Episode 54: Lauren Pittenger
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Introducing Lauren Pittenger
Lauren Pittenger is a front-end WordPress designer and developer. Her college degree is in English, but she’s always had a strong interest in design – and she has also earned a web design certificate. She is obsessed with her cat.
Show Notes
Website | Lauren Pittenger
Website | Mindful Creative Life
Twitter | @laurenpittenger
Twitter | @_mindfulcreativ
Life Coach School | The Life Coach School
Episode Transcript
Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.
Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.
Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.
Liam: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 54.
Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.
Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Lauren Pittenger. Lauren is a front-end WordPress designer and developer. Her degrees are English but she’s always had a strong interest in design and she also earned a web design certificate. She is also obsessed with her cat, as am I. Hello, Lauren, and welcome.
Lauren: Hi.
Liam: Hey, Lauren. How are you? Thanks for joining us on the show today. Can you tell us a little bit more than what Tara just shared?
Lauren: Yes. Thank you for having me. As Tara said, I’m a front-end designer and developer, and I actually work for Liam and his company LBDesign. Together, we design and build websites for our clients.
Tara: Glad to get that out of the way up-front. You and Liam work together and you and I have met as well and interacted a lot online. I’m really excited to have you on Hallway Chats today because there’s a lot that I don’t know about you and I’m looking forward to hearing more about that. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started with WordPress and maybe even how you and Liam started working together?
Lauren: I actually, as you said in my intro, have my degree in English. I always had an interest in art and design where I could Photoshop throughout school and high school. Then when I got to college, I continued to be interested in graphic design and art and all that. But somehow I decided to get a degree in English. After I got my degree, I kind of thought, “What the heck do I do with this?” [laughter] I started looking at jobs, and the ones that were interesting to me, which now that I think about it, it’s kind of obvious, were the ones around design. I decided to go back to school for a web design certificate and so I just went to a community college and got a certificate, I learned about HTML and Flash which I never actually used in real life. HTML, I think I said that already, and Photoshop, and Illustrator, and InDesign. It was really just the very basics of design production work. While I went through that certificate program, I had a teacher who was contacted by a local company who was looking for somebody to help with their website. She told me it was with WordPress, I said, “I can’t do that. I don’t know about that. That’s databases.” She’s like, “No, it’s fine. You can figure it out.” What was really great about going to community college was that they offered access to Lynda.com. It was through working for– I ended up working for that company that that teacher told me about for, I think, two and a half years. I did a lot more than just help with their website as small companies end up doing. I learned a bit about WordPress and started taking classes with Girl Develop It as well. I knew that I wanted to do more of that type of work and so I tried to learn as much as I could. Eventually, somebody that I met from Girl Develop It actually told me about the job with Liam, so I applied and now we’ve been working together for almost three and a half years now. Not quite four years, so that’s kind of my story of WordPress.
Tara: That’s a great story, and I know Girl Develop It is a wonderful organization and I believe that Philly chapter is really active and I’ve talked to other people who have sort of found their way via Girl Develop It as instructors and as learners or learners becoming instructors and all of that. I’m glad to hear that it was a positive thing for you too. Lauren, I’ve seen online that you are a self-professed introvert. I wanted to start a conversation about that because that’s a conversation that a lot of people in the WordPress space and in the tech space touch upon. It’s interesting because I think, especially in social media, introverts sometimes are not as introverted as they are in person. There’s been some sessions, sort of pre-WordCamp sessions to help people who are maybe introverts or who are shy, to be more comfortable at WordCamps and events like that. Can you talk a little bit about what that means for you and what you’re doing around that word introvert?
Lauren: Yeah, I love this question, thank you. Yes, I’m a total introvert, I’ve always been very quiet and I like to just kind of observe what’s going on around me, and that often doesn’t include talking to people. [laughs] As it relates to WordPress and working on the internet and specifically WordCamps, I found for me just kind of– it’s interesting, I never actually thought about this as much.
Tara: We love to do that to people, catch them off-guard.
Lauren: But the internet can kind of serve as a platform for which to observe people before actually knowing them. What I have found that really helps me as somebody who was shy and has social anxiety of talking to people is getting to know them online, and that’s mostly on Twitter. It’s kind of getting acquainted with people in a more comfortable, for me, way. Following people in WordPress on Twitter and starting conversations that way has helped me– you, too, talk about belonging. I think that helps me to feel like I belong to something that, in person, would be more uncomfortable.
