Week 30 ??????

Monday

Monday was Victor's first day at his new daycare ??. We went there with Olivia, though she went to her group room. Lars and I were both there, and we just hung out with the other children and staff for 30 minutes. He did a great job, but it’s a bit of a mindfuck.

Back home, I cleaned our sunroom because I needed a place to work. I cleaned a corner and set up a table so I could start working.

Over the past couple of months, due to Victor, I’ve been neglecting my LinkedIn messages, so today I had time to reply to many messages. I have some interesting things cooking, and I’m very excited to be visiting Zealand - Sj?llands Erhvervsakademi and Steen Hillebrecht and doing a talk in early September for their brand new students about how they can start preparing for when they graduate and need to land that first job. Many other interesting messages were written, but that is the one that stands out.

After lunch, while Victor was napping, Lars joined me and helped me prioritize the different tasks I'm facing at the moment.

My starting point will be to focus on enabling job-seeking UX professionals to book me for coaching sessions and/or buy voice feedback on their job materials, like their CV, LinkedIn profile, cover letter, etc. We discussed how I should do it from a technical perspective without having to spend a lot of money on tools. I have no idea how many people feel this pain so much that they are willing to spend their hard-earned money on it, or if the price point is too high, too low, or a sweet spot. What I do know is, that I care about these people, and I have a lot of knowledge that they can benefit from.

After Lars came home with Olivia, I had some time, so I worked on my workbook on how to create a course. It’s interesting to answer questions about what pain I can relieve job seekers from. Low confidence and feelings of not being good enough come from countless rejections. I know because I’ve surveyed these people, and reading their responses was heartbreaking ??.

We had a lovely family time preparing and eating dinner and then getting ready for bed. I walked Olivia and caught up with Mariah Sells for around 15 minutes. I got to vent a bit about work challenges, and she told me about this test she took for a job that basically “weeds out” people with ADHD and similar challenges. So incredibly unethical, but unfortunately, I’m not surprised that stuff like that is happening. I am, however, happy I’ve never heard of Danish companies doing that!

Tuesday

Ahhr, nothing like starting the day with putting up laundry ??, and I’m not even joking. I love my drying area and have found a great system to organize the clothing. I find doing laundry super fulfilling, honestly.

Getting online, Zdeněk Pa?ek had some news for me on the new website. I found a wrong thumbnail for a video, and when uploading the correct one, I got a 505 Error. After adding some new companies to the video library, I felt like I had to do something more productive. So I looked at getting my coaching and feedback flow up and running. I’ve chosen to do a more manual and hands-on approach until I’m sure someone will actually use my new services. I’ve tried way too many times in my startup career where we imagine the best-case scenario and plan for that, spending way too much energy and time setting up flows, integrations, and blocking ourselves from getting other things done.

Starting off, I’m doing a small test with our email subscribers. I’ve set it up now to hit our members in the Friday newsletter, and on Monday, it will hit our job seekers. Super excited to see how it goes. It’s a vulnerable position to put yourself in because people are buying me, my time, my perspective on them. I think I’ll be able to act out the saying “water off a duck’s back” in case nobody thinks I’m worth their money. I know I’m worth their time because I’ve had great feedback on this type of work I’ve done with our members in the past ??.

Anyway, lots of playing around in Stripe and Mailchimp and testing my little flow. Now we’ll see if anyone books me ??.

I had a call with Clemence de Robert , who is co-organizer of Hatch Conference , and we talked through the format I have planned for the Hatch Mixer we'll host on September 4th, hopefully at my cousin Kristoffer Pind Levison Bar AUTOPOUL . I filled out all the things I needed to and updated our event schedule.

Lars came back with both kids, and for the last 20 minutes, while Olivia was drawing on paper on the floor, my stepdad called to inform me that they are coming to CPH tomorrow to drop off some things for his wife’s son. They had offered us their grill, a big-ass monster, which we happily accepted. Too bad we’ve had most of our summer gatherings for this year… it’ll be nice to see them shortly tomorrow ??.

Then I made us dinner and we invited our carpenter to join us, which was very nice. He spotted that our sliding door wasn’t properly installed and fixed it so the door now can’t slide out of the track. Super nice and a good trade for a meal! While we were eating, a pregnant woman came and picked up a sack of baby clothing neither of our children can fit. It’s nice to see it being passed on and not just thrown out.

I walked Olivia while I listened to an episode from @Ravnkilde podcast “Det g?r sgu nok” (roughly translated to “everything is going to be alright”) on how to make people invest in your business even though their money is tight. I wrote down a small list of improvement ideas for my little flow which I will implement tomorrow ??.

Lars and I found ourselves in a lovely situation of two sleeping children and chilled on the couch watching the newest episode of UK Taskmaster and then “The Traitors,” which is a reality format of the game Mafia/Werewolf, while I got to play The Sims 4. Perfect ending.

Wednesday

Getting back on the post-maternity path isn’t always a straight road. I still haven’t gotten back in the habit of checking my calendar before I go to bed to mentally plan for the upcoming day, so I totally forgot that I had planned to go to @Sasha’s house after dropping Olivia off at daycare. When I found out, I quickly packed my bag and called her while biking from home.

