two rather beautiful Russian blues. What was it that attracted you to the breed?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I actually am allergic to cats, and so Russian blues are one of the few breeds that if you have an allergy, it's actually okay to have 'em. There's an enzyme in their spit that makes them non-allergic, funny enough. And what I have found over the years is that they're actually a really amazing personality match for me too. They're quite inquisitive, curious. They love being at home. They're very playful, they're wise. So yeah, it's been a win over the last few years. Having them,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I had no idea that what caused the allergies was contained in their spit. That's a fascinating insight just to start with. And one of the things that I learned about Russian blues when I was researching for today is that they're actually believed to have been descended from the Royal Russian czars. And that was something that I thought was fascinating on many, many levels. But I was curious to understand, have you observed any regal tendencies on them?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Definitely. I have two. Greasy is seven, and Squeaky is four and a half. Greasy is more of the diva of the house. She definitely has diva tendencies. She loves perching up over the fireplace, actually, and she looks very regal as she does it. So yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was also wondering whether or not you had heard of and if you had, had you watched the show The Great, which is I haven't. Oh, you haven't. There's about, I think it's Catherine the Great. Yeah, it's a real laugh. Anyway, maybe that's one to watch with the two cats.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hey, thinking about something a little different now and taking your mind to your website, I read on there that you'd said about yourself, and I'll quote you now based on what's on your website. As a transracial adoptee, I've spent my entire life navigating systems and environments that simply weren't built for me. Just tell me more about that.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- So I was born in Bogota, Columbia as a baby, and I was adopted when I was about a year old. I grew up in Buffalo, New York to a white family. My last name is Polish. If you can't tell, people usually meet me and they get really confused, but I didn't realise until probably the last five years honestly, that I've been in this really weird environment where it's like I grew up, people didn't look like me. I went to work, I went to school, I did master's programmes, everything, and there's never been people that looked like me in leadership. I really rarely talk to other adoptees too. It's something that people don't outwardly speak about today. It's the end of November as we're recording this, but it's actually national Adoptee awareness month, but it's really not spoken about a lot of the times. Usually when people are adopted, especially transracial adoptees, they tend to assimilate within the cultures and the environments that they're adopted into. And so I would say that's been a huge part of my journey. And if my career path, and if you look at me kind of navigating environments, I've usually always been assimilating. And it hasn't been until later in my career that I realised how much of an energy suck it was, and I wasn't actually showing up as my true authentic self until the most recent years.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Coming back to where you started there where you spoke about it not being something that was spoken about, in particular the transracial adoption, what do you suspect underlies that? Why is it not something that's spoken about openly?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I think it's fear for one, at least in my own family. I can only speak about the fears that my parents had as they adopted me. They were afraid of losing me. They had the belief that they were my parents and they had a fear of me meeting my birth parents. I know that's common in a lot of other transracial adoptees experiences as well. I think there's a lot of taboo as well, depending on the country that the person is adopted from. It could be like white saviorism. You're going in, you're pulling these people out of their cultures and putting them into these new cultures and environments, and people usually don't want to talk about it. There's race embedded, there's culture embedded. It's really like everything we're seeing about culture now, even at workplaces where it's diversity, equity, inclusion, it's like taboo topic sometimes. And transracial adoption is kind of similar where it's just all of these things are kind of ingrained in the topic, so to speak. So yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you feel that it should remain a taboo topic?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- No, absolutely not. No. And even historically too, there's tonnes of books written by transracial adoptees. Usually the narrative is very shaped by the parents that are adopting the children. Here's my experience, here's what it looks like. It's not necessarily shaped by the people who were adopted and went through the change themselves. And so I'm very for, I think part of the reason why I love writing so much, I love writing, communication, speaking, all of that is because it's my story to tell. It's like my parents have their perspectives, adoptee parents have their perspectives, but nobody knows my experience like me, and it's my voice. It's a story that I can tell. And I love hearing stories from other adoptees too about their journeys and what it's like so different. Everyone's story is so unique.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I imagine that there is, and again, coming from a place where I don't have firsthand experience of this, but I imagine the sharing of stories by transracial adoptees and enabling other transracial adoptees to read those is almost, it seems to me like a form of comfort. How has your experience of reading other transracial adoptees experiences been?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- It's been wild. I read this one book last year, I think it's called, it's Under the White Gaze or something like that. It was literally like I was reading part of my own story. A lot of people who are adoptees describe themselves as feeling like the only person, they didn't have people to relate to or understand their experiences. And so reading stories from others is completely eyeopening. It's like, oh, I never felt, I never knew this is common. This is a pattern. In the same way that we listen to research interviews, we're like, oh my gosh, you had that too. And I've been very lucky. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. We have an organisation here called Boston Adoptee Post-Adoption Resource Group. And so they do a lot of writing circles and events and open mics for adoptees as well to share their stories, which is really, it's been amazing because when I grew up, I didn't have that at all. I didn't have a community. I didn't see others who were adopted at all.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, thinking about when you were growing up, when do you first remember becoming aware that you were different to your parents?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- So my memories of childhood are somewhat mixed, and it's something I'm still unpacking. In therapy, my parents would call me different. My mom would have a nickname for me. She'd be like, oh, my Colombian or my Amazon woman. It was like she said it lovingly, but it made me feel like another a lot of the time. And I do have a sister. She is biologically my parents. And so that was always like, there's family dynamics. My sister looks like my parents. I didn't look like 'em. I was being treated differently. Almost like a golden child in some ways where it's like, oh, we want your life to be perfect because you came from nothing. And I felt a lot of weight as a kid to perform and fit in a specific role, which it's taken years of kind of deconditioning to break away from that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We'll move on shortly into something that maybe actually related to this, but I was curious, just to finish up on this aspect of our conversation, how would you describe where you've currently arrived with this very integral part of your