Tara: Yeah, I think it’s very true that what social media has done for any of us, whether– I don’t necessarily think I’m an introvert but I definitely have some social anxiety. What social media does is it allows you to have a comfort level with someone before you even meet them in person. I was just talking to some women who I met through WordPress, through Slack, and Twitter, and we hung out together in person. It was kind of like we already felt like we had a bond before we actually even met. It breaks down some of that initial getting to know each other. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. It doesn’t necessarily take away the awkwardness that you have when you’re in-person with people caring on the conversations because you can’t type and edit and change your thinking mid-sentence. [laughter]
Liam: You can change your thinking but what you’ve said already has gone out.
Tara: [laughs] Yeah. I’ll switch gears from the introvert a little bit but maybe it will relate to that and ask sort of our signature question which we asked ourselves recently, and I realized what a difficult question it is to answer. You know it’s coming. Success. Lauren, how do you define success? What does success mean for you?
Lauren: Yeah, I love this question. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I loved both of your answers to that in that episode. I think for me success is– I think that there’s a lot of different aspects that feed into it. Personally, it’s continuing to grow personally and professionally. It’s really kind of purposeful in creating my life. It’s looking at the default programming, if you will.
Tara: I like the code reference, good job.
Lauren: [laughs] I haven’t thought about that but I like that. Looking at the default programming that I’ve picked up over the years and being willing to ask myself whether that stuff is working for me anymore, and making decisions towards whether it’s my mindset or the actions that I’m taking in my life. That’s a big part of it. Then also, I think an indicator for my own success, and I feel kind of weird saying this out loud, but it’s really how– I think the point of life, and I decided this a few months ago, is that I wanted my life to be about loving so I can decide– the question I can ask myself is how well am I loving other people and my life and the things that are in my life, and kind of using that as a metric for my own success. Does that make sense?
Tara: That’s phenomenal, yeah, I loved that.
Liam: Yeah, that is just filled with wonderful imagery and phraseology and I absolutely loved that. Thank you, Lauren. You said a number of different aspects about your definition of success that I want to just kind of ask you about. With the understanding that so much of it is the different aspects, right? You want your life to be about loving and how well am I loving myself and other people. It almost sounds like, if I’m hearing you correctly and understanding you correctly, that success is more of a journey than a destination perhaps. Maybe successful, to put that in air quotes, is a nicer stretch of the road where it’s less hilly and less rocky, although hills can be beautiful, but I just mean in less emotionally and psychologically and all those other ‘lys’. It’s less arduous. Would that be something that you would agree with that I hear that right, where it’s more of a journey and it’s about trying to journey ‘well’?
Lauren: Yeah, and one of the kind of images that I’ve had recently is the image of being on a train and the difference between intentionally getting onto the train and sometimes being thrown off of it by these default things that aren’t serving me, and then making a conscious decision to get back on it.
Liam: There’s a certain imagery there with the train that indicates that, well, we can choose to get on, and we can fight getting thrown off, and we can work to a cheek to decide which train to get on, right? Are we going to take the train to New York? Are we going to Chicago or DC? Ultimately, we’re not controlling where that train goes because we get on as passengers and we’re not the driver, we don’t control the speed. I wonder in your analogy, in this imagery that you’ve worked up, which I really like, was that a deliberate choice? With life, we respond what comes at us and we make choices. And we can’t control the actions of those around us and maybe that’s kind of like the train. Were those parts of the analogy that you would explore yet?
Lauren: Yes, I love that question. It’s really not a train. My choices are how I am showing up in my life, not what is going on around me. The choices that I have are how do I respond or react to those things, and I could react in a way that is default and might not be– default is not always necessarily bad. Sometimes our default does serve us but when it doesn’t, I think, is where the decision is. Does that make sense?
Liam: Yeah, it totally does. I get where default can serve us but default should be a deliberate choice and not a, “Well, that’s what I always do.” Because you’re going back to thinking about what is default and what does that mean in this situation or this aspect of my life. Default can be great, okay, that I’ve got sorted, right? I’ve got that successfully figured out at least for now. But looking at the other stuff, I liked that a lot, thank you.
Tara: Yeah, me too. Lauren, what would you say is the most important thing that you do every day in this journey?