She had been a doll and bought us pastries ??. It was really cool to see her house. She has an amazing place with so many loving details, and it’s clear that she is an active, curious, and colorful personality.

We made a small agenda of 3 points:

1. The Why UX podcast: She’d like to do some episodes with a kind of sub-theme of the original one.
2. Our new event, which for now is called “Job Winners”: An event where we interview the people who actually landed the cool jobs, to hear about their approach. We hope we can get some hiring managers to join and share why they chose this candidate. (Ping us if you or someone you know should participate.)
3. Email logics: I’m in the process of setting up a new email flow, and I’m a total newbie on this. I’m even in the process of changing mail providers, which is a nightmare (comment if you can recommend something and why you recommend it ??). But Sasha knows a lot about this and offered to help me when I’m a bit more on track ????. It’s really nice to get help offered ??.

We also talked about doing a series of interviews with freelancers in the UX space. Perhaps that could be the podcast… (@Vujic, @Lena, @Helle, I’m thinking of you ??, if you’re reading and interested, let us know ??).

Lastly, she was inspired by the AWESOME @Nischa’s community @Career and how they once a month have a community “give-back” session. Here you can present an issue/challenge you’re facing, and everyone has to pitch in to help the person. Love that, although I personally can’t commit to that because of our children.

We were offered to join for lunch at the Billetto office, so we biked over there. On the way, we talked about fitness classes and instructor styles. I really need to get back on stage in a gym soon.

After we said goodbye, I biked home, and I do really like to bike through the city (haha, well mainly Amager ??). At home, I had a lovely time with my family.

Thursday

I started the day with a call from an employee from Autopoul giving me a green light for the event ?? Now I just need the Hatch peeps to create the event so I can move with it.

I hustled the rest of the day! I was in doubt about what to do, so I asked ChatGPT. If you download the app, you can talk directly to it, and it replies. I explained where I was at and then asked what to do. It suggested a trillion things, but the first one was to build a landing page. I was glad that I did the Preely interview with Riziki Nielsen , where he told us about this AI tool called Relume , which is a site where you explain what you want a website to do, and then it creates a sitemap that I could work from. Again, I use ChatGPT a LOT, explaining what I want and letting it do some of the legwork. Obviously, I had to rewrite quite a bit, but it was more motivating for me to collaborate with it. In a day, I had written all the content I needed and even made some draft quotes for people I’ve worked with over the years. I’ve sent it over to a few friends to read through and give me some feedback. It feels a bit vulnerable because I’m going to start doing career coaching and providing voice feedback on people’s job-searching material. I really want to help people, and this way, I feel like there is a clearer path for people to do so.

Friday

I was feeling a bit sick, like a train had run me over. Lars took Olivia to daycare with Victor, and I spent the entire day in bed/on the couch and under a blanket. Sucks to spend a day like that…

Saturday

I was still feeling sick, so it was kind of the same recipe…

Sunday

I felt better, and I started off my day with a session with my psychologist. We talked about how things I can’t control are affecting my mood. I’ve felt more anger in the past year of my life than I ever think I have. But in the past couple of weeks, I have felt more sadness, and I get very overwhelmed.

I want to thank you for reading along, and I’m going to be very honest with you now. I’m very much in doubt about whether I should get an adult job so we can start saving up money to make improvements on our house for a better future for my family, or if I should keep on fighting for CPHUX and the people in it. I’ve been in the startup world for just shy of a decade, and there is a thing about it: if people don’t care if you shut down tomorrow, then it isn’t that important. I know for a fact that a lot of people would be very sad if I closed down CPHUX tomorrow. I’m grateful to everyone who is a member and even to the ones who have been members. But I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been away for roughly 2.5 years. Getting pregnant with Olivia, reorganizing for my co-founder to run it without me (I started working after a month). Then my co-founder decided to leave, so now I had to reorganize to run it alone. Then realizing I was pregnant again and reorganizing to go on a full maternity leave where I couldn’t be accountable for anything. Now I’m FINALLY back, and the reality is that we are losing more members than we are getting. Not a lot, but it’s going the wrong way.

Obviously, I can’t expect to turn that around by snapping my fingers, but every time we lose a person, I get sad. My loving husband tells me I can’t take it personally, and I don’t, but it hurts because it feels like taking a step backward. A small step, but still. I hope I can do things to turn it around and be bigger and better. I really want to continue doing this because I see the impact CPHUX is creating for individuals and on company levels. I’m hella proud but frustrated AF because I'm still not being paid what I’m worth.

If you have any advice, then ping me, and if you have considered becoming a member, know that I care and appreciate every member we have ??.

Late in the day, my co-mother Magdalena came by with her son Hugo. He's the same age as Victor and it is so fun to see these 3 children play together. We had lunch together and then just had a good time playing in the living room. After she left I got to spend over 1 hour in the garden, cutting down hedges, pulling weeds from the ground and just seeing my poor garden, that have been neglected for 10 years, get a bit more in shape. I even discovered a cute pebble bed after trimming down our neighborhood hedge around 40 cm inwards...