Interview: Tiffany Dawson, Career Coach & Multi-award Winning Podcast Host of "How to be a STEMinist"

By Angela Tai

You’ve worked in mechanical engineering at several notable companies including Norman Disney & Young, Aurecon and BuroHappold Engineering. When did you first become interested in the field and how did you get involved in the STEM community?

I guess this is going to sound really unplanned but I was like most people who felt that they had to choose what they were going to study at university when they were in high school. At the time, I felt like I hadn’t gotten to know myself as a teenager, I hardly knew what I wanted to do the next day let alone the rest of my life. I really enjoyed math and physics and I was quite good at them. I spoke to a career counselor and she told me to become a radiographer and I’m sure it would’ve been a great job but it wasn’t for me. My dad is an electrical engineer so I’m sure I was influenced by him and his career. I had no strong inkling of what I wanted to do so I fell into engineering in Australia. I took all of the general engineering courses my first year and at the time, I felt like all the moving parts were very interesting to learn about so that was how I ended up in mechanical engineering. Honestly, I had no real desire to go into it but I’m glad I ended up there. 

Recently, you posted about the importance of confidence on your Instagram page. In your caption, you talked about how you lacked self-confidence at one point and you outlined the three misconceptions you had of yourself. Maintaining girls’ confidence in STEM fields is incredibly important. How can mentors increase the confidence of girls who are interested in pursuing a career in one of the STEM fields? 

A lot of mentors are good at giving advice, that’s what we do as mentors, we’re supposed to give advice. Listening and asking questions is also so important when you’re a mentor, you have to really be able to listen to your mentee. Whatever it is that they’re doing, ask them questions so that they can think more deeply. Sometimes, you might tell someone something that’s new to them so it’s important to balance giving advice and listening. Ultimately, you want to be doing both at the same time. 

Quite a bit of what you talk about is confidence and the relationship we establish with ourselves. You also host web classes about this subject matter. What are some tangible steps people can take to build themselves up? 

As you said, this is a topic I’m really passionate about because I did go through my own bouts of low confidence. I was a very shy and timid child, I made it look like I wasn’t but on the inside, I really lacked confidence. I think there’s a lot of bad advice out there on how to build up your confidence and some of the things that have come up on the internet were like, “change your appearance, get your hair done or wear high heels.” I mean, if this is the first thing that pops up on Google, no wonder why it is so difficult for all of us to build up our self-confidence. Women are constantly being told, “this is why you’re not getting the raise or that promotion.” When I was going through my discovery process, I faked it until I made it; that works for certain situations. For instance, it helps when you have to give a presentation to a client, you definitely have to fake it in a presentation because it makes you appear more confident. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you appear confident on the inside. I always get my clients to figure out what their top three values are because when you’re not confident, you can’t trust or rely on yourself. Confidence is having faith in yourself when you don’t know what you believe in. It’s a really hard thing to do but the most practical thing is to figure out what your top three values are and figure out what you believe in. What are your priorities? Forget about all that advice about going to a party by yourself, that gets you out of your comfort zone but it doesn’t build confidence on the inside. 

Have you experienced imposter syndrome? 

Yeah I’ve really struggled with that one, especially the more senior I got in my STEM job. When I was more junior, I only wanted a promotion to know that I’m good/worthy but once I got there, the exact opposite happened. I was a leader of 30 engineers but who am I to tell these amazing people what to do? These people have been in the business much longer than I had been and my imposter syndrome blew out of proportion. I used the motto ‘fake it till I make it’ but that didn’t help, that just taught me how to be an imposter and that’s why my imposter syndrome grew. I was fortunate enough to have been able to get some help; at the time, I was taught some simple strategies to overcome imposter syndrome and I felt so grateful because I know many other women don’t have those opportunities. 

Being a woman of color in the STEM field, do you feel that your heritage/gender gives you a different perspective and experience from your (male) counterparts when it comes to problem solving?

Sometimes, being a minority in STEM is a bit of a superpower because you do have a different perspective compared to everyone else. I was living in between two cultures. I grew up in Australia but my family is chinese. I had to learn to think in a slightly different way than other aussie kids, I didn’t have to question certain things but I did anyway. It gave me such a different perspective on things, especially when it comes to problem solving. Problem solving is all well and good when your team agrees on something, you definitely want everyone to agree on the final product and be happy. You might never question something or come up with a different solution if you don’t have someone on your team who has different ideas. Diversity of thought is important as well as including various sexual orientations and genders, that’s how we solve problems really well. 