Lauren: The most important thing that I do every day is– I call it meditating on paper and it’s a practice that I learned about through a coaching program that I’m in. What you do is basically do a brain dump onto paper and then look at all of those sentences as just thoughts in my head. Then you take each of those sentences and you do what is called a model on them. A model is a way of gaining awareness about the things that you’re creating with your own mind. The idea is that you have your circumstances which, if you think about the train, it’s all those things that are happening outside of ourselves. Somebody saying something to us or stubbing my toe on something. Until you would have that circumstance, and then you have a thought about it. From that thought, you have a feeling and while you’re feeling that certain way, you do certain things. From those actions, you get a certain result.
Tara: That’s a very thoughtful approach to so many things. It seems like– going back to your word, purposeful, that you used earlier which is a word that I gave a lot of thought to as well. Having so much purpose and thought behind your reactions to things that happened around you sounds like it is very important. Also, it sounds like it’s hard to do sometimes in the moment. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges around that?
Lauren: Yeah, sometimes it’s not possible for me yet to do it in the moment, which is okay. It’s a practice towards being more conscious and aware of really my own mind. Sometimes it’s looking after the fact at, “Well, what was I thinking in that moment that made me say a certain thing or act a certain way?” I have heard, though, that the better you get at it, that you can do it in the moment, but like we said, it’s a journey and it’s a practice.
Tara: Yeah, it’s a very intentional mindful thing to do, to pause in those moments before reacting. I can definitely appreciate that, thanks for sharing that method, that’s really cool.
Liam: I’m going to change it up a little bit if I can and just circle back around to build a little bit of a focus on WordPress. Lauren, obviously, I know you, I recognize you. I know that you’re quite active in the WordPress community. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about that and how you came to get involved and maybe as it relates back to success and purposefulness and loving well, what does that all mean to you? Let’s talk a little bit about you in the WordPress community, if you will. That’s an open ending question so sorry like that, but maybe start with how did you get started and what attracted you to it. Then maybe touch on as you’re developing this definition of success, how does that apply to your involvement with the WordPress community?
Lauren: I’ll be honest. When I first got involved, it wasn’t really driven by love. It was more like feeling a sense of needing to be better. Being better at my own job and being better with WordPress. I think when I first got involved, it would have been like 2014. That would have been going to the meetup that Liam organizes.
Liam: That was 2014, and then how did it go from there?
Lauren: And then it was, Liam, you encouraged me to apply to WordCamp Philly and you encouraged me through speaking, which I never ever would have imagined doing as somebody who is very quiet and shy.
Liam: Then as you spoke at a number of different WordCamps and presumably you got more comfortable with that or at least liked it or were willing enough to do it, maybe if no other reason, just to make me quiet and leave you alone. Where did it go from there? Honestly, don’t stress about it. We can edit out for time.
Tara: No worries at all.
Liam: Silences.
Tara: I think we should go back to the deep questions instead of the history questions because they’re interesting. [laughter]
Liam: Yeah, I wasn’t trying to go for history, but yeah.
Lauren: I don’t know if this kind of answers your question but I see the history of it as really kind of– I think it wasn’t really driven by my current definition of success. Just recently, the stuff that I’m learning by doing my own work to be more deliberate and purposeful and mindful in my own life. I’m finding that I want to share that with other people. I recently gave a talk at a meetup and it was about, I taught them the model. I just really enjoyed that and so I see what I want to continue doing is more of that and giving back in that way. Does that kind of answer your question?
Liam: Yeah, it totally does, thank you.
Tara: Based on what Liam said, it sounds like you’ve responded to some encouragement and advice so I’d like to ask you another one of our questions which is around advice and if you would share with us any significant or perhaps the most significant advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life.
Lauren: I came up with two things and I wouldn’t necessarily call them advice but kind of beliefs that I’ve taken on as true. And the one is the practice of using the model in my life, and the second is that the idea that– and this might sound silly but the idea that negative emotion is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. I learned that on a podcast. Yeah, as somebody who has social anxiety, being anxious to talk to people is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. Because feeling anxious and being okay with that, and being anxious and wishing I didn’t feel anxious. It’s kind of glaring on the negative emotions. That idea, I remember hearing that and I was like, “Why did it literally take me 32 years to learn this?” Yeah, that changed my life.
Liam: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more that negative emotions, whether they’re anxiety or stress or anger or kind of anything that we might, generally speaking, consider negative, and I really was about 40 before I really appreciate that.