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Person? I would say when it comes to adoption, I'm still processing some of it. They're still childhood memories that I still don't have an access. I'm still unpacking that, but I would say I'm owning my story now. I know my values. I know it gives me energy. I'm not afraid to speak my truth as much as I was when I was younger. I was a people pleaser growing up because of being adopted, and I'm no longer that. So I feel like I'm in a deconditioning phase from some of the stuff that I've been through, which I think that many people are as they're in adults, you go through things as your child and you learn these coping mechanisms. And then when you become an adult, it's pretty much, I always describe it as healing is coming home to yourself. And so yeah, I'm healing. I'm forever healing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a beautiful way of framing it, that coming home to yourself. And I'll just briefly share something about myself. So I grew up without a father. I was raised by a solo mom, and I met my dad when I was 26 for the first time through the most random set of circumstances. And I had actually met my two half sisters just a week or two before that. And I certainly, when I was 26, I came to this completion of closing a circle around that feeling. And I think the coping mechanism that I had as a young man growing up was definitely this underlying feeling of anger and resentment about that abandonment. And it wasn't until I let that go that literally a month later, I met my sisters and then met my dad, and it was just wild. But there is definitely something and that awareness that you, not everyone, but people can reach as they age. If you're thinking critically and reflecting on your life, there is some value and magic in there if you're able to let some things go or at least process what they mean so that you can make more informed decisions about what to do about them.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say I'm embarking in a different part of my journey now because I'm actually seven months pregnant right now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Congratulations.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Thank you. Thank you. And so my child, when I give birth will be the first person that I meet that actually shares my DNA. It's going to be, I don't know, I've talked to some friends who have had children who were adopted, but it's going to be a new journey. It's going to be a different part of the story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That will be a wonderful moment. I certainly wish you all the best.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about journeys of different sort now and looking at your career journey, you are a self-described job hopper. And just to give people some context, you started out in instructional design, you later moved into research, you've had a bit to do with product management as well, and now you're a leadership coach. What has been driving this seemingly restless career journey?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- If I'm being honest, I actually think it came from my relationship. My father growing up, I grew up very blue collar family. My father is a machinist. My mom worked at the post office and I heard him my whole life saying how he wished he went to school, he wished he did better with his career, how unhappy he was with office work and machining and stuff like that. And so when I went to undergrad, I had an amazing manager at the time. I actually got exposed to instructional design for the first time. I got exposed to coaching for the first time, and it really set me down this path of I love learning. I hated learning in school. Growing up in middle school and high school, I was not good at it because I'm neurodivergent and I had issues with learning, but when I was in university and undergrad, I could just learn for the sake of learning.
- And that really thrusts me into my career path. And when I look at every single role that I've had, that's been the backdrop. Even when I was in research, when I was in products, it was all ed tech products, it was all learning products. How can we help people at work? How can we help people learn? And so on the outside, I think it looks very job hoppy. If I present my resume to someone, they're like, what? But now when I look back, I can see the threads of everything. I was always trying to learn new things, push myself to learn new roles, new functions, expand myself in some way. I never wanted to be boxed in. And I think that also relates to being adopted too. I didn't like being in a box,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I don't want to box you in here, but I do want to pick up on something that you've put into your LinkedIn profile, and that was you published the results of several behavioural and psychological assessments, and I just want to give this to people for some context and also for yourself, just to prompt your memory. So that included your disc style, which is a stabiliser, your predictive index, which is a scholar slash artisan, your Myers-Briggs, which is an INFJ and Enneagram, which is a style number four. If you had to briefly summarise, there's a lot in there. There's a lot of depth behind those numbers and those numbers. What would you say about what that means about you?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I'd say at a high level, I am a very deep thinker. I'm kind of like an idealist in some ways where it's like I need a mission to stand behind. I'm a deep thinker. I love deep work. I'm a researcher for a reason, but I'm also a trainer. I'm a lifelong learner. I would say if you look at the profiles, it's like you'll read that. You'll get creative too. Usually the profiles that I mentioned are very creative, always designing, creating new things and exploring new things. So I find that I used to work for an assessment company. I used to work for the Predictive Index for about three and a half years. They're really great for shorthand to pick up other people's working styles and be able to have conversations. They also huge into astrology, so I'm like, look at my birth chart. You'll learn all about me. That's the deep dive. But yeah, I think it's a really cool way to learn about people and see people's working styles.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perhaps a little bit of a segue, but I know nothing about astrology, so tell me a little bit about astrology. Is there something in the moment now that's top of mind for you as far as astrology goes?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah, astrology is really interesting because essentially it's looking at the planets and cycles of the planets. And when everyone is born, they essentially have a birth chart which basically outlines where's the location of the planets at the time that you're born, and you can look at different parts of your personality, and it's really in depth. I'd say right now the big things that are going on in astrology, mercury just went into retrograde today actually. So that usually impacts communication, technology, travel, there's time delays typically. And then we also just entered a new phase of Pluto. It entered Aquarius for I think the next 40 years, which is actually the last time that I believe it happened was during 1776. So a lot of government chaos, war systems and structures being broken down, and we're kind of seeing that at least in the United States with the recent election. And so it's pretty interesting from that perspective to see planetary alignments and then historical events too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it certainly seems like we're seeing that also in Israel and Gaza and Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well, which I'm not sure if your birth parents still have ties to Poland, but obviously they're right next door to what's going on.
- You mentioned mission and you need to have a mission, and you've shared, I think a little earlier in this conversation and also on a previous conversation, that you've often felt like you are the only woman, the only person of colour, the only researcher in the room, and that this feeling had fueled feelings, I suppose, of isolation and this pressure to constantly prove yourself. You've also spoken about in other context and other forums about a work related and anxiety injury that served as a wake up call. What was it that you were waking up to in that moment
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- For context? So it was 2018. I had six years within learning experience design, and I made the decision to move into product management. In my role, I accepted a role. It was this EdTech platform. It was like my dream job on paper. I was leaving to go meet my new team before I started my first day just to get to know them. And I was in my head, I was in my head thinking about, oh, I need to make a good impression. How's this going to go? And I was running down the stairs. It was raining that day. I fell down the stairs and I broke my ankle. It was so bad. I had to have two surgeries at the time, and I had to actually start my first six months remotely. So this was before, before teams were fully remote. And so for me, it was a wake up call to be present, to be in the moment, to also listen to my body because I didn't, my body had to shout at me to make me realise that I had anxiety and I had panic attacks too at the time, which I didn't really know that's what it was.
