What I learned today - a practice

It’s pretty amazing to see people share their knowledge and wisdom to help people create better lives.

I noticed in my experience, when I look inward, I see how beautiful this world we live in and the people around us. I am grateful to live in a time where we are empowered to become more aware of our thoughts and actions.

Points of awareness: What do I want to optimize in my life? Living and working joyfully. It starts with the self.

Use and practice what serves people and us better, the world around us.

Unlearn the unconscious habits of mind that ultimately keeps us stagnant, fearful, angry, agitated, which eventually hurts the people we serve and us as human beings.

Tonight, I looked up to the sky and witnessed the colors of the sky perform its orchestra of colors; adorned with orange, magenta, purple, and dark blue.

These past few days, I witnessed the human power of caring and compassion. I learned so much about resilience, vision, vulnerability, and the strength of the spirit. Joy is accessible. Happiness is right in front of us when we really want to be happy and fulfilled.

So here is a little mental exercise that was inspired by a TEDxTalk by Amit Sood, MD of Mayo Clinic. I am glad I found this video because it helps to put things into perspective for the times when I feel sad about something that I continuously hear, or see in the world around us. I hope you find wisdom and hope in it as well, to empower you to practice self-care and be joyful, compassionate, and kind.

Gratitude, hello

Every day I will sit in silence with you

Practice a meditation called to thank you

I want to be conscious and awake

closing my eyes as I take note

how each of my dear five people

brought me joy today

Inspiration: Learning. Neuroscience. Brain Happy. Heart. Joy. Gratitude. Love. People. Freedom. Family.

You are beautiful. You are healthy and full of Universal grace.

Surrender. The best is yet to come and there is so much opportunity in this world. You are the creator. Much love.

Twenty years ago, Dr. Amit Sood, a Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic, came to the U.S. thinking he was coming to the Disneyland of the world. He expected everyone here to be very happy. What he saw surprised and shocked him.

Imposter syndrome and self-doubt

My background is instructional design, advising and consulting, customer service, and medical education. I spent over 15 years having worked in both private and public, for-profit, and non-profit institutions. I am pivoting to tech. How do I show my value for me to be able to help a person(s) scale their business and be part of a team, given my limited experience in tech?

Now that I am here in California, especially being in the Bay Area, I am noticing that I have some major self-doubt. I see that I am comparing myself to fellow instructional designers.

This looks like fear.

I am ready to give. I want to challenge myself and continuously be in a place to grow. I am driven within, and I want to find that group of dreamers and individuals that want to help people have better lives. It makes me happy to create and design experiences. It lights me up to explore the needs, gaps, and frustrations of people and collaborate to find something. Together, we can come up with solutions to make people's lives better. I realize I don't have all the hard skills that the companies I have been watching want. But I have a dream that every single rejection leads to the company that wants a person like me.

Do we find yourself doubting your experience, or have trouble listing your accomplishments? Explore these thoughts and address them head on. When we are in our comfort zones, it is easy. But when we put ourselves in discomfort of manifesting our dreams; writing our wishes, fear creeps in to keep things in status quo creating excuses of why we can’t do it. See it. Observe it. Release it. Pivot to work towards making your dreams a reality. All power to you. All power to us. For all you crazy romantic cats out there. You got this. It’s an opportunity.

A talk describing a personal journey dealing with Imposter Syndrome, and how others can look at their own personal doubts about their ability in a new way. Rita DeRaedt is a product designer at Google living in San Francisco. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

Simple, concise and consistent

I was fortunate enough to learn about how Articulate works. We showed our subject matter experts on converting PowerPoint lectures to e-learning using Articulate Studio (now 360). The great opportunity there was to allow flexibility for our learners so that they could watch these modules at their own time. Our learners are medical students, so imagine the load of medical information they have to learn in a given amount of time.

