All right, I'm gonna get going right on time. Sound good, everyone. Ok. Um, so hi, everyone. Welcome to the Adventures of Women In Tech workbook workshop on learning to ask. I'm going to do a short introduction before we get into the material.And if you're joining us, feel free to put in on chat where you're joining us from. Hello, everybody. Um, really great to be here with you all today. I'll do the introduction kind of slowly. So if people are filtering in, they won't miss any of the workbook content. Um, so what you're joining today is a workshop based on content from the Adventures of Women in Tech book series. Um, I'm Alana Karen and the original author of the first book, The Adventures of Women In Tech. How we got here and why we stay and I'll introduce my colleagues, have themselves introduce in a little bit as well. Um, the original book I published in 2020 I'll talk a little bit more about both of the books before I get into the introductions. So for the Adventures and Women In Tech, why I wrote it was that I really wasn't seeing a book out there that covered all the different backgrounds, all the different interests, all the different ambitions, all the different ways people might even want to be in tech or work in tech.

And I was really interested in that. So I interviewed over 80 women and I wrote a book filled with stories about the different ways people got to tech, the different things that they want to do their different roles, both technical and non tech, technical, all their different backgrounds.

And of course, the challenges that they've had and how they've found that they're able to navigate their careers. And in doing that, I really did start to think about those core tools, those core skills that women need to travel within tech. And um I'll talk a little bit more about those in a minute, but I don't want to put off too long introducing my women colleagues. Um So when I was starting to promote the first book I was asking and answering the same questions over and over again about core skills. And it came to me that maybe I did really need to follow up the first book with a workbook to go through those skills. And I was talking with some of my favorite women who I've run into along the way in my career and they happily helped. We are missing one of them today. Um But today you have four of us. Um So I'm gonna start left to Right. Just with how, um how, how, I don't know, we're just gonna go in whatever order I please. I, I think so. Um CYA I met when we were both working on Google Fiber and she joined as an amazing trainer and I wanted to involve her because she had all of this training background.

Sara, can you cha, can you share your current role and why you were interested in working on the workbook?

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alana. Hello, everyone. So excited to be here. My name is Sara Hughley. I'm a learning and development senior strategist at Google. Absolutely. A fantastic opportunity. I'm in learning and development for 20 years. I'm always so passionate about passing forward any nuggets related to uh working in technology because those were passed along to me. So I'm so happy to be here. Thank

you. Thank you. Um Mary Lee and I met when we were both presenting to school Children about what was exciting about tech. Um Marilee, what is your current role and why, why did you want to partner with me on

this? Thank you, Alana. And yeah, this is a true story we were presenting to, I think it was eight year olds and when uh Alana Stern came up, I was just so inspired by her. So I followed her and then I saw the first book and I reached out to her and I said, look, this is really fantastic. I want to help I want to participate. What can I do? And when, when she talked to me about the idea for a workbook, I immediately jumped in because I always believe in framework thinking and having some pointers. And honestly, I put in this book, everything I wish I knew when I was um finding myself in tough situation in challenging situations throughout my career. So, uh I wanted to be involved just to give back to the community and learn from you and also be able to pass on uh my insights to other people.

Absolutely. Yes. Um And we were just, we were so excited to work on a project together. We kept coming up with project ideas. George Georgia, I also worked with in fiber and I hired her directly after hearing that she'd stayed up all night reading a book about customer service. And uh yeah. And then of course, we had been writing buddies during a particularly hard part of our careers. We just started to write together. So I of course, thought of you when we were coming to this. Um Can you tell me what your current role is and why you wanted to work on this with me? I think you're muted still. Oh, no, it's still muted. Is the button at the bottom in the middle. Not working. I heard you earlier though. Oh, we might have to skip George's intro while she sorts this out button is not working. Skip me Ok. Well, we'll rejoin and I'll do the skills before your part comes. Ok. Ok. So Georgia is also actually the author of the Taking Up Space Exercise that we're gonna talk about. So I definitely want her volume button to work at some point. So we'll, we'll work that out. Um So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the five tools that I discussed in the first book and the workbook is based on. So in interviewing women, it was clear that there's all kinds of things that help them in their journey.

But what I noticed was that almost everyone hit on five core things and those things were resilience, marketing 101 or the ability to self market asking, asking for what you need and what you want also. Oh, wait, I think we have Georgia because I hear more sound OK? Um Don't mute yet. I'll, I'll come back to you in a second. Uh OK. So we got through asking for what you want and what you need, finding support and then lastly owning you're awesome, like that ability to feel that you are in fact awesome and carry that with you so quickly before I talk about that more. Georgia, please introduce yourself.