- I was just like, oh, I can't sleep. I'm restless. This is what's happening. And so it's like the learning for me in that experience is to slow down and listen to the wisdom that my body has because I always describe doing versus being. I was doing a lot of doing at the time. I was doing tasks, I was showing up, I was analytical. I was like, I'm going to rock this role. I'm going to hustle. I'm going to do all this stuff. But I wasn't checking in with how am I feeling? How do I feel right now? Who am I being? Who do I want to be? Does this feel like the right fit? It was all about measuring up how am I going to be perceived? And that should have been a signal to me that maybe it wasn't the right fit at the time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about that question, how am I going to be perceived? Where does that originate from? Have you been able to put a finger on the source of that anxiety?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- That is my family growing up. So my family of origin, it was very much like perform, we look this way outwardly. I even see it now with my niece sometimes. It's like you get the ribbon, you did great in bowling or great in tennis. You achieved that, and that's what I was rewarded for. And typically when you go into workplaces, it's the same thing. You get awarded for being the people pleaser, taking on the extra work, all of that. And so it originated then and it morphed into this other thing. I would say I'm probably the complete opposite, and I'm like, I don't care. I do care how I'm perceived, but it's more like how am I perceived by in environments where people have the same values as me, that's more important. I don't care what Elon Musk thinks about me, if he even thinks I don't care. We're just on two different wavelengths. We have nothing in common at all, so it's really not going to bother me what he thinks. It's really about if my heart is shared by the same values as someone, am I being of service? It's just I'm measuring the indicator of success is just different now for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it certainly seems that many of us are encouraged to care about things that we have no hope of controlling the outcomes over and how you are perceived by other people. Yes, you can influence that to a certain degree, but ultimately that decision is not one that's in your hands to make.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- No, yeah. I work with so many clients all the time. I had a call last week with someone who was just like, oh, they're interviewing for roles. And they're like, well, what if they think this? What if that? And I said to them, you can't control other people's emotions. You can't. You can only show up for yourself and make sure that you're honouring yourself. You can honour the other person, but it's trying to control. It's like, let's let go. Let go of trying to control it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's that scene of the first Star Wars where Luke's in the trench about to blow up the Death Star. I'm not sure if you're familiar with episode four. And anyway, his mentor, obiwan Kenobi, who has died, comes over the, well, it's not even a speaker. He is speaking into his mind directly from the other place, if you like. And he says, let go Luke. And so Luke puts away all this technology and closes his eyes and then squeezes that trigger on his joystick and makes the shock and blows up the Death Star. So of course that's the movies, but that's illustrating, I suppose, the point that I felt that you were trying to make.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah, I always give this metaphor. It's like we squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. If we want something, we think if we squeeze it hard enough or throw enough energy at it, it'll happen when really what sometime needs to happen is an easing off where we just let it be for a bit and then let things unfold. Because the opposite can actually happen when we try to control too much. It's like nothing. The opposite happens because we're trying to do too much. So I'm very much about easefulness and flow and let things unfold.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the things that I believe you are trying to unfold, and maybe it's a little more purposefully than I made that sound, but that is to do with the founding of Learn mindfully. And I've heard you talk about how one of the key things that you want to achieve through learn mindfully is what you've described as levelling the playing field at work. What does levelling the playing field at work look like?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I think it looks like everyone is given the opportunity to succeed in the way that they believe is success to them. I think that I've been in so many work environments where I'm being told that metrics growth, these are the values of the individual leaders, so then they have to be my values, but we just honour people for who they are. I have a tonne of clients who are individual contributors. They call themselves introverts. They're deep empaths, they care, they don't want to climb a ladder, they just want to do great work and work on a mission that's important to them. So let's stop pressuring them to pursue a path of management when that's not what they want to do. They just want to thrive at what they're good at. In the same respect, we have leaders who are born to lead and want to do that.
- And so let's give them the space to define leadership for themselves rather than telling them what a leader looks like or doesn't look like. I've been in tech now for a decade, and the images that were often thrown at me were like Elon Musk and Andreesen Horowitz and all these Steve Jobs. Those were idealised, and it's like they don't look like me or share my values. I want to surround myself with leaders who have similar values and I can create my own vision of what leadership looks like, not what somebody else is telling me. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Those people that you named, they have behind them, there's story there. There are certain narratives and stories that we're told in our circles as to what success looks like, what a great achievement looks like. And I'm curious, when you are talking to your clients, other people look to those people as anchors if you like, or a possible projection of what success could look like for them for better or worse, what references or what tools do you enable your clients to use to give them an alternative story or an alternative narrative so that they can build a career that feels successful to them in the way that they want it to be?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I have values discovery exercises, so most of the time it's actually sitting down. I have a list of questions for them, I ask them, but from everything, what makes you angry? Usually because anger is like a signal of value or something that's been violated. I'll ask them, who inspires you? It could be an author, it could be someone in your life. I'll ask them about spark moments that they've had when they felt fully alive too. And so usually I start with values and then from that, when they tell me the experiences, I pull the values out of it. And that's usually what they use as anchor points for making decisions moving forward. But it's not like reading off a list or anything like that and saying, this is what leadership should be. I try to let every person define it for themselves. I definitely have frameworks that I love.
