The long and winding road

This week, it’s been 2 years since I went to the Chamber of Commerce and registered Convocat as my own freelance company. 2 years…and what a ride it has been so far! While I usually share my learnings and insights into conversation design with you, starting Convocat also meant starting a career as an entrepreneur. I’d like to take some time to reflect and ponder a bit on that part of my journey.

I keep a folder on my desktop called ‘Troepjes’ — little pieces of junk, which is basically a collection of drafts, braindumps, observations, snippets and small texts that are all waiting for a moment in my schedule to be unified into an article. Like this one, which is about what it took to move out of corporate life, the moment I took the plunge into entrepreneurship, the impact of COVID and how building communities has helped me reshape and redefine my core business.

Saying goodbye to corporate life

Starting Convocat meant saying goodbye to 20 years of a salaried and secure corporate career. Before moving into conversation design, I’ve worked as a tech writer, a business analyst, a requirement engineer, scrum master and international project manager for various corporates.

And only now that I’ve been a real-life freelancer for a while, I realize that I’ve probably been a freelancer at heart during that whole 20 years. I’ve always been fiercely independent, always loved doing project work, and invariably, my managers would remark ‘You’re doing great, but we’re missing a consistent line in your work: you just seem to hop from topic to topic’.

Those managers were absolutely right, and it turns out that this synesthetic way of thinking, of connecting the dots between seemingly disparate topics, is something that’s hard to fit in the rigid organizational structure of a big corporate (it has actually turned into my superpower as a consultant :-) ).

And increasingly, I found myself having more and more trouble squeezing myself into that structure. I managed for sure, but did it spark joy? Less and less. And less. Until it started dawning that finding yet another new job might not be the best solution. Perhaps the time had come to take the big leap out, and start following my own energy?

Preparing for the big leap: create an exit strategy

Mind you, this insight didn’t happen overnight. I’m not talking weeks here, but months, and in all, even years. And I really needed that time to dis-attach from my corporate identity, from the 200% energy that I put into my work, and from the self-worth I derived from it. I’ve always called this my exit strategy: consciously taking a step back and having a look at my whole life. What place does work take in my life? What brings me energy, and what drowns the energy from me? What do I do naturally, and what kind of activities take a lot of force and willpower?

But also: where do I stand financially, and what kind of standard of living do I envision in the future? How much would I be willing to give up in return for complete independence? What would I need in terms of practical stuff, like money? I started putting myself on a minimal salary, only covering the things I really needed (and spoiler: there’s a lot you can do without!). Whatever I had left after that, I put aside in a savings account, which I dubbed my emergency exit account. My goal? To save enough money to survive one year without any income, so that I could find out what I wanted to do next.

This way, I gradually detached from what I thought I should be in the eyes of others and discovered my own drives and motivation: learning, sharing, connecting, taking on lots of new things, being able to follow my own lines of interest, allowing myself to take the handbrake off and completely go for something at my own speed. And then rest a little afterward.

And I created space, both mentally and practically, as a playground where this could happen. Where I could happen. Sometimes deliberately, but more often out of the experience of “This is what I don’t want to do anymore. This is not my path. This is someone else’s expectation. This is what I can do without.” It’s not always the most pleasant work, and it never finishes. But it’s rewarding in every sense.

The Aha-Erlebnis

So there I was, with this lingering idea of leaving in the back of my head, with a growing sense of urgency. But no clue yet as to where I wanted to go. I hopped jobs a few more times, without much result. And I guess that’s where Lady Luck was on my side, because in 2019, I ended up at a chatbot conference. I met a bunch of linguists there, started building my own first bot, and had this magical aha moment: this is what I wanted to do!

This was a fortunate event in so many ways, but most of all, because it made me discover a professional field that unites everything I love: psychology and user research, content and copywriting, logic and systems design, and most of all: linguistics. It’s not every day that you come across a gift like this: discovering your personal sweet spot and then a profession that brings together all these aspects under one name: conversational AI.

So what is it that you’re doing again?

