I'm Heather Nemelka, and I'm really excited to be with all of you today. Wherever you are across the globe isn't technology fantastic. It allows all of us to be together across different time zones. Joining for a common purpose.Uniting 100,000 women in tech to foster innovation with purpose and impact as many of, you know, a technology stack is a collection of different technologies that work together for some purpose. Usually as a foundation for systems such as websites, mobile apps and stand-alone desktop software, just as a developer would want to be very intentional with their stack selection. So should you be in developing your own personal stack today? You're going to learn about the mindset and foundational habits you can develop to adopt and develop your own personal stack. You'll learn how to overcome self conscious bias, discover your superpowers, build habits to optimize your day. I'll be sharing my deck after the presentation.

So don't worry about taking notes. I wasn't always in tech. In fact, it took me a really long time to get into tech. Um Before I got my first job in tech, I had spent um almost half my life being a stay at home mom. I still remember in the nineties when my oldest son was a baby and the internet was just becoming a little bit more mainstream. I was learning how to surf the web and I really didn't know much about it soon. I started an ebay business and an Amazon Ecommerce business for fun. But other than that, I really didn't spend much time on a computer as I started adding more Children to my family. I got busy being a mom and found myself spending less time in front of a screen and more time in the school Carpool lane. Seven years ago, my life became completely Ski Wampus. When my husband filed for divorce. After nearly 25 years of marriage, suddenly I became a single mom of five kids with bills to pay and no idea of how I would support my family. Fortunately, my brother helped me get a job as a marketing coordinator for a local sports medicine company. And I soon found myself Googling marketing acronyms when my manager wasn't looking and listening to marketing 101 podcasts late at night. Although I had no idea what I was doing. I was determined to do my very best and silently hoped the company wouldn't find out.

They had hired, they had hired and made a mistake over the next several years, Google and I became the best of friends whenever I didn't know how to do something I googled it. I learned how to troubleshoot a website, launch a company newsletter and manage a growing commercial account on Amazon. Although I love my job, I knew it was time to leave when a new chief marketing officer was hired and he started to take all of my responsibilities away one by one. It took less than three months for him to destroy all the self-confidence I had built up and I found myself really struggling with my abilities. This lack of self-confidence and increased doubt in my personal abilities is what I like to refer to as self conscious bias. Most of us are familiar with unconscious bias, which is a bias based on mistaken inaccurate or incomplete information in favor or against a group person or thing. Self conscious bias is when you rely on your own personal unsupported judgments against yourself as compared to another in a way that is unfair and overly self critical.

How many of us have allowed our own self conscious bias to get in the way of our success and personal development. How many of us have listened to the voice inside our heads telling us we don't really know what we're doing. Others can do it better and we really should just give up over the years. I lived way too much inside my head and let my self conscious bias influence my self worth. It came naturally to doubt that I was good enough and smart enough to do the job. For whatever reason, I trusted the self talk inside my head over the external praise I had been given over the years. It wasn't until recently that I discovered a simple solution to overcoming self conscious bias and negative self talk. The solution, positive affirmations, affirmations are reminders or statements that can be used to encourage and motivate yourself. For the longest time, I thought positive affirmations were a joke. But then I came to a point in my career when I was full of self doubt and ready to quit, I was desperate for something. Anything that might help me during this period, I was reading several self improvement books and all of them mentioned the value of positive affirmations out of desperation. I decided to finally give this affirmation idea a chance.

Did you know that the journal of social cognitive and effective neuroscience published a study where researchers use MRI and found that practicing positive affirmations regularly activates the reward centers in the brain that respond to other pleasurable experiences. So, practicing positive affirmations help activate the areas of your brain that make you positive and happy. Ultimately positive affirmations, boost lost self self-confidence and this is just what I needed. So how is it done? First? You make a list of all the affirmations, you will repeat each day to come up with the list. Start with I am use the present tense, you'll want to make them short and specific and of course, state them in the positive and most importantly, make sure they resonate with you. So someone may suggest an affirmation for you. But if it doesn't resonate, you're not going to want to use it because it won't work. So you're going to start with only a few statements at first and then you're going to add a few more over time to always have them top of mind. You want to print them out or write them on a piece of paper where you can hang them on your mirror at home and also post next to your desk where you work.