- One is the proactive leadership model. It talks about five different ways that you can lead. All the people that I mentioned are in one dimension, which is called Leading from the front, which is very much like, oh, you lead by taking charge and being aggressive and all this stuff. But there's other dimensions that you can lead from being a partner to someone when you lead from behind. A lot of people that are in mission-driven or volunteering work lead that way. So leadership can look very different depending on your style, what you value, what's important to you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about people who have inspired you, you've previously spoken about your admiration for a person called Parker Palmer who's an American author, educator and activist. What is it about his work that resonates with you and how has it influenced your own approach to coaching and leadership?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I read some of his books, I want to say probably six or seven years ago, and he writes a lot about work being a calling. He writes a lot about work, being a calling, being of service. He was definitely a religious, he was an interesting person. He was a religious figure, but he also taught in higher education. And so he blends philosophy and theology and all these things, but he talks about being of service a lot. And so that really resonated with me. I talk about having a mission to get behind. I'm not someone who can kind of show up at work and it's all revenue, all growth. We're talking about ROI and a RR and all this stuff. I've done it before. I lead very much through intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. And that's what his work speaks a lot about is find your purpose, find your calling. And some people don't view work as a calling, and that's completely fine. It's just something to pay the bills, that's totally fine. But while I'm here with this time, I want to do something that I enjoy as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Me too.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Your coaching style and leadership facilitation style, you've described it as mindful. So when you are working with your clients, what does that mindfulness look like?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- It looks like a slowing down. So I blend it in a few ways. One of the ways that I use mindfulness is through visioning exercises. So even when we're talking about at the very, I do an exercise called Inner Mentor and inner visioning. I ask clients to look like 20 years in the future, and I walk them through a meditation so they can actually feel it for 'em. I also do somatic work, so it's a lot of tuning in as we're talking. If they say I'm upset about something, I'm like, let's tune in. Where do you feel that? What is that energy like? Is it big? Is it small? Let's define it some. So there's a lot of somatic, there's meditation, there's visualisations, and there's naming of things. Like sometimes I have people, clients show up and they're like, I'm comfortable. That's not an emotion actually.
- I will take out a feelings wheel sometimes and say like, alright, where is this feeling? Where is it in the wheel? Just because what I've noticed as adults, we get so disconnected from those things. So it can show up in a lot of ways, but I think when it comes down to it, what people end up getting is intentionality. They slow down, they tune into the body, they listen to their unique wisdom within themselves instead of just the doing. It's the being side too. So it's not just analytical and cognitive. It's like, what's my energy? Does this give me energy? How am I feeling?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've heard you describe your role or how you see yourself as a coach as that of a gardener, and you see yourself, and I'm paraphrasing you here, as cultivating, planting seeds, cultivating those environments where other people can thrive and grow. And I was thinking if we extend that analogy a little further, it also means dealing with weeds. What are some of the more persistent and challenging weeds that you face in your work and how do you address them?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Within my own work or what I see with client's weeds,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What you see with client's Weeds.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah. The main thing that I see is what I call inner critic or saboteur. It is the talk track that every single person has in the back of their head that's like, I can't do this because I'm afraid. Because usually it is out of fear. It might be out of you're trying to protect yourself in some way. I've become quite familiar with my own, but that's usually the biggest thing. And it prevents clients from taking risks, doing things that are important to them. It might prevent them from applying to a job or seeing their unique, really special sauce. And I also equate, it's similar to imposter syndrome. It's that voice that's there telling you no, you don't know anything, you don't know enough, you're not good enough. That's the inner critic, the saboteur.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked a little earlier on about using tools like a feeling wheel. You talked about naming things. It almost sounded like bringing some sort of tangibility and some specific and some clarity to what's going on for people and thinking about exercises that I've done in the past. And also thinking about how when you ask someone, how's your day going? And the standard response is good, it almost seems like we need to be prompted sometimes to go deeper and actually get into the details of how we are feeling. What role does that clarification or that you help others to play in themselves? What role does that play in helping them to overcome that saboteur, if any?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- You have to process something to get past it, not in the same way. So there's a difference between coaching and therapy. With therapy, I work with my own therapist. It's heavy trauma intensive. We're digging deep, we're excavating things. With coaching, it's usually looking to the future, helping to unblock a goal. Usually when there is a barrier, a challenge, something that a client cannot get over or they keep coming back to, I can't do this. Usually there's something that's unprocessed there and emotion, a feeling, a past experience, a fear that might be getting in the way. And so when I work with clients, it's just tuning in. It's like, well, what's there? Sometimes I see, I was on a call last week and a client was, they're talking about looking for their job search, and then I do a lot of trauma-informed work, so I can see the signals that they're trying to stifle the emotion down, and they're like, no, I'm fine.
- And I'm like, no, let's pause. I am just holding space. We don't need to move on. We can just sit here right now in this emotion so you can process it and then we can come back and move forward. Otherwise, the unprocessed emotion, there's Bessel Vander Cole, I believe talked about the body keeps score, the repressed emotions stay in our bodies and they will wreak havoc in other ways. And so yeah, it's all about holding space for what is honouring it in the moment. It could just be a few moments. Emotions actually only last for 60 seconds, which may be surprising for some people. And once you process it, you can usually move on from it. When we don't take that 60 seconds is when we get stuck. It's when we keep coming back. It's when we keep reliving things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So that processing, so after that 60 seconds of emotion is that us using our rational minds to make sense of what our bodies are telling us. How do you think about that role?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Usually it's not. So the rational mind is us interpreting the emotion. It's us trying to describe it. I'm sad because of X, Y, Z. When I say processing, it's just tuning in. It's the same part of your brain that you're using when you meditate. It is just tuning in, close your eyes, just be there for a moment. Hold it. Usually I'll ask them, what does your body need right now? What do you need to feel safe right now? And usually it's not like anything that we normally come up with, which is problem solving. It's like, yeah, I just need time. I just need a nap. I need to go for a walk. I need sun. It's like, yeah, go do that. Let's do that. So it's a different part of your brain that you're using typically.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have you ever had someone break down and cry in a session?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah, I always say, because usually every single client that I've worked with has cried in a session before. Clients always apologise to when it happens. They say, I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm crying. I'm like, why are you No, there's nothing to apologise. It's an emotion. It's the same thing as when you're happy. When you're angry, you should never have to apologise for an emotion ever. And then there's a saying in some coaching circles like your coaching, when your clients are crying, like you're getting to the core of things, you're getting to what energises, what de-energize is, what is truly meaningful to them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is several hundred people by now. I imagine that you've coached, which means that several hundred people that you've been with when they've been crying and this professional relationship, this is a professional relationship that you're in. What have you learned about people as a result of that emotion that you've witnessed?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I think what I've learned personally and through the relationships with clients is that we get to a point when we're growing up, when we turn off the emotions and we stick with logic because we need to do things we want to accomplish, we want to be successful, but the emotion is still there, it's just unexpressed. And we end up kind of hiding it, stuffing it down. And I think one of the most beautiful things that people can do is reconnect to that because when you stuff one emotion down, it stuffs all emotions down. You can't pick and choose which emotions you're kind of celebrating and which ones you're not. And the people I meet with when they come to me, they know they're unhappy in some way. They're not sure what's wrong. Through our work together, we're tapping back into their wisdom, their intuition, their curiosity.