And once I realized that my future was in conversational AI, that brought the momentum to flip the switch, close the door, and jump. I closed my eyes, quit my corporate job, built a website, found my first gig…

…and then, in March 2020, COVID happened.

Convocat and COVID

I managed to work on-site for my first client for exactly 7 days when the first lockdown was announced, and we were forced to work from home. And looking back, this might probably have been the best thing that happened to me.

Staying at home meant that all of a sudden, I had very few possibilities to actively expand my real-life professional network. Other Dutch meetups were canceled too. I wasn’t allowed to travel to future clients for coffees. And I really started wondering whether I should return to a regular job as a tech writer, because, I mean, how was I supposed to find new work this way?

This whole conundrum made me turn to the online world. I’ve always loved blogging, sharing on social media and connecting through online communities, and LinkedIn seemed like a natural place to start connecting to the conversational community. I started sharing, connecting and commenting on people’s posts. Simply because that’s what I love doing.

And you know what’s so great about a whole world in lockdown? Everybody turned online. People that I’d normally only meet at a US conference like Project Voice, now were actively reaching out and starting conversations online, because that was the only channel still available.

Another great thing? Internet is a wonderful normalizer: it really doesn’t matter whether you’re new or experienced, a big name or just starting out: it’s extremely easy to digitally approach someone and introduce yourself, something that I might not so easily do when I’m at a physical conference. So slowly but surely, I started building out my online network, asking for advice and at some point starting to share some of my own expertise too.

Building online communities: Voicelunch Language & Linguistics

I joined Voicelunch quite early, and immediately felt at home there. In a time where companies were bombarding us with knowledge session after knowledge session, having a space to just be was such a breath of fresh air. No pressure, no recordings that no one rewatched anyway, just good company and great talks.

It wasn’t very long before I felt a wish to start a more specific community, especially aimed at conversation designers, linguists and language lovers in general. In Brielle Nickoloff I found a like-minded soul with equal ambition and energy, so off we went, and started Voicelunch Language & Linguistics.

Voicelunch Language and Linguistics now has a steady following of around 35 regular visitors every two weeks, and many more ‘incidentals’ (with peaks of 80 visitors on very popular topics). What truly amazes me, is that we managed to move beyond the beginner’s level, general admission talks into truly academic topics.

From Women in Voice to Women in Conversational

Our newly founded Dutch community, Women in Conversational, is hyperlocal, and as such does justice to the linguistic diversity of the Netherlands, Friesland and Flanders, in a way that no global community can. Sometimes, a global approach works best, but when it comes to language technology development, and in some cases even digital language preservation, local might be the way to go.

Community work: not an aside anymore

Looking back, I realise that building communities is not a sideline activity anymore, something that I do next to work. It has become my work. Even when I take on a conversation design assignment, COVID and remote work have forced me to actively and consciously build a remote community first. Without it, there’s no way I can even start working.

Remote onboarding: build a contextual community

I notice that few companies realize how hard it can be to onboard with their organisation when you’re fully remote. But at the same time, how is this different from starting a community from scratch? And community, forging meaningful relationships in a work context, that’s what I know how to do. So I talk to my one contact person, and ask her for 2 more people I should talk to. And I ask those 2 people for 2 more people to talk to. And within a week, I can build my own, local and contextual mini-community.

Do I always succeed in making this work? Well no, not always. There have been one or two occasions where the corporate structure made it quite hard to work this way, or where I didn’t manage to find a way. And even though these moments were hard when I was right in the middle of them, they did teach me a valuable lesson: my approach might not have worked there, but my approach works for me. It’s how I want to work. And that, in the end, is why I started this journey in the first place.

Summing up…

So yeah, looking back at the last two years, I can say I’m still very much in a happy place. A few sobering experiences under my belt for sure. And a few exhilarating ones too. But the most worthwhile experience of all? Well, sometimes, at a moment when you least suspect it, this little sensation happens:

En ik hou m’n adem in Anders maak ik het nog stuk Zo klein, zo krachtig kwetsbaar Een moment van puur geluk

And I quietly hold my breath Because if I don’t, it might just break, So small, immensely vulnerable, A moment of sheer joy