Welcome to another edition of “Vinita-dumps-her brain”. As always, it’d past mid-September, and I’m posting about August.

• [AVIATION] Working at Qantas, I was in a role where I was working across different airlines in a safety capacity and airworthiness was talked about often.
• [AVIATION] Turboprops vs jets
• [AVIATION] Why do airlines get banned from certain countries?
• [AVIATION] Conflict Avoidance
• [CULTURE] Great article and accompanying data viz on the price of burgers reflecting our high cost of living.
• [CULTURE] I love articles like this. There’s a similar one about powerpoints taking away our ability to write. The Moral Threat of Bicycles.
• [CULTURE] This is a deep historical dive of toolkits. Nerdy I know.
• [CULTURE] I used to subscribe to The Juggernaut, a curated newsletter for South Asians. I thought this entry was quite funny / amusing.

• [CULTURE] I am a screaming fangirl of Priya Parker. I took her Gathering Style quiz the other day and got “Master of Organization”.
• [CULTURE] A friend has been posting all kinds of little galleries on Insta and I’m jumping on the bandwagon: Little Art Galleries. I’m a frequent user of the Free (book) Libraries around where I live.
• [DESIGN] I was digging into some of the old Config videos and found one by Hayley Hughes, whom I had crossed paths with while I was at GE. Her talk is about frameworks for design teams. We might think it doesn’t matter but this really affects our collaboration skills.
• [DESIGN] Another one from the old Config videos: Exploring Spatial Software. Relevant to the work I’m doing in virtual reality at the moment.
• [DESIGN] The delightfully saturated history of color charts.
• [DESIGN] Yes for more explicit facilitation resources in the world! Dan Brown’s guide to designing design workshops.
• [DESIGN] Another facilitation library I found!
• [DESIGN] The deadly sins of data viz.
• [DESIGN] On the research side of things, how to write insights. I find every business, team, and person approaches this differently so I appreciate someone actually putting a perspective together on this.
• [DESIGN] On the back of the writing insights, they need to be stored in a Research Repository. Totally aware that only mature organizations can organize and manage all these products, but it is important.
• [DESIGN] Women Talk Design is publishing a book! And of course they wrote about the process to do it, which I adore!
• [DESIGN] Dramadoodling!
• [DESIGN] An example of great design. Humanitix is changing the way prices are displayed and sent out an email explaining the design change. Humanitix.pdf
• [DESIGN] One of my amazing Design friends got me onto Sara Wachter-Boettcher at Active Voice. Her recent newsletter was mind-blowing around leadership presence.

You need to work on your leadership presence.

I swear, almost every woman and nonbinary person I know—and a good number of men, too—have received this feedback. And I gotta admit: I hate it.

First of all, it’s vague. What, precisely, does leadership presence look like? What behaviors does it include? How do I know if I’m getting better at it? Telling someone they need more leadership presence is about as useful as telling them they have bad vibes. Actually, less useful—at least if you told me that, it’d be kinda funny.

But that’s not even the worst problem with “leadership presence.” It’s also extremely fertile ground for bias and gatekeeping. Because often, when someone tells you that you lack “leadership presence,” what they’re actually saying is: You don’t fit the mold. You don’t look and act like the leaders I’ve seen before. And if you have an identity that’s historically underrepresented in leadership, you literally can’t fit the mold—your gender, race, disability, neurodivergence, or any number of other facets will always make you different.

Plus, a lot of those status quo leaders are…not the kind of leaders we need more of: ego-driven, overconfident, inhumane. I think we’ve all seen enough of that in the world.

Enter: the double bind

So here’s where things get really fraught. If you try to fit the mold—try to dress like and speak like and behave like the status quo leaders around you—you’re liable to be told that you’re too aggressive, and not likable enough. You should smile more!

But then if you follow that advice, you’re likely to get told that you need to be more assertive, or more visible. That you lack gravitas.

It’s a classic double bind: you’re always somehow too much, and yet not enough.

What a lot of people do when they hear this feedback is try even harder to hit the perfect balance: Confident, but humble. Smiling, but serious. Poised, but approachable. Firm, but easygoing. The list never ends.