What advice would you give to young women, especially women of color, who are curious about jobs in the tech/engineering sector, but aren’t necessarily seeing representation from people who look like them? 

I totally sympathize with that because I’ve been there, I’ve sat in meetings before and thought to myself, do I belong here and is anyone going to take me seriously? It can be really intimidating, there’s a couple of things though. The first is that there are more and more people of different backgrounds going into leadership now, obviously there’s not as many as we’d like but there are people starting to get there which is amazing to see. While you might not have a role model who you can relate to in your own company or in your own workplace, we’re so blessed by having the internet and by having social media. Reach out to different role models who you can look up, it’s important to see what their thoughts are and use that as a way to look up to them. There are amazing communities for women in tech/stem and for women in engineering specifically. Find a community that works for you and a medium where you feel comfortable talking with them and so many people have joined my facebook group b/c they can’t relate to a poc or woc at their own company and that’s why they join. 

You mention that you feel most empowered when helping women in STEM transform into the confident and influential individuals that they are. How do you establish and maintain long-lasting relationships with clients?

This is a good question; I don’t know if it’s necessary to always have long-lasting relationships with everyone you meet. Sometimes, it’s okay to get to know someone at a certain point of their lives and let them go. I know that a lot of people find pressure to stay on top of their contacts all the time but you have to think about what support you need at the time and what type of ongoing support you will need. You don’t have to catch up with people regularly but there’s people you might want to catch up with 1-2 times per year. It’s actually easier with this pandemic - you can send little messages or voice notes on LinkedIn which goes a long way.

The speed of the economic downturn due to the COVID pandemic is unprecedented. How has your own business strategy as well as your coaching strategy changed due to this “new normal?”

Absolutely, it has changed. It did change for a period of time at least. My business was very young when the pandemic started, it was about six months old. Starting a new business is tough anyway but I felt like I was making some great connections with corporate clients prior to the pandemic. I do one-on-one coaching and corporate group workshops, all of the corporates were like, “oh my gosh there’s so much to deal with right now, personal development for our staff is not front of mind.” I totally understand that and there were so many other things to deal with at the time. I didn’t really know what to do, I had all this information that I had gotten ready for these corporate group workshops so I was like okay, I need to get this out there one way or another. This led me to start my own podcast, I love podcasts and listening to them and I figured, maybe I’ll put together 10 episodes and perhaps a couple of women will tune into my podcast each week. I didn’t expect it to take off but it was immediately obvious that this was information that women needed in the world. This pandemic was a blessing in disguise for me because otherwise, there would be thousands of women who wouldn’t have had access to this information. That was probably the biggest thing that happened in terms of my coaching practices. In the UK we’ve been quite used to having Covid around so most corporate businesses are operating as normal and I’m still providing corporate group workshops. I’m also providing one-on-one coaching so things have gone back to where they were before Covid and now I’m back on track to where I want to be. 

What advice would you give to others who want to explore entrepreneurship due to job loss but might not be their first choice?

I think even if it’s not your first choice, you might be pleasantly surprised by the journey that entrepreneurship might take you on. Personally, I have grown so much as a person since starting my own business. It has been an amazing personal journey and I love not having to rely on anyone or expecting anyone to check my work.I would say that although you’re an entrepreneur going in on it alone, you don’t have to be alone. There’s lots of communities where you can connect with people, I really really encourage people to reach out to a business coach. I know that for the first few months, I thought it was too much and I didn’t know how to do any marketing or create content. I didn’t understand how to attract clients, I’ve grown up in this culture where my dad prides himself on never paying anyone to do anything for him, he does his own home DIY  and electrical work. I grew up thinking that it’s honorable to do things for yourself but as an entrepreneur, that’s a very good way to burn yourself out. Reach out to a business coach if you can to get you through any obstacles that you might otherwise have to trample through if you don’t have guidance. 

What are some mistakes that people make (or that you made) when starting a business? 

I think the biggest mistake I made was just expecting way too much of myself. If I look back now, I put so much pressure on myself to get things right the first time around. Now, I have a different energy level and it’s more like running experiments. When you first start a business, it’s something that’s completely new so you have to give yourself a break. For example, I spent so much time perfecting my first article on LinkedIn and I thought the whole world would read it. It took me a long time to hit the button to issue it and nobody had read it for a whole 24 hours! I thought, maybe my writing is really bad because it was the first time I’d written an article and I didn’t know what type of messaging worked for my audience yet. I put so much pressure on myself to get all this stuff right and what I realized is that it’s a series of experiments. You don’t have to get every single thing right, you just have to keep taking the next step and moving forward instead of a step-by-step path that you must follow and achieve every step of the way. 

