Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I felt, as a subject matter expert, I wasn't being heard, even though I knew I had value to add.

I was getting frustrated because I felt that what I was trying to communicate was falling on deaf ears.

But the reality is, because I was coming across as a very aggressive communicator, they had to raise their psychological defenses and were not able to hear me out.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating with my guest, who is a perfect fit for the show.

She is an engineer turned career coach for engineers, and she has coding experience of over 10 years and now coaches her clients from various backgrounds to communicate if they want to change their careers and how to upscale themselves and so much more.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show.

Hi, Dagna.

Hey, Roberta.

Thanks so much for having me here.

I am super excited to be a guest on your podcast.

And I am super excited that you are here.

You're welcome.

I said you're a perfect fit because even though I'm not an engineer by trade, but I worked with them for so long.

And one of the reasons I started the podcast, which you'll get into.

But before we do that, please introduce yourself.

Tell everyone where you are and your background.

Yes.

Hi, everyone listening.

My name is Dagna Bieda, and I'm an engineer turned career coach for engineers.

And I'm the tough love kind of a coach because I've been in engineering shoes.

So I exactly understand what it means on a day-to-day basis.

And I've worked in multiple various environments, spanning across two different continents, creating LT networks in C++ through a distributed web app in Ruby on Rails, through mobile app development in Swift and Java and Kotlin.

My clients have also various and very diverse backgrounds coming to me from small startups as well.

As much as Fang plus companies with the experience ranging from like five years to 20 plus years in their programming career.

The reason they come to me is because they typically find themselves stuck in their career or at a crossroads in their professional life and not sure how to move forward, how to get past that obstacle.

And a lot of the times I find that the communication is one of the issues.

So I'm super pumped to be here and talk to you about it.

At this point in time, I'm located in Charlotte, North Carolina, but originally I'm from Poland.

And one of the things that can affect your communication is for example, coming from or growing up in a culturally different setting than the one that's more prevalent or common in your work environment.

So that's something that we could dive into as well.

We will dive into so much more as I'm listening, but please carry on, yes.

But essentially, if you're an engineer and you feel stuck in your career and you've done so many things, but you feel solid about your technical foundation, just not know what to do next, I'm here for you.

You can find me at my website.

I'm sure that we'll share links at some point.

But essentially what I help my clients with is to reprogram their mind for success in their career.

Because I like to say I moved from programming computers to reprogramming human minds because that's what I do with my clients.

Either way, it's programming.

Yeah, absolutely.

How did you get started of all the careers?

Why did you decide software engineering was the way to go for you?

So actually I studied control engineering and robotics.

I wanted to build robots.

I felt this was like the most futuristic thing I could think of to do when I was say 15 years old.

And that's something that I was just interested in at a time.

So I naturally followed my curiosity and I studied robotics.

But then in my very first job, as I started building robots in one of the projects that I was in, it's kind of European equivalent of the American DARPA program.

We were creating a robot and working with several universities across Europe.

And so I realized that creating robots is actually very time consuming and kind of slow.

And I was looking for speed.

I was looking for impact.

The robot that I had worked on wouldn't really make that much of an impact.

I mean, in terms of how many people would work with the robot, it would probably be just a few people.

It would be just a few PhD students in one of the universities that we were working with.

And so I kind of felt the speed wasn't my kind of speed.

I wanted to grow rapidly and expand.

And I also at a time, in that point in my career, fell in love.

And people when they're in love, they do crazy things.

And so I decided to move from Poland to United States, but I didn't make the move right away.

First, I wanted to just make sure that if I switch my career, I'll do something that will help me land well after I moved to the United States to potentially be with the love of my life, which played out perfectly.

We are still together, have some beautiful kids, a great house, and life panned out very well, even though it was a crazy move at a time.

Thinking about making that move to United States to follow my heart, I also was very pragmatic.

I knew that the amount of jobs that I could find would be much easier for me if I transitioned from being a robotics engineer to being a software engineer.

You know, I studied programming in college.

I had no choice.

I absolutely hated programming at that point in time, but I had to do it, right?

You have to program different parts of the robot, and so it's just inescapable.

And so whenever I made a transition, I started working at Nokia in their Rotswaw office in Poland.

And so it's interesting because as I started my very first job as a software engineer, as a junior software engineer, the team that I've worked on completely changed my mind and my perspective about programming, and I fell in love with it, even though initially I absolutely hated it.