- They come to life again. And that's one of the most beautiful things. Once they do that, they figure out what they want to do, what gives them energy. They reach all their goals. And so it's almost like I always describe when I get coaching clients, they're kind of in a fog. It's rainy. They can't see. They don't know which way, and when they leave, they're like a sunflower or a ray of sun where it's just like you feel when the sun is on your skin. You're like, Ugh. And it's just really beautiful to witness the change in them.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's quite a few people at the moment that may be listening to this as well that possibly don't feel like the sun is shining on their skin or hasn't been for quite some time. And your role that you held, or two roles that you held actually one at Maze and the other at user interviews, you estimated, I heard you say that you'd spoken to at least 2000 researchers over the last five years about what they're going through in their roles. From those conversations, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've heard researchers speak about?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- This was actually the precipice for me starting learn mindfully too. I was doing interviews and the themes that I was hearing were like, I'm on a team of one. My organisation doesn't appreciate me. I have to prove myself all the time. There's no career pathing here. Nobody cares. I have no partners. It was all interpersonal things. It was all defined as people problems or talent development problems. Those haven't gone away. I still meet with researchers who are my coaching clients now, and it's the same thing. A lot of people that are still working full-time are stressed out with having to do more with less. There's years of layoffs at this point. So they're seeing their teammates, their coworkers leave, they're having to pick up extra work, but they're not being compensated or recognised for it. And a lot of researchers are rethinking whether they want to stay in research in the first place. They're like, I joined this to make a difference. I chose this career path to make a difference. Is that actually happening?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And speaking about the broader UX field, that wanting to make a difference is certainly one of those key themes that comes through when you're talking to other UXs, right? It's one of the things that seems to get us up and out of bed. So you can imagine it's not great for people when they feel like they're not achieving that. And you've said about UX people, professionals before, and I'll quote you now. You've said, we are great at caring. We all care very deeply about other humans, and that shows up as empathy in our work and our ability to connect with other people. So I was thinking about that and I wondered whether or not you have seen or whether you see a downside to this steep level of care. Has it in some ways contributed to the personal challenges for some in ways that they may not have anticipated?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Absolutely. I mean, I can speak for myself as well. When I say researchers care ERs care, I wear that absolutely. I wanted to make a difference in the world in education and all of these things. I also understand that what is my superpower also has a shadow side. And the shadow side is codependency and putting other people before myself, not setting boundaries between me and work. And I see very similar things with my coaching clients too. They're burned out. They care so much. They're in toxic environments, perhaps because of either things from their childhood or just workplaces that they've been in where there's toxic cultures and they're repeating the cycle and they want to make a difference and be like an evangelist. But it's like, is this environment healthy for you? So yeah, I think that every superpower has a shadow side to it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Maybe this is joining a.here, but I also have read something that you'd written recently where you pulled up the 2022 Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, and that found that 44% of global employees, which rises to 50% of employees in the United States, experience stress during the workday. And I'll just define stress for people just so it's clear as defined by the WHO, and this is a paraphrase here. It's a state of worry or mental tension that's caused by a difficult situation. So repeated layoffs, toxic cultures, a number of different things may cause us a boss that's just a bad apple. Those sorts of things can cause a lot of stress. When you think about that report and the trend seems like it's increasing as years go on, do you think that it's our working lives that have become objectively more stressful? Or is it that somehow we've become less equipped to cope with the challenges we face?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I don't think it's either or. I think it's both. I think that, at least from what I've seen in my practise is that almost every single client that I have coming to me has workplace stress. It's usually burnout in some way. And I think that I have a hypothesis. It manifests as workplace stress because we spend the most of our times of our lives at work, we spend more time at work than we do at home. And so that's where it's kind of manifesting first. I think a lot of clients that I have come to me for coaching when we're working together, absolutely, but they may not be seeing a therapist on the side because coaching is more approachable to therapy, which is like my partner. He's a social worker. And to me that is still astounding. There's still people out there who may not have been with a therapist before, worked with a therapist, and so coaching is kind of more accessible for them, which is great.