This is important because at first, you won't be able to remember to say them, let alone remember them. Once you have your list posted, you will say them every morning when you wake up and repeat them before you go to bed. You should also say them any time you need an extra boost of self-confidence. I keep mine by my desk for this very reason. Pretty soon, you will have them memorized and you will find yourself saying them as you walk from your car into a store. And throughout the day, an example of some affirmations could be, I'm good enough. I'm worthy of my success. I'm excited about the work I'm doing. I feel strong and powerful every day. I am smart and capable of handling anything. It is definitely awkward. At first, it's not easy to start thinking and speaking about how amazing you are. When you feel completely incompetent, it takes practice, it won't feel comfortable at first. But if you practice positive affirmations every day, they have the power to change your life. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't always in tech. Actually, it took me a while to get into tech. And now that I'm finally in tech, I wanna give back and help others, especially women discover their superpowers and contribute to tech in a meaningful way. Your superpowers are a very important part of your personal stack development. You may be wondering what I mean by superpowers, superpowers are real and we all have them. It's just that they're often less obvious than you think and it usually takes time to uncover them.

Many of us don't recognize our superpowers because they come so easily to us. So we don't think that they're special. We tend to take them for granted because we think everyone has those same powers too. But actually they don't, for those of you who have already discovered your superpowers, you are very fortunate for those of us who are still wondering here is how you can discover your superpowers first. You want to create a list of all the things you do. Well, what are your strengths? Which ones do you feel most passionate about if money wasn't necessary and nothing stood in your way, what would you do? Ask the people who know you really well to share what they most admire about you and then ask yourself the following. What did you used to love doing as a child that's been put on hold? What comes naturally to you? Once you have this list compiled, you will feel strong and you'll want to start noticing the patterns you see. Do your passions and strengths intersect. Think about those strengths and abilities that make you more efficient and offer you a competitive advantage. Are you a software engineer who can also write well or a marketer who can code? Can you combine any of your unique skills to provide more value to your company? Career?

Coach Val Nelson suggests to look for the areas in which you excel without much effort. Those are likely indicators of your superpowers for some. This could be synthesizing complex sets of data for others. It might be presenting in front of a large group of people when you can identify those areas where you are most comfortable and confident. This is a sign of where your superpowers lie. You may be thinking I'm not that unique. I'm not even the best of what I do. Don't let that self conscious bias be a blocker. Some of the best business leaders weren't the best writers, coders or marketers, but their superpowers helped them motivate those around them because they could see the big picture now that you know how to discover your superpowers. What are you going to do about them? In the comic Spiderman?

Peter Parker's uncle Ben tells him with great power comes great responsibility. And so it is with you. Once you discover your superpowers, you need to overcome the fears you may have preventing you from putting your strengths to their greatest use. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D Roosevelt once said, you gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you cannot do. Overcoming your fear is a prerequisite for greatness.

Take the first step in your superpower journey by showing your willingness to say yes to your mission. Your set of skills and talents can change your life and those around you. If you let them discovering your superpowers and overcoming self conscious bias are just the beginning of developing your personal stack. The third and most important activity is learning how to build habits to optimize your day. I'm a big believer in the power of positive habits when I went back to school five years ago to get my executive MBA. I realized after the first week that I was already falling behind, I knew I needed to make some drastic changes. If I were going to graduate, Charles Duhigg, the author of the book Power of Habit, wrote that a crisis or perceived crisis can help people change. A crisis, can help you see that certain things need to be rebalanced. Business school was a crisis in my life, I knew I had to come up with a solution. And in the process, I learned how to build habits, to optimize my day, to understand where I needed to implement better habits. I first evaluated how I was currently spending my time. How was I spending my time when I wasn't at work? How was I spending my time on the weekends? I discovered that although I did a lot of good things, I also wasted a lot of time.