So with my team, I was able to very quickly grow, and that allowed me to, once I moved to the States, easily find a new job here and continue to follow my passions.

And as it turns out, I was also able to tap into that speed that I was looking for and tap into that impact.

Because in my last job, I worked on creating apps for parking and transit across multiple cities in the US who are using the app that I've worked on.

And at the click of a button, just deploying the app made it possible for millions of people to use what I've created.

And that felt much more satisfying.

The impact, as you say.

Let's talk about the work environment first.

So you went from hating it, you say your teammates made you fall in love with it again.

What were some of the things you feel they did to change your mind and love the software programming environment?

It was the mindset and the understanding of what's really important.

You see, in the academia setting, what I thought was important was solving complex and difficult problems no matter how the code looked like.

So a lot of the time my code was a mess, it was spaghetti.

All I wanted it to do is just work without any thought being put into being able to maintain it or let alone have someone else take over my code.

They would not get any part of it.

So my mindset as I was going through the university was like, okay, I just need to pass this assignment.

I just need to write something that compiles, that works, that gets the job done without really putting any care or effort or emphasis on how it's written or thinking about what is going to happen when someone else comes into picture and has to now take care of the code that I've created.

And so shifting that perspective and understanding that creating great code is about making sure it's easy to understand for other people, it's that it's maintainable.

That's what allowed me to shift my perspective and fall in love with the programming.

What were some of the differences in the work culture when you compare the Polish work culture versus the US one?

Yeah, so that was a big adjustment.

I'm not going to lie.

So part of the reason is, you know, in Poland, we are much more direct in our communication.

This different sense of humor, I would say, a little bit darker, there's a little bit more irony and sarcasm.

And when I moved to the States, I kept on that Polish way of thinking and communicating, and a lot of the time it wasn't landing well.

You know, people would tell me, Dagna, why are you being so arrogant?

Why are you so rude?

You know, my manager at one point told me that I come across as someone who's scary because I was always prepared, I always had an opinion, and I was coming across as too forceful because of the way I spoke, which came from where I grew up, from Poland.

Where it's perceived as you just being normal.

For me, yeah.

The interesting part about it is that because of my very direct communication, it helped me back in my career because people did not want me to be their team lead, to be their manager because they thought I was a mean person.

You know?

And because it was not, it was very nuanced, it wasn't very clear for me to see, it took a long time before I finally grasped, okay, this isn't working, I need to change my communication style.

Instead of waiting for all my American colleagues to all of a sudden download and adjust to this Polish way of thinking, right?

I didn't understand for a long time that they grew up in a different setting, and so they had a different mindset around communicating.

So there's a specific tool that I currently use with my clients to help shine the differences between the culture of origin, whether you immigrated from another country or you grew up in an immigrant family and the culture of your workplace.

It's called Hofstede models, and there's six different dimensions.

And it's phenomenal in helping you understand how you think, which feels like, okay, if I think this way, probably everybody thinks that way, which is not true.

And it helps you to really see those differences in a more concrete way as opposed to something being nuanced and subtle.

Like, you can see very well those differences, and that will help you then make a choice, whether you want to continue acting as you were or whether you want to change something.

Can we ask for one example, if you remember any specific example where if you said something like that in Poland, it was normal and acceptable and nobody thought twice about it versus in America, you came across as arrogant or scary, as they said.

Any sort of sarcastic comment would fall into that category, really.

Because I know, I mean, I've met American friends who like sarcasm as well.

Would you say that maybe it also depended on how familiar you were with the person?

So at work, people didn't expect sarcasm at all, or were they sarcastic with each other if you were eavesdropping, but they felt like your sarcasm was a little too much.

So for me specifically, my problem was more in a meeting setting or public setting than one-to-one conversation.

When I had a conversation with someone one-on-one, it seemed as if they would get me better or understand me better, my message would come across better.

But in a public setting, there was this one situation where the company that I worked for had to make a very difficult decision and let a lot of people go.

And at the end of the day, there was all-hands meeting, and I raised my hand, I raised my concerns, I shared what I thought they didn't think through on how the layoffs would affect me in my engineering role.

After that meeting, Roberta, can you believe, one of the directors comes to me and he says, Dagna, why did you call our executive leadership team a bunch of idiots?

Did you use those words?

No, I did not, but that's how my message came across.

I sounded harsh when I wanted to be direct.