- And then I think our world in general is just getting more complicated. We were born hunter gatherers. We were working on farms. I just watched a documentary over the weekend on PBS, but the gilded Age and the rise of industrialization and two shifts and we're overnight shifts and all this stuff, and we're still in kind of the early years of that when we actually think about history in general of human beings, we're meant to be outside in the sun tilling our soil and in the gardens and getting our hands wet. And now we have things like AI and technology and all of these things, and it has exacerbated a lot of our challenges when it comes to isolation, loneliness, depression, et cetera. I think a lot of the studies that have come out over the last few years with Facebook about how Instagram has impacted people's mental health and all this stuff, we're still seeing just the impact of that. We don't know we're living it in real time. So I think it's both of those things combined. I think life is becoming more technologically advanced, more complicated work is taking up more of our time and healing and self-care is not prioritised as much as accomplishments and outcomes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I can totally relate to that and this is probably going to need some fact checking, but I believe also before the onset of the industrial revolution, while our standard of living was much lower, and I'm not trying to suggest it was a panacea in any way, shape or form, we were much more likely to work in with the natural rhythms of the seasons and of nature. So we would
- Adhere to our circadian rhythms. We would work less in winter. You'd plant and do you plant in spring? No, you plant in fall. I don't know. You planted at some point you could do both. Yeah, you could do both, right? Do both. But now with the intensification of everything, the measurement of time, the industrialization of everything, there's no longer throughout the year, there's no longer those times or those periods of rest and recovery. We just go, go, go, go, go. And I can personally speak to my 20 year career so far. Certainly in the last few years felt the burn of that way of working and living and having children has certainly been a perspective bringer to me to encourage me to reevaluate my relationship with work, which is still not a hundred percent in the way I'd like it to be if I'm being honest. But we're getting there. Yeah, we're getting there. Certainly a role to be played for listening to your body and not just charging on for 365 days a year. You have to pay for it at some point, right?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Oh yeah. And that's where burnout comes from. It's essentially your body is starting to shut down because you've been ignoring the signals when it comes to overwork or exhaustion and things like that. In the same Gallup survey that you quoted earlier in the same survey, it actually showed that people's relationships to work were changing since the pandemic. So that was a huge inflexion point for many people in 2020 to just rethink, is this how I want to spend my time? That's why a lot of people are like, I don't want to commute anymore personally. I got rid of a three hour commute. I don't ever want to do that again. You can't pay me to commute anymore. And they just really, us as humans have thought about what do I value? And maybe it's not the time at work. Maybe it's the time with my family, my friends, other things that matter to me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Bringing this down now to back to the individual, we've been talking about broader social and technological shifts, economic shifts that have happened. You've previously written, and I'll quote you again now, while we can't control external events, we can control our attitudes and responses. How far do you think our ability to control our attitudes and responses extends, especially when it comes to these more trying circumstances that we've been talking about with the job market during the pandemic, those sorts of situations?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- It definitely becomes more difficult as you are in the middle of a traumatic event or maybe I always talk about the zone of tolerance. It's a framework that you can use. Usually our body wants to be at an equilibrium in this wonderful median of zone of tolerance where you're being challenged, but you're adapting to the challenge. But then we end up either becoming hyper aroused, fight or flight or hypo aroused or we become depressed and stuff like that. If we are going through a trauma, it could be C-P-T-S-D, which is like chronic trauma over and over again. It could be a smaller trauma like a layoff. Not to say that layoffs are smaller trauma, but it's not kind of the chronic one after the other. It is likely that you are going outside of your zone of tolerance, which means that you have less control over how you react.
- It is about getting to safety. I always say with people, find your sense of safety, get comfortable If that is chilling, watching Netflix because you need to, that's what's going to calm you down. Go for it, going for a walk, go for it. Once you have some time that passes, you've process things, the trauma, then you have more control over how you can show up. You can talk about, this is how I want to show up versus this is how I am showing up. We can talk about things like leadership style and getting creative and what's the vision. But if you are going through a trauma or something like that where your nervous system is activated, you typically cannot act in a way where you're thinking about alternative solutions. You just need to protect yourself and keep yourself safe. And that's why coaching might also not be a good fit for people who are going through a layoff. I would say, you got to pay the bills. I don't want you spending money on coaching, pay to eat, pay for your house.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you talk about processing, and it sounded like that was after the point where you've advised people to get safe, whatever that means for them to get into that space where they're no longer, I suppose, caught up in the whirlpool of that trauma that's going on, get a bit of distance now. That's my language there. Is that the point where in your earlier quote, when you were talking about controlling your attitudes and responses, is that the point where that becomes both possible and perhaps beneficial to minimise or shape the degree to which that traumatic event has an impact on someone's life?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- It can be. I'm actually in a coaching certification right now. It's called neuroscience and relational trauma. And so it talks about there's a change management curve. There's also a trauma curve of when are people ready to handle the trauma, change their circumstances. And it really depends on each person. Some people may be ready for the change, actually hyper activated, and they solve problems by, they don't want to sit in the discomfort. And so while it may look like they're ready for a change, they're actually not like they need to just sit and be uncomfy for a while. So it really depends. Even when I'm doing mindfulness work, when I say processing, it could be just feel your feet on the ground. This is where embodiment comes in. Feel your feet on the ground, feel the sensations, notice the breath, listen to some type of anchor, like a sound or something like that.
- That might be traumatising for some people, depending on their past, I never want to push them to change. I want them to be comfortable, be safe. That might be a signal to that They need to work with a therapist because there's something bigger there than what a coach can help with. But usually when I, I've had some people go through layoffs or come from traumatic workplaces, I usually want some time to pass maybe three, six months and then we can work together because when the trauma just happened or the trigger just happened, you're in a reactive state, you're usually in a fearful state. It's hard to get creative and think about things, vision, where you want to go. You're in the surviving rather than the thriving state of mind at that point.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That makes sense. And we've been talking here a lot about the individual and how they experience trauma and how they might be able to bring to bear some perspective to get to a place where they can grow and thrive post that trauma. But if we think now about the organisations or the context that we live and work in, I suppose you've talked previously about work in the sense that we spend more time as you just quite rightly pointed out earlier at work than we do in our other environments. And one of the things that you've recently said, and I'll quote you again, is that what we often get wrong about burnout is that we assume it's an individual experience, something for one person to fix and get better on their own, but we couldn't be more wrong. This puts the burden on the individual. It's a systemic issue, and the responsibility lies within organisations to foster supportive environments. And I'm curious about this. I'm curious, how do you see the relationship, if any, that exists between an individual working to manage their attitudes and their stress responses and an organization's efforts to control the nature and the level of stress that's inherent in their workplace?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- It's interesting. One of my former direct reports was messaging me last week because she was interviewing for a role and she said, do I have the right to ask these tough questions during the interview process about the workplace culture and the environment? Absolutely. When we are joining workplaces, we are embarking on a relationship together relationship. Me as the worker, the employee is one half of the relationship, and then the workplace is the other half. I think a lot of times the workplace can get off scot-free because it's not one specific individual. It is the system of the workplace. It's management, leadership, the culture. All of these things bucketed into one. But it is a relationship and it's usually fluid. There's going to be cultural norms. There's things that need to be set, but it also needs to shift. I'm also very pro-union and workers' rights, so that's where my perspective is coming in from. I believe that workplaces right now, at least in the United States, it's because of laws that we have that they're trying to cover their ass. Most of the time.