Apologies for that and my mute button. Um Yes, everyone. My name is Georgia Dey Payne. I am currently a Director of Trust and Safety at youtube. So I get paid to watch youtube videos all day long. It's pretty awesome. Um I focus specifically in the misinformation space. Um And Alana alluded to this, Alana hired me very early on in my career and took a big bet on me. Um And she is one of the people throughout my career who has helped me navigate this very topic um of what is, you know, who am I personally and professionally and how does that show up at work and how do I navigate tech? Um So I was fortunate to, to be able to follow alongside Ilana when she wrote the initial book. Um and I have found with, with books like that, but really the the real gems are in applying it to your own life. And so when she came up with this workbook idea, I had a ton of energy around. Ok. Yes, there's so many nuggets in here. How do we help people actually figure out what it means for them? And so that's where my, my passion for this came in. Uh with that, I will pass it back over to you a lot.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um And I put in the chat, I did not make them say all these nice things, they're just doing that of their own volition. Um So I see Alba makes a comment in here that it is really complicated to stay in tech and that is part of what I was seeing when I was interviewing women that along the way they would learn these skills in order to progress or deal with the systems or maybe deal with the lack of support from a manager and having to find it elsewhere and they would come through it often wiser braver and ultimately having stayed.

But we know there's so many who maybe don't make that journey or feel good about that journey. And what I also noticed is that this took up time, right? This took up time where it would take a woman five years, 10 years, 15 years before they felt confident. And so the question was, how could we accelerate that? And how could we take maybe some of the lessons that we've learned and turned them into exercises for other women to help them on their journey. Um And I certainly do think that this could help companies as well. Um But for now we're gonna share it directly with you so that you potentially have these skills for yourself or to share with others. Today. We've noticed that there's this huge appetite around this topic of how do you learn to ask for what you want and what you need and how do you feel even comfortable taking up the space to do that? So I'm going to hand it back to Georgia. Who's going to talk about this exercise from the workbook?

Awesome. Thanks Alana. Yeah, I wanted to share a story from a number of years ago that has really impacted uh my career and, and stayed with me. Um I was, I was struggling with a new project at the time, I was in a program management type capacity. I started jumping in, I saw that a ton needed to be done, but it wasn't clear what my role was or what it should be, how much should I own versus facilitate versus get someone else to do. So, I went to my boss hoping, OK, she'll give me a ton of direction and a clear path and it'll all be good after this. Um And instead of providing uh that level of detail, she actually challenged me to think bigger and she kind of did the exact opposite. Um I, I explicitly remember her encouraging me kind of in response to all of these things that I had questions around. Um And kind of wondering exactly what my role should be in a given situation. She just said, if you see a gap, go fill it, like take up that space. Don't wait, don't hesitate, just lean on in there, right? Uh And grab it. Um And what was probably a very offhand comment for her at the time has really ended up turning into a career mantra for me.

Um So when we put this workbook together, this was I think probably the first topic Alana that I said, I, I, you know, I would want to be in here. Um And this, this mantra of taking up space has empowered me to be proactive about my career and personal needs and solving specific business problems. It's provided encouragement to help me act like an owner in, in whatever I'm doing. Um And really given me the confidence to, to ask for what I need and encourage me to do the work to figure out what those asks are, which is really what we'll talk about today. Um And I bring up this, this specific uh example and, and, and mantra because what my boss was really doing at that time was encouraging me to make an ask, right? She was pushing me to identify in this specific instance of a specific business problem. Later on down the line, it was kind of more personal desires that I had um that needed attention and, and encouraging me to figure out what I needed to ask for in order to drive those solutions whether they be personal or professional. Um so great, like we know we need to do this, but like, how do we really do it? Where do, where do we go? Um I don't know about you.

I'd love to hear people chime in on, on the chat, but I find it extremely difficult to even figure out what to ask for. Um It can be hard to know where you wanna go professionally personally, um or even know your blind spots, know where you need help. Um And even when you do have those things figured out knowing exactly how to ask for help in them, um, is extremely difficult as well. Uh, for me often it has kind of felt like writer's block where I'm just, like, staring at a blank page and I don't know exactly where to go or, or what to do next. Um, so as part of this, this article in the workbook, if you have had a chance to look at it, um, I, I thought that kind of uh throughout my career to date and what are the types of asks that I've had as kind of a framework to use for helping us figure out um additional asks uh that we need to make.

