Cayled Nowak

Honestly, I would probably say my kids. I was a non-traditional student, and I had little kids at the time I was going to school, and I think they were just really proud of me. I thought that it was a really great time to show them what hard work looked like, and that's kind of where the brunt of all of this came from. It helped keep me motivated, kept me going, because it certainly wasn't easy going to college and working and having two little kids and doing it all on my own. So it was a lot of work, and it was a labor of love, and I think that had I not had children watching me, I think maybe I may not have been as successful as quickly as I managed to make it work.

The best advice I can give anybody is to always remember: seek first to understand, then to be understood. I keep this written on a post-it note, and I take it with me almost everywhere I go. Whether it's professional or personal, whether you're coaching somebody in your field, you're mentoring, or you're trying to connect with somebody that you're trying to work with and there's just something not clicking and you're not getting progress, I always remind myself of that one thing. Sometimes you have to step back and step outside of the situation and say, okay, I need to understand what's going on here before I can get in here and get people to understand me. It's a term that came out, I heard it one time, and it's the biggest thing that's ever clicked with me, professionally and personally.

Stop apologizing. That's what I would probably say, because a lot of times the women that I run into in our field and in our career, they're not always engineers, but some of the support staff, I always want people to stop apologizing for everything all the time. I'm sorry to bother you, or I'm sorry to do this, or I'm sorry. I really think that people gain a sense of confidence when they start recognizing that you don't have to apologize for anything, and I feel like that's kind of more of an inherent female trait that we always seem to be overly polite, overly apologetic. I would tell women to stop apologizing, because you're not getting in somebody's way, and you're never a bother, and it's never an inconvenience. You should never think of yourself as an inconvenience. No matter what role you have in an organization, whether you're project admin or you're a receptionist or anything like that, you have every right to be there, you have every right to ask questions, and you have every right to interject in any situation that you have a question or you need clarity or anything like that.

I think that in my field, it's very easy to quickly be overlooked. And I think that if you don't advocate for yourself, I think that that is a major reason in how people become overlooked in organizations. I think generally as a whole, people who are more timid, more shy, introverted like myself, it's a lot harder to get noticed, and it's a lot harder to make meaningful impacts in the direction you want to go, because you don't have anybody ever advocating for you. You have to learn how to step way far outside of your comfort zone and really jump into some really shark-infested waters from time to time to really show people what you're capable of and what you're good at, because they're not just gonna look at you and say, hey, that girl over there, I know she's good at this, she'd be a great choice for this opportunity. Getting on the interview panel was a really difficult position for me to get in, but continuously shoving myself very far outside of my comfort zone, because I am an introvert, I was able to secure that. Now I get recognized more, so it's just constantly stepping out and constantly trying to be seen for the qualities that you want to be seen for, and not just another body filling a workspace. It's really showing that you can create meaning, but it's getting people to recognize that you have something to give.

I really stick to my core values, and I think integrity is kind of like the foundation of where everything that I do comes from. I hold myself accountable, and that is something that I carry throughout what I do in my personal life, in my professional life, and I just really go back to the saying, and I don't know who coined the phrase, but just doing what you say you're gonna do. If you're gonna do something, you need to make sure you do it. So that's, and it just all builds off of that. So I would say, you know, my core values and the values that I use both very much equally in my personal life and in my professional life would be integrity and accountability.