- It's not coming from a real sense of care for the employees of wanting to do right by them and see them thrive. It's usually let's do the bare minimum so that we can meet our profit targets and margins and make sure we don't get sued. And so I think that, I'm just being honest, I think that at its core, workplaces have a long way to go when saying that they're really employee centred and employee first, absolutely, employees should advocate for themselves. But there is an onus on companies as well to own part of that, of why are we doing this? What does thriving actually mean? How are we supporting them when it comes to l and d or family life or caregiving? Because employees are not one dimensional. They have life going on outside.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We think about the employer employee relationship, and we think about the current job market. It's pretty clear that the current job market, by and large, favours the employer over the employee, particularly when it comes to UX and perhaps more broadly to tech. And that may mean that some organisations feel that they don't have to work as hard anymore to attract the kind of talent that they were just a few short years ago. And it may also mean that some people, professionals who are looking for work may feel that they need to accept any job that they're offered. Now, while I acknowledge that everyone's personal financial situation will be different, and those that are perhaps in a better financial situation will have the ability to make perhaps better decisions or less rushed and stressed decisions that people who are not in that same position may make. What red flags would you advise people to watch out for during the hiring process that would help them to make a better decision if they're in that position?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I always tell people too, there's what I call, when I work with clients, I work on an activity called an ideal career profile. And usually we define ideal as if you could wave a magic wand, what do you want it to look like? And it's not just your career, it's things outside of work too. How do you want to spend your free time vacation, et cetera. I also would talk about a minimum or a bridge role for some people. So if you are in a tough spot and you feel like you have to take something, that's fine. Maybe it's a contract role to pay the bills. You can get in a good spot, get stabilised, get your feet underneath you and feel comfortable. So longer term you can go for that real ideal role. There's nothing wrong with that at all. I've done that before. When it comes to red flags, there's tonnes, it's, I have a red flags list that I use with clients for things, but if you are seeing an expedited hiring process for some reason they're showering you, praising you for some reason, being like, oh my God, you're going to change the company like idealising, that's usually something else is going on here.
- I always say, listen to your body too. If you feel like you have something in your gut that's telling you this is not the right place, that's also a sign. And then I also encourage clients to ask questions, ask interview questions based on your values. So if work-life balance is important to you, we end up doing a reverse interview guide basically. So value is work-life balance. Ask them, Hey, what's a typical working day? What are your hours usually like? When's the last time you went on vacation to really dig into the responses of the organisation because that turns into your rubric for do they meet your needs? Because right now a lot of companies are like, no, you need to measure up and meet my syllabus and criteria. And employees forget about their own. They're like, oh no, I can do it. I can shapeshift.
- And it's like, well no, if this place is not giving you the things that you outlined you wanted, probably not the right place to go in the first place. For me. Another one is if a company is not open to learning things and they're like, my way is the highway, I'll ask, when's the last time you ran an experiment or when's the last time the company failed at something? If they can't pick out something, that might be a signal that maybe they're not afraid to admit failure or maybe they're not experimenting with things. So it's really going to depend on each company.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me more about the scenario where they may be heaping praise on the applicant that would make people feel good. Why is that something that people should be mindful of?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- That is a trait of narcissism. I've had it now that I look back on previous roles, I've had that many a times, especially in startups where you meet with the founder, they tell you everything that's going to be great. It could be even you accept the offer, you're onboarding and they're like, oh, this is great. You're going to change the whole company. You're going to change everything. That's usually the first phase of the, it's love bombing essentially. And then as the relationship goes on, it switches. They end up attacking you. They will diminish your self-worth. They will tell you that you're not good enough at things. And that's kind of the phase of the relationship with the narcissist. That's something that I'm really interested in is it's the relational trauma piece because usually when we think about narcissism, it's a one-on-one thing. It's like this leader, this person, but workplaces are systems and so looks a little bit different where it's like the system is saying this behaviour is okay. There's people backing it up, whether it's managers or line managers or whatever it might be. And it gets more difficult to tell, but there can still be signals there for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke a little bit earlier about listening to yourself. You may have even mentioned the term if you didn't earlier. It was definitely mentioned somewhere else around intuition. Listening to your intuition, that is a term that probably means many things for different people. How would you define your intuition and what role has that played in your career journey?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I would say when I was younger in my career, I often got my intuition mixed up with analysing or thinking it was the next right step for me. As I have started to heal, be on my healing journey, I really understand what intuition is now. It's funny, I call myself clairvoyant sometimes because I'll think of something randomly and then I'll get a text message from the person that I was just thinking about. It's the weird serendipitous moments like that for me though now it's like intuition is very much trusting my gut. If something doesn't feel right, when something feels wrong, maybe you left something plugged in, you're scared it's going to start a fire or something like that, so you unplug it and you avoided a fire or something like that. It could be just like, for some reason I don't trust this person. That could be your intuition.
- And then you realise a few months later as you started working with them, they're going behind your back, their backstabbing, whatever it might be. That was your intuition trying to speak to you and say, maybe you don't feel safe, maybe you don't feel comfortable around them. And so just listening to it, our body will give us signals before our brain does, before we can actually interpret it. So that's why I say a lot of body wisdom listening to the body. If you feel like you're going into a meeting with a boss and you're hearts beating fast chest is clenching, you got stomach pit, that's your body speaking to you for some reason about do you feel safe around your boss? Is it something else? But that's, it's speaking to you in some way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I once worked for somebody maybe 10 or more years ago, and every time I think about them, which isn't often, but whenever for some reason I'm in a situation where they come to mind, I still have this feeling of dread and it's just a deep feeling of displeasure with bringing that memory to the fore. And I probably should unpack this somewhere else other than on the podcast, but it just something that came to mind when you were describing that listening to your body. And sometimes we rationalise those things away, or at least I do in a moment. I prioritise the financial aspect of that relationship over and above the emotional aspect of my life that it was negatively impacting. And I think I consciously knew that's what I was doing. And I suppose like I said earlier, or perhaps it was you who said this, that eventually you got to pay the price and the price is now, every time I think of this person, I get this awful feeling.
