Working Conversations Episode 223:
Owning What's Mine and Coming Full Circle
Sometimes, we set down a piece of ourselves, not because we want to, but because the moment calls for something else. We step into the urgent, the necessary, and the now. But what happens when that part we set aside starts calling us back?
In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of my own professional evolution—how I’m reconnecting with the foundational work that shaped my early career: user experience (UX) design.
Right before the world shut down in March 2020, I had just launched a new keynote called The Experience of You. It was rooted in UX thinking, designed to help people understand how others experience them at work—and how to be more intentional in shaping that experience.
But then, like so many plans in early 2020, that keynote was shelved. The pandemic hit, and my work quickly pivoted. I dove into helping organizations adapt to remote work, lead through chaos, and reimagine collaboration in a hybrid world. Those topics—leadership, hybrid meetings, return-to-office friction—became the core of what I talked about in this podcast and in my consulting work.
And yet… that UX part of me never went away.
Recently, I had what I can only describe as a quiet, internal reckoning—an almost mournful realization that a vital part of who I am professionally had been lying dormant. It wasn’t gone. It had just been waiting. And now, it’s time to bring it back—more integrated, more powerful, and more relevant than ever.
Here’s what that means for this podcast and for the work I’m doing.
You’ll still hear the familiar themes you’ve come to expect: the struggles of managing hybrid teams, navigating return-to-office mandates, and making meetings truly effective in virtual and in-person settings. But now, I’ll be layering in UX frameworks and thinking, shedding new light on old challenges. I’ll be using UX methodologies to reimagine how we lead, how we communicate, and how we design better human experiences at work.
This isn’t just a pivot—it’s a coming full circle. I’m elevating a core part of my professional identity that’s been quiet for too long. And in doing so, I hope to inspire you to do the same. Because maybe you, too, have a part of yourself that’s been sidelined. Maybe there’s a skill, a passion, or a perspective that once defined your work—but has since taken a backseat to the urgent and the immediate.
This episode is about reclaiming that part of you.
It’s about honoring the nonlinear nature of growth—how it sometimes requires us to press pause on the things we love most, only to return to them with even more clarity, maturity, and purpose.
So, join me as I share what’s next for the podcast, how UX thinking will infuse future episodes, and why “owning what’s mine” has become my mantra for this season of professional life.
Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Share it with a friend or colleague who’s ready to embrace the future of work!
Let’s return to what’s been waiting—and make space for what’s next.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast, where we talk all things leadership, business, communication, and the future of work. I'm your host, Dr. Janel Anderson.
In early 2020, I launched a brand new keynote called the Experience of You. Would you get a five star rating? It was rooted in my background in UX, that's user experience. And it applied that thinking to leadership and personal brand. And I was so excited to bring this work into the spotlight. I delivered that speech exactly once on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. And then the world shut down. Suddenly, my clients didn't need a fresh take on UX thinking. They needed help leading remote teams, running virtual meetings and navigating uncertainty.
And like so many of us, I pivoted and I rose to the challenge at hand. But now, after all that detouring and adapting, I'm circling back and I'm finally owning something that I have always known. UX thinking is not just for tech teams. It belongs to leadership. It belongs in how we lead, because we're leading humans and we need to design the experience for those humans of our leadership. So today I'm sharing that journey with you and I'm inviting you to think maybe about what you've left behind that's ready to come forward again. So let's start with a little bit of the backstory. Now, if you've listened to episode one of this podcast where I tell my career story, you know that my career is always woven through leadership, communication and technology.
Early in my career, I worked for a telecommunications company. It was a startup company that did products for hospitals that integrated lots of different databases and different tools that they had in their hospital systems with their phone system. And it was revolutionary. It was a brand new system and it was exciting. I would go out into the field and I would train those users, those end users, on how to use our product. And it was caused so much, in some ways consternation for some of the people who were using it because much like AI today, some of the people back in the early 90s thought that computers were going to take their jobs. And so I again, I explain all of this in greater depth in episode one, if you want to hear that whole career story. But basically, in addition to the training work I was doing, I was also doing user experience design work.