I knew that if I optimized my days with better habits, I could find more time to study for school and still get everything done while I could have implemented a number of new habits. I decided to focus on just three to start first, make a plan for the day, follow a morning routine and tackle difficult things. First near Igal. The author of Hooked said that if you don't plan your day, someone else will. Before I went to bed each night, I learned how to create a plan for the following day. First, I made a list of all the things I needed to do that next day, I then put them into categories and those activities would be in the certain category that I had decided that I would do when I got them done. So I put all of the errands that I needed to run under car, all of the house chores under home, all of my work activities under office, all my internet activities, under computer and all the phone calls I needed to make under phone. This allowed me to be efficient with my time. Wherever I was. For example, if I had errands to run in my car, I brought my list with me to make sure I did everything I needed to while I was in the car.

This prevented me from going back out at another time for something I missed. And if I didn't get everything done that day, the items would carry over to the next one. The second habit that I implemented was to follow a morning routine. Even though I got up early every morning, often before five o'clock ami usually spent 30 to 45 minutes on my phone, looking at emails and social posts from friends and responding to texts. Not only did I waste a lot of time, but I also let others dictate my priorities for the day. In order to avoid this wasted time, I decided to map out an optimal morning routine for me. It looked like this. I wrote down what time I would wake up and the activities I would do during a time block. I would actually make sure that I got those things done and sometimes I would have time to add other activities and sometimes I didn't, but I tried to follow this routine pretty closely most days so that I could make sure I got done the things that I really want to do. And at 830 I would leave for work by creating an optimal morning routine. I was able to get more personal things done before my work day began. The third habit I started was tackling difficult things.

First American writer Mark Twain first introduced this idea when he suggested that we eat the frog. No, he didn't mean eat an actual frog instead. He was suggesting we start with the biggest, most challenging tasks each day and get them done first to incorporate this habit into my life. I decided to identify the two things that I had to get done each day. And I would do those two things. First. These were designated as my frogs. At first. This proved to be really difficult in his book, the four hour work week, Tim Ferris wrote, being busy is most often used as a guide guys for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. We often will do anything we can to avoid the most difficult tasks. Unfortunately, these tasks are usually the most important ones instead of us using precious brain power and energy, worrying about the task all day, just eat the frog. Once you eat the frog, your other task will seem easy. In comparison by following these three habits, make a plan for the day, follow morning routine and tackle difficult things. First, I was able to optimize my day. I accomplished more and felt better about how I was spending my limited time. Once I could consistently accomplish more and execute these new habits, I was able to slowly add more habits to my routine just because I established some really good habits.

Doesn't mean I was perfect every day. Sometimes I missed James. Clear author of Atomic Habits wrote missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly, the breaking of a habit doesn't matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. I think this principle is so important that I'll stick to it even if I can't do a habit as well or as completely as I would like too often we fall into an all or nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up. The problem is thinking that if you can't do something perfectly, then you shouldn't do it at all. The important thing that we learned from James clear is to rebound if you have a bad day, hopefully you've learned how to overcome self conscious bias, discover your superpowers and build habits to optimize your day. Just as different companies require different tech stacks.

You will need to develop a personal stack that works for you and like a tech stack, developing a personal stack takes time. But every action you take gets you closer to the type of person you wish to become. In closing. I'd like to leave you with one last quote, Merle Dandridge American actress and singer. Once said, as women, we have superpowers. We are sisters, we are healers, we are mothers, we are goddess warriors. So develop your personal stack and go discover your greatness and superpowers.

If you'd like to ask me any questions, feel free to email me at H Nemelka at Comcast net.net. And I will also be sharing my deck on my blog at Ski wampus.com. Thank you and hope you enjoyed this presentation and I'd love to keep in touch if that's something you're interested in doing. Um happy to take some questions if there's some right now since we have a little bit of time. But I, I hope all of you will, will go and be super and accomplish great things during your day and your career. Thanks for joining.