Um And so kind of, you know, I, I, I've created a couple of categories, there's specific skill sets, right? As uh uh a skill that we need that we don't have or that we want to get better at. There might be financial asks where your equation of work hours, pay and talent, you know, doesn't make sense to you anymore or it's not on par with what the market would offer. Um Career asks how, how we can be intentional about where we are today and where we want to be in the future and how we create that path. Um I, I, what I call work life balance asks. Um I, I have a system with my, with my partner where we uh we ask ourselves this twice a year right of is, is the amount that we are giving to work and giving um to our personal lives, right, for this season. And is that balance um uh in a good kind of tension um or things that might be more specific to a given project or task that you need like an, an Opex ask or head count or, or particular allocation um of people on a team. Um So what we're gonna do in, in the next uh part of this uh Merrilee is actually gonna walk us through an exercise to bring this to life um and help us brainstorm where we wanna see change or optimization.

Um And how we can kind of go about uh preparing to make these types of asks. So with that merely I will pass it off to you.

OK? Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Well, um first of all, I have to say that I was so inspired by this section. And after reading everything that Georgia wrote, I went um back to a mentor and I said, look, I know what I wanna ask for for my life and I know that you're the right person to give this to me. So I had a very specific ask. I reached out to her. Um It was essentially an introduction that she made for me, which changed my life in many ways. So, um thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So the next um section is going to be 10 minutes where I will provide some prompts for you. So I encourage you to take a pen, take a paper and just think through these questions because this is gonna be interactive. I want you to, to truly get into the, the spirit of this and, and live this workshop by having something tangible. OK? Um If we can go to the next slide, Alana. Perfect. Thank you. So I want you to take a pen and paper or an empty dog or anything like that. And I want you to think in what area of your personal or professional life you'd like to see the most change and these areas can be exactly what Georgia mentioned.

Um When I went through this exercise, I took a step back for my career and everything I was doing at the time. And I said, all right, am I happy where I'm at? If I'm not happy, is it because I would rather work on the different project? Is it because I would want a different um role in tech? Because that's, that's also another thing you may be far into tech and you may say, look, I want to be a software engineer. I wanna be a product manager. How do I do this pivot? Is it change you want to achieve financial? Um Is there a certain goal you have in your mind? Do you want to change companies or on a personal level? Do you wanna find more balance? So is there a work life balance that you have in mind? Um, or it can just be general help? Do you need some support? What would you like to change? So with that said, I am gonna give you two minutes to just clear your head and write down one or two bullet points of what you'd like to change? 30 more seconds. All right. Um This is so it looks so much easier than it actually is. Like I, I took a minute to, to think about it. Personal professional, what I wrote down is I actually had a, a second um child recently. So my, what I wanna change is I, I want to be extremely efficient at work so that I can just dial off at the end of the day and spend quality time with my kids.

So I wanna figure out what efficiency means how to say no to things that don't matter anymore. Um So that I can optimize um quality time with them. All right. If we proceed to the next slide, the next section is what is one specific ask that you could make of someone to help you move towards your desired state? So you have defined the desired state, whether it's personal, whether it's professional. Now, if I could give you a magic wand, what would you ask the wand to do for you? It doesn't, don't think about the person right now. Don't think about who it is. Don't think about whether it's realistic or not. But if you had a magic wand and you could get one wish granted, what would they ask be? For example, for me, the ask would be to only get very impactful projects and to be able to be given the flexibility to manage my time in any way or man want. So write down one ask that you would ask your mother want and in two minutes, we'll proceed. And I did paste um the slide deck with empty slides in case you wanted to use this and write your answers just so that you can keep it handy afterwards. Ok?

I'm gonna give you 20 more seconds. All right. So now you should have an idea of what it is. You would like to achieve. What change do you want? Number two, you know, how, what force would actually push you to that direction? So what is the ask that would make you take one step or five steps towards that direction. And now what I want you to do on the next slide, it would be that magic one that we talked about. If you could give it a name and this name can be a coworker. It can be a boss, it can be an ex boss, it can be a friend, it can be a colleague, it can be someone from your alumni network at, at college. It can be your family member. It can, it can be your, your kids, anyone. What would you ask this person is answered? So now the question is who is gonna be the one answering this for you? So we know who we're gonna ask, please write down the specific person that would be best suited. Now, it can be more than one, right? It can be two or three. but I found that this exercise helped me so much to identify um the person that had the experience, the knowledge, um a person that I had a great relationship with that truly cared about myself in order to provide true, real meaningful insights and a person that also has the authority to support me on something I, I really wanted to achieve.