Now, I didn't realize it at the time, but I would be out there in the field with the users and I would see ways in which the software could be better or I would see errors in the software and I would bring that back to the office and I would tell our engineering team, hey, we need to fix that, this, that or the other thing. Sometimes I would have these huge lists of things that needed to be changed in the user interface of our software. And our engineers, let me tell you, they were so exasperated with me because they were still working on the low level stability of the system because, you know, if the hospital's phone system goes down well, patients lives are literally on the line, they need the phone system up.
So they were worried about those low level stability issues and I was worried about how does it look and feel to use the software because I was working with the people who were on the front lines using the software. And again, I was doing that user experience design work before I even knew it was a discipline. Now my journey then takes me into grad school. And while I was in graduate school working on my PhD at Purdue, I took classes in human factors and design. And so I realized, like, oh, this is an actual discipline and there are specific methodologies behind this discipline.
And so I started to learn those methodologies. And again, it fits so nicely with everything else that I was doing. Because if you know my career history and my education history, you'll know that I wrote my dissertation on virtual team communication way back in 2001 when I like to joke that nobody cared. And it's not quite that nobody cared, but I was on the forefront of studying how communication and technology and leadership all co mingle in the modern organization. And again, I was quite a ways ahead of the curve on that. And I certainly didn't think it was going to take a global pandemic to bring those things together in the way that it did. I thought it was going to happen more organically and much sooner than in 2020. So again, this has always been part of my DNA in my career, like the user experience side of things and the human factor.
So again, I got a chance to study that from an academic standpoint. What when I was at Purdue working on my PhD, then next step, University of Minnesota, where I'm a college professor. And I actually got to teach classes on user experience design and be on boards of directors and different places where I actually got to use those skills alongside my other skills and my teaching skills, then pivot again from higher education back into the corporate world where I worked at Thomson Reuters as user experience director of a global team. And I got to do that work literally all across the world. And I got to build this amazing team of user experience designers and researchers, most of whom I am still friends with to this day. I got to build this like amazing rockstar team. We had so much fun and got to influence product design really literally across the company and across the globe.
It was so exciting. And again, user experience was at the core of that. Now, one interesting thing, and I can't remember if I talked about this in episode one or not, but one interesting thing is you take that user experience, design and my education and communication and you marry those two things up. I was able to get stuff done in that very large corporation in a way that sometimes other people just couldn't do because I understood the politics of organizations and I understood how to communicate effectively in organizations to get the UX work moving forward. And again, I was doing politics with a lowercase P in order to make things work inside of a large organization. And of course, the things I was trying to make work were getting the products to be more user friendly and design designed for the humans who are going to be using them. But at the same time, I was using that same skill set to influence and to lead and to create relationships in the company. I was using those same core UX frameworks in my human interaction.
Now in 2019, so again, now we're going to jump again. So I've left higher education and I've been running my own business for, gosh, at that point, close to 10 years solid, nine years I had been doing the work of keynote speaking, executive coaching and corporate training. So I'd been in the trenches of this work for probably close to a decade at this point. And in 2019 I realized, oh, you know, my user experience knowledge that has been so foundational to much of my work, it's just really not showing up in my work in a way that it could. And so in 2019, I started working with a phenomenal speech coach to pull that information out of me and integrate it into my work. And that's where the speech, the Experience of You, that keynote, that's where that came from. And so I was working on that in late 2019 and early 2020. Now again, I got the opportunity to deliver that for the first and only time in that format or right before the pandemic happened.
Now that keynote was positioned to really elevate the UX thinking and the communication skills that I both know so well. It brought together leadership, perception of how we are seen by others, which sometimes is more powerful than the actual reality of what we're doing. People's experiences of us are filtered through their own perceptions. So it brought together leadership perception and UX thinking together in that same speech. And then everything changed. So I was in Texas delivering that speech when I basically got the heads up call one of the government agencies that I work with was on the leading front of knowing that everything was shutting down. And they called me while I was in Texas, and they said, hey, you know that work that you do on virtual teams and managing at a distance? Which of course was in my back pocket, but I wasn't using it very often? Well, they said, work need you for that. And I was like, well, I'm in Texas now.
