Blog post: Being successful while being yourself – summary of our workshop with Stephanie Grönke

By Rebecca England

As part of the “Guilt free approach to your career series”, I attended CamAWISE’s workshop on “Being successful while being yourself – Play to your strengths instead of playing a role” on 22nd February. The session was run by Stephanie Grönke, yoga teacher, as well as career and leadership coach. Stephanie kickstarted by sharing with us that she had chosen to be more herself tonight by wearing a cosy blue jumper. She also showed us her newly taken business photos, which unlike most polished and serious photos, portrayed her smiling behind her laptop in outdoor spaces.

From this, Stephanie challenged us to think about “what prevents us from being ourselves?” We were put into breakout rooms and given a couple of minutes each to name as many factors as we could. Sharing our answers in a word board afterwards, responses included fear of judgement and following rejection, fear of being the odd one out or not fitting into industry expectations, lack of self-confidence and being afraid of upsetting others. This then sparked Stephanie to share the roles that people stereotypically play at work (image below!), instead of being themselves. 

Roles Stephanie shared that people often play to “fit in” at work.

As Stephanie explained each role, I found myself laughing as I knew many of them were true for myself and were also expectations of how to become successful in STEM industries. Amongst the group, we reflected that the “Insecure overachiever” resonated most with those living in Cambridge. But Stephanie reminded us that just because these traditional roles exist within STEM professions, this should not enforce us to change ourselves into these roles. For example, there are strengths to being both an extrovert and an introvert, and perhaps being our more authentic personality even amongst a group of more opposing personality types, could help improve the culture. 

To bring the mood up, our next task was to share our strengths in paired breakout rooms. We each had two minutes to reflect on our own strengths, before then sharing something with the other person we believed was a strength of theirs from today’s session. This was an empowering exercise and made me realise that I have many strengths, such as high-energy levels and writing. It also made me realise that some strengths may not be top of my list, but are quickly identified by others, such as my self-awareness and curiosity.

Next, Stephanie showed us a video snippet from psychologist and brilliant mind Brené Brown, who is most famous for her TED talk on vulnerability. I was pleased to see Stephanie enjoyed the works of Brené Brown too, since I have read three of her books – The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly and Atlas of the Heart!

Following from this, Stephanie ran a short meditation session. We all closed our eyes and listened to Stephanie guide us through breathing exercises and imagining scenes of running water. Like most meditations I do before sleeping, I enjoyed it so much I felt my muscles relax and nearly fell asleep!

This then set us up to have a clear head to answer Stephanie’s final two questions. “What is success to me?” and in the next week, what is something we can do to work towards that goal? This challenged us to define success in our own words and reflect on how we can change our habits to kickstart our goal. For myself, I defined success as maintaining a good work-life balance – being engaged by work, with enough spare time for health and fun for myself, friends, and family. My actions to move towards that goal were to take more breaks during the working day and try out Stephanie’s suggestion to delegate tasks when I feel overwhelmed.