So I will let you uh I will give you a minute or so to write down um 23 names of people that could help. I'm gonna give you 20 more seconds to wrap up your thoughts. All right. Thank you. And I have to say when I was going through this exercise, uh By the time I reached the stage where I actually wrote the names down, I felt like I had achieved a big thing because not only had I turned my, my hopes and my dreams into a tangible plan, but I got the thrill that I may actually be able to achieve them.

So it's, it's so important to be able to break things down. In a tangible way. And writing things down is actually making you feel that OK, I am doing something for this. I am taking action. OK. So now we have our plan, we know what we will ask our magic wand. We have transformed our magic wand into actual people that would represent this and, and perform the change or help us um step towards this change that we want to achieve. And now the last step, which honestly is not the most difficult step, but it's the most practical step if you will is on the next slide. And essentially, I want you to imagine that you are approaching these people, one person, two people, no matter how, how, how many you put down, I want you to think about how you will structure that conversation. So if we can go to the next slide, Alana, how would you ask people for this specific thing you want? Now, here's the thing. OK? Regardless of whether it is you reaching on linkedin or texting them or calling them or seeing them in person, it's very important to make it easy for people to help you. OK? In fact, the easier it is the better it's gonna be. Here's an example.

Someone reached out to me on linkedin and they said, oh my God, I have seen a role on meta, which is exactly what I need. And I need you to refer me to this role. They pasted the URL here's my most updated regime. They pasted the resume. Um And here's the best contact email and here's a little blurb about me so that you can actually add it to the referral. And I responded in seconds. I'm like you made it so easy to me for me and I just pasted everything, submitted it within three minutes or so. And then um two days later they got an interview. So the easier you're going to make it for someone, the faster it's going to be the the most efficient way possible. So, um if it may be something more complicated than a referral, OK. So in that case, you need to provide enough context so that the person you're reaching out to is actually getting the full story. Um And the more they understand they're gonna be better equipped to actually help you and help you refine the ask, right? Because what you have in your mind, you may say, look, I wanna be a CEO tomorrow. Maybe the mentor is gonna tell you, look for you to get to CEO.

You may 1st need to become a director or become a VP or you may need to get into the manager track. You haven't managed people. Maybe you wanna see if it's for you, if you're for it as well. So you wanna give the power to your wand or to these people to transform and help you refine this. It's another important topic. So um I want you to write down literally bullet points of how you would structure it. For example, it can be like um here's the ask, I want the referral or to my example about the manager I told my manager, hey, I have a family now, but I do not want this to take my career behind. So I want to have the most impactful project and I am gonna say no to things that are not impactful or headed to the right direction. So um write down the structure of your ask, write down the context of your ask the why and then ask them for the how and tell them, hey, I need your help. Here's what I want you to do for me. So I'm gonna give you two or three minutes for this and this is the last thing, by the way. Mhm I'm gonna give you one more minute and I have to say, I love that.

I see we have 66 people and these people have been here from the beginning. We only lost two people. So it kind of proves the point that Georgia made where it's very difficult to ask. So having a workshop where a lot of people that share the same concerns are working on, this is just really, really great. So thank you all for, for sticking around and for going through this exercise with us and to Georgia for writing this part. All right, and you can see that within 10 minutes, we have achieved, putting down our dreams and our hopes and our thoughts and what it is we want to achieve. And then we actually have a tangible plan where we even know how we're gonna structure in conversation. The last thing I'm gonna say before um had it back to Alana George and Sri is that um don't feel shy reaching out to people and asking for a favor. The moment you get over being shy, the better it's gonna be. Um, if you try it once and you'll see how positive that response will be, then you will say, oh my God, I can't believe I was shy or even if you don't get a response, um Just think of it this way. If you don't try the answer is definitely gonna be no. So why not give you? I said thank you for participating in this. I'm gonna pass it on to Elana.

Well, on this point, I want Sara to briefly touch on how we do think about this and think about it as a safe experiment. This is actually a whole another exercise in the workbook. So we're just going to touch on this briefly, not walk through it. Um But I did think it was a nice o on your point. It's a nice moment to think about how can you do this and how can you feel safe doing it? So, Cyria, can you do that for us?

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alana and thank you everyone for going through this exercise with us. We hope that you find it very valuable. Every time I go through the exercise, I come up with something new. So I'll be working on additional a today. Um So Alana wrote an amazing exercise within the book related to um identifying your safe experiment. So we've gone through the exercise of your having your ask, but it can be daunting if you're in a space where you feel uncomfortable with, with making that ask, you're unfamiliar with the space that you're in. And so she walks you through in this exercise, a step by step process on building an equation for identifying safe experiments um in training just in general, especially with work in corporate America, we always find ourselves having to go through training after training and then we walk away trying to have an understanding of how we can actually apply that training in the workplace to our core role.