And they said, well, how fast can you get back here? I said, well, my flight's tomorrow. They said, can you come after you land? So, like, literally, I was on the ground in a government agency, teaching them as fast as I could how to manage at a distance and how to pivot their whole organization to send people to work from home. Now, that's what was needed in the time my clients needed. Virtual communication, remote leadership, hybrid management, all of that. And of course, I wrote my dissertation on virtual team communication back in 2001 when nobody cared. Now the content was in my back pocket for what my clients needed starting on March 15, 2020. I knew that work inside and out because I'd written my dissertation on it and because I'd always kept my finger on the pulse of that research.
Now, I taught that content occasionally, and that's why one of my government clients knew that I, you know, knew exactly what they needed. And so I delivered that program to them. And of course, it was a variation of some other work that I had been, you know, sharing with clients occasionally, but not exclusively. And then, of course, when the pandemic hit, it was pretty much exclusively all I did. I called up all my clients and I said, hey, how can I help? And then for the next several years, I was booked solid delivering programs on how to be productive at a distance, how to lead at a distance, how to effectively communicate across space and time, how to build relationship when you're working across a distance, and all of that. So starting in mid March 2020, that's what was needed of me. And I pivoted so successfully to meet those needs. In fact, I had some guilt about success because a lot of other keynote speakers, well, their businesses were falling apart.
But I had this unique knowledge that situated me perfectly for a global pandemic. But still, UX thinking at that time moved back to the background, not to the forefront as I had just been planning. So, you know those moments where, like, you're working on something you're so excited about and then something changes in the world and it just gets squashed? Maybe your boss tells you no you can't go in that direction. Maybe the marketplace changes, whatever, but, I mean, that's what happened to me. And it was necessary for me, for my clients. It was necessary to rise to the challenge at hand of what the world needed at that time. But it was also a detour because, remember, I had just spent all this time, money, effort, re cultivating that in late 2019 and early 2020 and working it back into my content. And then it was so disappointing, I had to set it aside.
Now, let's come full circle. Here we are in the middle part of 2025. Over the past year, I have been challenged to say, how am I different from other people who speak on the future of work? How am I different from others who talk about return to office, who talk about how to navigate hybrid workspaces, who talk about all the things that I am talking about? So I was challenged recently, well, not quite recently, but like six months ago, I was challenged by being asked, what's my differentiator in this future of workspace? And it was clear as anything. To me, my differentiator is UX thinking. But then when I looked back over my website and my speaker demo reel and all of my assets, that UX thinking was nowhere to be seen. Now, I still felt it to the core of my being because it is part of my DNA. But when I looked at my marketing material and the face I was presenting to the world, that UX thinking was nowhere to be found.
And so that sent me into, well, to be fair, it was a little bit of an existential crisis. When I was like, oh, my gosh, I spent so much time in 2019 pulling this to the forefront. Oh, and it has now disappeared again. It was a bit like feeling like you're in quicksand. And so I, I asked myself, you know what? Isn't that core differentiator? It's absolutely UX thinking. And again, I noticed it was missing from not necessarily my way of being, because it is still part of my way of being, but it had been missing from my keynotes, from my training content, from my executive coaching, from all the different ways that I show up in the world and deliver what I know to my clients. So as I navigated this existential crisis and thought, like, how do I bring this back and how do I bring this back in a way that's needed right now in 2025? And it's different, my friends, than it was in 2019 because of all that we've been through over these past five years.
I mean, it's a half a decade. It's half a decade and a lot has changed in that half decade. So as we think about, like this disconnected world that we've been living in, and, you know, you've heard me talk about these themes on the podcast, and those same themes are still going to be present. I'm just going to be elevating UX thinking inside of the content that I'm talking about. Now, that UX thinking does have some frameworks and so on that come with it that are absolutely ripe for how we lead humans. And so you're going to be taught, you're going to hear me talking about some of that UX thinking and those frameworks and how they're not just for evaluating technology, they're about for evaluating how we lead as well. So it's a super exciting time to be bringing that UX content to the work that I do and really elevating it and putting it front and center. So here's what it means for you.
