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We can get anxiety and feel fear from those things we cannot control. Things like doing our jobs well, enhancing our larger organization (our team of peers and beyond), and helping your network (catching up, lifting others up). The Inner Game of Stress by Tim Gallwey, a tennis coach who paired with medical professionals to write this book, encourages us to think about what you don’t control, what you don’t control but keep trying to control, and what you control that you are not presently controlling (all about awareness).

Tom Hollingsworth, Network Analyst and Tech Field Day Event Lead, says we cannot always be chasing a stretch goal - set manageable, reachable goals and be ok with not making everything a stretch. If everything is a stretch goal eventually the rubber band will break. Work on stretch goals often enough that it feels like a special occasion and pushes you past boundaries but not so often that it adds stress.

Jonathan Frappier, Senior Product Education Engineer at HashiCorp, stresses the important of finding something to help maintain balance. He slowly peeled back extracurricular activities after almost losing his passion for technology but took up snowboarding as a hobby with the family.Look out for how you are feeling at any given moment. If beaten down, remember to look for the wave that will come to give you energy to do something new or something you once enjoyed. Don’t try to ride every wave. Awareness of going through the waves allows you to pick yourself up and come out of it.

Cody de Arkland encourages us to Give yourself room to build up new confidence when starting a new career path / role, and let it be ok to not be confident for a time. Build on what excites you and the places your confidence comes from.

Josh Fidel says loving your job isn’t enough to prevent burnout when other priorities slip. In his case, it was too much time away from family because of travel 5 days a week combined with the immense pressure of working with large customers on things under close inspection by leadership.

Things like exercise, being in nature, and a practice called Morning Pages helped me get away from the overwhelming feeling of such a large to-do list. It was all this and not having social media logged in on my phone.

Bill Kindle, a Senior Systems Engineer at Chemstation, needed creative outlets like writing and participating in community groups to fight back burnout and boredom with his job. The rev up and rev down of extra curriculars is different based on your situation (in contrast with Jonathan Frappier needing to trim down activities outside work).

We’ve seen a trend in guests who had some kind of background in education and then went into technology. I’m part of that list as are Ethan Banks, Jonathan Frappier, and a couple of others. Don Jones told us that teaching is just repackaging information. Think about roles where that is needed.

Dominique Top, a Solution Engineer at HashiCorp, started off perfoming in a band and studied music at the Dutch Pop Academy. She worked at an Apple store in retail sales and learned more about the devices and the tech. She got a job as a recruiter for DevOps roles but would try to learn from the candidates about the technology, eventually attending and later leading community meetup groups in the space. She got into DevOps community advocacy and then met a leader from HashiCorp who suggested she fill some skills gaps (which she did and later got a job as a Solution Engineer).

Stephanie Wong, Head of Developer Advocacy at Google Cloud, went to school for communications and digital humanities (impact of tech on society and culture). She practiced her audio/video production skills in a guerilla podcast; When it came time to apply for a job for developer advocacy, she could apply all her tech skills from being a sales engineer with her communications background to get the job. There is also a shout out to dreaming in bands concept here and saying no to Google Cloud (dream company).

Jimmy Tassin, a former IT admin and Solution Engineer at Lumen, said despite lacking industry-specific experience, he had experience in government-regulated industries, which was a positive when interviewing for a financial services industry job. During other times, he was able to draw the paralells between operating a successful Minecraft server and IT administration.

Sales experience doesn’t always come from sales roles. Give the example of selling projects to your boss (not just that we should upgrade to the next version because it’s better). Tony Reeves, a Solution Engineer at VMware is a great example of this.

Nick Korte said selling his ideas on solutions at a helpdesk was still selling.

David Klee went from doing IT for a performing arts center to working for a consulting firm to eventually starting his own consulting business. The focus on helping solve interesting problems and his no nonsense / low pressure approach helps put customers at ease.