So a bunch of idiots did not come out of your mouth verbatim, but that's how they received the message?

That's how it was received.

Exactly.

And it was imagine it was a company-wide meeting, and this person comes to me and gives me that feedback.

And that was really a turning point, because that's when I realized, okay, it would have never occurred to me that I came across this harsh, that this could be interpreted as it would.

Because at the end of the day, whenever we're communicating, it doesn't matter what your intention was.

It matters what comes across.

How I interpret it.

Yes.

When I was in South Korea, we used to talk about these nuances because we would teach English, but English also varies in meaning and interpretation based on the situation and the circumstance.

And how do you teach those nuances to people who speak English as a second language?

Because then, like you said, when they come to America or the UK, Australia, whatever it is, it's going to be interpreted differently.

Oh, that's very true.

I mean, part of it could be that I am in the south of the United States, where people are considered to be more polite, right?

Rather, as opposed to being more from the...

If you were in New York or the Midwest, probably California even, yeah.

It would maybe come across different.

But you know, the point that I think it's really important here that I'm trying to make is to just have the awareness of how your message comes across, regardless of the context.

And one way to get that understanding, get a deeper understanding here, is essentially by talking to your coworkers, to your peers.

Like, let's say you're leading a meeting at work, right?

It's a good habit to after that meeting, ask a few people, hey, how do you think that came across?

Like, if you know that coming too hot, too strong, is something that you want to work on, it's impossible to improve on that without having that external feedback, because there's so many things that are hiding in your blind spot.

Mm-hmm.

Take the initiative to ask how you are perceived, and not just assume that they understood it the way you intended.

And then secondly, I find this very interesting from your story that usually the other telephone engineer are more the reserved personalities who literally have to be called out to say, Dagna, do you have something to say?

Whereas you're the opposite, you speak up.

So the way that I see it in the engineering industry, yes, you have those more junior engineers who tend to be passive communicators, right?

And they have to literally be asked in order for them to step up and share something, right?

It might even feel like you're pulling the tongue in order for them to like say something.

But then on the other side of the spectrum, you have people who have a good amount of experience under their belt.

And when that situation happened, I was a senior engineer.

It was further in my career.

I felt very confident in my abilities.

My technical foundation was strong.

And what I felt as a subject matter expert there was that I wasn't being heard.

Even though I knew I had value to add, I was getting frustrated because I felt that what I was trying to communicate was falling on deaf ears.

There was a moment, I'm gonna be completely honest with you here, Roberta, that I thought that some people that I'm working with are maybe incompetent because I'm really trying hard and they're not hearing me out.

But the reality is because I was coming across as a very aggressive communicator, they had to raise their psychological defenses and were not able to hear me out.

They were getting into this fight or flight response because of my communication skills.

And I can see it in hindsight.

It wasn't clear back then, but I can clearly see it now.

And if it wasn't for that feedback, Dagna, why did you call our executives a bunch of idiots?

I probably wouldn't have worked on those skills.

Especially when we started, you said, they even used the adjective scary to describe you.

If something is scary, we do become defensive.

We get withdrawn.

You step back from the situation, and you're like, when she comes down the hallway, I'm going the other direction.

Like Meryl Streep, when the devil was protestant.

Yes, this kind of strain that aggressive communicators put on their relationships with others holds them back.

Because who wants you to be their team lead if they think you're scary, if they think you're mean, if they think you're not going to be supportive.

And so creating safe space for others in a conversation is what's critical and something that I was missing out on for a long time in my career.

I'm about to ask, you said you had a senior position, so you did lead some team members.

So I was a senior software engineer.

I didn't manage anyone under me.

I did mentor younger, more junior engineers, but I didn't have any managerial responsibility or formal leadership responsibility.

The kind of leadership that I displayed towards the end of my time in that particular role was when the company acquired another company, and it was really hard for some folks from the company that has been acquired to navigate the situation.

Kind of unofficial title, but they did ask me, because at that point, my communication skills were much better, to be a sort of change champion.

That's how it was called.

Be the kind of person that makes it easier for others to go through that transition, but it was without any formal leadership role, if that makes sense.

It did bring about potential for promotion, in fact, I was offered a promotion the day that I came into the office to put in my resignation because I decided to become a coach.

Which is great for your clients.

But yeah, I find that interesting, especially looking back.

If I were an engineer and I needed help with my career, one of the main reasons I will enlist your help as my coach is you just have this running theme of awareness, of self-awareness, of reflecting.

