What IA Summit 2014 Showed Me
When I attended the IA Summit in 2013, I heard great talks, attended amazing workshops and learned a great deal. I also had a feeling that I had made connections that would last with people who would (and do) have an influence on me, both personally and professionally.
This year’s IA Summit was something more. While at the Summit, I had a flash of clarity that this was a pivotal point in my professional and personal life. And I don’t really indulge in alcohol, so I’m pretty sure this is bona fide clarity.
I’ve long asserted that I do what I do for a living because not only do I love it, but I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing that each day I’m working on things that will make people’s lives better, easier. What I hadn’t fully realized, until this past week at IA Summit, is how much better it’s made my own life.
I’ll have to admit that in my youth, I was pretty selfish and self-centered. At least that’s what I see when I look back. (I know my closest friends will contradict me, but that’s their job.) I was consumed with my own existence and my small circle of friends. Of course, I was in theater and the film industry for the first 27 years of my life, so there was my first mistake. That’s a profession that caters to, encourages and reinforces narcissism paired with raging self-doubt.
Once I stumbled my way into my first job that involved web design, things began to change. Slowly, but they did change. The more I learned about seeing a user interface from someone else’s perspective, the more I started to look at other areas of my life. What did my friendships look like from the outside? What did my relationship with my family members look like from someone else’s point of view.
I had been in user experience design (called by many different names before I realized that was what I was doing), for about 8 years before I realized that I rarely asked people how they were doing when I talked on the phone with them. As I said, this was a very slow progression to enlightenment.
It was my sister-in-law that made me realize this. No, she didn’t point out any faux pas to me. It was the fact that every time I spoke with her, I felt loved, appreciated and valuable. I started wondering why that was. I realized it was the fact that she always started conversations with me by asking how I was doing. And not just the idle “how’s it going?” But the full-blown “how are you feeling? how is work? how are the kids? how are the dogs?” deep dive into my state of being.
I thought about why I called people and what I talked about when I spoke to them. I realized I didn’t ever begin by asking about their health or well-being, but rather would launch into what I was doing, then get around to them telling me how they were doing.
I decided to make it a habit when I met new people to ask about what they do, what’s important to them and ask about family and pets. When I first started doing this, I did this out of conscious effort. I didn’t want to be that selfish person I felt like I had been. Now it’s a matter of course to ask after their well-being.
Each day I find myself thinking about situations from someone else’s point of view, and I’m not just talking about the work I do. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I think “they must be having a bad day.” And I don’t let their bad day become my bad day. I don’t cuss or yell or honk at them. I let them go on and hope their day gets better.
This can irritate some of my friends and family because it’s a perpetual Pollyanna/silver lining outlook, when all they need at the time is for me to be on their “side”. I’m working on that whole ‘more empathy with family and friends than with strangers’ thing. It is amazing how much slack we’ll cut a stranger or acquaintance when in a similar situation, we’d give the people we love the most unholy hell.
IA Summit 2014 also made me take another look at the way I interacted in conversations with people. Being an improvisational comedian, I have a pretty smart mouth. One day into the conference (after the first workshop), I realized I was entertaining too much rather than just being me. Sometimes Theater Amy takes control of the mouth, and it can be hard to get her attention.
It was at this point that I decided to literally bite my tongue during sincere conversations so that I wouldn’t make light of them. I chose to spend entire one-on-one conversations with people asking only about them and giving honest but brief answers about myself. And you know what happened? I learned a lot.
So to the people who were so kind as to spend time with me this year at IA Summit, thank you. Thank you for your wisdom, your humor, sharing your triumphs and your failures, for talking to me, listening to me and being simply amazing individuals with vibrant lives and stories to tell.
Until we meet again …