After getting feedback from our students, we learned a big thing. A game-changer is that we want to make sure that we show them we value their time. We focused on learner-centered experience. Much to our great surprise, our students appreciate it and felt like they were more in control of their learning when the modules are simplified, concise, and consistent. This also made our subject matter experts happier because it helped them organize how they delivered the material in a meaningful way. The bottom line is to keep things simple yet concise and useful and keep this consistent. All the fancy buttons and transitions are merely distractions. Content, when written well, speaks for itself. Learners (users) will take away more from what we expect. Have faith. Instill confidence and cultivate the power of curiosity. People are inherently curious. Adults want to drive their own learning. It is amazing what happens when we give them space and freedom to figure things out and let them question things than reading and listening to the bulleted points word for word. Value both of our learner and our subject matter experts. Allow the possibility to facilitate a relationship between the teacher and student. We can also save money by keeping things simple. At the end of the day, all learning materials are products. When we design products with a lot of features, we can lose sight of the message of the product.

These are my own thoughts and views from our personal experience working closely with subject matter experts and students. We learned so much from the value of simplicity, the power of people, curiosity, and desire to learn. We are thankful for the honor working at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.

On going live

…there is never the right moment ever to start to share your story, but now.

It starts with this very moment. When I first started writing content for Ramen Girl Don’t Hesitate, I kept thinking of many excuses why I had to have this before making it more accessible to the world. In my mind, I had to have a logo. Well, that was in November 2018, and it’s now July 2019. I still do not have one. Who cares. If I wait for the right moment, it will never happen. If I wait for things to be perfect, I will never have the right moment. I will never ever share this story. I remember thinking about how long the title of this website, but I also wanted to make it memorable and fun. Here’s my move, so I came up with this. I am getting myself out of the way. I wanted to get my ego, my pride, my mind, out of the way of my own crazy creative desire to share my silly story in the hopes that someone out there in this thing called the world wide web of stories and dreams, would find joy in it to get empowered to get out in the world and make it happen no matter what.

I have a lot to be embarrassed about if I wanted to go there and be self-deprecating. Believe me, I can make myself go there if I really wanted to make myself sad and miserable. I will share with you the vulnerable side of not having a job lined up, moving to the most expensive part of the United States. What was I thinking? My mind quickly likes to go there at times when I haven’t eaten or rested or haven’t practiced my self-care.

Imagine this. One mid-morning in May, I showed up at my parent’s house thinking it would be a lovely surprise for them. Something that would bring them happiness to finally see me here, near them. The thought of seeing my mom more brought me so much excitement. The idea of seeing my dad and finally getting a chance to go on brewery trips with him, mom and my siblings would be the ultimate dream come true and would spark joy.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, California, on May 2018.

You can fill in the blanks of the reality check. You can imagine the energy of this and the ripple effects a girl has caused to her friends and family, her dog Finnegan. Moving to the Bay without a job is CRAZY! Enjoy this run-on sentence stream of consciousness of her mind. “To think that I made a declaration in one evening of December 2017 that I would simplify my life manifesting things to move in the direction of purging stuff that I have accumulated through the years of creating a home and life in Columbus, Ohio; my Honda Fit getting totaled by a Subaru Forrester on my home from lunch on the lightly powdered snow day; falling down my icy front steps that one January freezing morning; Marie Kondo-ing the 3-bedroom house I love, thrive and live in; talking to my boss announcing my move and asking for my resignation. It came in three. That move inspired RGDH. I have some things I have yet to do to for the people I left who helped shape me and help me become the person I am now and continuously becoming.”

I have taken some time off for personal reasons. These pages are helping me explore what is deeply important. I don’t know where I am going. I have no answers, but for those who get a chance to discover these pages, I hope you can find inspiration and no fear to pursue something greater than yourself. Being in California, I see the day to day struggles, challenges, and fantastic impact of many incredible individuals I have encountered; of those who are in the trenches of manifesting their dreams. California is not a comfortable place to live, but one thing for sure, you will find people from many walks of life and experiences beyond what you expect, whose hearts are open and the drive to make something to observe. There will be forces out there that will test your emotions and thoughts. Stay the course, and practice resilience and gratitude. I will forever be grateful for Steve Jobs and his impact in this world. Stay weird and different. Your time will come.