Because I think a lot of professionals, even leaders, they struggle with that.

That's why when a coach comes to the office and says, I did a survey with your team, and here's what they think.

Let me see what you think about yourself.

Oh, you've got yourself 90%.

Your team thinks you're 30%.

That lack of awareness.

But I find that each time something happens, you reflect.

Is there a reason you've always had that about you?

Thank you really for pointing this out, Roberta.

And I mean, in fact, my business, it's called The Mindful Dev, because mindfulness is at the core of what I do.

So at the beginning, I've shared with you that I moved from programming computers to reprogramming human minds, right?

And so similarly to reprogramming human mind, whenever you're reprogramming an app or a computer, you have to know, first of all, what's not working and what it is that you're trying to fix.

So in programming, we call that root cause analysis, right?

Whenever you get a bug, you are diving into the code and you're trying to figure out, okay, why is this bug happening?

What are the circumstances?

Which lines of code?

In my book, I write how you can do the same in your mind essentially in the legacy code of your mind.

So how do you analyze what's currently there?

Using mindfulness, using awareness, doing some journaling practice, and how you use all that in order to change how that software is running, to change the outcomes that you're seeing in your life, to see the results.

Any engineer will tell you it's not possible to fix an app if they don't know what's broken.

Of course.

The same thing applies to our human mind.

You said you went to resign to start being a coach.

Had you already spoken to some of the industry professionals, to some of the engineers to say, I've learned some things about what makes you get stuck in your career because I've been here, my experiences taught me this, and now I'm going to help guys like you, would you like to take us through how that happened?

What happened really was that I experienced burnout in fall of 2019, or that's when I became aware that I burned myself out.

And in the midst of a burnout, I realized, okay, I need some help.

Like I can no longer pretend that everything's going well for me when it's not.

I essentially got into talk therapy.

And after talking with a professional who understood my situation, I was able to completely shift my perspective, change some beliefs that I had, and my life step by step slowly started improving.

And I have this massive aha moment like, wow, just talking to someone and have such a massive impact on someone else's life, I want to do this, and I can do this, and this is what I do as a coach, right?

Because it felt so impactful.

And remember, I've been chasing impact.

Impact has been the running things, of course.

And as I transitioned, it's not like I decided to become a coach, and then I left my 9 to 5 and then became a coach.

Not really.

I was slowly working on being a coach as a side gig.

First, starting with answering questions on Reddit, then getting free clients, then getting paid clients, but charging very little comparing to what I charge right now.

And as I was coaching people, as I was able to get them results, that's how I created this confidence in myself.

Like, okay, I can do this in my 9 to 5.

Why am I now wasting time working for someone else when this is all I think about?

This is what I dream about.

This is what I really get excited about.

Like, it's time to make that move.

And I'm not gonna lie, pandemic made it easier for me.

I was holding back on making that shift because I was afraid of missing out, not being in the office, not being around people.

But guess what?

Pandemic made it so that I was already stuck in my house, already not being in contact with other human beings in the office.

So I figured, well, the circumstances are the same, and I have this confidence, so I'm not gonna miss out on anything.

Now is the best time.

And that's when I made my switch.

The pandemic did nudge a lot of us to take some chances, didn't it?

Yes.

Then you started to coach clients.

What would they come to you and say, Dagna, this is my problem.

How would they define that and the reason would they enlist your help?

It was really at the beginning, being at the crossroads, just not knowing what to do next.

So the very first thing that I do with my clients right now is gaining clarity, getting crystal clear on how their definition of fulfillment looks like.

The definition of fulfillment and the values, I should say, because whenever you are clear on what it is that you care about, on what it is that you want to do, and you work in an environment that aligns with your values, that's when you are naturally able to tap into so-called flow states, where you have unending motivation, the time just flies by, you're having fun, you're moving forward, and there's no obstacles that you couldn't kind of jump through.

This was how it all started, getting that clarity.

Currently, what it is that I do with my clients is once we know what it is that they care about, then we figure out how they can design a career path for themselves, because it's not just about finding opportunities out there, it's also about creating your own opportunities, whether that's within a company or starting something on your own.

It's also about understanding how you can get from here to there and what's missing, what's the gap, what's the gap in your mindset and what's the gap in your skill set.

So with the engineers that I usually work with, communication is a huge gap.

And that makes sense.