What we would like for all of you to walk away with is an equation and steps for not just this exercise, but once you're able to go through the workbook of ways that you can actually apply what you're reading and what you're learning, what exercises you're going through. So one thing that you want to do when you're looking at creating a, your ex experiment is you want to ask yourself a few different questions you wanna ask yourself? What do you feel like the most empowered, identify that in the workplace? Who are people that you actually are very, very safe with working to and confiding in and probably bouncing ideas off of? Um what are some things that makes you feel a little bit uncertain when you're thinking about sharing information at work? And then as far as your preparation time, what does that look like for you when you're preparing to, to deliver that message or have that ask or submit your idea? This can come together in an equation for you. Once you've identified those areas of a good environment, you can add that with your trusted people and then your prep time, you'll have uh an equation that will equal out to your safe experiment. Um So, for example, in some instances, I may have feel very comfortable communicating with my teammates and it may take me a little bit more time for that prep work. And I also love speaking engagements. That could be the equation for my safe experience.

It's, but yours may be something totally different. They're never going to be the same where you get into that space where you may be feeling a little unsafe is where something may be a little off with either your environment, the people that you are pitching to or your prep time. But once you've identified what your equation looks like for you, you can take the as exercise that we just completed or it could be something totally different and test it out. Maybe you're asking for a raise at work or you're pitching an idea or to George's point ear earlier, you're finding a gap in the organization and you're stepping up to take that, you can use your safe experiment and that equation to, to actually stand up and have that meaningful conversation or pitch that idea or ask for what you want within the organization.

Now, start out small, that's what we're asking. But as you become a little bit more comfortable with your experiment, kind of change your equation a little bit. Maybe you don't prep as much or maybe you speak in front of uh uh organizations or groups that you're not familiar with. This will allow you to extend your boundaries and you'll find that you're asking in more meaningful ways and you're, you're standing up for what it is that you want within your life, personal and professional if you would like to post um make sure that you hashtag only my awesome so that we can go out and applaud you and celebrate with you and let us know if you need anything.

Thanks, Alana.

Hi. Thank you. Well, we don't have full time to do a total debrief. So I thought we just do a rapid fire last few minutes where I run through some questions um just for us to debrief together and you can just add them into chat. Um as you're thinking about these. So, I think it's always fun after you do these exercises to think a little bit about, well, what was hard about doing this, what part of making it an ask is most difficult for you? Um, I think for me it's about the imposition. I don't know. I just always feel like I'm taking up someone's time. Um, and so for me, what makes it feel safe is feeling like I've really thought it out and I've made it as crisp and a me and, and just like the person can answer it and, and do it, you know, they could do it in three minutes, they could do it in five minutes. Right. Like, I've, I've three questions. 30 minutes. Right. Like, I've, I've done my homework and I'm ready. What about you? What feels you can just pop them in to chat? Yeah. And posing on people. Mhm. Now, the interesting thing is most people love to help, especially if they feel like, um, it, there, you know, like you're, you're sort of letting them show off what they're good at, you know? You're right. I do have that connection. I do have that knowledge.

Um, so it is funny, like, I almost never feel the way about being asked for help as I think people feel about it for me. Yeah. How do you get into it? How do you get out of it? Yeah. Ah, Patricia. This is a very good one. I do think sometimes we sort of like self edit our ask into something smaller instead of going for the big ask and what would it take for you to get more comfortable thinking that way? But also asking for it? Yeah. The sort of disbelief that it's possible. Georgia. And yes, Fatima. It is, it is possible that we just don't always get what we want from these asks. And I do think it's, it's interesting to think about, are we asking the right questions? Are we asking the right people? Like, what might be sort of off in it? Um Yeah, because it is weird to just constantly be under impressed, right? Like what, what is leading to that? I think thinking about as I wrap up here, just a lot of my other questions are trying to think about like, how do you feel when someone asks something of you and can you unpack a little bit? Maybe some of your hesitancy about asking or your concerns about asking by reversing it? Right? What, how, how do you like to be approached? What makes it feel good to you when you're approached?

And could you apply some of that back and start to feel a safe experiment brewing in reverse? Yeah, absolutely. OK. I will post my other debrief questions in here before I hang up just for people to see. But otherwise we are at time. Um Sa Marilee Georgia just come off of mute and say thank you and goodbye.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.