XD Community: personal and professional wellness.

For those of you able to join this morning's call, thank you. I know many people weren't able to join today, so I look forward to hosting the next one and soon, having a real-world catch up.

This community initiative has been set up to support the XD community now and in the future and the themes noted in the original callout were well received and discussed. 

Themes from today's call:

01: Wellness

What a great way to start! Presence, mindfulness and the re-ordering of one's life were the dominant themes. Here's what people are doing to look after their mental and physical wellbeing; I know I will be borrowing some of these ideas, particularly learning a new language:

• learning to cross-stitch
• doing cross-fit at home and maintaining the fitness community via Zoom
• golfing - the courses are empty at the moment (hint)
• meditation and mindfulness (if you're interested, join my free weekly mindfulness and meditation session, Tune-in Tuesdays)
• online yoga and meditation practice
• cooking at home; my favourite way to get present and look after your mind and body
• more time with family instead of being 'on' and available all waking hours
• learning a new language, eg Duolingo or Memrise

02: Refreshing your portfolio

In the downtime, this is a great opportunity to boost your CV and portfolio. One of our CX leaders spoke about his recent personal rebrand and refreshing of his portfolio. Here's a summary of this part of the discussion:

• Rethink and reframe who you are; the world has changed and culture/culture-fit is critical. How can you position yourself to be more than your technical skills?
• showcase your knowledge of tech and the importance of expressing that experience is more than an interface.
• limit the volumes of text and adopt a story-telling approach to express yourself
• show a timeline of your career, including previous careers and education
• what are your approaches to continuous learning?
• show your creative thinking in your portfolio (creativity is more than lovely UI)
• avoid textbook language; instead, what does CX design mean for you?
• What's your personal design philosophy?
• Talk about yourself in a loving way, feel OK about your diversity and quirkiness coming through
• Move your portfolio an online mode (eg Wix or Squarespace)
• Integrating your outside interests to showcase you as a whole, unique and interesting being. For example, some of the interests that participants spoke about include cross-stitching, line-drawing, illustration.
• What this does is show potential employers that you're a well-rounded human. After all, we ARE human-centred, right?

03: Being of service to the world

We all belong to more than one community

• What are your personal interests and passions? How can you take these passions and serve your community? Are there any Not Profits that you feel aligned with? Can you support them and keep your design skills up?
• We ran out of time here but left with me forming a Slack group for the XD community:

Join our Slack community and be part of the discussion.