- And you mentioned wisdom and I wanted to come back to some potential wisdom here. And that's the closing lines of the road not taken by Robert Frost. And those lines are two roads diverged in the wood and I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference. Do you think that's good career advice or does it oversimplify the complexities of navigating a meaningful career path? I
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Think that I would say everyone's career is very unique. We were talking earlier about right now we're in a time when employers are favoured individuals, not so much. I'm seeing a lot of people take that as their call to I'm going to go do independent, I'm going to be on entrepreneurship, I'm going to go build my own thing. And that's wonderful. There's some people where that's not possible right now. It's maybe a dream, it's a little bit more distant, but I always say, I don't know, it's just my background. I want to go down the road that's less travelled. I want to go see what's going to work for me. But there's nothing wrong with following a path that you're attracted to as well. If you feel pulled to it. If you want to be a manager or a leader, you want to climb it because that's the mission that you feel pulled to. Who am I to say that's wrong? And that's why I work with everyone individually to finding their values. I have some folks who they want the raise, they want the promotion, and that's where they want to go. And that's fine. That's their path.
- And a few years later it might look different because their values change.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've previously talked about how when you're working with people, you tell them that I'm the expert in coaching, but they're the expert in their own experience. And so when you think about things that might not align with your values but may seem to align with your client's values, values are slightly different or at least they prioritise different things at different points of their lives. Does that mean that in your coaching relationships that you rarely, if at all, offer specific advice?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- You really did your research with that. So that line that you mentioned of the, I'm the expert in coaching, you're the expert in your lived experience. That's part of my agreements that I speak with clients. So during our first session, we build the relationship. I always say that as a coach, I'm leaning in a hundred percent to the relationship and they lean in a hundred percent it's not going to work if I'm leaning in 200% and they're leaning in 10%, so it's not going to work. So what I am trying to demonstrate is that we are equals. I have some clients that come to me who want what I define as mentoring, which is different than coaching. Pure coaching is like as a coach, I'm holding space, I'm asking you questions, we're coming to your next right step for you. Mentoring on the other hand is like, I want to hear from somebody who's been through a similar experience.
- Either they started a team, they've been a researcher, maybe they had this role before. I sometimes get people who want both. And the way that I approach it is I'm holding your coaching goals for you. This is what we discussed. If you want my expertise, I will sometimes say, would it be helpful if I shared a personal experience or shared my own perspective about this? With the coaching that I do, I always ask permission before I share stories or offer advice to see that my client wants it. Because what often happens, if we think about the regular workday, people are unloading their judgments, their perspectives all day long on people. They're like, you didn't do this right, I wouldn't do that. You can learn so much from people's values just by the comments they give you and coaching's not for that, coaching's for the client and what they want and their goal. And so I always make it optional. I'm like, I had a similar experience. I was a researcher on a solo team. Would it be helpful to share what I went through? And usually clients will say yes. Sometimes they're like, nah, I don't need to hear it today. And that's fine. That's completely fine.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wonder just how applicable that asking for permission might be or how valuable it might be outside of coaching in terms of friendships or working with colleagues, whether or not that's something that we should be thinking of asking more often.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Always. I think every relationship, if there is anything. It's funny, I always describe when I was in the beginning of my research journey as a user researcher, I had qualities of coaching. It's part of how I was showing up naturally when I went through coaching school, I learned how to be in relationship with people, relationship truly be in relationship. How do you design agreements and design an alliance with someone? A lot of people don't even think about that. They don't think about, this is the type of relationship that I want with my parents, my husband, my partner. This is the relationship I want with my child. You come together, you speak as equals, you figure it out. It's usually like you're reacting together to something. Especially at work, the first project you usually have with someone, if something is broken, it's not like let's take the first maybe two weeks to define how we want to show up and then set that intention. It's usually just like, oh, things are broken. I think the world would look mighty different if we took the time and intentionality to design things a little bit more in our relationships.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of time, I wish we had more time, but we need to bring our conversation down to a close and to do that, I realise that most of our conversation today's been on serious topics like burnout, mental health, career planning, all these things that are quite important for us to talk about. But perhaps we should finish on a slightly lighter note, and I want to quote you one last time. What you said was stay curious and have fun. Work doesn't have to be that serious. At the end of the day, I'm sure many of us got into UX because we love learning and we love connecting with other people. So make sure to have fun. So if someone listening to us today no longer feels fun in their work, how would you suggest that they go about reconnecting with that sense of joy and curiosity?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- I would say start outside of work. Actually find a hobby, something that you usually do. It could be something from when you were younger, you were a kid. I love dancing. I was a dancer for 14 years and so for me over the last few years, it was taking Zumba class. I just wanted to get out, clear my head, have a new way of doing things. It also looks like gardening usually. I always tell people, let's focus on the things outside of work first, creating boundaries, having fun, spending time with people you love and that energy will come back into work. So read that book, talk to that person that interests you. Just get curious about things. Whatever piques your interest, just follow it and see where it takes you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This has been a thoughtful conversation. We've certainly covered some really important territory. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My pleasure. Totally my pleasure. Roberta, if people want to connect with you and keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing through learn mindfully, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Roberta Dombrowski:
- You can go to my website, LearnMindfully.co, and then LinkedIn. If you look me up, Roberta Dombrowski, happy to connect with you as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Roberta. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Roberta and all of the things we've spoken about.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe so it turns up every two weeks. And also just tell maybe one other person about the show if you feel that they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or perhaps you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co,nz. And until next time, keep being brave.