Tara: I just learned it now, so. [laughter]
Liam: You’re well ahead of the curve, Lauren. But the understanding that emotions come, right? When someone says you won the lottery, you’re now a billionaire or a millionaire, we don’t decide to get excited. When we stub our toe into the table, we don’t decide to get mad or angry at that. It just happens. I have no idea why that happens, whether that’s physiology, biology, or psychology, probably a combo of all three. But it’s really how we respond to that emotion, that’s our power. That goes right back to what you were talking about earlier, Lauren, about being purposeful in creating your life and then meditating on paper by analyzing what emotions came in, how you processed them, how you dealt with them, how you responded to them, how you acted on them. And then analyzing, I’ll say, your justification about whether or not that was good or bad. Yeah, I love that. Very, very succinct. Very, very comprehensive in your thought process, thank you.
Tara: There’s another layer there, too, that I want to talk about that I really latched onto, which is the idea that not only is that not a negative thing, there’s nothing wrong with that emotion, but that it’s actually normal. I take comfort a lot of times in knowing that I’m not alone. Sometimes you feel like your anxiety or your response to something or whatever’s happening to you, that you’re the only one that’s feeling that way or that’s ever gone through that experience before. I think that part of that advice is related to that in terms of it’s okay, what you’re feeling is normal. I think that’s important to point out as well. Thank you for sharing that, that’s excellent.
Liam: Tara, I’m going to riff on that a little bit and you’re probably going to agree with me. I’m playing with language here but I’d suggest that there is no normal. There is common or more common or less common.
Tara: Yeah, common is probably a better word than normal, that’s true. I probably had a bad word choice there. But the idea really that whatever anxiety you’re feeling, that there’s nothing wrong with that. I think that was maybe the word that you used, Lauren, that there’s nothing wrong with the negative emotion. In fact, that it is common or normal and that people feel that way, too, that you’re not alone maybe is what I meant to say. Thank you for clarifying that, yes.
Lauren: Yeah, if I could say one more thing. I think about it as like– and what I learned from one of my other teachers is the fact that we feel negative emotion means that we’re supposed to, it just happens. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a thing that happens.
Tara: I love that. That means a lot to me, thank you for sharing that, actually.
Liam: So, Lauren, you shared a lot with us around success and advice and thought processes and self-development and self-improvement, that’s been really cool. I’m going to ask this question of you and ask you kind of around this. What’s been your biggest challenge to date? It can be work-related, it can be kind of personal development-related. How are you or how are you overcoming or addressing that challenge?
Lauren: All of the things that I talked about like meditation and the work that I’m doing in this coaching program has all been driven by– my biggest challenge has been on my own brain. I mentioned social anxiety earlier but, you know, I also have depression and ADHD, it’s through those challenges that really made me do this deeper work into myself and kind of find the purpose in my life. I don’t think that it’s an overcoming, I think it’s a practice of working with these things and not letting them drown me inside my own head.
Tara: What a thoughtful and purposeful approach to that one. I really appreciate you’re sharing that with us. Sounds like you’re in a transition time in a very thoughtful way. I’m excited to see how and where you go with that. With that, we need to wrap up our interview unfortunately because I would love to keep talking to you about this. But I would like it if you would share with us where we can find you more, find out more about you and maybe if you could share this process that you’re using as well?
Lauren: Oh yeah. I have my own website, laurenpittenger.com but I haven’t updated that in probably over a year.
Liam: Welcome to being a web professional. None of us update our sites. [laughs]
Lauren: Twitter’s a different story. You can find me on there at @laurenpittenger. I recently shared a new blog where I’m going to be sharing more about the practices that I’m doing to create deliberate life. I have a new blog called Mindful Creative Life and it’s online at mindfulcreative.life. My coach’s name is Brooke Castillo and she is at The Life Coach School. She also has a podcast and website, thelifecoachschool.com. I definitely recommend checking her out.
Tara: Yeah, thank you so much, that sounds great. Lauren, it’s been great chatting with you, thank you so much for sharing so many things with us, we really appreciate it and we appreciate the lesson that you had about your advice and taking that to heart today as we speak. Thank you.
Lauren: Thank you for having me on.
Liam: Thanks, Lauren. Always a pleasure to see you and chat with you and spend time with you. Thanks for joining us on the show today. Bye-bye.
Lauren: Bye.
Tara: Bye, Lauren.
Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.
Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.
Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.
Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.
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