Right?

It makes perfect sense though, because if you think about engineering education first, we tend to overvalue the hard and technical skills.

And let's say you go to a four-year college, all you get pounded into your head is how important the tech skills are.

And they are, and we're not downplaying them.

They are, yes.

Absolutely.

But that kind of downplays the value of the soft skills, and that's where the deficit comes from.

In the curriculum, you usually don't really find that much weight being put on the soft skills.

And while, yes, the hard and the technical skills is what gets you the job, in order to be seen and be valued as a professional, you need to develop the soft skills as well as an engineer.

Right.

Here's what somebody said.

If, say, you are a 10 out of 10 on your technical skills, what you learned at university.

OK, you're brilliant.

You're an engineer.

10 out of 10.

But if you cannot communicate, you are perceived.

Everything is perception.

You are perceived as a 3 out of 10 in your technical, because you don't even know how to tell Dagna that this is what I'm good at.

This is what I'm programming.

Everything is perception, especially at work.

We're talking about communication and with your team as well.

So you don't want your brilliance to be overlooked just because the communication and soft skills part is missing.

Exactly.

I am totally on board with what you just said, Roberta.

And I think that it's very important to highlight how missing out on those soft skills is what's going to get you to that position of being a subject matter expert with years of experience under your belt, just being frustrated and feeling like you work with incompetent people, where in reality, it's you missing the skill of communicating, conveying your ideas, getting your point across.

That's super important.

I can see that the perspective is shifting slowly because we have so many now engineers who are in that plateau, where they have their technical expertise, they feel confident, yet someone less experienced or less knowledgeable or less confident gets promoted over their head, or they're not getting that project that they wanted to work on because they couldn't market themselves and their skill set.

And that's really something that will affect the career.

So the technical skill set, what gets you kind of like in the door of tech career in the role that you're applying for, but the soft skills is what carries you through.

And they carry it through, because think about it when you lead, there's so much that you juggle in addition to the technical work.

And if you haven't proven while doing the technical work that I can juggle so much, I can communicate to different settings.

That's why you're not memorable when they say, okay, who are we going to promote next?

Yeah, absolutely.

But I'm going to add one thing, Roberta, because you did mention whenever you lead, whenever you manage, and a lot of people are not interested in that.

So I'm going to go a step further and say, even if you're not interested in management or leadership, your career is going to suck if you don't work on those soft skills.

Even if you're just a wizard, you want to go the wizard route.

Even if you want to go the wizard route, you're going to get frustrated because people are not going to get you.

They're not going to get on board with your ideas.

You're going to have trouble communicating your brilliance.

You're not going to be seen.

And we always say that the one thing about colleges, we understand they're not going to cater to everything.

They're not going to give you everything you need.

But when you've been in college, Dagna, who are you exposed to presentation skills wise?

Your lecturer.

And how do they make presentations?

Yeah, usually it's not that great.

They just say, okay, you're going to do your assignment from page 200 to page 250 and submit it next week.

You know, that's the only exposure you've had.

So how will you know when you enter the job market, how to make a brilliant presentation?

Very well said.

That's a great point.

But you know, building up on top of that, I feel like in terms of the university, there's also this way of how we measure success that's not really great, that we kind of take it as our baggage from university, where we limit ourselves to something that other people say instead of creating an insight and looking for answers and understanding where I as a person fit into the marketplace.

And we give that kind of power away, because whenever you're in a university, how do you know if you did good?

Well, your professor or teaching assistant is going to give you a grade, and that grade is a measurement of your success to an extent.

And once you graduate, you have to break off from that mindset, and you have to be the one who goes out and asks, hey, how do I compare to my peers?

What is it that I'm missing?

How can I grow?

What are the opportunities around this or that thing that I'm interested in?

You have to be the one that kind of grabs your own career, but also this understanding of what it is that you're missing in terms of skill, and just go out there and look for answers for yourselves, because nobody out there is going to tell you and give you an accurate assessment.

You have to look from within to find the answers.

The awareness you were talking about earlier, you literally are the driver of your career path, and that taking initiative is, you know, you're not going to wait for your boss to say, you need a presentation skills course.

You must always take the initiative.

Yeah, you're the driver.

Absolutely.

So if any engineers are listening and they feel stuck, what would you say should be the first step in order for them to start working on their career paths?

Well, the first thing would be to get in touch with your values, right?

