I’ve never found it easy to show people what I’ve been working on. It’s been a huge pain point for me in my working life and to a certain extent in my personal life.
I’m getting better, I’m making an effort to make the distinction between what I’ve made and who I am, which is the key.
I’ve just found it hard to seperate that in the past, especially if I’ve been working on something for a long time.
Recently I presented a project I’d been working on for multiple months with coworkers. We presented to a large group consisting of different types of stakeholder in the project. To say I was nervous was an understatement.
Not nervous about the work we’d done in our team, but becasue I was the lead on the UI design and the presentation, my bit was what the audience were going to see and critique first. Many, many thoughts went through my head before that session.
During the session - which was actually a user feedback workshop - I remained as detached as I possibly could. It wasn’t easy to hear critisism of what you’d been working on, but unsurprisingly it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it was going to be.
We had lots of excellent feedback, which above all else was actionable (yay!) and we can therefore use it to improve the work we’re doing. This is obviously a huge benifit to exposing your work to people, and the only way to actually produce anything useful.
The more I do this sort of thing the easier it becomes, so I’m calling it growth. It makes my work better, but also will make me more resilient in the future.