In one of your articles on your blog posts, you wrote candidly about the lessons you learned at the end of this past (and very tumultuous) year. You noted that negative feelings are merely action signals and that when you don’t know what to do, do something. What steps do you take to avoid burnout?

To avoid burnout, I think that whole action signals thing was amazing for me. I learned that from reading Tony Robbins’ book Awaken the Giant Within. It’s a massive book and that’s the one thing I’ve taken away from it, whether it’s burnout or any sort of negative emotion, you have to think about it objectively and ask yourself, “what does this signaling mean to me?”. When we physically hurt outselves, we will stop and do what needs to be done to make it feel better. I guess we don’t know how to help ourselves with those negative feelings because it’s internal and we figure that maybe something is wrong with us. We think that we should ignore it and it’ll go away but when you put a band-aid on if you cut your finger, what this is signalling to you is that it hurts too much so you have to stop doing that thing. If you’re feeling really stressed, you have to think to yourself, what are you feeling and what is this stress telling your body? It’s probably telling you that you need a break and the standards that you have set for yourself are too high. You need to figure out why you’re feeling that way and do something about it, you have to figure out what that action signal is and now you have to act. You have to change something to get away from that situation and if you’re ever feeling any sort of negative emotion, you need to think it through instead of ignoring it. 

You’re not just an advocate but a mentor for so many people. What attributes do you think a good mentor possesses?

I think that I actually encourage most people to reach out to a number of people for mentorship because you can never expect one person to have all of the answers. Sometimes, mentors are asked to be everyone and everything to their mentee. I think everyone can be a great mentor in their own right, especially when they’re listening and asking questions. You can’t just tell people what you think, you need to ask them what’s challenging them right now instead of going full blown “you need to take these steps.” I guess one of those attributes is empathy, you have to be able to wind back in time to meet your mentee at their level since you may very well have gone through the same challenges back then. 

As someone who’s constantly putting out content, where do you find your inspiration? 

My mom likes to ask me why or how I have so much to talk about. For the first 10 episodes of my podcast, I already had lots of information that I wanted to share with the world. I listen to the women who I coach and the women who join me for Career Clarity Calls - these are complimentary calls for women who need help with no one else to turn to. During certain periods of time, really distinct topics have been coming out at different times of the year. I also chat with people on social media and I try to provide the necessary advice and make it accessible to everyone on these podcasts. 

How do you set goals for yourself? 

As an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to do. I was told I needed to set business goals and I set all these goals that didn’t actually mean anything to me. I guess I would put a number down that was definitely more than what I needed to lead a healthy life because I thought it would be shameful to aim for a number less than that. There’s this real pride in earning this certain number of zeros per month because everyone else’s goal is to get to 4/5/6 figures per month or whatever it is that’s desirable. I started to set goals that had no real meaning to me, I didn’t know why I did that. Even if I make more money, does that mean I get to move into a mansion or something that’s supposed to enhance my quality of life? I’ve been reading this book and it has really flipped my thinking and this will actually tie in nicely with your question about goals. In this book, it basically talks about how you can live a rich life but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to become rich. It really encourages you to think about the lifestyle that you want and it’s very relevant to people who work for others. You have to think about what’s important to you; for me, the only important things are to live comfortably, have spare time to spend with friends and family and to make an impact in the world. I really don’t need all these luxuries in life. When I look back at my monetary goals, I want to look back with this mentality and think about what my priorities and goals were and how I worked from there. You have to figure out what you want your legacy to be - it’s a step that so many people miss and I definitely missed that myself. 

What are some of the lessons you learned from 2020 that you’re taking with you into 2021? 

This is a good one! Here’s the thing - I think there’s so many lessons I can touch on, especially those that I learned in 2020. I feel like I was forced into having more space to think and to be with myself. I love spending time with myself anyway, I am an only child and it was kind of like being forced to not have a social life for a few months. I’m literally living the highs and lows of my life and it has kind of encouraged me to think on a deeper level about who I am. Without all of the highs and lows, why can’t I be happy deep down? I didn’t have happiness within myself without having something to look forward to. To answer your abstract question, I guess it really encouraged me to go from surface-level thinking to a deeper level of thinking. I needed to think about what makes up my core and what actually makes me happy despite all of the distractions of life. After having all that space and time to get to know myself more, I felt like it allowed me to build up this inner confidence that I didn’t have before Covid. The pandemic has had some great positive effects, it has given me inner quiet confidence.