And understand how the current workplace that you're in is or is not aligned with the things that you care about.

And one way to go about it is by hiring a coach like me or reading my book, my upcoming book called Brain Refactor, because it discusses part of the process that helps you understand how to be more effective in your role and how to create the kind of outcomes that you're looking for in your career, whether that's more confidence, more money, more opportunities, you name it.

It's really about how you think about certain things in the context of what you're aware of about yourself, what you know about yourself.

Would you say that your clients are a certain age group or it's the broad range?

Is it those who just started their jobs and they feel stuck or they've been software engineering for decades and they feel like after 30 years, I feel like I'm not going anywhere?

It's a spectrum, really.

So I've had clients who were as early as two years in their career, and they felt solid enough in their technical foundation that they wanted to start growing the other skills, including the soft skills.

My oldest client was actually 69 years old.

So it tells you that people from a wide range of spectrum are trying to tap into the opportunities and are trying to figure out how they can do it.

And one thing that I also want to mention is you probably could figure it out on your own, right?

What I'm offering, though, is this condensation of 10 plus years of my own practice and experience, and then having tested that in clients across multiple domains and giving you the strategies that work.

And I've had clients who in as short as three, four months step into career opportunities that they thought were out of reach because they gained the confidence.

They tell me that their imposter syndrome just disappeared and vanished because they feel very confident in their skills.

I've had clients who doubled their salary as a result of working with me.

This is something that's really possible, this incredible growth, even in this tough economy that we're currently in.

The clients that come to me don't typically have trouble landing jobs as long as they follow through on the coaching because the reality is coaching with anyone, whether that's me, whether that's Roberta or someone else, is that at the end of the day, it's like going to the gym.

If you don't put in the work, don't expect results.

I'm not going to do the thing for you, of course.

And do you have clients who have found it challenging to culturally adapt?

Yes, but they were not realizing how they were holding themselves back.

And so for example, in the American workplace, there's a very individualistic culture where you're expected to be proactive, take ownership, make decisions, and really kind of grab the steering wheel of your career.

Be the leader, be the initiator, whether or not you're in a leadership position.

And especially for my clients who come from Asia, where the setting is more of a collaborative one, where you feel like a part of the team, a lot of them wait to kind of be given instruction, be told what to do, because that's a sign of respect in their culture.

Yeah, I remember.

And so whenever we're able to kind of understand, okay, this is something that worked in my country of origin, but it's not really working here in the States, because engineers tend to have this belief, my work speaks for itself, which it doesn't.

But when you add the belief, the work speaks for itself, to, you know, I need to wait to be called out, then that creates a negative ripple effect.

The perception.

When your colleagues take initiative and you wait to be given instructions, so in that scenario, you see how the perception can fall negatively on your side.

A lot of the time, it's not that people are trying to stay invisible.

On the contrary, they want to be seen.

They want to grow in their career.

They just don't know how to go about it, and they lack that awareness piece of, okay, this is how I grew up, but this is not necessarily working for my current set of circumstances.

Are there any last words of wisdom, anything you were hoping to share today with our listeners that I haven't asked you yet?

Well, one thing that I like to point out is that the potential is already within you.

It's just about digging out what's already there.

So I hope that gives the listeners a bit of motivation, a bit of inspiration, and whether that's to read some interesting book on personal development, maybe mine.

Yes.

Or consider to start working with whether a therapist or a coach or getting feedback from a trusted coworker on how they could improve in their job.

I hope this serves as a good motivation.

Excellent stuff.

Words of wisdom from Dagna Bieda from North Carolina.

The software engineer turned coach for engineers who helps them with their career paths.

I really appreciate how open and aware you were with your experiences, and it's going to help a lot of people who are listening, because I think once you start with the awareness piece, then the rest of it, you will know where to go for answers.

So thank you so much for sharing your story and your expertise today.

Thanks so much for having me here.

It was a blast.

I know I had a lot of fun as well.

But before you go, so first things first, please tell us where to find you online.

The best place to find me is LinkedIn.

So you can find me in my profile.

Just type in my name, Dagna Bieda, D-A-G-N-A-B-I-E-D-A, or follow my Twitter account.

Or you can just simply check out my website, themindfuldev.com.

And if you're looking for the book, you'll likely find the link to Amazon under themindfuldev.com/book.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking on Communicating Podcast once again.

Please log on to Apple and Spotify, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

And stay tuned for more episodes to come.