Here's what it means for this podcast and the work that I'm doing. So you're going to hear some new things coming through in the podcast. You're going to hear some of this again, some of the many same themes that we talk about here all the time. The struggle with return to office, the struggle with managing hybrid teams, the struggle with effective meetings that are being either held at a distance or held in that hybrid fashion. We're still going to be talking about those same things, but I'm going to be elevating some of the UX frameworks and UX thinking to shed new light on those same topics. Now, again, as I was just alluding to, I will also be taking some of those same UX frameworks and methodologies and applying them to human communication and to leadership. So you will see some new and exciting content in this space, and you'll see some additional tweaks and shifts in the content that I've already been delivering that reflect this evolution. So that's what's happening.
And you know, again, as I navigated this bit of an existential crisis when I realized with just such almost mournfulness that, oh, here's this core part of me that's just been lying dormant these last five years. It's time to really bring this back and elevate it. And you know what the takeaway here for me and for you is that sometimes we have to put down a piece of ourselves. Sometimes we have to put down something that's near and dear to us to step into what's needed in the moment.
So again, maybe you've been told no, maybe you've been just maybe you had to play this part of your hand because that's what the moment needed. But then this other part of who you are or other cards that are in your hand just had to sit quietly for a moment. So the important thing here to remember though, is that part of you that maybe had to sit quietly for a minute until it was their turn, well, it didn't disappear.
That part of you is still there waiting for you to call on it. Maybe it's not quite time for it yet, or maybe this conversation is making you realize, oh, it is time. It is time for me to bring that back. It is time for me to elevate that part of my identity or that expertise or industry knowledge or work experience that I had in the past. It is time to elevate that. So again, I want to frame this as an invitation for you. Is there some part of your experience, your background, your expertise that you've let go quiet? Maybe it needed to go quiet because the market needed something else from you, or the people that you lead needed something else from you? Is there a part that it's time to bring back that you are ready to step back into more fully so that you have the full authenticity, freedom of self-expression that is you, that is your leadership, whether you're leading from the side or whether you're leading from the top of the organizational chart. What would it look like to bring that back and to fully own that part of your professional story more completely? I want you to take some time after you're done listening to this podcast to go for a walk in the woods or to be out on the water, or to just reflect quietly with a blank sheet of paper in front of you.
I want you to take some time for you to internally and deeply ask yourself that question. Is there something that it's time I bring back in order to be the fullest, most authentic expression of myself as possible. So, my friends, you now know where I'm headed and I'm glad you're here with me again. You're going to start to hear me talk more about UX thinking in the show and more of my frameworks and strategies about how we connect technology, leadership and the human experience together in the workplace. You're going to hear more of that. So here I am reclaiming when I started years ago and building on that foundation with more clarity and more conviction than ever. And I hope it gets you thinking, I hope it gets you thinking about what part of your experience or identity have you been holding at arm's length? Something that you once believed in that's asking for another chance? Or something that was once more a bigger part of you that needed to go dark for some reason and now it's time to bring it back. If this episode sparked something in you, I'd love to hear about it.
If you get my weekly emails, you can just hit reply to that and tell me about your experience. Tell me about what, what went dark for you that you're now bringing back. If you don't get those weekly emails, you can sign up for them on my website @ janelanderson.com/223 for episode 223. You can also find me over on LinkedIn. Drop me a note there. If you haven't already, please hit subscribe on whatever podcast platform that you're that you're listening to this on. And if you're over on my YouTube channel, heck, you're going to notice the upgraded visual experience of the podcast. My studio got a lighting upgrade and oh my gosh, it is like night and day difference. And if you're not following me over on YouTube, if you have not subscribed to my YouTube channel, you're going to want to go over to YouTube.com janelandersonphd and like and follow me there.
And then again you get a picture of the upgraded studio lighting. Oh man, I feel like I'm in a spaceship. It looks so cool. All right, my friends, until next week, have an awesome reflection on this episode and again, hit me up with what you're going to bring back into your professional life. To be the fullest self-expression and to be the most authentically you as possible because you're going to see it all play out here in the podcast for me. All right, take care my friends. Be well.