Threading the needle isn’t only exhausting. It’s also ineffective. Because the more you focus on being “perfect,” the less present you become. You’re too in your head: overthinking, overpolishing, overpreparing. And when you’re in your head, you can’t be in the moment, connecting with the people around you. You’re too caught up in second-guessing and deferring and doubting yourself. And when that happens, you actually lose touch with the parts of you that are the most interesting—your sparkle, your edge, your je ne sais quoi.

That won’t get you that elusive “leadership presence” either.

So…now what?

I’m not here to be a downer, I swear! I just think it’s important to acknowledge that you can’t fix this double-bind. Not because you’re not good enough, or not trying hard enough.

But because you aren’t the problem. A biased, oppressive culture is.

I do have a path forward for you, though. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best one I know of: Stop trying to thread that needle.

Let go of the idea that if you were just more X and less Y, you’d stop getting this feedback.

Let go of the idea that there’s somehow a perfect way to have “leadership presence”—and replace it with your actual presence.

Because as weaponized and biased as “leadership presence” has become in workplaces, presence is real. And I guarantee you’ve experienced it. Think: A workshop facilitator with a knack for convincing groups to work through their differences. Presence. A street performer who can get a whole crowd clapping along. Presence. A podcast host whose voice is so captivating, you sat in your driveway for 15 minutes just to keep listening. Presence.

It’s not always loud, either. I often think of my friend Eileen as having a huge presence, even though she’s much quieter than me. Yet, every time we’ve run a workshop together, the audience has hung on her every word. I’ve seen teams that couldn’t go two seconds without squabbling become calmer, more collaborative, and more trusting with one another under her guidance.

You don’t have to be like Eileen to have presence, though. Trying to mimic her would be just as ineffective as trying to mimic those old-school leaders (except Eileen tells better jokes). Instead, you need to get comfortable with yourself. You need to believe that what you bring to a room is meaningful, that it’s valuable, and that you deserve to be there.

You need self-trust.

Self-trust doesn’t just come overnight, though—especially if you’ve been internalizing biased BS about how to look and act and be your whole life. It takes time to learn to untangle what you think about you from all those cultural messages and unfair opinions you’ve absorbed over the years.

In fact, what we’ve found working with people 1:1 and in Power Shift, where we go deep on this topic, is that self-trust doesn’t stand alone. It’s actually more like the top of a pyramid—and underneath it are two more foundational elements: self-management and self-knowledge.

