Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, guest host Josh Birk talks to Katie Villanueva, Golden Hoodie winner and Salesforce Administrator at 10K Advisors.

Join us as we chat about her work with mental health advocacy and mindfulness principles that you can apply to your work as a Salesforce Admin.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Katie Villanueva.

Mental health advocacy in the Salesforce ecosystem

Katie started out as an accidental admin, getting her degree in radio and television. These days, she works as a Salesforce Administrator for 10K Advisors, where she’s hard at work updating legacy code with flows and improving workflow processes.

Katie’s also the founder of the Mental Health and Illness Trailblazer Community Group. It’s a space in the ecosystem to make meaningful connections, share resources, and share stories. “We’re not alone in our struggles,” Katie says, and what’s important is to build that support network and talk about it.

Mindfulness principles for stress management and personal growth

Recently, Katie gave a talk at Midwest Dreamin’ entitled “Appreciate Your #AwesomeAdmin Self,” based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven principles of mindfulness. The principles are a skill and something you have to practice, but they can help you overcome fear, doubt, imposter syndrome, burnout, stress, and negative self-talk.

The principles are:

Non-judgement
Patience
Beginner's mindset
Trust
Non-striving
Acceptance
Letting go

In the talk, Katie gets into how you can apply those principles to your work as a Salesforce Admin.

As seen on the Dreamforce stage

At Dreamforce, Katie presented “Automate with AI: Prompt Builder, Flow, and Slack,” about the magic you can make when you get all three working together. If you missed out, she recently covered the same topics on How I Solved It with Jennifer Lee.

Katie has so many great insights to share, so be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full Transcript

Josh (00:05): Hello, Admins! Guest host Josh Birk here, and today I'm going to bring you my guest, Katie Villanueva. You may have known Katie Villanueva from her recent Golden Hoodie Win. Also, Katie and I share a long history of mental health advocacy, and indeed, today we are going to talk about mental health and wellness tips for the workplace. Now a quick note due to the Gravity, well, which is Dreamforce. We actually recorded this shortly before Dreamforce, but it is not coming out until well after Dreamforce. So just kind of imagine when Katie's talking about the session that she's going to do at Dreamforce that she already did it. I attended it and it was wonderful. Now over to Katie. Alright, today on the show we welcome Katie Villanueva to talk about her work with mental health advocacy and some of her upcoming presentations. Katie, welcome to the show.

Katie (00:56): Hi, thanks for having me.

Josh (00:58): Alright, well let's start with your early years. What did you go to school for?

Katie (01:02): I went to school for radio. Television. Yeah. Well, no, actually a farmer. And then I graduated with radio, television, so I bounced around until I found my niche in the world, which is Salesforce being an admin.

Josh (01:20): Okay. And what was your first involvement with Salesforce?

Katie (01:23): I was an accidental admin, accidental on purpose admin. I wanted to do the job so they didn't have anybody doing the job. So at a company that didn't have a team or didn't have any experience with Salesforce, you always have that one person who ends up being the accidental admin. I sought out that position and said, I want to do it.

Josh (01:49): So you were kind of a voluntold admin, but you sort of voluntold yourself?

Katie (01:54): Yeah, yeah. I had a lot of really good ideas and nobody was going to execute 'em the way that I wanted to execute them, so I just decided to steer the ship myself.

Josh (02:09): A classic form of if you want a job done. Right. Got it.

Katie (02:13): Yes. Love it.

Josh (02:16): And how would you describe your current job?

Katie (02:18): Oh, my current job, I am no longer steering ships. I am absorbing all the things about Salesforce. I went to, the first role that I had was at a smaller company, no integrations, we only use Sales Cloud. It was a great role to wrap my arms around Salesforce and what its core capabilities were. But I graduated into this role. Now I'm with 10 K advisors. They're amazing, made up full of great people, and they have a really old org and it's full of code, and they're looking to update it with flows and retire those old workflow rules and put 'em into flows and clean up that old code and put it into something that now Salesforce is capable of doing that it wasn't able to do eight years ago. So I'm learning a lot about Code and Flow and also just the mega massive org that it is. And I'm working with a team, so I'm also learning best practices and how to work with others and share the helm.

Josh (03:31): Got it. Nice. Nice. Well, we're focusing on mental health for the most part today and awareness. So tell me a little bit about the Trailblazer community that you started. Yeah,

Katie (03:40): So I created the mental health and illness user group, and it is a space in the ecosystem where we can make meaningful connections and share resources and share stories and try to figure out this not only work-life balance and build up a support system around you, but understand that we're not alone in the struggles that folks have that I think everybody has at one point or another in their lives, or folks that are dealing with mental illnesses such as myself, I have bipolar disorder and I get to meet other people with bipolar disorder, and we get to talk about how that affects us doing the job and how we get through that. So all kinds of, everybody's got stuff going on and we weren't talking about it that much prior to the group, openly, at least that I was aware of. And I started talking about it and folks gathered around and I went to Salesforce and said, Hey, I think there's a community here that could use some support and can flourish. And they agreed and we created the user group. It's a virtual user group, but at conferences we try to meet up and color Well, I mean, conferences are so exhausting.

Katie (05:15): You get zapped or whatever the word you want to use, you get drained really easily over socialized, overstimulated. And some folks use it as a quiet time and put on some music and chill out. And then other folks just use it as icebreakers too, to meet some other people, conference goers, and then it's very library vibes. It's quiet, there's small talk or there's no talk. I love it.

Josh (05:47): Which is sometimes exactly what people need. So that's good. Yeah, no, I agree. And I feel like it's actually Dreamforce and Trailhead DX have only gotten, I think is the way I'd put it. Being on the floor on Moscone can just be visually overstimulating even before you start lingering in sounds and social interactions and things like ...

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