So if you’re struggling with where you want to go, yourself, comparing yourself to others’ achievements, not being perfect, not being pretty; not be good enough; being ashamed; being embarrassed or being uncomfortable…this is a place where creativity happens if you stop and get time to yourself. It begins with awareness, it starts with you, only you, in the struggles and the valleys of sorrow and fear with your heart, mind and soul, there is hope and the desire to move forward, the opportunity to grow and find joy in the world around you even when things are not as you expected, imagined, planned. For this, I present to you my tiny ever-evolving wabi-sabi Ramen Girl Don’t Hesitate.

I was thinking of how space is an opportunity to get down and real. Music is space. There is no perfect time. It is now. Put yourself out there and see how it feels. Brandbeats | SE32 | The Influence of Space on Spotify kiss and celebrating music and the creative weirdos out there. With love and respect.

Labor of Love

If we are going out into the world to be and live our life to create impact into this world through epic servitude, we owe it to ourselves to get into the grittiness of ourselves. Looking inward and deeply embracing what is there. Life happens. We are constantly impressed by someone or something. Sometimes there are moments where we are able to slow down, pause, and events in our life, we are given the opportunity to observe (if we let it) and see this (put something into action). If we are lucky enough, we get to see this raw being we call ourselves. It is a window. Now the next thing is to whether look through or go through; opening it or keeping it closed. You have the power more than you think. Whether you like it or not, we are just hitting the surface. If you want to dig deeper, seek those who will guide; empower, cultivate courage and trust within you, break the limitations for you to discover and explore this to get to love for yourself and to the world. All power to you.

Tilting to a little thing: When we were little girls and boys, what sparked stuff within us? When did you get to sit down with your family or friends, sit quietly and learn to open perspective? When was the last time you did something new and get out there? When was the last time you fell in love with the person talking to you just through listening intently (you not listening to respond but hearing) and allowing them to flower like a lotus flower? So many possibilities. What is your intention for all this? Who do you thank? Who do you celebrate? Who do you respect? Who do you trust? Questions are endless. The spark is within you. You are the creator and designer of your life.

Exercises to start:

Get out in the world. Have dinner with friends and turn off your phone. Talk to random people or with a person you love that you haven’t talked to. Initiate a conversation and bring a vulnerable topic. See what happens when you do something opposite you are told or heard to do.

Playlist: Songs that bring you joy.

Hope you find yourself lit up with this. Remember your mind is powerful. You are enough. You are beautiful. Rock your love.

UX/UI

When I left home for the university. I never imagined years later, I would be sitting like a lotus flower typing about my experience and desire to keep learning something new. I have always had a deep love for Liberal Arts and Social and Behavioral Sciences. It cultivated a quiet appreciation for exploration and discoveries. These discoveries were not just reading unaffordable used textbooks, but meeting people from diverse backgrounds, living frugality, working in retail while putting myself through school to pay for my food and housing; a girl always falling in and out of love, overcoming adversity, fostering friendships, enjoying the moment. It has opened doors to dimensions I could never imagine if I had not taken the leap of faith to just do.

I have been exploring UX Design on my own. As a side note, the fact that I moved to California without a job lined up was a crazy romanticized move. With this newfound experience of a kick in the pants status, rather than pining or lamenting for a formal UX/UI education, I took on a challenge of exploring alternative kinds of learning environments to study it instead of that high-priced tuition from an institution I couldn't financially justify. Right now, the silly thing to be grateful for is that I have the time and space, health, soul and openness to the experience of finding and crafting my own curriculum. My time is valuable, and I want to use it learning something new and getting myself in a new healthy headspace. I realize this is a considerable risk, but why make it safe, with not knowing or if Karl the Fog flirting with me, there is an excellent opportunity for building an emotional connection. After all, I want to find the true meaning of user experience. To build empathy, moments of struggle, frustration must be there. I could make myself miserable by being in pity mode "woe-is-me-mode," or I could have fun with comment bubbles of self-discovery. Adversity is embraced as I open my heart space. In the meantime, lean back, breath, and exhale and let the lyrics of moving this soul be allowed to flourish. Thank you for your space. Thank you for your love of learning. Thanks for embracing this moment. Here we go.

Here’s a start:

uxlore

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