• Self-management is the practice of noticing what’s going on within you—your thoughts and feelings—and then choosing how you want to respond, instead of letting knee-jerk reactions take the wheel. It’s the ability to regulate yourself under stress—instead of shutting down or getting defensive. Because if we want to have presence, we have to first be present: able to participate in the current moment from a place of calm, clarity, and curiosity, instead of at the whims of our fear or our hurt.
• Self-knowledge builds on self-management. Because once you’re able to gain some distance from those knee-jerk reactions, you have more space to see yourself clearly—and to get comfortable with what you see. You can figure out who you are—without getting hung up on what you think other people want you to be, or what you were told you should be. Self-knowledge is also about knowing your values and strengths—but also your weaknesses and knowledge gaps. So you can speak up confidently when you have a POV to share—but without sucking up all the air in the room, or feeling the need to have an opinion on everything just to prove your worth. Because you don’t need other people to validate your worth. You already know who you are.
• Self-trust gets a lot easier once you’ve worked on those other layers. Because when you know yourself, and you know how to stay calm and present, you can trust yourself to show up in a room and just be. You don’t have to overthink and second-guess all the time—because you know that you’ve already done the work needed to meet this moment. You can confidently share an opinion or make a decision—without feeling threatened by someone else seeing it differently. You radiate confidence and care.
• [DESIGN] Related to play, we think better (and learn more) when we write by hand:
  • Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.
  • Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.
  • "Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher, an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.
• [FINANCE] I’ve written about negotiation before. More than just a theoretical concept, I love finding the specific words to use. I subscribe to the SmartPurse newsletter and have done their course, and really enjoyed these scripted concepts.
  • “Let’s Team Up on This”
    • Negotiation doesn’t have to be a tug-of-war. By saying “Let’s team up on this,” you’re telling the other side that you’re in it together. Suddenly, you’re not opponents—you’re partners on a mission to find the best solution. Who wouldn’t want to collaborate when it’s framed like that?
  • “I Understand Where You’re Coming From”
    • Everyone loves to feel understood, right? Dropping this phrase into the conversation is like handing out a warm cup of coffee. It’s comforting and shows that you’re not just hearing them—you’re really listening. Trust and good vibes? Check and check.
  • “How About We Try…”
    • Stuck in a rut? Try tossing out “How about we try…” to keep things moving. This little phrase is like a spark that lights up new ideas. It says, “Hey, let’s shake things up!” and invites the other side to get creative without feeling boxed in. Boom—progress!
  • “I’m Open to Exploring…”
    • No one likes a brick wall. That’s why saying “I’m open to exploring…” is pure gold. It shows that you’re flexible, easy-going, and ready to roll with the punches. Flexibility in negotiations? It’s like being the cool kid at the party—everyone wants to hang out with you.
  • “How Can We Make This Work?”
    • Flip the script with this. It’s a simple question that packs a punch, steering the conversation away from obstacles and straight into solution territory. It’s a collaborative nudge that shows both sides are working toward the same goal. Let’s get those creative juices flowing!
  • “Based on What I’ve Researched…”
    • Knowledge is power, but it’s also your secret weapon in negotiations. When you lead with this phrase, you’re saying, “I did my homework, and I’m ready to back up my ideas.” It’s like walking in with a full deck of cards—confidence boost included.
• [PRODUCTIVITY] I believe i found this in Beth Mathews’s monthly newsletter. I believe in this concept a lot from the seasons of creativity to the Womancode listening to your body and planning activities accordingly. There are so many scenarios where this self-awareness could be super helpful.
  1. Knowing when your creative energy peaks throughout the day and week can help you prioritize using that energy for projects that matter to you. Don’t waste it on organizing design layers or administrative work.If you work on a team, share this with your boss or project manager. Communicating your preferred creative flow will not only empower you to create great work for your career but it might just save you those hours of clicking away into the abyss when you just can’t think of one.more.concept. It’s so painful, right? Perhaps your project manager can schedule meetings later in the day or week. Or perhaps your boss can help you block off design time so there aren’t any interruptions

• [PSYCHOLOGY] How to do mental time travel. Great technique for meditation or burnout.
• [PSYCHOLOGY] Inner Development Goals Framework.

• [PSYCHOLOGY] I’ve followed School of Life for a long time now. I really enjoyed this video on How to Spot the Loveliest People in the World.
• [PSYCHOLOGY] In design, we often do a lot of affinity mapping of concepts. I’ve done this exercise with my therapist with mapping core values. I forgot where I found this but thought it was a great starter list to create your own activity with cards.

• [TECH] How often we pick up our phones
• [TECH] I’ve been navigating some political mines at work and this made me smile (I will consider using some of them: Email Sign-Offs
• [TECH] Using ChatGPT is mostly about learning how to prompt correctly. Here’s a GitHub repo for creating some of these creative prompts.
• [TECH] A great history about when women stopped coding.
• [TECH] After many years of dragging my feet, I finally invested in a paid password manager (1Password) for both my family and myself (although convincing my mother to use it is another story). I received this interesting guide to Digital Estate Planning that really got me thinking about “death cleaning for the digital space”.

Finished Reading:

• The House: I thought this might be a bit boring but I found it really well written.
• The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club: a fun, easy read

Finished Watching:

• I’ve cut out many streaming services as of late so need to go on a hunt for things to watch.

New Vocab:

• Mud Map - Australian term for an informal map, intended to assist, but with no pretentions to accuracy or completeness.
• Zhuzh - Commonly used to describe that extra something added to almost anything, the slang term has a centuries-long history
• Dipsomania - alcoholism, specifically in a form characterized by intermittent bouts of craving for alcohol.